On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, Carrol Cox wrote:
> I started teaching in 1957 -- but it wasn't til the mid-70s that
> students started to be offended by my sacreligious remarks. In the
> rural grade school I attended in the '30s & '40s sneers at creationism
> were perfectly safe. In my 10th grade biology (1944) class in a small
> town high school evolution was taken for granted. It would have been a
> real shock had someone objected.
>
> My own subjective impression from the '50s is that they represented
> the highwater mark of secularism in the U.S. There is a lot to accuse
> the '50s of, but religiosity is not one of them (at least in
> comparison with the last quarter century). Things may have reversed in
> the late '50s -- but my impression is that the real change for the
> worse began in the early '70s & climaxed in the mid '80s.
Your personal experiences run directly counter to the standard interpretation, which is not to say they aren't true. Could they possibly have resulted from changes in your geographic location over that time? This is a big country, with a lot of within-group variation. Or perhaps your experience varied with the larger cachement area of the universities you taught at? The only time I ever had to deal with fundamentalists in class was at Columbia University, not because it's a fundamentalist hotbed, but because it's a national school. (And although vastly outnumbered, I found fundamentalists were much more willing and able to fight about religion than their secular colleagues, because the latter, true to their lack of creed, just didn't care about it. So the fundis punched above their weight and the rest of us avoided the subject. Perhaps in the 50s, the secularists were more confrontational precisely because they felt they were overthrowing something -- as the fundis feel today?) Perhaps local schools might better reflect local sentiment.
For what it's worth, Eisenhower referred to his administration as "piety on the potomac" in a book he published in 1954 called _The Christian Century_. The 50s were also when revivalism, which had been in decline, became once again an important national phenomenon under Billy Graham and Bishop Fulton Sheen. But of course Graham was still going strong in the 90s.
Also for what it's worth, church attendance reached 55% in 1950, and rose to its historical all time high of 69% in 1960, from which it declined to 62.4% by 1970. Although admittedly, a key feature of American religiousity is that most of it is not church based or bound by doctrine, but rather free floating. As Ike said in his book "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith -- and I don't care what it is." Or as one of my teachers once recounted to 1950s public service announcement to me, "Today is Good Friday. Remember to attend the church or synagogue near you."
The 70s by contrast, as you know, are usually thought of the decade of irreligious self-absorption. But interestingly, the origin of the phrase "The Me Decade" is an essay by Tom Wolfe titled "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening" where he interpreted the the self-actualization boom as yet another dynamic blossoming of the peculiar American religion. I actually think it's a pretty smart essay.
Anyway, you may well be right. I wasn't there. And it's certainly another way to look at it. The 80s certainly brought us a televangelical boom on cable, and there was this guy Ronald Reagan. Perhaps it requires finer distinctions to capture the changes over this period than more or less religiousity. I have a feeling changes in the relation between national and local play a role, both in party politics and in communications technology.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com