> I think his point was that religious enthusiasm thrives
>
>during periods of political quiescence. Thus it was
>no accident that the whole "born again" movement
>got going in the US following the decline of mass movements
>like the antiwar, civil rights, and student movements.
>E.P. Thompson in his *The Making of the English
>Working Class* made a rather similar point. Outbreaks
>of religious revivalism among English workers generally
>occurred during periods when there was relatively little
>limited resistance by workers against capital.
>
>
I can't help but think there's something missing from this analysis, at
least as far as the "born again" movement is concerned. Remember, it
started to achieve national prominence during the late 1970s-- a time
when much of the rest of the country was enjoying some fairly nice
expansions of hedonism (recreational drugs, sexual experimentation, the
emergence of gay political activism, self-help movements like est,
comic-book movies, video games, you-name-it). I'd also like to remind
everyone that this was after the considerable _successes_ of the
anti-war, civil rights, and student movements. Very little of the
cultural stuff mentioned above began in the late 1970's. They'd been
existent, and growing, for years.
And there are institutional factors to consider: the born-again movement benefitted immensely from the private television "networks" established by Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker, and the syndicated programs of Falwell, Robison, Swaggart, and many others, many of which began in the mid-1960's. (I forget what the details were re the FCC's governance of these programs were, but I think info on that could be found in the works of Sara Diamond, or Conway and Siegelman's _Holy Terror_.)
And the rise of the right-wing-- with its attendant religious factions-- should take into account the work that went into that movement as far back as the 1950s. Sara Diamond's _Paths to Dominion_ is especially good on this. If I recall this correctly, she argued that one seminal event of postwar American conservatism was the establishment of Buckley's _National Review_, which-- at the time-- represented an attempt to assemble conservative thinkers in "one place" and to keep the more radical and lunatic factions (like the Birchers) out of the tent. Another was the ideological realignment of the Cold War, where the old isolationist conservatism was superceded by a more interventionist, hard-line anti-Communist position. The Goldwater campaign of 1964 brought a number of young strategiests and activists into the movement. And there was the growth of evangelical and Fundamentalist sects of Protestantism, which I mentioned before.