Religious Revival In The 1960s

The religious revival within the Cold War context did not last long. In the 1960s, the world experienced a sharp downfall of religious beliefs and affiliations, a phenomenon especially severe for Christianity. The void of mind was, later, partially replaced by the newly emerged idea of human rights in people’s life and international arena (1970s). Individualism rocketed up, and a sense of collectivity faded away. The church was replaced by human rights, and unfortunately, the risk of human rights to be misused towards a political end was just comparable to the status of religion in the 1950s.

Following the 1950s revival of religious practices and the development of the Spiritual-Industrial Complex, the 1960s saw a drastic evaporation of Christian

This may be because of the large influx of non-Christian believers into the U.S. in the 60s. McLeod is cautious in attributing the reasons for such decline. He notices no clear evidence that the opposition of Christian sexual teaching led to the destruction of the churches. Yet he makes an exception that the publication of Humanae Vitae indeed drove away a significant amount of followers of the Catholic Church, even including high-profile priests. The orthodox idea of birth control and sexual relationship in the papal encyclical ran contrary to the liberal spirits of the Civil Rights movements then. McLeod does ascribe changes in family life, for example issues around home ownership and property rights, the diffusion of compassionate marriage and the drop of religious socialization of children to be the agencies of religious downfall. Other reasons he states comprise of multiple student protests, expansion of secondary education (not seminary schools), the separation of law from Christian morality, and the general decline of a

For the 1950s, government took the stage and assisted in creating a civil religion, or that the population spontaneously obeyed the American Way of Life as a civil religion, thus upholding their belief in traditional, formal religions. In the 1960s, nevertheless, I still did not see, at least from McLeod’s discussion, the agency of the churches themselves in this crisis. The church tried to tackle the problems about the declining congregations and ordinations, but there is not a clear depiction of how the church conceived the crisis. What was the relationship between the churches’ perception of the threat and their corresponding actions? Did the churches exaggerate or underplay the threat so that it best served their own strategy? In the 1950s, the pragmatic approach to revive religion reduced the spiritual purity of the religion. Would the church, taking advantage of the 1960s religious crisis, embrace the opportunity to really attract members with true belief and thus return to apostolic purity? The book traces many responses by the church, yet it did not evaluate the effectiveness of different methods taken by the church. The churches’ situation and self-awareness may have power in either accelerating or reducing the speed of the