I think one of the mistakes I’d made about history was that I’d pictured it more as a logical progression from one thing to another, one technology to another, etc... But it’s more of a spiritual tug-of-war with one side gaining temporary victory. That’s the thing I missed - all victories are temporary and all defeats are temporary. The Church is failing now, just as it was succeeding in the ‘50s. It probably happens like that because when you’re winning the tug-of-war you think it’s easy and let your guard down, even though it’s ever fought at a deep and difficult level.
Looking at the decades of the ‘40s-‘80s and you see a tremendous whipsawing back and forth of good and evil.
The “god” of this world for at least a century has been science, and so it’s not surprising that it has been used as the premiere Trojan horse for evil. In the 1920s & ‘30s, eugenics was “science” that deemed Jews worthy of death, Down syndrome babies unworthy of birth, and blacks inferior to whites. Some of this “science” went so far as to be able to supposedly tell murders by the shape of their head and teeth.
In 1948 “science” was used to create the conditions for the sexual revolution. Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent sex report was released that year:
“Kinsey's work and research was manipulated so that its results would be indicative of what he himself believed, without any real and tangible scientific support. According to Paul Robinson, one of Kinsey's biographers, Kinsey's work was designed to ‘undermine the traditional sexual order.’[6] Kinsey had his own amoral agenda and hoped to use his research as the scientific base to ‘change society's traditional moral values.’”
But there was help from the good guys. Thomas Merton published a fabulously successful book about his spiritual journey called “Seven Storey Mountain”. George Orwell wrote a prescient book warning of government overreach and surveillance called “1984”. In 1948, Billy Graham has his first hugely successful crusade. In that same year, a nun (Mother Theresa) received a vision from God to found an order serving the poor in India.
Attack - counterattack. Attack - counterattack.
In 1952 Norman Vincent Peale writes a surprise best-seller advocating memorization of bible verses to bolster positive thinking. The next year an even bigger surprise came when Bishop Sheen was a television star.
The momentum was all on the side of “team good”. But, the enemy was awakened and a fierce counterattack began.
In 1954, wary of the sudden popularity (and thus power) of Sheen and Peale, LBJ inserts his amendment into legislation that forbids churches from participating in the political process. This is the first step towards a wall between church and state and a de-Christianized society.
In 1956, Playboy Magazine started and “Lolita” was published. Elvis and his hips came on the scene then too. In 1957, an obscene gay sex book “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg.was published and the beat poet era began. By ’59 Bishop Sheen was off the air and St. Pope Pius XII had died -- the last good pope until John Paul II came along in ’78.
In 1960 the Christian charismatic movement began, starting with the Anglicans and making it to Catholics by 1968. But the ‘60s were mostly a series of catastrophic losses. School prayer and Bible studies were banned. The birth control pill was invented and quickly the Supreme Court legalized contraception and then abortion. In ’64 the first movie to break Hollywood ban on pornography appeared and by ’72 X-rated movies were common. The gay movement begins in ’69.
Then more counterattacks from the good guys. The “Jesus revolution” of the hippies occurs in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and hundreds of thousands are baptized. Jimmy Carter, an unapologetic Christian, is elected president in ’76. Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” begins in ’79 and helps kick off the Reagan era. John Paul II is elected pope in ’78. The Medjugorje apparitions begin in ’81. It’s a counterattack that eventually fells the Soviet Union and lead to a better U.S. judiciary, one that promised to eventually roll back Roe...
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Bill Buckley’s brother Reid was kind of a prophet when he complained in ‘06 about GW Bush not getting his judges and nominees through. In 2016 it was “hold my beer” time given how they destroyed Trump:
“The necessary political concordat of any democracy is .. that its president have the right to their nominees for the cabinet, the bench, and the major bureaus, who are properly rejected only for reasons of incompetence or unethical conduct…and by vote of the full Senate, not a cabal. That this modus operandi has been dissed by the Democratic leadership, establishing an ugly precedent, bodes ill for our republic.”
Buckley went on to say, “Our representatives as a whole, the political establishment, without ideological distinction, though with a few sterling exceptions--are, have become, our republic's assassins.”
He died in 2015 so never got to see how his predictions came true to even a (previously) political establishment lover like me. The failure to accept Trump as duly elected president in '16 broke the legimitacy of our government.
