Word: greeleys
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most part, these intellectuals have confined their criticism of liberals to the secular area. Andrew Greeley, the Chicago priest-sociologist who is proud to be an Irishman and a friend of Mayor Daley's, has broadened the attack to the religious front. "Let us be clear at the beginning: this is a volume of dissent," he says in Unsecular Man. "It rejects most of the conventional wisdom about the contemporary religious situation." The conventional wisdom he rejects is the "pop-sociological-religious analysis which has become part of the American intellectual preconscious...
...Greeley believes that "the basic religious needs and the basic religious functions have not changed very notably since the late Ice Age." He argues that the technopolitan secular man, the hero of religious liberals of the early sixties, the man who had "come of age" and was too tough and self-sufficient to feel a need for religion, exists only on certain Ivy League university campuses. You won't find him in Kensington or South Boston or Queens...
...revolution. The prophets at the "great secular universities" believed that history was clearly heading in one direction, that the human race was becoming more and more enlightened through the centuries, and that with this enlightenment would come a new maturity which in turn would make religious myths unnecessary. Hogwash, Greeley argues from Nisbet History shows change to be discontinuous, discreet and non-directional. Neither gradual "enlightenment" nor the loss of the need for myth is inevitable, Greeley says...
Even more compelling is Greeley's argument against the "literary myth" which holds that a society can be accurately described by what its intellectuals think. Intellectuals ignore survey data on religion and even the strange new cults popping up on campus and thus conclude, after consultation with each other, that the religious impulse is dead...
...basic flaw in Greeley's arguments lies in his definition of religion as "an explanation of what the world is all about." This notion takes in ideology as well, so that under Greeley's definition. Marxism would be called a religion even though it disavows the notion of God. Yet Greeley explicitly rejects the arguments of liberals for a "God-less Christianity" a la Dietrich Bonhoffer. In the end, one has absorbed empirical data and a considerable body of theory all pointing to the persistence of theistic religion, only to discover that God is not really the focal point...