Word: religion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...perhaps 40 million Protestant Evangelicals, both black and white, and they are the fastest growing element in American Christianity (see RELIGION). They also constitute a natural constituency for Carter, responding enthusiastically to his frequent use of words and phrases that identify him as one of them: love, brotherhood, decency, purity, compassion. His preaching of traditional moral values also appeals to many others, notably blue-collar Catholic "ethnics." Typically, a black clergyman in Philadelphia praised him as a man "with a Bible in one hand and a ballot box in the other...
...MOST PEOPLE in our times the really perplexing questions of sin and redemption turn up in a secular context. Religion tends to be a perfunctory kind of activity, if you bother with it at all, or an eclectic sort of scholarly pursuit. Everyone has mystical moments, or gets tangled up in emotions, fazed by situations that are hard to sort out in a rational way. But 20th-century life demands a pretty pragmatic and scientific frame of mind...
Christian love, Eastern serenity, contemplation--they're all right, but too often you have to squeeze them into your spare time, maybe as an after thought. Perhaps religion affords an out when you're down and confused, but it hardly rates as opium for the masses anymore, if it ever...
...spiritual rather than economic and social. The average American today is lost. He doesn't know what to believe, where to go, what to do." Marquette University Sociologist Wayne Youngquist calls these spiritual concerns collectively a "metaissue-an issue above issues. It involves tone, honesty, decency, truthfulness, morality, religion...
...like Griffin sees a basic problem with the activist Catholic movement, a problem stemming from the failure of Vatican II's reforms to materialize. "The further away from Vatican II we get the easier it becomes to pursue either a shallow spiritualism or to say it's all bullshit, religion is the opiate of the masses and Marx and Freud were right," Roodkowsky said...