Word: secularize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Christmas-card list, the nonprofit foundation in Charlottesville, Va., has generally stayed focused on what he says is "my calling from God"--to defend religious liberty against what he sees as government encroachment. In interviews and publications, the institute describes Christians as a besieged population assaulted by a coarse, secular culture and the government that fosters it. Dramatizations in the group's Religious Apartheid video show bureaucrats dismantling a family and soldiers brainwashing a hapless father with four sinister buzz words of the secular world: "love, tolerance, diversity and choice...
While the mass media fetishizes fame in the persons of actors, elected officials, musicians and similar sorts of people, the popular attitude toward these objects of secular worship is nowhere near uniformly positive. No matter how good the economy is and no matter how few Washington peccadilloes have come to light in a given year, there always seems to be an undercurrent of "throw the bums out" sentiment among the electorate. Incumbents often try to present themselves as reformers or agents of change so as to avoid the public's perennial dislike of the current power structure...
Even here at fair Harvard, essentially a vast secular temple to success, there exists a certain amount of resentment toward those who succeed. An article which appeared several weeks ago in this newspaper about the current crop of Rhodes and Marshall scholarship nominees began by jokingly noting that the students who had been nominated were finally beginning to reap the rewards of "staying home all those Saturday nights." While it was nothing more than a mild and probably fairly accurate gibe, this line is indicative of a certain resentful "Yeah, they got nominated, but at least they have no social...
...clear that concerns about euthanasia cover an extreme depth of opinion, predominantly rooted in secular concerns," he said...
Even the small child notices that beneath all the fun spookiness of the day there lies something deeper (and perhaps darker). There must, after all, be a reason why the holiday has been so enthusiastically appropriated by secular, mainstream culture. Bobbing for apples is fun, but it's not that fun. Halloween has such staying power because secular America gets many of the same things out of the holiday that the Celts and Medieval Christians did so many years ago. Halloween the popular celebration is a comforting, attractive gloss on the subject matter that lies at its core. Even...