Sociologist Philip Rieff, the great interpreter of Freud, described the shift in Western consciousness like this: “Religious man was born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased.”9 The 1960s were the decade in which Psychological Man came fully into his own. In that decade, the freedom of the individual to fulfill his own desires became our cultural lodestar, and the rapid falling away of American morality from its Christian ideal began as a result. Despite a conservative backlash in the
