Many Americans experienced the social, sexual, and religious changes of the 1960s as “liberation,” but others were deeply unhappy about the direction the country had taken, especially about sexual permissiveness, but also about school prayer and other church-state issues. Their reaction to the Sixties soon produced a backlash strong enough to be visible nationally. For the next two decades, these people—conservative in both religion and politics—swelled the ranks of evangelicals and stanched the hemorrhage of religious engagement of the Sixties, a kind of aftershock to the Sixties’ earthquake.
