The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

For decades, reinvigorating Western religion and philosophy with a dose of Asian spiritualism had been a favorite project of Western intellectuals: Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, F.S.C. Northrop, the Beat novelists and poets. The generations that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s were, in this sense, religious. Until 1975 religion, measured by both professed belief and church attendance, had been falling off, but it then began a steep rise that would last two decades. The Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam classified the period as another in a series of what American historians call “great awakenings.” Fundamentalism and evangelical Christianity would shape American politics, starting in 1976 with the election to the presidency of Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, himself a “born-again” Christian. It was a revival led by young people, not a remnant composed of a few geezers.