Where observers would perhaps have got things most wrong would have been by focusing on the traditionally Christian West, and not paying attention to the wider world – to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the quantitative hearts of a truly Global Christianity…one lesson is that media and academics in the late 1960s chose to stress and exaggerate the trends they did because they approved of them. They wanted a progressive, secular-leaning, ecumenical future, and wrote as if that was inevitable. They did not want an evangelical, charismatic or fundamentalist future, and ignored signs pointing to it.

In recent months I have been lecturing and teaching quite a bit on key anniversaries – on the centennial of the end of First World War, but also on that other tumultuous year, 1968. The religious aspects of 1968 are not quite as legendary as other events and trends of that year, but they are extraordinarily significant. Looking at them today, the main lesson we learn is the gulf that separates contemporary perceptions of key trends from later views. What we see at the time is very different from what later generations will recognize as the really important developments. That should be a powerful warning for us today. What currents or trends might we be missing?

The secular developments of 1968 have received plenty of attention in recent months – the assassinations and racial unrest in the US, the popular youth movements around the world, violence in Paris and Mexico City, the continuing war in Vietnam, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the first stirrings of global terrorism, and so on. The world seemed to be in a period of grave crisis, even on an apocalyptic scale. Each of these events in its different way discredited some long-accepted source of authority. Western liberal democracy found many critics and challenges, but so did the familiar alternative of Communism: the Czech invasion of August 1968 closed that alternative for anyone with a sense of moral decency.

But what were the religious responses? Assume you were following mainstream media through the year, what were the key stories illustrating the likely development of the world’s faiths to the crisis? The following is impressionistic, but I think it accurately reflects the tone of debate.

As commonly viewed (do note that qualification), the largest religious story within Christianity was the struggle to make faith relevant in an age of activism and social upheaval, and a shift away from supernatural dimensions of faith. These ideas found expression in books like Harvey Cox’s 1965 The Secular City, but they were achieving very widespread influence by 1968.

These trends were only appropriate given the near-certain political future, when Western free enterprise capitalism was so obviously doomed, and would have to evolve in directions that were collectivist and communal, based on state authority and economic planning. The United States itself likely faced an apocalyptic future, rent by race wars and political protest. The global future was socialist, or Communist. As they used to day in Europe at that time, the optimists are learning Russian. The pessimists are learning Chinese.

In the US, mainline churches were split by controversies over political activism, especially in matters of race relations, and Vietnam. In May 1968, Presbyterian minister and Yale University chaplain, William Sloane Coffin Jr. was on trial for conspiracy for encouraging Americans to evade the draft. In the same month, the Berrigan brothers – both Catholic priests – were among the Catonsville Nine protesters who burned hundreds of stolen draft records. Meanwhile, the US Episcopal Church created its General Convention Special Program, GCSP, which was widely denounced for channeling funds to black extremist organizations. This was only one factor among many creating dissent, but the mainline churches now began a general implosion of numbers and membership.

The issue of “coming to terms with the modern world” (as it was commonly phrased) particularly hit the Roman Catholic Church with the disputes following the Papal encyclical on artificial contraception, which I have already discussed. It is hard to exaggerate the collapse of morale in the US Catholic church in this time, or the speed with which trust in institutional authority disintegrated. The celibacy issue contributed to the exodus of American clergy from the late 1960s onward. From 1968 through 1973, resignations of priests were so numerous that three-quarters of all ordinations were required just to fill these gaps, not counting losses from death or retirement. In the US and elsewhere, nuns left their convents in the tens of thousands. Taken together, this contributed to a sense of the church’s being inexorably driven to accept liberal modernity, including secular values in approaches to sexuality. The question was just how long that stubborn Vatican hierarchy could fight back the inevitable.

So if the old churches were failing, what new trends or impulses might supplant them? Apart from general political activism, the concept of liberation theology now became commonplace. That movement received its first major public visibility in September 1968 with the meeting of the Latin American bishops, CELAM, in Medellin, Colombia. This popularized such concepts as base communities, and the “preferential option for the poor.” Those ideas found an American home in the work of James H. Cone, who in 1969 published his Black Theology and Black Power.

As in other instances, we see the outcomes of trends that were pushing change in 1968, although the books or statements might have come a year or so later. So we see women’s and gay activism beginning within the churches in 1968, although public manifestations did not become fully apparent for a year or two. The gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Church dates from 1968. The gay Catholic organization Dignity was officially founded in 1969.

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