You thought it was going to be capitalism that would save the world through American business, but actually it’s this new spirituality that joins the East and the West, and joins all these different things that God set asunder–in particular, male and female. And this spirituality is involved in a process of mystical trance-like going beyond the self and the mind and the body, into some kind of state where one feels united to all things. 

The coming of the goddess to the land of our fathers is the title I propose to you as I attempt to describe what I think has happened in particular in America in the last generation. I want to first of all introduce that subject with some thoughts about the great American Revolution.

I believe the American Revolution which is the most critical for America happened very recently. How did it happen? What was it?

Well, I want to look at the influence of the Sixties. What was the agenda in the Sixties? It was an agenda of destruction. But it was also an agenda of reconstruction of a totally different worldview. So that’s more or less the plan of my talk in this essay.

You can probably feel it in your bones, like the rag-tag Colonists hearing the staccato sound of the advancing, implacable British war machine before the Redcoats actually arrived on Lexington Green. Or, like the poorly equipped handful of foot soldiers in the World War II movie Saving Private Ryan, who prepare to defend a bridge in a small French town, sensing the rumblings of the oncoming German tanks and hearing the eerie screeching of their metal tracks over those old cobblestone streets long before that overwhelming firepower appears in sight to blast them into eternity. I imagine most of you hearing me say this sense that there is something afoot in once-Christian America. The earth is moving. The kings of the earth are conspiring together against the Lord and His Christ. The Christian faith in Christian America in this day and age is under serious assault. That’s why I suggest to you that the most radical American Revolution took place not in 1776, when you all revolted against my king, but in the last generation of the twentieth century.

In these last thirty or so years, we have witnessed the first Great Awakening — of Paganism. In this land known for its spiritual awakenings of the Christian faith, we have witnessed the first great awakening of Paganism, which indeed has deconstructed Western Christendom and produced a radical transformation of this once-Christian society. Couched in the emotive language of democratic rights and fair play, religious Paganism has taken control of the collective mind of the West. The pro-gay marriage forces state their case in civic revolutionary terms. I quote: “Just as our forefathers rejected King George’s oppressive laws in 1776, we should reject today the unfair laws regulating marriage.”

I would suggest to you that between unfair taxes–that worldwide empire did cost a tidy sum–and the gay marriage issue, there is surely no comparison. The latter is the true revolution against the entire Western understanding of the family, of marriage, including that indeed of the pagan Greeks and Romans.

You know, some people don’t believe that a revolution has taken place. The radicals on the left want you to believe there’s been no culture war, that things are going on just as normal. I remember sitting a year or so ago in a seminar of the American Academy of Religion, and it was a group of radical Feminists sitting up there talking about the culture. And one of them, who had written a book called, The Changing of the Gods, had the arrogance to suggest that nothing had happened. Well, I mean, when you change gods, something serious has happened, right? It’s not something like the invention of sliced bread. Something serious has happened.

Another one of these Feminists was talking about the right-wing backlash, and she mentioned one of these typical right-wing books, Spirit Wars, of which I was the author! Well, I quietly hid my name just so that I wouldn’t get attacked at that particular moment! Yeah, according to the radicals, nothing’s happened. It’s just the normal turning over of the American democratic process.

Chuck Colson thinks the war has taken place, but it’s far from lost. Don Richard Newhouse claims that America is incorrigibly Christian. He says, “The Christianity of America is as confused as it is incorrigible.” And he takes some encouragement from that, that America is still profoundly Christian. But I think a confused Christianity is as dangerous as anything I can imagine. Gertrude Himmelfarb, a Jewish historian and observer of the culture, recently wrote a book titled One Nation, Two Cultures: A Moral Divide, and stated, “There has been a culture war, and the left won it.” David Fromm, in the book, How We Got Here: The Seventies, the Decade that Brought You Modern Life, says that his book attempts to describe “The most total social reformation that the United States has lived through since the coming of industrialization.” Roger Kimball, in his book The Long March, describes the upheaval that took place from the Sixties on: “As an upheaval of dramatic proportions, a momentous social and moral assault has been unleashed on our education and cultural institutions. We have lost our moral consensus.”

An example of this in the recent news is when Tom DeLay, the third-ranking Republican in the House, offered the opinion about what had happened in America: that “the small elite of opinion-makers was waging a cultural coup d’etat on our country’s fundamental values.” And the reaction to that was to suggest that he himself was actually guilty of a culture war. A House Democrat said that ‘that kind of a statement was ugly, mean-spirited, partisan culture warfare.’ But the truth of the matter is, there was an ugly, mean-spirited, partisan culture war, and it happened in the Sixties. And now we’re told that we should act as if it didn’t happen, and just get on with life, as if things are fine.

I would suggest to you that in this last generation some major things have happened. I want to give you a list and see if you resonate with my observations. Just notice–and I won’t go into any detail–the things that have happened in the last generation: the victory of the sexually liberated over the sexually inhibited; the victory of a new censorship of speech over free speech; the victory of women as breadwinners over bread-makers (I mean by that women as mothers and homemakers); the victory of divorce over marriage; the victory of the Feminists over the patriarchs; the victory of a woman’s right to abort her child over the unborn child’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the victory of the child’s rights over the parents’ rights.

Let me stop there for a moment and share with you a statement from an article written by Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1973 in The Harvard Educational Review. Former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has not changed her opinion from this statement. She advocated liberating our “child citizens from the empire of the father.”

Consider the victory of the multi-culturalist over the American melting pot; the victory of gays over straights; the victory of moral chaos over moral consensus; the victory of the irrational over the rational; of the earth/space spiritualists over the materialists; of spirituality over God; of the Postmodern over Modernity; of political correctness over the pursuit of truth; of the rest of creation over human beings.

Just down the road in Princeton, Peter Singer, who is considered by some one of the most influential living philosophers, says this: “For three thousand years at least, the majority of people have considered that human beings were special. Well, not anymore. It is no longer possible to live by the idea that there is something special, unique, even sacred about human beings.”

The victory of the goddess over God; the victory of BCE/CE over BC/AD. These are not motorcar numbers I’m talking about. Some of you who are aware of what’s happening in academia know that in this last generation we have dropped the references to time in terms of BC – before Christ and AD –  Anno Domini. Now we refer to time in this totally meaningless and foolish, innocuous way as “before common era” and “common era.” What on earth that means, I have no idea, but it enables people to avoid bringing Christ as the center of history, and indeed what that really represents is that history has lost any sense of direction. And the victory of many ways over the One Way.

Is that a revolution? That is incredible to me. When you can lay those things down, and people have the gall to say there’s nothing that’s changed…how can so many, so blessed with the gospel in this country, the fortress of evangelical Christianity in the recent history of the modern world, go so morally and spiritually haywire in such a short time? Vast numbers of red-blooded Americans, including many in prominent positions, such as Bill Clinton, Bill Bradley, and Vice President Al Gore, to name just a few of those that you’ve seen in the news recently, all claim a past born-again Christian experience, and yet now are deep into Deepak Chopra, goddess spirituality, abortion, homosexuality, and religious syncretism.

Let me give you an example. I won’t tell you the name of this person, but I’m going to give you two citations. One he made in the Sixties, and one he made in the Nineties. Here’s the first one: “The choice is simple. Between the eternal and the passing, between Jesus Christ and the world, I’ve made my choice. I love Jesus Christ, how about you?” In the Nineties this same man said, “Christianity offers one way to achieve inner peace and oneness with the world. Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism and Hinduism are for others. Increasingly I resist the exclusivity of true believers.” 1 Can you imagine the same person saying those two things? That was Bill Bradley. In the Sixties he was a famous basketball player–from these parts, by the way, Princeton University–and he had a dramatic Christian experience. Campus Crusade actually printed his testimony, and I cite from that testimony. And it went all around the country, and Bill Bradley with it. In the Nineties he rejects the exclusivity of Jesus Christ.

A major change has come over that man, which I take is somewhat symbolic of many people in our culture. I just thought of a few names: Donna Sommers, raised in a Christian background, wonderful singer in her own black Christian church, left the faith, became one of these great rock singers. After that she decided she’s going to come back to religion, and where does she end up? She’s on the psychic hot-line. Belle Hooks, a brilliant black woman who was raised in an evangelical home, went to university and began to study, and rejected her evangelical faith. I heard her giving a lecture to a thousand teachers of religion, with excitement proclaiming the freedom she now finds in Buddhism.

Something has happened in our culture to turn people away from the gospel and to these other systems of thought. W. C. Routh, a sociologist from the West Coast (sometimes known as the Left Coast), has surveyed believers as to what they really believe, and one of the things he came up with just last year is that nearly half of the born-again believers said that all religions were equally true. That’s half of “born again” believers, so we’re not surprised when the Southern Baptists receive a letter written on House of Representatives stationary complaining about their attempt to convert the Hindus in their project to preach the gospel in Chicago. They were accused of “overly aggressive and insensitive language which goes beyond the bounds of decorum, tact, respect and understanding.” That was a letter from six members of Congress, on Congressional stationary, accusing the Southern Baptists of being un-American. The backbone of the nation is now often treated as the nation’s funny-bone, and banished to the margins. How did we get here?

Analysis of How We Got Here

I’d like to propose to you an analysis of what happened in the Sixties. I’m not suggesting that’s the only way to describe what’s happened. It seems to me that it was in the Sixties that much of this material came up onto the surface and out into the streets. We can go back and back and back to find the origins of that, but for the moment, as a social phenomenon I would like to suggest to you that the Sixties revolution really explains where we are today. And indeed, just a year or so ago we celebrated Woodstock. To me it’s in some mythical Garden of Eden somewhere, but you know better than I do that it is a real place. As a matter of fact, the people who went there some thirty years ago didn’t necessarily go there for an orgy, but they went there for a spiritual search for a Garden of Eden.

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