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Chicken Little Panic, Then Silence
Our highly secular academics and journalists tend to flock
together and run, now and then, to cover a single spiritual story.
When some religious activity at last forces itself upon media
leaders, they tend to flock like Chicken Littles in panic over a
single raindrop . . . the sky is falling! The authors of this book
recount such a cackling in the last months of the 1980 presidential
campaign. Having rushed out to scream that fundamentalists
were backing Ronald Reagan's bid, months after the main story
had been clear, most major-media journalists then ignored the
story after the votes were counted, having never scratched below
the surface of TV evangelism's giant social movement.
The pale secularists of the press simply have failed to deal with the vivid new spiritualism. And I have to confess my own share of such failures in forty years as a working reporter and editor in national media. My sins of omission are uncommonly serious, since I could often see the fire but generally could not figure out how to explain it clearly enough to sound an effective call or alarm. Indeed, a few of my personal failures serve as a partial checklist on the rising religious turmoil since World War II. Samples:
- Having covered most southern and northern race riots, I somehow failed to explain the profound church involvement (especially from Little Rock onward) clearly enough for us to expect that inevitable confrontation at Selma. There, fired-up white and black ministers risked death to march against Alabama's segregation machinery.
- Black friends more or less forced me to visit Chicago's Elijah Muhammad in the 1950s and to recognize the unique promise of Malcolm X (before the autobiography). But my secular blinders almost made me miss doing the first national report on the Black Muslim sect just when it was becoming the critical new force in American ghettos.
-
Theologian Paul Tillich's End of the Protestant Era,
plus his direct admonitions to me, alerted me to the prospect
of "post-existential"
agonies like the rise of the radical right and the violence on college campuses. He spent our last talk just before his death comparing notes with me on the early stages of such movements. Although Tillich's religious analysis drove me to do the first national expose on the John Birch Society, I was far slower than I should have been to see us heading into the generational riots over fundamental values at Berkeley . . . Columbia . . . Kent State . . . The spiritual crises that flamed up in those struggles have yet to be resolved in years of apparent peace.xvi
- By the mid-1960s, fundamentalist leaders like Billy Graham and Gabe Payne and born-again writers like Keith Miller (author of The Becomers and of Please Love Me) had shown me the struggles ahead. The Christian right would be far more powerful than the Christian left had been. I did warn in a 1965 article that prudent Americans might yet know "why the prudent Romans fed their lions on Christian meat." But my conviction that religious movements would forge the new political majorities did not lead me to spell out the specifics in time to help anyone understand the situation any better.
-
In my long, happy years as the editor of Psychology Today
magazine, I tracked down and published dozens of systematic
probes and surveys that defined a historic shift in U.S. values
and beliefs. Theologian Sam Keen helped the editorial staff to
patrol the cutting edges of this transformation through the
work of seminal thinkers—from mythologist Joseph Campbell
to mystic Carlos Castaneda, from the stern Rollo May to the
despairing Ernst Becker, from porpoise admirer John Lilly to body
mystic Mike Murphy. Researchers helped us trace the new realities.
The University of California's sociologists of religion helped us
measure the broad shift toward body mysticism, what I called a
sense of "God in the gut." Dr. George Gallup helped us
identify the mystical beliefs rising inside the standard denominations.
Father Andrew Greeley, priest-sociologist at NORC, startled me
with his data on the broad public belief in mystical powers: 58
percent of American adults say they've experienced ESP, 27
percent say they've talked with one or more dead friends, and 6
percent have undergone profound mystical encounters very much
like St. Paul's blinded fall on the road to Damascus. Some unseen
power now unseats our rationalistic certainties. Daniel Yankelovich, soon to publish his most perceptive study of our changing values, has led me through year after year of carefully measured evolution toward today's religious upheaval. Precise as ever, Dan finds about one out of three people rebelling against the cold "instrumental" values that obscure the sacred worth of the whole man or woman.xvii
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