7 - Secularization in American Society: A Review of the 1960s

Summary

Over the last fifty years there have been a few major changes in the ways in which Americans experience their relationship to the nation as a whole, to the sacred, and to the passage of time. Together, these changes reflect aspects of the process of secularization in complex modern societies. In this essay I will argue that secularizing societies and, in particular, American society from the 1960s forward have become permeated with temporality by the increasing differentiation of the sacred from religion and by a sense of chronic crisis.

I will also argue that the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King, Jr., drove the sacred from places closest to the cultural center and into more immediate, accessible, local, and particular contexts. Martin E. Marty noted of the Kennedy brothers and of King that after “their declines and deaths” there was “a change of religious experiences in a new, centrifugal direction.” Marty went on to note that as Catholics became more divided under the reactionary leadership of Pope Paul VI, “presidential religious symbols … were seen in an almost wholly negative light,” and African Americans became increasingly polarized between separatists and more conservative and liberal constituencies. Kennedy had stood between Americans and the abyss of nuclear war. King stood between Americans and the abyss of violent racial conflict. Their deaths opened the doors to terror wider than ever before.