We are V.A.'s (Virtual Assistants)

 A brief departure from my series on the topic of the church/state issue. 

We are Virtual Assistants. My wife and I are a team. When we retired from our full-time jobs, we decided to start our own business. We wanted to work together, and we wanted to work from our home office. She was an administrative assistant for her whole career. I was in small business and startups in my career. 

We combined our talents and interests into a business solution for a small business that needs a staff to handle the details of their business that is not the core or revenue-generating part. 

Our ideal client is someone who is spending more time working in their business and not on their business. 

Reach out to us and see where we can help you. Remember before you drown in a sea of stress, call Your Office SOS.

The Church and State and the state we are in ( Part 2)

The church in the middle of the twentieth century was an integral part of America. But after WWII, it took on a decidedly culture Christianity flavor. Everyone was Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish. Look at the Arlington National Cemetery at the time. If there are Muslin or Athiest or any other religious symbol, they would have been minuscule and a very tiny minority. Today I am sure it would be much different. The public cemeteries would have reflected the same religious demographics.

The US experienced a kind of revival but not like earlier revivals that were moves of God by His Holy Spirit. There was a return to religion to form a context for a way to view the world as it took shape after the two World Wars and the current Cold war of the mid-century. But the mainline churches had been corrupted by the higher critics of neo-orthodoxy. They offered a context to the godless communism that emerged as a new threat after the Korean War. However, the new wave of religion was a form of godliness but denied God's power and personalness. 

God was getting lost in the suburbs. What connection to each other and God in the agricultural area was morphing into the industrial age, and a mechanized process god: religion emerged. The moral values of America were a Judeo-Christian sort of ethic. Check out Hay's Rule and Hollywood battles. 

School prayer was normative, and textbooks were sprinkled with spiritual values. But the tenuous values and superficial adherence to an abstract God began to crack. 

James Dean and the like began to portend and foretell what the '60s would bring. 

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The Church and State and the state we are in ( Part 1)

Oh, where to begin. I need to cover this ground because it's my opinion that the younger people ( I mean under 60) have not received proper education about civics and history in public school.

Let me digress and speak of my own "baby boomer" upbringing. Being raised in the USA in the '50s, we were being fed a lot of propaganda. Propaganda took place in our schools, both public and parochial. The media was only somewhat complicit then, but that is a subject for another blog. 

Post WW2 and Korean War; America in the '50s was fighting the Cold War. These were the IKE years. American nationalism was at an all-time high. Most of our parents believed in God and country. The foreign threat with its nuclear ramifications was uniting our country. But at the same time, simmering unresolved internal conflicts still were starting to appear. 

The racial issues and women's movements seemed to have been put on hold until we could gain some semblance of safety from our foreign enemies.

Many of our parents were 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants who fought to make America safe from the terrors of their "old country." Even so, the melting pot was beginning to boil over in the '50s.

I don't intend to address the broad scope of the tear in our nation's fabric in-depth here. I am content for the moment to single out the significant fraction and reason why our form of government is on the brink of collapse in 2020.

To set the stage for the boomer view of history lets briefly look at the 1st half of the century. "OK, Boomer" gets its context.

It seems like war and depression and then war again marked the 1st half of the twentieth century. But there were two other issues that I will interject that had a significant influence on the first half of the twentieth century that are critical to our story's development: Woman's Suffrage and the Temperance Movement. 

Those two issues brought together an alliance with unintended consequences. 

From a blog: https://amazingwomeninhistory.com/womens-suffrage-and-temperance-movemen

Women were thought to be morally superior to men by nature, and many advocates for women's suffrage argued that women should have the vote because of this. Advocates for temperance wanted women to have the vote because it was believed they would vote for prohibition due to their moral superiority.

So when I say radical Christian Fundamentalists and Feminists in 2020, no such coalition could be conceivable. But in the first quarter of the twentieth century, that's exactly what happened.  

During this period, the church, for the most part, was visible but beginning to fracture. Cities everywhere sprung up with the steeples of churches dominating the skyline. They were taller than the courthouses and commercial buildings; this is a fact that should not be dismissed lightly.

But as the organized churches grew in size structurally and physically in both size and number, their spiritual growth started to stagnate and decline. 

At this point, we will leave off for today and take up the topic again on subsequent posts.