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.