Old Time Religion On The Wane

Historically, old time religion may well have seemed an essential provider of social cohesion during the past centuries of industrialisation, but it clearly has overstayed it's welcome.
This is nowhere more evident than in America, where the true freedom-loving spirit went into decline during the last 30 years of the 20th century. The '50s and the '60s in America each witnessed a great freedom-thing and, interestingly, both were initiated by women.
The '50s had Rosa Parks simply decide she had had enough of being treated like a second-class citizen because of the colour of her skin, and the '60s had Madlyn o Hare win a court case to have the coercive recitation of prayer banned in state funded schools.
Freedom-loving America was at it's peak!
Reaction was bound to follow, and America's intellectual elite, it's so-called educators, sat on their hands (or maybe played fiddles) and watched it happen.
Denial is a nasty hangover from colonial times, the Dark Ages, and not just a Catholic thing, either. It's about a middle class (real or imagined) being proud to be a middle class, and fearful of losing that "status"!