If the Modernity or Enlightenment Project started fading after 1945, to which religious faith was it most closely aligned to --- and did that religious faith group's power also start to fade in consequence ?
Or perhaps I have it back-asswards.
Was that faith tested in the moral fires of WWII and found seriously failing ?
Such that it never recovered its world-wide culture-wide cachet but became instead ever more tightly clung to by those un-reconciled to the fading of Modernity ?
The world establishment was dominated (pre 1945) by people who were white and male and whose families had originated from North Western Europe and who had been raised in a mainstream Protestant milieu.
Not all that world-wide political-military-economic-intellectual establishment was from that Protestant grouping - think quickly of Hitler, Stalin, Tojo and Mussolini --- but the tone and the pace of Modernity was set by the Protestants.
They dominated the universities, media and civil service, military and business elites (even in countries that had sizeable minorities or majorities of non-Protestants) of most of the biggest most modern nations in the 1940s.
One thinks of 1950s Canada for but one example.
Anglicans, Presbyterians , Methodists, Lutherans.
Some Baptists - maybe.
No Pentacostals or Salvation Army , no orthodox faiths, no Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists ,etc.
Agnostic or atheist was okay - even expected in certain circles (science) but one still had to have been raised in a Protestant atmosphere before rejecting it for "the higher protestantism" (scientism).
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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