Spiritual politics

IF, at the end of World War II, a commentator on American religion had predicted that in the course of the next forty years urban mass revivalism would be rekindled; a Roman Catholic politician would be elected president and Roman Catholic priests convicted of destroying draft files; a German-Jewish immigrant would become Secretary of State; untold numbers of Americans would attach themselves to Oriental gurus and self-help cults; the birthday of a Negro minister would become a national holiday; prayer would be banned from public schools and the teaching of Darwinian evolution embroiled in controversy; a fundamentalist account of the Millennium would be the best-selling book of one decade and fundamentalist ministers the best-known leaders of American Protestantism in the next; then he (or she) would likely have been dismissed as the prisoner of a bizarre, if obscure, fantasy.