Conservatives, in the United States and elsewhere, are sometimes faulted for blaming “the 1960s” for many of today’s most persistent social ills. Surveying the situation in contemporary Europe, French social theorist Olivier Roy suggests that they are mostly right—at least with respect to recognizing that the 1960s mark a moral and religious watershed in modern history.
The fallout from that decade sets the backdrop for the question posed in Roy’s pointedly titled book Is Europe Christian? Not mincing words, Roy argues that “[e]verything changed in the 1960s,” when a “revolution in morality took place” and a “new anthropology centred on human freedom” was born.
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