Should We Not Have Noticed This?
Chapter five of Well's book is called simply "Self." In a nutshell, what happened was that our individualism, which had always been a potent factor in American life, turned inward in this decade. It withdrew from the outside world. And during the 1960s a new worldview emerged. To a great majority of Americans, it now became clear that the self had become the source of all values. The pursuit of the self was what life was all about... It is not unreasonable to think that this turn in our culture would have found resistance among the religious. And it did at the more liberal end of Protestantism, ironically enough, but evangelicals fell headlong into this new way of seeing life. It could be heard, in the 1980s and 1990s, every time Robert Schuller’s cherubic countenance appeared on television. He was moving in a new direction, though he also claimed to be traditionally Protestant. He announced that this new self-focused preoccupation was nothing less than a new Reformation.
