The Starting of Cultural Reintegration

The Starting of Cultural Reintegration
As is often the case, the leading edge of a cultural integration can be highly deviant.

The cultic movements of the 1960s and 1970s emerged as early signed of reintegration around spiritual commitment.

They benefited from the fact that their newly minted religious norms could generate relief from the anomie of the counterculture.

Members of groups such as the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas and – for their elders – Scientology reflected the aberrant consequences of a need to find definition, clarity and strong and binding ties, which had been lost over the preceding decades.

Intensity of commitment was based on deification of dubious leaders who laid claim to people’s material assets, to their option to live as they choose, and even to their choice of mate; this was a radical response to the loss of family ties and traditional values.

These new communities of belief of origin, gave expression to the need to feel a sense of rootedness.

This initial radical response was soon superseded by the search for adaptation more consonant with traditional religious culture.

Fundamentalist belief offered both social stability and a relationship with a religious format that many of the maturing baby boomers’ parents would have understood.

For other it was a less well defined disposition, one that drew on a variety of spiritual tradition and religious, one that reflected a desire to integrate diverse beliefs in a world made smaller by electric media and international travel, and one that reflected the liberal education that had frame the world view of many who were now seeking some of sense of transcendence.

Children of the counter culture generation could no longer sustain sectarian enmity as a cultural norm; they had seem and experienced too much.

Now they would encompass an ecumenical view of life’s purpose, one that legitimated the diversity their country now sanctioned.

Spirituality a seemingly vague term for the pursuit of personal meaning, fit the bill.

It even allowed for mutual respect, or at least guarded acceptance of discourse between fundamentalists and secularists.

It thereby provided a large tent that could house diverse views of transcendence and allow acknowledge of a certain commonality across the country’s many subcultures.
The Starting of Cultural Reintegration