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Autor: Burleigh, Michael Buch: Sacred Causes Titel: Sacred Causes Stichwort: 1960; Weitergabe des Glaubens; Wandel in der Liturgie Kurzinhalt: Textausschnitt: 354a The most significant changes were among the screaming young girls to whom film-makers obligatorily cut away in their star-focused films. Changes that were infinitely subtle can only sound rather mechanical. Because of the progressive feminisation of piety in the preceding hundred years, mothers and grandmothers were primarily responsible for instilling religious values in their children. Now the cycle was broken, in the sense that, as a contemporary investigation has shown, religious parents only have a fifty-fifty chance of replicating their beliefs among their children, thereby giving those beliefs a 'half-life', whereas non-believing parents are successful in transmitting their own non-belief. This process did not arise overnight.1 During the 1960s a distinctive youth culture fuelled by recent relative affluence displaced older ideals of domesticity, one consequence being that traditional religion lost the main site for its transmission through the generations, based as that was on the binary stereotypes of pious and respectable women corralling more wayward men into the traditional Christian home and family. According to the historian Calum Brown, author of the most innovative work in this field, almost overnight girls' and women's magazines that celebrated a traditional range of domestic feminine virtues were swept aside by such products as Jackie in which 'Stories focused on the words "you", "love" and "happiness".' Out went the good-deed-doing Four Marys of its predecessor Bunty, and in came making oneself appealing to The Monkees, a US pop group manufactured to subtract market share from the British Beatles. Much of the content of Jackie seems incredibly innocent, from a contemporary vantage point where magazines aimed at very young teenagers speak to concerns hitherto confined to younger adults. A new range of magazines for young women, notably She and Cosmopolitan, the former a product of the 1950s and the latter of the early 1970s, provided more adult versions of the same shift in moral discourse, highlighting women as people with careers or as consumers, while even the more staid Woman's Own, which was primarily aimed at housewives, witnessed an expansion of the range of problems countenanced by their agony-aunt columnists, so as to breach such taboos as female sexual satisfaction, while references to religion disappeared.2 (Fs) |