Wilkinson, “All Falling Faiths”

The Sixties won the Culture Wars. Or, perhaps it’s better to say, the Sixties are winning; Culture Wars never really end. That Sixties culture dominates America today is obvious, and many celebrate that fact. Some aspects of Sixties culture in fact are worthy of celebration. But not all, and not everybody is celebrating. Earlier year, Encounter Books published an assessment of the Sixties by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s. Here’s the publisher’s description:

In this warm and intimate memoir Judge Wilkinson delivers a chilling message. The 1960s inflicted enormous damage on our country; even at this very hour we see the decade’s imprint in so much of what we say and do. The chapters reveal the harm done to the true meaning of education, to our capacity for lasting personal commitments, to our respect for the rule of law, to our sense of rootedness and home, to our desire for service, to our capacity for national unity, to our need for the sustenance of faith. Judge Wilkinson does not seek to lecture but to share in the most personal sense what life was like in the 1960s, and to describe the influence of those frighteningly eventful years upon the present day.

Judge Wilkinson acknowledges the good things accomplished by the Sixties and nourishes the belief that we can learn from that decade ways to build a better future. But he asks his own generation to recognize its youthful mistakes and pleads with future generations not to repeat them. The author’s voice is one of love and hope for America. But our national prospects depend on facing honestly the full magnitude of all we lost during one momentous decade and of all we must now recover.