As with journalists, professors increasingly reflect the demands of institutional survival more than the traditions of their own trade. To the extent that there exists a culture of academic dissent, it hardly makes its voice heard beyond the faculty lounge. The church, another traditional source of social and political change, is similarly faint and distant. Part of this is due to the media having decided that the only religious America worth reporting is that which is fundamentalist and right-wing, but there are other forces at work as well. Ministers step out and congregations pull them back.
Ministers choose to seek a bishopric rather than relevancy.
Ministers, like the rest of America, find themselves increasingly ruled by institutional rather than human priorities. And so forth. Whether their alternative is consumerism, nihilism or social service, the result is a silence where the raucous sounds of revival are desperately needed. In the meanwhile, as usual, change waits for the young. As during the fifties, the establishment now presents a stolid, unyielding, unthinking, unimaginative wall of bland certainty.