1 shows in detail how the western world was secularized. God and the idea of the spiritual in terms of the supernatural were finally eliminated from the ordinary thought processes of people. Religious ideas and practices could be retained in private, but in the public forum they were taboo. The western culture bought into the secular values. The power of a culture to form the thought patterns and lifestyle of people living within it is almost inexorable.
Values come slithering in like wisps of fog under the door.
Their influence is almost undetectable until the whole is saturated with them. Unfortunately the churches were vulnerable. In 1968 when secularism reached critical mass and transformed the thought processes of the western world many religious people rushed to divest themselves of their distinctiveness. Recently a parish had to face the probability that it would no longer have a full-time pastor assigned to it and in all probability would be pastored part time by a priest from another parish. This would be possible if the parish reorganized itself so that it was laity led.