“It happened this way: some troubled governmental bigwig hit upon the idea that the United States was going astray. Surveying our internal turmoil and strife he concluded that America’s many eruptions of discontent were interconnected and symptomatic of a single pervasive illness… He decided that the U.S. had broken with the Protestant ethic that nurtured it; that we as a nation had ‘fallen from grace,’ as he put it. He detected political, economic and cultural degeneration. And at back of degeneration he saw a bankruptcy of traditional Christian values. This gentleman convinced several other well-placed figures in government of the validity of his critique… Half the people who consider themselves Christians are dissatisfied with the church because it’s too big, too impersonal and too commercial: it doesn’t penetrate their lives as deeply as it does their pocketbooks. They’re impatient because it isn’t changing fast enough. The other half are uptight because it’s changed too much already…. The Christian establishment, no longer in touch with real life, was quaking and shaking in a crisis situation.”

p. 153, p. 156, p. 157
Another Roadside Attraction, a completely fictional novel written by
Tom Robbins in 1971.

Richard M. Nixon was President of the United States that year and Ted Cruz had just been born. It would be 8 more years before Jerry Falwell would launch his Moral Majority and 17 more years before Pat Robertson would run for President and Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart would be caught with their pants around their ankles. But Tom Robbins seems to have seen it all coming. This was before Jimmy Carter and before Ronald Reagan. Weird, huh?