March 17, 1999

Is the religious right becoming sectarian? That was the question I found myself asking after Paul Weyrich, one of the founding fathers of the Moral Majority, recently called on Christians to "drop out" of American culture. "I believe that we have probably lost the culture war," Weyrich lamented.

In the early 1960s Granger Westberg gave a sermon on grief at Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago. The response from listeners indicated that it was something more than the usual sermon.

He spoke of the experience of loss and the stages of grief. He provided not a script for moving through the process of grief but an account of the feelings and changes that come with loss. The sermon eventually became a book, Good Grief (1962), which sold millions of copies and was translated into several languages.

Why are people ripping "For Those Tears I Died" out of songbooks and hymnals? It's one of the most popular Christian folk songs to come out of the '60s. It's been translated into 12 languages. There's hardly an evangelical songbook in which it doesn't appear. Written by then 16-year-old Marsha Stevens, the song expresses adolescent piety, yet its images of baptism and liberation are universal. Liturgical purists may think the song too personal or sentimental, but a lot of people count those elements as strengths.