The next part of the article is called “The Mystical Sixties”. Because of the many movements in the late sixties, one for example is the Vietnam War movement, helped bring about a boom of cult religions. Finke and Stark’s argument is that there are not an unusual number of cults and that the Indian influence has no major matter over cultural matters. From using many references including a table they show numbers of cults formed from the fifties till the late eighties. Also

“The Eastern Aspect” is the section talked about next. I think in this section they use too much citations and references and can easily confuse a reader. They quote a bit from Cox, which at the end of his citations I think is a weak argument which we talked about in class. “In conclusion, Cox noted a great irony, that though many critics charge…who are clear-headed enough to be ‘open to other life-patterns.’” I think in this statement it is a poor result because he talks about brainwashing which can have alternate meanings and I think can not be taken all too serious. In summary of this section they again go to table 1 on page 355, and reflect on the percentages of Eastern influence of cult formations. One thing that I think was very clever by Finke and Stark was that they brought up the immigration laws that kept out most Asians therefore Eastern religious teachers. Then in 1965 it was dropped and big influencers of Eastern religions were let into the country. What Finke and Stark say in this section that clarifies their argument, I think is that it took only a relatively a small number of American converts to Hinduism to generate some Hindu-based cult movements ; which if you think about it, it is not an explosion it is a normal thing to do when something new like that comes into to an area.

What looks like the only section that Finke and Stark believe is actually an explosion is the one on the Evangelical eruption. They start by bringing up source material on the argument that cultural crisis is the reason from leaving mainline denominations to the Evangelical churches. Another argument is that the sixties were the general reason for the shift in what churches people went to. Finke and Stark once again refer to another Table, two, this starts with the 1940’s, then the 60’s, then 1985. It has mainline churches, then the Evangelical; the mainline churches you see drop and drop, the Evangelical goes up and up. The percentages shown to the far right show how the mainlines drop off a bit, and then the Evangelical churches have actually skyrocket through the middle of the century. This table I think is a huge success for them since it is a respectable source for their argument. At the end of their argument they use lots of statistic’s which is a good thing, if you can prove your idea by numbers that is a good thing. They end the section with thoughts of why mainline churches go down and why these new Evangelical Protestant church

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