Yearbook '69: Attack Of The Futurist Christians!
LatestIn 1947, a group of Evangelicals founded a private college in Pasadena, where they imagined they could educate their children in a wholesome, Christian environment, free of the wider world’s corrupting influence. Naturally, the 1969 yearbook is pure gold.
Ambassador College, a regionally accredited institution that at one time had satellite campuses in Bricket Wood, England, and Big Sandy, Texas, closed in 1997. But the 1969 ENVOY, its “annual pictorial record,” is still available on PDF. The ENVOY starts, as all periodicals for the ages do, by taking stock of the Global Situation.
It is 1969, so naturally the Global Situation is bad.
“NEVER was the world like it is today! Gigantic leaps ahead in technology and certain sciences — men walking and cavorting about on the moon, yes — BUT, unsafe to walk on sidewalks here on earth,” write the yearbook editors.
The ENVOY (all capitalizations, exclamation points, typographical quirks, elisions, solecisms, mis-spellings, elipses, and random italicizations are original) sets out to examine five categories of human progress, before getting around to chronicling the year from the perspective of the Japanese Club and the men’s basketball team.
All five are found lacking. History, Education (“In modern Education we find perpetuation of FALSE VALUES, the teaching of distorted history, warped phychology, perverted arts and sciences, worthless ‘knowledge'”), Science & Technology (“The principal contribution of Science and Technology has been the production of constantly more terrifying weapons of mass destruction. Pushbutton world? Yes, today either of two men could push a button and destroy two whole continents, probably ending in the extinction of mankind!”), Commerce & Industry, and Governments are all given a serious dressing-down. The authors seem dismayed to find ruthlessness and dishonesty among business executives, and “selfish, greedy men of excessive vanity, ambitious in their lust for RULE,” among world leaders.
“Morals in the cesspool of homosexuality, perversion, public nudity on stage and television, widespread acceptance of premarital sex, adultery, divorce, breaking up more than a fourth of our homes!” It seems modern society is doomed — and how. “In all five of the categories that principally plunged ancient Rome to its fall, today’s western civilization is following that precedent, riding to its fall, with increasing vehemence!”
It’s strange how little the rhetoric changes; even today, mainstream conservative organs like the Heritage Foundation are still comparing contemporary American society to 5th Century Rome.
It gets worse. “Fashion has brought us the mini-skirt and the micro-mini, ‘topless’ bars and restaurants have sprung up — and even a few ‘bottomless’ and ‘nude’ have attempted to emerge. Now comes the “see-through” fashion for women. A whole new type of society has emerged — the Hippie movement, rejecting and rebelling against the ‘Establishment,’ putting a premium on slovenliness, filth, ‘free sex,’ and drugs. […] The Social Order today is acutely SICK! It supplies no PURPOSE for human existence, knows nothing of the TRUE values, has no knowledge of THE WAY to real peace, happiness, and abundant well-being.”