ABSTRACT
No account of the rise of being SBNR can dispense with the pivotal influence of the 1960s. This chapter seizes on a crucial development of that decade by focusing on the death-of-God theology and its complicity in the cultural rise of being SBNR. The sudden notoriety of these Christian Existentialists revealed a fractured religious terrain: evangelicals enraged over the latest modernist heresy; secularists pushing these Protestant dissenters to jettison their lingering ecclesial attachments; mainliners, by turns, proud and fearful of the religious rebellion that their theological liberalism had helped generate; and various seekers inviting Altizer and company to join them in a spiritual counterculture of heady experimentation. The “Is God Dead?” sensation of the sixties drew on diffuse seeker sensibilities, further loosened the cultural hold of mainline Protestantism, and blessed a churchless quest for the sacred through and beyond the death of God. As the controversy played itself out, many of the basic lineaments of the SBNR sensibility came into sharpened focus.
