Our American involvement in the Vietnam War grew out of the anti-communist mania in the country after World War II. After WWII, both Republican and Democratic candidates were stridently anti-communists. But the Republicans tended to see the Democrats as soft on communists. As a result, then-Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts campaigned vigorously on a supposed missile gap with the now defunct Soviet Union, but the supposed missile gap turned out not to exist. Nevertheless, the supposed missile gap helped him rally voters to support him in the election, which he narrowly won.
In the book Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (Oxford University Press, 2006), Philip Jenkins, a former Catholic, includes the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade in his titular decade. Even though he focuses on more than just American Catholics in his book, it would not be unfair to them to say that many of them also subscribed to the anti-60s rhetoric that he describes. For anti-60s conservatives, the 1960s serve as a watershed symbolizing certain trends that they tend not to like, to put it mildly.
In short, our collective American understandable fear and hyper-vigilance about the real threat of communism worldwide after WWII became the staple of the Republican Party. Donald J. Trump, the Republican Party's 2016 presidential candidate, campaigned on fear and hyper-vigilance in the 2016 election, which he narrowly won, thanks to a combined total of 77,000 Trump voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
For Trump, the Islamic State and its terrorism served as his counterpart to JFK's supposed missile gap.
Of course the Democratic Party's 2016 presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, did NOT support the Islamic State and its terrorism.
In the 2016 election, both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party did NOT support the Islamic State and its terrorism, just as in the 1960 election, both parties were anti-communist.
In the many states where Trump won, white voters tended to be over-represented among the Trump voters, including many white American Catholics and many white Protestant Evangelicals who are also opposed to legalized abortion in the first trimester.
Now, frankly, I was surprised to find that Voderholzer discuss the four senses of scripture as extensively as he does (pages 189-199). He points out that the 1993 Catechism of the Catholic Church actually recommends the "'fourfold interpretation of scripture (par. 115-120)'" (page 189; also see page 198). But most ordained Roman Catholic priests have not been trained in explicating the four senses of scripture, so they are not likely to preach from the pulpit about the four senses of scripture. Your guess is as good as mine as to how many practicing Catholics could preach on the four senses of scripture week after week in homilies at Mass on the scripture readings of the day.
Now, Voderholzer has a surprising subheading: "Christianity is Not a 'Religion of the Book'" (page 171). Granted, to spell out the obvious, the canonical scriptures of Christianity are contained in the book known as the Christian Bible. Granted, to spell out the obvious, the Roman Catholic Church issued the book known as the 1993 Catechism of the Catholic Church and routinely publishes translations of papal encyclicals and official documents of Vatican II. Nevertheless, in the Roman Catholic tradition of thought, "the church's faith is concerned first and foremost with a personal relationship to [the imagined] Jesus Christ" (Voderholzer, page 171). Simply stated, a person does not need to know how to read the Christian scripture to be baptized a Christian.
Now, after Vatican II, there was an uptick of interest in spirituality among Roman Catholics worldwide, as is attested in the 1,100-page book The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality, edited by Michael Downey (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier Book/ Liturgical Press, 1993).
After Vatican II, there was also an uptick of interest in Native American spirituality in the United States and Canada, as is attested in Philip Jenkins' book Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality (Oxford University Press, 2004).
I attribute the widespread uptick of interest in spirituality after Vatican II to the deep impact on the human psyche of the critical mass of communications media that accentuate sound that Ong alerted us about in his 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History, mentioned above.
Now, Voderholzer titles his penultimate chapter "Hope instead of Utopia" (pages 200-210). In it he returns to de Lubac's extremely ambivalent view of Joachim of Fiore (c.1135-1202). Voderholzer had discussed de Lubac's view of Joachim earlier in his book (pages 98-99).
Because of the anti-communist mania in the United States after WWII, many Americans may not be especially interested in the secular utopia imagined in communist theory. Oddly enough, the secular utopia imagined in communist theory is rooted in Joachim of Fiore's imaginative interpretation of the supposed divine trinity in the Christian tradition of thought.
In the Christian tradition of thought, it was commonplace to accept St. Paul's image of the church as the so-called body of the supposed Christ (1Cor. 10:16; see Voderholzer, page 179). In addition, it was commonplace to accept the supposed divine trinity. As Voderholzer explains, "The Holy Spirit [the third divine person in the supposed divine trinity] is described [in the tradition] as the soul of the body [known as the church]" (page 179).
From this imaginative conceptual framework in the Christian tradition of thought, Joachim of Fiore constructed a threefold account of history by naming a certain historical period after each divine person in the supposed divine trinity. Briefly, Joachim's imagined time or kingdom of the Holy Spirit was later transmuted into the secular utopia imagined in communist theory.
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