A difficult agenda: can the Religious Right achieve its goals?
Posted by Brian on Mon 19-Dec-2005 at 10:50 am
Back in 1968, Melbourne journalist Keith Dunstan published a wonderful book called Wowsers (i.e. obsessive puritans). Evangelicals claim that the word ‘wowser’ is merely an acronym for the slogan ‘We only want social evils remedied/removed’, but this is false - see Dunstan’s first chapter for a more accurate etymology.
In his book, Dunstan examined all the major concerns of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century wowsers. There were the old perennials like ‘the Demon Drink’, tobacco-smoking, prostitution, pornography and gambling, but there were a number of other ‘Evils’ against which puritan divines fulminated and waged war. Among these were ‘the Evil of the Desecration of the Sabbath’, ‘the Theatre Evil and the Evil of Dancing’, ‘the Evil of Bathing’ and ‘the Evil of Cremation’.