The Revival of Religion in America

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Introduction

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Overview

Washington journalist Morton Kondracke had moved steadily up the ladder. Three years ago, at 46, he was the Washington bureau chief of a major news magazine. He was a regular on a weekly television news panel. His wife had an outstanding career of her own. He appeared professionally confident, as if there were nothing he could not do. It may not have showed, but his life also was in crisis. “I was working for an organization that was pathological and was more or less systematically doing bad things to people who worked for it,” he says. “Everybody was miserable. I was powerless to stop it. I had smacked up against something I could not do. I had failed. It was ego-bruising.”

It was then that he made a decision to return to church, which he previously had attended only ritualistically. “It was an intellectual decision, but it hit me in an emotional way.” It was also a sudden decision, and it took place, in all places, at Las Brisas Hotel in Acapulco one morning between the time Kondracke woke up and the time he got up. “I made a pact with Jesus that I would stop drinking, and I also made a bond with him. Then I tried to find out what that meant.”