Even setting aside the proliferation of widely diverse Christian sects during that period, Christianity's position as the supreme measure by which Westerners gauged their world had, by then, not only been challenged but in many ways overshadowed by the myriad new ways of thinking and philosophising:
by conflict theory, by orientalism (and by "orientalism" we mean in this context an obsession with fetishising everything between Greece and Hawaii including the ideals of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others), by nationalisms, by Marxism and its many attendant isms... There were popular antire…