Time & Perspective Quote by Tom Wolfe

A classic Wolfe move: he praises a cultural softening while sneaking in a sharpened blade. "We live and let live" reads like a bumper-sticker creed, but he treats it as a seismic moral pivot, something a society doesn’t arrive at by accident. The key phrase is "amazing change in values in a rather short time" - Wolfe is doing his favorite kind of measurement, the sociological gut-check, registering how quickly taboo can turn into tolerance once the old enforcement mechanisms lose their bite.

Then comes the provocation: "freedom from religion". Wolfe isn’t just describing secularization; he’s reframing it as liberation, a rights-based escape from moral surveillance. The subtext is that religious authority didn’t merely guide private conscience; it policed public behavior, defining whose choices were acceptable enough to coexist. "Let live" implies there were people who previously weren’t being "let" at all. Wolfe’s wording carries that history without naming it: the closet, the stigma, the civic penalties, the everyday humiliations.

Context matters. Wolfe’s career tracked postwar America mutating at high speed - sexual revolution, gay rights, the decline of mainline Protestant cultural hegemony, the rise of lifestyle individualism. He’s admiring the new tolerance, but he’s also registering it like an anthropologist watching a tribe swap gods. The wit is in the inversion: religion, typically associated with freedom, becomes the thing you need freedom from.