Bork wrote several books, including the two best-sellers "The Tempting of America", about his judicial philosophy and his nomination battle, and "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline", in which he argued that the rise of the New Left in the 1960s in the U.S. undermined the moral standards necessary for civil society, and spawned a generation of intellectuals who oppose Western civilization. During the period these books were written, as well as most of his adult life, Bork was an agnostic, a fact used pejoratively behind the scenes by Southern Democrats when speaking to their evangelical constituents during his Supreme Court nomination process.