Billy Graham and the cool (?) version of evangelicalism

The President of the United States looms large in the news because of the power and influence of the office. With a narcissist running a seriously dysfunctional Administration in the White House, the number of Presidential incursions into the daily news can get exhausting. Susie Madrak recounts Joe Scarborough's lament about information overload in Scarborough: So Much News, It's Hard To Know Where To Begin C&L 03/01/2018.

But taking a break from the current Presidential professional-wrestling spectacle, I ran across a journal article about an interesting moment in the public ministry of Billy Graham, who this week lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda as though he were a departed head of state.

The period in question is the early 1970s, when Graham most clearly and publicly identified politically with a President, Richard Nixon at the time. At this same period, he took a new interest in youth evangelism. This was part of what is sometimes called the Long Sixties. And one feature of the times was the prominent presence of a kind of alternative-lifestyle brand of evangelical Christianity, which the national press hyped as the "Jesus movement," a label with which participants identified.

One notable instance of that tendency was led by Francis Schaeffer, whose son and one-time heir apparent in his ministry now regularly criticizes the Christian Right and it's authoritarian Christian dominionist politics. The elder Schaeffer establised what later came to be called an "intentional community" called L'Abri in Switzerland, a kind of fundamentalist Christian commune. A biographical sketch in the conservative evangelical magazine Christianity Today by Michael Hamilton ("The dissatisfaction of Francis Schaeffer" 41:3 03/03/1997) described his intervention in American evangelical culture this way:

... this was no ordinary fundamentalist preacher. He and his wife, Edith, had lived for ten years in a student commune they had started in the Swiss Alps. When he lectured, he wore an alpine hiking outfit--knickers, knee socks, walking shoes. By 1972 he had added to his already singular appearance long hair and a white tufted goat's-chin beard. Most curious of all, he seldom quoted from the Bible. He was more apt to talk about the philosophical importance of Henry Miller (then regarded as the most pornographic writer in American letters).

During the next two decades the Schaeffers organized a multiple-thrust ministry that reshaped American evangelicalism. Perhaps no intellectual save C. S. Lewis affected the thinking of evangelicals more profoundly; perhaps no leader of the period save Billy Graham left a deeper stamp on the movement as a whole. Together the Schaeffers gave currency to the idea of intentional Christian community, prodded evangelicals out of their cultural ghetto, inspired an army of evangelicals to become serious scholars, encouraged women who chose roles as mothers and homemakers, mentored the leaders of the New Christian Right, and solidified popular evangelical opposition to abortion.

The Schaeffers left an imprint on the wildly diverse careers of Jesus People organizer Jack Sparks; musicians Larry Norman and Mark Heard; political figures Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jack Kemp, Chuck Colson, Randall Terry, C. Everett Koop, Cal Thomas, and Tim and Beverly LaHaye; and scholars Harold O. J. Brown, Os Guinness, Thomas Morris, Clark Pinnock, and Ronald Wells. Strange bedfellows, indeed, and this is part of the puzzle of Francis Schaeffer. Clues to its solution are spread across a half-century and two continents--from Westminster Seminary, the art galleries of Europe, and an English boarding school to the Mayo Clinic and the U.S. Supreme Court. And in the end, when the pieces of the puzzle are all assembled, the life of Francis Schaeffer gives us a picture of a side of evangelicalism quite at odds with the trajectory of the modern world. [my emphasis]

As the list of famous Christian Right figures who saw him as a major influence shows, despite the "hippie" and intellectually highbrow image he struck, his contribution to evangelical culture landed heavily on the side of the Christian Right and dominionism. We can't blame Schaeffer for what his self-proclaimed followers may have done. But it's worth noting that Randall Terry was not only the leader of the militantly anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. He was also an important player in getting the violent Patriot Militia movement going. HIs now liberal/progressive Christian son Frank has emphasized what a major role his father played in promoting the anti-abortion cause.

It's probably worth mentioning here that "evangelical" in the American usage is not a blanket term for Protestant, as it is in parts of Europe including Germany. The American usage refers to theologically conservative Protestants, including but not limited to fundamentalism. People not immersed in the politics of that world may find it difficult to see a distinction between fundamentalists and their non-fundamentalist fellow evangelicals. But participants in denominational politics and theological polemics are keenly aware of the differences. Billy Graham is particularly known for appealing to both "evangelicals" and "fundamentalists," which gave him a more moderate image than a closer familiarity with his faith and politics might justify. Francis Schaeffer, too, bridged that gap while planting his feet in conservative American Republican politics. As Hamilton writes, "Schaeffer created for himself a highly independent place in the public world of evangelicalism. He had wide appeal to students with countercultural leanings, but also to conservative politicians. He remained in touch with but aloof from the other leading figures of American evangelicalism."

Graham continued to cultivate a more moderate image, while Schaeffer became more and more radicalized in a rightward direction. Hamilton writes:

In trying to assess the meaning of Francis Schaeffer, it is instructive to compare him to Billy Graham. Both reached the peak of their influence at about the same time, and both had an immeasurable impact on American evangelicalism. Graham in many ways represents the moderate middle of evangelicalism--defusing controversy, wishing the best for everyone, friend of both Republicans and Democrats, slow to disturb middle-class conventions willing to cooperate with anyone who will let him preach the gospel. As historian Grant Wacker once wrote, "When Graham spoke, middle America heard itself." It was just as natural to see Graham and the President on the fairway together as to see Graham on a platform with a Bible in his hands. [my emnphasis]

Larry Eskridge looked at Graham and the Jesus People circa 1970 in "'One Way': Billy Graham, the Jesus Generation, and the Idea of an Evangelical Youth Culture" Church History (March 1998). At that time, there was a big growth in interest in evangelical organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ that focused their evangelizing efforts on young adults. Eskridge points out the demographic element of Baby Boomers producing a bump in the numbers of people in that age cohort, calling it "the 'pig-in-the-python' effect of the Baby Boom."

Schaeffer the Younger draws a harsh judgment on Graham's religious and political legacy at his blog (Billy Graham Is Lying In State. Why? We Are Not Iran. We Are Not A Theocracy. 02/28/2018):

Billy made magical thinking mainstream. He shaped an evangelical movement that then became as political as he was in his Nixon-supporting years and unlike Billy, this movement never repented of trading Jesus for politics. Full circle: Billy Graham sought to forge a movement that was distinct from the Southern racist fundamentalism of his day, yet that is precisely what today’s evangelicalism has become again.

Magical thinking isn’t a very good basis for policy or politics. “I believe Donald Trump is a good man,” Franklin Graham said on CNN, last month. “He did everything wrong as a candidate and he won, and I don’t understand it. Other than I think God put him there.”

Graham’s converts from the 1950s to 1990s (my generation, old, white, and tired) lined up to support not only Trump but Roy Moore. One of their very own, Sarah Huckabee, stands up every day and knowingly lies for Trump, covering for his multitude of sins on everything from racism to his lies about paying off porn stars, to abusing scores of women and denying that the Russians attacked our democracy to help get him elected.

Graham and the neo-evangelicals, as they called themselves, tried to create religious revival in the United States. Fifty years on what they got instead was Trump and Roy Moore, climate change deniers, white nationalism and the NRA’s lock on the party evangelicals uniquely empower.

This is a undated video of Graham from around that period, Billy Graham - young people - Birmingham AL:

He says early in the video:

There's enough spiritual and moral power in this stadium tonight that could change the nation. And change the world. If we begin to march for Jesus Christ. Young people all over the wold are marching for every cause in the world. And tonight I believe the time has come to declare ourselves and stat marching in earnest for Jesus Christ. ...

Well, our hope is not in Communism. Our hope is not even in democracy. Our hope is in Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God. [my emphasis]

1972 was the year that Graham endorsed Richard Nixon for re-election as President.

It doesn't require especially careful listening to tell that in that sermon, he presents the political manifestations of young people becoming engaged as a menacing development, darkly invoking the supposed similarities with the period leading up to the Second World War in which millions of people perished," in which "blood splattered across this planet, as it's never been splattered in history."

He pronounces "fascist" as "fash-e-ist."

When he say that young people of "this generation" are being deceived by Satan, his listeners in 1972 mostly understood that he was not talking about people being deceived by the power of concentrated wealth or by propaganda for an unjust war. In fact, he quotes "the Devil" as saying, "All you need is security from the cradle to the grave and you'll be happy." The welfare state is part of Satan's trickery! And people who aspire to a world in which all being have "security from the cradle to the grave" are promoting a Satanic goal! Wait ... what?!

The evangelical rhetorical context here has to do with evangelicals' attitude toward political issues, which can be remarkably flexible. In the kind of Protestant Christianity Graham represented, proselytizing is seen as a central task of the Christian believer. The task is understood as saving peoples' souls from burning in Hell for eternity, a task of some obvious urgency. So any Good Samaritan type ideas of social solidarity are considered distinctly less important, unless they are embedded in proselytizing or missionary efforts.

So for social or political causes with which the evangelicals reject, they can argue that secular efforts will ultimately be ineffective. Only getting a large enough number of people saved by Jesus, i.e., recruited into that brand of Protestant Christianity, can resolve those problems. Think of it as the "thoughts and prayers" position. This feature of fundamentalism in particular often leads observers to assume that this attitude would result in political withdrawal, or quietism.

But the flexibility reveals itself over social-political causes which the evangelicals support. In those cases, active involvement in lobbying, protest, and various kinds of political activism is seen as very much part of the Christian's mission on earth. This is framed in religious terms by which those kinds of political engagement are an expression of the higher religious values of the believers. So while conservative evangelicals may think "thoughts and prayers" are the best that can be done when it comes to reducing gun proliferation, urgent action is required to get abortion outlawed.

Those positions may look contradictory or hypocritical. And, often enough, they are. But its also a cultural narrative - maybe "culture war" narrative is a better term for it - to identify among themselves which causes are godly and therefore legitimate and which are bad, or evil, or Satanic. Dogmatism and authoritarianism also come into play here and encourage evangelicals to feign respectful listening to people associated with the bad causes only in order to establish credibility with them to convert them from their ungodly beliefs. If saving souls from eternal damnation is a primary mission in life, developing effective sales techniques is essential.

Eskridge describes Graham's marketing approach to young potential converts this way:

,,, his larger approach to the youth problem in his national ministry, [involved providing] a tolerant, openhanded response that was at variance with much of the hard-line rhetoric that secular and religious conservatives used in denouncing the younger generation in general, and the counterculture in particular. Indeed, Graham saw in the Jesus Movement a cadre of young prodigals who - rejecting the counterculture - had metaphorically come home to their parents' America via the bridge of an old American tradition: evangelical religion. [my emphasis]

Eskridge also declares somewhat grandiloquently of this outreach to long-haired and disaffected youth, "In supporting this uniquely evangelical spin on youth culture, Graham and the BGEA's [Billy Graham Evangelical Association's] efforts to legitimate the Jesus Movement were yet another example of evangelicalism's uncanny ability to harness popular forces and movements for the furtherance of its mission."

This is part of what the late Billy Graham had a moderate image, despite the conservative nature of his theological conceptions, his politics, and social attitudes.

Megachurch pastor Rick Warren spent a few years in the early 2000s trying to cultivate a similarly moderate image. Maybe he wasn't as skilled at doing it as Billy Graham. That ploy ended with Warren pretty abruptly dropping it with his hosting of a joint appearance at his Saddleback church with Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain in August 2008. Just after the event, he trashed Obama for not having been sufficiently anti-abortion. (Michelle Vu , Rick Warren: Obama's Abortion Answer Not Clear Enough Christian Post R08/19/2008) He didn't endorse either candidate. And Obama generously invited Warren to give a public prayer at his first Inaugural. But that was pretty much the end of Warren's posture as a moderate, based on his concern for issues like gay rights and environmental "stewardship."

In fact, Warren's position on abortion was largely indistinguishable from that of the most hardline fundamentalists. Even including the fanatical label of abortion rights as perpetrating a "holocaust," a label that validates the most violent antiabortion fanaticism while tossing in anti-Semitic dog-whistling in the mix. (Nia-Malika Henderson, Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren on abortion, sexuality and Obama Politico 11/29/2009)

On abortion, which has become central to the health care debate, Warren takes on Obama's idea that abortions should be rare, suggesting that stance essentially supports that life begins at conception.

"We've had 46 million Americans who aren't here. Those who could be here since Roe v. Wade, who are not voting. I think that innocence is a holocaust. I really do," Warren said. "Now, I think that we have to get beyond the name calling and find common ground to work on these issues. Now, I don't understand the idea of it should be rare and less. Well, either you believe it's life or you don't....why would you believe it should be rare?....If a baby, a fetus is not a life, then why restrict it?"

In 2012, Warren was echoing the phony Christian Right complaint about the Mean Libruls violating the religious freedom of good Christian white folks who think it's God's will that they discriminate against gays, loose women, black people and other categories of sinners. (Jaweed Kaleem, Rick Warren, Saddleback Pastor: Obama Has ‘Infringed’ Upon Religious Liberties Huffpost 12/28/2012)

Similarly the "Jesus movement" of the early 1970 left few distinctive "countercultural" elements in evengelical culture. Though it has been observed fundamentalist and Christian Right networks do form a kind of subculture that sees itself in a "culture war' with the mainstream American culture.

Eskridge seems to think the main surviving contribution of the movement to present-day evangelicalism was a musical style:

For the long term, in countenancing the union of evangelical youth with the popular style of the Jesus People, Graham gave his blessing to a manner of coping with American youth culture that became characteristic of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century. By the 1990s, evangelical youth cultures that paralleled "the world" were an assumed part of the subculture's landscape and proliferated in as many guises as their secular counterparts. While still not accepted by some sectors of the evangelical community, the strategy took hold, backed by a continually growing "Contemporary Christian Music" industry and marketing infrastructure. The groundwork for this change was laid in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the success of the Jesus Movement. The Jesus People did disappear as a movement, but they were not killed off by a lack of interest. It is more accurate to say that they were gradually replaced as a new cohort of young people, infatuated by the evolution of new musical styles and affected by the ever-increasing segmentation of the youth market and the subcultures and group identifications that accompanied these trends, took their place. [my emphasis]

And the quality of the contemporary Christian music is itself questionable. I know better than to make a blanket criticism of a whole musical genre like that. But ... There are good Christian contemporary songs. The brilliant folksinger and songwriter Kate Campbell, for instance, has a number of songs that could count as Christian contemporary. But much of fits into what is called 7-11 music: seven words repeated eleven times. Traditional hymns feature more complex music and more sophisticated lyrics. And it generally doesn't come close in quality of emotional intensity to the African-American spirituals.

The "Jesus movement" of the 1960s and 1970s

I've posted before about the "Jesus movement" of young evangelical Christians in the late 1960s and 1970s, e.g., Hippies to the right of me, hippies to the left, here I'm stuck in the middle with Evan Bayh 02/23/2010.

Randall Stephens at Religion in American Life has an interview with Larry Eskridge, who has done a new book about that phenomenon, A History of the Jesus People: An Interview with Larry Eskridge (n.d., accessed 08/12/2013), Eskridge's book is God's Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (2013). In the interview, Eskridge says:

In terms of the particular historical moment, the Jesus movement's biggest bottom line was in generational terms: it played a major role in keeping evangelicalism together by providing a much easier path for a lot of people — particularly evangelical kids raised in the church—to navigate the massive changes that buffeted American society and culture during that period. The Jesus People had a degree of "with-it-ness" and a cultural cache that the larger movement certainly didn’t possess going into the late '60s. I think it’s fair to say that if the Jesus People hadn’t come along when they did the evangelical church would have been nowhere near as formidable a force throughout American culture come the 1980s and beyond.

He also mentions the innovative impulses in religious music of that time:

Music was such an important element in what held youth culture together by the 1960s that it would have been truly surprising if any sort of popular movement could have had any grass roots traction without a musical component. The Jesus movement was certainly obsessed by music just like the larger youth culture — "Jesus Music" seemed to naturally pour forth in the form of halting, homemade folk songs and bluesy, rock tunes from the earliest manifestations of the movement all across the country. A whole network of musical groups and venues grew up within the space of a few short years along with the infrastructure to distribute the music to Jesus Music fans. Of course this was all surprising in that the music of the Jesus People was an obvious departure from the norms of the larger evangelical subculture. Certainly there was no shortage of resistance among older, more traditional church people to the new forms of music. But the combination of cultural crisis, earnest Jesus People fervor, and the sheer size of the generational cohort eventually served to lessen most older evangelicals' opposition. I think most adults in the churches saw that it would be a better alternative to cultivate their kids’ enthusiasm for Jesus by indulging their new worship choruses on Sundays and letting them listen to Jesus Rock in their spare time.

The hippie subculture had a definite religious element involved, more the vague sort that today is called "spirituality" as semi-distinct from "religion." I still like the broad classification used by John Robert Howard that I posted about in The sixties: those famous hippies 06/14/2008. His two categories "visionaries" and "freaks and heads" included people who had some kind of spiritual perspective on life, though in mostly cases it wasn't necessarily terribly theologically sophisticated; but the same is true of most church-goers. You don't have to be a professor of theology to have a serious religious/spiritual orientation or important insights along those lines. See, e.g., Jesus of Nazareth.

And while many of the "freaks and heads" were using pot and psychedelics for entertainment (or self-medication), certainly the early advocates of LSD had quasi-religious and mystical ideas that they connected with LSD usage. The early issues of Psychedelic Review included articles along those lines, such as Herman Hesse: Poet of the Interior Journey by Tomothy Leary and Ralph Metzner (1:2 Fall 1963):

Few writers have chronicled with such dispassionate lucidity and fearless honesty the progress of the soul through the stages of life. Peter Camenzind (1904), Demian (1919), Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narziss und Goldmund (1930), Journey to the East {1932), Magister Ludi (1943) -different versions of spiritual autobiography, different maps of the interior path. Each new step revises the picture of all the previous steps, each experience opens up new worlds of discovery in a constant effort to communicate the vision.

The "Jesus movement" of the 60s and 70s was a diffuse movement that led into many directions, including cult groups like the Children of God.

But the relationship of the "Jesus freaks" to the hippie counterculture was fated to be superficial and imitative. Within the confines of conservative evangelical Christianity, i.e., fundamentalism, there wasn't much room for the kinds of social unconventionalism distinguishing the hippie movement. Quoting my earlier description of Howard's other two categories of hippies from 1967:

Howard's categories of "midnight" and "plastic" hippies provide a way of talking about the cultural diffusion of some hippie styles, practices and attitudes. The business system always seeks ways to make money. And the hippie movement made love beads and leather shirts commodities with decent profit margins. Despite the exaggerated reactions from many of their elders, hippie styles could be adapted by people who had no ambition or desire to "tune in, turn on, drop out", as a popular saying had it. Thus, the "plastic" hippies.

The "midnight" hippies, on the other hand, are those who don't adopt hippie styles but do share some aspects of the more thoughtful hippie criticisms of the broader society.

Within Howard's classification scheme, the Jesus Freaks fit more into the "plastic" category. That is, they adopted some of the clothing and hair styles of the hippies and some of the more tolerant peace-and-love postures of the hippies, which distinguished them from judgmental, fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists. You can see how the styles might be attractive:

But experimenting with drugs and even using alcohol were pretty much as taboo for the "Jesus movement" as for any straitlaced fundamentalist devotee. For them as for their more conventional elders, "exploring" things like "Eastern religions," i.e., Buddhism and Hinduism, was only legitimate in the context of proselytizing people away from those views to conservative Christianity. In general, proselytizing was as much or more of an emphasis for the "Jesus movement" adherents as for their more conventional fundamentalists friends of their own age as well as older ones. Christianity has always had a significant element of syncretism to it, although Christians have often highly selective about it. We could understand the "Jesus movement" of that time as a sort of cultural syncretism. Or, to put it another way, a branch of traditional Protestant proselytizing that also gave its adherents a way to feel "cool" and in touch with their less socially inhibited friends and acquaintances in their age group.

Also, anything that sounded like "free love," which would be pretty much cover most sexual activity outside of marriage was also off-limits to the "Jesus movement." Hippies were more demonstrative at least about their claimed lack of inhibitions ("hang-ups") about sex than most people, except for maybe frat boys. As I wrote in the 2008 post:

The hippies also helped challenge public hypocrisy about heterosexual sex and love practices. And Howard notes how the hippies may have contributed to the gay rights movement. The openly-gay libertarian-anarchist writer Paul Goodman was popular among the alternative-lifestyle hippies. Howard notes that in the Haight-Asbury neighborhood in San Francisco, Ground Zero for the Summer of Love in 1967, even before 1967 the Haight had become home to a community including blacks, white beatniks and "a small homosexual colony".

The "Jesus movement" was not noted from producing any greater openness or even healthy adult attitudes about sex than the larger fundamentalist subculture of which they were a part.

One aspect of their history that is surprising and disappointing is the limited contribution of their "Jesus music." Maybe I'm being too narrow in that evaluation. Some of the songs used in "folk masses" at the Catholic Church are actually good, with memorable melodies and lyrics that show some insight and reflection. And the "Jesus movement" music presumably had some effect on that style of music.

It's hard to say that for the marketing genre known as "Christian contemporary" music. An awful lot of it is just plain dull, with simple melodies, unimaginative instrumentation and superficial, repetitive lyrics. My sister-in-law mildly mocks it as "7-Eleven music": seven words repeated 11 times.

It didn't have to be that way. Kate Campbell's 2001 album Wandering Strange is an example of what Christian contemporary music could have been. But then, most of the songs there are new arrangements of older songs from the Baptist Hymnal. Someone more knowledgeable than I about the early Jesus Rock songs might be able to make a plausible case that there was a "co-optation" of the genre to become at least less annoying to fans of more traditional styles. And maybe the commercial genre of Christian Contemporary is too narrowly defined. If it regularly included songs performed by Johnny Cash or Kate Campbell with Christian religious themes, it would be expanded for the better from my perspective.

I've more than once heard this song used in Catholic confirmation ceremonies in Austria (in English), K.D. Lang sings Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah:

Works for me. Why could Christian Contemporary do this kind of thing? It's even a "hallelujah" song! Okay, the lyrics aren't strictly Christian, it's by a Jewish songwriter and it's sung here by a lesbian performer, but still ...

Pentecostals and fundamentalists are often distinguished from one another. But that's mainly due to differences over rituals like speaking in tongues, Pentecostal "prophecy" and exorcism. The general approach to the Bible and to social attitudes and sexual habits are generally compatible. But I wonder how much of the "Jesus movement's" energy and activists eventually wound up channeled into Pentecostal ("charismatic") movements. Because the Pentecostals in some ways already practiced rituals that were both regarded as weird by other fundamentalists and were most mystical. In those ways, they were better positioned to take advantage of the "Jesus movement" impulse than other established denominational traditions.

It occurs to me that corporate Democrat Cory Booker is a modern example of something like the "Jesus movement" of the Sixties and Seventies, a public figure who manages to come off as open and tolerant but also looks to be closely tied to Christian Dominionists. (Susie Madrak, Anybody But Cory Booker C&L 08/12/2013.

Tags: jesus freaks, jesus movement

Hippies to the right of me, hippies to the left, here I'm stuck in the middle with Evan Bayh

There was an episode of Law and Order (that would be Law and Order Prime, the one with Sam Waterston) in which Waterston's Jack McCoy prosecutes a case of a 1970s terrorist would gets busted years later after having transformed herself into a respectable Republican lady under an assumed identity. There is a lot of conversation about the meaning of "the Sixties" in connection with the case. In the end, she's sent to prison to get out, as I recall, sometime in the early 2000s. McCoy says wearily at the end (quoting from memory), "Maybe by then the Sixties will finally be over."

The fictional Jack McCoy was too optimistic. For a lot of Republicans, it will always be 1969, Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew will always be bravely defending white civilization and hippies and antiwar protesters and scary rioting black people, and the Commies will always be poised to come ashore in San Francisco and begin their conquest of America. There are even young conservatives who parents hadn't hit puberty yet in 1969 who are stuck in 1969!

So is recovering conservative Michael Lind. Lind is one of the best in analyzing the pathologies of the American right, which he has being doing for years now. His takedown of Pat Robertson's paranoid conspiracy-theory classic The New World Order is one of the best of that sort of thing I've seen. But, Lordy, that fellow Lind is as haunted by the Sixties as he former fellow conservatives are. In Glenn Beck is the new Abbie Hoffman Salon 02/23/10, he argues - I'm not sure if it's even partially tongue-in-cheek - that Glenn Back and the Tea Party movement are the dirty freaking hippies of today.

In doing so, he uses some compulsive Centrism to set up a just-like-the-hippies comparison to today far-right activists and loons. For example:

Just as the New Left claimed that the New Deal era wasn't really liberal, so the countercultural right claims that the Republican Party from Nixon to George W. Bush wasn't really conservative. '60s radicals like Carl Oglesby denounced John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as sinister "corporate liberals" in the same way that the radicals of the right claim that the two Bushes, if not the sainted Reagan, were inauthentic "big government conservatives." The radical left had Ralph Nader. The radical right has Ron Paul.

It's not quite nails-on-the-blackboard bad. But here are a few obvious problems with this approach.

You would be hard put to find anyone reasonably identified with the "New Left" of the 1960s saying that the New Deal "wasn't really liberal". If you were going to research this in some detail, some obvious American sources among the more intellectual ones would be the publications Monthly Review, Radical America, Socialist Revolution (later Socialist Review) and New Left Notes.

The New Left is a term that covered a broad range of people, from some (but not all) civil rights activists, the more militant Democratic Party reformers, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other student activists, anti-Vietnam War protest groups, and an assortment of critical intellectuals, Maoists, and a variety of leftwing political sects. Basically, they rejected what they called "Cold War liberalism", though I'm not sure how often they used "corporate liberal" as a pejorative. "Establishment liberal" was probably more common. (All three are useful descriptive terms, although the outlook known as "Cold War liberalism" or "Scoop Jackson liberalism" back in the day would now be called "neoconservative".) The New Left also rejected Soviet-line Communism. The Communist Party (and the Socialist Party) were the Old Left.

The term New Left I believe originated in Britain, although it wasn't not such a drastic neologism. It was the more-or-less Trotskyist British journal New Left Review, which is still published, that popularized the term. The New Left in the United States is conventionally dated from the 1964 Democratic convention, specifically the establishment of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in opposition to the desires of the Democratic leadership at the time.

But the general perspective of the New Left was that they wanted either radical reforms or revolution, the latter term various and imaginatively defined. Except for maybe the more dogmatic (or maybe hack) Marxists, they hardly accused the New Deal of not being "liberal". They might criticize the New Deal for being a too-limited set of reforms designed to preserve the capitalist system, which the New Left generally preferred to see replaced by some form of socialism. Liberals wouldn't argue with that analysis. On the contrary, they would have bragged that the New Deal saved capitalism by curbing its worst abuses. And that Franklin Roosevelt had no intention of setting up socialism, the paranoia of the Glenn Becks of the 1930s notwithstanding.

If the New Left particularly emphasized one negative aspect of the New Deal, it would be that it didn't directly address the problems of white racism and Southern segregation, in particular. That aspect of the New Deal was not liberal, although a 1960s New Leftist might say that it was all too characteristic of Democratic and Republican Party liberalism (yes, there once was such a thing as Republican liberals!) that it failed to address both structural and subjective white racism. And who would step up today to argue against the accuracy of that criticism? Even Republicans are happy for any opportunity to label liberals racists, no matter the contortions in which they may have to indulge to get there.

You can always make superficial comparisons that are plausible at a high level. You could say, for instance, that in 1965 the Democratic Party, the Republic Party and the US Communist Party were all political parties and so they were basically the same. It wouldn't tell you anything meaningful about American politics. It might tell you something meaningful if you were looking at laws applying to political parties in 1965.

So, yeah, Glenn Beck criticizes Republicans as well as Democrats. And New Left activists in the Sixties criticized Democrats as well as Republicans. So what?

Lind's article also blurs the difference between hippies and New Left activists. Yes, there was considerable crossover influence. But the actual hippie counterculture tended to be nonpolitical, and was a distinct phenomenon from the New Left. Hippies for the most part didn't spend their time organizing antiwar rallies or writing historical articles analyzing the history of white racism. And while some members of the Black Panthers may have used drugs, their activity had more to do with things like going out armed with their own shotguns and confronting abusive cops than with getting stoned and teasing out the deeper meanings in Herman Hesse stories.

In the nightmares and daymares on which so many of today's Republican conservatives feed their fears, those hippies are still out there all mushed together with black people with leather jackets and shotguns and unkempt Vietnam veterans demonstrating against the war and Bill Ayers plotting with ACORN to bomb bathrooms in government buildings. I'd prefer to see liberals and progressives de-mystify those fears and distorted images rather than clumsily try to turn the composite bogeyman against the Tea Partiers.

In any case, Lind's article gets the wrong counterculture for the Tea Partiers. Since the 1920s, Christian fundamentalists have nurtured a kind of religious counterculture that heavily overlapped with what is sometimes politely called the "folkways" of white Southerners. And there has been a subculture of fanatical, conspiracist rightwingers with clear continuities back into the 1930s. It today's Tea Partiers are part of a counterculture, those are the sources of it, not the mushed-up scare image of "the Sixties".

In fact, the Christian fundamentalist subculture actually had a small overlap with the hippie movement - not so much with other Republican bogeymen of the Sixties. Those were the "Jesus Freaks" or "Jesus people" or "Jesus movement" of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Billy Graham even cranked out one of his many proselytizing books under the title, The Jesus Generation (1971). It left one clear cultural heritage, "Christian contemporary" or "praise" music. Also known as 7-11 music, i.e., seven words repeated 11 times.

I recently came across a 2007 book by Preston Shires, a history done from a conservative Protestant viewpoint, called Hippies of the Religious Right : From the Counterculture of Jerry Garcia to the Subculture of Jerry Falwell (2007), published by Baylor University Press. Baylor is a private Baptist liberal arts school that in recent years expressed high academic ambitions. But they recently selected former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr as their president; see Marv Knox, Kenneth Starr named Baylor president Associated Baptist Press 02/15/10. From the parts I've read, the book itself seems remarkably superficial and credulous, but it does give an account of the phenomenon of that time.

However, he also absurdly asserts that violence in the anti-abortion movement is the fault of the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies! Here is his typical rightwing justification for that polemic:

This violent aspect of the Christian Right was beholden to the darker side of the counterculture. In the same way that certain sixties’ youth could justify violence against those who advocated and practiced war or who denied civil rights to nonwhites, some Christian Right activists justified violence against those who advocated and practiced, in their mind, murder.

It's all those damn fucking hippies' fault!

Git over it, people! A rightwing fanatic walking into a church in the Midwest and shooting an "abortion doctor" in the head is not the fault of some hippie smoking pot in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in 1967! This is just the typical projection strategy that so many Christian Rightists commonly employ to avoid taking responsibility for their "bad choices", as they like to say of other sinners. Anybody even remotely familiar with the history of lynching in the US knows that rightwing fanatics and sadists didn't need the Sixties Flower Children to teach them about murdering people for their own bigoted ends.

Here is also the conflation of the conservatives' images of the enemy from 1969 that Lind's article plays into: hippies, antiwar activists, uppity black people, and those dadgum loose wimmin screwin' around and gittin' theirselves pregnant.

Wake up and smell the global warming, folks. Log on to the Internet, this new thing all the kids are talking about. You might even be able to dig up some reality-based information on the alternative movements of the Sixties there. This sitting around yelling, "You hippies git off my lawn!" is getting a little old.

Tags: jesus freaks, jesus movement, michael lind, radical right