You’d think that few people have less in common than the stereotypical evangelical revivalists of the 1960s and the hippie Aquarians who wanted to turn on, tune in, and drop out. But an article by Brink Lindsey in Reason Magazine looks back at the two social movements and sees them as curious mirror-images of each other. Their philosophies of everyday life were radically different, but the impulses behind them had a lot in common:
Evangelicals and Aquarians were more alike than they knew. Both sought firsthand spiritual experience; both believed that such experience could set them free and change their lives; both favored emotional intensity over intellectual rigor; both saw their spiritual lives as a refuge from a corrupt and corrupting world. That last point, of course, was subject to radically different interpretations. Aquarians rejected the establishment because of its supposedly suffocating restrictions, while the evangelicals condemned its licentious, decadent anarchy. Between them, they left the social peace of the ’50s in ruins.That peace deserved to be disturbed. Its cautious, complacent liberalism was ill-suited to coping with the emerging conflicts of mass prosperity. It frustrated the aspirations of blacks, of women, and of the affluent young. It suppressed and distorted economic energies by throttling competition. Its spiritual life tended to the bland and shallow.
The two movements worked together without realizing it, Lindsey argues, to break down the social and spiritual inertia of postwar America. And for better or worse, today’s sometimes baffling cultural climate is a melange of the (often contradictory) values and ideals they championed. All in all, a very interesting read; it lays out the intentions, triumphs, and failures of each of the two movements.
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August 2, 2007 at 22:42
Well I used to attend a church the came out of the hippie movement. It’s very laid back, friendly and casual. I found it very attractive because it had a ‘grass roots’ feeling to it. It was totally dedicated to word of God in first observation.
They would meet in tents which I found outright beatiful like a young maiden. I really liked their dedication to basics. Going to their service was like going to a picnic in feeling. It was so serene. The philosophy of that church was that of a picnic, that is you bring what you can and share it with family.
Then they changed, they built their first building and now the feeling is like going to a banquet. You eat good food but you have to pay for it, for you and your close guests.
The picnic feeling was gone. I departed from that fellowship. They feel knit together in their own little clan with their own little world. I lost my desire for them.
The church I hope to find is the one who is out to make a public feast. Invite the widow, the alien and the stranger and the orphan. Where they the outcasts are the guests of honor, not your family or your close fellows.
I think that what it means in Jude that some are blemishes in your love feast, thinking only about themselves, their family and their own close friends.
“Come to me all you that are heave laden and I will give you rest”: that sort of attitude is my hope present myself to others.
August 5, 2007 at 07:59
I think Lindsey is right about the two movements being mirror images of each other. Certainly, similar points have been made before by other authors.
The problem with the article is that it makes a very interesting and provocative claim at the end—that the two movements canceled out parts of each other’s ideology and left us with a libertarian consensus. I think that idea merits further discussion. But the article doesn’t spend enough time developing that argument. It’s just tacked onto the end of the article.