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.