The Aquarians and the Evangelicals

On April 5, 1967, representatives of the San Francisco Oracle, the Diggers, the Family Dog, the Straight Theater, and other parts of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene held a press conference to announce the formation of the Council for a Summer of Love. The event scored friendly media notices: The next day’s San Francisco Chronicle described the coalition as “a group of the good hippies,” defined as the ones who “wear quaint and enchanting costumes, hold peaceful rock ’n’ roll concerts, and draw pretty pictures (legally) on the sidewalk, their eyes aglow all the time with the poetry of love.” ...

The evangelicals’ therapeutic turn, like that of the counterculture, moved with currents of psychic need sprung loose by mass affluence. Indeed, the two opposing religious revivals overlapped. The Jesus Freaks, or Jesus People, emerged out of the hippie scene in the late ’60s, mixing countercultural style and communalism with evangelical orthodoxy. As the hippie phenomenon faded in the ’70s, many veterans of the Jesus Movement made their way into the larger, socially conservative evangelical revival. ...

The resulting cultural synthesis that prevails today, this accidental by-product of ideological stalemate, remains nameless. It could be called liberal, in the larger sense of the tradition of individualism and moral egalitarianism that America has always embodied. It could also be called conservative, if that same liberal tradition is understood to be the object of conservation. But the ideologies that pass for liberalism and conservatism today are too weighed down with authoritarian elements for either to lay claim to the real American center. Since American society today is committed to a much wider scope for both economic and cultural competition than was allowed before the ’60s erupted, it makes most sense to call that center libertarian.

With their wider exposure to history, literature, philosophy, and science, recipients of higher education were more likely to see beyond the confines of their upbringing—to question the values they were raised to accept, to appreciate the virtues of other cultures, to seek out the new and exotic.

Brink Lindsey needs to make it clear that the professors were not just teaching with neutrality. Almost all were attacking the parent's conservative values using one-sided liberal arguments and adding the lure of a tempting justification for fornication and lasciviousness.

It was never a level playing field that just happened to convert the students right out from under the parent's noses (nor is it anywhere near level today). It was an unethical abuse of power by opportunistic, morally liberal idealogues who used the college classroom as a way to destroy values and make converts.

The news media and television establishments daily reinforced the socialist, immoral message of the proselytizing professors so that in the end the students, in a leap of new morality solidarity, converted to the cool new amoral movement, hurtfully destructive though it was and still is.

This past midnight, my local PBS station broadcast a “Gay-Lesbian-and Trangendered Choir” concert that presented assorted Gospel songs. They were part of no organized religious group, but were recognized by the Methodists and Unitarians. This group of “proud” people wore choir robes, just as regular church choirs, and each had a sash that “told their individual stories”, of how their families and society at large rejected them but how they rose above it with the aid of (what they re-imagined and re-invented about) God.

I am struck sometimes by the arrogance of Man, who just like Old Nick, the devil, has decided that we know much better than God what is right and what is wrong. To them, if their personal sins fly in the face of what Christ and the Bible have decreed acceptable, it must be that Bible scholars and the original authors of Scripture must have had bad hearing, or that God mumbled.

One of these ‘holy people’ opined the eternal misunderstanding that “God doesn’t make mistakes, so He made me just the way He wants me.” This implies that if you are a pederast, into bestiality, a con-man, a liar, a swindler, or are just prone to torturing small animals in your garage, hey, that must be OK as well. By this (mis)understanding, an alcoholic should just drink up, because that’s how God made him, we should just let children born with AIDS die, and should deny the diabetic insulin. Taking this claim full circle, I as a “calorically-gifted” fat person should be able to eat whatever I like, reguardless of the meddlers at the Center For (Misapplied) Science in the Public Interest, because I bear absolutely no responsibility to behave correctly to what anyone else thinks. After all, “God doesn’t make mistakes, so He made me just the way He wants me.”

Nothing makes me sadder than someone who is “proud of their sins”. They strike me as people who will never learn another thing until the day they die, but shortly after that, are going to find our a great deal.

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