Hippies of the Religious Right: From the Counterculture of Jerry Garcia to the Subculture of Jerry Falwell

6. The Countercultural Christians

 6 tHe CounteRCultuRal CHRistians It comes as no surprise that all biblically grounded groups of Christians attempted to proselytize America’s youth during the sixties; after all, each group hoped to remake America in its image, and where better to start than with the younger generation ? But evangelistic success did not mean that the young converts conformed to conservative religion in all aspects. Indeed, those youngsters who came forward and opted for biblically grounded Christianity made their spiritual decisions for their own purposes. The original countercultural Christians were known specifically as “Jesus People” or “Jesus Freaks” precisely because they could not be called anything traditional, even though they tended toward biblically grounded Christianity.1 The first rumblings of a youthful swing toward biblically grounded Christianity came, quite appropriately, from the land of tremors and new beginnings, California. Fundamentalists, new evangelicals, Pentecostals, and eventually charismatics sent their laborers into the streets and onto college campuses and found fields ripe for harvest in the Golden State. But in going forth, the successful missionaries found that they had to adapt to the ways of their target audience, often dropping residual sectarian views and Victorian habits, and then they had to adjust their message so that it emphasized a revolutionary, hippie-like Jesus. In order to succeed, street evangelists had to recognize the authentic rebellion that youth were exercising against their  Hippies of tHe Religious RigHt parents’ beliefs and lifestyles, and they had to match that rebellion with antiliberal polemics drawn from biblically grounded Christianity.2 Ministering in the Street By the mid-1960s, while evangelical organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ worked some of California’s major campuses , such as UCLA, individual street evangelists, more or less freelance, distributed religious tracts on Sunset Strip and other major venues of hippiedom. Dispensing with suits and ties and donning hip clothing, these evangelists mingled, listened, and talked. The alienated street youth, who had abandoned family traditions for a liberated life of drugs and sex, and who now found drugs and sex had not quenched their spiritual thirst, discovered the evangelists’ antitechnocratic message enticing, if not compelling. Many followed the evangelists home to see, learn, and experience more.3 The first significant sixties’ street ministry (if one does not include Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge), began in 1966 when Tony Alamo, an adult convert from Judaism, and his wife Susan, who had converted at a younger age, began evangelizing youth in Los Angeles. Before committing themselves to the street, Tony and Susan were young and popular Pentecostal evangelists who made a good living preaching from church to church, but one night, driving along Sunset Strip, they looked out from their car at the hippies walking alongside and came to the conclusion that the street youth were spiritual orphans who needed, wanted, a home . . . and they believed they could provide them that home in Jesus. They left their car, conversed with the young people, gathered a handful of them, took them to their own home, won them over to Christ, and bedded them down for the night. Because Tony had lived life fast and loose as an entertainer and talent agent prior to his conversion, his lifestyle and thinking fit in well with the counterculture crowd. He and Susan soon devoted themselves to the street, and in time the couple distanced itself from regular church ministry, and even became, to a degree, opposed to the traditional church.4 tHe CounteRCultuRal CHRistians  Another early street preacher was Arthur Blessitt, a young ordained Baptist minister who went to San Francisco to continue his religious education but became involved in witnessing to hippies instead. He and his wife moved to the Los Angeles area in 1967 where he went into secular coffeehouses, places where hippies met to “rap” and buy drugs, to carry on his witness . He finally secured a location for himself, one night a week, in a go-go bar where he could talk to youth. The venture was so successful that he went out to look for a permanent building and found one on Sunset Strip; he christened it “His Place.” One visitor to His Place was a certain Don Williams, college youth pastor at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. Henrietta Mears, the lady who had counseled Billy Graham and mentored Bill Bright, hired Williams, but she passed away shortly before his arrival, leaving him on his own to seek out ways to connect...