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

Introduction

 intRoduCtion In the mid-1970s, America’s raucous counterculture, which had raged since the mid-1960s, faded away. Ignited by racism , poverty, war, and government oppression, the fires of the counterculture subsided as the effects of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and of President Johnson’s Great Society took hold, and then were effectively snuffed out with the 1973 withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Vietnam and the capitulation of the establishment’s Silent Majority leader Richard Nixon in 1974. True, the Great Society had not eliminated poverty, but an experiment in that direction had been attempted; and although minorities still suffered discrimination, progress in achieving equality had been made. More definitive were the end of the Vietnam War and the demise of Richard Nixon’s presidency. The year 1974 may be considered a turning point, putting an end to what had been called the “sixties”—a decade stretching from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the resignation of his old rival Nixon—and opening up a new era charged with religio-political zeal. This pivotal year’s spiritual significance may be instanced in a conversation between evangelist Billy Graham and a young hipster man of twenty-two who had been living a desultory life. Graham told him that no matter “what he did, where he went, or how he ended up,” he would always be loved.1 The young man was rebellious, fast with cars and girls, easy with drugs and drinking, and he was also Billy Graham’s  Hippies of tHe Religious RigHt son. William Franklin Graham III, called Franklin, had plunged into the sixties counterculture as a teenager, but in July of 1974, the same month in which Richard Nixon faced impeachment, young Franklin converted to his father’s faith. The counterculture had lost its antiwar and antigovernment impetus, but its activist soul would live on in another avatar.2 Billy Graham’s son was one of millions of youth who to some degree succumbed to the sixties’ counterculture. Many, including those who had not been born into a religiously conservative household like Franklin, would surprisingly end up in the robust evangelical movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. These new conservative religionists brought with them the radical activism of the counterculture and gave American institutions—whether religious, economic, social, or political —a vigorous rank and file filled with a new dynamism. This activism was not simply a vibrant and politically motivated imitation of the New Left by young conservative religionists, although political reporter Nina Easton makes just such an argument in her analysis of baby-boomer rightist Ralph Reed. Conservative activism was actually a faithful expression of a commitment to radical engagement that had been engendered and nurtured by sixties’ youth during the counterculture and then authentically and persistently lived out by them, albeit for different causes, after they converted to a biblically grounded Christianity.3 The beliefs and behavior which coalesced into the Religious Right in the 1970s may have been fed by many different streams of thought and style—and certainly everyone recognizes the influence of fundamentalism—but one of those streams had its source in the counterculture.4 ...