Editor’s Introduction

In this issue, our authors explore the intersections of religion and social and political radicalism, sometimes in surprising ways. Spiritualism—the phenomenon that swept America in the nineteenth century—had links to political and social movements of the time, notably incipient feminism. Likewise, the pivotal counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s requires that we recognize its religious as well as its social and political aspects, many of which are linked to the use of psychedelics. Our authors explore in new ways the extent and nature of the radicalism of these two periods, separated by about a century.

Our first article is Elizabeth Lowry’s “Spiritual (R)evolution and the Turning of Tables: Abolition, Feminism, and the Rhetoric of Social Reform in the Antebellum Public Sphere,” in which she argues that there is a much greater connection between the spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century and dramatic social changes than previously recognized. She emphasizes discourse analysis, as do several authors in our previous and current issues, in this case invoking the notion of “counterpublics,” public spheres of oppositional discourse critical of the mainstream, and analyzing how spiritualism represented both a shelter and a catalyst for such counterpublic discourse.

Our second article, Chris Elcock’s “The Fifth Freedom: The Politics of Psychedelic Patriotism,” also focuses on rhetorical analysis, but in his case the subject is how proponents of psychedelic drugs in 1960s counterculture, figures like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, sought to encourage an American counterculture through widespread use of psychedelics. Elcock is focusing on a paradox: those advocating psychedelics or psychedelic religion to challenge or overturn mainstream American cultural norms often invoked American patriotism and exceptionalism to do so. In other words, paradoxically, American psychedelic religious discourse is simultaneously radical and yet seeks to situate itself as classically American, more American than conventional antipsychedelic social norms.

Our third article is Morgan Shipley’s “This Season’s People: Stephen Gaskin, Psychedelic Religion, and a Community of Social Justice,” which takes a close look at the intersection of religion and social transformation in the life work of Stephen Gaskin and of the Farm, a utopian community in Tennessee. Often, the counterculture—and in particular, countercultural interest in Asian religions, meditation, psychedelics, and mysticism—was characterized as inward looking, even as narcissistic, and as antisocial or antinomian. Shipley demonstrates that the Farm and its various social justice projects in fact show the precise opposite: that the perennialist mysticism of Gaskin manifested itself not in solipsism but in serious and even dramatic projects aimed at changing the world for the better.

In our fourth article, Stephen Whitfield discusses the unusual life of “A Radical in Academe: Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University,” describing in the process not only Marcuse’s remarkably wide countercultural influence but details concerning him in the classroom and on campus, as well as with students like Angela Davis, who were to become themselves national names. Marcuse was without doubt among the most influential authors of the period—books like Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man captured and spoke to the spirit of the times. What was it about Marcuse’s thought that was so in tune with the zeitgeist and that made him such a charismatic theorist of the counterculture?

And our final article, Tor Egil Førland’s “Cutting the Sixties Down to Size: Conceptualizing, Historicizing, Explaining” takes a new look at this period but from a very different perspective. In this iconoclastic article, Førland calls into question much of the scholarship on the 1960s as representing something closer to advocacy than analysis. He argues that scholarship on this period would be better served by greater objectivity and historical distance rather than relying on narratives that reflect uncritically those of the participants.

We also include a conversation between Chris Elcock and Ed Rosenfeld, who was very active in the 1960s psychedelic movement and knew nearly everyone influential within it. This conversation offers many details concerning the specifics and uses of psychedelics during this pivotal era. Finally, we include five book reviews, including reviews by well-known authors Michael Barkun on JSR author Martin Miller’s new book and...