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  • A History of the Jesus People:An Interview with Larry Eskridge
  • Randall Stephens

THE JESUS PEOPLE REPRESENT ONE OF THE LARGEST mass religious movements of the 20th century. Larry Eskridge's God's Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (Oxford University Press, 2013) examines this fusion of the hippie counterculture and evangelical Christianity that burst onto the scene in the late 1960s.

Eskridge is associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals and editor of the Evangelical Studies Bulletin at Wheaton College. With Mark Noll, he is co-editor of More Money, More Ministry: Evangelicals and Money in Recent North American History (Eerdmans, 2000). Randall Stephens recently caught up with Eskridge to ask him about the Jesus People. (This interview is adapted from the Religion in American History and the Historical Society blogs.)

Randall Stephens:

What first got you interested in the topic of the Jesus People?

Larry Eskridge:

I found the Jesus People an interesting topic on several levels. I came of age during that period and got involved in the Jesus People movement in my local area in northern Illinois. So, if doing history often serves as something of an exercise in autobiography, I stand guilty as charged by dint of being curious about the overall movement and the reasons for its initial success and eventual disappearance.

At a larger level, I've long been interested in the way that evangelical religion intertwines with mass media and popular culture. The Jesus People received a great deal of media coverage, and they replicated various aspects of the counterculture and youth culture.

Finally, my interest grew as the result of conversations I had in the late 1980s with a few evangelical historians who discounted the impact of the movement and who viewed it as an immature, irrelevant, generational religious fad. I remembered the movement's pervasive presence during the 1970s. I thought that it had been an important influence in the lives of a lot of evangelical Baby Boomers. Not only were the Jesus People a colorful, interesting bunch with their communes, street papers, and Jesus rock bands, but they also represented a chance to take the religious life and experience of young people seriously. I was frankly taken aback by the manner in which some scholars were able to discount the religious experiences and attachments of young people in our more-or-less contemporary settings—they surely didn't do that with the young audiences that were impacted by the preaching of Jonathan Edwards!

Stephens:

How influential do you think these countercultural evangelicals have been in shaping American Christianity?

Eskridge:

Well the book argues that they were surprisingly important in shaping the nature of American evangelicalism and—by reason of the growth in evangelicalism's organizational, cultural, and political influence in subsequent years—a larger force than has heretofore been thought. You can't have a real handle on the 1960s and 1970s—especially on the youth culture of that era—without acknowledging the Jesus People.


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The godfather of Christian rock Larry Norman. From David Di Sabatino's documentary film Fallen Angel: The Outlaw Larry Norman (2009).

There were obvious institutional manifestations—the growth of the Calvary Chapel network of churches and its offspring the Vineyard, for example. But the larger impact was felt at the grassroots level in the manner in which the movement modeled a different relationship with popular culture and youth culture. Before the Jesus People, evangelicalism had a very nervous, if not downright oppositional, relationship to "worldly entertainments" and all the allures of popular and youth culture. The Jesus People movement, however, made a Christianized version of popular culture that could be put forward as a means both to evangelize unbelieving youth and build up the kids who came from evangelical homes and churches. There was, and still is, opposition to this way of handling the boundaries between "the World" and "The Church," but to a large degree the Jesus People marked a revolution in handling these relationships.

The movement played a major role in keeping evangelicalism vital by providing a much easier path for a lot of people—particularly evangelical kids raised...

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