On Jesus People USA and the Evangelical Left

JESUS PEOPLE USA

THE

E VA N G E L I C A L L E F T

AND T HE

EVOLUTION OF

CHRISTIAN ROCK SHAWN DAVID YOUNG

1 INTRODUCTION

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vangelical Christianity has become a powerful force in American popular media, youth culture, and the political arena. Contemporary manifestations of popular evangelical culture remain connected to a history commonly associated with the American counterculture of the 1960s, specifically a revival of conservative Christianity among American youth.

Though powerful in content and scope, evangelical Christianity appears to walk with a limp. New versions have been emerging in the United States, redefining the evangelical impulse, challenging the great American trinity of big business, big government, and big religion. And this has been accomplished to the sound track of the “Jesus freak.�

We have been told that evangelical Christians lean on their right side, lumbering along, plodding their way through the so-called culture wars.

And so it has become commonplace to associate American evangelicals with religious and political conservatism. Whether one views this group of believers as draconian or amenable, today’s evangelical has become part of a larger conversation, a narrative thread that begins with Jimmy Carter and continues through the Obama years. At its best, evangelical Christianity is known for its ability to engage culture, meeting people where they are. And at its worst, it will go down as a juggernaut associated with televangelist escapades and Bush-era foreign policy. Regardless of how history will recall

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this version of the faithful, what will remain is the cultural synchronicity with which evangelicals have long operated. They have, in the words of the Apostle Paul, become all things to all people. But where did this version of Christianity begin? And how has it become so intertwined with popular media and, more specifically, youth culture? Although evangelicals have engaged pop culture since the Great Awakenings, our story begins with a group of hippies.

The year was 1967 and the hippie movement was at its peak. But as with any cultural revolution, there is a culling often fueled by disenchantment.

For some, the break from the original revolution involved a deeper entrenchment into social radicalism. But for others, a return to some form of tradition quelled the angst felt toward both the establishment and the counterculture. Hoping to carve a new path, a number of hippies sought to resolve their own crises in the historical Jesus. The Jesus Movement was a significant American revival that changed the way many youth experienced Christianity. Disenchanted with mainline Christianity, the hippie movement, and the New Left, young evangelicals dubbed “Jesus freaks” sought emotional and spiritual security in the aftermath of the cultural revolution. Hoping to spread the gospel to youth of the 1960s, a number of conservative denominations adopted the cultural vernacular of “hip,” pop cultural products. Jesus freaks were attracted to Pentecostalism, which piqued hippie interest in spiritualism. And the Jesus freaks’ enthusiasm for conservative interpretations of the Bible appeased traditional religionists.

Ultimately, conservative reclamation of popular culture was intended to rescue those caught in what many perceived as a decline of American values.

This new version of evangelical Christianity became a powerful force, making its mark on publishing, film, television, festivals, and music, continuing the historical lineage of American evangelicalism as a dominant, complex, growing expression of Christianity. As this movement found what many deemed a significant lacunae between U.S. culture and Christianity, “new paradigm” churches provided Jesus freaks an institutionalized means to counter mainline liberalism’s infectivity to deal with existential anxiety. As membership within mainline denominations declined, conservative evangelicals welcomed fresh-faced converts nursed on a mixture of revivalist Christianity and Christian rock music, reinforcing the movement’s ability 2

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to combine contemporary “hip” Christianity with traditional forms of biblical conservatism.

THE JESUS MOVEMENT: A CONTINUED “SPIRIT” The Jesus Movement certainly made its mark on conservative American Christianity throughout the course of the 1970s. But the effects of the movement can still be seen today in contemporary Christian aesthetics, new paradigm churches, communes, and new, emerging versions of the so-called Evangelical Left. Unbeknownst to scholars who once dismissed this movement as culturally irrelevant, the paragon for earlier evangelical approaches to culture (George Whitfield, Charles Finney, Billy Sunday, and Amy Semple McPherson) continued under the new auspices of evangelical hippies. These young converts had an enormous influence on the way evangelicals understood, produced, and consumed cultural products—though some historians and sociologists have maintained that this particular expression of evangelical Christianity was a ghost of its former self.

The mercurial Jesus Movement’s core ideals were preserved in Jesus freak communities and have been celebrated in the largely Nashville-based Christian music industry. Although the movement has often been lumped into a larger history that associates evangelicals with the Religious Right, a number of Jesus Movement veterans went on to challenge the dominant paradigm of American evangelical Christianity as commonly associated (rightly or wrongly) with Reagan- and Bush-era conservatism.

This book explores a post–Jesus Movement “Jesus People” commune that does not conform to our common understanding of evangelical Christianity (at least in the United States) or popular Christian music. The community has diverged from the “cosmic” urgency that characterized early Jesus freaks.

Still, to a certain extent they hold to the principles of the original movement, combining lived religion (in their model of community), evangelical activism, and the hippie aesthetic. But despite this triumvirate—seeming historical continuity of the puritanical—the group’s epoch is nothing short of tattered, complex, and nebulous. To say their history is filled with a vast 3

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combination of wondrous humanitarian accolades and near-devilish missteps would be a gross understatement.

The book also offers an analysis of this community’s social and cultural influence through the Cornerstone Music Festival, an annual multivalent event created by the community in 1984. Their political and theological ideals were often included as part of a larger conversation at the festival. This protean carnival evolved into a gathering where shared discourse served to create new understandings of what evangelical Christianity and faith-based music is or could become. Summer 2012 marked the final festival, creating an empty space where religionists and artists left-of-center once called home.

For twenty-nine years Cornerstone created a ripple effect throughout the Christian music industry, changing the way a number of evangelicals have traditionally understood evangelical popular music—how it is defined, how it is produced, and how consumers perceive its relationship to evangelical Christianity. But the importance of this particular Jesus commune concerns more than the tepid nature of contemporary Christian music or the ever elusive consumer-demographic of evangelical youth.

An analysis of the community and the festival offers the reader a glimpse into a subculture that highlights an emerging disenchantment with the Religious Right and the Secular Left, as well as mainline liberal Protestantism.

In short, there has been a sort of clarion call by a great number of evangelical ministers, activists, authors, and intellectuals who now embrace the various theological uncertainties associated with postmodernity and pluralism.

In so doing they have attempted to reestablish left-leaning principles of social justice and articulate a cogent understanding of a new orthodoxy, now exemplified within the so-called Evangelical Left. And while it is easy to glean insight from a number of studies that consider the purely theological or historical nature of these sociopolitical developments, a study of the organic process of ideological change is far more informative and compelling.

EVANGELICAL PROGRESSION This Jesus People community demonstrates how evangelicalism is continually reinvented as practitioners attempt to reconcile pluralism with what I 4

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will call “establishment evangelicalism.” Thus an examination of the group sheds light on fundamental cultural problems related to pluralism. This was demonstrated at their music and arts festival, where music groups and guest lecturers challenged how art and ideas were represented and processed. And they even challenged the evangelical paradigm.

An analysis of Cornerstone (and the tensions between establishment evangelicalism and various countercultural Christian expressions) problematizes and nuances the ways in which religious commitment and “fanaticism” are depicted by parent cultures such as establishment evangelicalism. Using the festival as a case study, I explore how social discourse affects religious and political belief as members of the commune connect with an ideologically diverse population. Those who attended the festival were often challenged to reconsider basic assumptions about faith and the arts. For Cornerstone, “lived religion” exemplified reactions to and sympathies with cultural pluralism, further demonstrating how contemporary Christianity continues to evolve. The outcome of this multicultural experience was this: those who attended were exposed to various liminal moments; each situation—whether a concert or a lecture—encouraged the individual to reevaluate long-held beliefs and reconsider political and theological paradigms, which (I argue) are in many ways constructs of both establishment evangelicalism and the contemporary Christian music industry.

I offer an analysis of how the Jesus People community, Cornerstone, and (as an incidental consequence) the music industry experience ideological change in response to cultural pluralism. In the end I consider the community’s longevity, their impact on the festival, how the festival contributes to shifts within the Christian music industry, and how the spirit of the Jesus Movement is maintained in the Jesus People community and expressed at Cornerstone. As such, the community and Cornerstone both demonstrate how conservative (establishment) evangelicalism is being challenged as veterans of the right-leaning Jesus Movement have been intersecting in unique ways with an emerging Evangelical Left.

To some extent, Cornerstone maintained the spirit of the original Jesus Movement as it nursed dreams of a simpler “tribal” faith, which connected religious commitment to a larger global community without overt focus on denominational loyalty or dogmatism associated with establishment 5

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evangelicalism. But this is also complicated by a number of competing sociocultural pressures: the rapid growth of individualism, the American tendency to mix evangelical Christianity with nationalism, and the commercialization of popular evangelical music. As a counterpoint to mainstream evangelical festivals and other “establishment” forms of Christianity, Cornerstone offered an outlet for musicians who would otherwise have been marginalized by the church. It provided a space where burgeoning faithbased artists experimented beyond the boundaries of the Gospel Music Association’s gatekeepers. It nurtured up-and-coming musicians who did not conform to what is traditionally expected of contemporary Christian music.

And it provided a safe space for consumers from both the right and the left to enjoy art and ideology in a common, friendly space for about one week.

Ultimately, the social impact—the legacy—of Cornerstone and the Jesus People has been the music.

The Jesus People community has redefined how popular evangelical music is understood, defined, and performed. The record industry is now filled with artists whose beginnings can be traced to the evangelical subculture, and Cornerstone had a hand in remaking how consumers thought about faith-based music, radically altering how popular evangelical music is represented. But this community’s cultural influence extends well beyond how the church perceives musical styles and lyrics. The reason evangelicals have increasingly reconsidered their popular conceptions about faith, politics, and music can be traced to the so-called culture war, as represented in our common political and theological binary.

Since the 1980s the Religious Right has garnered support and criticism from both secularists and religionists. In some ways, the average evangelical tends to view the Religious Right with the same suspicion it holds for both Republicans and Democrats. But despite its waning popularity it has not been declawed. On the contrary, as the political center continues to shift, the poles also shift, often widening the divide until one cannot locate a true center. On the other hand, there are other evangelical Christians who continue their search for a middle ground (a gray area) between conservatism and liberalism. The result has been a germinating discontent with the American evangelical paradigm.

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While the presence of an Evangelical Left is nothing new, the ideas espoused by adherents are being popularized among young consumers through an unlikely portal—the Christian music industry, a historically conservative arm of evangelicalism. Philosophies commonly associated with left-leaning politics now permeate a great amount of modern Christian music as artists muse over ideas once dismissed: they ponder the environment rather than puzzle over the Apocalypse; they explore the dangers of war and nationalism and avoid exploring Christian triumphalism; and they encourage listeners to mourn poverty rather than glory in the heavenly streets of gold.

The people in this commune are often encouraged to entertain and embrace ambiguity, but do so within the context of maintaining ideological order, a tall order to fill. Tensions commonly associated with existential anxiety and pluralism resulted in their reevaluation of the way meaning is understood and presented, a philosophical development often referred to as the “crisis of representation.” Thus some leaders within the Jesus People commune began to sympathize with “postmodern” criticisms of how religious truth is represented and how the politics associated with art and society are defined, processed, and consumed. This approach to culture created a space for the community, one best defined as “progressive,” without the historical baggage associated with theological liberalism. This progressive aspect of the community and the festival demonstrates a vastly different collective experience from the typical conservative megachurch or Christian music concert. Is this the quintessential left-leaning evangelical gathering? Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Many who attended Cornerstone remained affiliated with conservative evangelicalism. Thus the community and the event have functioned interstitially, connecting two very different dichotomies.

Despite their dalliance with postmodernism and cultural pluralism, the Jesus People community self-identifies as evangelical. But what do we mean by “evangelical”? For historian David Bebbington, evangelical Christians have historically embraced four categories essential to the evangelical identity: dedication to Christian conversion, Biblicism, activism, and crucicentrism, the belief that the crucifixion of Christ atoned for the sins of

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humanity. To a certain extent, the Jesus People leadership read these essentials with postmodern eyes. Some academics and ministers have demonstrated that the term “evangelical” can be broadened to include a number of movements or individuals. Historian Randall Balmer’s approach creates an ecumenical template whereby anyone who has experienced a spiritual “new birth” can qualify as evangelical—those who have been “born again.” While specific theological positions are negotiable for the Jesus People community (as we shall see), their core principle involves some form of new birth (spiritual salvation), however nuanced that understanding may be. Despite their evolving theological paradigm, this community can be considered evangelical, but in a broader sense of the term. And in some ways, this complicates how evangelical Christianity in the United States is often understood (or misunderstood).

I offer three core arguments. First, historians have demonstrated that in most cases American communes are short-lived. But this community has continued beyond its 1972 genesis owing to various structural and organizational mechanisms. Furthermore, their ability to engage and evolve with American culture has fed into a sort of sustained commitment, which is often absent in other communal groups. Their longevity (to date) is a result of what sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter refers to as “commitment mechanisms,” particularly the commitment of second-generation and younger members who are unaffiliated with founders. Second, the Jesus People and Cornerstone have offered us a new way to understand evangelical popular music. Third, the Jesus People and Cornerstone sustain a vestige of the original Jesus Movement. Despite the conservative nature of the original movement, this community represents the general ethos of “emergent” Christianity and the Evangelical Left and, through the festival, contributed to newly emerging forms of progressive Christianity.

Both the commune and the festival contribute to a growing counternarrative to the Religious Right as emergent Christians and others associated with the Christian Left either reclaim what was purest about the Jesus Movement (before being absorbed by the Evangelical “establishment” Right) or now locate a livable space where both evangelicalism and cultural pluralism can coexist comfortably, despite paradox and existential tension.

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