Placing Jesus People USA Within Evangelism

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

THEOLOGY, POLITIC S, A ND CULTUR E

or remains relatively sectarian. But JPUSA has managed to avoid this. Its activism is connected to a decision to place authority in multiple leaders, whose perennial goal is to nurture a cultural relevance that binds them to their surroundings.

This chapter will demonstrate how beliefs about salvation, the end of time, and political affiliation have defined evangelical social justice in the United States, surfaced in the Jesus Movement, and come to influence JPUSA’s ideological evolution. The so-called millenarian impulse influenced evangelical activism between the 1970s and 1990s, causing widespread Christian fascination with Rapture theology, to the extent that a cottage industry of end-times publishing swept up churches sweltering under the impression that a demonic “one-world government” would either wholly eradicate spiritual freedom or arise as the arbiter of doomsday. The chapter demonstrates how this impulse was revitalized during the Jesus Movement, was celebrated in popular evangelical music, and is now losing force, as evangelicals begin to question religious certainty. The chapter concludes with the claim that theological and political adaptability has contributed to JPUSA’s longevity and social impact, warranting a larger question: would a similar functional paradigm serve society as a whole?

PLACING JPUSA WITHIN EVANGELICALISM: MODERN TO POSTMODERN Broadly speaking, the Jesus Movement included four different expressions.

These have, in some fashion or another, contributed to remapping the landscape of American evangelicalism: evangelical, new paradigm churches such as Calvary Chapel and Vineyard; isolationist communes such as the Children of God and Tony and Susan Alamo’s Christian Foundation; mainstream communes such as Shiloh houses; and groups such as Jesus People Army and JPUSA’s parent group, Jesus People Milwaukee. Despite this spotted history, JPUSA cannot be counted among the post–Jesus Movement, new paradigm evangelical mainstream. Nor can it be counted among communes associated with doomsday isolationism. While isolationists

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constructed enclaves attempting to question a culture bereft of moral values before the advent of the apocalypse, JPUSA (though moderately millenarian in earlier years) was more interested in practical matters of justice. And although David Gordon argued that during the 1970s JPUSA exhibited the same millenarian tendencies as other Jesus freaks, the community has changed to one that is now somewhat interstitial, one that remains simultaneously antiestablishment and connected to the wider culture.1 Unimpressed by the evangelical marketing machine, JPUSA views isolationism as dangerous to both the individual and the larger church culture. Simply put, its members are best understood as practical contemplatives.2 Always seeking to put faith into practice, their service to the poor is tempered by a thorough examination of the Right, the Left, and their own community. Consequently they enjoy some freedom to discuss ideas openly.

Both leaders and rank-and-file members often form opinions based on a combination of spiritual experience, biblical exegesis, and recollections of their own religious past. Wearing an Obama shirt, jokingly referring to himself as an “Obamagelical,” the outspoken politically liberal Jon Trott recalled an inability to resolve an existential crisis in his youth. And in a mainline liberal fashion, Trott’s pastor suggested, “There are many roads to Rome . . . what matters is your sincerity,” whatever your belief. Trott’s response was measured and probing: “So, when you say God, you don’t know what you mean.” His pastor did not resolve the matter. “He [the pastor] did not live on the planet of anxiety that I lived on.”3 Many JPUSA communards have attempted to find a space somewhere between the ambiguity of theological liberalism and the certainty of theological conservatism. But despite his need for clarity, for Trott, conservative responses to the world also indicate a near-flawed theology. For him, early Jesus Movement converts were sold a bill of goods. The initial humanitarianism of the Jesus Movement was eclipsed by theo-political powers (read Religious Right) that championed visions of empire (a Christian one), fears of a New World Order, and a sense of immediacy concerning personal salvation as the Rapture approached. As the Religious Right came to power, Jesus freaks were converted to a different Jesus—one that was patriotic, individualistic, and Republican. But JPUSA was able to avoid entanglement

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with the Right while simultaneously maintaining a relatively conservative theological position, at least for a while. Given its historical evolution, how can we classify it? And does its propensity to evolve preclude any evangelical orientation?

Even at its most conservative, evangelical Christianity is too complex to categorize. The various expressions (fundamentalist, nondenominational, Pentecostal, charismatic, orthodox, emergent) remain porous and conflicted, in part due to the forces of pluralism. Given the multiple political and theological beliefs that make up those who claim any or all of these classifications, understanding what qualifies as “membership” within each tradition remains to be seen. Alex Schaefer considers the fiscal conservatism of the post-1960s evangelical culture and the rise of liberal evangelicals, suggesting that the New Right “tapp[ed] into the anti-liberal sentiment and moral concerns of Evangelicals” and that “its embrace of laissez-faire is one of its weakest planks, because capitalism itself helped undermine ‘traditional values.’ ”4 As a result, the language of liberalism was used to co-opt Jesus freaks. In fact, the language of the counterculture was not entirely separate from the language of conservatives who sought limited government.

After all, says historian Malcolm Magee, “the 1960s were characterized by a distrust of the government. It was not seen as too big a jump to go from an anti-Vietnam version of anti-government to a Ronald Reagan version of anti-government. Many of the rallies and concerts in which musicians were present and performed were focused on moral issues.”5 Its embrace of conservative theology and rejection of a materialism (largely associated with laissez-faire capitalism) initially defined baby boom evangelicalism.

But the antimaterialism often associated with Jesus freaks faded with the rise of Reagan-era conservatism and the Jesus Movement’s more significant cultural legacy, contemporary Christian music. And it’s this sense of internal conflict that makes the category of evangelicalism so nebulous.

Religious and social historian D. G. Hart has argued that evangelicalism does not truly exist as a movement precisely because of its amorphous nature. While the evangelical spirit of the nineteenth century is not dismissed, Hart argues that evangelicalism is merely another form of fundamentalism. The difference is that this form of fundamentalism (conservative

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Protestantism) is culturally engaged, lacks collective agreement, has no central authority, and is driven by popular opinion. For Hart, the qualifier “evangelical” is simply an adjective used to describe the zeal of a particular kind of Protestant Christian.6 But Nathan Hatch maintains that the ability to reach decisions by popular opinion (without central authority) is, in fact, precisely what has strengthened evangelical Christianity and qualifies it as a movement.7 For JPUSA, the signifier “evangelical” was paramount to its communal identity throughout the 1980s. Without it the group would have remained on the fringe, with little hope of attracting large numbers to the Cornerstone Festival. In the 1980s Cornerstone offered lectures and workshops designed to train Christians in biblical apologetics (a distinction for both evangelicals and fundamentalists), using the works of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Flannery O’Conner, Francis Schaeffer, Norman Geisler, and Josh McDowell. During this era of Cornerstone, JPUSA remained unflinchingly evangelical and theologically conservative. But the dogma of conservative theology has often obscured praxis (at least for JPUSA). Engaged in critical theory to the point of allowing a certain measure of epistemological doubt, JPUSA’s activism went on to distinguish it as uniquely positioned to challenge the dominant paradigm, even in the 1980s.

With the exception of minor musings over how God metes out salvation, communards (especially the council) have historically been theologically conservative, thus complicating our ability to locate them within a fully leftleaning ideology. Arguments from Hart and Hatch notwithstanding, in the 1990s there arose an upsurge of self-identified evangelicals who parted ways with ideas traditionally (if stereotypically) associated with evangelical Christianity. Then later in the decade, progressive forms of evangelicalism began to find popular acceptance, reaching a groundswell at the turn of the twentyfirst century. Postmodern Christians “emerged” to enter conversations about faith, doubt, and literary criticism. So JPUSA’s quest for faith simply represents one of many attempts to wrestle with the deep-seated questions associated with modernity and postmodernity, without drowning in the process.

Emergent Christianity represents an ongoing “conversation” concerning philosophical topics such as modernism, postmodernism, poststructuralism,

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and pluralism. Given the collapse of absolute truth-claims and the increasing fragmentation of the individual within the global economy, emergent Christians often find solace in public iterations such as www.emergent village.com and in progressive “postmodern” evangelical leaders such as Tony Jones, Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle, Doug Pagitt, Shane Claiborne, Rob Bell, and a host of “new monastics.”8 In many ways both emergent Christianity and the Evangelical Left are similar with respect to their counterrightist activism. And despite the growth of rightist allegiances, groups affiliated with the Evangelical Left and emergent Christianity have delineated the evangelical approach to culture in such a way as to allow those who adhere to various beliefs a certain margin of error, inspiring humanitarianism within those who would otherwise maintain an upward gaze colored by an imminent doomsday.

Although Christian humanitarianism was quite present in denominations such as the Salvation Army, certain nineteenth-century evangelicals, and liberal Protestants up through the 1930s, the Evangelical Left uniquely defines itself against mid-twentieth-century forms of evangelical Christianity that in many ways never fully realized any full-throated response to structural or systemic injustice. Now uncertain about ideological particulars, these evangelicals live with theological ambiguity, but they also apply a softer version of the social gospel, one still firmly wedded to evangelical belief. Regardless of the zeitgeist that defined JPUSA theologically, its impulse remained rooted in faith, one that encouraged members to live in the way of Jesus, a way that, for them, was in contradistinction to both American evangelicalism and the Religious Right. But given JPUSA’s emphasis on practical human need—and attendant beliefs that both the state and JPUSA businesses should finance the general welfare in service of morality—how can we determine where an evangelical impulse ends and the social gospel begins? Put another way, can we consider them evangelical in the traditional sense of the term?

Historian David W. Bebbington’s classic method of defining evangelical Christianity is a useful model for analyzing JPUSA’s theological position.

For Bebbington, the essentials of evangelical belief include a dedication to Christian conversion, biblicism (a high view of scripture), crucicentrism

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(the belief that the crucifixion of Christ atoned for the sins of humanity), and activism.9 In the 1980s JPUSA exemplified all four. But was the community truly a part of evangelicalism?10 As members of the Evangelical Covenant denomination, JPUSA has enjoyed a certain ecclesial respectability necessary for survival. Although evangelicalism may lack collective agreement (according to Hart), the movement, if we can call it that, has gained significant cultural traction that now extends into the cultural mainstream. This can be seen if one considers how evangelicals throughout the 1960s and 1970s viewed the more radical Jesus-freak communes that peppered the United States. Traditional evangelicals measured the viability of these groups based on ideological expectations common among selfdefining evangelicals. As a result, many groups found themselves affiliating with the larger parent culture, hoping for evangelical acceptance.

In the interest of evangelical solidarity, the Cornerstone Festival once gave JPUSA a chance to muster a public image for the evangelical community, annually reintegrating the commune into the parent movement. But in the wake of the festival’s closing, how will JPUSA fare? Without Cornerstone it may be a stretch for the group to attract travelers to their lowincome operation. Furthermore, will they lose public affirmation and larger sociocultural influence? Put another way, to continue under the umbrella of evangelicalism, JPUSA must please an evangelical constituency, which is at the very least moderately conservative. But what accounts for the disparity between JPUSA and its more conservative affiliates?

RECONNECTING YOUTH TO . . . SOMETHING Preston Shires has argued that both Christian fundamentalism and liberal Christianity alienated youth throughout the 1960s.11 Fundamentalism was anachronistic, judgmental, and, according to historian George Marsden, culturally isolated.12 On the other hand, liberal Christianity did not provide answers to existential anxiety, often failing to deliver on promises to aid the needy. Shires explores the collective effort to combine the best of two worlds, writing, “The eventual unity and common purpose shared

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between countercultural Christianity and evangelicalism surpassed that shared by the Beats and the Old Left . . . so much so that whereas the Old Left and the New Left disagreed on the means and purpose of reaching a non-capitalistic manner of life, countercultural Christianity and evangelicalism eventually became unified both in goal and practice.” The “common purpose” shared by countercultural and establishment evangelicals extended into the 1970s, climaxing to form what would later become a new movement. Shires reasons that the inability for the Old and New Left to agree on strategy worked to evangelical advantage, particularly as the right came to new power during the 1980s. He continues: “And even though historians speak of evangelicalism in the latter 1970s without reference to the Jesus movement, it is the melding of these two initially somewhat distinct movements that explains why the ‘evangelicalism’ of 1980 was radically different from the ‘evangelicalism’ of 1965.”13 Adherents to New Evangelicalism and Bill Bright’s para-church organization, Campus Crusade for Christ, actively sought to recruit youth who were (in the estimation of conservatives) equally dissatisfied with watereddown liberalism and the culturally obscure, recalcitrance of fundamentalism.14 In response, evangelical Christianity was given an intellectual boost.

Then Christian apologists such as Francis Schaeffer attempted to provide polemics rooted in Scottish Common Sense Realism, while remaining unrestricted by the fundamentalist bogeyman of anti-intellectualism or a politic of separation. Schaeffer’s God, according to Shires, was one who was identifiable by those disenchanted with all other human constructs, one that “middle-class youth could both have a feeling for and be intellectually proud of; and, not least in importance, he was a God who opened up infinite possibilities for human creativity by liberating the individual from naturalistic philosophy and the technocratic lifestyle naturalistic philosophy had imposed on society.” Speaking the language of the counterculture, Schaeffer tapped a rhetorical strategy that resonated with Jesus freaks. “Freed from the machine and connected to the infinite,” writes Shires, “the human experience became a never-ending adventure. This was full-fledged expressive individualism.”15 JPUSA embraced this early on. Schaefferian apologetics served JPUSA communards who, throughout the 1980s and part of the

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1990s, sought intellectual reasons in support of faith—though, as we shall see, this would later be jettisoned.

The ability to freely experience and express God in multivalent ways became emblematic of the early Jesus freak. This distinguished the Jesus Movement from conservative, Calvinist-based evangelicalism and mainline liberalism. But unlike JPUSA, many early Jesus freaks were unconcerned with the need to intellectualize God. Embracing the Pentecostalism that attracted youth disenchanted with empty theorizing, Jesus freaks on the West Coast quickly became quintessential examples of baby boom, Jesus Movement evangelicalism. With the exception of JPUSA and the burgeoning Evangelical Left, Jesus-freak conservatism (at least the West Coast version) became the staid mythology of Jesus Movement lore.

PRACTICAL DIFFERENCES While JPUSA reengaged Christian apologetics in the 1980s, other believers continued to find truth in spiritual experience. New paradigm, post–Jesus Movement churches provided a middle ground between liberal Christianity and fundamentalism. But this middle ground is different from Schaeffer’s version. Most groups classified as “new paradigm” offered answers to existential crises while also encouraging Pentecostal expression. As such, these groups were therapeutic, individualistic, and antiestablishment. Furthermore, the emphasis on experience created a situation where the post–Jesus Movement church could be classified as both primitive and (ironically) postmodern. Historian Donald Miller has compared baby boom evangelicalism to enlightenment-based philosophical models that have traditionally dominated Western Christianity since the eighteenth century. The result, he argues, has been that “religious debates have been relegated to discussing the truth or falsity of beliefs, making religion ‘disembodied,’ cerebral matter.”16 He goes on to highlight how new paradigm Christianity has reacted to this, arguing that many assumptions of Enlightenment thought have been challenged. The clay feet of rationality have been revealed, and postmodern philosophy is

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