Radical Faith: From the Sixties Counterculture to Jesus

By Vern Fein

Radical Faith captures the intimate inside story of journeys through cultural alienation and radical politics to an equally committed and more lasting faith in Jesus.

If you came of age in the 1960s, this is a piece of the story of your generation-perhaps even your own story. If you are a Christian, you may find the first-person spiritual

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vern Fein
• Release date: Jun 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781646062461

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The idea of writing this book came to me a bit before my retirement. I wanted to understand more deeply the somewhat unique experience some of my friends and I had as Christians. Growing up with little faith, I evolved into a committed atheist during my college years, including a long stint in grad school, where I became engaged in the radical politics of the New Left that culminated in the huge anti-Vietnam War movement as well as the lifestyle changes that we called the counterculture. Then, in the single greatest surprise of my life, Jesus found me, and I had a second radical transformation when I came to faith in Christ, a journey I have now been on for over forty years.

So, in my life, I was two kinds of freak. First, I was a freak because those of us who were immersed in the counterculture eschewed the term hippie, preferring to be called freaks because we did not want to be a normal part of the broken, hypocritical culture we experienced around us, including marriage, school, government, and religion. And then, when I became a Christian, Jesus Freak seemed an apt term for us young believers who passionately embraced the commitment to follow Jesus in radical discipleship.

My fellow Jesus Freaks and I were part of what became known as the Jesus movement, which exploded on the church scene as powerfully as the radical political movement that preceded it. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, countless young people from a variety of backgrounds came to Christian faith in a radical new way that changed the character of the church in this country and around the world. For people like me it was a conversion from one counterculture to another.

Why should any of this interest you? If you came of age in the 1960s, this is a piece of the story of your generation—perhaps even your own story. If you are a Christian, you may find the first-person spiritual journeys enlightening and inspiring. The Christian Renewal movement of the late 1960s and 1970s may or may not have been as far-reaching as the First and Second Great Awakenings in American history, but it profoundly transformed many lives. Finally, if you’re fascinated by cultural history, these stories encompass an unusual time when a generation raised largely in privilege—this was largely a white, educated, middle-class movement, very unlike the concomitant black revolution that was mostly political and vastly different on a cultural level—came to see their country as profoundly unjust and faced a government intent on sending them to kill and die for a small country ten thousand miles away. How some of us responded and the surprising thing that happened next will hopefully be of interest.

The questions rose up in me, as older minds tend, I think, to reflect more, to wring out their pasts to see what the pure water of memory may contain. What happened to those people who had the same life turns that I did? How did they become part of the first counterculture revolution, and how and why did they come into the second huge change? How were they doing now, what had they done with their lives, where were they in their faith now that had blitzkrieged them without warning, and what was their view of the church that had become a haven instead of the scourge it was for most of them during their radical days? I was curious, so I began to seek them out and ask if I could interview them. Most of them were eager and willing although there were different outcomes among the participants, some strong in the faith, some actually somewhat antagonistic. Only a few would not interview, almost universally due to illness. It was both an exhilarating and a sad interviewing experience for me as all lives, we know, do not unwind the same.

The format will be simple based on the interviews. We will examine the early religious life of the respondents, talk about their immersion in the 1960s counterculture, present the startling history of their conversions to a radical Christian faith, and finish with a look at where they are in their faith now and their attitude toward the church. The book will end with a personal epilogue in which I give my own extended views and critique about what I think is going on now in the church. But besides briefly introducing the different perspectives, in the main body of this book, I will let the respondents speak for themselves, mostly in their own words, and not try to homogenize the dialogue.

The following is a hopefully, unbiased presentation of how they engaged with me, which taught me a lot about my own journey and will hopefully be revealing and meaningful to those who had this same experience. If nothing else comes from this, writing it has been interesting and challenging for me. I hope you who choose to read this reflection will find that true also.

Chapter One

EARLY FAITH

Religion, at least outside the southern US Bible Belt, was not very significant for many of us growing up in 1950s and early 1960s America. Whether Jewish or Christian, most of our parents—especially our fathers—were not actively religious. As adolescents, the storytellers in this book knew few if any committed believers. When we encountered someone like that at school, he or she was a novelty. And while American society was nominally Christian, and prejudice against other religions was common, people’s everyday experience of life was almost entirely secular. Politicians were expected to give lip service to belief in God, but there was no bloc of religious voters. The civil rights movement eventually brought together religious activists from historic African-American denominations, mainline politically liberal Protestants, socially conscious Catholics, and activist Jews. However, evangelicals were not politically active as a self-conscious group. Our parents overcame the Great Depression, defeated the Nazis, and created the American middle class. They truly were a remarkable generation. But though they sent us to church or synagogue, we somehow came of age without a core sense of deep meaning in our hearts and lives. Some of us looked for that meaning in political protest and an alternative counterculture lifestyle, but only found it in Jesus.

All the over twenty storytellers who were interviewed were born in the US with the exception of one who became a citizen early on. All but one were born in the 1940s or 1950s when religious attendance in some form was almost always a part of one’s childhood. There were a few exceptions, a few atheist or agnostic parents who at the time were a tiny minority. Accordingly, the respondents’ upbringings ranged from no religion at all to, very rarely, a deep immersion in church. Some resonated with God and church; others did not. A few were raised in Judaism, which by that time was largely part of the American mainstream. Yet later on, when as young adults they became Christians, it was always an astounding surprise. Prior to that transformation the vast majority believed that they would never, of all things, become committed Christians and attend church.

These accounts of early religious involvement are grouped by religious affiliation: (1) the majority who were raised in Christian homes and attended church; (2) those with some Jewish upbringing; and (3) those with atheistic influences. This and subsequent sections will focus on one or two of the storytellers for a more in-depth view, followed by some additional remarks by those who had similar experiences.

CHRISTIAN

The majority of interviewees in this book, as expected, had Christian backgrounds and went to church. With very few exceptions, most reported that they did not have any real relationship with God or sense of God actually being in their lives in their earliest years. Most went to church dutifully all the way through their high school years but did not think their parents’ faith was real or set a good example that they wanted to follow. Therefore, when they got to college, almost all of them stopped attending religious services and fell totally away from any faith they had acquired. They felt that church was boring, outdated, and irrelevant. The Bible was never presented as a vital book and was seldom read or included in family life. And a few had very bad early experiences with church legalism that colored their view of God, the church, and faith. Because of this, one called God toxic. Below are some of the testimonies of those who were raised in the church, either Protestant or Catholic (it did not seem to make much difference), and their religious views when they got to college were not much different from those with nonbelieving Jewish or atheistic backgrounds.

Brad is a good example of the majority who attended church as a child but without any feeling of connectedness to God. Brad was raised in the United Methodist Church and was taken to church regularly, but he had little sense that his parents were believers. To him, ". . . that church was just the largest Protestant denomination in the US, and it seemed that the theology of the church was to believe