Hello my name is Andrew, and I have problem with
hippies and Jesus. That is, no matter how short I cut my hair or how punk is
more my generation, I am an unrepentant hippy despite my sanity and sobriety.
That is, no matter how much I respect Quakers and Buddhists, Taoists and
atheists for the integrity of their worldviews, I am a repentant Jesus Freak despite
my intellect and irreverence.
Last weekend, I attended the Forecastle Music
Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, that is because I missed my annual date with
the Rude Pundit at Bonnaroo, due to my activism supporting the LGBTQ and
divestment movements at the big Presbyterian shindig in Detroit (which you may have
heard about in my last post for this site), which happened to fall on the same
dates as the Roo. On Sunday, since I missed church due a very late Saturday, I
decided to wear my “JC [Jesus Christ]: the original hipster” t-shirt (see
picture) that I’d recently purchased at the liberal Jesus hippy answer to
Burning Man, called the Wild Goose Festival, in Hot Springs, North Carolina.
While I loved the fist-bumps, “great shirt dude”
shoutouts, and general spiritual mayhem made by wearing this shirt instead of
say, a tie-dye, a paisley tanktop, a Replacements t-shirt (they were playing
Sunday), or any other festival-appropriate duds, it cuts to the core of my hippy
Jesus problem.
You see, in the phenomenon known as American Jesus as exemplified by a movie
of that name recently released and book by that name from a few years ago,
anyone can make their move with Jesus the way that the hippies and hipsters do.
So, we get: gun-control Jesus and gun-toting Jesus, gay Jesus and gay-bashing
Jesus, brown-skinned immigrant Jesus and the Jesus-loving hate-monger meeting
him with an unwelcome wagon at the U.S.-Mexico border. Although some illusion
about the attainability of an elusive Christian unity has always been implied
as a necessary component of our faith, the culture war in America all but
forbids it.
Some days, it seems I have something in common in
terms of core values with everyone but the Bible beating bigots in the Bible
belt. My anti-war, pro-choice, inclusive, civil rights, economic justice Jesus
has enough cross-references in the Bible for me to feel I am following Him in
all my leftish ways, but if one day, I were to wake up and find out that the
deer-hunting, cage-fighting, forced-pregnancy Christians actually were the true
Christians, I am pretty convinced I couldn’t stay on the team.
On Sundays, I
pay lip service to unity with my conservative Christian friends, because I want
to be open-minded around them in hopes they will be open-minded around me. But
there comes a time in those conversations where one of us ends up accusing the
other one of serving Satan instead, if only in our private judgmental thoughts.
That’s not nice, but it’s honest.
We can trace my hippy Jesus roots back to my parents
and life in the early 70s when my preschool and elementary-school consciousness
made sense of my family’s devout Christian faith coupled with our unwavering support
of the farmworkers, the feminists, and George McGovern or Jimmy Carter. There
was a split in the roots or lineage of the hippy-Jesus tree around that time.
Both left and right Christians of the era embraced
the hippy clothing and the hippy music, the hippy commune and the hippy
coffeehouse. That is, the hip lifestyle that included fantastic folk and rock
music or health food and homebirth and happy homegrown DIY-craftiness all but transcended
politics. Yet those same hip folks could divide quite contentiously when it
came to politics.
On the left side, we were connected to the Beatniks,
the Catholic Workers, and the anti-war movement. Writers like the great Thomas
Merton or artists like Sister Corita were prolific and eloquent voices for the
people from inside Catholic orders. On the right side, what is today known as
the evangelical scene embraced the street people and ex-acid heads with such an
embrace that once converted they bought into the fundamentalist, simplistic, anti-abortion,
apocalyptic faith espoused then by the likes of Hal Lindsay and his book The Late, Great Planet Earth and with
too many late 20th and early 21st century correlations to
mention.
The original Jesus hippies had an organic appeal to
them before they evolved into today’s crunchy conservatives. Today’s Christian
hipsters are not that different, and here in Nashville, it’s hard to tell the
right-wing hipsters and the left-wing hipsters apart until you start talking
books and theology and voting trends. But some of the worst views in our world today
about unquestioning support for Israeli and American militarism, wishing for the
end times, trying to pray away the gay, disrespecting women and the environment,
and damning all other religions or non-religions to an eternal hell, these
devilish ideas can be traced in America not just to the far-right evangelical Christians
but from within that community to specific trends within hippie Christendom,
including those who were identified with the Jesus People in the early 1970s.
Because I cannot shake my hippy dippy Jesus Freak
identity, and my tastes in all natural food and psychedelic folk rock music
reflect this, it’s important for me in my research about the 60s and 70s to
seek out the members of the Jesus revolution in American counterculture who
kept their roots on the left side of the split. We are just the kind of people
you will meet at a Wild Goose type festival or see stopping the water shutoffs
in Detroit and advocating for immigrant reform and worker justice.
From the fog of war and weariness of economic
exploitation, it’s sometimes difficult to find Jesus as liberator and
life-force and unconditional love and not so much as culture warrior, even
though we often need to choose sides in these battles if we are to defend what’s
left of goodness and the democratic spirit, as power-mongers of every stripe
find new ways to dominate. What love and what hope do we have that love and
hope will stand up to all this monstrous and authoritarian insanity?
mentioned in the blog:
http://americanjesusthemovie.com/
http://wildgoosefestival.org/
mentioned in the blog:
http://americanjesusthemovie.com/
http://wildgoosefestival.org/