Welcome to the Real Jesus Revolution!

by

As I watched the new feature film, The Jesus Revolution, a flood of intense memory rushed through me.  Because I lived its plot, along with a cohort of other young people in the late 60’s and early 70’s who were drawn both to the counterculture and to the message and example of Jesus. 

I lived in Santa Cruz, California, through that era.  I have vivid, warm recollections of sitting around driftwood bonfires at the beach at sundown, singing plaintive Jesus songs accompanied by guitar with other earnest, long-haired, bandanna-bound, dewy-eyed young people.  On the chrome bumper of my old station wagon I pasted a sticker that read “Jesus Is”.  For a while I went to a weekly Greek-language Bible study led by an older fellow who had attracted a living-room full of counter-culturals in beads and bells who would point their index fingers in the air to share the “One Way” (Jesus) sign with each other.  In my zeal, I started a short-lived ‘zine about the Jesus movement in my last year of high school.  For that, my fellow politically radicalized friends pegged me as a religious weirdo.  For my 18th birthday, they sent money to a nutty character named Kirby J. Hensley, founder of the Universal Life Church - to ordain me by mail-order into the Christian ministry.  (The church was founded originally as a means of dodging the draft during the Vietnam war.)

I was attracted to the Jesus People, a movement later nicknamed “God at the Beach”, because it felt so much more authentic and emotive than the staid, boring mainline Protestant worship to which I’d been subjected as a child and teenager.  It seemed to bring together all that was good in the social and cultural change movement at the time, along with what was good in Christianity.  But it did not take me long to realize that just as quickly as the Jesus Revolution flowered in day-glow colors, it was being co-opted by fundamentalists who were definitely not cool and definitely not about social and political progress. 

And that shift is illustrated in the movie.  The evangelicals who made it as a propaganda film surely did not intend for it to display the subtext it reveals.  As soon as the Jesus Revolution merged into evangelical churches, it lost its countercultural juice.  God at the beach rapidly morphed into fundamentalism in the suburbs.

The movie starts with an old-school, uptight church in southern California – depopulated, boring.  A Jesus hippie shows up and the pastor grudgingly lets him in – and then a flood of youngsters in Birkenstocks follows.  Almost overnight, the church goes from singing Rock of Ages in tremolo to singing prototypical CCM – Christian Contemporary Music - with a rock band.   In a flash, it goes from neckties to open-collar shirts, pumps to flip-flops.  

But what didn’t change was the fundamentalism.  A different vibe, a different wardrobe, a different sound… but the same old biblical literalism, religious exclusivism, and backward social values.  There were no women leading the Jesus People in the film.  Nor does the film acknowledge that one of its protagonists, the Jesus People leader Lonnie Frisbee, was gay and apparently died of AIDS.  He was a victim of the very fundamentalism he espoused.  The scenes in the film that depict bad acid trips could have been lifted straight out of the ridiculous anti-drug movies that we were forced to watch in high school.  (As for myself, I didn’t drop LSD until I was in seminary – and the experience was profound.  It made sense of the mystical tradition of Christianity and it shaped my consciousness for the better, ever after.)

So why this film, and why now?  Because the evangelicals who funded it, freaked out by the rapid depopulation of their churches, want to see the Jesus Revolution happen again today.  But are they able to see the deep irony to which the film points?  The casual clothes worn in today’s megachurches, the come-as-you-are culture, the rock bands playing praise music, and the earnest intensity of their preachers can’t disguise the fact that the Jesus Revolution of the 60’s has degenerated into the same judgmental, decidedly non-revolutionary version of Christianity that characterized Chuck Smith’s church before Lonnie Frisbee showed up.  In the film, Chuck Smith’s daughter, reflecting back on what his church was like before Lonnie came along, asked:  “Where was the love?”  Surely the filmmakers didn’t intend for viewers to ask the same question about evangelical churches today – but they should.  Where is the love in churches that treat women as inferior to men?  And condemn same-sex relationships and marriages?  And overwhelmingly support right-wing demagogues?  In the film, one of the young Jesus People questions the movement:  “What if this is just another addiction?”  Indeed, that is what it has become.

So it’s time for another Jesus Revolution – but of a very different kind.

Today’s Jesus Revolution should once again lift up the life and example of Jesus of Nazareth as our pioneer of peace and love.  We should spread his message, and invite people into authentic Christian community.  And go much further with his love than the Jesus People of the ‘60’s took it!  It should be a revolution against consumerism, unrestrained capitalism, autocracy, and greed.  It should offer salvation from loneliness and meaninglessness.  It should support and celebrate the divine gift of diversity in all its forms, including LGBTQ+ sexuality and relationships.  It should embrace all that is good in the other religions of the world.  It should lift up the Bible as sacred myth with tremendous power for positive transformation, and revolt against reading it as historical fact or as a rule-book for living today.  It should mobilize Christians to work and serve with others in solidarity for peace and justice and racial harmony and environmental protection and health care for all and freedom from poverty.  It should show people how to experience God personally through contemplative practices.  It should keep the faith, and drop the dead dogma that gets in the way of the pure, unconditional agape love who is God.

An image in the film haunts me: that of a bearded, grinning Lonnie Frisbee walking down a country road in sun-drenched southern California, holding a walking stick and wearing a long, funky poncho. For a short time, the Jesus People unwittingly imitated a form of Christianity that their fundamentalist groomers knew nothing about.  The Jesus People cast off the trappings of so-called civilization and lived simply, focused on full immersion in divine love.  That’s just what the early monastics did.  By the time that movement started in the 4th century, the church had become the state religion of the Roman empire, with all the attendant corruptions.  The monastics sought a simple, pure, direct experience of the faith by withdrawing to the desert to contemplate into oneness with the divine.

We’re there again.  It’s time to go to the “desert” beyond corrupted Christianity and commercialized culture, and get back to our raw spiritual roots, liberated from useless doctrines and inhumane social values.  There we can meet God face to face, and practice the love that follows.

Good news!  The real Jesus Revolution is happening right now in progressive Christian communities around the world.  Let’s take it to the streets – and to the beach – and go the distance this time!