The Road to Shalom

THE SIXTIES: America's Suicide Attempt

• Fran Sciacca • Season 2 • Episode 3

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In his classic work, Modern Times, historian Paul Johnson titled his chapter on the  Sixties, “America’s Suicide Attempt.” He  saw that decade as a near implosion of American culture, due partly to a war between the generations.

In this second episode of Fran’s new series, “There And Back Again: A Hippie’s Tale,” he paints a vivid family portrait of Middle America after it had enjoyed its vacation from war during the Eisenhower era of the Fifties. James Dean’s classic film title, “Rebel Without a Cause” seemed to have expired by the end of the Sixties as America found that it was at war with itself. And the Church, it seemed, was more bound to the flag than the Cross.
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OTHER  RESOURCES BY FRAN SCIACCA:

Welcome to episode two of “There And Back Again - A Hippie’s Tale” a little sidepath on the Road to Shalom podcast. In this episode, we’re going to get back on the road right where we left town in the first episode—the world of white Middle America in the Fifties. Our next stop on our trip is a quick visit at the decade historian Paul Johnson gave the ominous title, “American’s Suicide Attempt” — the Sixties. But, before we leave town I want to share a couple guiding thoughts for us that I hope will be a sort of mental GPS for our whole journey. Based on some thoughtful listener feedback I got on the first episode, I think it’s important for me to draw a clearer picture of the boundaries and limitations of our journey. Sort of the “banks” within which this river of reminiscing is gonna flow.

First, I want you to know that it’s not possible for us to unpack and expose most of what was happening across the socio-ethnic landscape of America during the years we’re talking about. Remember, if we were in a plane, we’d be at about 50,000 feet. Why this limitation? Well, for one thing, it’s beyond my own experience. I simply wasn’t exposed to what was happening among people of color and immigrant families while I was growing up. Our family had its own struggles. My dad never finished high school, and worked 7-day weeks my whole childhood, running a dry cleaning business. His primary customers were people with lots of cash and the emblems that go with it. Executives from two large paper mills nearby. My mom and dad were the equivalent—at least in our little town of 2,500—of “the help” in Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 book by the same title. The six of us lived in a 900 sq ft home. There was certainly white privilege in my world. But my whole world was white. And the privilege I saw I couldn’t enjoy. My friend’s parents drove Cadillacs and T-Birds. We drove a Ford station wagon.

I, like the majority of Americans at the time, was isolated from the larger world. I had no idea what was going on in Los Angeles or Chicago, growing up in Nekoosa, Wisconsin. And to be fair, if you had lived back then, you wouldn’t have either. We had one phone, it hung on the wall, and the line was shared by three other families is what was known then as a “party line.” Also, and please don’t be offended, but for many of you listening, if it hadn’t been for Tim Berners Lee, you wouldn’t be as informed as you are either today. He developed the HTML programming language made it possible to combine text and graphics on computer screens around 1993. It was called the World Wide Web back then. You know it simply as the Internet, and if you’re older than 27, there’s never been a day of your life when it wasn’t around. And along with it, the pathway to most of what you know about the world outside your own city.

And, let’s be honest…we’d all be a ton more ignorant than we are if others hadn’t done a ton of the heavy lifting for us to learn. Much of what we know today about the darker side of American history is the fruit of the sweat equity of others. Movies like “Mississippi Burning” in 1988, and “Ghosts of Mississippi” in 1996, brought the murder of 3 civil rights activists and the assassination of black activist Medgar Evers into the public eye. “The Tuskegee Airmen” in 1995, and the more recent movie, “Hidden Figures” about 3 black women doing crucial work for NASA, yet segregated from everyone else because of gender and color, informed us of the racial repression and deep segregation in the military during WWII. Books like Michelle Alexander’s, “The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in an Age of Color Blindness,” and Christena Cleveland’s,“Disunity in Christ,” have done a ton to educate us about our broken justice system, and racial disparity and division among evangelicals in the mid-20th century. And the even larger truth is that you and I didn’t do the work. They did. We know because they told us.

All that to say, there is a ton of truth out there now that wasn’t there a half century ago. There was a whole lot of ignorance—in the truest sense of the word—for most folks, until the 70’s at least. And remember, our journey is “there and back again.”

So, please be patient, and I’d urge you to be a bit humble as well. Trust me, by the time we get to the present, there’ll no longer be an excuse for not knowing. And, from within the world where I live as a follower of Jesus, there won’t be any excuse for not caring either. Okay, let’s start the car and get back on the road.

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Life in Camelot

 As a Roman Catholic kid who grew up in a small Wisconsin town, I can’t forget the excitement that swept over our parochial grade school when we learned that America had a new president who was both young and Catholic. He was charming and witty, his wife seemed to be plucked from the pages of a storybook, and there were children living in the White House! It was almost magical. John F. Kennedy and Jackie had indeed brought “Camelot" to Washington D.C. As a ten-year-old kid, it sure seemed like the best of times. It would never have occurred to me just how radically different my life would be by the time I was twenty.

But, the momentum of the Fifties was strong. Life was still good—or at least we were still enjoying it. And personal enjoyment was the standard by which things were judged as “good” back then. By now rock and roll was a permanent fixture in everything having to do with being young; it was the social axis around which our entire lives rotated. My own involvement in rock music began during the sixties, beginning with playing bass for a popular dance band in high school and building to a zenith in college with a talented folk-rock group. Heck, I even did warm-up for a couple of major groups of the era back then.

As the sixties began, its music reflected a world obssessed with fun, and seemed to orbit three predictable themes: teen romance, fast cars, and surfing. There were more bands and solo artists than one could imagine, but the "supergroup" for Middle America in the decade's early years was the Beach Boys. They wove all three dominant themes into a musical fantasy that appealed to any teenager with functioning hormones. Rolling Stone Magazine made this comment about them as late as 1976:

In the sixties, when they were at the height of their original popularity, the Beach Boys propagated their own variant on the American dream, painting a dazzling picture of beaches, parties and endless summers, a paradise of escape into private as often as shared pleasures. . . In surfing, the Beach Boys had hit upon a potent image. Leisure, mobility and privacy—it was the suburban myth transported to the Pacific Ocean . . . California—in 1963, it was the one place west of the Mississippi where everyone wanted to be. Rich and fast, cars,women, one suburban plot for everyone; a sea of happy humanity sandwiched between frosty mountains and toasty beaches, all an easy drive down the freeway.


An abbreviated discography of the Beach Boys' singles illustrates the dominance of these themes, not to mention their vast appeal:

A Partial List of Beach Boys Singles, 1962-1966

"Surfin' U.S.A."   1963

"Surfer Girl"   1963

"Little Deuce Coupe"  1963

"Fun, Fun, Fun"   1964 

"California Girls" 1965

 "Barbara Ann" 1966

"Good Vibrations" 1966

 Between 1963 and 1975, the Beach Boys cranked out twenty-eight albums. Their musical fantasies did a great deal to perpetuate what some called an "uncomplicated suburban utopia." And I can tell you as fully functioning adolescent, I was found myself contemplating visions of bikinis, and making skateboards out of scrap lumber and broken roller skates—something unheard of in the frozen hinterlands of Wisconsin. I, along with everyone my age, were wishing “they all could be California girls,” rather than studying racial injustice or the conflict in Indochina. At the dawn of my teen years, the only black person I had ever seen was Hank Aaron when my Boy Scout troop took a bus trip to watch a Braves game in Milwaukee. I had no idea that Motown Records had been formed three months before I turned 10. Even though oddly, I went to sleep at night listening to Ray Charles records. Speaking of music, by the decades end, at least one permanent racial integration would have been achieved. Soul music would soon put black faces and black music in front of a lot of white folk. The Temptations, the Supremes, the Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and a host of others would be household names before I hit the college campus. But I didn’t know that, and for the most part, all this would be happening under the radar anyway, because what was soon to be ON the radar would get a whole lot more air time and ink.

As the youth culture began to gobble up more and more of the record market, the inevitable happened—guitar sales skyrocketed and a growing number of young people decided that they too would become rock-and-roll stars. I was one of them.  As a result, it seemed like almost overnight, the thoughts and feelings of American youth, rather than those dictated by the record company producers, began to leak into our music. The standard themes of teenage sexuality and adventure hung around, but a new music hybrid began to encroach on rock and roll’s hallowed ground. Folk music—or folk-rock, to be more precise—had a much more thoughtful and agitating message than the Beach Boys.

One of the many faces of this new music was a young man from the Iron Range in Minnesota named Robert Zimmerman. He migrated east, changed his name to Bob Dylan, and became a permanent fixture in American pop history. He wasn’t a vocal superstar, but man could he write! The content of his lyrics totally eclipsed his lack of vocal talent. His induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 20 years later also listed five of his songs as major shapers of rock music.

In some ways, Dylan was to the sixties what Elvis was to the fifties—the velcro holding a generation of lost children together. Yet, to fully appreciate the pathos of this music, we need to examine some lesser streams of the larger culture which in many ways was responsible for becoming a raging torrent. Let’s take a little detour down three ideological side streets that will lead us right back to main street where Dylan and a few other pied pipers of the Sixties will be.

The first side street we need to visit on our way back to main street, is the civil rights movement. As early as the mid-fifties, with Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation was unconstitutional in institutions of higher learning. But the dictum that "you can't legislate morality" was proved true. In 1957, Eisenhower had to send troops into Arkansas to force the governor to comply with desegregation orders. President Kennedy used the same tactic five years later in the case of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. He made a strong statement about the State of our disunion when he said, “"One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves. Yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free …  And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” It was about this time that Alabama governor, George Wallace blocked black students from entering the University of Alabama, as a show of his commitment to keep  his famous, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” statement he made at his inauguration.

In August of that year, two hundred thousand supporters gathered to hear a black Baptist minister who advocated a nonviolent approach to the civil rights issue, deliver a speech at the Washington Monument. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, "I have a dream, . . ." was permanently etched into the American consciousness that day, and would become one of the top 100 speeches of the 20th century. I would be shocked if any of you are not only familiar with those words, but know exactly how it sounded because you’ve heard sound bites from that speech.

Dr. King was a charismatic organizer who brought a sense of solidarity to the civil rights cause. He had sympathetic supporters among a growing number of white college students as well as in the black community. Many whites participated in the effort to register black voters in the South in the early sixties, traveling to the Deep South in what was known as the Mississippi Summer Project. They learned there was another side to “Southern hospitality.”

My own city of Birmingham, was given the degrading name of “Bombingham” because between 1947 and 1965, at least 50 racially-motivated bombings had occurred. A few months before his Washington speech King was arrested and wrote his famous, “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” A month after his Washington speech, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, killing four children. One of the most highly publicized acts of terror in our history.

 But, there were some among the black community who were impatient with what they perceived as slowness in Dr. King's diplomatic style of civil disobedience. They advocated a faster method of securing racial “justice." Portions of the civil rights movement turned decidedly militant during the mid-sixties, especially after the assissinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. One of the more visible groups was the Black Panther Party. Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldrige Cleaver became familiar names on campuses throughout the country. Cleaver’s, “Soul on Ice” was required reading in my sophomore sociology class. Along with the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. The older, less violent civil rights organizations, such as Stokely Carmichael's Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, began to lose their notoriety and clout as the Black Panthers and their predominately white counterparts in the anti-war movement gained momentum and power. And as always, a spot on the evening news. Things were heating up for sure.

The second side street is the Viet Nam War. Before JFK even stepped over the threshold of the Oval Office to assume his duties as president, "Vietnam was already one of America's largest and costliest commitments anywhere in the world." Eisenhower had deliberately refused to involve the United States in the battle over the Seventeenth Parallel during his own administration, but shortly before he got out from the public eye, he lamented: "The loss of South Vietnam would set in motion a crumbling process that could, as the processprogressed, have grave consequences for us and for freedom." This idea would later be politicized and weaponized as what was known as the "domino theory." In 1964, the North Vietnamese attacked our destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the result was the Tonkin Gulf Resolution which gave President Johnson the authority to escalate our involvement to full-scale war—which he did six months later, after the devastating attack by the North Vietnamese called the Tet Offensive. 

The Fifties’ “Rebel Without a Cause” of white Middle America lost his job about this time. The Vietnam War was a conflict that grew to be one of the “causes” in what would be known as "the movement" in just a few years. It wouldn’t be long before militant groups like the Weathermen would be chanting, "Bring the war home," instead of, "Bring the boys home." In all its vagueness, the anti-war sentiment towards Vietnam became synonymous with the sixties. Especially if you were living in Middle America. Vietnam was one cause for the rebels of the decade. The other lightening rod was the growing social awareness of the plight of people of color in the land of the red, white, and blue. And to be fair, the civil rights movement was much, much older than the anti-war movement, its visible origins dating back to the early to mid-fifties. What about the nation as a whole?

Three months after Dr. King told the world he had a dream, the U.S. had a nightmare. Some sixties historians point to the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 as the day the "militant/activist" sixties began and the age of passive innocence ended. By mid-decade, race riots and war protests had erupted in nearly sixty cities, killing 141 (mostly in the race riots) and injuring more than 4,500. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 added more fuel to the fire. The catch phrase on buttons around college campuses had been "Give a Damn." But by the decade's end, according to one historiographer"giving a damn had become a bitter, angry thing.” And, I want to camp on this for a moment because it’s important. 

This era had an almost hypnotic effect on those of us in college at the time. It was as if someone had actually followed Abbie Hoffman's half-serious suggestion to put LSD in the drinking water. My own brother was in 'Nam (soon to be seriously wounded by mortar fire), while I was skipping classes, mindlessly brandishing my black arm band, which I believed was evidence of my solidarity with the movement. But, in fairness to us kids from Middle America, I have to tell you that life on the college campus was confusing at best. We were away from home for the first time, sitting under the teaching of professors who were eager to destroy our faith as well as our confidence in all of the leaders in our lives…with the exception of them, of course.

Pictures of Vietcong blown beyond recognition, or of innocent Vietnamese children, circulated through the dozens of new underground newspapers, which seemed to operate on the principle that it wasn't true if it wasn't obscene. Confusion reigned in the very institutions built to teach wisdom. In fact, the professors were often the ones telling us of American "imperialism," and that the plight of what they called, the Third World, was actually the fault of the United States. It was America's capitalistic greed that should be on trial. We were actually urged to commit ourselves to the cause of North Vietnam—to become, what some called themselves, the "Americong." Political rhetoric was everywhere on campus, from the classroom to the lunchroom. Even the restroom graffiti took a leftist bend, away from the typical sexual themes.

By the mid-to-late sixties, on the college campuses, the anti-war movement seem to have eclipsed the civil rights movement in notoriety. In fact, militant student groups like the Weathermen had kidnapped the Black Panther motif of "urban guerillas" out of its original ethnic context and transferred it wholesale to the anti-war effort. Supporters of the political Left may disagree, but many white middle-class kids in the anti-war machine hijacked legitimate black causes and turned them into excuses for white excesses. I was one of them. It became an excuse to just act out and act up.

So, what was the net gain for all the noise? Was it raising the collective conscience of American youth, particularly those on the campuses? Although I had a few friends who were reading Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon, if you had asked the majority of us exactly what it was about Vietnam that we were protesting, we couldn't have told you. There was just this "sense" that a war between generations was on and you'd better take sides. Each of us felt like the Omega Man, and that the destiny of the world hinged on who came out on top. A then lesser known musician named Stephen Stills wrote a song for his group Buffalo Springfield, in response to curfew laws enacted for Sunset Strip in Hollywood to keep young people from plugging up traffic. It was eventually hijacked and converted into a banner song for the counterculture, because it supposedly captured how we all felt. The song was called, "For What It's Worth":

There's something happening here.
 What it is ain't exactly clear.
 There's a man with a gun over there,
 tellin' me I've got to beware. . . .

Paranoia strikes deep,
 Into your life it will creep.
 It starts when you're always afraid.
 Step out of line the men come and take you away.

You better stop, hey, what's that sound?
 Ev'rybody look what's goin down. . . . 

Racial and political unrest wormed its way into the lyrics of folk-rock singers and onto the airwaves of America. Even the folk-rock group I was in my sophomore year of college began to write songs about the uncivil "civil war" that was ripping our country apart. A sampling of the lyrics from a handful of folk-rock artists of the era illustrates the mood of the times:

(words: Pete Seeger 1949 @ dinner for Communist Party of the U.S., Peter, Paul, and Mary - 1962) 

If I had a hammer. . . .

I'd hammer out a warning . . .

It's the hammer of justice,

It's the bell of freedom. . . .

All over this land.

("Eve of Destruction," Barry McGuire, 1965) 

Think of all the hate there is in Red China!

Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama!

Ah, you may leave here, for four days in space,

But when your return, it's the same old place,

The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace,

You can bury your dead, but don't leave a trace,

Hate your next door neighbor, but don't forget to say grace,

And you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend,

You don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

("Saigon Bride," Joan Baez - 1967) 

How many dead men will it take

To build a dike that will not break?

How many children must we kill

Before we make the waves stand still?

Quite a jump from Elvis’ "lay off of my blue suede shoes" lyrics of the Fifties, or the Beach Boys’ “I wish they all could be California girls” of the early Sixties!

The sixties was a decade of intensity. In less than five years, we had witnessed the assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy; All of that happened between 8th grade and high school graduation for me. It seemed like all the good guys got shot. Roll into that angst the gradual erosion of the peaceful sector of the black rights movement, the unbridled and unguided militant demonstration and destruction by students under the banner of peace, and finish it off with the merger of the political Left and the "flower children" into what historians have collectively called the “counterculture." And you’ve pretty much got the cultural climate of the decade. A long way from “I Love Lucy,” don’t you think?

If feelings had been de-emphasized in the fifties, the Sixties was ruled by feelings rather than facts. The stronger the commitment, the more "righteous" the action.

Okay, let’s turn down the third side street. Any history of the sixties would be incomplete without some discussion of this vital ingredient of the era. If rock-and-roll was the state religion, and the political Left the high priests, then drugs could easily be labeled the sacrament of the sixties. Scholars have argued for years regarding which came first, the "rocker" or the "doper." The lyrics and lifestyles of the rock stars certainly perpetuated and nearly canonized the drug scene, but drugs were also a part of the beat culture, which had virtually nothing to do with rock and roll. There was something more at work, I think.

An important part of understanding the legacy of drug use in the sixties (the need for a war on drugs in the eighties) is the concept of ideology. The civil rights movement and the anti-war movement were both rooted in ideologies about human equality. In the sixties, drugs were an integral part of an entire "anti-establishment" worldview that was dangled before us, and which we gladly accepted. Drug use was part of a larger ideology; it was not just a behavioral thing. The drug problem of the eighties, popularized by the so-called “war on drugs,” was certainly the offspring of the sixties lifestyle, but that is where the similarity ends. Even today, with our opioid crisis, there is no intellectual or personal quest behind it. It may be hedonistic, it may be addictive bondage, or maybe just escapist stupidity, but it surely not ideological.

Please don’t hear me trying to evade the legitimate guilt and blame that should fall upon my generation. We let more than one culture killer out of the cage. I’m just trying to help you understand what was going on at the time. To clarify that, although pleasure was certainly one of the by-products of drug use back then, it was not the only thing driving the car. A bunch of us honestly believed that drugs were the magic key to raising our nation's consciousness and hopefully awakening its conscience. It was a grand illusion to be sure, but it was a genuine belief among many of those who smoked, dropped, and shot the drugs of the decade.

Here’s a description of one California "chemist" that I think bridges the connection between drugs and the worldview of the counterculture:

 Expert chemists like the Bay Area's Owsley [Stanley], who set up underground laboratories and fabricated potent and pure LSD tablets in the hundreds of thousands, were not in it just for the money; they kept their prices down, gave out plenty of free samples, and fancied themselves dispensers of miracles at the service of a new age—"architects of social change" with a "mission . . . to change the world," in the words of one of Owsley's apprentices.

Drugs were believed to be a path to social change. Many of us believed that part of the credit for our insight into the nature of America's social and political hypocrisy was a result of our involvement with drugs. Paul McCartney summarized this ideology perfectly in a comment to Life magazine in 1967:

After I took it [LSD], it opened my eyes. We only use one tenth of our brain. Just think what all we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part! It would mean a whole new world. If the politicians would take LSD, there wouldn't be any more war, or poverty or famine.

  Did you hear that? We thought politicians should drop acid instead of taking bribes! It was that simple. But, there was a serious flaw in our "better living through chemistry" approach to life. Did you catch it? For some reason, it didn't last and couldn't be explained to anyone, much less translated into pedestrian-level life on earth. I recall spending an entire evening wasted beyond belief on some opiated hash, studying the surface of an orange! I’m serious. I honestly believed I had discovered a mathematical theorem that would change the world. Of course, when morning came I had a terrible time explaining my radical discovery to anyone with a functioning brain. There went my Nobel Prize.

Some of the heavy drug users and dealers on our campus who became Christians in the early seventies actually brought this drug ideology into their new faith. They planned to buy property in northern Wisconsin, raise dope, bring unbelievers to their farm, and get them high so they would be more susceptible and open to the gospel! It might have actually been the birth of the “seeker sensitive” movement. Seriously, it’s ludicrous in hindsight, but a powerful testimony to just how deeply the belief in the redemptive power of drugs had permeated our generation. And these weren’t merely random adolescent musings trying to work their way up. This ideology was also coming from the top down. Listen to what Timothy Leary, the Harvard sociology-professor-turned-drug-guru, said about Lysergic acid diethylamide, known simply as LSD, or “acid”:

LSD is Western yoga. The aim of all Eastern religion, like the aim of LSD, is basically to get high; that is, to expand your consciousness and find ecstasy and revelation within.

His partner in crime, Ken Kesey, famously known for his “acid parties,” said it even more poetically:

The first drug trips were for most of us shell-shattering ordeals that left us blinking knee deep in the cracked crusts of our pie-in-the-sky personalities. Suddenly people were stripped before one another and behold: we were beautiful. Naked and helpless and sensitive as a snake after skinning but far more human than that shining nightmare that had stood creaking in previous parade rest. We were alive and life was with us.

Kesey's flowery metaphors were typical of those who had broken over to the "other side" and come back with tales of marvel to tell and of course to sell. The appeal of drugs was enhanced by Kesey and those like him who spoke the foreign language of hallucinogenic drugs. It served to create a sort of we/they phenomenon in which they possessed the wisdom and insight which we needed. Kesey’s philosophy was further bolstered by the presence of two super-groups of the era that played at his parties: The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

Much of the music of the decade also carried the call to "turn on." Jimi Hendrix sang about a "Purple Haze" in his brain that changed his perception of things. Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" spoke about being taken places one could not normally go. The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" described a land unknown to hallucinogen virgins, speaking of a boat drifting down a river bordered by "tangerine trees," and enveloped in "marmalade skies." The Jefferson Airplane's hit, "White Rabbit" talked of drug experiences in terms of allusions to the classic tale of "Alice in Wonderland." There were songs that explicitly promoted drugs and drug-taking; but there was also an abundance of musicians whose music was commonly accepted to be best appreciated when the listener was high. The Doors' took their name from Aldous Huxley's poem about mescaline, "Doors of Perception." The Moody Blues and the later Beatles also fit this category. When asked what type of lifestyle the Sgt. Pepper's album was portraying, former Beatle Paul McCartney made it perfectly clear: 

Drugs, basically. They got reflected in the music. . . . Remember, drug-taking in 1967 was much more in the musicians' tradition. We'd heard of Ellington and Basie and jazz guys smoking a bit of pot, and now it arrived on our music scene. It started to find its way into everything we did, really. It colored our perceptions.

Drugs were as ubiquitous as rock music, and usually as accessible. We considered the Catholic priest on our campus "cool" because he got high with the rest of us. We never felt the need to question his orientation, even when he allowed the Newman Center to be used for seminars on witchcraft (taught by one of the English professors). The taking of drugs somehow pre-empted the need for logic and consistency because "we" were living on a higher plane and consequently had a better view of reality than "they" had. Sometimes you can be so open-minded, your brain fall out.

Well, what about the church in Middle America during the Sixties? What was happening with conservative evangelicalism. Well, predictably, the near identification of God and the gospel with America in the Fifties bore some very unfortunate fruit in the Sixties. The counterculture with all its crazy clothes, loud music, loose morals, and recreational drug use couldn't have been more “Un-American.” We were perceived as the enemies of God by a lot of religious adults, Christian or otherwise. We were not a mission field to be reached, but a people group to be avoided. An attitude of self-righteousness prevailed for the most part, in the church culture. With a few exceptions like Chuck Smith and the Jesus People on the west coast, it was tough to find anyone who was willing to look past the way we looked. I weighed about 95 pounds and had an enormous afro. I looked more like a Tootsie Pop than anything. Let me share two experiences on our campus in Wisconsin. One of the guys that came to faith in Jesus had the nickname, “Bummer.” He was tall, had hair down to the middle of his back, wore knee-high moccasins, had leather bags and feathers hanging on him, and a leather hat. The day after he committed his life to Jesus, he went to church at the local Baptist church. Two deacons saw him coming, and with one on each arm, they spun him around and escorted him out of the church! Not the best introduction to the family of God. On another occasion, the one pastor who had embraced us and was grateful for our newly found faith, invited a black church choir to sing at his church. The whole front row of us newbie Christians were on our feet singing along and blown away by the talent expressing praise. He nearly lost his job for that choice. One of the elders said to him as he left that church that God knew what he was doing when he made everything after its own kind. Those black folk were a different kind for him, and belonged by themselves. Again, not the best intro to Christianity for us ex-dopers.

The church of Middle America had offended the youth culture for all the wrong reasons. Rather than seeing themselves as an outpost of heaven, children of God who happened to have been born in America, they saw themselves as American Christians. The pledge of allegiance may have become more important than the Great Commission…or the Great Commandment, for that matter.

The sixties was a complex time, and understanding it in retrospect is difficult. But the threads that were loose and dangling as the fifties ended became tightly woven into a discernible lifestyle tapestry during the sixties. And as the sixties drew to a close, it appeared, if for only a moment, that wisdom actually did reside with the youth of America. Maybe it was true that, “all ya need is love”…or maybe not.