THE JESUS REVOLUTION
The most startling thing about this religious revival is that it took place almost overnight. Americans in the sixties had only a lukewarm interest in religion, and demoralized Christian leaders were talking about a “post-Christian era” and wondering if God had died. As late as 1970, it was rare to find a person who considered religion more than a once-a-week affair, and anyone who talked seriously about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ was considered a crackpot. Then, in the early 1970’s, all heaven broke loose. Suddenly religious books flooded the stores. Christian talk shows like CBN’s “700 Club” were as popular as soap operas, and it became respectable to talk about one’s born-again experiences with friends and neighbors. White House prayer breakfasts and other signs of “piety-on-the-Potomac” entered Washington. Most importantly, Christian cults began to proliferate like wildfire, especially among teenagers and young adults. America’s youth was looking for something to replace the anti-war fervor of the late 1960’s in their lives, and born-again Christianity, with its simple theology and fierce emotional appeal, filled that need perfectly. The Jesus mania among young Americans found its most visible expression in huge rallies like the “Expo ‘72” convention in Dallas, where thousands of twice-born adolescents from all over North America met to bellow hymns, raise their index fingers in the Jesus movement’s “One Way” salute, and scream pep-rally cheers: “Gimme a J! Gimme an E! Gimme an S!….” Since then the evangelical movement has been picking up momentum, and now the evangelicals- once the “lunatic fringe” in many U.S. churches- are moving into the mainstream of American religious life. Roughly one out of three Americans claim to have had some “born-again experience.” Churchgoers who once concerned themselves mainly with social issues like civil rights now howl like tent-show preachers about “God’s amazing grace” and “the blood of Jesus,” and are taking up such once discredited practices as faith healing and “glossolalia,” more popularly know as “speaking in tongues.” Just what set off this gush of spirituality? As one might expect, evangelicals claim God is trying to awaken the nation to its sins and lead America back onto the paths of the righteous. But there are more rational explanations for America’s current obsession with the Gospel. Historians have found a pattern in our nation’s religious history. “Great awakenings”- massive revivals of interest in religion- appear to sweep America every 80 years or so on the average, with spells of backsliding in between. The last such awakening peaked around 1900 and saw the rise of Christian demagogues such as William Jennings Bryan and Aimee Semple McPherson. So we may have been due for some mass religious movement about now, and the Jesus revolution may run out of steam in the next few years. From a psychologist’s point of view, the Jesus movement may be a retreat from reality- or, more accurately, a frantic effort to make reality easier to grasp. This is an age of terrifying dangers, from pollution to nuclear proliferation: and we are tempted to embrace any philosophy which says, as evangelicalism does, that God’s in heaven and everything will work out fine in the end. Life gets more scary and complicated every day, and educator Peter Marin, writing in Saturday Review, has suggested that the Jesus people “are moved by what moves many of us today- a need to reduce the nightmare complexity of things to some manageable form.” Don’t fret about Russian A-bombs or cancer-causing chemicals; just believe in Jesus, and he’ll take care of you. It’s a simple pitch with a powerful appeal. Then there is the media’s power to consider. Some students of the born-again movement think evangelicalism is a child of TV- not the hour-long extravaganzas of Billy Graham and Oral Roberts, but rather the sitcoms and cop shows. As James A. Taylor of the Canadian journal United Church Observer pointed out recently, the twice-born Christian’s view of life has much in common with a TV scriptwriter's. On many television shows, the main characters care only bout each other and are indifferent or downright hostile toward everyone else. Stand by your friends, they say, and to hell with the rest of the world. Taylor notices this same attitude among evangelicals, and he thinks this TV mind-set explains how born-again Christians “proclaim love but produce hate.” He also sees a parallel between the happy endings on TV shows and the Christians’ belief that God will work out all their problems for them. Taylor thinks evangelicals see God as “the great program producer in the sky,” and adds: “They’re following the television example….and not that of the New Testament.” Maybe Taylor is right, and the Flintstones and My Mother the Car did lead to the born-again movement. But it is hard to assign any one cause to the evangelical movement, because there is no such thing as the evangelical movement. What seems at first to be a monolithic crusade is actually made up of hundreds of separate churches and sects, bound together by little more than the Christian label. There are groups with names like Jews for Jesus, The Way International, Bikers for Jesus, and the Jesus Christ Light and Power Company. Some “Christ-centered” organizations have million-dollar budgets and thousands of members; others have no budgets at all and can fit their membership in the back seat of a Volkswagen. Some born-again Christians are liberal in their politics. Others are reactionaries, and still others think Christ meant for his followers to keep out of secular politics entirely. Some evangelical groups preach a quiet message of repentance and rebirth, while others carry out well-organized hate campaigns against “sinful” minorities they don’t happen to like. Evangelicals may distrust all earthly powers and wealth, or they may wrap themselves in the flag and claim Jesus will make you a millionaire if you worship him. In short, the Jesus movement is so big and diverse that almost anything you say about it is likely to be true, and the opposite just as true. Truth and lies, charity and bigotry, love and fanatical malice- they are all part of the Jesus revolution, which sometimes seems so contradictory that it’s hard to tell whether America’s born-again Christians really believe what they preach. Well, just what do they claim to believe? Evangelical faith is hard to pin down in a few words. But the born-again Christian’s creed, boiled down to one paragraph, is something like this: Humans were created perfect, in God’s image, but were corrupted and cut off from fellowship with God through the sin of Adam and Eve. (Some evangelicals believe Eden was an actual place where the parents of the human race ate a real apple; others think the Garden story is an allegory.) Since then the human race has been unable to speak with God directly and must deal with God through Jesus, the divine incarnation of God, who gave himself as a sacrifice- that is, took on himself all the sins of humankind- so that sinful humans might be able to receive God’s blessing and forgiveness. To get to heaven, a person must repent of his or her sins, submit completely to Christ’s guidance in everything, and follow God’s commandments, in all one does, as set down in the Bible. This is known as the “born-again experience,” and evangelicals say there is no salvation without it. Those are high ideals, and Christians can hardly be blamed for losing sight of them occasionally. Even the Apostle Paul, perhaps the most devoted of Christians, fell so far short of the Christian ideal that he called himself the “chief of sinners.” But born-again Christians are commanded to keep aiming for moral perfection, with God’s spiritual guidance. So one would expect evangelicals to practice what they preach about love, honesty, and righteousness- especially since Christ reserved some of his harshest words for hypocrites. Many evangelicals, perhaps a majority, do live up to Christian standards of conduct. But occasionally it’s a little hard to reconcile what born-again Christians do with what the Bible says. Consider the evangelicals’ wealth, for instance. “The wealth in Christian hands in this country is fabulous,” remarks Henry Sloane Coffin in his book The Way of the Cross; and he wasn’t exaggerating. Many born-again businessmen have salaries near the six-figure range and ride in limousines driven by paid chauffeurs, while many Christian entertainers and industrialists live in homes which would qualify as palaces in most nations. And on the corporate level, many evangelical associations have incomes in the millions or tens of millions of dollars. In fact, the wealth of those organizations is so great and obvious that the Council of Better Business Bureaus recently called for a public audit of some evangelistic groups which take in more than $1 million apiece every year. Where does all that money go? It’s hard to say. Some evangelical organizations, such as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, have released information on how their money is spent; but as a rule, Christians are stonewalling on the issue of making their finances public. It would seem however, that some of that unaccounted-for cash may not be going to spread the Gospel, feed the hungry, or clothe the poor. The Christian Century reported last year that members of one Christian crusade were under indictment for using donations to improve private homes, build a private swimming pool, invest in real estate, and buy wigs and hair treatments. Clearly a lot of twice-born Christians are living more like King Herod than like their Master, who had little sympathy for the rich and often used them as symbols of sin and stupidity. Christ even said wealth was an obstacle to salvation: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matt. 19:24). Disturbed by that plain denunciation of big bankrolls, the evangelicals have tried to justify their riches by borrowing a page from Andrew Carnegie. We’re just custodians of wealth rather than its owners, they claim. But there’s no evidence that Christ ever made that distinction- and one wonders if Christ would give today’s evangelicals the same advice he gave the rich young man who wanted to get to heaven: “Go and sell all that you have, and give to the poor…and come and follow me.” (Matt. 19:21.) Since money means political power, born-again Christians are starting to cast their eyes toward the ballot box. Evangelical groups in several states are said to be grooming twice-born candidates for upcoming elections, and there is talk in some circles of a crusade to "save America" by getting evangelicals elected to public office- where, presumably, they could work to give some of their own beliefs the force of law. Of course, nothing says a born-again Christian can’t be a tolerant and enlightened public servant. But when one considers that some prominent evangelicals have reportedly come out against freedom of the press and in favor of cruel and unusual punishments for crimes (castrating rapists, for instance), one can only wonder what kind of government some born-again Christians would like to see in America. But not all evangelicals want secular power. In fact, many liberal evangelicals are suspicious of all temporal authority-"powers and principalities," as the Bible puts it- and think a Christian’s duty is to oppose the earthly powers-that-be whenever they appear to be flouting God’s law. "Christ never said Christians were to seek secular authority," explains a theology student at Boston university. "In fact, he made a clear separation between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of men. ‘My kingdom is not of this world, ‘ he said. ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.’ You get the idea: the state serves only its own interest, whereas a Christian is supposed to serve God’s interest. You can’t give your complete allegiance to God and the state at once. A Christian is commanded to obey the princes, presidents, and so forth of the world- but only when their orders are compatible with the bible. And nowhere does it say anything about Christians running for public office. Why should Christians become one with the civil authorities, when they’re the ones who tortured Christ and put him to death?" That’s a good question, and typical of those put forth in Sojourners, a liberal evangelical monthly based in Washington, D.C. Sojourners has campaigned for the release of political prisoners in Chile, Iran, and other dictatorships supported by U.S. dollars, and has blasted the Carter administration for its "selective morality" on the human rights issue. "Why hasn’t our president spoken a word for the voiceless victims who continue to disappear in Chile?" Associate editor West Michaelson demanded in a recent issue. "Or sat down with those fortunate enough to escape from Pinochet’s grasp? Here at home, Sojourners has also exposed the hypocrisy of the fat-cat Christian who fairly wallows in money while children in the inner cities are starving. And almost alone among evangelical journals, Sojourners has denounced the real-estate speculators and other businessmen who make their fortunes off the misery of displaced ghetto dwellers in U.S. cities. The anti-establishment tone of Sojourners is unusual among born-again Christian, many of who seem to be straining at gays and swallowing ghettos; and only time will tell what impact the views of these liberal evangelicals will have on the born-again movement. Liberal and Conservative. Rich and poor. Honest and hypocritical. Visionary and short-sighted. The evangelical movement is all of these at once, and no one can say just what it will become in the years ahead. The born-again set may lead us to an era of greater individual freedoms, or perhaps a repressive alliance of church and state. The evangelical movement may run out of energy and die soon, as other "awakenings" before it have died. Or its triumphs may be just beginning. But this much is certain. Secular society can no longer afford to ignore the evangelicals. Their numbers are too great, their wealth too impressive, their influence in the media too strong. And it would pay us to keep a close eye on the Jesus movement, lest the evangelicals use their newfound strength for less than holy works. |
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