1 of 3
by Mark Oppenheimer Yale Univ. Press, 2003 304 pp.; $30 |
In Knocking on Heaven's Door, Mark Oppenheimer offers a well-written and consistently interesting, if not always persuasive, account of America's most recent religious awakening. In five case studies, Oppenheimer seeks to demonstrate that the religious impact of the counterculture that blossomed in the 1960s was both deeper and more complex than has been widely supposed.
Oppenheimer begins with the Unitarians. Before gay rights became the stuff of Supreme Court decisions—indeed, even before the issue became central to gays themselves—the Rev. James Stoll announced his sexual orientation to a group of college-age Unitarians in 1969. Nothing ought to be surprising about that, given the degree to which Unitarians are reluctant to judge anything—except perhaps conservative religion itself—as sinful. Still, Americans in 1969, even very liberal Americans, were generally quite queasy about homosexuality. In addition, Stoll, as Oppenheimer writes, was "probably a sexual predator." Despite all this, Unitarian churches and fellowships, before long, had so intertwined themselves with the counterculture that it became impossible to say where one ended and the other began.
Oppenheimer turns next to the introduction of folk music into the Catholic Mass. Although the Catholic Church was a bastion of conservative support for American values, many of the country's most famous new leftists—most notably, Mario Savio of the Free Speech Movement and Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society—were raised Catholic. Protests against the Vietnam War were led by radical priests such as the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip. Mary Daly was among the first feminists who made religion her special concern.
Against such explicit forms of political radicalism, the Church generally stood firm. But in the aftermath of Vatican II, officials were responsive to liturgical reforms, opening the door to guitar-strumming folk singers like Sister Miriam Therese Winter and Joe Wise. Some parishes, such as Cincinnati's Community of Hope, devoted themselves to upbeat (and unorthodox) ways of celebrating Mass. Although their particular innovations have largely died out, their influence, Oppenheimer argues, lives on; ordinary Catholics have become receptive to more open musical styles that would have been viewed as anathema by the originators of the Tridentine Mass.
For Jews, countercultural movements took the form of havurot, small-group fellowships usually meeting outside of, and sometimes in defiance of, the synagogue. Freedom seders and feminist interpretations of ritual offered a way for Jewish young people to honor their upbringing even while joining the kinds of protest movements to which Jews have always been attracted. Like the alternative Catholic liturgies, most havurot went out of business after roughly ten years of experimentation and excitement. But those who led them, in significant numbers, went on to become major scholars and rabbis in more conventional forms of Jewish observance.
Oppenheimer's fourth case study examines the conflicts over women's ordination in the Episcopal Church. We tend to think of mainline Protestants these days as automatically sympathetic to feminism, but there was in fact fierce resistance to ordaining women among many Episcopalians, both laypeople and clergy. Faced with the prospect of ever-escalating internecine warfare—many of the women who felt called to the priesthood were nothing if not determined—Episcopalians accommodated themselves to the seemingly inevitable. Here the influence of the counterculture, as Oppenheimer tells the story, was palpable: "Seeing women celebrate the same ritualistic, ceremonial Mass, hearing them intone the same words: this was a visual and aesthetic shift, and it changed the Episcopal Church more surely than the updated 1979 Book of Common Prayer did."
share this page
RSS Feed
