Future historians will find it significant that in the mid-sixties student and theological radicals raised their voices above the din of American culture almost simultaneously. Jack Kerouac, the forlorn protests of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pat Boone, and the youth “’twixt twelve and twenty” so faithfully portrayed in the film Generation Without a Cause vanished from the campus scene in the wake of the Berkeley disorders of 1964 and subsequent developments. In their place stood intelligent, articulate, committed, and militant radicals who threatened to bring the System to a standstill. So also in theology, the neo-orthodoxy endemic in American seminaries was shaken to the very ground of all its being when five theological mavericks rushed to fame in the years 1965 and following by announcing the “death of God.” In their radical orbit now move many influential theologs and their sophisticated post-Christian students.
With historical perspective blurred by our proximity to these developments, we can only speculate on their relation to each other. Yet one thing seems certain: whereas theologians may claim to have disengaged themselves from the biblical God and revealed religion, students nowadays—and the broad counterculture they represent—are radically attached to commitments they regard as virtually revealed. “In the end it is religion that constitutes the strength of this generation,” asserts sociologist Paul Goodman, “and not … their morality, political will, and common sense.”
This fact carries with it great implications for the Christian Church. Committed students of the seventies will be more easily radicalized for Jesus than their “beat” predecessors of a decade ago because the idea of commitment need no longer be argued in addition to the faith. Moreover, in an atmosphere of universal commitment—where the pressure exists for each to do his own “thing”—biblical Christianity, like other religious options, can be presented boldly as a legitimate, credible, and necessary ideology for the foment of the moment.
But with these exciting implications goes an important caveat: in general, a culture that is universally religious, and that offers religious liberty, is also irremediably pluralistic. That is to say, radical, biblical Christianity cannot avoid stiff competition from other attractive countercultural ideologies. Thus it behooves one who will present and defend the faith intelligently to understand the countercultural milieu, both by first-person involvement in it and through the perspective that literature provides. To this end the following bibliography is offered, not necessarily to approve all its books advocate, but to help those who want to minister to a sizable segment of today’s young people.
Introduction
Protest and gnostic. While these two types have only occasionally appeared together in history, in the counter-culture they subsist side by side. The best way into the new protest movement is that Sears Roebuck Catalogsized volume, The Movement Toward a New America (Pilgrim Press/Knopf, 1970), assembled by Mitchell Goodman. It is a moving collage of photos, cartoons, original prose, and photo-reproduced text from the leading New Left, Panther, Movement, and mainline periodicals, covering the highlights and trauma from the 1956 bus boycott to the Kent State massacre. This book has great persuasive potential.
Theodore Roszak’s Making of a Counter Culture (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969) is probably the best introduction to the new gnosticism. It is sympathetic and well grounded in experience and literature. “We grasp the underlying unity of the counter cultural variety,” summarizes Roszak, “if we see the beat-hip bohemianism as an effort to work out the personality structure and total life style that follows from New Left social criticism.…” In so doing, the counterculture attempts to “demythologize” the scientific world picture of Western democracy and to “remythologize” our world by its striking social and religious atavisms. Roszak shows eloquently how this is being done.
The Greening of America (Random House, 1970) by Charles A. Reich uses the term “Consciousness III” to designate the same phenomenon. Unfortunately the book itself falls into that category to a certain extent, being long on rhetoric and short on analysis. It is nonetheless a valuable piece of insight. Two other books pertaining to countercultural gnosticism belong in the knapsack of every Jesus person: William Braden’s The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God (Bantam Books, 1968) and A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscoveryof the Supernatural (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1970) by Peter Berger.
History
It would be good to begin reading with the seminal book on the history of revolution. The Natural History of Revolution (University of Chicago Press Phoenix Books, 1970 [1927]) by Lyford P. Edwards is just that. Edwards, a church historian, presents a general theory of revolution by showing the similarities among the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions. Staughton Lynd’s Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Pantheon, 1968) narrows the field, suggesting that the new protest movement has its roots implanted in the radical soil cultivated by the American Revolution. Finally, to bring us up to date, Calvin B. T. Lee has written The Campus Scene: 1900–1970 (David McKay, 1970).
Beginning in the sixties, pre-Berkeley student protest of the freedom-ride, sit-in, civil-rights variety was at a peak in the organization discussed by Howard Zinn in SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Beacon, 1965). The free-speech era that began at Berkeley in 1964 is covered in Berkeley, The New Student Revolt (Grove, 1965) by Hal Draper, in the volume edited by Seymour M. Lipset and S. S. Wolin, The Berkeley Student Revolt (Doubleday, 1965), and in Revolution at Berkeley (Dell, 1965) edited by Michael Miller and Susan Gilmore. The situation at Columbia in 1968 is recorded in Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis (Atheneum, 1968) by Jerry Avon et al. and in the Cox Commission Report, Crisis at Columbia (Vintage, 1968); the debacle that occurred in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention in the same year is reviewed inter alia in the Skolnick Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, The Politics of Protest (Ballantine Books, 1969). The Walker Report, Rights in Conflict (Bantam Books, 1968), covers the incident at great length. A spate of quickie books followed the most significant development of the convention disorders, the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. The best are The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities (Harper & Row, 1970) by J. Anthony Lukas, The Conspiracy Trial (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970) edited by Judy Clavir and John Spitzer, The Great Conspiracy Trial (Random House, 1970) by Jason Epstein, and defendant Tom Hayden’s account, Trial (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970).
This brings us to the New Left, subject of an enormous amount of literature. Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau provide a handbook on historical backgrounds and on the many student groups in The New Radicals: A Report With Documents (Vintage, 1966). Jack Newfield’s A Prophetic Minority (new edition, Signet, 1970), though written in 1966 and slightly dated, is the classic study of the New Left, its history and rationale. Other significant contributions are those of Phillip A. Luce, The New Left (David McKay, 1966), and Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (Vintage, 1967) and The Agony of the American Left (Vintage, 1969).
Rehearsal
“Lord, make my heart a place where angels sing.”—John Keble
This morning Abdiel came in first; while he
Began to strum a small guitar, he perched
On half a dozen bales of ragged hopes
And grimaced: “Surely these could be cleared out.”
When Michael came, strange solemn trumpet notes
Sprang from the floor with every step he took,
And Gabriel, close behind, hummed shining tunes
That caught and matched each silvery trumpet tone
While he looped back the drapes and pulled the chairs
To semi-circles. “Drab,” he murmured. “Gray
And even dingy.”
“Open, though,” said Michael.
“Available. Still listed in the ads
Up there. And fair acoustics. Abdiel,
Give us A. Now, Gabriel, ready? Unison—”
They sang.
ELV A McALLASTER
Ideology
The shortest route to understanding the counterculture is listening to its members. The new protesters speak in an essential volume, The New Student Left: An Anthology (revised edition, Beacon, 1967), edited by Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale. Containment and Change (Macmillan, 1967) by Carl Oglesby and Richard Shaull gives an excellent and representative analysis of America’s role in the world from the New Left standpoint. The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (Random House, 1968) has achieved wide circulation and has been made into a movie. Its author is nineteen-year-old James Simon Kunen, a student at Columbia during the holocaust there. Roger Rapoport and Laurence J. Kirshbaum have produced Is the Library Burning? (Vintage, 1969), a book especially valuable for the insight it gives into the sins that call down the New Left’s wrath. Three Harvard graduate students, Tom Christoffel, David Finkelhor, and Dan Gilbarg, have collected the materials that evolved out of Social Relations 148–149 in 1968–69, the course credited with a major role in radicalizing their university. Up Against the American Myth (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970) is a most impressive and provoking volume. Recently, another group of East Coast students, galvanized into action by the Kent State incident, produced a 300-page manual of radical activism—perhaps the most complete expression available of the counterculture’s revolutionary spirit. The Organizer’s Manual (Bantam Books, 1971), published anonymously by “The O. M. Collective,” gives in immense detail the cumulative experience of the activist veterans and tells you how to “do it yourself.” Speaking of “doing it,” the minority, violent-sensationalistic sect on the New Left, the “Yippies,” have expressed themselves through their leader Abbie Hoffman in his book Revolution for the Hell of It (Dial, 1969) and in Jerry Rubin’s Do It! (Simon and Schuster, 1970). Recognize, however, that Hoffman and Rubin make such excellent straw men that their publicity is far greater than they deserve and wholly out of proportion to the number who actually follow their ideology.
Finally, for “where it’s at” at the moment, and where it was at any given point in the last decade or so, consult the periodicals of the “Movement”: New University Thought, New Left Review, and Studies on the Left (all early sixties); The New University Conference Newsletter, Liberation, Our Generation, New Politics, The Activist, and that essential, mass-level organ of radical thought, Ramparts. The underground papers are too many for mention here; to cite one would be to do injustice to a dozen other great ones. Robert J. Glessing has provided the open-sesame to the countercultural treasury they contain in his slim volume, The Underground Press in America (Indiana University, 1970). He is especially good at tracing swings in editorial concern from cultural and political subject matter to personal introspection, poetry, and astrology to war protest and confrontation politics.
With the Kent and Jackson State massacres the new protest movement suffered its first martyrs. But who are some of the leading reformers from whom it draws ideology and insight? Some will suggest Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, or Mao Tse-tung (and the writings of these four are well worth reading). Others will reflect on the influence of Marx, Lenin, or Trotsky (again, valuable reading). However, the influence of theoreticians such as G. William Domhoff (Who Rules America?, The Higher Circles), C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite), William A. Williams (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy), David Horowitz (The Free World Colossus, Empire and Revolution), and Dave Dellinger (Revolutionary Nonviolence) and of other intellectuals such as Paul Goodman, Howard Zinn, and Staughton Lynd has been far greater. Perhaps the best introduction to the expanse of thought they represent is the volume Radical Sociology (Canfield, 1971) edited by Horowitz. Herbert Marcuse has provided much of the ideological backbone for the international body of radical protest. He has been tagged a Freudian, Hegelian Marxist, but he is orthodox in none of these philosophies. His most important books are One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Beacon, 1964), and Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Beacon, 1960). Two of the best ways into his complex thought are his essay “Repressive Tolerance” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Beacon, 1965) edited by Robert Wolff et al., and the interview with him by Guenther Busch, “On Revolution,” in Student Power (Penguin Books, 1969) edited by Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn.
It is difficult to speak of ideology in connection with the gnostic side of the counterculture. The many who might be considered its gurus must include Allen Ginsberg (for his ubiquitous poetry), Alan Watts (for his several books on Zen Buddhism), and possibly Timothy Leary. A good deal of pop music in the last decade—especially that of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones—has helped set an alienated, gnostic tone as well. Disciplining oneself to listen to the local Top 40 station for twenty minutes a day would in fact pay off in a considerably increased understanding of the counterculture. Or you might simply obtain Dennis C. Benson’s interpretation of the music scene, The Now Generation (John Knox, 1969).
Interpretation
Needless to say, psychologists have had a veritable field day interpreting the counterculture. Kenneth Kenniston broke considerable ground by working for a summer with a cadre of New Leftists. He recorded his findings in Young Radicals, a remarkable book that dispels a good many fictions about countercultural youth. In 1969 he brought it up to date in his article “Notes on Young Radicals” (Change, Nov.–Dec., 1969, pp. 25–33), which distinguishes within the Movement between two personality types associated with the idealistic-nihilistic distinction. His caution carries great authority: “Psychological explanations alone are not adequate to understand today’s student radicals. Student radicalism has developed within a social, cultural and, above all, a political context.… We must study the evolution and rationale of the student movement itself.”
A founder of Students for a Democratic Society and a distinguished researcher on student activism at the University of Chicago, Richard Flacks, contributes “The Liberated Generation: An Exploration of the Roots of Student Protest” (Journal of Social Issues, 1967, pp. 52–75), a sympathetic analysis. Another article, this one synoptic, comes from S. L. Halleck, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. “Hypotheses of Student Unrest” (Phi Delta Kappan, 1968, pp. 2–9) summarizes and comments on practically every explanation that has been given for the phenomenon. Robert Kavanaugh’s insight, “The Grim Generation” (Psychology Today, Oct., 1968, pp. 50–55), faithfully represents the burden of student testimonies the author has encountered at the end of seventeen years’ experience in the university.
Three general religious interpretations are noteworthy. Daniel P. Moynihan wrote two of them, “Nirvana Now” and “Politics as the Art of the Impossible.” They appeared in the August, 1967, and Autumn, 1969, issues of The American Scholar. A third, “The New Reformation” by Paul Goodman (New York Times Magazine, Sept. 14, 1969), draws a specific analogy with good insight and sympathy. Theology has its say in New Theology No. 8 (Macmillan, 1971) edited by Martin E. Marty and Dean G. Peerman, a collection devoted to “the cultural revolution.” From the standpoint of biblical Christianity, one of the best volumes available is Arthur Gish’s New Left and Christian Radicalism (Eerdmans, 1970), a sympathetic, constructive perspective from one intimately involved in the counterculture. Like it but more theological is The Christian Revolutionary (Eerdmans, 1971) by Dale W. Brown. They Dare to Hope: Student Protest and Christian Reponse (Eerdmans, 1969) by Fred Pearson is somewhat less helpful. The first forty-one pages of Francis Schaeffer’s Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (Inter-Varsity, 1970) also represent a move in the right direction but are characteristically brimful of generalization. We need still more of the wit, wisdom, and surgical skill of a William Stringfellow, a greater measure of the Berrigans’ informed passion, and a larger dose of Jacques Ellul’s masterly analysis if we are rightly to interpret and minister to the growing counterculture of our time.
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.” Or, to put it another way, the scriptures of secular religion are found in the popular press. In reading them we not only learn to reach the culture they portray; we also find that “cultural and spiritual growth are related. The enlarged capacity created by an appetite for a wider spectrum of cultural interest will increase our intake ability for spiritual truth too” (Clark Pinnock, Set Forth Your Case, 1967, p. 21).
James R. Moore is a graduate assistant at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and co-editor of “Trinity Studies.” He has a B.S. from the University of Illinois.
