I just watched THE JESUS REVOLUTION. Highly recommend it. It gave me a lot to mull over.
I grew up in those hippie movement/Jesus movement days, so it all seemed pretty normal to me at the time. I had nothing to compare it to. The movie holds out hope that even in the midst of today’s insanity, God can raise up an army of Spirit empowered believers from all the generations present to meet the challenge in a special way and bring a counter-weight to the insanity.
It does a pretty good job sympathetically capturing the anger, and confusion of both the older generation and the youth of the day. It discusses the lostness and emptiness of the Hippies with a realistic behind the scenes look at what they were really up to. (Like imagining themselves a movement of peace and love while supporting global regimes that were murdering tens of millions of people, and who were planning the murder of tens of millions more of their own countrymen if they won in America.). Like many today they couldn’t tell the difference between peace and escaping inner turmoil through life destroying chemistry, between love and unchained wantonness.
But Jesus has an answer for a questioning soul.
That said, these days were not innocuous. Even with “the Jesus Revolution” we didn’t win the culture war; by all appearance they are winning. Some smug, or more likely lazy Christians will poo poo this, saying “God is on His Throne and His arm is not short.” And they are right in all but the poo poo, tut tut, ain’t nothing but a thing, all’s good. God IS on His throne; His arm is NOT short. But spreading human suffering and evil should never be poo pooed.
The hippie generation pushed through laws that have allowed them to murder over 60 million of their own children, “drove” God from the public sphere, forced a shift in moral center away from discovery of paths of life toward the crowning of the individual in all of his or her or something else’s self creative corruption, away from wisdom and toward human feeling. Which radically changed the meaning of “love” away from “seeking the good of others even when it hurts” to “honoring and celebrating the feelings and choices of others, sanctifying the individual as morally autonomous.”
These hippies were loved by Jesus and objects of His grace, but they were also an army of useful idiots being raised up as weapons against Western Civilization, its values, morals, ethics, and religious convictions.
This hippie generation raised Millennials and GenZ most of whom reject all moral boundaries and even the very idea of male and female… the rest seem so scared that they don’t dare say anything about it, having no cogent moral argument to stand against it. Generations have been seduced into the LGBT movement which has a combined 40% suicide attempt rate, massive substance abuse problems, scary levels of mental and emotional illness, sky high domestic violence, and a severe loss of capacity for rational thought. They are babes dropped in the middle of the woods alone without paths anywhere, being told that their own hearts will lead them through safely… so long as those hearts are bent on the overthrow of Western Civilization. They are convinced that all that is wrong with the world is not the fault of those who drove the hippies and kidnapped the minds of the last two generations wholesale. The people with the sledgehammers have convinced the youth of today that the damage and confusion is from those on the receiving end of their blows and not the result of their blows themselves. Like the Hitler youth, raised to be mass murderers, seduced into throwing away their moral virtue and ethical boundaries, todays youth are in the thrall of dark souls plotting evil in the world. That is never something to poo poo. They are victims in need of rescuing, objects of divine love, and a great threat to human civilization everywhere… i.e. objects of divine judgment.
But the movie does raise awareness. We may be afraid. We may be confused. We may not see a clear way forward. But we are called to engage, to understand what is happening, to speak to it through the wisdom and leading of the Holy Spirit. It’s easy to be angry and afraid—we are facing dark days—but there is a way forward. I am striving to discover and articulate with God’s help what that way is as I write my book, SWIMMING IN A BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW: A LOVE LETTER TO MY CHILDREN. (Coming soon, I hope)
As the Jesus Revolution spread, Thomas Anderson saw today in the hippies of then. He saw a shift in worldview, a shift in moral center. He tried to warn everyone in his book, CHANCE OR THE DANCE (Seems like a dumb title until you read the book). It is a brilliant but not an easy read.
What the Jesus Revolution failed to do for the youth then was rewrite their broken worldview and bring correction to some basic errors in evaluating reality. This failure would allow (in addition to today’s secular nightmare) such things as “Progressive Christians.” In fact, one of the reasons we seem to be losing the culture war even in the Church is because most Christians that I know, earnest believers, actually share some of these broken worldview cogs unawares. Others are just at a loss to understand what they are dealing with and lead with “love” hoping it will be some kind of panacea for what ails them undiagnosed.
But embracing an unbiblical view of love is part of the problem.
