Moving Beyond the Shock Absorber - Part 7
TIME Magazine: The Jesus Revolution
Part seven of a 10-part series from an article by Stuart Crawshaw that appeared in The Briefing in 2008 titled: Moving beyond the shock absorber: The place of youth ministry—past, present and future
Social movements and the birth of postmodernism
The 1968 student riots in Paris inspired the American students in their continuing protests. By this time, they were focused on ending the war in Vietnam. This one issue galvanized youth culture across the western world. In San Francisco, the students at Berkley, the hippies who had taken the place of the Beatniks in the Haight Ashbury district and the young activists in the Black Panther Party joined forces. They created a formidable coalition that inspired young people all over the world. Alan Touraine has argued that, at this time, young people formed movements that changed the culture of the western world.
The student activists were on the forefront of what Touraine calls new social movements— movements for free speech, civil rights, cessation of war, feminism, and gay rights—many of which emerged at Berkley, defining the second half of the 20th century with their fresh, anti-establishment ideas. While these movements challenged the power base of modern institutions, they were also the inherited values of the Enlightenment. The individualism behind Kant’s ideas fueled these new social movements, and the existentialism of Kierkegaard inspired young people to change their world through drug use.
This new era was dubbed ‘postmodern’. Postmodernism rejects the defined boundaries of the scientific approach to art, music, history, science, politics, economics and popular culture. The important relationship between ideas and technology would continue into the postmodern era. The car, the transistor radio, records and movies allowed the ready dissemination of a popular new youth culture. Soon the pill would give reality to the idea of sexual freedom, leading to the emancipation of women. Technology provided a generation with the opportunity to choose between the values of their parents and the freedom to create their own version of future.
The postmodern idea of society—an era of competing ideas—was beginning to take shape. Humans gathered increasingly around a common interest that distinguished them from other groupings. These groupings are the hallmark of new social movements: in the pre-modern village, people gathered out of necessity for survival in small intimate groups; in the modern era, these communities were being broken down into city hives.
Here, people gathered around a new economic reality: the machine. In Marxist terms, they are classified as either proletariat or bourgeoisie. But now people gather around an interest in a particular kind of music, their ideal of civil rights, or marches to stop a war. This change in the definition of a group gathering together affected the church (in Greek, the word means a ‘gathering’). Can the church survive this new way of defining societal groups, which increase the power of the individual to choose how he or she wants to live?
Is God dead?
The way the church communicated Christian values was also seen as out of date. The generations looked and sounded like entirely different cultures in the same country. The most important dissemination tool of the church—its stable communication between one generation and the next, weakened by the Industrial Revolution—was now seemingly falling apart.
In many Christian families, the core of church communities—that is, parents and their teenagerswere now in open conflict with each other over clothes, music, drugs, sex and lifestyle issues. Forms of youth ministry from the Billy Graham era could no longer be relied upon to fill the gap between the generations. The tent meeting format, popular a decade before, no longer attracted baby boomers as it did their parents.
Church attendance was in decline. Not all baby boomers fit the stereotype of the young radical, but enough had been influenced by the rock ‘n’ roll generation that they saw the church as a thing of the past. A new cultural shockpostmodernism—emerged to threaten the very existence of the church in the secular era. It was, potentially, the biggest threat since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This quake went to the core of community (the family unit), creating a generation gap that split families profoundly, and interrupting the passing on of the gospel from one generation to the next. Would Christianity become extinct as a result? It appeared likely. In 1966, Time Magazine ran as its cover story, ‘Is God dead?’.
How could the Christian church possible respond to a youth quake of such magnitude? Yet again a shock absorber would come into action. Another grassroots response arose to meet the challenge of relevance, expressing Christianity in a postmodern form. In 1971, Time Magazine ran another cover story that focused on the church in the newest secular era. The title was ‘The Jesus Revolution’.
Warning: Jesus still at large
The article’s author wrote,
Jesus is alive and well and living in the radical spiritual fervour of a growing number of young Americans who have proclaimed an extraordinary religious revolution in His name. Their message: the Bible is true, miracles happen, God really did so love the world that He gave it His only begotten son. In 1966, Beatle John Lennon casually remarked that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ: now the Beatles are shattered.
How did Jesus make such an unexpected comeback among a generation that looked set to reject him? It happened in same way other youth ministries had made comebacks in times of change in the secular era: the Jesus movement began, grew rapidly and then institutionalized according to the same formula laid down by the archetypal youth ministry, the Sunday School.