Cultural Revitalization Movements
John Weir Perry’s theory of cultural change was adapted from Anthony Wallace, who refers to these collective renewal efforts as cultural revitalization movements. Wallace says they arise in times of stress—defined as a condition in which a part or the whole of the social organism is threatened with more or less serious damage.1 Many revitalization movements successfully changed the dysfunctional paradigm or worldview that dominated during their era and thus resolved the cultural crisis. Both Perry and Wallace provide numerous historical examples of revitalization movements—Christianity and Islam, and perhaps Buddhism, originated in revitalization movements.
The prominent historian of American religion William McLoughlin finds Wallace’s model is generally applicable to the “Great Awakenings” in America, with several modifications that will be discussed later. McLoughlin has argued that there have been four major cultural revitalization movements in American history. The first two Great Awakenings are accepted as historic events by all American historians.
The first took place between 1730 and 1760. McLoughlin notes, as do most historians, that the First Great Awakening created the revolution in consciousness that gave rise to the American Revolution: “The Revolution, implementing the new republican ideology was in fact the secular fulfillment of the religious ideals of the First Great Awakening.” Or, as the eminent American historian Gordon Wood put it, “After 1765, the concept of political independence became not only political but moral. Revolution, republicanism, all blended in American thinking.”2 The Second Great Awakening took place in the early nineteenth century. McLoughlin, unlike most historians, believes there was a third awakening in the early twentieth century—the Social Gospel movement. McLoughlin was the first to propose that the 1960s constituted a Great Awakening
The first two awakenings were instigated by waves of Christian revivalist meetings. All revitalization movements, McLoughlin notes, were “periods of fundamental ideological transformations” that made possible “the growth of the nation in adapting to social, ecological, psychological and economic changes.” Cultural revitalizations constitute “the awakening of a people caught in an outmoded, dysfunctional world view to the necessity of converting their mindset, their behavior, and their institutions to more relevant or more functionally useful ways of understanding and coping with the changes in the world they live in.”3
What is relevant to note here is that in America’s Great Awakenings, rather than one or several central prophets (as Perry’s model implied), there have been a wide variety of prophets. Yet despite the diversity of the religious affiliations (e.g., Methodist, Quaker, Presbyterian, Unitarian) of the spiritual leaders in the first two Great Awakenings, their vision and theological beliefs had common salient features as compared to those of the religious establishments against which they were spontaneously rebelling. McLoughlin’s revised model of revitalization is of particular relevance for the situation we are facing today in the context of the multicultural society America has become. It highlights the importance of developing a unifying messianic-redemptive vision based on universal symbols.
McLoughlin’s account of America’s revitalization movements provides historical mooring for Perry’s theory concerning the decisive role of spiritual leaders as catalysts of change. Prophetic leaders emerge in times of cultural revitalization, and they also foster a revitalization process. The changes effected in the past by visionaries undergirds the hopeful perspective I am conveying in this book: the Mad Pride movement that is just now emerging propitiously in the midst of the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced—our survival is at stake—could develop into a revitalization movement. It could spark a new awakening or rekindle the embers that remain from the fires lit during the days that McLoughlin calls America’s Fourth Great Awakening—the social movement and counterculture of the 1960s. (The Occupy Wall Street movement began just before this book was ready to go to press. Although the future is unpredictable, OWS belied the contention of some commentators that the 1960s was the last period of progressive popular revolt.)
The Second Great Awakening and the Messianic-Redemptive Vision
These revitalization movements provide a model for an alternative to secular (e.g., Marxist) paradigms of transformation that are not fully adequate to the exigencies of our current crisis. The messianic-redemptive vision was prevalent in America’s past, though it has been buried in the course of history. For example, although many left-wing activists are committed to a redemptive (secular) vision (e.g., a socialist revolution), virtually none of them are aware that evangelical postmillennial Christianity provided the foundation and inspiration for the most powerful reform movement in American history prior to the 1960s—the Second Awakening. Many of them would deny their narrative is “messianic” or “redemptive,” since they have adopted the scientific positivism of modernity. Unlike the left-wing reform movements in the 1930s, the Second Awakening of the early nineteenth century (which included the abolitionist movement) was based on an explicitly messianic narrative and vision—one that has since been eclipsed and suppressed in the course of history. This was partly because Evangelical Christianity began to become transformed after the Civil War, in large part into a reactionary premillennial right-wing cult, today composed of millions of Americans. (There are socially progressive tendencies within Evangelical Christianity, but as of yet they are relatively small and weak.) The messianic postmillennial Christian vision was the source of the Second Awakening’s endurance and power.
According to historians, the first third of the nineteenth century was the period of the Second Great Awakening (Smith argues it extended until the Civil War.)4 Robert Abzug and others showed that the most ardent religious reformers in those days—Christians of sundry denominations—believed the millennium was near and that its realization depended on human righteousness and progressive (to use the modern term) activism, including abolitionism, to bring society into conformity with the Christian prescriptions of justice and love. The majority of American Christians believed that Christ would return to Earth to launch a thousand years of peace and prosperity, but as postmillennialists they believed that Christ would return only after humanity was acting in accord with God’s will. (The nineteenth-century evangelical Christians were reformers of all sorts; they did not subscribe to the fatalistic, premillennialist, and militaristic beliefs of most “Evangelical Christians” today.) Christianity in the early nineteenth century espoused messianic beliefs that were in accord with Buber’s definition of messianism (see the introduction under the subheading Mad Pride in Transition), inspired as it was by the prophetic strain in Judaism (e.g., from Isaiah to Jesus): the coming of the messianic age, the recovery of heaven on Earth, depended on the righteousness of humanity, it required the creation of a society based on Christian norms of justice.
Since the responsibility for change in postmillennial Christianity lies with humanity and with God acting through humanity, the literal return of Jesus seems to be a superfluous part of this narrative, but no one at that time seemed to notice. It was only in the twentieth century that some Christians began to develop a profound and esoteric interpretation of the Second Coming; they claimed it would not involve the literal return of Jesus, but the coming of the “cosmic Christ.” Paul Levy has explained Jung’s esoteric interpretation of Christianity.
God is incarnating not just through one man, as it did through Christ over 2000 years ago, but is incarnating through all of humanity. Jung talked about, “. . . a broadening process of incarnation. Christ the son begotten by God, is the first-born who is succeeded by an increasing number of younger brothers and sisters.” Christ was the first attempt by God to incarnate and transform itself. Now humanity as a whole will be the subject of the divine incarnation process. What is happening in our world right now is the second Coming of Christ, what Jung calls the “Christification of many.”5
Thus according to Jung there is a divine initiative—this is the supernatural dimension to transformation—but it seeks expression through as many human beings as possible.
The foundation for the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century and the social activism that marked it was the spontaneous theological revolution that developed in the decades after the American Revolution. This was a new Christian Reformation, a theological revolution marked by a widespread attack on the reigning Calvinist doctrines of original sin and determinism—predestination. John L. Thomas describes this as an upsurge of the Romantic faith in human perfectibility, which found expression in prophets as diverse as Charles Finney, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a motley assortment of radical utopians and abolitionists.6
The historian of theology Dan McKanan argues that the Awakening was the spiritual theological fruit of the growth of the Jeffersonian ideal of equality planted fifty years before, during the American Revolution.7 This is a cogent explanation, as one would expect that the ideal of equality would naturally find its theological expression in a rejection of the fatalistic Calvinist doctrine (derived from St. Augustine) that only an elect would be saved—that the majority were consigned by God to eternal torment. Clearly this idea was not conducive to social reform.
In religious terms perfectionism was the antithesis of the Protestant idea of original sin—that each person as a result of “original sin” was “totally depraved,” as Calvin had expressed it. As opposed to total depravity, perfectionism affirmed—although this was made explicit only by a few intellectuals and reformers—the “infinite worthiness,” as Emerson called it, of each human soul and her ability to actualize her potential here and now, with God’s help.8
Thomas captures the sweep of the movement, “Salvation . . . lay open to everyone. Sin was voluntary: Men were not helpless and depraved by nature [as Calvinism asserted] but free agents and potential powers for good. Perfectionism spread rapidly across the whole spectrum of Protestantism. The progress of the country suddenly seemed to depend upon the regeneration of the individual and the contagion of example. . . . As it spread, perfectionism swept across denominational barriers and penetrated even secular thought.”9 Perfectionism meant that the perfectibility of each individual would be accomplished as soon as oppressive social conditions were transformed.10 As Evangelicals saw it, this was the precondition for the advent of the millennium.
As the legitimacy of Calvinism was undermined in the early nineteenth century, Americans were consequently instilled with a new sense of power and ethical responsibility. Many believed it was within their power to create the conditions for the realization of the kingdom of God on Earth. A new humanistic Christianity was emerging in a wide variety of different denominations that set loose a wave of reform activities—from abolitionism to women’s rights, to Christian anarchism, to the first ecumenical Christian pacifist organizations, to the creation of utopian communes. “What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world,” exclaimed Emerson.11 Christian historian Timothy Smith argued, “The [nineteenth-century] evangelicals played a key role in the widespread attack on slavery, poverty and greed. They thus prepared the way . . . for what later became known as the Social Gospel [a Christian socialist movement that flourished in the early twentieth century].”12
The belief that the kingdom of God was at hand had swept up many Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century. The messianic-redemptive vision had sunk its roots in the collective psyche. Such messianic expectations would be considered psychotic—madness—if they were expressed by a patient being examined by a psychiatrist today, but the zeitgeist at that time was radically different from the secular world-view of the modern world. Christianity in the first half of the nineteenth century was imbued with the “utopian” expectation of the dawning of the millennium, the breaking into this world of a new supernatural miraculous order.*38, 13 It must be emphasized how normative that ideal was at that time. It was only in the late twentieth century that mainstream American religion and culture—after the traumas of the horrors of the world’s bloodiest century—became robustly antimetaphysical, anti-utopian and, under the guise of scientistic secularism, banished messianic hope in its all its various guises (secular or religious) to the hinterlands of superstition or madness.14
The Second Awakening did not bear any resemblance to modern Christian evangelicalism or fundamentalism, which with its premillennialist doctrines and emphasis on human innate sinfulness is similar to the fatalistic perspective that had been repudiated in the revolt against Calvinism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The antebellum Evangelicals (at least in the North) were dedicated to changing the world, whereas modern premillenialist Evangelicals believe that human beings have no power to avert the apocalyptic destruction of the Earth—Armageddon—which God has already commanded to punish unbelievers. How this strange doctrine melded in the 1980s with the militaristic xenophobic politics of the Christian right is a long story. The point here is that it involved the inversion of antebellum Evangelical Christianity from a worldview that inspired utopian hope and movements for progressive reforms into a worldview empowering forces of reaction.15
Charles Finney, the most prominent Christian evangelist of the nineteenth century and a strong opponent of slavery, rejected the legacy of his own Calvinist background—which affirmed the impotence of the human will and that salvation would be effected for the predestined by grace alone—and based his sermons on his conviction that human beings are “active participants with God in both their own salvation and the affairs of the world.”16 Finney preached that human activism in partnership with the Holy Spirit was the means for “the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.”17 In 1835 he exulted that “the millennium can come in three years” if Americans and their churches would “do their duty.”18
Cushing Strout describes revivalist meetings on the frontiers: “Gathered in homemade tents for several days thousands of families would eat, drink, sing, shout, pray and cry together. . . . It was a jamboree and an awesome rite, a family picnic and a religious crisis, one community under God . . . with free will and heavenly justice for all.”19Finney’s revivals took place in the East in churches and were generally more sedate than frontier revivals, but his fiery sermons produced many converts. “He aimed his sermons toward one goal—to make the stakes of salvation burn in the mind of his listeners. Religious experiences, once private dialogues between God and man, now took places in public settings; men and women, realizing and confessing their sinfulness before all who would listen.”20
Finney’s conviction that the millennium was in reach was not anomalous for the era. One historian aptly wrote that “America in the early nineteenth century was drunk on the millennium.” The great theologian and historian H. Richard Niebuhr (brother of Reinhold) captures the popular mood well in The Kingdom of God in America, written in 1937, “[A] great wave of expectancy came over men. . . . A Christian revolution was evidently taking place; a new day was dawning.” This gospel of the coming kingdom that had begun with individual conversions of heart had become social. “It insisted that the fruits of the personal revolution needed to appear and, insofar as the revolution was genuine would appear in the whole common life, in science, art, agriculture, industry, church and state.”21 The leaders of revivalism disagreed on many particulars, but they agreed on two major points. There was no way into “the kingdom of God on Earth” that did not entail crisis on Earth and “the loss and death to the self.” Today we would call it the death of the ego. Second, they agreed on the necessity of meeting the future crisis by “pressing into the kingdom,” which was coming with both judgment and promise.22
The expectation of the coming kingdom on Earth was “nurtured by the continuing revival until it became the dominant idea in American Christianity.”23 Let me emphasize this: Christianity at the time was based on a messianic-redemptive vision of social change. This gave rise to the burgeoning of a sense of collective hopefulness. By psychiatric standards this mood would be considered “manic.” (Note the similarity to the experiences of Dr. Ed Whitney, interviewed in chapter 14.) William Ellery Channing*39, 24—the great mentor of Emerson—saw in “the victory of Christ’s spirit the coming of his kingdom to earth.” Channing wrote, “Christ comes in the conversion, the regeneration, the emancipation of the world.” Channing believed Christ’s spirit demands the abolition of war and slavery, the practice of philanthropy, and the “government of all life by reference to the dignity and worth of men.”25 To those who participated in the awakening, the humanitarian reform and evangelical movements were simultaneously evidence of the kingdom’s coming and “instruments whereby [the advent of] the kingdom was being hastened.”26
The antislavery movement was also a product of Christian evangelicalism, of the spiritual revitalization. This kind of utopian revitalization is strikingly similar, as will be shown, to the spirit of the 1960s, in spite of the fact that in the 1960s the idiom of the rebels was not Christian. It is striking, however, that in both the Second and Fourth Awakenings it was believed that a combination of individual regeneration with a commitment to social reform would have eschatological consequences. Despite the secularism of the 1960s’ counterculture and New Left resistance, they seem to have been possessed by a vision similar to that of their nineteenth-century forebears—the recovery of paradise on Earth, of the return to the Garden of Eden.
Theodore Weld was a stellar example of the fusion of the personal and political dimensions represented by the awakening. He was a Finney disciple who became one of the leading abolitionists. He went from town to town preaching against slavery and braving the wrath of proslavery mobs in the Midwest. Abzug, Weld’s biographer, raises an important issue: What was it that gave Weld and his comrades the courage to persevere in the face of staunch opposition and such meager material remuneration for their work? There were several factors. First, like the Biblical prophets, they saw themselves as rebels against the injustices of society, and they cared little for earthly rewards. But this negative factor would not have been enough to inspire such sacrifice.
The second factor was probably more important: Weld and men like him “ordered their lives around one idea . . . that admitted of no compromise . . . they believed in the Millennium, to be made by men and made quickly.” That is, it was a messianic-redemptive vision—based upon human endeavor—that was the source of their power of endurance. “When all else was going badly they could place their faith in eventual triumph as prophesied in the Bible, and as heralded by signs of the times. One only needed to keep working at it.”27
Abzug notes that Weld often used a metaphor in describing society. He “saw society as sick.”28 This is a striking parallel with the radicals of the 1960s. If he had access to the language of the twentieth century, Weld, like Erich Fromm and R. D. Laing, may have said that society was “insane.” He did not view conformity to a “sick” society as normative; the new world that the Christian reformers were seeking to give birth to was normative. Society needed to be restored to health. To those who warned Weld of the dangers of upsetting the social order, he scoffed and responded that the task of the Christian was not to preserve order but to determine “what would quicken the church, turn the nations from their idols, pioneer into being the glories of the millennium, and cause earth to bloom with the hues of heaven.”29 The radical abolitionists (men like Weld and Garrison) were creatively maladjusted, and they knew it! Their compass was not set to the sights of “normal society”—which they believed was itself existentially “off course”—but to the millennium, the new order, the kingdom of heaven on Earth (see chapter 4).
Niebuhr noted that even a slight success in the movement was enough to prompt Weld to exalt, “If these are the first fruits what will be the Harvest? If the gatherings of handfuls wakes up such loud acclaim, what will be the song when the morning stars break out together . . . as the whole mighty growth that now stands as a forest . . . comes before the Lord of the harvest, and is gathered into his garner?”30 It was the same spirit that led Edward Beecher to cry out in 1865, “Now that God has smitten slavery unto death, he has opened the way for the redemption and sanctification of our whole social system.” Weld was passionately convinced that the abolitionists would triumph because ending slavery was the “cause of God.”31
As Niebuhr put it, for Weld and the abolitionists the coming kingdom was “ judgment as well as promise.”32 The abolitionists believed that only repentance could save sinful men from the wrath of God. Weld said confession and restitution were necessary—abolishing slavery, feeding the poor, and giving jobs to the unemployed. “This may save us. God grant it may not be too late.”33 But God’s mercy in this era was as deep as his wrath at human sinfulness; Weld saw sin in social as well as individual terms, much like liberation theologists over a century later. When Lane Seminary asked Weld and his students to dissolve their organization and to desist from their abolitionist agitation, Weld wrote, “Is this the time to destroy our society [i.e., organization] when truth is fallen in the street and judgment turned away backward? When the pulpit is overawed, the press panders to power, conscience surrenders to expediency. . . ? When the heart of the slave is breaking with the anguish of hope deferred, and our free colored brethren are persecuted even into strange cities?” Weld answered his own question: “No! God forbid that we should abandon a cause that strikes its roots so deep into the soil of human interests, and human rights, and throws its branches upward and abroad, so high and wide into the sunlight of human hopes and human well-being.”34 Yet despite all obstacles, Weld persisted in the confidence that the days of slavery are numbered in “this land of liberty and light, and revivals of millennial glory.”35
Timothy L. Smith’s controversial but extensively documented classic Revivalism and Social Reform (1957) corroborated two of the main ideas expounded above: that the messianic expectation was present in the nineteenth century and that it led to what we would call today “progressive” social action. He attempted to demonstrate that the Second Awakening did not end until the eve of the Civil War, when it had unleashed a crescendo of antislavery and social reform sentiment. The revivalists, the evangelists, played a key role in the “attack on slavery, poverty and greed” and thus prepared the way “both in theory and practice for what later became known as the social gospel.”36 (The Social Gospel adherents were liberals or socialists.) Smith’s book, as he puts it, “indicates that revivalism and perfectionism become socially volatile only when combined with the doctrine of Christ’s imminent conquest of the earth.”37 In other words, Smith’s study of this period indicates the social power of the messianic-redemptive vision and thus strengthens the argument for what I call the messianic-redemptive paradigm.
According to Smith, by the time of the Civil War, the conviction had become “commonplace” (in the North) that “society must be reconstructed through the power of a sanctifying gospel and all the evils of cruelty, poverty and greed done away with.” From this perspective a ragtag band of radical reformers, as, for example, the abolitionists were at the start, effected a major change in several decades. (Of course, there were also historical and economic factors creating antagonism to the “slave-ocracy.”) It was the “enlargement of millennial [messianic] hopes” that engendered this new sense of “social responsibility.”38
To take one eloquent and more philosophical example of a common sentiment, William Hosner, a Methodist abolitionist, author, and newspaper editor, wrote in an editorial in 1852, “Wicked laws not only may be broken, but absolutely must be broken: there is no other way to escape the wrath of God.” Slaveholders must be banned from the church. The mission of the Church “is to establish the Kingdom of God on earth by the banishment of unrighteousness and the introduction of universal holiness.”39 Both Smith and Niebuhr (unlike his brother Reinhold) present messianic-redemptive paradigms of social transformation or revitalization. It should be noted, of course, that as usual the shadow side of messianic possibility was also present: the terrible wrath of God at the injustice of women and men. Thus, if human beings do not rise to the occasion, the wrath of God will consume saint and sinner alike.
In Wallace’s and McLoughlin’s terms the economic and moral tensions of the nineteenth century—most prominently the moral disturbance provoked by the scandal of slavery in a republic dedicated at its founding to the principle of equality—constituted the conflict that inevitably engendered the religious revitalization of the Second Great Awakening. According to McLoughlin there have been many revitalizations in the course of history, and they inevitably spill over into social reform movements.
To put it in more theological terms befitting this particular revitalization, the Second Awakening had all the markings of a kairos—a moment of human decision in history marked by “the entry of the Kingdom of God into human affairs”—a period in which an “eschatological leap” becomes possible if not imperative, one that “overcomes demonic powers and then transcends the limits of previous political, racial and economic history.”40 We see how during the Second Awakening the Kingdom of God initially comes to life in the inner life of men and women; it starts first in the visions of those who become the leaders of the movement—mostly revivalists—who express it in words that, to use Jung’s term, reverberate in the psyches of the ordinary men and women. (See the discussion of the power of leadership in Aurobindo’s work, chapter 17.) The power of the messianic vision is combined with new theological concepts and a new mythos and communicated through books, sermons, and revivals.
What Paul Levy says about music of the ’60s could be said about the revivals of the Second Awakening. “The music of the ’60s was both an expression of an expanded consciousness, while simultaneously being the vibration, which precipitated and catalyzed the very expansion of consciousness of which it was an expression.” To put it in Jung’s terms, “If the translation of the unconscious into a communicable language that reverberates proves successful, it has a redeeming [redemptive] effect. The liberating vision of the artist [or prophets] attracts us into itself so as to make itself real in time, changing the world in the process.”*40 Thus, the kingdom of God enters into history and constitutes a kairos.
The kingdom of God, or the messianic expectation, enters the psyche in moments of acute social crisis, as it did during the Second Awakening, when the future of slavery, of democracy, became a matter of collective decision. It is human beings who then place it—the kingdom of God—on the historical agenda as the task of human beings aided by God. (The deterministic worldview as we saw was repudiated during the Second Awakening.) Thus, the kingdom of God as a utopian or messianic vision enters history, galvanizes human beings, and gradually but suddenly seems imminent or at least within the realm of possibility.
Of course, it must be said: judged by eschatological standards, the Evangelical reformers’ own standards, the Second Great Awakening was a failure; the eschatological leap was not made, the defeat of the demonic powers turned out despite all the blood shed to be but temporary, the millennium was not ushered in. Moral suasion—contrary to the expectations of abolitionists like William Garrison, Theodore Weld, and others—had not led Southerners to voluntarily abolish slavery, although it greatly increased antislavery sentiment in the North and increased the rancor between North and South, thus becoming a catalyst for the Civil War, which led to the legal abolition of slavery. Contrary to the expectations of the abolitionists, the abolition of slavery was not followed by programs to implement racial equality. Racial caste oppression took on a new and ugly face in the Jim Crow system. Despite the limits of its accomplishments, the awakening of the first half of the nineteenth century “created the most powerful reform era in American history.”41 It eventually changed the norms of society: it anchored into the moral firmament of American culture the ideal of equal rights—first articulated by Jefferson—for women and men, as well as black and whites. But this is a far cry from the redemption of humanity that the great reformers had expected. The march of progress turned out to be a cycle of eternal return, as today we face, as a species, the greatest crisis in the history of humanity, one that could lead to the very annihilation of the species.
But according to H. Richard Niebuhr, in one sense the Second Awakening was a breakthrough: its most distinctive feature, one that endowed it with its vitality, was its recovery of the sense of immediacy and universality of the messianic vision (this had been first recovered in the First Awakening a century earlier)—what John L. Thomas described above as the era’s Romantic “perfectionism.” H. Richard Niebuhr stated that the idea of the imminence of God’s kingdom—with all that it promised for humanity—was “the dominant idea” of the nineteenth century (as discussed in this section above).
We have seen something of its power: how the messianic vision steeled abolitionists like Theodore Weld and informed Weld’s thought. It led the masses to reject established or ancient Christian church doctrines (some that Protestant Reformers borrowed from Augustine or the Catholic Church) and affirm a radically new interpretation of Christianity. It forged Christianity into an instrument of social reform as well of spiritual regeneration. It led the abolitionists to the revolutionary conclusion—asserted with prophetic fervor—that justice requires the abolition of slavery and the equality of all men. The messianic ideal has not been realized, but the memory of its power reminds us of the power of its memory as a potentially transformative force.
In the terms frequently used by Christian theologians, it is the promise of God.
The 1960s and the New Spiritual Awakening
William McLoughlin argues that there was a more recent revitalization movement in America. According to McLoughlin’s unique theory, the 1960s’ revolt and counterculture was the Fourth Great Awakening in American history.*41 Unlike the previous awakenings, it did not take a Christian form. This revitalization movement was a response to the crisis of liberalism and technocracy,42 as McLoughlin and others have documented. The events of the 1960s’ revolt and counterculture, as described by many participants and historians, bear a striking similarity to the Second Great Awakening, although McLoughlin was the only one who explicitly drew the analogy. Both upheavals combined a collective passion for social justice and equality with profound messianic hopes, and both were fueled by the belief in the perfectibility of human beings and society.
As I recall, by 1969 the 1960s’ political activists were possessed by a strong sense, a virtual certainty (I know I was, at seventeen years old), that the struggle to right the wrongs of the world would soon lead to “the revolution”—just as Weld, Finney, and the participants of the Second Awakening expected that their endeavors would bring about the millennium. The ideal of perfectionism (as exemplified in the nineteenth century) was reborn. The revolution would be an era of justice and peace and happiness. The intellectual leadership of the New Left of the 1960s had no sympathy for the state-socialism (or “state-capitalism,” as some Marxists saw it) of the Soviet Union, which they saw as a betrayal of the true socialist revolution. For the previous generation of former leftists who had become political conservatives, the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union was not a product—so they argued—of betrayal but of the messianic utopian ideology itself, Marxism, which by failing to accept the tragic limits of the human situation unleashed destructive passions that inevitably undermined the social order and paved the way for the advent of totalitarianism.
Although Christianity was out of favor in the 1960s, many activists and cultural rebels were inspired by the mysticism of the East as well as the pagan nature-religions of native Americans.43 The use of LSD and other consciousness-altering drugs led many of the young to turn to the more disciplined pursuit of mystical illuminations through transcendental meditation and other Eastern mystical disciplines. The fledgling ecology movement cultured a new reverence for the Earth. As in the nineteenth-century awakening, spiritual revitalization was fused with political activism, except that in the 1960s this movement was primarily restricted to the young, unlike previous eras.
The popular imagery of the counterculture as expressed in the poetry, popular literature, and folk and rock songs (such as the Beatles, Dylan, Joni Mitchell) was profoundly messianic and often drew on Judeo-Christian imagery and prophetic themes while rejecting or ignoring Christianity itself. Additionally, there were striking resemblances between rock concerts and hippie events (from Woodstock to “be-ins”) on the one hand and the revivalist meetings of the Second Awakening on the other.44 One might note also that the 1960s had its own equivalent of nineteenth-century preachers: savvy and eloquent spokespersons with a message of change and revolution were transformed into celebrities overnight and gained access to the media, where they preached their perfectionist gospel.
I include here a list of a few cultural icons who were messianic preachers of the 1960s. All presented their messianic ideal in different terms and images. None that were well-known used the terms messianic, or the kingdom of God—except for Martin Luther King Jr. and the Jewish rabbi, theologian, and civil rights and antiwar activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with King. Heschel did not become an iconic figure until he was rediscovered after his death in the early 1970s. The Berrigan brothers emphasized the prophetic more than the messianic, but the prophetic derived its strength from the messianic vision in Isaiah of “beating the swords into ploughshares.” These figures convey a sense of the variety of messianic archetypes evoked in the 1960s and early 1970s. The similarity to the revivalists of the Second Awakening is striking. They were not similar to modern revivalists, whose conservative or right-wing premillennialist beliefs are dissimilar from the early nineteenth-century preachers.
The visions of these cultural icons overlapped in many ways. Timothy Leary was the LSD guru who preached, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Leary himself was a Harvard psychologist who first used LSD in psychology experiments and ended up soon thereafter resigning from—dropping out of—Harvard. In the late ’60s he was imprisoned for possession of marijuana and was busted out of prison by a underground revolutionary group composed of former student leaders, the “Weathermen.” The Weatherman preached combining violent revolution with doing psychedelic drugs and listening to rock music. They hoped to recruit young hippies to their organization.
In music, there were the Beatles and Bob Dylan. In the early 1960s there was Abbie Hoffman, a New Left Jewish student who went south to participate in the civil rights movement; in the midsixties he became an antiwar activist, a political prankster (a “Groucho Marxist”), and a political hippie who took psychedelics and went on to politicize and radicalize many hippies in the mid- to late 1960s. In 1968, Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, Stew Albert, and a few others formed the Youth International Party (YIP). They had launched a new movement of “Yippies”—politically radical hippies devoted to the antiwar movement and social revolution. Allen Ginsberg was a peace activist, world famous beat poet, Hindu/Buddhist, preacher of “flower power,” who would sing Hindu hymns and chant “Ommm” at antiwar demonstrations. There was the elderly Herbert Marcuse, utopian Marxist philosopher, who was deemed “the ideological godfather of the New Left” by The New York Times. There was John Lennon, the Beatle who combined transcendental meditation with peace activism and who famously embarked on a “bed-in” in which he and Yoko Ono stayed in bed naked for several days in 1969 to protest the war in Vietnam (they invited the press in to look and received enormous publicity). Lennon also wrote a brief antiwar anthem that was repeatedly sung by millions at antiwar rallies, “All we are saying is, ‘Give peace a chance.’” That was sung as a refrain over and over, sometimes for a half an hour at a time. There was Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. There was Baba Ram Dass, a.k.a. Richard Alpert, former Harvard professor turned LSD guru (a colleague of Leary’s) who spent several years in India and became a Hindu swami, denounced the use of LSD, preached meditation, and wrote the famous bestseller Be Here Now.
There was Eldridge Cleaver, former criminal and prisoner who wrote an autobiography that was compared by critics to the work of James Baldwin. Cleaver became a Marxist and joined with street hoodlum turned revolutionary Huey Newton (unfortunately Newton remained secretly a hoodlum with a drug habit and a penchant for raping women) to form the Black Panther Party, which advocated cooperating with white people to agitate for a socialist revolution. There was psychiatrist R. D. Laing, discussed throughout this book. There were the two pacifist antiwar Catholic priests, the Berrigan brothers, who made headlines everywhere when they broke into Selective Service offices and destroyed the draft files. There was Tom Hayden, cofounder of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a New Left student activist who married movie star turned peace activist Jane Fonda. Hayden became a left Democrat politician in the 1970s. These are just a few of the many well known spokespersons and revolutionary icons of the 1960s.
McLoughlin observed that “the pietistic element in the counterculture found its symbol in the Woodstock Nation after a particularly idyllic concert festival in 1969.” McLoughlin thinks Joni Mitchell’s song Woodstock captured the revivalist mood of the three hundred thousand persons who participated in the event, the most famous symbol of the sixties era. The last verse follows.
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devils bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.45
“We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” is as explicit and poignant a Judeo-Christian messianic archetype as one could imagine.
McLoughlin writes, “In many respects the rock concerts and festivals deserve comparison to the old camp meetings, where people entered into a special arena of religious enthusiasm with like-minded souls seeking release from confusion and ready to ‘let loose’ in orgies of emotional enthusiasm. . . . In between these mass celebrations they carried the aura back into daily life” by listening to the songs on their radios or stereos. “They sang the new songs of liberation like gospel hymns.”46 It was as if the kingdom of God was stirring within the collective imagination of the youth of the 1960s. Once again a messianic-redemptive vision had captivated the hearts of young men and women.
It is a remarkable fact: the same kind of archetypes of renewal, redemption, death-rebirth, and messianic transformation that were activated in the Great Awakening of the nineteenth century—that were so clearly connected to the Jewish-Christian mythos—were reactivated among the youth of the 1960s who had repudiated Christianity and Judaism in favor of secular ideologies (e.g., neo-Marxism) or Eastern mysticism, which usually lacked a messianic element. Insofar as there was a messianic influence it was derived from secular philosophers who were neo-Marxists, like Herbert Marcuse. Or it was derived from the lyrics to the music. One ought also to mention the radicalizing effects of LSD and marijuana, which, when used—as was typical—in a sacramental way, almost always relativized the reality of modern Western culture and gave users the sense that it was one among many cultural constructs—and not a very good one at that.
Paul Levy describes how art and music helped the new consciousness to spread and change the world. In the following quote Levy explains the power of sixties “music”; these observations could also be accurate if one substitutes for “the music of the ’60s” the many demonstrations, slogans, and the happenings led by the secular preachers mentioned above, all of which received extensive publicity. The effect was cumulative.
Contagious in its effects, art can “virally” spread via the unconscious of our species in a way which liberates and unleashes a latent, creative energy lying dormant in the unconscious of humanity, which has the power to effect real change in the world. An example is the galvanizing influence that music began having in the 1960s—socially, politically, and on consciousness itself. The music of the ’60s was both an expression of an expanded consciousness, while simultaneously being the vibration, which precipitated and catalyzed the very expansion of consciousness of which it was an expression. In creatively translating what is being touched inside of themselves into a communicable language, the artist taps into forms, vibrations, and realizations that exist in the formless, atemporal realm—a dimension existing “outside of time”—that are waiting to be discovered, formulated, and brought forth at the right moment “in time.”47
The “revolution” the 1960s rebels dreamed about and expected did not occur—just as the millennium the reformers and abolitionists believed in did not occur. The masses were not converted. However, the 1960s had a powerful impact on social norms. Author, cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society, and 1960s radical activist Tom Hayden lists the accomplishments of the 1960s in his book The Long Sixties. These include the abolition of the military draft, voting rights for black people and for those aged eighteen to twenty-one, the Freedom of Information Act, and “tougher environmental and consumer and health and safety laws than any passed since.” In addition, there was “the decline of censorship” and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in the early 1970s by both houses of Congress, though it failed to gain ratification before its 1982 deadline.48 Oddly, Hayden does not specifically mention the establishment of a new cultural norm of equality between men and women. Some of these reforms have been vitiated by policies passed by George W. Bush and continued by Obama. The effects of the environmental laws have been vitiated by the far more toxic kinds of environmental practices that are now permitted and by the captivation of the regulatory agencies by representatives of the industries they are regulating. This is referred to as “the revolving door” between industry and government.
The Fourth Awakening did not succeed in effecting the kind of institutional changes that McLoughlin, the liberal historian of religion, still thought (in 1978) would soon be forthcoming in the form of political implementation of more cooperative, socialist (but not Marxist), and ecological policies. In fact, two years after McLoughlin made his predictions, Ronald Reagan was elected president. As Hayden put it, the gains of the 1960s were “not enough to stop the movement of repression still contained in a system that seeks pervasive control over lives and resources.”49
To the extent to which the 1960s counterculture was not aborted, in the ensuing decades it lost its subversive thrust as it became assimilated into modern society—reduced to a trend of fashion and identity politics and relegated to cultural niches such as the “the New Age” and academia.
It is possible that Mad Pride will be able to help to re-evoke messianic archetypes or even to develop a messianic paradigm like I have started to do in this book. The messianic imagery of the counterculture still ferments on the margins of the collective imagination, and it blazes today in the psyches of the mad alongside their apocalyptic terror: for, in the moments of their “mania,” the mad have always been convinced that the millennium is near.