To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.
Christopher Lasch, “The Narcissistic Society”
The Jesus Revolution was primarily a youth movement. It exploded with great vigor and fervor, and as its people got older, its dramatic presence in the American consciousness gently faded away. The young Jesus converts like Greg Laurie grew up. They settled down, married, and began having children. They started churches, careers, and ministries. Some went to the mission field, either in the US or in faraway places. Some went into politics or business or the law. Some became priests. Some wrote books, recorded albums, had reunions, and laughed when they looked at old photos of their hippie days. It was a new season.
The broader culture of the baby boomers changed as well. The revolutionary fervor and energy that had characterized the ’60s shifted to a more cynical, less activist status quo. Two enormously different events shaped this transition. They were very different, but at the most fundamental level they shared the same dark root: humankind’s insatiable hunger to gain and retain power, regardless of the cost.
The first is the specter that grew in the ’50s and ’60s, convulsed in the ’70s, and has haunted America ever since. The Vietnam War.
The second is the scandal that began with a third-rate political burglary at a Washington office complex and became a cover-up that toppled a president. Watergate.
The ’70s were surely shaped by other events as well. In May 1970, National Guard troops killed four students during an antiwar protest at Kent State University. In 1971 the first microprocessor computer chips were developed. In the winter and spring of 1972, President Nixon made historic and unprecedented trips to China and Moscow. That fall he won a landslide reelection to the presidency.
In January 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that a woman could not be prevented by her state from having an abortion in the first six months of pregnancy. That same month the Watergate burglars were convicted, and presidential aides started bailing out, one by one, to reveal a massive cover-up at the highest levels of government. The nation became aware of a White House taping system whose big reel-to-reel tapes had relentlessly recorded the conversations that had shaped history.
For example, Richard Nixon told a speechwriter in 1968 that he had “come to the conclusion that there’s no way to win the war” in Vietnam. He continued, “But we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage.”1 The war would go on spilling certain blood for uncertain reasons for five more years, until the US pulled its last troops out of Vietnam in 1973.
After the start of the Arab-Israeli War in October 1973, oil imports from Arab nations were banned in the US, creating an energy crisis. In May of ’74, impeachment hearings began against President Nixon in the House Judiciary Committee. On August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the office of the presidency. Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president. No doubt wishing he was playing golf somewhere in a land far, far away, one of his first official acts was to pardon Nixon in an effort to spare the nation the ongoing pain of a long, ugly trial.
In April 1975, a guy named Bill Gates and his buddy Paul Allen started a little company; they called it Microsoft.
At the end of that month, North Vietnamese forces completed their takeover of South Vietnam as American embassy staff hurriedly abandoned Saigon. The communist regime’s blood-red flag with its yellow star flew over the former capital, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
President Ford survived two assassination attempts, one by former Manson Family devotee Squeaky Fromm, who showed up with a gun a few feet away from the president at a Sacramento event. (She later explained that she had wanted to make a statement against environmental pollution and its effects on air, trees, water, and animals. Fortunately for Mr. Ford, her pistol jammed.)
In late 1975, a guy named Gary Dahl began selling egg-sized stones, nestled in straw, in cardboard boxes complete with air holes. Pet Rocks were an immediate sensation and made Dahl a millionaire. The New York Times later opined, “The concept of a ‘pet’ that required no actual work and no real commitment resonated with the self-indulgent ’70s, and before long a cultural phenomenon was born.”2
By 1976, two geniuses named Steve created the first Apple desktop computer. Steve Jobs sold his VW Microbus to finance their venture; Steve Wozniak sold his calculator. The wood-cased, hand-built personal computer was the new Apple company’s first product. Jimmy Carter was elected president. Bolstered by Carter’s outspoken faith and the 1976 conversion autobiography of one of Nixon’s most notorious henchmen, Chuck Colson, “born again” became a familiar term in the public lexicon. Newsweek magazine proclaimed 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical”; its cover story made no mention of the Jesus Movement. America celebrated her bicentennial.
As the ’70s wound down, a movie called Star Wars became the top-grossing film of its time. President Carter presided over the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. The first Polish pope, John Paul II, was elected. He would play a key role in the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union. In 1977, Saturday Night Fever hit movie screens, celebrating the last popular music movement that was driven by the baby boomer generation: disco.
In the fall of 1978, more than nine hundred members of a “rainbow family of equality” followed the instructions of their malevolent leader, Jim Jones, and killed themselves with cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in their commune in Guyana. The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant had a partial core meltdown, fanning fears of environmental disaster. Sixty-three Americans were among ninety hostages taken at the American embassy in Iran by radical followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had deposed America’s former ally, the Shah of Iran. By the summer of ’79, the nation was preoccupied with yet another oil crisis, long gas lines, habitual disillusionment, and a brand-new fear—Islamic fundamentalism.
For those who lived through the ’70s, these factoids create a dot-to-dot narrative where memories fill in the blanks. For those who didn’t, it’s a Forrest Gump–style survey of a time long gone.
Vietnam tore up a generation. Its prisoners of war came home with tales of hard-core patriotism and faith that pulled them through their long days and terrible nights in captivity. They and other vets were met with jeers, insults, and derision. People called them “baby-killers.” Popular films released in the late ’70s, such as The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, showed the misery, evil, moral ambiguity, and horrors of the war in a way that shocked armchair Americans. More than fifty-eight thousand American service members died in the war, their names now engraved on a long black wall of stone in Washington, DC. Hundreds of thousands of other young men and women were physically and psychologically wounded. The war created a widespread, powerful tide of betrayal, shame, mourning, waste, suspicion, and deep, deep sadness.
The gradual reveal that was Watergate, so soon after Vietnam, augmented the effect, generating a perfect storm. If US presidents from Kennedy through Nixon had deceived Americans about the war in Vietnam, now Nixon’s profanity-filled tirades, neuroses, and lies created a profound, weary distrust and malaise in America.
Historians like to point to one speech by President Jimmy Carter that spoke to the prevailing mood of the late ’70s. It’s known as “the Malaise Speech,” though Carter never used that depressing word in it. Speaking from the White House in July 1979, Mr. Carter earnestly told Americans:
I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. . . . It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. . . .
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.3
Mr. Carter went on to expand on the pressing issue of the moment, the energy crisis caused by turmoil in the Middle East. He asked Americans to use public transportation or carpools to save fuel, to turn down their thermostats, and to obey the speed limit.
But it’s unlikely those energy-saving tips would in fact create a new strength in America. The crisis Carter identified went deeper than the cost of gas. It wasn’t just a crisis of confidence. It was a deeper crisis of cynicism.
The mood was very different from the revolutionary tone of the ’60s. Chaotic as they are, revolutions are expressions of hope. They are fueled by the belief that change can happen and that it will bring a desired result.
The tone of the late ’70s was less idealistic and less hopeful. It lacked the generous, group-oriented spirit of the ’60s. It was far more focused on the self than the community. President Carter’s speech warned:
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.4
A few years before President Carter’s speech, the celebrated cultural commentator Tom Wolfe made his own analysis of the decade in an article in New York magazine. Wolfe profiled the ’70s as a movement away from the communitarianism of the hippie movement and toward a new celebration of the individual. He called the new time period in which America found herself “the Me Decade.” The pendulum of history had swung from the antimaterialistic, communal revolution of the flower people to a more consumer-centered, individualistic, selfie default that seems to have reigned ever since.
The Me Decade marched onward into the 1980s, the 1990s, and the new millennium of the post–9/11 world. America saw the rise of the Moral Majority and other faith-based movements of evangelical involvement in politics. Ronald Reagan ambled into the White House. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War came to an end. The economy boomed, as did Christian parachurch ministries, movements like Promise Keepers, and new, growing megachurches all over the United States. As always, there were ample political and sexual scandals, and the rather spectacular downfalls of soiled televangelist empires. The stock market soared, crashed, and soared again. Progressive social movements unleashed in the ’60s grew in their mainstream power. Wars and rumors of wars tore up the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. True racial and ethnic reconciliation was still a dream. Drugs continued to destroy the lives of countless young people. Characters as disparate as Bushes, Clintons, Obamas, and Trumps occupied the White House. And still, as Sonny and Cher sang in 1967, the beat goes on.
Back in 1979, Pastor Chuck Smith reflected on life, history, and all he had seen God do in the Jesus Revolution. He wrote a book called End Times. He wrote that he believed the world could end by 1981. He acknowledged he could well be wrong.
He was.
But still, one era was ending in America, and a different world was emerging.