Remember when we were gonna not only change the world, but completely rearrange it?
The Jesus Movement was seeded by the Spirit in the soil of the massive social unrest of the 1960′s. Many Boomers who came of age during this era learned that the military-industrial cabal responsible for U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, the Cold War, Agent Orange, and Wonder Bread needed to be dismantled. Young people discovered their voices as they questioned authority in the form of dissent, protest, and in the case of a few extreme groups, domestic terrorism.
For those of us during those years who came to faith in a Jesus even more radical than the radical politics espoused by many of hippie age peers, many of us felt deeply about the war, environment, and the proliferation of nuclear arms. I knew a few believers who moved into left-leaning Mennonite-influenced communal living arrangements founded on non-violence and granola. But for every young Jesus person who made that choice, a hundred more found the spark for their political activism lit by social issues. The sex, drugs, and rock `n roll zeitgeist of the 1960′s crashed head-on into a brand-new wave of Jesus followers who’d repented of it all in order to follow him. The 1973 Roe V. Wade decision by the Supreme Court made abortion legal in this country, and served as a touchpoint for political activism among many of these newly-minted conservative voters. [Read more]
