Jesus Freaks by Don Lattin

Haight was, but the next day he headed back into the city to find out. He’d been raised in southern California, joined the military, and converted to Christianity through the work of a Baptist preacher at Travis Air Force Base northeast of San Francisco. Now, at age twenty-five, Kent was on his own mission from God.
    â€œSan Francisco,” MacKenzie’s sentimental ode to peace and love, was an instant worldwide hit when it was released in the spring of 1967. Now everyone knew about the strange vibrations emanating from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets.
    There was a cultural revolution erupting in this blue-collar neighborhood of dilapidated Victorians and struggling shops. Rents were cheaper than over in North Beach, where the edgy artists, Beat poets, and assorted hangers-on were losing their monopoly on hip. In Berkeley, on the other side of San Francisco Bay, the revolution was political and had a harder edge. It was mellow in the Haight. Golden Gate Park was just a few blocks away. What would come to be known as “the San Francisco sound” was taking shape in the form of rock bands like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. And there was this little chemical called LSD.
    Philpott got the call from God just weeks before the official opening of the Summer of Love. By then, the advance guard of the hippiemovement—led by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters—had already put on the Trips Festival, a drug-fueled celebration held in January 1966 at the Longshoremen’s Hall near Fisherman’s Wharf. A year later, there was the Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg chanted “We are one!” Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor and psychedelic evangelist, made his first public appearance in San Francisco. Hare Krishna devotees danced in ecstasy. Thousands of revelers poured onto the Polo Field, and the bands played on.
    That was just a warm-up for the summer of 1967, when the scene got very crowded and very crazy. Suddenly, it seemed like all the loose screws were rolling into San Francisco from across the nation and around the world. There was talk of peace and love, but there was also hunger, homelessness, rape, and lots of people strung out on drugs. For a freshly ordained street preacher, it was an evangelical gold mine.
    On his first day in the Haight, Philpott thought it wise to see what was happening—if anything—at an evangelical church close to ground zero. So he found his way to Hamilton Square Baptist Church and was looking in the window when a young man tapped him on the shoulder. “Would you like to meet someone who really knows God?” the man asked.
    Kent took the bait and began a lifelong friendship with David Hoyt.
    Hoyt had also grown up in southern California, but had a much rougher time of it than his newfound friend. He’d bounced around foster homes and juvenile halls and wound up in Lompoc Federal Penitentiary on a drug conviction. In prison, Hoyt passed the time reading about Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Eastern philosophies.
    Hoyt moved to San Francisco following his parole in September 1966. By the spring of 1967 he had become a disciple of Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, also known as the Hare Krishnas. That was whom David Hoyt wanted Kent Philpott to meet. Krishna was the god he was talking about. But that didn’t stop the Baptist preacher and the Krishna devotee from developing a close friendship. They got together often, Kent with his well-worn Bible and David holding his copy of the BhagavadGita. “He’d try to convert me to Hinduism,” Philpott recalled, “while I taught him scripture.” 1
    When Hoyt moved into the Hare Krishna temple in San Francisco, he and Philpott continued their Bible study in the basement and drew in a few other students at the temple. “When the Swami heard