Jesus Freaks by Don Lattin Page A

about me, I had to explain what I was doing,” Philpott recalled. “He agreed to let me continue if I came to their worship—the kirtan— and stayed for an hour and a half of chanting. They’d go on and on dancing and chanting until they worked themselves into a frenzy. It was like being out on Hippie Hill on acid listening to the Grateful Dead, but it was a worship service. After the kirtan , David and I would go in the basement and study the Bible.”
    Jesus would prevail over Krishna, but it took a dream and a fire to seal Hoyt’s conversion. Asleep one night in the temple basement, David dreamt that he was missing out on the Rapture—that all the true Christians all around him were rising up into heaven while his feet stayed on the ground. Then he woke up to find his personal altar ablaze. “I always thought he just left a candle burning,” Philpott mused. “But David attributed it to God.”
    Hoyt moved into Philpott’s room at the Baptist seminary in Marin County and stayed through the Summer of Love. “We started an intense on-the-street ministry that summer,” Kent recalled. “We’d just walk up to people and tell them about Jesus. That was the whole thing. We didn’t even have any literature, but we sure went to town. We were there all the time.”
    They didn’t know it at the time, but Kent and David were helping birth the Jesus movement, a wave of counterculture conversion that would alter the face of American Christianity. Some called them “Jesus people.” Others preferred the term “Jesus freaks.” By the end of the year, another group of Marin County converts had opened up a coffeehouse in the Haight called the Living Room and soon took their mission down to southern California, opening two more Christian communes. Theologically, they were conservative evangelicals, but sociologically, they kept many of the trappings and the values of the emerging sixties counterculture.
    Across the bay in Berkeley, the Jesus movement took form as the Christian World Liberation Front. Jack Sparks, a Pennsylvania State University professor who had been involved with the evangelical Campus Crusade for Christ, started the group and an underground Christian newspaper called Right On , which blended the love of Jesus with the radical rap of the New Left. Here’s a sample from a Christian World Liberation Front tract entitled “The Second Letter to the Christians.”
    Dig it! God has really laid a heavy love on us! He calls us His children and we are! The world system doesn’t recognize that we’re His children because it doesn’t know Him. Right on, brothers and sisters, we are God’s children even though we’re a long way from being what He’s going to make us. Don’t get hooked on the ego-tripping world system. Anybody who loves that system doesn’t really love God…. That world system is going to be gone some day and along with it, all desire for what it has to offer; but anyone who follows God’s plan for his life will live forever. Dig it! This whole plastic bag is exactly what Jesus liberated us from. 2
    Two of the fastest-growing evangelical churches of the seventies and eighties—Calvary Chapel and Vineyard Fellowship—were fueled by the Jesus movement of the late sixties. Chuck Smith, who started Calvary Chapel in late 1965, was not an early fan of the hippies. “These long-haired, bearded dirty kids going around the streets repulsed me,” he later wrote. “They stood for everything I stood against. We were miles apart in our thinking, philosophies, everything.” 3
    To many Americans, the Jesus freaks were a contradiction in terms. The counterculture was supposed to be about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Evangelicals were supposed to be about piety and sexual purity. But evangelical Christians—especially before the rise of the religious right and its