Progressive and Conservative Religious Ideologies

The Tumultuous Decade of the 1960s

Richard Lints

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317075240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

This book explores the surprisingly disruptive role of religion for progressive and conservative ideologies in the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. Conservative movements were far more progressive than the standard religious narrative of the decade alleges and the notoriously progressive ethos of the era was far more conservative than our collective memory has recognized. Lints explores how the themes of protest and retrieval intersect each other in ironic ways in the significant concrete controversies of the 1960s - the Civil Rights Movement, Second Feminist Movement, The Jesus Movements, and the Anti-War Movements - and in the conceptual conflicts of ideas during the era - The Death of God Movement, the end of ideology controversy, and the death of foundationalism. Lints argues that religion and religious ideologies serve both a prophetic function as well as a domesticating one, and that neither "conservative" nor "progressive" movements have cornered the market in either direction. In the process Lints helps us better understand the complex role of religion in cultural formation.

PART I
Protest as Upheaval and Retrieval

Chapter 1
Revolutions and Ruins: The 1960s and the Paradoxes of Interpretation

There is a good deal of anxiety about the direction of American life. In fact there is reason to fear that America may be entering a moral and political crisis.

Susan Sontag (1966)1

Introduction: The 1960s and the Emergence of Postmodernism

An archeological search into the eruption of ideological forces in the 1960s is difficult because the original formations are often hidden beneath layers of emotional scars still present from that tumultuous decade. In this regard, the sixties remain a time deeply covered by a shroud of passion.2 It was a time of great catharsis for America and most especially for those whose lives became identified with the radical changes occurring in that era. Those who experienced the decade first-hand rarely ever remember it with indifference. Few have ventured to write about the tumultuous decade without a profound recognition of their own disturbing experience in that period.3 It was a time, both beloved and despised. It was a radical era with radical causes, carried on in radical ways by radical people singing radical songs.

Learned reflection upon the decade bears out a sense of eruption and upheaval. The decade has been variously referred to as the “Fourth Great Awakening,”4 “America’s cultural revolution,”5 “the secular revolution,”6 “the savage sixties”7 “the destructive generation,”8 “the nervous generation,”9 “the seismic sixties,”10 “America’s suicide attempt,”11 “the slum decade”12 and “the age of rubbish,” a phrase the late intellectual historian Richard Hofstadter promised he would use as a title if he ever undertook to write a history of the United States during the 1960s.13 As the titles suggest, the radical character of the decade suggested a radical break from the past and yet an uncertain future. The straightforward question to begin: Why were the changes radical?14

Politics is the conventional key that often unlocks the interpretive door in this period and therefore presidential politics inevitably are foundational to the collective written memory of the decade.15 Vietnam and the four tragic public assassinations (John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X) are most often seen through this lens. The “story” of the decade is normally narrated in terms of radical political events and in part this is accurate. But the radicalization of politics surely is part of a much larger story. Everything from music to students to sex to architecture to religion had “radical” subplots, which explained their significance in and for this period. “Radicalization” was the strange social glue which held the 1960s together, one of whose manifestations was in politics but by no means wholly defined by politics.

In the decades that followed, this radicalization was often interpreted with the tools of the culture war typology. This supposed that the conflicts were essentially political in nature and that these conflicts happened along a right-to-left (conservative to liberal) spectrum. The common stereotype has claimed that the “radical” movement of the decade was decidedly from the left against the right. The defining issues along this spectrum were political and most especially having to do with political authority. “Who would determine the fate of the nation?” seemed an ever present question looming over the cultural horizon in the decade. The radicalization of the decade was interpreted as an attempt to wrest (political) control away from the traditional forces of government (and to a lesser extent the church). The narrative of this radicalization appeared to suppose that the real action in the decade was fundamentally progressive, orienting itself towards yet greater freedom from institutional controls.16 The conservative side of the decade was primarily a reaction against this push for freedom. Or so a standard culture war typology suggested.

There is an important paradox in the interpretation of the 1960s. The nature of this paradox has lied behind the central interpretive question of the decade—was the Sixties a decade of promise or peril? Did the decade mark the ending of an era and thereby the establishment of a new age or did it mark a climatic crisis for a secular society and thereby hearken the nation back to its roots? Was it a decade for optimism or pessimism?

The traditional answer has been—it depends upon your perspective? If you were a progressive you viewed the sixties as a time of hope—the old establishment paradigm was collapsing and a window of opportunity for a new age of racial, gender and ethnic liberty and equality had been opened. If you were a traditionalist you viewed the sixties as a time of horror which thankfully woke the faithful up and launched us into a search for and a potential recovery of significant aspects of the nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage. Neither the conservative nor progressive interpretations of the 1960s adequately accounts for the complexity of the religious realities of that age though they manifest a vital component of the paradox. The crises of the sixties were at one and the same time animated by a retrieval as well as a criticism of the past. The retrieval of the past could be used for liberal and progressive causes as well as conservative ones, suggesting that “liberal” and “conservative” may not be sufficiently rich enough categories to explain the complexities of the decade. There were different thrusts and perspectives in the retrieval of older submerged subplots in America’s history as a means of criticizing the general direction of that history. Appearing as polar opposites on the surface, diverse movements could equally protest the tragic distortions of America’s identity. They might equally view themselves as outsiders to the nation, while also believing they possessed inalienable rights to be insiders.17

On a standard reading of the decade, the so called “right hand side” of the spectrum was committed to conserving the past including its traditions, customs, moralities, authorities and so on. The left hand side of the spectrum, by contrast sought to distance itself from the past locating the promise of the future in the freedom from the past. The political dimension of the culture wars suggested the central split right to left, had to do with this issue of authority, and specifically the authority to frame the political destiny of individuals. Traditionalists were interpreted as seeing the meaning of life as a “given” and therefore public institutions of control (government) were called to protect the older order.18 Progressives were interpreted as seeing political destiny as fluid, emerging from each individual’s own creativity.

Appearances sometimes were deceiving. The rhetoric of the culture wars was present in the decade and there can be little doubt that the cultural tension was often experienced (as well as interpreted) along a right-to-left spectrum. But overshadowed is the reality that both the right and the left saw themselves as outsiders during the decade. The radicalization of the decade occurred at both ends of the spectrum.19 The relative success of each was determined in large measure by their ability to portray the revolt as one against the establishment. The establishment was interpreted as too liberal by conservatives and too conservative by liberals but the tools of dissent belie a facile characterization of either side as simply “right” or “left.” The movement of disestablishment of the 1960s had many sides to it and all sides used analogous strategies against their common enemy—establishment liberalism. In this regard, criticism of the establishment was not homogenous, but enormously complex and varied. To use another metaphor, the cultural conflict of the 1960s was triangular in shape. The missing element in the standard bipolar culture war typology is the “middle.”20 The establishment was the power broker denying the fundamental goals of both right and left, and equally despised by both ends. Its pragmatism was resented on the right by those who believed in transcendent values and feared governmental influence over individual confession and conviction. The critical realism of the establishment offended those on the left who believed in the promise of each individual and feared the government protected the rights of too few individuals. In other words the story is more complicated than the standard typology permits, though the resilience of that typology points at an enduring truth, America’s identity was indeed under siege in the 1960s and afterwards.21 The character of that revolution is the point of the present work, as I’ve suggested, and will later argue the depiction of the revolution may be helpfully enriched by the constructs of modernity and postmodernism.

The revolution encompassed a culture war but was not exhausted by it. The concern is, therefore, less with a social chronology of the 1960s, than it is an interpretation of the decade against the backdrop of stereotypes as a way to better understand the complexity of the decade. The intent is to see the forest in spite of the familiarity of the trees, or maybe to see some trees that haven’t been seen because of the familiarity of the forest. Paying attention to the religious dimension of the revolutionary episodes in the decade reveals how ironic the forces of protest actually were. At the very height of modern secularity, religion of many varieties made surprising comebacks. Even while God was declared dead on the cover of Time Magazine in 1965, the Jesus People with their long hair and rock music provided a striking reminder that the young generation could be both radical and religious. The decade was a conflict of values but those values were not easy to predict by their cultural styles. Religious values in particular were rooted in diverse religious communities and arose from deeply conflicted theological schemes with differing approaches to cultural engagement which made it hard to determine the sides by the color of the (cultural) uniforms.

There are two significant and complex components often overshadowed in the traditional political narrative by which the story of the 1960s has been remembered. These are disestablishment and democratization. The disestablishment of the 1960s, in retrospect, was the abandoning of modernism with its emphasis upon technique and mechanization and the embrace (in a qualified sense) of postmodernism with its emphasis upon irony and ambiguity. The surest sign of this in the 1960s was the pervasive loss of hope, which had been engendered by the project of modernity. The nation witnessed the apparent collapse of its own salvation history (otherwise known as cultural progress) in this period. The cloak of liberalism, which had clothed the nation since early in the twentieth century, appeared to come apart at the seams. Disestablishment was inevitably accompanied by disillusionment. The patient (America) got sick somewhere in the decade and almost everyone could feel its effects, though they may have (violently) disagreed as to its cure. Ironically, the patient had never appeared stronger than she did as the decade began. The nation’s victory in World War II, the economic boom of the 1950s and the massive new space program each held out the promise of an endlessly bright future. But by the end of the decade, the future seemed by contrast rather bleak. The race riots, the War in Vietnam and Watergate all conspired to burst the bubble of hope. The nation began to doubt itself, questioning not only its moral virtue but also its long perceived manifest destiny as the melting pot of cultures. Increasingly it appeared the melting pot had boiled over and everyone seemed scorched by it.

The legacy of disestablishment in American history is a well established pattern, but in the 1960s, political and religious enemies sought together to remove the powers that be. These powers-that-be represented an entrenched authority fundamentally at odds with the goals of the outsiders. Almost everyone thought of themselves as an outsider, each in their own way thinking of themselves as a victim of America’s past. When the move to disestablish was combined with a prophetic impulse, the nation was brought to a breaking point. The Civil Rights Movement and the New Right in very different ways each relied on resources of sacred values to push their agendas against a secular pragmatism of the entrenched establishment. The prophetic rhetoric of both movements was rooted not only in their role as outsiders but also in their recovery of older notions of transcendent truth. They each delivered harsh criticism of America’s compromises with big business and the commercial establishment. They might have held starkly different visions of the future but their prophetic edge proved too powerful for the sustaining of a flaccid and optimistic secularism. Even as some theologians celebrated the age of secularity, some secularists decried its anti-religious character. The roles played out in a century old warfare between science and religion were quietly reversed as the history of science was unveiled as religious-like in its fundamental commitments, and religion reentered the public square with a vengeance. At the end of the 1960s the nation no longer seemed sure of where it was going, though clear that it needed to change.

A second complicating theme in the story of the 1960s was democratization. A persistent thread that appeared woven throughout America’s past was its protection of individual freedoms. The nation was continually “moving west” in its own mind, conquering new frontiers by the courage of rugged individuals. Not until the 1960s was there a realization that many groups had been trampled upon in America’s...