Parable About the Origins of the Counterculure

Posted : 27 Jul, 2011 02:00 PM

This is something different taken from a book, The Great Rebellion: A Biblical Scrutiny of the Popular Culture or 1962-85 and Its Christian Versions



When I sent the manuscript of this book to a Christian book house, the editor answered and said the church was not interested in the counterculture. What he meant is that the manuscript did not fit any category the editors of Christian books then thought would be best sellers. It was self-published and distributed by Puritan Reformed Discount Book Service.



Suppose you could design a whole New Culture

that you think would so weaken American Christianity that it would no

longer be a vital force in society...



Part of your plan would be to create a kind of drouth of culture and

spirituality in the fifties so people would soon be starving for

culture and spirituality. Then, when the New Culture began to arrive,

it would be very exciting and would be the "springtime of the cultural

revolution." At first only a few thousand people would be involved in

the New Culture, from about 1959 to 1963. But then a few years later

it would grow to include millions of participants.



The early excitement of the "cultural revolution" and artistic

bohemianism of about 1959 to 1968 was like experiencing a long wanted

rain on sun-parched and whitened ground in the Southwest. After a long

and hard drouth, when rain does finally come, its smell on that dry

soil is so invigorating and delightful. So, in the late fifties there

was for a few people some promise of a cultural rain. We waited for it

like old George West who sat up there on top of his huge pile of

skulls from his longhorns, dead from lack of rain, looking southeast

to the Gulf of Mexico for rain that would bring relief to his herds in

South Texas.



The art bohemians were the first cultural rain, and then in 1962 came

the drug movement under psychologists Tim Leary and Richard Alpert.

Soon we had self psychology and humanistic psychotherapy and an added

interest in all kinds substitute religions and pseudo-spiritual

experiencing. In 1966 the hippies came on the scene, and the feminists

got going strong by 1970. It rained and rained liberating movements,

all designed to free us from the restraints of pleasure and

self-fulfillment which many thought were part of Christianity. After

it starts to rain and the rain keeping going, it takes a while for all

the little streams to get to the Big River and fill it to flood stage.

By the early seventies the more negative side of all these movements

flowed together into one New Popular Culture. But before the national

media sold the New Culture on a mass scale there was a social

openness, some trust, creativity, expansiveness and excitement going

for a few thousand followers of the avant-garde then.



By the late seventies the Big River was way above flood stage. The

flooded Big River is the New Culture. By 1978 just about everybody was

being swept downstream in the middle of the Big River, which is the

late 20th century popular culture. Some people in the backwoods are

not being swept along as fast...By the end of the seventies most

Christians and non-Christians were just drifting along under the

beguilement of the New Culture. If you had been the designer of all

this, things would have seemed to be working according to plan.



The current out there in the middle of the Big River was fearfully

swift by 1980 and there were strong undertows that could pull you

under. The use of hard drugs is one dangerous undertow. So is the

drift into the occult. There are mills of people out there in the

current of the New Culture. Like dumb cattle, people follow one another around

swimming in circles, until they go under and may drown.



The New Culture and its Christian versions were designed to make sure

it would be very hard to swim against that flood current all alone.

Only a good swimming horse will take us back upstream against that

strong current of the New Culture - which is both outside and inside

of American Christianity. But one does not sit up there proudly on the

great swimming horse, which is the word of God, and ride the

river...You throw off all the heavy gear - saddle, bridle, boots,

spurs, ten gallon hat, six-shooter and ducking coat - and hang on to

the horse. He will land you safe on solid Biblical ground upstream.



Being blind, these New Culture people just follow the mill of people.

The full effect of some of these mills was not to be fully felt until

the children of the families that were broken in the mills and in the

quests began to turn to crime in the late seventies. From 1972 to

1981, violent crime rose 44 percent.

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