Jesus Movement

Topic: Religious Folk Music Revival
The word “beatnik” began as a reference to Beat poets and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. [1]  The theme of his 1957 novel was at least as old as Huckleberry Finn. [2]  Television producers transformed it into Route 66 in 1960. [3]

Hippies replaced beatniks in 1967 as romantic outsiders.  Many in the nation first became aware of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in January, when the local underground newspaper staged a mass protest against California’s ban on LSD.  The Human Be-In featured Timothy Leary, who endorsed LSD; Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who promoted Buddhist and Hindu beliefs, and local music groups like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. [4]

Youth from around the country began descending on San Francisco over spring break.  They kept coming.  It became the Summer of Love when flower children and hippies and drugs were everywhere. [5]  The Monterey Pop Festival in June gave acid rock bands a megaphone. [6]

The word “hippie” became a generic term for a persona, wearing jeans and letting one’s hair grow long.  While the term was associated with the drug culture of marijuana, it covered everyone from those, like Janis Joplin, [7] with serious problems to ones who continued smoking recreational pot.  In between were people like Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary who experimented, but rejected it in 1969, [8] and those who saw the effects on their friends in junior high school and never tried any substance.

Evangelists responded to the proliferation of drugs with techniques that went back to groups like the Salvation Army, [9] who had opened missions on Skid Rows in the nineteenth century to save the souls of alcoholics by reforming them.  Arthur Blessit ran a nightclub on Sunset Strip in 1965 to convert prostitutes and drug addicts. [10]  Ted Wise opened a coffee house near the intersection of Haight and Ashbury in 1967. [11]  Both were Southern Baptists. [12]

Lonnie Frisbee was the prototypical convert.  He had a vision of Jesus calling him to proselytize when he was on an LSD trip. [13]  Wise found him preaching on the streets, and took him back to his religious commune north of San Francisco. [14]

Later, John Nicholson gave Frisbee a ride when he was hitchhiking south.  Nicholson’s girlfriend’s father wanted to meet a real hippie, so he introduced the two. [15]

Chuck Smith was pastor of a small church in Costa Mesa in Orange County.  Both he [16] and Calvary Chapel had been associated with Aimee Semple MacPherson’s Four Square Gospel Church, but had left it. [17]  Smith hired Frisbee to help run a half-way house for drug users, the House of Miracles. [18]

Frisbee went into the streets to bear witness to Christ, and took his converts back to Calvary Chapel. [19]  The usual meeting began with “two hours of music and testimony”followed by forty-five minutes of Bible study led by Smith. [20]

Smith’s theology, like that of many involved with the Jesus People Movement, was premillennial. [21]  Their belief that the apocalypse was near mirrored protest movements against the War in Vietnam and in the South.  Barry McGuire’s recording of “The Eve of Destruction” [22] had reached the Billboard charts in 1965. [23]

Premillennialism hadn’t disappeared after the Holiness manifestations in the 1890s. [24]  Matthew Sutton found supporters of Prohibition turned to its philosophy when Franklin Roosevelt was elected.  The head of First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood wrote: “The results of the past election in our beloved country tend to confirm the conviction that we are living in the end days of human government in the earth. . . . Surely the Lord must be at hand!” [25]

The founding of Israel in 1948 reignited it.  Frisbee believed the Six-Day War of 1967 marked the beginning of the final days.  He cited Joel, who had predicted that, after a battle, God would “pour out my spirit on all flesh,” that “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,” and “your young men shall see visions” as the explanation for the Jesus People. [26]

Speaking in tongues was not an attempt to contact the world of the spirits, as it had been in Los Angeles in 1908 when William Seymour was holding his revival on Azusa Street. [27]  It was a sign, one among many, that an individual would be among the protected when Doomsday arrived. [28]

This was the same division that had occurred after Cane Ridge, when Presbyterians rejected the emotional aspects of the revival and groups like the Cumberland Presbyterians broke away. [29]  The same cleavage yawned in the early 1900s when middle class whites shied away from what they saw as the excesses of Seymour’s revival.  The leading Presbyterian theologian argued the age of charismatic gifts had ended with the Apostles. [30]

When an Episcopal minister in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles reported “he had received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit” in 1960, he was forced to resign. [31]  Likewise, George Bradford was forced out of his Presbyterian pulpit in 1968. [32]

Many of the cities in Southern California had welcomed large numbers of Southerners who came to work in the shipyards, war production plants, and military bases in World War II. [33]  They aspired to the middle class, and many associated speaking in tongues with lower-class people back home.  Another of the Jesus Movement leaders declared:

“We don’t believe in wild-eyed fanaticism.  We’re not holy rollers.  We don’t toss babies up in the air or handle snakes.” [34]

Attitudes were changing.   The son of a Hollywood Presbyterian minister admitted people in his Bel Air congregation were speaking in tongues in 1963, [35] but doing it in private groups, not in public meetings. [36]  When another minister appealed his firing for speaking in tongues in 1968, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church ruled that espousing charismatic gifts was not grounds for termination. [37]  It formed a committee, who recommended they be accepted, if properly interpreted. [38]  After all, Calvin had not ruled them out, only said they had disappeared from lack of faith. [39]

Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the Four-Square Gospel Church, had been ambivalent about public manifestations of religious experience.  She set aside a separate space for individuals who were overtaken by the Holy Spirit, so they wouldn’t disturb the larger crowd she was attracting with her faith healing. [40]

Smith had a similar aversion to public, rather than private, displays.  He felt that outbursts of glossolalia “demonstrated insensitivity to decorum and common sense” [41] and that “teaching of the word is an ‘act of prophecy that edifies the whole body and is superior to speaking in a mysterious tongue’.” [42]

Frisbee’s earliest religious experiences had been in his grandmother’s Pentecostal church.  He remembered a Calvary Church meeting where the musicians had “ushered in the tangible presence of God into our midst—which is the absolute goal of worship.” [43]  He left in 1971. [44]

End Notes
1.  Jack Kerouac.  On the Road.  New York: Viking Press, 1957.

2.  Mark Twain.  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885.

3.  Dennis MacNally.  Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America.  New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1979.  272.  Cited by Wikipedia.  “Route 66 (TV Series).”

Katie Mills.  The Road Story and the Rebel; Moving Through Film, Fiction and Television.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006.  Cited by Wikipedia.  “Jack Kerouac.”

4.  Danny Goldberg.  “All the Human Be-In Was Saying 50 Years Ago, Was Give Peace a Chance.”  The Nation website.  13 January 2017.  The newspaper was the San Francisco Oracle.

5.  Wikipedia.  “Summer of Love.”

6.  Wikipedia.  “Monterey Pop Festival.”  The festival was organized by John Phillips, then of the Mamas and Papas.  He was discussed in the posts for 13 October 2019 and 20 October 2019 as part of The Journeymen.

7.  Wikipedia.  “Janis Joplin.”  She died in 1970 from an overdose of heroin.

8.  Paul Stookey was converted in 1968. [45]  He often used the name Noel Stookey or Noel Paul Stookey on his Christian songs.

9.  Lonnie Frisbee recalled “we got the concept for the Living Room of ‘soup, soap, and the gospel’ from General Booth, the man who established the Salvation. Army.” [46]  Booth was William Booth.

10.  Edward E. Plowman.  The Jesus Movement in America.  Elgin, Illinois: David C. Cook Publishing Company, 1971.  46.

11.  Plowman.  43–44.

Mark Ellis.  “Communal ‘Hippie House’ in S.F. Bay Area Was Ground Zero for Jesus Movement.”  God Reports website.  30 August 2018.

12.  On Blessitt:  Plowman, 46, and Larry Eskridge, “Jesus People Movement,” World Religions and Spirituality website, 15 October 2016.

On Wise: Eskridge.  The commune-coffeehouse was run by four couples: “Ted and Elizabeth Wise, Steve and Sandy Heefner, Jim and Judy Dopp, and Danny and Sandy Sands.” [47]

13.  Lonnie Frisbee.  Not by Might Nor by Power: The Jesus Revolution.  With Roger Sachs.  Santa Maria, California: Freedom Publications, 2017, second edition.  42–43.  Paul Fahy brought this to my attention in “Lonnie Frisbee: The Problem of Charismatic Hypocrisy.”  Understanding Ministries website.  2016.

14.  Frisbee.  44.
15.  Frisbee.  66–67.

16.  Randall Balmer and Jesse T. Todd. “Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, California.”  1:663–98 in American Congregations: Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities.  Edited by James P. Wind and James W. Lewis.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.  1:673–674.  Cited by Wen Reagan.  “A Beautiful Noise: A History of Contemporary Worship Music in Modern America.”  PhD dissertation.  Duke University, 2015.  155.

17.  Wikipedia.  “Calvary Chapel.”
18.  Frisbee.  68–69.
19.  Frisbee.  69.

20.  Ronald M. Enroth, Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and C. Breckinridge Peters.  The Jesus People. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eermans Publishing Company, 1972.  86–87.

21.  Enroth.  Chapter 9.

22.  P. F. Sloan.  “Eve Of Destruction.”  Copyrighted by Trousdale Music in 1964.  Recorded in July 1965 by Barry McGuire.  “Eve of Destruction.”  Eve Of Destruction.  Dunhill D-50003.  Released 12 August 1965.  [Discogs entry]  McGuire turned to religious music after meeting Arthur Blessitt in the streets of Hollywood in 1970. [48]

23.  Wikipedia.  “Eve of Destruction (Song).”
24.  The post for 22 March 2020 discussed the premillennialism of the 1890s.

25.  Matthew Avery Sutton.  “Was FDR the Antichrist?  The Birth of Fundamentalist Antiliberalism in a Global Age.”  The Journal of American History 98:1052–1074:2012. Quotation on page 1062 from Stewart P. MacLennan.  “Crumbs from the King’s Table.”  King’s Business 24:2:January 1933.  Ellipsis in Sutton.  MacLennan led the church from 1921 to 1941. [49]

26. Enroth.  12.  Joel 2:28, King James version.  Much of this premillennialism drew from Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth.  Zondervan published it in 1970.  Zondervan’s interest in premillennialism was mentioned in the post for 9 August 2020.

27.  Seymour and Azusa Street were discussed in the post for 7 December 2017.

28.  I’m using Doomsday as a neutral, generic term for the end of the world.  Terminology is difficult, because the Bible offers few details.  Men, going back to Thomas Nelson Darby in the 1870s, [50] have distilled the allusions into a simple chronology.  Life will be marked by chaos and strife that are the prelude to the arrival of the antichrist.  Seven years of Tribulation will follow, before Christ returns for the battle of Armageddon.  Some believe all true Christians will be whisked away before the Tribulation in the Rapture.  Others think they will suffer persecution for three and half years, and then be removed.  Still others think the Rapture will occur after the Tribulation but before the battle of Armageddon. [51]

29.  The Cumberland Presbyterian Church was discussed in the post for 28 July 2019.

30.  Vinson Synan.  The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition.  Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997 edition.  209.  The theologian was Benjamin Warfield of Princeton Seminary.  His book was Counterfeit Miracles.  New York: C. Scribner’s, 1918.

31.  Wikipedia.  “Dennis Bennett (Priest).”
32.  “History of PRMI.”  Presbyterian Reformed Ministries International website.

33.  For instance, “Costa Mesa surged in population during and after World War II, as many thousands trained at Santa Ana Army Air Base and returned after the war with their families.” [52]

34.  Tony Alamo.  Quoted by Enroth. 195.  Alamo and his wife Susan Alamo founded the Alamo Christian Foundation in Hollywood in 1966. [53]  Both were raised in Jewish families. [54]  The same language was used by the curate who denounced Bennett: “We’re Episcopalians, not a bunch of wild-eyed hillbillies.” [55]

35.  PRMI.  Louis Evans, Junior, was pastor at Bel Air Presbyterian.  His father, Louis Evans, was pastor at Hollywood Presbyterian from 1941 to 1953. [56]  The Hollywood church spawned the Bel Air one in 1956. [57]  Frank Farrell may have confused the two when he claimed 600 were speaking in tongues at Hollywood in 1963. [58]

36.  Synan, Tradition.  232.  Frisbee described the difference.  He said he first saw a private display when he was staying with a friend who started to speak in tongues while praying by his bed.  “I had never in my life heard anybody speak in tongues, well, at least the way he did.  I really didn’t know what speaking in tongues was all about.  When I was saved as a little boy and around my grandmother’s church, there were people in the meetings and shouted out with shrieking glossolalia—you know, the typical Pentecostal, fanatical, shrill utterances.” [59]

37.  Vinson Synan.  The Century of the Holy Spirit: 100 Years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal, 1901-2001.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2001.  No pages in online version; The Robert Whitaker Case section.  Whitaker was dismissed by the elders of the Chandler, Arizona, Presbyterian Church.

38.  Special Committee on the Holy Spirit.  The Work of the Holy Spirit.  New York: United Presbyterian Church, 1970.  5–7.  Cited by Levi Bakerink.  “The Charismatic Renewal in the Presbyterian and Reformed Tradition.”  Student paper.  Evangel University.  21 April 2014.  6–7.

39.  Synan, Century.  Section: The Presbyterian and Reformed Renewal.  The post for 26 January 2020 mentioned Leigh Eric Schmidt’s belief that pastors tolerated the ecstatic experiences that appeared in Scots Presbyterian kirks so long as they didn’t attract the attention of authorities.

40.  Daniel Mark Epstein.  Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson.  Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace, 1993.  172.  Cited by Wikipedia.  “Aimee Semple McPherson.”  McPherson was active in Los Angeles from 1923 [59] until her death in 1944. [60]  Her secretary attended Calvary Chapel, where Frisbee talked with her about McPherson. [61]

41.  Charles E. Fromm.  “Textual Communities and New Song in the Multimedia Age: The Routinization of Charisma in the Jesus Movement.”  PhD dissertation.  Fuller Theological Seminary, 2006.  155.

42.  Smith.  Quoted by Fromm.  155.
43.  Frisbee.  126.
44.  Wikipedia, Frisbee.
45.  “1968.”  Noel Paul Stookey website.
46.  Frisbee.  50.
47.  Ellis.

48.  John Cody.  “From New Christy to ‘Living Christ;’ Barry Mcguire’s Ongoing Journey.”  Canadian Christianity website.  October 2008.

49.  “Our History.”  First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood website.
50.  Sutton.  1056–1057.
51.  Enroth.  186.
52.  Wikipedia.  “Costa Mesa, California.”
53.  Enroth.  61.
54.  Enroth.  61.
55.  Synan, Tradition.  229.
56.  First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood.
57.  “Our History.”  Bel Air Presbyterian Church website.

58.  Frank Farrell.  “Outburst of Tongues: The New Penetration.”  Christianity Today 13 September 1963.  The article is only available by subscription.  Synan quoted it on page 231 of Tradition.

59.  Frisbee.  58.
59.  Synan, Tradition.  200.
60.  Wikipedia, McPherson.
61.  Frisbee.  84–85.