Dr. Hendricks is the President, Unification Theological Seminary, Barrytown, New York

This summer of 2007 we see memorials of the hippies’ 1967 "Summer of Love," one of which is Preston Shires interesting tracing of an historical path "from the counterculture of Jerry Garcia to the subculture of Jerry Falwall."

"If it had not been for the counterculture," postulates Shires, an Instructor in History at Southeastern Community College, Lincoln, Nebraska, "there may never have been a Christian Right, because the counterculture gave to evangelicalism the rebellious spirit, the youthful activists, and the committed voters it so needed…" (210) In essence, Hippies of the Religious Right argues that a significant number of hippies became evangelical Christians and transformed their countercultural energy and impulses into what became the Religious Right.

Shires delineates a worldview expressed in the hippie counterculture. It rejected perceived racial injustice and compartmentalized religion, and affirmed the golden rule and the importance of spiritual reality. It rejected the sublimation of the individual to the demands of society and affirmed expressive individualism. It rejected American "technocracy" but affirmed science and technology if subsumed within a spiritual order. And it rejected the conformist lifestyle represented by the universities, but respected logical argumentation and intellectual sophistication.

The hippie era was short-lived but energetic and infectious, at least to a large segment of peers of their global generation. Just as Christians from throughout the world journeyed to Los Angeles in 1905 to partake of the Pentecostal fervor on Azusa Street, and take it back home, youth from throughout the world journeyed to San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district in the late 1960s to partake of the hippie experience and likewise take it back home. What happened to that countercultural energy, that world-rejecting, world-transforming impulse? Shires argues that evangelical Christianity captured it.

To explain this, Shires backs up to discuss Christianity in post-World War II America. In rejecting their parents’ values, the hippies also were also rejecting mainstream, liberal Christianity and Judaism. They saw these religious expressions as lifeless and irrelevant.

Shires focuses on Christian leaders who felt the same way, such as Francis Schaeffer, Tony and Susan Alamo, Bill Bright, Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey, Carl Henry and numerous missioners named and unnamed. These individuals had separated from their parents’ worldview.

They agreed with much of the hippie social critique, and claimed it in the name of the Gospel: true Christianity is not tied to the military-industrial complex; true Christianity is the mode of the ultimate in self-expression, rightly understood as freedom in Christ. Authentic Christianity is committed to social justice and it allows one to integrate spirituality into a daily life that accepts material blessings as consistent with living for others.

Last, but far from least, Christianity offers the "natural high," eternal life in the embrace of the Holy Spirit. This was the message of evangelical Christians to the hippies. The initial penetration of evangelical Christianity into the hippie world took place on the streets. Hundreds of street preachers, witnessers and pastors like Chuck Smith took wandering hippies into their homes, fed and clothed them, counseled them off drugs and into a living relationship with Jesus.

Shires presents in fascinating detail the Christian coffee houses and communes such as Hal Lindsey’s "Jesus Christ Light and Power Company," "House of Acts," and "His Place." These enterprises germinated into churches, church movements such as Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel and John Wimber’s Vineyard Fellowship, or para-church ministries. Wealthy evangelicals, such as Richard DeVos of Amway, helped sustain such ventures, in DeVos’s case, Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ. (157)

Shires pays great attention to Francis Schaeffer, considering him a bridge between the hippie critique and the biblical message. The hippies had a critique but fell short in terms of a counterproposal beyond the illusory gods of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Schaeffer accepted the hippie critique and offered a counterproposal in a Jesus-centered worldview. In the process he aligned Christianity with the spirit of the new generation.

For Shires, this explains why the energy of the hippie movement did not deploy in the institutions of the Left. Schaeffer convinced the new converts "that the great misconception of the century was precisely the belief that liberals were tolerant and loving, and that biblically grounded Christians were not … The pluralistic and love-everyone themes [liberals] preached were whitewash; underneath lay a human-based selfishness that threatened true freedom."

Youth who had already rejected the mainstream liberal churches and synagogues, and who had the rebirth experience those churches talked about but never delivered, assented. "The fact of the matter," Shires continues his reading of Schaeffer, "was the liberals curtailed liberties, especially the religious freedoms of biblically grounded Christians.

Their political and social ridicule of fundamentalists and their liberally inspired judicial decisions, which forbade Christians to live out their faith in public classrooms, were not a testimony to freedom but rather a practice of intolerance and oppression…" (159) Schaeffer found the Republicans of the time to fit his framework and the Democrats to be party to secular humanistic values, "accommodationists with the technocracy.

Schaeffer concluded that by positioning biblically grounded Christians more decidedly alongside Republicans, even secular humanist Republicans when biblically permissible, he could further the gospel cause in America and help to spiritually revolutionize Americans." (162) Organizations such as Christian Voice, the Moral Majority, the Eagle Forum, the Heritage Foundation, the Christian Coalition served as vehicles through which ex-hippie "Jesus Freaks" mobilized to give political expression to their spiritual values.

"Evangelical churches in California that listened to Christian Voice now included many of the former Jesus Freaks, and the attributes of these Jesus People had been injected into the life of those churches." (165) Thus, the activist, change-the-world confidence of the hippies was nurtured in the womb of welcoming church communities, and by the 1980s, "the Christian Right became firmly established upon the political landscape."

In conclusion, Shires argues that it is deeply mistaken to view the Religious Right as a "reactionary movement fomented by enraged fundamentalists who had … come round to rebelling against the sixties." (209) To the contrary, it represents a countercultural impulse that stood at the forefront of social change, radically rejected the inherited establishment, questioned everything and sought new answers that would refashion the self and the world. How the hippie vanguard wound up among the leadership of the Religious Right is a fascinating story well worth telling, and Shires has done a great job of it. I do, however, have a few comments.

Shires is fair and value-free in his treatment. At the outset he prepares the reader by informing us that he going to take the language of the Religious Right at face value and not put quotes around terms such as "family values."

This is appreciated and sincere; and Shires does give credit where such is due. Pat Robertson, for one, comes off extremely well as Shires documents him risking his career to stand against racism early in his life. Hal Lindsey and other scions of the Right also shine through the sacrifices and sincere religious service they exhibited early on.

These are no Johnny-come-lately’s; they paid their dues on the street, bringing people to Christ and serving the cause of social justice without fanfare and at significant personal sacrifice. The genuine religiosity of these men and women shines through the narrative.

At the same time, Shires’s overall tone is that history took a wrong turn when the hippies moved to the right, and it would have been much more logical and constructive if they had turned left. He concludes the book by pointing out that the Bush administration is failing to fulfill the countercultural values of the Religious Right and now is the time for the Left to recapture the countercultural energy and voters that back in the 60s were on its side. I think he is mistaken here. This is because he pays virtually no attention to the most significant aspect of the hippies turning to Jesus and shaping the Religious Right.

Shires’ explanation of the move to the Right -- that the hippies could fulfill their ideals of the golden rule and expressive individualism more fully through evangelical Christianity than the hippie lifestyle -- is correct but doesn’t go deep enough. If Shires’ explanation is complete, then the countercultural power of the hippie generation can swing to the Left without much trouble. But Shires does not grasp fully why the hippies went to the Right and why it will take a much greater evolution of the Left in order to win them back. In short, the hippies moved to evangelical Christianity because offered freedom from free sex and drugs and provided a superior alternative.

Shires does not give due regard for the power of sex and drugs in the hippie culture. Free sex and drugs provided the religious dimension, the meat and potatoes that nourished the hippie soul. Within a few years, if not a few months, of engaging the hippie lifestyle, many youths encountered a combination of guilt, remorse and brokenness, and realized that the bus they were on was going nowhere.

The street missioner’s message began with a call to renounce sex and drugs, and begin a new life with a greater high and hope for real love through Jesus and the spirit- filled Christian community. This is the meat and potatoes -- okay, bread and wine -- of the Religious Right. Those who stayed on the Left did not get that message. The Left did not renounce free sex and drugs, and still has not renounced sex and drugs.

Shires tends to underestimate the intelligence and authenticity of the hippies in their shift to conservative Christianity. The move to Christianity was not a happenstance, a grateful response to bed and breakfast in a minister’s house. Its staying power after forty years is evidence of deeper historical dynamics, those endemic to authentic, enduring spirituality and family.

Drugs and free sex don’t work. Surrender of one’s life to God in a coherent religious community and fidelity to marriage and family does work. To recapture the generation it had in its hand in the sixties, the Left will have to transform itself even more than did the Right when it opened its doors to the unwashed youth on the streets, seeing in them not future voters, but souls in need of a Savior.

The move of a generation to the Right was not politically motivated, and those of the Left who think that it was, and that better politics will bring that generation back, still haven’t tuned in.