Books and Culture editor John Wilson, easily the best read person SWNID has encountered, today writes for WSJ on the habital misunderstanding of the 1960s. Not just the age of turning on, tuning in and dropping out, Wilson's '60s were the era that spawned many a radical Christian movement.
We think Wilson is right. There were lots of serious Christian teens and twenty-somethings in the '60s and '70s (which were the extension of the sixties with increased gloom) who got turned off of the infantile, self-indulgent Zeitgeist and went looking for a different way to express their unease with the state of the world. Informed by faith, some of them went off to do weird stuff like mission work or relief work or other stuff that doesn't pay well.
We recall our own late adolescent quest as a search for something that would bring some purpose to the bleak social landscape of selfish materialism and conformity to cultural or countercultural cliches. That's largely how we ended up as an undergraduate at an insignificant Bible college, reading knickered and goateed Francis Schaeffer and contemplating graduate study abroad to prepare for a wholly nonremunerative profession with negative social status. And we are hardly the exemplar of Christian radicalism for our generation.
There exist today a bunch of interesting middle-aged people who didn't go to Woodstock but in the name of Jesus did go to some other rather odd places and do odd things. Someone needs to start gathering their stories and telling them.
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