Yet the utopia called the Summer of Love wouldn’t last, and, after the movement faded out, not all of them went back to professional career paths. Disillusioned by bad trips and a sense that their pursuit of hedonism had been empty, thousands of burned out hippies soon experienced something possibly even more revolutionary than tuning out and turning on: a born-again religious conversion. [...]
While they would give up their drugs and promiscuous sex, the Jesus People retained much of their countercultural ways, bringing their music, dress, and laid-back style into the churches they joined. Their influence would remake the Sunday worship experience for millions of Americans. As the historian Larry Eskridge has argued, today’s evangelical mega-churches with their rock bands blasting praise music and jeans-wearing pastors “are a direct result of the Jesus People movement.”
But aside from the praise anthems and the casual preaching styles that have come to characterize contemporary evangelicalism, the Jesus People also reshaped American politics. They helped to inspire the birth of the religious right. Many conservative evangelicals had long avoided politics, believing it would corrupt their spiritual lives, but the Jesus People contended that Christians couldn’t keep their spiritual and political lives separate. “I think everybody should be a full-time Christian,” the Jesus People rock singer Larry Norman once said. [...]
The message that countercultural evangelicals delivered to their peers represented a radically different version of Christianity than preached in most churches at the time. Most repudiated institutional churches and their weak and vapid “Churchianity.” Instead, Ted and Elizabeth Wise, and others, stressed the need for a personal relationship with Jesus, who, in their telling, was not far from being a hippie himself. [...]
By the mid-1970s, the Jesus People had largely faded as a visible movement as the counterculture aesthetic fell out of fashion — “Where Have All the Jesus People Gone,” Eternity magazine asked in 1973 — but the reality was their deeper influence on American evangelicalism was just beginning to be felt. With their folk music, casual dress, and chill vibe, the Jesus People helped redefine the Sunday morning worship experience across American evangelicalism. For better or worse, the “Jesus Rock” that the Jesus People created and popularized led the way to the contemporary Christian music now embraced across many American denominations.
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