Thoughtful academics have long been sensitive to the liberal origins of the Reagan Revolution. In the bestselling Why Americans Hate Politics, E. J. Dionne emphasized just how easy it was for pot-smoking hippies to grow into espresso-sipping yuppies. The liberal heritage of the neoconservative hawks who have circled around Republican administrations since 1980 is even less disputed. These intellectuals, after all, hail from radical socialist and communist backgrounds, and they carried their youthful idealism with them in their various campaigns to spread democracy.

One significant faction of the modern Republican Party, however, is usually situated well outside what Louis Hartz famously described as the American liberal tradition. Indeed, the Religious Right routinely gets compared to the Taliban and the KKK. Even more sober observers regard the Religious Right as an illiberal reaction to the convulsions of the Sixties.

As its great title suggests, Hippies of the Religious Right sharply disagrees with the conventional wisdom. In Preston Shires' rendering, today's conservative evangelicals owe a great debt to the Sixties. Indeed, many of them participated in the counterculture. Like their radical counterparts, Shires contends, evangelical activists were marked by a "rebellious spirit," a deep anxiety over the dehumanizing effects of modern life, and a commitment to a kind of modern freedom that he calls "expressive individualism."

Shires deserves much credit for articulating such a bold and interesting thesis, and his discussion of "Jesus Freaks" is well worth the cover price. In general, though, his analysis of evangelicals feels underdeveloped. For example, he asserts that Focus of the Family "demonstrated the best melding of countercultural Christian ideals and traditional evangelicalism." Perhaps this is true, but I am not sure why Shires believes it. Likewise, he has almost nothing to say about the rescue movement—the largest campaign of civil disobedience since the civil rights movement, and one that grew directly out of the anti-war Catholic Left. Here is a perfect test-case for Shires' thesis.

So how did evangelicals change the rescue movement? Contrary to Shires' thesis, they did so by rejecting some of the very sensibilities that made Sixties social protest so distinctive. For one, they dispensed with the term "sit-ins" precisely because it smacked of a tradition of liberal pacifism.

Moreover, evangelicals had little interest in the liberal thinkers that influenced the first generation of rescuers. According to James Risen and Judy L. Thomas' fascinating account of the rescue movement in Wrath of Angels, the Catholic leftists who began abortion sit-ins in the 1970s found inspiration in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and especially Thomas Merton. Under their influence, John O'Keefe wrote A Peaceful Presence in 1978, a recruiting pamphlet that asked pro-life activists not to resist any police force so that they might experience and embody the "vulnerability of the unborn" and "solidarity with the child." So ensconced were these early Catholic activists in the world of Sixties radicalism that they initially attempted to recruit their liberal pacifist friends. Only after their appeals were roundly rebuffed did they belatedly turn to conservative Protestants for help.

Evangelicals responded, but did not accept the movement's early influences. Their lodestar was Francis Schaeffer, whose fiery Calvinism could not have been more different from the mystical pacifism of Thomas Merton. Randall Terry replaced O'Keefe as the movement's leader and swept aside what Risen and Thomas describe as its "sixties leftist feel." With Terry as its spokesman, the movement took on a new militancy and spoke in a much darker, apocalyptic language. By the 1990s, when anti-abortion activists descended deeper into violence, O'Keefe hardly recognized the movement he had pioneered. Michael Bray's A Time to Kill, published in 1994, signaled just how far rescue had drifted from O'Keefe's A Peaceful Presence.

To be sure, the same general narrative could be used to describe the civil rights movement: it too became more militant over time. But looking at the rescue movement this way obscures the kind of conscious breaks evangelicals made with the Sixties. The intellectual and sociological links between Sixties social protest and the rescue movement began to weaken precisely when evangelicals took it over.

Congruent with Shires' thesis, however, evangelicals in the rescue movement did often sound like Sixties radicals. When evangelical rescuers talked about "breaking the system," as even Terry did, it was not hard to hear echoes of the New Left. Like many Sixties movements, rescue attempted to push the frontiers of human freedom—indeed, it saw itself as a new civil rights movement. This self-understanding is constantly obscured by academic characterizations of the abortion conflict as a culture war.

If Shires continues his interesting work, I would encourage him to consider the possibility that the New Left in turn was deeply indebted to the larger Protestant culture in which it emerged. The radical egalitarianism and allergy to authority in the early New Left reflected a secular version of traditional evangelical doctrine. One might call it "the priesthood of all participants." Unlike the hierarchical unions of the Old Left, the New Left sought a politics without coercion. Chapters of Students for a Democratic Society, for example, would not even agree to take a break unless there was perfect consensus among members.

Freed from hierarchical organizations that emphasized solidarity, the New Left quickly took on a sectarian character. Not unlike Protestant churches, New Left groups began to splinter as activists sought a purer and more authentic expression of leftist politics. As political scientist Hugh Heclo has emphasized, "the movement" fractured into many movements as young radicals were called to a "plurality of authenticities."

Protestantism, after all, has always thrived in a state of protest. For this reason, evangelicalism has been a critical mainspring of American politics. It birthed the abolitionist, temperance, suffrage, anti-evolution, and civil rights movements. Today's Religious Right must be seen in this context rather than as the bastard child of the counterculture.

Nonetheless I agree that the ideals of the Sixties influenced the Religious Right, though in somewhat different ways than Shires emphasizes. I would argue that the Religious Right embraced New Left ideals at a time when many liberals had forsaken them. The youthful leaders of the New Left fervently hoped that important moral questions would return to the center of American politics. They believed that only moral controversy could revitalize American democracy and inspire alienated citizens. In its more contemplative moments, the New Left sometimes even appreciated the necessity of a well-organized Right to a more ideological and participatory America.

Today's liberals have largely lost their enthusiasm for "values voters" because too many of them turned out to have the wrong values. In other words, liberals have repudiated New Left ideals because the Religious Right was so successful at fulfilling them. While the Sixties Left built large public-interest groups dominated by checkbook activists, the Religious Right created grassroots organizations that mobilized disaffected evangelicals. This discrepancy prompted Robert Putnam to note in his otherwise grim account of American civic life, "It is, in short, among Evangelical Christians, rather than among the ideological heirs of the sixties, that we find the strongest evidence for an upwelling of civic engagement."

Despite some important disagreements with Shires' work, I think he deserves much credit for writing such an ambitious book. Others have taken a narrower cut at Shires' subject matter. The historian Doug Rossinow has written on Christianity and the New Left, particularly focusing on radicals at the University of Texas in Austin, and political scientist Allan Hertzke has made fascinating comparisons between Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson. But Shires is the first to try and explore the ties between the Sixties and the Religious Right in a comprehensive way. Thus, Hippies of the Religious Right should be a useful point of departure for students of the Sixties and the Right for some time to come.

Jon A. Shields is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado—Colorado Springs and has a forthcoming book on the democratic virtues of the Religious Right from Princeton University Press.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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