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What was the fertile soil that helped bring on this Christian Revival, what got all these young people to be searching for answers? Near the end of the movie The JESUS Revolution, it was spelled out by the Time Magazine reporter, when he stated to a young Greg Laurie “Our country is a dark and divided place. But in that tent [Pastor Chuck’s Smith’s church tent] there’s hope.” The question of the century is, has our nation become a dark and divided place once again, just as it was during the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the Vietnam War and those Civil Rights demonstrations? Do we have a large number of our youth searching for answers, as they were back then--looking in all the wrong places, but looking? Those dark and divided times was fertile soil for Revival. Do we have a similar “fertile soil” for a new Revival? Of course a revival comes from God reaching down into such a group with his Holy Spirit, drawing them to him and salvation, the “seed” must be planted in the fertile soil. So while the soil may be fertile, God still must plant the seed with his Holy Spirit. Question then is, is God about to start another revival with his Holy Spirit?

Significant Quotes from Greg Laurie’s & Ellen Vaughn’s JESUS REVOLUTION

The 1950s—A Black-and-White Decade

“It’s complicated. But if you were white and middle class in America, the time period between 1950 and 1960 is often presented as that cheerful decade in which the American family and other institutions provided normalcy after the turmoil of World War II…Now there was a sense of a new wind blowing: American prosperity. Many a man of the Greatest Generation finished college on the GI Bill and went to work in his conservative gray flannel suit, making an average of $4,100 a year. At 5:01 p.m. he’d return to his tidy suburban home, which cost $22,000, situated on a block full of zippy kids riding bikes with no helmets and dogs running free with no leashes.” So true, for me it was a postage-stamp lot and small two story house on Bright Road, Belmont Mass, before we moved on up to Belmont Hill and a much larger house, my parents, two sisters and I. So far this author is nailing it. “Our crew cut man was met at the door by his lovely wife, who was likely wearing pearls, a dress, an apron. She did not work outside the home. Wifey had a hot dinner in the oven, courtesy of her new Mixmaster and her electric stove. After meat loaf, mashed potatoes with gravy, green-bean casserole, and strawberry Jell-O, everyone would gather around the rabbit-eared Black-and-White TV. It did not have a big screen, but it weighed a ton and took about a week to warm up. The fam would eagerly watch shows like Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which were short on adventure but long on wholesome life lessons. Then everyone would put on their striped pajamas with piping on the lapels, drink a glass of whole milk, and jump in bed. The TV itself went to bed at midnight, signing off with the national anthem playing to scenes of saluting soldiers and a waving American flag. Then the screen went to a rainbow test pattern until it woke up the following morning. Television’s effect on mainstream baby boomers’ experience was huge. Social critics say that TV homogenized America, just like a big carton of frothy, white milk from cows on steroids. For the first time, persuasive images and cultural “norms” were right there for all to consume, in your own living room, regardless of where you lived. While books, newspapers, and radio targeted regionally or educationally diverse audiences, television story lines and advertisers catered to the lowest denominator in an effort to target everyone. People in California, Iowa, and the East Coast all saw the same shows and the same advertisements. Television had a nationalizing influence, creating or revealing realities that trumped local, traditional ties to neighborhoods, churches, or ethnic groups.”

“In this, television has been called the great equalizer, though it was very selective about who it equalized. In TV Land—with a few rare exceptions—everyone was white. And on 1950s TV, sex didn’t exist. I Love Lucy’s Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, married in real life, went to bed on-screen in cute little twin beds separated by a chaste nightstand. It was a mystery how little Ricky was ever conceived. Another mainstream message was that it was normal, healthy, and desirable to smoke cigarettes.”

“Life wasn’t all cheerful TV and status quo family life in the suburbs, of course. There were cranky rebels like Jack Kerouac, whose drug-and-alcohol-induced rants on life in America emerged from the frenzied pages of On the Road, the countercultural classic of the day.” [JESUS REVOLUTION, by Greg Laurie & Ellen Vaughn, © 2018 by Greg Laurie and Ellen Vaugn, pp. 27-29, sel. parts] But I have to admit, for me in the middle of the 1950s as a 9-year-old, in our “normal” suburban environment, we took no notice of these “rebels.” It was only in looking back, as a voracious history nut, that I discovered these rebels and countercultural people, who would end up contributing their influence on naïve high school and college students. I’m getting ahead of myself in this wonderful and accurate narrative.”

The Cold War

“Meanwhile, in spite of the great victories of World War II, the world was still a scary place. The worldwide conflict was soon followed by the Korean War of the early 1950s, which killed 37,000 Americans and ended with a demilitarized zone separating communist North Korea from democratic South Korea. A peace agreement was never actually signed; the dark and volatile tensions endure to this day. In 1949, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin detonated the first Soviet atomic bomb.” (After we had just about detonated 300 atomic bombs, nuclear blackmail, anyone? See https://unityinchrist.com/topical%20studies/America-ModernRomans2.htm ). “The race was on to develop a more deadly hydrogen bomb, which the US did in 1952. Tested on a remote atoll in the Pacific Ocean, it created a cloud 100 miles wide and 25 miles high, killing all life on the surrounding islands. The Soviets surprised the world by detonating their own hydrogen bomb in 1953, and then a bigger, badder one in 1955. Such deadly weapons demanded delivery systems with far more range than conventional airplanes. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth; the message was clear that they now could attack anywhere, at any time. The US launched its own first satellite in 1958. The Space Race and the Cold War were on. By the end of the 1950s, both the US and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear buildup so even if one side launched an annihilating attack, the other side could retaliate with a similar, obliterating response. The resulting term is still familiar today: mutually assured destruction [or M.A.D.].” [ibed. pp. 29-30, sel. parts] Duck and cover exercises were normal in grade schools, but I missed out on those, I was a remedial reader, had to go to a special school which catered to those with serious reading disabilities like I had. But the atomic arms race didn’t escape my notice, I was always trying to dig bomb shelters in the back yard and out in the woods with my neighborhood friend. I actually walked down to Belmont Town Hall and picked up an instruction booklet put out by the Civil Defense on how to build a bomb shelter. They sell now on E-bay for a good amount, wish I could find it, it’s a real historic period piece of literature.

Civil Rights

“The biggest blight on the “innocent” 1950s, however, was the state of race relations in America. The injustices are too many to recount. The Civil War had been fought less than a century earlier; it’s shocking to realize that racial segregation was the law of the land in America, with deep-seated bigotry the attitude of many. Interracial marriage was illegal, underscoring yet again the notion that African Americans were “separate but equal” was only halfway true. While legal segregation of schools was abolished by the Supreme Court in 1954, all public segregation would not be banned until 1964. African Americans were known as Negroes, colored people, or other derogatory terms. They were forced to use separate bathrooms, telephone booths, seats on buses, and entrances to movie theaters. An eloquent southern preacher name Dr. Martin Luther King became more and more well known, stirring the hopes of millions with his vision of nonviolent resistance and racial equality. Black churches provided the scriptural language that undergirded the movement. In 1955 a gutsy and faith-filled black woman named Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, when a white man “needed” her seat. Parks’ civil disobedience set a trail that would blaze for many more in the 1960s and onward. But in the ‘50s any fruit of the civil rights movement was still a dream, and much blood would be shed for decades to come.” [ibed. pp. 30-31, sel. parts] See https://unityinchrist.com/topical%20studies/America-ModernRomans3.htm.

The 1960s—Wonderful World of Color

Note: As a remedial reader, struggling through high school, in a normal square “Leave It to Beaver” family, having to join the US Naval Reserve as a junior in high school in order to not get drafted into the army, so I could finish high school, and then ending up on a World War II submarine from the fall of 1967 to early 1969, I missed out on the Hippie element of the 1960s. I lived on the outside edge of all this revolution going on. “Besides drugs—and helped along by drugs—the biggest upheaval of the decade was the sexual revolution. Rejecting the double standards or cloistered sexuality of the 1950s, the young people of the ‘60s happily rode a tide of free love, sexual experimentation, and the beginnings of the women’s movement, all helped along by the introduction of the birth control pill into the US market in 1961.”…“The one thing everyone agrees on, however, is the power of the sounds of the ‘60s. Even today’s twenty-somethings who know nothing about the decade talk nostalgically about those days of the best music of all time: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, the Kinks, Credence Clearwater Revival, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan [and Led Zeppelin, and lets not forget Jethro Tull]…the list like the beat, goes on. And on.” It was an explosion of high quality musicians and music writing and performance, pure talent—aimed against the Establishment. “During the months after President Kennedy’s assassination and the tough challenges of Lyndon Johnson’s new presidency, there were still diversions. Perhaps the biggest national distraction was the arrival in February 1964 of the original boy band from Britain, whose latest song had just hit number one on the US charts. Teenage girls screamed and fainted when the group arrived in New York surrounded by reporters. Parents across the country wondered what all the fuss was about. All Mom and Dad knew was that the band was named after insects. Beatles. Seventy-three million fellow Americans, including eleven-year-old Greg Laurie, camped out in front of their big-box TVs when the Beatles sang live on the Ed Sullivan Show.” I was 17. “Strangers to the times need to understand that the Ed Sullivan Show was a huge deal, a “really big shew,” as he used to say back in the day. Sullivan hosted the longest-running variety show in the history of American television. In an era before there were a million TV channels and a billion other entertainment options, he ruled the airwaves. Families across America gathered around the TV on Sunday nights at 8:00 p.m. It was a national ritual. Since Sullivan had almost no personality of his own, he had a unique ability to highlight his guests’ personalities. He hunched his shoulders and mumbled, seeming to have a speech impediment or at least unusual syntax. Time magazine said that “his smile is that of a man sucking a lemon…yet, instead of frightening children, Ed Sullivan charms the whole family. Sixty percent of the televisions in America were tuned in to watch the Beatles on Ed’s show. The Fab Four sang a few of their greatest hits like “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” John, Paul, George, and Ringo wore black suits with skinny ties and gently shook their mop-tops while they sang. They were in their early twenties at the time; Ed kept beaming and calling them “talented youngsters.” The British Invasion had begun.” [ibed. pp. 37-38, 43-44, sel. parts]

Another Invasion

“There was another invasion, of course, one far more significant than the trends of pop culture, though it merged with them to create the consciousness of a generation. America’s involvement in Southeast Asia had begun with a cadre of political and military advisors, like a trickle of stones sliding down a hill. But those stones became an avalanche, and eventually tens of thousands of young Americans found themselves sliding into the jungles of Vietnam, not quite knowing what they were fighting for…As the storm in Vietnam got stronger…the voices crying out against it at home got louder…young men started burning their draft cards. Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, organized opposition to the war, and protests began to simmer and explode on college campuses across the country. By April 1965, twenty-five thousand American soldiers were patrolling the rice paddies of Vietnam. By the end of the year that number would be two hundred thousand.” [see https://unityinchrist.com/topical%20studies/America-ModernRomans4.htm Under Johnson and Nixon 4.5 million Vietnamese men, women and children were slaughtered] “A lot of young Americans—both in Southeast Asia, where drugs were plentiful and cheap, and at home—were embracing the growing drug culture as the gateway to spiritual enlightenment, good times, or just as escape from the status quo. Marijuana was everywhere, but LSD was the drug movement’s poster child. It stimulated serotonin receptors in the brain; you never knew just where you would go or how you would feel, but you could drop a tab and take an eight-hour trip without ever leaving your chair. It was legal in the US until the mid-1960s.” Note: Timothy Leary, a Harvard chemist professor was making a very pure LSD. He was looking for a chemical way to achieve “Nirvana.” “The Pied Piper of the day, the Beatles, first got into LSD in the spring of 1965. John Lennon and George Harrison were at a party in England with their wives, and their obliging host dropped sugar cubes laced with LSD into their after-dinner coffee.” [ibed. pp. 44-46, sel. parts]

Two Distinct Americas

“By halfway through the decade of the 1960s, there were two distinct Americas. One was the conventional, achievement-driven, work-ethic world that had followed the ‘50s, populated mostly by people over the age of thirty [most of the dads who were veterans of World War II were in their forties by 1965]. The other was a growing youth counterculture that rejected mainstream values of conformity, convention, and climbing the corporate ladder. The new culture embraced the planet, higher consciousness, and alternative realities. Drugs were a way to enlightenment, life was about making love not war, possessions ended up possessing you, music was truth, and freedom was the ultimate high. By mid-1965, this hip youth movement had been tagged with its own noun, and the word hippie found its way into news reports. Fathers who knew best cautioned their kids from turning into dreaded hippies with long hair and bad values.” [ibed. pp. 46-47, sel. parts]

Today

“Today there’s a growing sense that history has run one of its cycles, and we’re back in ‘60s mode.” … “But like the hippies, millennials—people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s—say they are hungry for authenticity, a sense of community, and real care for people who are needy and marginalized. Like the hippies, they’re a bit cynical about big business, big institutions, or organized religion. Bombarded by competing content online for most of their lives, they shy away from advertising, causes, or techniques that feel superficially targeted toward them. They gravitate toward “user-generated content” that feels like it came from a real person, not a brand. Meanwhile, their phones ping with news alerts all the time, feeding a generalized anxiety about racial unrest, environmental sustainability, gender issues, long-range missiles, terrorism, and a polarized political process full of haters. Issues like sex trafficking, genocide, starvation and natural disasters are on their screens and in their faces all the time.” … “On the political front, it’s safe to say that we’ve lost the ability to have civil discourse among those who hold differing points of view. The national “conversation,” if you can call it that, has never been uglier, even as the many issues confronting our body politic—like ongoing debt, unemployment, health care, taxes, national security, immigration, and refugee policies—are absolutely daunting. Spiritually, many young people are fed up with conventional church, political Christianity [emphasis mine, what I call Christian-nationalism, see https://unityinchrist.com/topical%20studies/America-ModernRomans6.htm for examples and an explanation of that] that is mad at everyone, and the faith-virus of affluenza, todays version of the prosperity gospel.” “Today, 75 percent of young people who grew up in Christian homes and churches are now abandoning their faith as young adults…They’re impatient with big churches that are more concerned about fellowship groups than helping the poor. The seeker-friendly megachurches of their parents’ generation are too slick and programmed; they want something more real, more radical and more rugged.” [ibed. pp. 17-19, sel. parts]

What Half The Nation Sees Wrong With Christianity, Why They Want Nothing To Do With It

In the middle of all this social unrest going on in 2020, what I have honestly seen is a large group of evangelicals who have tied their hopes to a political party instead of Jesus Christ (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx8tsompfiM).  So do you seriously think the left, a good 50 percent of our nation, want to hear the Gospel coming from people who are rabidly espousing a right-wing, politically charged agenda, and mixing it with the precious Gospel of Christ?  It’s not gonna happen.  We’re shooting ourselves and our Gospel presentation in the foot if you think so. 

For some of my feelings about Christian-nationalism and Christian-nationalists, here’s some:

Politics of Evangelical Christianity

Evangelical Christianity’s human efforts to try to bring about a Revival into America by political actions is not the way God brings about Revival. In the 1800s Charles Finney, through the moving of the Holy Spirit of God, brought about such a powerful Revival in Rochester, New York, where for years to come the jails emptied out and stayed empty, whilst their churches filled up and stayed filled for years. And it was not done through local Christians in the area getting involved in local dirty politics or trying to legislate morality into the city. Instead, a powerful move of the Holy Spirit of God brought morality into the hearts of a majority of Rochester’s citizens. It is an insult to God and his Holy Spirit for puny man, albeit sincere Evangelical Christians, to attempt to usurp the job of the Holy Spirit through dirty political means. There will be no Revival amongst evangelical Christianity as long as they try to usurp the job of the Holy Spirit of God by way of dirty political means. These evangelicals are touching something sacred, a job that is sacred to God alone, through the work of the Holy Spirit. That is a dangerous thing, to sin against Light. And this is an example of that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx8tsompfiM

Some Ideas About What Needs To Change Within The Greater Body of Christ

The Christian Church, the real Body of Christ that is alive spiritually, needs to clean up its act, in order to be able to properly reach the Millennials, the counterpart of the Hippies of the 1960s. There is no way they are going to be interested in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or in having a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, as long as a vocal group who are calling themselves Christians are preaching a hate-filled message coupled to their interpretation of the Gospel. Those that are real Christians need to separate themselves from the Christian-nationalists and everything they stand for. Those groups have been infected with what Jesus called the leaven of Herod. What we fail to realize is that many of those on the outside, unbelievers, like many in my own family, are either somewhat neutral politically or liberal politically, and when they look at Christianity they lump all Christian groups together. So they view the most vocal of those who call themselves Christians, the Christian-nationalists, as being what real Christianity is all about. Christian-nationalists have polluted the image of what a true Christian is supposed to look like, and have in the process turned off over half of those living in the United States, over 180 million people, to wanting to have anything to do with Jesus Christ and the Gospel of Christ. If we truly want to see Revival in the United States of America, something has to change within the greater Body of Christ. For some ideas about what needs to change within the real Body of Christ that is alive spiritually, see and read https://unityinchrist.com/topical%20studies/America-ModernRomans6.htm.