[explogate 03: big national youth deal]

“THE WOODSTOCK OF THE JESUS MOVEMENT”

Mike Hertenstein
Sep 7, 2018 · 7 min read

[overwhelmingly invited]

After Muskie was neutralized, Nixon’s chief rival would be South Dakota Senator George McGovern — a former history professor and ordained Methodist minister. Graham worried that McGovern might draw the Christian youth vote.¹⁶ The Senator had called for total withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. That effort had failed, but it led to McGovern’s most famous antiwar speech: “Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave,” he‘d said, declaring that “This chamber reeks of blood.” George McGovern was “the most decent man in the Senate,” Robert Kennedy had said. “Which is not quite the same thing as being the best candidate for President of the United States,” replied journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who suggested that the job tended to require someone far less decent.¹⁷

Richard Nixon, in the Oval Office, told Graham he thought the re-election contest would come down to “those who believe in the old principles and so forth and those that believe in other things.” Taking it for granted that he and the president were in the first category, whatever that meant, the evangelist agreed. Nixon scoffed that the opposition was hopelessly tied to “way-out left-wing liberal media-types.” This observation would open the way to their infamous round of Jew-bashing.

Before that, there was an earlier round in the conversation which lasted nearly as long, on a topic toward which Billy Graham had discreetly guided the president: Explo ’72, a massive Christian youth gathering in Dallas, Texas, slated to take place in early summer.

Billy Graham worked onstage and backstage in Richard Nixon’s campaigns.

Like the pol he was, Graham shrewdly built his case. He mentioned a recent Texas poll showing how Nixon was ahead among youth voters. This was critical, since 1972 would be the first election in which eighteen-year-olds would be eligible to vote.¹⁸ Next, Graham noted that while Nixon was unpopular on campuses, most youth didn’t go to college. The trick was finding a way to get to the rest. He seemed to be working it out right there. But he also had just the thing.

The president, he said, was “overwhelmingly invited” to join the program at Explo ’72. There would be a 100k-plus kids from across country filling the Cotton Bowl for a week of meetings, he promised. The event was “the most highly organized thing I’ve ever seen.” Explo was run by Campus Crusade for Christ, known for computerized-efficiency and Mad-Men-level-marketing skilz. It would cater to youth styles — “beards and all the rest” — but it would nevertheless be “a controlled student situation who would be overwhelmingly pro-Nixon.”

Antiwar protesters at Billy Graham’s 1970 University of Tennessee Crusade, at which President Richard Nixon was a special platform guest.

The president wondered if Explo would be like his visit to the 1970 Graham Crusade at the University of Tennessee — a pro-Nixon crowd, but a famously-fierce antiwar protest. Graham assured him it would be much more controlled than that. He noted that “the establishment of Dallas, all those top super-millionaires…are really backing this thing. And they are pouring the money in.” Graham cited supporters like Ross Perot and Clint Murchison — the latter was another prominent name among the evangelist’s petro-patriarch base. He also mentioned Sid Richardson, another of the Big Rich oilmen, who’d recruited Graham to recruit Dwight Eisenhower to run for president. Oil, then, helped reassure this president about going to Dallas. (Another reason Explo was in Dallas was likely Graham’s membership in the city’s huge First Baptist Church, then an outpost in the rising conservative take-over of the denomination, now led by a pastor who will be remembered for being overwhelmingly pro-Trump).

“I think we should,” Nixon said. “It’s a good way to go to Texas.” He kept returning to the topic. “The Dallas thing is a must. Let’s put that date down.” Again: “I think the Dallas thing is terrific.” Haldeman made a note about the President’s attendance at Graham’s “big national youth deal in Dallas.”¹⁹ The week-long event was set to open in four months, Monday night, June 12.²⁰

[the real thing]

The President may have been sold on Explo at “Controlled Pro-Nixon Student Situation.” The event itself would be sold, then and later, as “the Woodstock of the Jesus Movement.” That meme came to be reproduced automatically, the perpetual motion of a PR machine. The image was powered of course, by siphoning the fuel from a much more powerful cultural icon: the “Woodstock Music and Arts Fair,” with its epochal musical program, “half a million strong” attendees, utopian ideals and communal aspirations.

Woodstock: “Three Days of Love and Music”

Archaeologists combing Max Yasgur’s old farm managed to dig up some old aluminum-can pull-tabs. But the 1969 festival left much more significant legacies, beyond even the historical marker and the Hollywood film. Woodstock became a potent symbol for its era — a symbol interpreted variously. For true believers, the event was a messianic sign of an alternative society, Woodstock Nation. For skeptics, like the eponymous Omega Man in a 1971 horror film, the festival was a harbinger of the apocalypse. Even so, it was only a long weekend.

Much of the miracle was that there were no major disasters. This made that event look even better in contrast with other touchstones-turned-millstone: like Haight-Ashbury, which collapsed from a Summer of Love to commodified anarchy. Or another festival, often bookended with Woodstock, held months later. The free concert at Altamont Speedway became a symbol of “the death of the Sixties’ dream,” when biker “security” led to the murder of an attendee.

No doubt, Woodstock was hardly the embodiment of the ideal. It had its own murky trafficking with commerce, its own share of self-indulgence and posing. Nonetheless, it wasn’t planned in the Oval Office, funded by Big Oil, puffed by Establishment media, and led in patriotic rituals by a military color guard. Explo’s famous tag-line might have been a bit more appropriate if the original Woodstock had been sponsored by IBM, Coca Cola and the U.S. Army.

Explo’s more effective rhetorical move here may have been the branding of The Jesus Movement, as a singular, homogeneous entity — like The Counterculture or The Establishment. All these would become tokens in ideological language games, which on closer inspection, prove abstractions of a much more complex reality than generally advertised. There was, true enough, a Sixties ‘religious awakening”: spontaneous, diffuse, diverse, shifting, merging, parallel eruptions, often expressed in hipster style, with their own complex relations with that other reputedly monolithic figure of the age, The Man. But many of the religious awakenings also had to contend with entanglements with a figure suggesting, in such terms, The Christian Man.

Simulacra of simulacra.

For Explo attendees, the main impression may have been that of overwhelming scale — the numbers, the hoopla, the divine. Explo meant an unprecedented affirmation of youth by grown-ups, a Prodigal generation welcomed home with the fatted calf. Attendees were part of something huge, certified, authentic. This was critical for a generation keen to encounter “the Real Thing.” Coke had used that slogan to sell their sugar-water. Now religious marketers stamped a version onto t-shirts proclaiming “Jesus is the Real Thing” — another murky overlap, between religious authenticity and consumerism. The result warranted Warhol-level irony, but this could be an unironic and earnest generation: that was often truest of the truest believers.

The paradox, however, dated back at least to the Medieval relics trade: even if an artifact may not have actually been a piece of the True Cross, it may still have been a medium of genuine religious experience. The paradox applied to Explo. For church kids raised within sectarian and cultural confines, Explo might present a radicalizing glimpse of a bigger world and a bigger God. Some went home permanently changed. Some just bought the t-shirts.

Woodstock had Hendrix. Explo had Johnny Cash.

Or the records: Explo was surely the Monterey Pop of the Jesus Movement. Like that other iconic festival, Explo heralded a new music for a national audience. There had never been a Christian concert like the all-day Jesus Sound Explosion: a sea of people, professional presentation, the music not always the most solid (much cheesy even at the time) but a few celebrity converts like Johnny Cash, and the best of crop of young Christian rock-ish bands . There was even, not insignificantly, some black Gospel and soul.²¹

It may seem easy to dismiss this breakthrough moment for Middle-America, church and state, in their Billy Graham –blessed reversal of popular prejudices against a one-time “jungle-beat” and hair-styles so blasphemous they’d been taken as a middle-finger to parents. The Explo kids raised a different finger: “One Way,” an intoxicating sign of certainty and accord, at that scary edge of monotheism-plus-missionary-impulse-plus-official-approval. Yet it was so affirming to so many in such a beleaguered generation, it seems small-hearted not to appreciate its validating, transformative power: as a kind of salvation.

NEXT: [explogate 04: radical religious protest]

© 2018 Mike Hertenstein. All rights reserved.

Mike Hertenstein

Written by

Scholar in the garret, monk in the cell, heckler in the back. Late-life seminary student. Writer, reader, listener, watcher.

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