[explogate 04: radical religious protest]
VARIETIES OF MORAL AWAKENING
[saved from/by the sixties]
What one is saved from, in the main, has been easier to talk about for revivalist religion than what one might be saved to. True, revival has led to social reform, even if that usually meant some Christians trying to reform others who used religion to sacralize their defense of the status quo. In any case, popular conversion narratives tend to major on the “ex” portion of spiritual biography: the overcoming of the rejected sinful self, one’s own Evil Other. Many would find spiritual kinship, then, with political conversion narratives about being “saved from the Sixties” (even as critics wondered: from which parts of “the Sixties” does one seek to get saved? Say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964? In fact, for some, just so. Civil Rights converted the Bible Belt into “ex-Democrats”: that was precisely Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”²²)

For a generation whose turbulent adolescence spanned that violent decade, it was an easy thing to map one’s individual biography across the age. This was even easier for those whose personal crashes coincided with the end of the decade, with so many simultaneous cultural and political crashes, when it must have felt like the whole world needed to be scrapped and started over.
“The Sixties,” in that view, becomes the Evil Other: individual sins blur with the sins of the era, countercultures and establishments, Altamont plus Vietnam plus Watergate. Against so general a darkness, a likewise singular solution makes its own strong case. Some decided “Jesus is the answer.” Others found religion brought more questions, and even disillusionment. Time marched on: some had to be saved from being saved from the Sixties.
Few talked about how so many, including religious converts, had actually been saved, in some sense, by the Sixties. After all, the Explo kids hadn’t driven cross-country to Dallas just to hear Billy Graham: they wanted his blessing on their generation, their culture, so hard to find anywhere else.

After Explo, church kids were authorized to enjoy certain select forbidden fruit of the era. Parents, too, could now admit that the kids hadn’t been wrong about everything after all. Still, somewhere in there, remained the fragments of a vision of a subversive critique to middle-class values, including religion. Depending on the particular beholder, “One Way” might cover a multitude of individual journeys, which, in the end, went more than just one way.
For the media-empire of Billy Graham’s late patron Henry Luce, the path out of Explo led reassuringly back to “normal.” LIFE’s colorful photo-spread²³ featured kids looked much less like countercultural cast of Godspell (off-Broadway debut: May 1971) than a utopian vista of clean-cut young Republicans — which, pretty much, is what Billy Graham had promised Richard Nixon is what they’d be. As with a TIME cover story on the era’s Christian youth awakenings , LIFE framed “The Jesus Revolution” as the embrace by a rebellious generation of Establishment religion.²⁴ Despite talk of the revolutionary power of the Gospel, the reigning assumption was that Jesus represented the mainstream rather than critiques of the mainstream.

For Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright, a fierce Cold Warrior, the goal had always been “Spiritual Revolution,” which he described as a “vaccine” against various other kinds.²⁵ Crusade’s signature tract — The Four Spiritual Laws — presented the Gospel as predictable and abstract as the laws of physics. It is hard to imagine an approach more out-of-sync with the young generation, but it proved convincing for some. The scientific approach may have contributed to disappointing results of a Crusade “blitz” on the Berkeley campus — which provoked a mutiny and exodus of senior staff. Obviously, that was not the sort of spiritual revolution Bright had intended. Yet a critical concern was staving off political revolution, even if the Crusade version of the Gospel was never quite as apolitical as scientific law. Bright had supported the right-wing candidacy of Barry Goldwater²⁶, and joined in pioneering efforts to recruit conservative Christians for political office.²⁷ In the White House, Nixon enforcer Chuck Colson (who, born-again after his Watergate sentence, became an elder statesman of Evangelicalism) trusted Bright: he seemed “safer,” Colson had said, than the uncharted wilderness of “Jesus Freaks.”²⁸
Soon the well-oiled PR machine would take ownership of the “Jesus Freak” narrative, marking the borders, defining the terms, identifying the “ex” from which they’d all been saved. For young converts dissenting from this narrowly-branded notion of the Gospel, it marked the end of a different dream. Explo may not have been the Altamont of the Jesus Movement, but it closed a period when Jesus Freaks were unsafe to the Nixon White House.
[radical religious protest]
Whether it was near-mutiny again or not, there was a “stormy session” of Crusade staff that resulted in Bill Bright sending word back to Graham, who passed it to Haldeman — just one day after that Oval Office meeting! — that the President was actually not invited to Explo ‘72.²⁹

Perhaps that tempestuous discussion had been influenced by the example of “Billy Graham Day.” Some months prior, a hometown tribute to the evangelist had featured an appearance by Richard Nixon that basically upstaged the putative guest of honor. The President offered what was ostensibly a testimonial for Billy Graham that press called a stump speech for Nixon’s re-election campaign, with focus shifting quickly to his own accomplishments and promises.³⁰ (Graham later rebroadcast the speech on his weekly radio show, The Hour of Decision.³¹)
If the Crusaders really wanted to keep from politicizing Explo ’72, though, they should have thought harder about doing Flag Day with full military color guard and the four-star general leading the Pledge of Allegiance. True, they may have been thinking about the patriotic services out of World War II, like the Youth for Christ extravaganzas where Billy Graham got his start.³² And YFC may have been on Billy Graham’s mind when he led a 1970 event on Independence Day in D.C. But surely by then it was clear such events could never be non-political: ”Honor America Day” was funded by Nixon backers and run by White House staff as a pep rally for the President and his Vietnam policy.³³ There were protests and arrests.³⁴
Flag Day, at Explo, was Wednesday. The military focus climaxed with a moment of silence for American prisoners in Vietnam. The respectful silence of nearly one-hundred-thousand youth was broken by the sound of chanting from the uppermost reaches of the stadium. “Stop the war! Stop the war! Stop the war!”³⁵ A small group of protesters unfurled a pair of giant banners, one read “CROSS OR FLAG?” the other “CHRIST OR COUNTRY?” Nearly one-hundred-thousand youth sent up “the largest billow of ‘boos’ I had ever heard…” one of the protesters would recall. The Dallas Morning News: “The Christian militants of the Prince of Peace and the might of the military were both in evidence last night in the Cotton Bowl…”³⁶
A group calling themselves the People’s Christian Coalition had thrown themselves into the otherwise massively unified culture of Explo, distributing antiwar tracts and carrying signs like “The 300 persons killed by American bombs today will not be won in this generation.” Much discussion was thereby provoked, pro and con, with attendees and then event officials. The dissident sentiments violated the spirit of the event, protesters were told. Even so, they were allowed to release into the environment a diversity of Christian views: on Scripture, social activism, church-state relations, war and peace — and the identification of Evangelicalism with this war and this President.³⁷

A leader of the PCC was Jim Wallis, 24, raised Evangelical but a child of his generation, who’d joined college protest and felt like an outsider among both campus activists and campus Christians. His view of the Gospel put Jesus on the side of social justice, struggle for the poor and oppressed. He brought that conviction to Evangelical seminary, where he found like-minded students who raised a fuss on campus and moved in together in a Christian activist commune. They started a magazine, The Post-American, whose debut issue featured a drawing of a thorn-crowned Christ wrapped in an American flag.³⁸ Wallis’s group made common cause with a larger generational rejection of an untenable status quo and quest for alternatives. They set their notion of “radical awakening” and “revolution” in a Gospel context.³⁹

A regular target for their spirited critique was Evangelical-led civil religion: “the church has lost its ethical authority and has become the chaplain of the American nation, preaching a harmless folk religion of comfort, convenience, and presidential prayer breakfasts.”⁴⁰ A specific target was Billy Graham: “Our leading evangelist plays golf with the corporate elite, opens his pulpit to the President’s politics, presides over nation-worship ceremonies…”⁴¹ The Post-American declared that the evangelist “not only fails to condemn American corporate sin with the same vigor that he condemns personal sin, but he [also] frequently identifies with that American system which creates so much evil in this world.⁴² For Wallis: “A vote for Richard Nixon is a vote for the spread of Americanism as a missionary religion.”⁴³
Wallis and group engaged in their own kind of cross-cultural missions. A month before the presidential election, they organized an appearance at Billy Graham’s own Wheaton College by Democratic Senator George McGovern. The event was its own ironic refraction of Explo. There were plenty of cheers, but also some boos in the balcony, with a “hostile banner.”⁴⁴
[pass it on]
Yet despite that surprising mix of political convictions in the Evangelical stronghold, despite Billy Graham’s own concerns that McGovern might attract the Christian youth vote, despite mathematics that showed McGovern would win if the newly-franchised demographic leaned Democratic, the youth gave their vote to Richard M. Nixon: by 52%, Protestants by 70%.⁴⁵

Indeed, it was hard to top the firepower on display at Explo, especially that last night. On Friday, June 16, Billy Graham issued a strong call for courageous discipleship. Then — as seen in the LIFE photo-spread — he passed a candle flame that spread among one-hundred thousand young people, as they joined all those voices in a catchy campfire standard.
Decades later, the disconnect from the youth culture it aimed to subvert was the punchline of a spoof by satirist who set the lyrics of “Pass It on” to the tune of Sixties rebel song, “Born to be Wild.”⁴⁶ In 1972, “Pass It On” had the hypnotic power of an altar-call for a generation of Christian youth, ever after plucking chords of longing for lost youth and more innocent days.
It only takes a spark to get a fire going…Once you’ve experienced it, you want to pass it on.
The moment stirred even the People’s Christian Coalition, joining in a song and ceremony that paradoxically kindled feelings of unity but also diverse meanings. (“CROSS OR FLAG?” “CHRIST OR COUNTRY?”) One young protester recalled how even the PPC responded “with both joyful affirmation at the good words being said, and painful awareness of the strong resistance to letting those words become flesh in response to the world’s agonies.” The group shared their own prayer for “strength and discernment and joy” in being true to their Christian call amidst an “Americanized civil religion” bigger on “Jesus talk” than “Jesus walk.”⁴⁷
At the very same moment, others were experiencing it and passing it on, even if “it” meant different things. Indeed, among those passing it on was a 16-year old kid from Arkansas who recalled how he’d been struck not just by “the impact that one life, and one light, can make,” but also the realization of how fast something might spread — good or evil.⁴⁸ Young Mike Huckabee went on that summer to get himself elected at Boy’s State camp, later he became a Southern Baptist minister, then a Republican governor, then a Presidential candidate, then a Fox News pundit, then the father of the Press Secretary of the President of the United States.

In that final service in the Cotton Bowl, the kids were also read a telegram from the current and soon-to-be-reelected President of the United States. Richard Nixon, who instead of going to Dallas to appear at Explo, as it turned out, spent the weekend with friends in the Bahamas.49 Nixon’s message to the tens of thousands of kids in the stadium offered his stump speech in an implied message about his own political leadership: “No nation or people can remain materially strong if it becomes spiritually weak” and that from America’s earliest days, Americans have found strength to overcome their problems with their religious faith.
The massive gathering of the Campus Crusade is heartening evidence that the students and young people of America are growing stronger in that faith: that many of them are discovering that the way to change the world for the better is to change ourselves for the better.⁵⁰
The theology was that of Billy Graham and Explo: changing not the world, but the individual: that was a certain take on the “spiritual” revolution. “That kind of change” — the words reverberated through the packed stadium — requires a deep and abiding commitment to spiritual values. It requires a moral awakening.” One imagines, against the otherwise silence, the echo: “moral awakening… awakening… awakening…” — fading into the Texas twilight.
It was Richard M. Nixon’s last public utterance before incidents-in-the-night that would eventually name all that would be remembered as “Watergate.”
NEXT: [explogate 05: all the president’s men]
© 2018 Mike Hertenstein. All rights reserved.
