Larry Eskridge on the Jesus People in Modern America: An Interview

Randall Stephens

[Cross-posted from Religion in American History]

Life magazine, June 30, 1972

Larry Eskridge is Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals and editor of the Evangelical Studies Bulletin at Wheaton College.  With Mark Noll, he was co-editor of More Money, More Ministry: Evangelicals and Money in Recent North American History (Eerdmans, 2000). 

Eskridge has also written the definitive account of one of the most significant mass religious movements of the last century.  His God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (Oxford University Press, 2013) examines the fusion of the hippie counterculture and evangelical Christianity that burst onto the scene in the late 1960s. I recently caught up with Larry to ask him about the project, his research, and more.

Randall Stephens: What first got you interested in the topic of the Jesus People?

Larry Eskridge: I found the Jesus People an interesting topic at several levels.  At the most basic was the fact that I came of age during that period and had been personally involved in the Jesus movement in my local area in northern Illinois.  So, if doing history often serves as something of an exercise in self-biography, I stand guilty as charged by dint of being curious about the overall movement and the reasons for its success and eventual disappearance.

At a larger level I’ve long been interested in the way that evangelical religion intertwines with mass media and popular culture and the Jesus People offered plenty to study at that level as they were the subject of a great deal of media coverage as well as replicating various aspects of the counterculture and youth culture in a comfort with pop culture and music that was, traditionally, very unusual within the overarching evangelical subculture.

Catholics, Protestants, and Sectionalism in Antebellum American: An Interview with W. Jason Wallace

Conducted by Randall Stephens

W. Jason Wallace is a professor of history at Samford University. He is the author of Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (Notre Dame University Press, 2010). I recently caught up with Jason to ask him some questions about his work on Christianity in pre-Civil War America and to discuss some of the

Wall Street, 1847. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

connections between religion, politics, and historical consciousness in the nineteenth century U.S.

Randall Stephens: What makes the era between 1835 and 1860 such a critical period in American religious history?

W. Jason Wallace: Between 1835 and 1860 most aspects of American social, political, and economic life reached something of a ferment.  Religion, and especially Christianity, underwent substantial trials as well.  Religious disestablishment was then, and still is, a young phenomenon in the scope of world history.  Unlike European churches, American churches had to compete in the marketplace of ideas for adherents.  People had choices.  Religious affiliation was not simply a matter of genealogy or geography.  As a result, in Nathan Hatch’s great phrasing, the democratization of the churches began in earnest.  With the First Great Awakening the confessional boundaries established over the course of a century or so after the Reformation slowly lost influence.  The Second Great Awakening all but ended the confessional church tradition in America.  Revivalism combined with broad conceptions of evangelicalism to create new Protestant identities.  By the middle decades of the nineteenth century many Protestant traditions that valued creeds and liturgy found themselves overwhelmed by evangelical sentiment.  Doctrine became less important than the individuals’ personal relationship with God, and behavior and public virtue came to be seen more and more as marks of “genuine” Christianity.  In some ways these theological shifts made evangelicalism valuable to the growing country because it gave sanction to the importance of virtue and morality for national life.  In other words, Christianity provided a code of behavior that could benefit everyone.  But for Christianity to be useful it had to be contained.  If disputes over theology and doctrine spilled into public life then Christianity could become divisive and socially destabilizing.  In part, this is exactly what happened in the debate over slavery. 

Richard Nixon: Victim of Religious Prejudice and Religious Pluralism

Chris Beneke

The morning after his loss to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential balloting, Vice-President Richard M. Nixon was awakened by vigorous tugging on his arm. No doubt groggy after two hours of election-shortened sleep, Nixon found his twelve-year-old daughter Julie next to him. She had been concerned by the previous evening’s returns and wanted to know the final outcome. Hearing the bad news, Julie then posed what her father described as a “strange and disturbing question.” “Daddy,” she asked, “why did people vote against you because of religion?” As Nixon recalled in his 1962 political biography Six Crises, he assured his daughter that people didn’t choose candidates because they “happen to be Jews or Catholics.” Instead, they chose them based on their estimation of the individual candidate’s merits.

This was an inspiring vision of political decision-making that didn’t comport with much else that Nixon wrote about religion and the 1960 election, nor much else in Nixon’s general approach to politics. Never one to underestimate the forces aligned against him nor his own suffering, Nixon went on to explain to readers that a smaller proportion of Catholic voters turned out for him than “any Republican presidential candidate in history (22 per cent).” Worse for his prospects that year, “there was not a corresponding and balancing shift of Protestants away from Kennedy.”