Title : 'That Jesus freak still lives inside of me': What happened when Christianity met the counterculture
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'That Jesus freak still lives inside of me': What happened when Christianity met the counterculture
Joni Thompson was baptised in a blow-up pool full of water, on stage in front of three or four thousand people.
Her boyfriend, Larry Eskridge, watched from the crowd in Chicago in the late 1960s as she traipsed up the stairs wearing her blue jeans.
After the short ceremony, Dr Eskridge says, she was "sopping wet ... but glowing and happy because of the commitment she had just made".
For six years, the couple were part of the Jesus People movement — a countercultural Christian evangelical revival that spread across America and the world from San Francisco in the late 1960s.
The movement acted as an important outlet for young people to share their frustration and bewilderment at the state of the world.
Dr Eskridge, now a retired historian, estimates more than 250,000 people converted, often becoming baptised in the sea.
He says the movement appealed to varied communities because it tapped into a disappointment with the direction of the swinging 60s countercultural movement, when people expected "the promises of peace and love and goodwill ... through narcotic enlightenment".
When that didn't always eventuate, the evangelical message spoke to something bigger that could comfort young seekers hoping for better times.
Connecting through music
From San Francisco, the coffee houses, music concerts and shared houses moved east, keeping their clear evangelical bent.
Then, in the early 1970s, the movement spread from America to Europe — brought by a community called Jesus People Milwaukee, who toured with a band called The Sheep.
For the Jesus People, music was the most authentic form of communication across language and cultural barriers.
"We were so ... good-looking, we had all our hair," remembers Susan Cowper, one of the founders of Jesus People Milwaukee.
"We were young, enthusiastic, we were capable of immediately making a connection with other young people."
She remembers a time of great optimism, despite the social backdrop of the struggle for civil rights, assassinations of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and president John F Kennedy and protests against the Vietnam War.
They travelled through Finland, Germany and the UK and wrote The Lonesome Stone, a musical about the history of the Jesus People movement in America.
The day before the tour was due to start, Ms Cowper remembers several rushed weddings between members who were due to travel together.
"We were very young, skinny and unwed," she recalls. "We all lived together and you know how that goes."
Ms Cowper says the faith that propelled her community forward is still relevant decades later.
"That Jesus freak still lives inside of me. I still have a lot of hope."
'Something really special' in the Australian context
The Jesus People movement reached Australia, too, with the Kairos festival held in Canberra just as Gough Whitlam's government was about to sit for the first time in March 1973.
Protesters moved through the city's streets under banners proclaiming, "The real revolution ... Jesus!"
The demonstration was a "public response to a new era, symbolised by the election," according to Hugh Chilton, a historian researching the relationship between religion and national life in post-war Australia.
The name "Kairos" — Greek for "a special time, a moment of beginnings, of coming together" — played on Labor's successful "It's time" campaign in 1972.
Dr Chilton says the Jesus People movement in Australia wanted to demonstrate a new model for the country.
"They were trying to say, 'There [is] a third way between communism and capitalism, between political left and right [and beyond the] received traditional expressions of Christianity in Australia."
The Australian Jesus people called themselves radical disciples, and were trying to return to what they saw as the way Jesus would have lived.
Dr Chilton says they were engaging with lots of "pretty thorny issues" — conducting sit-ins on the relationship between nature and the architecture of cities.
"They were thinking about environmentalism, pollution, immigration and land rights," he explains.
This social and religious shift came at a time when individual self expression was changing and becoming a more common experience.
"Rather than take received identities like the nation or the family or religion," Dr Chilton explains, "one really [needed] to find who one is."
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