Countering the counterculture

In an address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission in April 1993, Pope John Paul II acquitted Galileo for his heretical conclusion 360 years earlier that the Earth orbits the sun, explaining that “the theologian must keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences.” In his October 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, this same pope averred that Darwin was right, noting that the theory of evolution is “more than a hypothesis,” and assured believers that it is possible to be both a Christian and an evolutionist because “truth cannot contradict truth.”

Scientists who perceive religion as a dinosaurian relic incapable of adapting to an ever-changing cultural landscape should take note. Religion is inescapably Darwinian, evolving to fill empty niches and mutating to compete with cultural competitors. Nowhere is this adaptability more apparent than in the United States, where the separation of church and state has forced religion to compete with other cultural traditions and social institutions for the minds, souls and dollars of consumers. A spiritual free market has produced a melange of cults, sects and religions, from Mormons and Moonies to Scientologists and Southern Baptists, all of whom have adopted the uniquely American style of advertising and marketing their products and services.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the secularization of society, mandatory public education and the rise of modern science, Americans over the last century have become more religious than ever before. Pundits who call for America to return to the good ol’ days of our Christian founding fathers have their history backward. Historians and sociologists have demonstrated that belief in God, religiosity and church attendance have all steadily increased over the last two centuries. This is the American religious paradox, resolved if we think of religions in Darwinian terms as social organisms competing for limited resources as they try to pass on their ideological genes to the next generation.

A splendid test of this theory is how religion fared in the turbulent 1960s, the subject of Mark Oppenheimer’s insightful and charming cultural history in “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture.” In Europe, where religion and government are inextricably intertwined, change comes about glacially, if at all. “The Lutheran Church in Sweden is not much affected by rebellious youth culture or the fall of foreign governments; the Church of England is anemic whether the radio is playing the Beatles or Oasis,” Oppenheimer asserts. “But American religions must constantly sell themselves, and the ones that last are the ones that discover ways to exert imaginative sway.”

Busting the myth that mainstream religions suffered irreversible blows from their 1960s countercultural competitors, Oppenheimer demonstrates that, for example, Catholics, Mormons and Pentecostal groups such as the Assemblies of God saw their membership rolls swell. From 1963 to 1976, the Southern Baptist Convention grew by 2.5 million members, while Unitarians saw their ranks bulge by 30% (from 147,000 to 191,000 members), and Catholics by 15% (from 43 million to 49.5 million). The perception of the ‘60s as an era in which Americans dropped out of mainstream religion to hitch rides “on the paisley bus of religious experimentation” (in one of his many clever phrases that break up copious statistics) such as Transcendental Meditation, est and Silva Mind Control is simply wrong. Americans may have experimented with alternative religions, but they did not inhale.

In a 1973 study conducted in San Francisco, for example, only 1% said they knew a lot about Hare Krishna while 61% knew nothing; 3% knew a lot about Zen Buddhism, 27% knew a little and 70% knew nothing; 8% had participated in yoga, 5.3% in TM and 2.6% in Zen. “In other words,” Oppenheimer deduces, “in a famously liberal, iconoclastic city, a random sampling of the population revealed low, even minuscule, levels of familiarity with prominent alternative religions.”

What did happen in the ‘60s (itself something of a myth, Oppenheimer argues, since the decade of social and cultural turmoil was more like the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s) is that traditional religions evolved to remain “the spiritual homes for most Americans.” Although “many people pass through periods of religious seeking, often shopping at different churches, they finally settle into membership at one.” He defines religion as “a sacrificial system whose adherents do not ascribe to another religion.” It is one thing to be titillated by alternative belief systems (and maybe even briefly sample one or two); it is quite another to tithe a percentage of your hard-earned income to one. He defines counterculture as “a self-sustaining alternative model of culture.” Alternative religious movements were not truly countercultural because, for the most part, they did not displace mainstream religions. Instead, what happened is that traditional religious cultures evolved just enough to survive and outlive their would-be competitors. (Whatever happened to Silva Mind Control?)

Unitarians and gay rights, Roman Catholics and the folk mass, Jews and communal worship, Episcopalians and feminism, and Southern Baptists and Vietnam War protesters are Oppenheimer’s case studies in how remarkably adaptable religions are even in the most turbulent times. He chose these five religions because they are well established enough that, in his pragmatic definition of mainstream, “adherents can run for office without having to explain their religion.” How each adapted to these challenges to orthodoxy determined, in part, how well they survived. Unitarians (so-called because they reject the Trinity), with a history of supporting progressive causes, took well to feminist, antiwar and civil rights movements. So it’s not surprising that openly gay ministers would quickly find succor in most Unitarian churches (with feeble resistance from Southern and Midwest congregations). As a cultural species, Unitarians already were well adapted for the countercultural challenges and thus they passed through the crisis unscathed.

So did American Jews, who already had undergone profound changes earlier in the century under Reform Judaism, and whose essence was more cultural than religious. “Jews are Jews because of descent,” Oppenheimer says. “[T]hey don’t have to be under a synagogue roof, in communion with other Jews, or in good standing with a religious hierarch. They were always freer to experiment outside the established religious bodies.” Which they did with the havurah, a counterculture movement of small communities who gathered to study or worship outside a synagogue and away from the rabbi. As an example of religious plasticity, even in what constitutes religion per se, he notes: “Jews could be profoundly, traditionally Jewish while rebuking Jewish institutions.” This is how to survive a cultural crisis.

Episcopalians and Southern Baptists were not nearly as liberal as Unitarians and Jews, so the feminist movement for the former and Vietnam War protesters for the latter were not so easily incorporated. Yet in these case studies one can find a certain controlled tolerance, even if it is implemented for the purpose of preserving power and control (in the former) and gaining additional members (in the latter). A case in point is the Catholic Church, which abandoned the Latin Mass in 1967 to stop the bleeding of weekly Mass attendance that had been declining an average of 2% a year throughout the decade. Both Catholic school enrollment and conversion rates were dropping, along with vocations to the priesthood. Pope John XXIII’s call for aggiornamento, or updating, of the church came none too soon. Vatican II was the result. Mass would be celebrated in the vernacular rather than in Latin, the priest would face the congregation, and dry Gregorian chants would be replaced by the innovative sounds of the electric guitar.

Rock of ages.