There Have Always Been Fascist Hippies

The video is about Chuck Smith, Calvary Chapel, and the invention of the Hippie Jesus. This idea eventually became the Jesus People movement, also known as the Jesus Freaks. As the speaker in the video, Winter, notes, this was also the origin of churches using a stage and a rock band in an attempt to make Christianity cool again.

This was the same era as the beginnings of the “pro-life” movement, Winter adds. Add to this Chuck Smith’s apocalyptic beliefs, and you have the origins of modern Evangelicism and what would become the Trump Movement.

This ties in directly to work I had already been doing. In 2019 I started to research a book about, loosely, psychedelic politics and the dark side of psychedelic culture. This blog represents my first attempt to synthesize that research. The subject of political psychedelica has become increasingly urgent since then, and several other researchers have begun to publish on it.

But the casual approach was not the only thing Evangelical leaders took from the movement. They also lifted language about being a “full-time Christian,” for whom Christianity was political. Being a Christian meant a total confrontation with culture in the same allegedly revolutionary manner as their other hippie contemporaries.

By the mid-seventies, countercultural styles and attitudes were waning, and the radical elements of the Jesus Movement went with it. And despite their revolutionary pretenses, former Jesus People began organizing against “abortion, feminism, and homosexuality.”

The movement that began as “a backlash against the excesses of ’67” ended by committing themselves to the “most conservative beliefs of evangelical Christianity, particularly regarding gender and sexuality.” Finally, Evangelicals appropriated the idea that they were political outsiders from the Jesus People, despite their demographic majority status.

So what does this mean for our thinking about psychedelics and their impacts on politics? Writing for Frontiers in Psychology, Brian Pace and Neşe Devenot formalize this discussion in their article Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency.

They attempt to “show that conservative, hierarchy-based ideologies are amenable to incorporating psychedelic experiences.” Their essay is still in pre-publication at the time of this writing. They look at historical and recent public figures who have used psychedelics and show that these sentiments have been “expressed by [Conservative] thought leaders like Jordan Peterson and members of several neo-Nazi organizations.”

For these reasons, we must push back on the idea that psychedelics are a panacea. And we must remember that psychedelic experiences can often have a severe disordering effect on people without careful attention and support. Even more, people in that fragile emotional place are often vulnerable to predators of whatever sort, political or otherwise. Furthermore, we must remember that relatively ordinary people often choose far-right politics for what they consider to be good reasons. It is this perversion of desire with which we must be concerned.

Related posts:

Thus says the Lord GOD: I will take the children of Israel from among the nations to which they have come, and gather them from all sides to bring them back to their land. I will make them one nation…