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Thoughtful academics have long been sensitive to the liberal origins of the Reagan Revolution. In the bestselling Why Americans Hate Politics, E. J. Dionne emphasized just how easy it was for pot-smoking hippies to grow into espresso-sipping yuppies. The liberal heritage of the neoconservative hawks who have circled around Republican administrations since 1980 is even less disputed. These intellectuals, after all, hail from radical socialist and communist backgrounds, and they carried their youthful idealism with them in their various campaigns to spread democracy.
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One significant faction of the modern Republican Party, however, is usually situated well outside what Louis Hartz famously described as the American liberal tradition. Indeed, the Religious Right routinely gets compared to the Taliban and the KKK. Even more sober observers regard the Religious Right as an illiberal reaction to the convulsions of the Sixties.
As its great title suggests, Hippies of the Religious Right sharply disagrees with the conventional wisdom. In Preston Shires' rendering, today's conservative evangelicals owe a great debt to the Sixties. Indeed, many of them participated in the counterculture. Like their radical counterparts, Shires contends, evangelical activists were marked by a "rebellious spirit," a deep anxiety over the dehumanizing effects of modern life, and a commitment to a kind of modern freedom that he calls "expressive individualism."
Shires deserves much credit for articulating such a bold and interesting thesis, and his discussion of "Jesus Freaks" is well worth the cover price. In general, though, his analysis of evangelicals feels underdeveloped. For example, he asserts that Focus of the Family "demonstrated the best melding of countercultural Christian ideals and traditional evangelicalism." Perhaps this is true, but I am not sure why Shires believes it. Likewise, he has almost nothing to say about the rescue movement—the largest campaign of civil disobedience since the civil rights movement, and one that grew directly out of the anti-war Catholic Left. Here is a perfect test-case for Shires' thesis.
So how did evangelicals change the rescue movement? Contrary to Shires' thesis, they did so by rejecting some of the very sensibilities that made Sixties social protest so distinctive. For one, they dispensed with the term "sit-ins" precisely because it smacked of a tradition of liberal pacifism.
Moreover, evangelicals had little interest in the liberal thinkers that influenced the first generation of rescuers. According to James Risen and Judy L. Thomas' fascinating account of the rescue movement in Wrath of Angels, the Catholic leftists who began abortion sit-ins in the 1970s found inspiration in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and especially Thomas Merton. Under their influence, John O'Keefe wrote A Peaceful Presence in 1978, a recruiting pamphlet that asked pro-life activists not to resist any police force so that they might experience and embody the "vulnerability of the unborn" and "solidarity with the child." So ensconced were these early Catholic activists in the world of Sixties radicalism that they initially attempted to recruit their liberal pacifist friends. Only after their appeals were roundly rebuffed did they belatedly turn to conservative Protestants for help.
Evangelicals responded, but did not accept the movement's early influences. Their lodestar was Francis Schaeffer, whose fiery Calvinism could not have been more different from the mystical pacifism of Thomas Merton. Randall Terry replaced O'Keefe as the movement's leader and swept aside what Risen and Thomas describe as its "sixties leftist feel." With Terry as its spokesman, the movement took on a new militancy and spoke in a much darker, apocalyptic language. By the 1990s, when anti-abortion activists descended deeper into violence, O'Keefe hardly recognized the movement he had pioneered. Michael Bray's A Time to Kill, published in 1994, signaled just how far rescue had drifted from O'Keefe's A Peaceful Presence.
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