The Last Time The New Age Turned Right

Conspirituality may be new… but alternative spirituality’s turn towards the right is not.

Back in 1971, as a nine year old, I was surprised that my aunt and uncle — my cool aunt and uncle — managed to get my parents to sit and listen to a good deal of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar one afternoon in their apartment in East Rockaway.

I had never seen my parents paying attention to any rock album: they hadn’t shown any interest the year before when my aunt had played me Abbey Road, which was much more to my liking. For that matter, I had never seen them show much interest in religion. Obviously, Jesus Christ Superstar was making an impression.

That same year saw the production of another Christian rock opera, Godspell. That remained on Broadway at least long enough for me to see it when I was in high school, around 1976 or 77. In my secular suburban world of the Seventies, it was all transitory interest. Yet in other quarters, things were different.

I don’t mean to imply that these two musicals were right wing. At the time, Christian evangelicals were rather critical of them (both rock operas left out the resurrection, a not-insignificant part of the story of Jesus). What seems notable was that there was a crossover between Christianity and what we might as well call hippie culture (once again, I have to beg a little leeway as I oversimplify for the sake of the brevity required in a Medium article… visit this article for more in-depth look).

We have to call it hippie culture, because back in the day there was no New Age. The hippies are the element of the sprawling 1960s counterculture that most directly morphed into the New Age. Their rejection of modern, materialist culture in favor of exploration of higher consciousness (or at least different consciousness), the search for peace, and most importantly an openness to alternative spiritual paths and esoteric ideas, found expression in a more settled and socially acceptable way as the Sixties turned into the Seventies.

But not for everyone: hippie culture diverged into two streams. The New Age was one, but the Jesus Freaks movement was another. The term “Jesus Freak” started out as a pejorative but, like queer, it was co-opted into the movement. It wasn’t a long stretch, because freak was already in use to describe something of intense interest, as in, “I’m a jazz freak.” Anyway, it eventually became Jesus People.

Initially, the Jesus People seems to have kept to the openness of the hippy movement. Jesus, or Christianity, was perhaps just another spiritual road to explore and appreciate. Yet the stresses of the late 1960s and beyond made it difficult to retain the upbeat optimism of the Summer of Love. By 1971, Hunter Thompson could write that in 1967 they had been “riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave”, but:

… now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971

Thompson mentions the movements towards Jesus, gurus, and other authorities in the book, and his assessment of the situation was pretty spot-on, given the lack of historical perspective. When the idealism of the Sixties crashed on some hard realities, folks ran for cover, and some of them retreated to Christianity.

Throughout the Seventies, churches tried to capitalize on the movement, inviting younger people in with folk masses, as guitars replaced organs for hymns. But the hippies-turned-Jesus Freaks had stepped far enough outside of Western culture to require a stronger force to hold their psychic economy together, and many drifted towards fundamentalist, hardline Christianity.

The rejection of Western culture was rather complete, although it targeted not only values but the ability to think critically. Even the otherwise benign Godspell shows a rejection of the thinking function. It begins with a series of quotes by various philosophers, each trying to unravel the mystery of being. The overlapping quotes are eventually silenced by the chanting of “Prepare Ye The Way of the Lord!” — or — Screw thinking, the answer is simple.

It almost exactly parallels what’s happened to the New Age in recent years. The Covid pandemic was the final straw in a series of stressors (like our polarized political and social climate), and it tipped many idealistic New Agers into the dark waters of conspirituality. Once again: screw thinking and listen (only) to your intuition (or mine).

For Jesus People, the world was too scary and complicated, and they needed to retreat towards fundamentalist Christianity. For New Agers, the world was too scary and complicated, so they retreated towards conspirituality and far-right libertarianism.

We have to remember that hippies, New Agers, and other counterculture groups not only rejected Western culture, they were rejected by it. That’s bound to lead to an overly skeptical attitude towards the culture. But it’s hard to maintain skepticism in everything, and if this is so wrong, something else, it seems, must be so right.

There’s nothing wrong with skepticism about the institutions of Western culture. They are indeed full of problems and are perhaps bringing us to the edge of annihilation through any number of means. Alternatives are, as I’ve written before, desperately needed.

Folks that reject and are rejected by their home culture are bound to look for something better. That they’ll find something is almost guaranteed. Better is the tricky part.