Jesus was the first hippie. Or so say the subjects of Larry Eskridge's excellent new book, which focuses on the rise of the colorful and eclectic Jesus People movement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Jesus People represented the confluence of a hip form of evangelical religion and the counterculture. They sometimes smoked joints while studying their Bibles, and occasionally went on LSD trips in search of the Holy Spirit. The Jesus People wore jeans, bellbottoms, and beads to church, and the men grew out their hair. They also played music. Rock music. Loudly. Their bodies, their clothes, and their actions represented a powerful challenge to post-war, middle-class white evangelicalism.

Eskridge boldly argues, “The Jesus People movement is one of the most significant American religious phenomena of the postwar period.” The Jesus People, he explains, played a pivotal role in the resurgence of evangelicalism in the latter part of the twentieth century by shaping “the development and direction of the larger evangelical subculture” (7). To tell this story, Eskridge focuses first on the “Jesus freaks” of northern California. These were men and women who in the late sixties were immersed in the counterculture and all of its trappings who then converted to a form of evangelical (and often charismatic) Christianity. Although they worked with local churches, they found that mainstream evangelical leaders proved unable to deal adequately with the youth of the era. Wanting to share with others what Jesus had done for them, they set out as hippie evangelists, spreading their message first to Southern California and then beyond. As the grassroots movement spread, Jesus People opened coffee houses, established intentional communities, and learned to turn popular music to evangelical ends. They also became so skilled at drawing media attention that historian Martin Marty warned that for the sake of the movement it might be better off retreating from the national spotlight.

In the early 1970s the movement evolved, peaked, and then dissipated. The height of the Jesus People movement came at the 1972 youth EXPLO rally in Dallas, which attracted over 180,000 people. By that time, the majority of Jesus People were no longer hippie converts from Haight-Ashbury or Huntington Beach, but were instead church-raised young people rebelling again their parents' and middle class culture without rebelling against Jesus (Eskridge counts himself among this group). “From 1971 on,” he writes, “the pure hippie dimension of the phenomenon was increasingly eclipsed by a grassroots, high-school-age cohort of youth—frequently church kids—who were claiming the Jesus People name and image” (155). Eskridge also touches briefly on the more controversial groups that emerged from the Jesus People movement, including the Alamo Foundation, David Berg's Children of God, and the Shepherding Movement. Ironically, these groups and movements revealed that a strong authoritarianism defined some aspects of the Jesus People movement.

Eskridge argues that by the late 1970s, the Jesus People movement was over. But its impact was not. The Jesus People, he contends, gave birth to “Jesus Rock” and the genre of Contemporary Christian Music. Perhaps even more important, the “minstrels of the Jesus People movement” created modern “praise and worship music.” The Jesus People also encouraged the rise of the modern seeker-sensitive megachurch. According to Eskridge, “The casual, come-as-you-are informality and attachment to up-tempo contemporary music and pop culture that are the staples of this dynamic new ecclesiastical form are a direct result of the Jesus People movement.” This dynamic infused traditional churches and helped build two new denominations—Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard movement. Finally, the Jesus People movement was also extremely important in that it allowed evangelical youth to “negotiate a truce between the demands of their own religious heritage and the allure of secular youth culture” (8). In other words, it helped keep young people in church.

In crafting his arguments, Eskridge draws on a wide variety of sources including published books and memoirs from participants and critics, rich and illuminating street papers, and participant interviews. He also makes extensive use of an online survey, which, he admits, was “hardly scientific” in methodology, thereby limiting its representativeness and usefulness. Unfortunately, Eskridge did not interrogate the Jesus People as thoroughly as he might have. The book reads as an invaluable chronicle of an important moment in the history of American evangelicalism. However, Eskridge most often lets his sources speak for themselves without subjecting them to critical analysis. For example, Eskridge repeatedly lets his subjects share with the reader the benefits of conversion—Jesus People saw the light and their lives went from meaningless to meaningful. He rarely discusses the consequences of such conversions, their lasting impact, and/or what such conversion narratives might be eliding. Why did Jesus People shape their stories the ways that they did? What messages did such accounts intend to convey? Even more curiously, the Jesus People movement reached its height in the midst of the Black Power and feminist movements, but Eskridge tells us little about the racial views—or even the racial makeup—of the Jesus People. Numerous images in the book show African Americans working alongside whites, but Eskridge provides little analysis of race or race relations. In terms of gender, Eskridge acknowledges that Jesus People maintained patriarchal hierarchies, but tells us little more about how gender functioned in the movement. Finally, why did a movement grounded in seemingly democratizing impulses spawn authoritarian models of Christian living? Despite these limitations, this is an important, valuable, and engaging book that will certainly be the standard on the Jesus People movement for years to come.