Shawn Young's Gray Sabbath is a riveting countercultural story of an intentional evangelical Christian community moving steadily to the political left. Formed in 1972, Jesus People USA continues to defy the common narrative that places postmodern evangelical Christianity firmly in the grasp of right-wing politics. Through its urban setting, community and political activism on behalf of the poor, and its now defunct Cornerstone Music Festival (1984–2012), Young lays out a compelling case that JPUSA became a counterculture within evangelicalism early on in its history. This deeply researched book problematizes the cultural narrative that too often locates the hippie Jesus movement of the early 1970s as a direct path into the Moral Majority and the Republican Party.

From its early years, Young argues, JPUSA has been something altogether different from its Jesus freak contemporaries. Its unique longevity compared to a sea of failed communal experiments commands a deeper analysis, which Young superbly provides. Young argues convincingly that JPUSA's longevity can be correlated to three factors, “a commitment to aiding Uptown's (Chicago, IL) homeless population, a steady influx of new members, mission businesses, and a sustained affiliation with the parent denomination (Evangelical Covenant Church)” (222). Each of these topics occupies a central role in the historical narrative of its peculiar history and legacy. These aspects grew organically out of a commitment to communal living in an urban setting and the musical interests of many of the early members. But Young argues that these influences pushed the community into an interstitial place more closely aligned with the evangelical left occupied most famously by Jim Wallis's Sojourners community and Brian McLaren's Emergent Church Movement. Most convincingly, Young traces the moderately progressive strategies of the Cornerstone Music Festival as a catalyst for the breakdown of structural categories, while maintaining a connection to the legitimizing power of mainstream evangelicalism. As Young puts it, “This was a subculture within two subcultures; establishment evangelicalism and CCM [Contemporary Christian Music]” (217). Cornerstone provided the primary recruiting grounds for new communards while simultaneously generating interstitial space for engaging theological and political pluralism in an only moderately controlled evangelical atmosphere.

Shawn Young is the director of music industry and recording technology at York College of Pennsylvania and is the CEO and president of York Music Group. He has published works on the counterculture of the 1960s, communal living, the politics of popular music, and countercultural music. Young specializes in American popular music and religion, concert promotions, artist development, and critical cultural theory, and he is currently the coordinator for the forum on research for the Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association. His latest work, Gray Sabbath adds to a growing list of academic research into the cultural changes wrought by the 1960s counterculture viewed through the lens of religion as a contextual guide, such as Preston Shires's Hippies of the Religious Right: From the Countercultures of Jerry Garcia to the Subculture of Jerry Falwell (2006) and Larry Escridge's God's Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (2013).

Gray Sabbath begins with an overview of communal history and the Jesus freaks, drawing the necessary links between these uniquely American conceptions of modern evangelicalism and the Jesus People. Unlike many of its counterparts, however, JPUSA survived well beyond the usual time frame of similar groups of a few years and continues to thrive today. Chapters 4–6 delve deeper into the practical differences between JPUSA and its counterparts that Young argues explain its longevity; most notably its choice of Uptown Chicago as a communal living experiment, openness to postmodern theological questions, and an embracing of subcultural musical expression. Finally, Young wrestles with the future of the commune, addressing allegations of mental and sexual abuse, the second generation of communards, and the ending in 2012 of the Cornerstone Music Festival.

Young is at his best in describing the praxis of early JPUSA that set the stage for its ongoing evolution from an End-Times movement into one engaged in practical lived theology and praxis. He views the movement as having naturally progressed through its own agency and praxis of a social and communal faith. Extensive interviews of long-time members, leadership, and those who have left the community undergird his argument throughout, providing a convincing narrative of change over time within the community. While Young eventually addresses the allegations of abuse that the community has faced in the last decade, this critical subject is held until nearly the end of the study. Likewise the end of the Cornerstone Music Festival in 2012 is only adequately analyzed as a loss of cultural visibility. The reader is left to assume that these issues are mostly peripheral, when it is quite plausible that these events were integral to JPUSA's own theological evolution. But this is only a relatively minor complaint.

In total, this ethnographic study of one of America's most successful Christian communes is an exceptional work that problematizes the dominant narratives of evangelical and countercultural history. Students of American history, religious music history, and American evangelicalism will all find this a substantive contribution to their fields.