home | 1946-21st century | Political Conservatives in the West

Changing Mores in the 1950s and '60s

Changing ideas that impact religion is an old phenomenon. Hinduism had been a product of change and development. Buddhism developed into separate branches: Hinayana and Mahayana. Judaism changed, as reflected in the differences between the Sadducees and Pharisees. From the third to the twentieth century, new ideas have been adopted by Christians. From 1900 to 1950, more people came to believe in evolution and that the universe was older than 6000 years.

Through the 1950s and 1960s attitudes toward morality continued to change among people in general. With the popularity of psychology came a greater acceptance of sex as a normal biological urge.  To the dismay of their elders, youths responded to the reduced inhibitions of rock and roll. In dance, white folks were loosening up their bodies, including adults who wanted to be like the young.

Literature was loosening up - in the United States a little more slowly than in Europe. Respect for censorship had fallen from what it had been before World War II, discredited by fascism in Germany. In the United States censorship ended for books such as Fanny Hill, Voltaire's Candide or D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. The government did not suppress  J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, first published in 1951. And Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn were legally published.

In the United States, women hiding their ankles was long gone. The miniskirt was launched and in demand, and in 1960 admonitions about pregnancies from premarital sex were challenged by the introduction of the birth control pill. Within two years, 1.2 million women were using "the pill." And by 1965, five million women were using it. The idea of sexual intercourse for the sake of pleasure was spreading. In Iran, the Shah, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, was trying to bring his nation into the twentieth century, so to speak, and he decreed that women were free from the Muslim tradition of wearing the veil.

Liberalization in the Roman Catholic Church

On October 9, 1958 Pope Pius XII died - after 19 years as Pontiff. The new father of the Church, John XXIII (Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli), was a kindly looking man who tried to inspire a spiritual renewal. He promoted unity among Christians and wished to end the schism between Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians that had begun in the fifth century. He called for an ecumenical council - a worldwide meeting of Catholic bishops - the first since 1870. Also, he responded to appeals from Jews to do something about the age-old religiously inspired contempt for Jews.

Pope John considered eliminating warnings against attending secular universities and the Church's Index of Forbidden Books. And with the world population at around 3.1 billion and the advocacy of birth control rising, Pope John established a commission to study contraception.

In 1963, Pope John XXIII died and was succeeded by Paul VI. The ecumenical council that Pope John had called for - the Second Ecumenical Council, also known as Vatican II - was underway. In 1964, the Church study of the issue of the persecution of Jews culminated with the Church declaring that Jews were not to be considered guilty of having killed Jesus Christ. The Church stated that it reprobated "all injuries done against any people" and that it deplored and reprobated "all persecutions and manifestations of anti-Semitism." It declared that "the Church must be cleansed of all elements of scorn for or accusations against Jews." And the Church declared its opposition to discrimination "on the basis of race, color, condition of life [poverty] or religion."

The Second Ecumenical Council concluded in 1965. Out of it came the authorization for the use of vernacular languages in mass. The Council declared the value of other religions, without mention of "idolatries and fallacies" with which the Church had previously described other faiths. Hinduism and Buddhism were praised for being rich in myth, for their asceticism and their "insights of philosophy." Hindus were praised for their recognition of a supreme being and a personal god and as "seekers of divine truth." Buddhism was praised for addressing "the essential inadequacy of this changing world," for "attempts to reach truth and for posing a way of life by which men can, with confidence and trust, attain a state of perfect liberation." Islam was described as close to Christianity in its monotheism and its awaiting Armageddon. Judaism was described as closely interwoven with Christianity, and Jews were described as an "elected people, dear to God." The Council expressed hope for reconciliation and an eventual unification of Christians and Jews "as one people of God." And the Council concluded with the statement that the Church awaits the day - known only to God - when all people will call on God with one voice and serve him shoulder to shoulder.

In 1966 word went out to some Catholics that they no longer had to abstain from eating meat on Fridays, except during Lent. The commission established by Pope John XXIII to study birth control concluded in 1966 with a majority and a minority report. The Commission concluded that artificial contraception was not intrinsically evil and that a Catholic couple ought to decide for itself its method of family planning. The minority report urged that Pope Paul uphold Papal authority on the issue and maintain the prohibition against artificial contraception. Pope Paul went with the minority report. In 1968, in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, he reaffirmed the pre-Vatican II prohibition against birth control by means other than abstinence, and he reaffirmed the prohibition against abortion and against sterilization.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church was distressed over its decline in membership and the decline in men entering the priesthood. In France, for example, where 81 percent of the population claimed to be Catholic, attendance was falling dramatically from what it had been in the 1950s - down to only 16 percent attending mass at least once a month. In the United States, between the years 1963 and 1973, according to the Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley, Catholics attending weekly mass dropped from 71 percent to 50 percent.

And there was the problem of ignoring Church authority. By the end of the 1960s in the United States, according to Greeley, 70 percent of Catholic women were using artificial birth control. And, according to Greeley, the belief among Catholics that a family should have as many children as possible was declining: from 41 percent in 1963, down to 18 percent by the mid 70s. According to Greeley, between the years 1963 and 1973 the belief among Catholics in the United States that Jesus Christ had handed the Church to the popes of Rome had dropped from 70 percent to 42 percent.

In the late 60s in the United States, fifty-one priests stated that in good conscience they would not support Pope Paul's ruling on birth control. In Washington D.C., Cardinal Patrick O'Boyle warned the dissident priests against "false ideas." While Cardinal O'Boyle was reading his pastoral letter some people walked out in protest, and a woman shouting her opinions was forcibly rejected by ushers. Cardinal O'Boyle placed sanctions against the dissenting priests. Some were forbidden to hear confessions, and some others were forbidden to preach or teach. Some of the dissident priest retracted their dissent, and twenty-five of them were to leave the Church.

In 1970, the ordination of women occurred in the Catholic Church. And the Church issued new guidelines for marriage between Catholics and non-Catholics. Catholics were allowed to marry people who planned to remain non-Catholics, but the non-Catholic spouse was to be reminded that their children were to be reared within the Church.

Some within the Church rejected some of the "liberal changes" that had begun with Vatican II. Most prominent among them was Archbishop Lefebvre, in France. Archbishop Lefebvre founded the Society of Saint Pius X. Lefebvre spoke of his adhering to the tradition "necessary to preserve the faith." He spoke of "Eternal Rome, Mistress of Wisdom and Truth." And Lefebvre spoke of refusing to follow "the Rome of neo-modernists and neo-Protestant tendencies."

Religious Ferment in the United States

In 1960 a Roman Catholic, John F. Kennedy, ran for president, and a number of evangelical Protestants were afraid that a Catholic in the White house would give the Vatican too much influence in the United States. In May, the Southern Baptist convention spoke in opposition to the election of a Roman Catholic to the office of the President of the United States. A few Protestants, including the advocate of positive thinking, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, formed an ad hoc group called the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, dedicated to opposing Kennedy's election. But unlike the election year of 1928, when Al Smith ran for president, in 1960 the issue of Catholicism evaporated. A greater issue was that of a missile gap, Kennedy claiming there was a missile gap. [note] 

Kennedy favored an aggressive policy against Communism. Nevertheless, he came under attack by some outspokenly anti-Communist Protestants. They considered Kennedy a liberal. Kennedy was, after all, Harvard educated and a Democrat. They spoke of moral decline and Armageddon and of Communism as foremost in leading the world toward ruin. The Communists, they believed, in addition to advocating slavery, were the world's foremost libertines and foremost in advocating the abandonment of God's laws.

Leading the charge against Kennedy, liberalism and Communism was Billy James Hargis, from Tulsa Oklahoma. Hargis had failed at study but had been ordained into the ministry after having been at the Ozark Bible College a year and a half, having left before receiving grades in his courses. He called himself Dr. Hargis but was later to say that his real education came from the hard knocks of life.  He was another who believed himself to be gifted by intuition. His intuition led him to attack the National Education Association and the mass media. He accused mainline Protestant churches as having become infested with Communist sympathies. And he charged that the federal government was being directed by pro-Communists, by people who were parading under the name of liberal. The nation, he said, was in the hands of a group of Harvard radicals, hooked on "the insidious dope of socialism." Their hearts, claimed Hargis, "bled for the whole world but not for the United States."

Soon some of the nation's more religiously conservative Protestants had another issue to speak to. Since 1959 a case had been working its way through the courts concerning prayer in public schools. In 1962 the case reached the Supreme Court, and in June 1963 the justices of the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 1 that reverential Bible reading and prayer recitation had no place in the classrooms of public schools. Some Protestants were outraged, while some others claimed that there was opportunity enough for prayer, that kids could still pray quietly anytime alone on school grounds and that one ought to be satisfied with this and the opportunity that children had to pray at church, at home from morning until they went to sleep, and anywhere between school and home.

With Christianity not being openly expounded in their public schools, some Christians became more concerned that kids were being taught things that might subvert their brand of Christianity. Opposition to the teaching of evolution arose. The John Birch Society - an anti-Communist and largely Protestant group - joined those concerned with the schools, and in the early sixties their membership rose to more than one million. In the late fifties the leader of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch, had raised the question whether the President, Dwight Eisenhower, was part of the worldwide Communist conspiracy. In 1962, the John Birch Society announced that the Communist conspiracy controlled 50 to 60 percent of the United States (more than Lenin controlled Russia at the time of his revolution). And the John Birch Society claimed that Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement were instruments of subversion.

Mainstream Protestants versus the Evangelicals and Charismatics

Leadership in mainstream churches tended to be men educated in reputable institutions, and in the eyes those close to Billy Hargis many leaders of the mainstream churches were too influenced by the "pseudo-intellectualism" of the times. In the sixties, the Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches announced new positions. In 1960 the Episcopal Church approved artificial birth control, and that year the General Assembly of the Presbyterians (U.S. Southern) declared that sex between a husband and wife without intent of procreation was not sinful. In 1961, the National Council of Churches approved birth control and family planning. In 1963, the United Presbyterian Church General Assembly passed a resolution opposing compulsory prayer and devotion in public schools. In 1964 the Presbyterians ordained their first woman minister, Rachel Henderlite.

By the late sixties, study of the background to the war in Vietnam led some Church leaders to speak out against U.S. policy regarding the war. In 1970, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church stated that U.S. policy concerning Vietnam was a "fiasco" and it urged accelerated negotiations for ending the war. In 1972, the United Presbyterian Church asked for a total and immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam.

The nation as a whole continued to see the war as a fight against Communism, and Christians close to the opinions of Billy Hargis were appalled by their fellow Christians withdrawing their support from fighting Communists. These were Christians who tended to a part of the evangelical and charismatic movements, and they were gaining supporters, while the mainstream Protestant churches and the Catholics were declining in membership - the evangelicals attributing the decline in the mainstream churches to their having lost "their fire."

Those with "fire" were repeating a tradition that went back to the Great Awakening revivalism of the 1700s, and to Billy Sunday earlier in the twentieth century. They wanted to save individual souls, as did quieter religious leaders. Also they wanted to save the masses,  and perhaps the world. Their fervor was in part a response to what they saw as a world gone bad. The fiery evangelists before them had tried but had left society in what they saw as degradation or under the influence of the devil. But hoped sprang eternal, and the fiery evangelists of the most resent generation would try where their predecessors had failed. The Great Day when the devil would be defeated was often spoken of as soon a-coming.

Abortion

Before the birth control pill had become widely available, many young women were trying to control their lives by resorting to abortions, which were illegal.  Many of them were dying as a result, and others pushed to legalize abortion so that the operations could be performed by competent doctors in the safer environment of a hospital.  In 1973, in a case entitled Roe versus Wade, it was argued before the Supreme Court that laws against abortion in Texas and Georgia were infringing on the right to privacy. The Supreme Court responded by declaring that women had the right to an abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. The ruling shocked many Americans.  Traditionalists like Jerry Falwell took up the cause against the ruling. Many abortion opponents were people who were steadfast in traditional Christianity and were steadfast in their respect for the life of a fetus. Their instincts against murder were aroused, and they saw abortion as a violation of one of the commandments that God have given to Moses. [note] 

Billy Graham

The most popular preacher in the United States was a Southern Baptist named Billy Graham, from Charlotte, North Carolina. He entered the fifties at the age of thirty-one filled with evangelical fire. He was progressive in that he had integrated seating at his meeting in the South before the integration movement was well underway. He would be opposed to the resistance to school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas. And he was religiously conservative insofar as he believed in the devil.  He said that he believed in the devil because he saw the devil's work everywhere. God, he said, allowed the devil and all his designs in order to help God's great plan. [note]

Graham emphasized being "born again," drawing from the Gospel according to John, where Jesus is quoted as saying that "unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of heaven." With a weekly radio program, Hour of Decision, Graham attracted the attention of people across the nation and across denominational divisions. He became political insofar as he described the United States in a apocalyptic battle with communism, between Christ and Anti-Christ. He was criticized by some fundamentalist Christians for being too loose with Christian doctrine. He was criticized by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who claimed that "decisions for Christ" might commitments too spontaneous to be sufficiently profound.

By the seventies Graham was just as devoted a Christian as he had been in the fifties, but his stridency had diminished and he looked kinder. He had matured. Graham remained devoted to honesty and spirituality over greed. He complained that too many preachers had died rich. This one, he added, referring to himself, "is one preacher who won't." And unlike some evangelists he had the grace of humility. "I don't know much," he said, "but I do know this, I'm a great sinner and I have a great savior."

Graham associated himself with President Richard Nixon, giving the President an opportunity to speak at one of his rallies in Tennessee at a time when the war in Vietnam was most unpopular. With the crisis called "Watergate" and exposure of Nixon's recordings of himself, Graham began to regret that association. Nixon's tapes of himself in the White House contained many expletives, and Graham, who had not served in the military as had Nixon, said he was surprised that Nixon even knew such words.

Graham had built a good organization, and a part of his success was his use of radio and television. Graham extended his crusades overseas, going to Korea one year, to Brazil another year, and to Taiwan the year after that. His opposition to Communism did not include elevating himself through denunciation. And he put himself above the battle of worldly politics. This included his absence from civil rights demonstrations during the sixties, when clergymen from mainstream denominations were marching alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Nor did Billy Graham offer any worldly solutions to social problems. Graham reduced all problems to sin - as if more murders per capita in Alabama than in Switzerland was an indication that Alabamans were more sinful than the Swiss. Social conditions, including institutions, counted for nothing. Graham stayed focused on the solution to personal problems as "coming to Christ." Without Christ, he claimed, it was not possible to be happy. In one of his sermons he spoke of people trying to have a good time, going out on a date or drinking. "You have a good time for awhile," he said, "but soon it wears off. It's gone." Here he was in good stead with Christianity's traditional Stoicism, which stood in opposition to Epicureanism. Graham's message echoed the song that Peggy Lee had sung some years before - a song that asked "Is that all there is." It was a rejection of the Epicurean position of finding happiness outside of religion: in the beauty of nature, friendships, music and knowledge.

Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert

Billy Sunday had been another of those preachers with little education and a lot of self-promotion. He had promoted himself to the masses with spectacular tent rallies. The masses had not only radio, they had television. Television provided preachers with an opportunity to reach more people. With television they could reach farther than radio - radio having been largely local. Television offered a closer, visual connection to the preacher. People could watch and listen to revivals without standing on street corners or traveling and venturing onto dusty fields. In the seventies, an estimated 24 million people tuned in weekly to listen to preachers like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert and Jerry Falwell.

Oral Roberts was based in Tulsa Oklahoma. He started out preaching in tents and performing spiritual healings. He was following the Pentecostal tradition, a tradition that had been gaining wider acceptance among blue-collar whites and blacks in the south and west of the United States. After transferring from tents to radio and television, Roberts drifted away from spiritual healings, and he became a big enough name to be invited to join international evangelical conferences, to become a friend of Billy Graham and to win acceptance among other conservative evangelists. Not having been associated with traditional higher education, Roberts found a need to found a university of his own - a university and a medical complex in Tulsa. In 1972 he was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. And when Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, became president, Roberts dined in the White House. In the late seventies, however, he raised some eyebrows when he claimed to have seen Jesus and described Jesus as 900 feet tall. And he raised eyebrows again when he announced that "the Good Lord" would call him home if his followers did not send him the five million dollars that he needed for his ministry.

Some people advanced in religious work through formal education and selection by established persons within their church. The Catholic Church, for example, was very much into education, and its leadership arose through selection within the Church, including the Pope, who was selected by his peers. But with Robertson, advancement came with a good business deal: his UHF station. Pat Robertson got his start as a televangelist in 1960 by buying a small UHF television station in Portsmouth Virginia for $37,000. Before this, he had graduated with honors and a degree in history, and he had served as an officer in the Marine Corps, after which he had become immersed in Pentecostal theology and had become "born again."

Robertson was another departure from the more established religions. And he was a manifestation of freedom and upward mobility that existed in the United States. Robertson was still dependent on his ability to appeal to people. People were free to change channels or to turn their television set off, but many television viewers were more inclined to seek wisdom from those who happened to be visible and who spoke with fervor more than they were to seek out the works of those who had acquired a Ph.D. and were devoting their lives to dispassionate scholarship.

Robertson's critics accused him of having abandoned his desperately poor and pregnant wife and going into a religious retreat, telling her that God would take care of her. Indeed, she survived the ordeal, and Robertson went on to fame and fortune. By 1975 he was reaching an estimated 110 million homes, due in part to television's expansion beyond three major networks.

Robertson's broadcasts were spontaneous affairs that in 1965 included puppetry by Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy, two young people who had been an itinerant preaching team. Jim and Tammy launched their own show, modeled after the popular talk and variety show on NBC - the Tonight Show. And with their success at soliciting funds they were able to launch their own broadcast system, which became one of the leading religious networks. By 1975 the Bakkers had acquired contributions of more than $5,000,000, and they were national celebrities.

Meanwhile, another preacher, Jimmy Swaggert, had a style more Wagnerian than Robertson or the Bakkers. Swaggert was a Pentecostalist who began his career making annual recordings of gospel songs. He began preaching at what he called the "Camptown Meeting," broadcast on stations in Atlanta, Houston and St. Paul. From the sixties and through the seventies Swaggert could be seen on television telling biblical stories and denouncing sin, his telling moving from thunderous passion to breaks of sweet calm and then back to thunder. By the late seventies Swaggert's ministry was syndicated to over 200 local stations. People were moved by his passion and in his call to end the drift away from God. Swaggert complained that the public school system was "education without God, education without morality and education without the Bible." He spoke in favor of a society  in which all education was united with religion - as it had been in antiquity and the early Middle Ages.  There is no education without God, he said, nor education without morality or education without the Bible.

What Swaggert called education was not examination such as Abelard had advocated. Nor did Swaggert demonstrate interest in teaching skills in critical thinking. Swaggert was no Protagoras teaching people to become good citizens by learning to think for themselves. Instead, Swaggert made what amounted to passionate pronouncements aimed at obedience.

Among some of the better known evangelists - Jimmy Swaggert, the Bakkers and Billy Hargis - posturings of righteousness turned into embarrassment. Swaggert was found with a prostitute, and on the air he wept, confessing what everyone already knew. Jim Bakker would be sent to prison for fraud, and he would write a book entitled I was Wrong in which he denounced not only his "prosperity theology" but also what he called the seductive nature of power." Hargis had founded a Bible college, the American Christian College, and  in 1974 several students at the school, male and female, accused Hargis of sexual improprieties. Hargis resigned as the college's president, and in 1977 the college closed.

Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority

One of the televangelists who stayed on the straight and narrow path of righteousness was Jerry Falwell. Falwell was no cultural relativist.  Rather than see the Bible as reflecting the values of the time in which its sacred texts were written, he sees its values as forever absolute.  If the Bible said that women should obey, then they should obey.  If the Bible said that homosexuality was an abomination, then it was an abomination. Falwell speaks against pornography and the "God haters." And he describes people living together or having sex without the rigmarole of state sanction as living like animals.

By 1971, Falwell was being broadcast on 300 local stations, decrying moral decline in the nation. In 1979 Falwell founded the Moral Majority hoping to mobilize people of various faiths to press for laws compatible with conservative Christian values and a strong national defense for the fight against Communism.  He barnstormed the U.S. with "I Love America" rallies including "I love America" singers. Other preachers addressed his rallies. It was time, shouted one preacher, for "God's people" to come out of their closet and out of their church's and change America. The "great American dream," one said, had turned into a nightmare. Preachers spoke of knowing God's intentions: God, it was said, wants to turn this country around. And, trying to help God in this endeavor, people at the rally made a bonfire of books and recordings that they thought corrupting.

1980 was an election year, and at a Moral Majority rally in Dallas Texas that year, candidate Ronald Reagan addressed their convention and described them as having created "a new vitality" in politics and "a new sense of purpose" in the nation.  The "I Love America" singers appeared at the Republican convention. Ecstatic, the Moral Majority rallied to Reagan's candidacy, believing that he was one of them and could turn the country around.

Many in Jerry Falwell's movement were looking for specific reforms, such as laws further restricting abortion, laws against pornography, suppression of homosexuality and school prayer. But public opinion was not with them to the degree that the Congress or the Supreme Court would act as they hoped, and President Reagan's powers were limited. Public opinion would not swing sufficiently to the side of the Moral Majority. The Moral Majority would never become majority enough.  The profane culture opposed by the Moral Majority, Jimmy Swaggert and others  would live on.

Religious Diffusions

While the Moral Majority was trying to change the United States, across the nation a trend toward greater tolerance was taking place. A Gallup Poll in 1979 indicated that the number of Protestants believing that Catholics were trying to gain too much power had dropped to 11 percent, down from 41 percent in 1952. And the same poll indicated that the number of Protestants believing that the Jews were trying to gain too much power had dropped to 12 percent, down from 35 percent in 1952. [note]

In addition to anti-Semitism being on the decline, so too in the United States was referring to non-Christians as pagan. With the shrinking world, people had been learning more about each other, and they were putting more emphasis on what they had in common, including the belief that they were worshipping a common God.

In the United States, mobility was making church congregations more ethnically diverse. More people were shopping around in deciding which church to join. In 1978 the Mormons extended to women leadership in prayers in some services, and they admitted black men into their priesthood.

From the fifties the greater tolerance had opened the door wider for accepting religious influences from outside Christianity. It was the religiosity wider than Christianity that led Dr. Timothy Leary on his path toward LSD. In 1960, Leary had traveled to Mexico and there he had met an Indian Spiritual Healer. Leary was a psychologist with a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and he had a position on the faculty at Harvard University. He had been reared as a Catholic, but he also had leanings toward mysticism. From the spiritual healer Leary purchased some mushrooms with hallucinogenic properties. Leary's hallucinogenic "trip" inspired him to want to tell people to wake up, that they were God, that they had the divine plan engraved in the "cellular script" within them. He carried this with him back to his work at Harvard and carried on with it until he was removed from his teaching duties in 1963 and then expelled from the university's faculty.

A Difference between the Billy Graham and the Buddhist Mindsets

An Episcopalian minister from Britain, Alan Watts, toured the United States praising Zen Buddhism, inner peace, and release from the guilt and strictures embodied in traditional Judaism and Christianity. He was awarded an honorary doctorate of divinity and was guest lecturer at various colleges. He wrote prolifically, sold many books and gained a wide audience for his taped broadcasts on non-commercial radio stations.

The Buddhist approach to personal troubles differed from that often expressed at Billy Graham rallies. At a Graham rally the story might be told of a person who found only emptiness with success at some worldly endeavor, and more emptiness after trying to elevate himself further. Often the troubled person tries to fill his emptiness with something depraved, such as drinking, sending him into despair, until he finds Jesus Christ. Both those attracted to Graham and to Buddhism can see egocentric attempts at fame, fortune or whatever as not really satisfying. The Buddhist approach differs in that instead of feeling emptiness the person does not reach for attention or glory to begin with. Rather than pursue vanity, he embraces life as it is. This, I believe, includes embracing those one associates with. The Buddhist doesn't fall to utter despair or escape into use of some kind of drug (alcohol or what have you). He doesn't need picking up. He is standing on his own through moderation in ambition and appetite.

Transcendental Meditation

Also a part of the new age of psychology was Transcendental Meditation, also known as TM. TM's founder was a spiritual leader from India, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. His meditation involved chanting mantras, which was supposed to relax people physically and remove mental stress. Every month in the early seventies an estimated 10,000 people were attending TM centers, which numbered 350. In 1974, Maharishi Yogi bought Parsons College in Fairfield Iowa and renamed it Maharishi International University. Some business corporations adopted TM to relax their employees. Some universities also began employing TM, and physicians and psychologists became interested in measuring (quantifying) the psychic value of meditation. Maharishi claimed that his meditation techniques were a part of Vedic science. Some of his followers began to claim that they were able to levitate and that TM could go beyond individual psychic benefit to removing social and world conflict. Maharishi also claimed that his Vedic science gave one an ability to know anything and everything in the universe. And with these claims, the popularity of TM began to decline.

Another group that focused on human psychology and mental health was following what they called scientology. Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard had been a writer of science fiction. He declared his teachings a religion, winning a tax-free status while pursuing what mainstream religions pursued: better lives for people. Scientology advocated greater success in human relationships, in family life and in one's profession. It advocated a broader social consciousness. It sought to bring together into a single discipline a variety of studies, including Buddhist ideas. Scientology was described as an effort to get people off drugs, as a struggle for human rights, an effort toward the major principles of morality and self-awareness, and as an effort toward greater happiness.

The Rastafarians

In the seventies, the popularity of Reggae and the singer Bob Marley, a Rastafarian, helped spread Rastafarianism in the United States. The home of Marley and the Rastafarians was Jamaica. The Rastafarians were influenced by the black nationalism of the Jamaican Marcus Garvey and also by Judaism and Christianity. The Rastafarians viewed the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, as a divinity for the black race and as Jesus incarnate - the word Rastafari originating with Selassie's name prior to his coronation: Ras Tafari.

The Rastafarians believed they were descended from the ancient Hebrews who were exiled to Babylon, and they believed that Babylon was the power behind the oppression of blacks. They followed dietary laws, and in conformity with Leviticus 21:15 they refrained from cutting their hair. And a part of their religion was the smoking of ganja - also knows as marijuana.

Some Rastafarians were annoyed at the influx of whites whom they described as hippies. But generally the whites were welcomed into their faith. And change came to Rastafarianism when Haile Selassie was overthrown by his armed forces in 1976. This and Selassie's death was a shock to the Rastafarians, and in 1976 Rastafarians were required to cut their hair and make elaborate repudiations of emperor worship.

The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Another movement with origins in India was led by Mohan Chandra Rajneesh, a former academic. He left the university and joined the less formal trend in learning. He become an itinerant lecturer, traveling about India in a small, old car, and he attached himself to the recent rise in attention given to gurus. In 1970 he changed his name to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh - Bhagwan being a title that some in India believed should apply only to God. He dressed in casual and comfortable but striking white robes, and sandals. He sat with a Buddha-like stillness, a slight smile, his large eyes giving him an appearance of curiosity, kindness and serenity. A booklet on his behalf described him as having no ambitions to be a leader, suggesting that people were merely drawn to him as he guided them by example. The booklet described him as seeking to abolish poverty, to make humans more god-like and to show that religion was within rather than outside of people.

Like Alan Watts, Rajneesh was an advocate of a freedom from guilt concerning sexuality. He followed the ancient Tantrist tradition in India that united sexuality and spiritual enlightenment. He became known as the sex guru. He softly lectured that there was nothing immoral about having sex with whomever one wished. Do not be ascetic, he urged. Do not deny yourself. Enjoy! Be natural. Follow your feelings (impulses). Discover yourself. Renounce your worldly cares and responsibilities. His style of leadership was merely to advise. Sexuality and much else, he claimed, should be void of demand. And he led his followers in meditation - widely believed to be a necessary part of guru-ship.

Adding to a small group of fellow Indians that had gathered around him were men and women from Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Japan and the United States. These were people who tended to be more intellectual than average, people who were aware of events far and wide in the world, who in their scanning world developments had come across the Bhagwan Rajneesh. They were likely to be professionals or from a family whose breadwinner was a professional. Among those migrating to India to join the Bhagwan Rajneesh was at least one doctor and psychiatrist. The legal profession - lawyers - was also represented. And a few of the men who came had criminal pasts but more than enough money for airfare to India.

Following the north Europeans, French and Italians joined Rajneesh in India. Women outnumbered the men, their sexual aggressiveness leaving many men overwhelmed. By mid-1975 westerners outnumbered the Indians in Rajneesh's ashram, and their number brought an end to the easy days of card playing, lime-water sipping and lotus eating. There was not yet AIDS or herpes to worry about, but the spread of gonorrhea became a minor problem, as did scabies. There was overcrowding and a problem of order and delegation of authority. And the biggest problem was followers coming up with money to pay for their upkeep.

Rajneesh was becoming rich. He had attracted a variety of women of wealth, and he had two white Rolls Royces. Rajneesh was not spending money on his followers. His followers had to support themselves. One of his followers had an income from selling his photographs. Others made money using their professional skills. Some others got into the drug trade, mysteriously aided by Rajneesh's knowledge of when was an opportune time for transactions and movements. Some of the women made money selling their bodies at the better hotels in nearby Bombay. And soon the Taj Mahal Hotel, wishing to maintain good appearances, banned all women it knew to be from the Rajneesh's ashram.

The ashram was a sight to behold, Rajneesh's devotees wearing robes, the men letting their hair grow and looking like Middle Age paintings of Jesus. Rajneesh sought favorable publicity, and he was most concerned in selecting which photographs of himself should be used. He gave special attention to celebrities who wished to visit his ashram. Werner Erhart dropped by briefly, and when Erhart failed to praise Rajneesh following his visit, Rajneesh turned against him, describing Erhart as a shallow man, more interested in money than in spiritual matters.

Rajneesh was becoming famous, and fame had its price. Hostility arose in India against him. Some Hindus were annoyed with him for spreading discredit on Hinduism. His ashram was firebombed. Worst of all, he was investigated for unpayment of taxes, a debt said to be around five million dollars. Rajneesh decided that it was time to expand his movement and move to the United States. In 1981 he and his closest followers sneaked out of India on an airliner, leaving numerous unpaid bills to publishers and others. And the main body of his followers were obliged to follow him to the United States as best they could.

Bhagwan Rajneesh, now also being called the Enlightened One, created more problems for himself by ignoring legalities. He made a poor choice in location in establishing a 120 square-mile commune in the high desert of eastern Oregon, where he came into conflict with zoning laws. This was to be his home base. Meanwhile, he had establishments at Laguna Beach, California, and in Britain, Switzerland and Germany, including various successful nightclubs in Europe and bank accounts in Switzerland and other places. His followers are said to have numbered over 20,000, and his assets in 1983 have been estimated at $30.8 million. And at his dusty Oregon commune Rajneesh was enjoying his love of fancy automobiles - a fleet of white Rolls Royce limousines.

By 1985, the AIDS crisis had arrived, and at the Oregon commune restrictions were placed against sexual liaisons. Kissing was suspect as a transmitter of the HIV virus and was also restricted. A bigger worry for Rajneesh was U.S government agents responding to the complaints of people living near his commune and working on his possible violations of the law. Rajneesh's staff complained that they were being persecuted, while Rajneesh posed as the unconcerned master, above it all and utterly fulfilled. Having arrived in the United States on a visitor's visa, he was now in the United States illegally, And in 1986 he was charged with and he pleaded guilty to several counts of having arranged sham marriages for the purpose of followers acquiring U.S. residency. Also the Rajneesh was charged with two counts of lying to officials. He was fined $400,000, given a suspended sentence of ten-years and ordered out of the United States.

Rajneesh's personal secretary, Sheela, had fled with 45 million dollars to Switzerland, and then to Germany, where she was arrested. She and others were convicted of conspiring to commit murder, something arising from the commune's fight with local authorities in Oregon. Rajneesh's commune in Oregon dissolved. He tried to locate in some other country, but now his reputation was such that no country other than his homeland, India, would allow him to stay. He returned to India, where he paid the taxes that he should have paid in 1981.

Rajneesh stayed in the wisdom business, holding forth as a guru and guiding his audiences in meditation. He had claimed that humanity's inner world would change the outer world. But the outer world had had an effect upon Rajneesh. He dropped his title of Bhagwan and is reported by followers to have said "Enough is enough; the joke is over."

In 1990, only in his sixties, the outer world had again overwhelmed Rajneesh's consciousness: he died. But his movement lived on, taking the name Osho, a new name given to Rajneesh and associated with oceanic experience, a movement that remained concerned with both sexual liberty and spirituality.

The Hare Krishnas

Also a part of the shrinking world and the spread of religions was the rise of those known as the Hare Krishnas. This was Hinduism, which came to the United States in 1965 when Srila Prabhupada, at the age of 69, arrived in New York aboard a merchant ship. Prabhupada founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. The Society described itself as monotheistic, Krishna being another word for God. Prabhupada opened a small store at 26 Second Avenue, in the city's Lower East Side. At his store front, people came to chant and to hear his lectures. There were Sunday feasts and chanting sessions in nearby Tompkins Square Park, which attracted attention and converts.

Srila Prabhupada expanded his society to the San Francisco Bay Area, where it was joined by many described as hippies - people who were attracted by the society's advocacy of love and peace. Soon the society spread to London, Berlin, and back to India, the Krisha society centers increasing in number to 108. And Srila Prabhupada, according to his society, became the world's largest publisher of Vedic literature. The Hindu Bible, the Bhagavad-gita was a major component of its reading. And Srila Prabhupada wrote fifty volumes of works, writings described by the Hare Krishnas as wishing the best for all people and all "living entities."

to the top | 1945-21st century | Political Conservatives in the West

Copyright © 2002 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.

address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch29.htm