Toward a New Spiritual Revolution

2,726 words

Jesus Revolution (2023)
Directed by Jon Erwin & Brent McCorkle
Starring Kelsey Grammer, Joel Courtney, Jonathan Roumie, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, & Anna Grace Barlow
Written by Ellen Vaughn, Greg Laurie, & Jon Gunn

The story in the Book of Acts is unique in that the events described therein have been recreated across many ages, in states that were unborn and accents unknown at the time it was written. One such state is California. In the late 1960s, a Christian minister, Chuck Smith, channeled the hippie movement into a Christian revival in Southern California which went on to alter American society and politics.

This present essay isn’t about proselytizing but is rather a review of an unusual sort of film: a well-made Christian movie. I will examine the mechanics of a successful social movement, the circumstances which allowed both the hippie and Christian movements to develop and expand in the 1960s, and the unexpected moral dilemmas which they brought about — and which are still occurring.

Chuck Smith was born in 1927 to Californian parents, but his heritage stretched back to Confederate-era Georgia, and beyond that to Virginia. Smith’s mother later claimed that she dedicated him to the service of Divine Providence when he was born, given that his sister had been miraculously healed after contracting spinal meningitis. In 1958, Smith’s father and brother were both killed in a plane crash. His brother was an inexperienced pilot who had crashed while flying through bad weather. Smith decided to become a minister as a young man.

Pastor Chuck Smith

In the film, Smith (Kelsey Grammer), is the pastor of a declining church during the 1960s in Southern California. The congregation is old and stuffy, and the pews are empty. He and his wife (Julia Campbell) have one child, a daughter. One day while watching the news, he expresses frustration with the hippies. His daughter angrily responds to his harsh words. Smith says that he would take in a hippie should one appear. His daughter then picks up Lonnie Frisbee (Jonathan Roumie), who is hitchhiking, and brings him home.

Crime was on the rise in the late 1960s. American culture had not adjusted to this disorder. After the illicit second constitution that is the 1964 Civil Rights Act became law, sub-Saharans began rampaging in the great cities of the deindustrializing North. In California this scourge was still confined to Watts at the time, and the drug wars between sub-Saharan criminal gangs had yet to start. Gangsta rap was still two decades in the future. The criminals and serial killers who would use hitchhiking as a method of preying on the unsuspecting were beginning to appear, but were still largely unknown.

The real-life Lonnie Frisbee was a hippie who came from a troubled home. He seems to have been familiar with Christianity before he began his unorthodox ministry. He also enjoyed taking LSD. In 1967 he went to Tahquitz Canyon, dropped some LSD, and while tripping decided to become an evangelist. Shortly thereafter he won a scholarship to an art school in San Francisco and settled in a Christian commune in the Haight-Ashbury District.

When looking at the young Boomer generation’s activities in the 1960s, one cannot help but be struck by the idyllic world in which they lived. Frisbee could freely travel around California without much concern about money. He got a scholarship to a school in San Francisco despite the fact that he was not working particularly hard. He could hitchhike without the fear of being robbed or killed, and even more importantly without drivers being suspicious of him and leaving him on the roadside.

Jesus Revolution, as well as the homemade films of the revolution as it was ongoing, show a very white demographic. The Boomer generation consisted mostly of old-stock Americans who looked fit and beautiful. That generation didn’t hide their intelligence, either. Watch an interview with a young person made in the late 1960s and one will hear considerable acumen.

The Boomer generation and its spiritual revolution didn’t occur in a vacuum. It happened due to two events that had occurred decades earlier: pro-white American activists had enacted immigration reforms, and demographic activists encouraged old-stock Americans to reproduce. The actual Jesus Revolution — which involved many more ministers, churches, and so on than are shown in the movie — was the result of their predecessors’ work.

The actual meeting between Lonnie Frisbee and Chuck Smith happened a bit differently from how it is depicted in the film, but this is what makes Jesus Revolution so excellent. The film combines tension and comedy as the two meet in the orderly Smith household. Soon, Lonnie brings many more hippies into the Smith house, and they are attending Pastor Chuck’s church, shocking the older members.

The real Chuck Smith and his church leaders seem to have recognized the hippie movement’s potential even before they met Lonnie. Pastor Smith had read an article about the Christian commune in Haight-Ashbury and sent a young man named John to pick up hitchhiking hippies so that he could share the Gospel message. Lonnie, for his part, was in actuality hitchhiking in order to preach the Gospel to anyone who picked him up. That’s how Lonnie ultimately got paired up with Chuck Smith.

In the film, while Pastor Smith is on the cusp of leading a vast religious revival, Greg Laurie (Joel Courtney) is a dropout from military school who is having trouble at home. He and his mother (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) live in a trailer on a beach, and she is an alcoholic. Laurie falls in into a clique of kids who like to do drugs and ends up meeting Lonnie while he is having a bad acid trip in front of Chuck Smith’s house.

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Greg is also smitten by Cathe Martin (Anna Grace Barlow). Greg and Cathe seek the truth with the other hippies. They drop acid at a concert where Timothy Leary encourages the audience to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

Greg and Cathe are looking for the right things in the wrong places. Soon they see Lonnie preaching at an event in a park where people are explaining their religious beliefs. The film has a “Satanist” stand in for the opponents of Christianity, rather than the actually dangerous enemies of the faith such as the Jews or Salafi jihadists. “Satanism” isn’t an actual religion; it is rather a corporatized pseudo-faith for housebroken teenage “rebels,” whereas the organized Jewish community does a great deal of real damage. Opposing that community also requires real courage and involves real risks.

Soon the congregation grows to be so large that the church begins holding its services in a large tent and performs mass baptisms in the Pacific Ocean. People are coming from far and wide to be baptized. Its growth is due to Chuck’s organizational abilities combined with Lonnie’s incredible preaching. Those who knew Lonnie say that he was the real deal and could really do the things the Apostles did in the Book of Acts, such as healings, and that he connected people to the presence of the Almighty.

Greg receives the call to become a minister, and he and Cathe go to a Catholic church to help a priest who is a friend of Chuck’s. While Greg thinks he did a great job at the church, Chuck removes him from the project. The reasons for this are not stated in the film, but professional setbacks are common, so this scene allows the audience to identify with Greg.

The others suffer setbacks as well. Lonnie and his wife Connie (Charlie Morgan Patton) have serious marital troubles. Chuck and Lonnie also have serious differences over what should be done with the ministry. Chuck wants the congregation to undertake serious Bible study, while Lonnie wants a flashier approach — what some derisively call Jesustainment. Lonnie and Connie eventually leave for Florida.

The movie’s success comes from the fact that it is different from most Christian theme movies, where “getting saved” and “the message” resolves all of the protagonist’s issues. Such stories that remain fixated on an ideological or religious answer to all problems end up being worthless. Jesus Revolution shows that the characters all have serious problems and that their salvation and faith give them a community from which they can receive help, as well as a guiding template for action in which their problems can be defeated.

Lonnie Frisbee, Shooting Star

Lonnie Frisbee’s life and career were a bright shooting star across the firmament. He had two children with his first wife, and then they divorced. After starting the revival in California and then leaving for Florida, he later returned and was put on the staff of the Calvary Christian Church by Pastor Smith — but he eventually left that as well. He would go on to create a new branch of Protestantism called the Vineyard Movement. On Mother’s Day in 1980, he told his side of the story of his ministry in a sermon.

Lonnie Frisbee baptizing a convert in the Pacific Ocean.

Lonnie would marry a second time, but had no children with his second wife. All of those who knew Lonnie during his ministry said that he was a genuine man of God who had a true calling. He wasn’t out for money. But he was involved in homosexuality, albeit from inside the closet. He died in 1993 at the age of 43, some claim as a result of AIDS.

At Lonnie’s funeral, his fellow preachers struggled to say the right words, and there was some bitterness after Chuck Smith remarked that Lonnie hadn’t reached his full potential. Smith certainly felt some professional jealousy over Lonnie’s ministerial talents. It is also certain that sexually reckless behavior makes every endeavor a single conversation away from catastrophe.

The ministers were right to reduce Lonnie’s involvement in the ministry’s outreach when word of his indiscretions reached them. Churches can be sexually-charged environments, and a charismatic preacher who is a closeted homosexual can do severe damage to trusting members of the congregation, not to mention he can expose the church to possible legal entanglements.

The Wisdom of Age & the Energy of Youth

Chuck Smith was in his forties when the Jesus Revolution started in the late 1960s. Lonnie was 17 when he went to Tahquitz Canyon in 1967 to find God. The youthful Lonnie created an explosion that ultimately launched two religious revivals which went on to become large denominations. Smith wisely piloted his church through this period of enormous growth, having had the good fortune of being in his prime years of maturity when the religious movement began.

Prior to Lonnie arriving at Cavalry Chapel, he was, by his own account, a “Leftist.” He hadn’t supported the Vietnam War, for example. Lonnie also claimed that the congregants of Cavalry Chapel were all members of the John Birch Society when he arrived, so there was a real culture shock for him. But the Jesus Revolution was part of the second social revolution of the 1960s, and the blending of young, white, American Majority hippies with older, conservative anti-Communists was an ethnic and racial reaction to the liberal-minority coalition that backed presidents Kennedy and Johnson. It was they who supported immigration, “civil rights,” and the Vietnam War.

Chuck Smith Regrets Nothing?

It is unquestionable that Chuck Smith was a man of great faith who improved many lives. In an interview he gave to Greg Laurie near the end of his life, he was asked if he regretted anything. He answered that he did not. Here one can see some of the salesmanship underpinning the Jesus Revolution. Pastor Chuck described a life with few setbacks: He had met his loyal wife in a case of love-at-first-sight, and it was all smooth sailing after that. Greg and Cathe, for their part, had a longer courtship and carefully considered all the possibilities before they got married. Both dated other people — but kept returning to each other.

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Christian literature asks the really hard questions: “What does it all mean?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Pastor Smith talked about these things — no minister can avoid them — but he rather famously got diverted into the sort of gimmicky end-of-the-world predictions that came into vogue in the 1970s, predicting that the end would end in 1981. The prophetic pulp produced by American Protestant Christians is an enormous distraction and is entirely unserious. Why clean up plastic and driftnets that ensnare whales and other marine life when Jesus is about to return? Why build things to last if the end is just around the corner? Why work on curing diseases, developing more efficient processes, and so on?

Smith’s prediction was part of a much larger wave of prophecy that was ongoing at the time. For example, I can tell you exactly what I was doing on September 12, 1988: listening to the radio on the school bus, because that was when the Top 40 radio station ran a report on the end of the world — which it said would occur on that day. A NASA engineer named Edgar Whisenant had published a book saying that the rapture would occur then; it had been widely distributed.

This nonsense was partly a gimmick of Dispensationalist Theology, which has put Israel’s interests ahead of America’s and Jews’ ahead of those of Christians. As part of his end-of-the-world prediction for 1988, Whisenant said:

This last generation spoken of above started on 14 May 1948, the day Israel became a nation. Israel is the time clock of God throughout history. Israel is the blooming fig tree, and the last generation will end 40 wicked gentile years later on 14 May 1988.[1]

One must ask: Who paid for his book to be published and for its wide distribution? Christian Zionism is not Christian, and it makes slaves of American Christians. Chuck Smith worked with the Reverend Billy Graham, who knew all about the Jewish problem but didn’t feel that he had the power to stand up to them. Graham said to President Richard Nixon:

A lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.

Such superstitions ultimately make American Christians a rebellious and stiff-necked lot. Instead of following the message of the Gospel, white Americans build a golden calf out of alien abduction stories, conspiracy theories, and endless end-times speculation while genuine problems abound. Chuck Smith contributed to this, and Americans have since gone to fight “Babylon” twice, rivers of blood have been spilled, and now many Christians are cheering on Israeli troops as they bomb Christian churches and hospitals in Palestine.

American Christianity finds itself in a ditch today. The only way for a second revival is to look at what ministers such as Billy Graham said about the root cause of our actual problems and take a second look at the non-canonical, but useful writings of Saint Barnabas and the homilies of Saint John Chrysostom — and be prepared to face greater challenges.

John Chrysostom was a minister who was wise to the Jewish Question. His writings are easy to obtain.

Securing a New Spiritual Awakening

Jesus Revolution works because it shows the actual successes people can experience when they join a church. Greg and Cathe, for example, got married and had children and grandchildren. The Boomers who followed Chuck and Lonnie received tangible benefits from a real community, and went on to lead sober and successful lives. Smith’s church still holds large baptisms in the Pacific today. The formation of a helpful community is the real story in the Book of Acts; the miracles and the rest are secondary.

White advocates don’t have the ability to build such a community — at least not yet. Lonnie Frisbee might have gotten some resistance from his family for his preaching, but ultimately his family and society approved of the direction he took in life. White advocates, for their part, must walk a lonely road. But we have a calling as high as that of Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisbee. We must secure to borders for our people so that future generations can achieve a new spiritual awakening.

Note

[1] I don’t know why Whisenant later shifted the end date from May to September.