Evangelical churches and conservative denom-inations grew quietly in the suburbs. After the Second Vatican Council, Catholics began hearing mass in English and participated more actively than before in Sunday services.1New religious movements of Asian origin, such as Zen and Hare Krishna, spread in metropolitan areas, as did the humanistic spirituality of such groups as Esalen, EST, and Scientology.2 So-called underground churches and Jesus freak organizations emerged, and monasteries and religious communes began to attract new fol-lowings. For many people, it was difficult to know which spiritual path to follow.
In retrospect, the 1960s had a dramatic impact on American spirituality. Research indi-cates that many people were influenced by the turmoil of these years to adopt a freewheeling and eclectic style of spirituality.3 In addition to baby boomers like Shirley Knight who matured during the 1960s, many older Americans participated in the religious changes of this period, and many younger Americans have been influenced by it indirectly, thus giving the period much wider significance than can be understood by considering generations or cohorts alone.4 What has not been ade-quately considered is how activists in the 1960s and their subsequent critics reshaped Ameri-cans’ understanding of freedom itself, and how this new understanding contributed to . . . the rise of a spirituality of seeking.
New Horizons
Adam Westfield is especially articulate about how the 1960s shaped his views of spirituality.
Born in 1942, he grew up in New England, attended a private secondary school, graduated from an elite university, and then embarked on a career in business. Looking back on his child-hood, he says his parents taught him the impor-tance of family, trying hard, and being good, but left him to discover spiritual values on his own. He senses a strong shift in the attention given to religion in his family history. “I think my parents’ generation had a much more inten-sive sort of religious pre-history [than I did],”
he explains. “My father had been brought up
in Massachusetts and had gone to church two or three times a day. My mother’s family had all been preachers in the Unitarian church. I think by the time I came along they were both a little weary. They certainly didn’t evangelize their children.”
Being conditioned to seek spirituality on his own, he was eager to break out of the subculture in which he was raised. For a long time, however, “I was not aware that there were any other cultures at all,” he says. His first awareness came when his parents took him on a trip that included driving through a large city. His father had a small statue of a black Buddha in a cabinet at home, so when the boy spotted a black person for the first time on the trip, he shouted, “Look, Dad, it’s the Buddha!” In retrospect, he says, “It’s amazing. I lived in a time capsule, sort of Lake Wobegon, a place that time forgot. Everybody was white, and there were forty families that just sort of lived together [in my town] from 1942 to 1960. It’s amazing.”
As a child, Adam associated religion with a kind of stodgy, tight-lipped, strictly disciplined New England asceticism. It was a spirituality of dwelling that blended imperceptibly into the fabric of the town. Only after college did he start to reflect on the meaning of his own spirituality. He attributes his new interest in spirituality to the more open setting in which he was working. Many of the people were black. One of his closest friends was Jewish.
Adam started to realize that whatever spiritual path he took, he would have to come to terms with the racial and religious prejudices in his background.
During the 1960s his spirituality was deeply influenced by the civil rights movement. Adam appreciated the freedom to explore new ways of expressing his spirituality. During the Vietnam war he had to confront impulses toward violence for which his middle-class upbringing had not prepared him. Turmoil in his marriage was also to affect his spirituality. He remains involved in a church, but his spirituality is quite different from that of his parents.
Other people describe different avenues to experiencing new spiritual freedoms. Nancy Nystrom, like many teenagers during the
1960s, experienced the turmoil of the decade as conflict within her own life. Her parents were devout Catholics. During the 1950s they raised her in a secure home embellished with the trappings of organized religion. Her first memories are of Catholic statues “all over the house,” of saying the rosary and the Lord’s Prayer with her mother, and of conversations about God, sin, and divine punishment. She remembers being terrified of God. “I had a naturally curious mind,” she says, “but I was afraid to move, afraid to explore. I felt doomed, helpless, powerless.” For her, a spirituality of dwelling felt constraining.
When she was in seventh grade, Nancy quit attending the Baptist church her parents now attended despite their objections. “I hated the church, the minister, and God,” she recalls. But in eleventh grade her parents sent her to a Catholic high school, and Nancy started think-ing again about God. The principal told her it was more important to be spiritual in her daily life than to attend mass and confession. Every-one was friendly to her, and for two years she found a temporary home that made her feel secure: “I just wanted to belong.” Still, thoughts about God reminded her of her child-hood fears, so she postponed any serious inves-tigation of spirituality until she was in college.
“During the hippie era, I began on my own to read a little about Eastern religions,” she recalls. “I doubted Christianity, and I still felt very estranged from God, but I believed in reincarnation. My brother was reading a lot about the occult, and that got me interested in numerology and Tarot. I read the Seth books by Jane Roberts. Seth was allegedly a spirit guide. I never just embraced these ideas automatically. I had a lot of questions, but I believed some of the things, like the idea that each person has a spirit guide who is available if you want them. I also started going to a spir-itualist. And I thought a lot about the Ten Commandments. I wasn’t sure they were from God, but I did feel they were a kind of code imprinted on me and that they were a good way to live.”
The main result of these explorations was an enhanced sense of freedom. Nancy recalls, “I somehow felt freer. I felt as if I had more
control over my own life. I felt released from the shackles. I still couldn’t quite get a grasp on my life, but I was free of the angry God and hypocritical church experiences of my childhood.” She still feels this way. She no longer seeks counsel from spiritualists. She knows herself better than she did before and finds it easier to make up her own mind.
“There’s just something inside my soul that says God is good.” She says organized religion did not help her discover that; she needed to find it on her own. To be in charge this way is liberating. Images of freedom come easily to her. Sometimes she imagines herself floating like a balloon. When she prays, she imagines herself freeing her thoughts to rise like little balloons toward God.
Nancy’s journey began in reaction to a family and church environment that she found patriarchal and constraining. But she was also a product of her times. Indeed, her parents paved the way. Like a growing number of people in the 1950s, her parents switched denominations – from Catholic to Baptist – in hopes of finding a spiritual home more to their liking. Nancy was put off by both denomina-tions’ claims to having absolute truth. She decided that if it were possible to switch, it was possible to do without organized religion entirely. She was also raised to believe that things could be improved if people thought for themselves rather than clinging to the past.
Her parents favored the civil rights movement and voted for John F. Kennedy. Nancy says the social reforms of the 1960s “turned up a little flame” inside her that said she should be
“part of making things right.” The Vietnam war made her angry because she did not think it was making things right. Eastern religions and the hippie culture were a breath of fresh air. She admits she was naive, but she found them liberating because they appealed to the best in human nature.
Understanding the New Freedoms A decade earlier, few observers of American religion had foreseen the kinds of spiritual exploration in which Shirley Knight,
Adam Westfield, and Nancy Nystrom engaged during the 1960s. Schooled to think that spirituality depended on the tight-knit bonds of ethnic and religious attachments, they saw only the likelihood of spirituality diminishing as these attachments weakened. Indeed, the 1950s’ revival in established religion was regarded as a temporary phenomenon because of the social forces working against it.5 Intense, introspective spiritual searching was the last thing anyone expected; as Abraham Heschel lamented, speaking of Christians and Jews alike, “The self is silent; words are dead, and prayer is a forgotten language.”6
The upsurge of interest in spirituality in the late 1960s is all the more impressive when viewed against these predictions of declining interest in spirituality. The new quest for the sacred blossomed despite the break-down of social arrangements that had given religion its communal base. The fact that it could blossom this way attests to the fact that spirituality was indeed shifting from an attachment to place and becoming increasingly eclectic.
Although the 1960s was an unusual decade, filled with radical ideas and shocking behavior, it corrected some of the aberrations that the previous decade had brought to spirituality.
The clinging to safe, respectable houses of worship in which a domesticated God could be counted on to provide reassurance was being challenged by religious movements that reasserted some of the mystery that had always been part of conceptions of the sacred.
Americans in the fifties chose largely to remain where they were, opting for security rather than risking their faith in a genuine search for spiritual depth; however, in the 1960s many Americans, having learned that they could move around, think through their options, and select a faith that truly captured what they believed to be the truth, took the choice seri-ously, bargaining with their souls, seeking new spiritual guides, and rediscovering that God dwells not only in homes but also in the byways trod by pilgrims and sojourners.
The sixties questioned middle-class, white-bread definitions of who God was and of where God could be found, making it more uncertain how to be in touch with the sacred.
In this process, more Americans drew inspira-tion from the struggles of the poor, from the rich spiritual traditions of African Americans, from other world religions, from rock music and contemporary art, and from changing understandings of gender and sexuality. If the result was more complex, it was at least more true to the broad variety of human experience.
The mood of the sixties was also indebted to nearly a century of US and European com-mentary on the growing anonymity of modern life, ranging from Karl Marx and Ferdinand Toennies to Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt to William Whyte’s Organization Man and David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd. In these depictions, the spiritual homes – Marx’s “heart of a heart-less world” – that had provided warmth, succor, and identity in the past were becom-ing increasbecom-ingly sparse as a result of large-scale industry, the assembly line, the bureaucratic workplace, the city, and finally the suburb.
Whereas it had once been possible to have a distinct, nuanced, public sense of who one was as a result of living in a particular neigh-borhood or attending a certain parish, now, according to these interpretations, one had only a numbing feeling of anonymity. In the suburb of the 1960s, just as in the factory of the 1890s, each person was an interchangeable part, all fundamentally the same in outward appearances. Whatever distinctive chara-cteristics of spirit set the individual apart from others were largely invisible to those same others. The growing desire to escape was thus less of an inclination to leave home for the sheer sake of gaining one’s independence than of wanting to flee the stale sameness of modernity that was threatening to engulf one’s very soul.
The religious efflorescence of the 1960s was also rooted in longstanding traditions of freedom in American religion. These tradi-tions not only emphasized the right of indi-viduals to choose their own faith but also provided a set of arguments about the basis of this right. For instance, Thomas Jefferson had offered two grounds for the free exercise of religion that remained part of thinking in the United States two centuries later (despite some changes in understandings of basic
terms). One was that the human spirit was naturally inclined to think freely, to be curious, to examine alternatives, and to be influenced by arguments and opinions. The other was that any conviction arrived at short of such free exploration was somehow less than genuine. It was, in Jefferson’s view, similar to being coerced, and thus tending “only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness.”7 Although these arguments focused mostly on preventing the state from interfering with reli-gious expression, they were also associated in Jefferson’s mind with the need for people to be free of religious influences that might encourage them to pay homage to one church or pastor rather than seeking another more in keeping with their deepest moral convictions.
Throughout the 1960s, interpreters of the religious scene supplied connections between what was happening among US youth and larger, historical frameworks. Rather than view-ing the new experimentation as a complete break with the past, these interpreters saw continuity with important features of Western religion.8 These interpretations nevertheless presumed that people were still searching for spiritual homes, albeit different ones from those of their congregations or families.
Indeed, much of what attracted public attention were experiments, such as com-munes, underground churches, and student groups, that fit this conception of the pressing need for new spiritual homes.9 Freedom was understood as a desire not so much to discard all forms of religious organization as to move from organized religion to new religious communities. Freedom would thus at least be constrained by such leavening influences as the need to get along with each other and to get things done. Religious tradition could embrace some of these alternatives.
It was less clear whether religious leaders could embrace a new mentality that placed less emphasis on community of any king.
People who were searching on their own were assumed to be potential members either of alternative communities or of established reli-gious organizations. The possibility that they might remain permanently on the road was less desirable, particularly because the source
of their seeking was taken to be alienation from institutions they did not like. Nobody quite understood that they were also being pulled by a freedom they did like, nor that this freedom was quite compatible with the increasingly fluid environment in the United States.
It is possible with hindsight to see not only that freedom was at the heart of the spiritual quest of many Americans during the 1960s but also that the meaning of freedom was changing. Western religious thought has generally held that individuals choose among various courses of action and therefore must have freedom to exercise this choice. Because individuals are likely to choose evil, however, some means of guiding their choices must also be present. Conscience is an inner voice guiding individual choice. It restrains individ-ual choice by reminding people of their social responsibilities or by reflecting time-worn social norms. The key to understanding how the 1960s reshaped ideas of spiritual freedom lies in the difference between freedom of con-science and freedom of choice.
Conscience speaks authoritatively about right and wrong. It does not connote shades of gray as much as it does obedience or dis-obedience to clear standards. It is thus, as the sociologist Emile Durkheim emphasized in his classic treatise on religion, a feature of community.10 Individuals who live in homo-geneous communities with authoritative stan-dards of right and wrong can be mentored by an internalized voice. This voice is binding, meaning that freedom lies in the right to vol-untarily obey or disobey rather than having to conform to some arbitrarily imposed or coer-cive standard. Freedom of conscience implies an absence of external intrusion into such communities. The sacred space is morally invi-olable, and yet it provides freedom within its boundaries for individual talents and convic-tions to be expressed as long as primary loyalty to the community is maintained.11
In contrast, freedom of choice becomes important when individuals must make their way among multiple communities. Decisions are required about entry and exit into partic-ular communities and about whether to
participate in any community. Under such conditions, the internal voice decides less between right and wrong and more between better and worse. Freedom to choose implies having available an array of options. The ability to make good choices depends on exer-cising the right to weigh these various options.
Norman Mailer’s essay on the “hipster,”
which in many ways presaged the mood of the 1960s, illustrates the emerging emphasis on freedom of choice. A person of character, Mailer wrote, is not so much one who can dis-tinguish between good and bad as one who can realize possibilities in the face of growing uncertainty. To make choices is the hallmark of freedom because every situation poses “a new alternative, a new question” and because emphasis is placed “on complexity rather than simplicity.” True freedom comes from liberat-ing oneself from the repressive “superego” of the community and from developing one’s own moral imagination through a process of experimentation.12
The Rights Revolution
For many people, these new ways of thinking about spiritual freedom can be traced to the civil rights movement. Government was the agent most capable of intruding on taken-for-granted freedoms of conscience. In the 1960s, government was perceived as a threat by many who thought it was interfering in their local communities, but it also offered new freedoms to those who felt unable to express themselves adequately. The civil rights movement, calling on government to protect freedom of conscience and being resisted for the same reasons, became one of the prominent places in which freedom was redefined – and in ways that would influence not only civic discourse
For many people, these new ways of thinking about spiritual freedom can be traced to the civil rights movement. Government was the agent most capable of intruding on taken-for-granted freedoms of conscience. In the 1960s, government was perceived as a threat by many who thought it was interfering in their local communities, but it also offered new freedoms to those who felt unable to express themselves adequately. The civil rights movement, calling on government to protect freedom of conscience and being resisted for the same reasons, became one of the prominent places in which freedom was redefined – and in ways that would influence not only civic discourse