Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  “I don’t think there’s anything there,” I said, more than a little flummoxed.

  “The demon of lies!” the Reverend cried out, and they once again laid hands on me and commanded the demons to leave in the name of Jesus.

  After a while they decided that my case was graver than they’d first believed and that it would be necessary to set another time for a more serious bit of work on my demons. I agreed, and returned to the house where I was staying, packed my backpack, and left.

  I caught a Greyhound bus to Sumter, where I’d been baptized at the age of twelve as a Presbyterian, and met with the family minister there. After I told him the story, he stood up and said, “Well, they’re probably right, you know.” His demeanor changed from a kind, ministerial expression of concern to one of righteous godly wrath as he confronted the devil himself.

  “If you were really a Christian, you wouldn’t appear here with long hair! You clearly don’t have the Light of Christ in you! Get out you hypocrite!”

  As he shouted this he pushed me toward the door of his office and I left, bewildered, stumbling into the darkness outside.

  I took a Greyhound bus back to Oklahoma and all along the road home I read a book on demon possession, a sort of “how-to-manual” for self-exorcism, just in case. And I tried to figure out my next steps.

  It was my second foray that year into fundamentalist cults, and I stayed a little closer to home for the rest of the year. Fortunately, after a time my head began to clear and I went back to church with normal, slightly more down-to-earth fundamentalists. By now the Pentecostal Holiness and the Southern Baptists around the family in Oklahoma seemed quite liberated and friendly by comparison with the folks I’d been hanging out with in South Carolina.

  I count myself fortunate for passing through most available phases of Bible Belt religion rather quickly. In Oklahoma I only briefly attended Tyler Assembly of God Church before I became a member of the First Baptist Church of Madill and, in addition, attended various non-denominational Evangelical churches. By the time I was coming to question most of the religion around me I had been sprinkled Presbyterian, baptized in the Spirit in the Pentecostal Church, and immersed in the First Baptist Church of Madill, Oklahoma. Through it all ran the thread of apocalyptic faith and a set of values that didn’t square well with the world in which I lived—nor, strangely enough, with the churches I attended.

  No one around me seemed to notice that latter fact. I lived in the region of the “Christian nation” with the densest population of “Bible-believing Christians” and it seemed that no one around me knew anything about the Bible. Somehow it eluded everyone that Jesus, were he alive at that time, would have been wearing his customary sandals, long hair and robe, and would have been out there with the hippies protesting the war in Vietnam. Somehow the Christians I knew didn’t get what Jesus was saying when he stated “If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me” (Matthew 19:21). They seemed not to have read the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, or at least they had missed Acts 2:44–45: “And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need.”

  But that wasn’t all. There were the other passages, powerfully impacting me but apparently ignored by my fellow Christians, passages such as the one in which Jesus rebuked a man for calling him “Master” because, as he said, “Call no man ‘master’ for you have only one Master in heaven.” Then there were the many contradictions and problematic questions that people seemed not to notice, contradictions too many to note here, but which began to gnaw at my faith. To those around me it would have been blasphemy to have stated the obvious: that Jesus and his followers were anti-imperialist anarcho-communist revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the established order and set up a completely different way of life in the Israel of their time. It would have been blasphemy, and I would have been locked up in a mental institution anywhere in the region for stating the obvious. There was, it seemed to me, something seriously wrong with the people around me—or was it me?

  During that time I was told the GED test was being offered at job training center where I was studying small engine mechanics, and on a whim I decided to take it. Two weeks later the guidance counselor called me into his office to give me the news. He said my scores indicated that I must have studied hard for the exam, and he congratulated me. I was shocked. I didn’t know that you were supposed to study for the test. He said I’d done particularly well in reading and writing, and he asked me if I really wanted to be a mechanic, after all. I said no, that I really wanted to be a writer. He encouraged me to go to college.

  In the fall of 1973 I started my first semester of college at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant. I was the only “Jesus freak” on campus, and two or three years older than the other incoming freshmen, but I didn’t care. I was there to learn and grow and find answers to the many questions I had about life.

  The following summer of 1974 my friend from Dallas, James Elaine, invited me to join him and his church group on a study program for Christian college students to Switzerland. James and I had met at a Christian conference and as we were the only two hippies there, we became friends. I thought it would be wonderful to spend a summer with him and other Christians in Switzerland, so I applied and was accepted. I had just enough money for a round-trip ticket from Montreal to Zurich with a dollar left over. The route from Oklahoma to Montreal I could make by hitchhiking and I was certain I’d find something to eat along the way, but a dollar wasn’t going to be enough.

  My grandmother somehow had managed to save $40 from her Social Security checks and the sale of quilts she made, at $25 per quilt, and she secretly passed the money on to me so I wouldn’t go hungry hitchhiking to Montreal and back. She didn’t want the other grandchildren to know she gave me the money and she made me promise not to tell them because, as she put it, “they’d all be a-wantin’ some money, and I ain’t got no more to give ’em.”

  James and another artist named David Park and I spent our days washing dishes in the hotel, and evenings studying the Bible and Bible prophecy. The owner of the hotel was a Darbyite, or at least a dispensationalist, and he had a long map of time as taken from the bible up on the wall of his study that extended from near the doorway to the desk by the window at the far side of the room.4 It started with 4004 B.C. when God made Adam and eve, and it ended somewhere in the near future, quickly moving through the Great Tribulation, the coming of the Anti-Christ, the Rapture of the Faithful when they rise from the graves to meet Jesus at his Second Coming, and finally, the coming of the Heavenly Jerusalem and the end of time. I no longer remember the old man’s name, but he dwelt long on the map and studied the final section carefully, certain that the rapture would happen before he saw death. Now, more than forty years later, I believe, at last, he may have been proven wrong.

  We took hikes into the mountains when we could, up steep paths through deep forests that led to alpine meadows from which we could see other mountains and valleys, dotted with villages. Once or twice I joined the Baptist youth on an evening of carousing in a local café where James’s brother David practiced the only French he knew on the waiter, “une autre bouteille de vin, s’il vous plait!” We became so drunk we had to hold each other up as we walked back down the narrow streets to the hotel. On the way we slipped into a tent at a traditional Alpine music show and watched Swiss cowboys dressed in their traditional garb play songs in German and French, slapping their knees as they took elaborate steps in a strange traditional dance. We were discovered and thrown out into the night and we giggled loudly as we continued our way, with great effort, back to the hotel.

  The evening studies were geared toward somewhat intellectual Baptists so we were introduced to C. S. Lewis (whose books I’d already read), Francis Schaeffer, Os Guinness, and others. We also had guest speakers visiting, and it wa
s one of these, Dr. James Parker, “Jim,” who had the greatest impact on me.

  Jim only stayed with us briefly, but I recall his discussion of “radical Christianity” and the “radical discipleship” of people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He brought copies of two alternative newspapers: The Post-American (later changed to Sojourners) from the Sojourners community in Washington D.C., and Right On (later changed to Radix Magazine) from the Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF) in Berkeley, California. As I read through the magazines I became very excited. Here I met, in print, Christians who understood their faith as I did. There were articles by William Stringfellow, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement, Phil and Daniel Berrigan, William Everson/Brother Antoninus, E.F. Schumacher, and many others. I no longer felt crazy, as I had for the previous few years, reading the Bible as a hippie in the Bible Belt and thinking I was reading out of a different book from the one everyone else had.

  A few months later, back home at college in Durant, Oklahoma, I came across a stack of Right On! newspapers at the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship building. I took one and read the paper from cover to cover and then subscribed.

  I was studying journalism at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and one day I heard a rumor that the ROTC would be moving in and occupying two floors of campus dormitories, likely displacing other students in the process. I decided to write up the story, so I went to the dean’s office to see if I could get an interview. His secretary asked what I wanted to talk to the dean about, and I told her. She went into his office and returned a few minutes later to say he was busy and couldn’t meet with me. I returned right away to the office of the school newspaper and a few minutes later Ken Nichols, the head of the Journalism Department came in and said he wanted to talk to me. He’d evidently just gotten off the phone with the dean, and told me I couldn’t write the story. This was my second encounter with censorship in the educational system. I was getting the message loud and clear that “the press is free to those who own it.”

  By early summer 1976 I decided to drop out of college and hitchhike to California. My father didn’t ordinarily give me much advice because he knew I probably wouldn’t take it anyway, but on my final morning home, as I prepared to leave, he decided to do what he could to dissuade me from what he suspected might be a disastrous trip to Sodom and Gomorrah, or at least prepare me for what he thought I would find there. First he warned me to watch out for the transvestites of San Francisco, who, he said, were quite convincing until you felt the bulge under their dresses. When he thought I grasped the dangers of the transvestites, he turned to the second lesson. This one he’d doubtlessly learned when he was living in Oakland in the late thirties and it was based on the simple fact that Californians hated Okies. “You gonna find out when you get out there they gon’ treat you worse than a dog,” he finished.

  “Dad,” I responded, probably in a tone of mock exhaustion, “people in California will never know where I’m from. I don’t have an Okie accent.”

  At that point he gave up. We loaded my pack in the car, I kissed my mother goodbye and my father drove me to the interstate where I would begin hitchhiking into my new life in California.

  Chapter Three: Berkeley: The Utopia after the Revolution

  Fortunately, in 1976 a considerable number of people in Berkeley didn’t yet know “the Sixties” had ended. Graffiti for the New World Liberation Front, “NWLF,” sprayed in red on the wall facing People’s Park indicated that some Marxist-Leninist-Maoist guerrilla activity was ongoing in the area, even if most armed revolutionary activity had come to an end with the dramatic, bloody attack on the Symbionese Liberation Army in Los Angeles two years before. There were still many signs of an active counterculture, like food coops, housing and worker cooperatives, and a lively cultural scene with many regular poetry readings, a number of repertory movie theaters, active café life and, of course, concerts and happenings, and everything else, at People’s Park. It was, for me, a little paradise, the utopia I’d sought my whole life as I hitchhiked around the US, but never, until now, knew actually existed.

  I had only the vaguest notion of the recent history of Berkeley, and even less familiarity with the recent history of radical Christian participation in what had been called “the Movement.”1 Aside from a handful of Baptist hippies, like James Elaine, most of the “Jesus people” I’d known up to that point were just fundamentalists or, at best, Evangelicals with sideburns, long hair and sandals. Until my arrival in Berkeley I’d been relatively isolated from the Left wing of the Jesus movement, and until I’d been introduced to Right On! by Jim Parker in Switzerland, I hadn’t even known there was a Left wing. In Berkeley, I was soon to discover, there were hippie Christians, and early on many of them had been allies, if not collaborators, with secular leftists in what they had seen as a revolutionary process.

  Certainly, the Left wing or, what one writer has called “the Moral Minority,” of the Christian churches, was never granted a big role in North American society, and it certainly garnered fewer news headlines than did Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” and other right wing Christian groups.2 Nevertheless, the acts of courage and protest of the “moral minority” were greater than their numbers, even if those acts were routinely dismissed or ignored by the press. There were, for instance, the radical Quakers, and many other radical Christians, who had made up the core of the Abolition movement of the 19th century, and had protested virtually every imperial campaign the US had engaged in from the Mexican-American War on. The Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), went on peace and human aid missions to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, putting the spotlight back on this small group on the margins of the Christian tradition.3 The Social Gospel movement, which included the likes of Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and others, had become active in many progressive causes from the 1870s to the 1920s and left a legacy on radical politics in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1933 Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker Movement to feed unemployed workers and engage in a struggle for peace and justice. Other Catholics, including Philip and Daniel Berrigan (the Berrigan Brothers), joined in the 1960s. The example of these and other “radical” and Left Christians began to take on a new sense of importance with the rise of the “Jesus People” movement in the early 1970s. New communities of Christians, often meeting in houses as “house churches” began to emerge as “free” or “liberation” churches.

  These new church formations occurred in tandem with “the Movement” of the time, as Harlan Stelmach demonstrated in his fascinating work on the Berkeley Free Church (BFC).4 Initiated in 1967 as the South Campus Christian Ministry (SCCM) by church and local businesses around Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, the project was soon dubbed the “Berkeley Free Church” by the youths it served under the leadership of a young Episcopal priest named Richard York. Starting in June 1967 the BFC began its work in what had become a “full-fledged youth ghetto” by providing basic services to the hippies and countercultural youth who were flooding the area. Under its motto, “Celebrate life—Off the World Pig!” it became a significant institution of the emerging counterculture-New Left in Berkeley.

  The ministry began as a paternalistic social welfare project aimed at controlling or mitigating problems associated with the emerging youth culture and so it provided a “crash pad,” health and crisis counseling services, food, and referral services. Some of these “ministries” eventually were spun off into the Berkeley Free Clinic, Berkeley Emergency Food Program, and others. Alongside, or perhaps within, this context a church began to grow up, with John Pairman Brown joining as its resident theologian in 1968. Soon Anthony Nugent, who, like York, had been a community organizer in Oakland and met York in seminary, joined the “mission” as a co-pastor, although Anthony noted in an email to me that York “very much needed to control, dominate, be the sole ‘leader.’”5 In the wake of the struggle for People’s Park, in which the Free Church played a key role, instigating, then mediating the conflic
t and, finally, serving as an emergency room for protestors wounded by the National Guard, the tensions between York and Nugent exploded. Anthony Nugent went off to form the “Submarine Church,” leaving York as the sole authority at the BFC.

  As a result of the internal splits and a coordinated program of repression on the part of the US government’s COINTELPRO operations, by 1969 the fragmentation of the Youth/Anti-War Movement had begun in earnest and this was reflected in the BFC. Two currents ran increasingly in different directions, according to a quarterly report of the project directors of the BFC, with a divide “between ‘mysticism and action, accommodation and confrontation, Utopian and revolutionary.’”6 The “mystical, accommodationist, utopian” (hippie) side of what Stelmach called the “oppositional youth culture” inspired the growth of alternative spiritualities, the “back to the land” movement, and diverse lifestyle innovations throughout the following decades. The “activist, confrontational, revolutionary” current (New Left) flowed into burgeoning of the “New Communist movement” and an array of vanguard parties. That latter movement reached its peak in 1973—1974 from whence it began its slow decline.7

  Into this context came the Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF) arriving in Berkeley in 1969 as a “ministry” of conservative Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ. No doubt Bright hoped to convert much of the Berkeley Left to Jesus and the “American way,” but the man he sent to organize the project, Jack Sparks, had different ideas—or at least he did once he arrived in Berkeley. The rather straight-­arrow Evangelical ex-professor from Penn State quickly transformed into a long-haired, bearded “freak” indistinguishable, on the outside at least, from all the others who frequented the city. The ministry under Sparks also went “undercover” and appropriated all the trimmings of the counterculture—starting with a name that was designed to locate the organization amidst all the other “world liberation fronts.”