Cults, Rock Music, and Jesus's 1970s Dominance
Why was Jesus everywhere in the seventies?
I think most will agree that Jesus is one of the biggest celebrities of all time. We’re still talking about this dude thousands of years later. Politicians, athletes, musicians, and powerful people reference him in speeches and postgame interviews every day. For the most part, his influence is relegated to the far-right and stained-glass windows in churches. If you’re a Christian, I’m sure he’s very important to you (especially this weekend). If you’re not, you probably don’t think about him much.
However, there was a time in the 1970s when Jesus’s celebrity had a major resurgence in popular culture outside of the church. His values of inclusion and empathy, and his story became omnipresent throughout the decade’s biggest moments. This was not just a time for “Jesus Freaks,” secular people were captivated with Jesus’s influence too! He became a presence in mainstream rock music, and communes, and somehow inspired two of the most successful musicals of all time. Jesus was as ubiquitous in the 1970s as millennial pink is today. So how did it happen and what am I talking about?
It all began in a little town called Nazareth… no I’m totally joking. Let’s start in the late 1960s and the blossoming commune culture in the United States.
Leading up to the 1970s, social revolutions like the student movement and the civil rights movement fueled young people to seek out alternative living arrangements and a lifestyle that differed greatly from their parents’. Baby boomers and The Silent Generation were grappling with major changes in society and sought fulfillment both spiritually and emotionally through communes and consciousness-raising groups. People weren’t connecting with traditional religious channels which felt out of touch with society’s newfound openness. They were rigid and puritanical, and people of all backgrounds toyed with an ever-growing spectrum of spiritual experimentation.
For example, hundreds of New Yorkers seeking to either “drop out” or retreat from the demands of adult life, left for a more agrarian lifestyle in The State of Vermont. This created a major diaspora of counter-cultural “seekers” keen to start over with a blank slate. There were communal groups focused on Christianity, Zen Buddhism, music, and sustainable living, or a mix of all these ideas together. These radical values of pacifism, community, and unpretentiousness? It married the hippie ethos with Christian-tinged spiritual cleansing.
Unfortunately, there was a dark side to this widespread embrace of the spiritual quest. It was an opportunity for megalomaniacs to take advantage of people’s openness. By the early 1970s, religious “new-left” movements became increasingly sinister. Cult organizations like Children of God, Heaven’s Gate, and the Peoples Temple led by Jim Jones, sprung up around the country. All of these religious cults used the teachings of Jesus and the Bible as a foundation, with the promise of salvation in the afterlife to extremist and dangerous means.
Jim Jones is an evil man: he killed over 800 church members in a mass-suicide in 1978. However, before the tragedies, Peoples Temple was known in the media as a community pillar in San Francisco. Before the late 1970s, his reputation was that of a beacon on behalf of the impoverished. Jim Jones planted roots in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, an area whose population was displaced by city planning. He gave communal living and faith to hundreds of at-need residents from all racial backgrounds. The reason Peoples Temple was beloved by the liberal political class in the early-to-mid 1970s, was because of this radical inclusiveness and seemingly altruistic distribution of social services.
Jim Jones appeared to be living out the values of Jesus with a counter-cultural vibe: he embodied inclusivity and unconditional love by embracing drug addicts, the homeless, and sex workers, and the media widely covered his acts of service. This veneer of social justice is integral to the branding of cults in the 1970s, and part of why people often overlooked their menace. The Vietnam War ended in 1973, social welfare programs were drastically cut, and poverty was on the rise. If a religious organization could step in a pick up the slack, while preaching leftist ideas, why investigate any claims of mistreatment?
Also, liberal, boundary-pushing ideas were trendy! Even Jim Jones preached atheism at times and ordered members to use the Bible as toilet paper to showcase the hypocrisy of traditional religion.
San Francisco was a hotbed for several of these spiritual movements, and Jesus was creeping into a different organized religion in the same city.
Jews for Jesus was founded by Moishe Rosen, a former Jew, raised in the Reform tradition who converted to Christianity in the 1950s. This guy was not a cult leader, but his aggressive movement was controversial. He believed that Jews for Jesus could be a community for “Messianic Jews,” those of the Jewish faith who also accepted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. If it seems ludicrous that two key pillars of this religion, Jesus as Christ versus Jesus as a false prophet, could co-exist, it kind of is. However, there was a major generation gap between the newness of the 1970s and the rigid tradition of the past. If there was a time to shatter existential norms, this was it. People experimented with all sorts of off-the-wall belief systems, so why not take advantage?
The 1970s communal and spiritual movements provided a space for baby boomers to push the bounds of intellectual, inclusive conversation. They were questioning institutional religion and traditions, and Jews for Jesus positioned themselves as an alternative. They marketed their movement as part of the counter-culture, even if it was a re-packaged version of Evangelical Christianity. Rosen insisted this duality could exist in religious identity even if previous generations had considered it to be completely antithetical.
Rosen assertively courted young Jewish baby boomers who were disillusioned by the faith of their upbringing to bring them into this glossy, youthful hybrid of Jesus. However, as is with most organized religions, there were other motives to the gospel. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Far-Right Christians realized that Jewish people and Zionists would be important in the events leading to Jesus’s Second Coming. Jews for Jesus was embraced in Christian communities, while it was rejected and admonished in the mainstream Jewish community.
So outside of the cults, the communes, and the religious groups, where was society at, and did other people have Jesus on their minds? People were eager to expand their perspectives and get creative, and it didn’t take long for the music industry and pop culture to get drawn into the zeitgeist.
In 1972, The Doobie Brothers’ “Jesus Is Just Alright” debuted on the charts and the reception was ecstatic. The Doobie Brothers were a soul-infused rock group that shared fans with The Allman Brothers and Aerosmith and inhabited the mythos of the rock lifestyle. When “Jesus Is Just Alright” came out, it was a single on the album Toulouse Street which features a cover photo shot at a former brothel. This was not a squeaky clean group singing about how much they loved Jesus or trying to convert people, these were musicians having a good time and relishing the transgression.
This sort of murky morality mixed with the contrasting ideas of rock music and fixed cultural ideas is the sort of expansive content people wanted. The band hasn’t explicitly stated their intention in the message, other than to say it’s a great song, and people dug that sort of ambiguity. It was a major U.S. hit, peaking at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1973.
Additionally, there were not one, but two highly successful, hottest-ticket-in-town, shows that featured Jesus as a contemporary idol and music superstar.
The first, is the extremely well-known and beloved Jesus Christ Superstar written by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The show began as a rock opera concept album (very 1970s) and toured internationally after its start in London. It then became a Broadway musical and ultimately a Hollywood Blockbuster starring newly-minted sex symbol Ted Neeley as Jesus as he navigates the week in the lead up to his crucifixion and betrayal by disciple, Judas.
The movie is utterly camp, and deliciously 1970s for its costumes and choreography, and features a hippie bus complete with all the feeling of living on a desert commune. What it does though, is court controversy, and importantly challenge our systemic ideas of this entire Jesus fantasy world created by religious leaders. Roger Ebert gave the film Three out of Four stars at the time of release and outlined the film’s issues succinctly:
The movie has become controversial for a couple of reasons: Jewish groups have attacked it for being anti-Semitic, and some reviewers have wondered aloud why the only Black [person] in the movie happened to be cast as Judas. Jewison is wrong, of course, to blame the death of Jesus on the Jews; the Roman Catholic Church, which hasn’t exactly been in the vanguard on this question, officially decided some years ago that the doctrine of collective Jewish responsibility was in error… But Jewison is dealing with a fantasy about the life of Christ, not fact, and if he wants to typecast, that’s his right as a filmmaker. We also have the right to be offended.
Yes, we have the right to be offended! The boundaries were pushed, and audiences loved it. It grossed $24.5 million in 1973 ($158 million in 2022 dollars) and is still touring worldwide today. I guess the man and the musical has staying power because people love the idea of a rock and roll Jesus.
The second Jesus-inspired musical was 1971’s Godspell written and created by composer Stephen Schwartz (creator of the musical and soon-to-be movie, Wicked.) Like Jesus Christ Superstar, Schwartz insisted on a rock-oriented soundtrack that sounded more like contemporary music, and less like church service. It was also adapted into a film in 1973, but released to less fanfare. What’s striking about the show’s story is how it blends Christian hymns, the flourishing Bohemian subculture, and rock music. It incorporates a colorful cast of characters that appear as a traveling troupe of hippies akin to The Diggers of the late 1960s.
Godspell was very successful, akin to Jesus Christ Superstar, and similarly broke down the barriers between rock and roll and Christianity, but Evangelicals were suspicious of both. Each musical lacked inclusion of the resurrection, and organizations were upset with the morality of each production which gave Jesus sex appeal, the apostles a funk style, and framed romance and empathy in a humanist way in the relationship dynamics between Jesus and his followers. It brought the inclusion and free love vibes to the audiences in a way that felt authentic to the life of Jesus.
Audiences were exploring this new fractured world of agnostic spirituality and mixing their love of James Taylor, babes in tight jeans, and the mysticism of the Age of Aquarius into a new sort of popular culture. Mainstream Christianity was uncool, but people could embrace this reimagined 1970s Jesus. He’s not some untouchable icon but a hippie compatriot and a friend. These stories were a primitive expression of faith which NYT theatre critic Clive Barnes described as a "perfectly contemporary and perfectly vulgar concept of peace and goodwill to all men".
Both composers were around twenty-five years old at the time they created these classics, and neither were Christians or even religious. They both were inspired by the contemporary social movements and reimagined this story with the flourishing rock-and-roll culture and hippie ethos. Both are still beloved productions because they pose existential questions about the meaning of life, religion, and the pursuit of happiness. This post-1960s afterglow of exploration was all the rage, and Jesus was a malleable vessel to deliver the goods.
It’s funny to think about Jesus as this fluid, existential token with a contemporary perspective. I honestly can’t think of a more fixed identity in our current popular culture. Perhaps in the 1970s, he was less defined, and I give people like Steven Schwartz and those hippies in Vermont credit for the nuance they gave to spiritual enlightenment. Why not explore and look for alternatives?
For Further Enjoyment-
Top Tracks:
Superstar - the disco finale from the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar, 1973)
The cast of Godspell performs on The Today Show in the mid-1970s
B-Sides:
Freaks and Geeks (Millie plays The Doobie Brothers)
Midnight Special - The Doobie Brothers perform Jesus is Just Alright
I loved, it all started in Nazareth, but from the sinister side, I lost a good friend to The Children of God, who had to stop seeing any family and friends, one to the Divine Light Mission , and one to the Hare Krishna's. The latter wasn't so bad, we got invited to 'feasts', which were nice events, but we drifted apart pretty quickly as that was an all consuming group.
I jokingly started a sect with me as a guru, based on Maharaji, but even though my public 'readings' were from Winnie the Pooh, there were a few people who took my satire seriously and came to me to help them with their life problems. It was a time that many people sought meaning and it was pretty scary how some cults were able to find easy prey.