What we see is the genesis of an unplanned spiritual juggernaut that ultimately swept the country and led to the evangelical conversion of millions, including many outside the hippy subculture from which it sprang. This movement was rooted in the plain, unadorned teachings of the Bible and emphasized turning away from sin to uncompromising faith in, submission to, and relationship with Jesus Christ. Its original foot soldiers — often living in communal households, reeking of patchouli oil, and wearing beads and bell bottoms — walked the beaches, boardwalks, and streets of Southern California passing out tracts and inviting people to religious worship, evangelistic services, Bible studies, coffee houses, and baptisms.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared at The American Spectator.
On Thursday, February 23, the two-week-long, nonstop religious revival at tiny Asbury University in rural Wilmore, Kentucky saw its official end. Starting with about 20 students who stayed after a regular campus chapel service, tens of thousands had been drawn from across the country in that short span to participate in almost radically simple prayer, singing, and worship. By then, this “awakening” was reported to have spread to several other religious colleges.
In what even the most religiously cynical person must admit is a surprising coincidence, Jesus Revolution — a film exploring the genesis of the Jesus Movement that began among drugged-out hippies in the late 1960s in California and rapidly spread nationally and even internationally — hit the theaters the very next day. It has already quadrupled original box office expectations, grossing almost $33 million in slightly under two weeks. Not bad for a small-budget independent film with only one big-name actor.
Jesus Revolution focuses on the remarkable transformation of the life and ministry of conservative pastor Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammer), his unlikely partnership with hippy evangelist Lonnie Frisbee (Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus in The Chosen), and the salvation of Greg Laurie (Joel Courtney) from the “sex, drugs and rock & roll” lifestyle. Laurie, who now pastors a Southern Baptist megachurch, co-authored the book that inspired this movie.
What we see is the genesis of an unplanned spiritual juggernaut that ultimately swept the country and led to the evangelical conversion of millions, including many outside the hippy subculture from which it sprang. This movement was rooted in the plain, unadorned teachings of the Bible and emphasized turning away from sin to uncompromising faith in, submission to, and relationship with Jesus Christ. Its original foot soldiers — often living in communal households, reeking of patchouli oil, and wearing beads and bell bottoms — walked the beaches, boardwalks, and streets of Southern California passing out tracts and inviting people to religious worship, evangelistic services, Bible studies, coffee houses, and baptisms.
This movement jumped over boundaries of race, denomination, political ideology, lifestyle preferences, and social class to unite millions in a common faith as it expanded and, at times, exploded old forms of worship — not to mention that it gave us what we now think of as contemporary Christian music.
This startling evangelical revolution, which focused heavily on disaffected young people destroying themselves in the vain pursuit of liberation and authenticity, emerged in a nation that was deeply divided over everything. The cultural fabric had been seriously weakened by other revolutions, such as sexual, divorce, and the New Left. Intractable conflicts over race and civil rights, feminism, busing, and integration played out on the streets. Headlines regularly highlighted the depredations of violent groups like the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Black Panthers.
Campuses convulsed with protests, culminating in the accidental shooting of four by National Guardsmen at Kent State in 1970, which is memorialized in Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s famous song. In full color, Americans watched young men die in a war that most people had come to doubt we would win. Draft cards were being burned, and thousands of young men fled to Canada. Millions of young people were on drugs, which kept penetrating schools at younger levels. Terrible urban riots marked too many “long, hot summers.” The worst were those following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, which one commentator called “the greatest wave of social unrest since the Civil War.” This came on the heels of over 150 race riots the summer before.
The world seemed to be constantly on the brink of nuclear disaster and was certainly marked by tensions ever-ready to boil over, including the omnipresent Cold War and the expansion of Communism. At the end of the decade, the lunar landing brought Americans together and gave us a much-needed shot of national pride — but not much and not for long.
What would have happened to America but for the Jesus Revolution?
As Josiah (DeVon Franklin), a Time journalist covering the movement, says in the film: “Our country is a dark and divided place, but now there’s hope. And it’s spreading.”
Many historians, including one of my atheist professors in graduate school, argued that the evangelical movement in England in the 1700s had prevented disaster in the face of serious social decline, inoculating it against the curse of the French Revolution. Scholars could make an equally compelling argument for the impact of the Jesus Revolution.
Millions of people were desperate because of the conditions of their own lives or the realistic fears they harbored about their children, families, society, and world. Suddenly, in the midst of their hopelessness, unlikely people were aggressively reaching out to lost and troubled youth and young adults with a saving message expressed in a language they understood.
Untrained newbies barely established in the Christian life themselves worked alongside seasoned believers to share hard truths with lost people. Then, they did whatever it took to help them live out these truths when and if they made the decision to turn from the paths they were on.
Folks on all sides who came together over Jesus had to overcome deeply engrained prejudices, animosities, traditions, and habits. A lot of lives were turned upside down as the walls came down — not instantly or easily, but steadily and surely. This was a new kind of “radical” for a period worn out by radicalism: radical grace, radical forgiveness, radical love, and radical obedience to the plain text of the Bible.
Jesus Revolution does an excellent job portraying all this without schmaltz or gimmicks. I lived through these times and came to Christ myself through the ministry of mostly ex-hippy art students living together in “covenant households.” Watching this film, I found myself reaching for the hanky — not just because of what I was seeing but because of what I was remembering. An old friend and former bandmate of mine told me that he and his wife had the same experience. We know where we would have been but for the Jesus Movement. Before seeing the movie, it seemed odd to me that Kelsey Grammer, a guy about the same age as I am, kept choking up in interviews about this film. It does not seem odd to me now.
Were there serious problems in this movement? Of course, and the film addresses obvious ones: theatrics, an unhealthy obsession with miracles and the spectacular, and too many gifted but untested leaders. Inadequately prepared potential leaders were given too much responsibility too soon, and some fell prey to their own egos and the adulation of admirers, as is evident in the breakdown of Lonnie Frisbee and his relationship with Chuck Smith.
Not addressed in the film was the role of “end times” speculation fueled by events in the Middle East. Students of biblical prophecy in the Jesus Movement interpreted these events to signal an imminent Second Coming, exemplified by the wildly popular 1970 Hal Lindsey book, The Late Great Planet Earth. And in the rush to, as they often said, “make sure there were new wineskins for the new wine” (Mark 2:22; Matthew 9:17), traditional forms of worship and classic hymns were discarded too quickly and thoughtlessly.
Yet millions “saved” through this movement persevered through these difficulties, made corrections, learned, and moved on in the faith. We already see that dynamic in the film in the early stages of the remarkable biography of Greg Laurie, who ultimately became intimately connected with Billy Graham, a powerful senior statesman of evangelicalism who thankfully embraced and supported the Jesus Movement without ignoring its foibles.
So why is this film such an unlikely success? There are no simple answers to questions like this, but I would like to hazard one, which I think is also connected to the remarkable phenomena that just unfolded in rural Kentucky: Jesus Revolution speaks to our nation at a time at least as, if not more, divided, hopeless, and troubled than the era of Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison.
Drug epidemics and overdoses rage, penetrating every racial group and social class, while suicides, mental illnesses, and sexual and gender confusion among young people climb. Social media makes us sicker and more divided as people retreat to echo chambers when they are not shouting, denouncing, or “canceling” those with whom they disagree. Educational institutions are increasingly Orwellian ideological training centers rather than places dedicated to communicating true knowledge and literacy. Young people are abandoning religion — not for atheism but for vague personal spirituality that is little more than repackaged ancient paganism. Elites in and out of government keep lying to and manipulating us. We cannot trust our FBI or intelligence services, and now even the venerable CDC has betrayed us.
Trust in our major social institutions has hit new lows, and rightly so. Urban race riots returned with a vengeance in 2020, along with now-chronic violence in cities where woke politicians are no longer able to put public safety ahead of ideology and businesses cannot protect the wares on their shelves from shoplifters and flash mobs.
The international scene looks less stable and more dangerous than it appeared 50 years ago. Will China invade Taiwan? Will Putin or Kim Jong-un launch nukes? Will the brutal invasion of Ukraine draw us into World War III? The reservoirs of strength available to us half of a century ago, which Nixon accurately called “the silent majority” in 1969, are grossly depleted. Our brokenness extends across the political, ideological, and cultural spectrum.
For many of us baby boomers influenced by the Jesus Movement, the hope we felt through our first “born again” president — and then on through the Reagan years and beyond — is now replaced by disappointment, cynicism, and fear. Those of younger generations vacillate between focusing on personal material welfare, comfort, and safety and getting caught up in social justice causes and tribal identities with simplistic views of reality rooted more in slogans and emotions than facts and logic. Historically low marriage and birth rates in our nation are poignant evidence of young people allergic to commitment — but perhaps even more just paralyzed by fear, mistrust, and lack of confidence about the future. At least hippies were searching for “truth”; millennials and beyond increasingly do not believe it exists anywhere beyond their own preferences.
While political and cultural engagement is more vital than ever, no political or cultural fix we can engineer is likely to turn things around. Increasingly, many Americans are coming to believe that, if our civilization is to survive — if Baby Boomers and their children are going to have any hope in a good society for themselves and their progeny — the answer must come from outside of us, from above.
Our hope is not in ballot boxes, lobbying, marches, or media campaigns, important as they are. But the answer will be found on our knees and in face-to-face faith communities across denominations and churches renewed, revitalized, and refreshed by God himself doing for us what we cannot hope to do for ourselves.
Are Jesus Revolution, the overwhelmingly positive public response to it, and events like these recent religious awakenings positive harbingers of a fresh spiritual revitalization of America? Are we in the darkness before a glorious new dawn? Whether you are a person of faith or not, you should hope so. Because if this does not happen — and soon — well, God help us.
Dr. David J. Ayers is the Fellow for Marriage and Family with the Institute for Faith & Freedom. His latest book is “Christian Marriage: A Comprehensive Introduction.” This article is used with permission.

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As we learn to meditate on the meaning and application of the Word, every believer ought to grow in the grace of actually applying it to life. You see, it’s one thing to prayerfully discern how to put a passage of the Bible into action, but it’s another thing to do it. And we must press on to actually being doers of the Word because that’s where the truth comes to life for us, and that’s where we bear the kind of fruit that glorifies God, amplifies our joy, and blesses other people.

Over the years, I have benefited from Colossians 3:1-17 more than even I know. One of the main reasons for this is that it so clearly displays how God works with his people; he is always seeking to transform our hearts and shape our motives rather than just modifying our behavior. Human religions, including Christian legalism, try to change or control people by imposing rules upon them and demanding conformity from them. That is, they seek to work from the outside in. But while their approach has an appearance of wisdom and spirituality, it has no value in suppressing the flesh and addressing self-indulgence (Colossians 2:23). Indeed, human religion has no power to transform even a single life.
In contrast, God seeks to shape godly behavior in us by getting to our hearts, by helping us see and feel that we’re loved and accepted by him without reservation through faith in Christ, by helping us understand why he instructs us in the way he instructs us, by inviting us to join him in his work, and by giving us the power of his Spirit to do what’s glorifying to him, best for us, and beneficial to others. He issues the “what” of his commands on the foundation of the “why” of the gospel, and Colossians 3:1-17 displays this well in the space of just a few verses.
Seek the Things Above (3:1-4)
To begin with, we see in verses 1-4 that God, by his eternal grace, made us alive with Christ when we put our trust in him so that our past, present, and future blessings have been eternally secured for us. As for our past, Paul states that we died, which is to say, our old selves died with Christ when we believed in Christ. As for our present, Paul declares that our lives are hidden with Christ in God, where our Good Shepherd faithfully and ceaselessly intercedes for us and protects us from all threats within and without. As for our future, Paul prophesies that when Christ returns and his glory lights up the sky, then we who have put our trust in him will also appear with him in glory.
Friends, for those who believe, this is our reality and destiny, and nothing or no one can change, corrupt, or snatch away what God has done for us! And since this is so, doesn’t it just make sense that we would spend our lives seeking the things above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God? Doesn’t it just make sense that we would set our minds and fix our eyes on the things above, and not on earthly things? In verses 5-15, God calls for a number of things from his people, but all of these things are built upon this “why” of our lives in Christ. Why should we rid ourselves of certain things and develop a way of life characterized by other things? Because God has done all of this for us in Christ, he wants us to come into the fullness of his joy by cooperating with his work in us.
Put to Death the Earthly Things (3:5-11)
With this in mind, God gives us some negative instructions in verses 5-11 and some positive instructions in verses 12-15. He calls on us to seriously and severely rid our lives of certain things and passionately and persistently clothe ourselves with other things. But I say again, and we must never forget that these things flow from the “why” of the gospel as God revealed it to us in His Word.
On the one hand, God calls us in verses 5-11 to put to death everything that’s still earthly in us, things that aren’t pleasing to him and don’t reflect his heart and character. Specifically, he mentions sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, greed, anger, wrath, malice, slander, and filthy language from our mouths. Paul warns us that because of these things, the righteous judgment of God is coming upon all who refuse to humble themselves and receive the grace, forgiveness, and life of God in Christ. But for those of us who have believed by God’s grace, his best desire for us is that we let go of, and in fact kill, our old self along with its way of life and put on the new self, which most beautifully images Christ.
As Paul says in verse 10, God is renewing us in knowledge after the image of our Creator; in other words, he’s transforming our lives by first transforming our minds, hearts, and wills. Since this is so, let’s cooperate with him and kill everything in us that’s working against him. You see, this is yet another part of the “why” of Colossians 3:1-17—God is working in us, he’s renewing us in his image, and for this reason, he’s calling us to die to what’s already dead in us. He’s saying, My Children, trust me and cooperate with my work in you.
Put on Godly Things (3:12-15)
On the other hand, in verses 12-15, God calls us to clothe ourselves with the kinds of things that reflect his heart and character. Things that are honoring and glorifying to him. Things that give rise to the greatest joy in us. Things that bless and build up other people. But before he does that, he adds even more to the “why” of his instructions in verse 12, “Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and dearly loved.” Friends, these things are facts of our lives through faith in Christ, and there’s simply nothing we can do to make ourselves more or less chosen, holy, and dearly loved. Of course, our behavior still pleases God (if we obey His Word) or displeases God (when we sin), but the fact is that he’s completely forgiven and accepted us through faith in Christ and counts us as his chosen ones, his holy ones, his dearly loved children. This is the reality of our lives.
On the foundation of this “why,” God then invites us into the privilege and joy of being like him. He graciously calls us to cooperate with his work in us and develop a way of life that best magnifies him, amplifies our joy, and equips us to be a blessing to others.
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God’s Holy Scriptures provide us all kinds of assurance of His love, not least in His articulation of our doubts. God cares about our faith struggles and included words of doubt for us to connect with so that we would see that He sees and understands us. Don’t let doubt drive you away from God, but rather allow His own expression of your doubt to draw you closer to Him.

Insecurity in our relationship with God is a fairly common experience. While many of us can be reassured of God’s love fairly easily, for some individuals, anxiety over their salvation can be so intense that no amount of reassurance can provide comfort. In such cases, our greatest hope is to turn to the God of comfort who anticipated that we would have these doubts about Him. God describes our doubt in His Word in order to draw us closer to Him.
There are a number of different reasons why someone may struggle with the assurance of God’s love, but consider these three common reasons. First, consider contextual influences. While our context does not cause us to do anything, it does influence us. It impacts us in significant ways. Things like childhood experiences and parents can have a profound impact on our sense of God. Perhaps you experienced God through an abusive parent, or abusive pastor, youth leader, or Sunday school teacher. All childhood trauma impacts us deeply, but trauma that associates God with our abusers makes it particularly difficult to see God as loving.
Second, consider personal influences. Our own personality can also play a part in cultivating doubt. Some of us are wired in such a way that faith is particularly difficult. Take, for example, someone who struggles with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Some individuals who struggle with OCD may feel that they have sinned even when they can’t identify anything specific. Others may constantly struggle with a need to perform some routine to merit favor or earn God’s love. But even apart from mental illnesses, our own dispositions can add layers of complexity to our relating to God. Hyper-sensitivity can make us exceedingly aware of our unworthiness. General insecurity can make us fearful and reluctant to approach God. Perfectionism can create a constant frustration with our religious performance.
Third, consider scriptural influences. This factor may seem strange; after all, the Bible speaks plainly about God’s love for us. Yet, the Bible also speaks about God’s judgment against sin and sinners, His displeasure over wickedness, and His perfect moral character. That can be intimidating when we are already struggling. As a result, many who struggle with the assurance of salvation tend to overemphasize, misread, or misapply the various passages that speak of God’s judgment against sin.
It is helpful to know some of the common reasons we may struggle with doubt. Think about your own life and your own struggle with assurance. Do you see any of these elements contributing to your doubt? Identifying what contributes to your struggle allows you to tailor a response to those influences as you fight the good fight of faith (1 Tim. 6:12). Yet, Scripture offers us greater help.
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