Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost brings us an observation concerning the 60s (the setup here is that Christians were extensively involved in the cultural upheaval of the 60s, but that there is virtually no coverage of it in the secular or Christian press or histories):

Note, too, that just as chroniclers from the left want to preserve the zeitgeist of the ’60s from any contamination by the Holy Spirit, so chroniclers from the right–conservative Christians in particular–are wont to cast that decade as a time of dramatic national apostasy, a turning away from God, the bitter harvest of which we are now reaping. To acknowledge that the reality was much messier–that the Bergstroms are as well suited as Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin to represent the spirit of that time–would require these pundits to start from scratch.

This goes right back to the reflexive idolizing of the past the church, for whatever reason, has had for as long as I’ve been alive. The church has collectively denied any involvement in the social upheaval of the 60’s in order to maintain the view that the root of all evil in America traces to those damnable hippies. As neat and tidy as that narrative is, it just isn’t true. Christians were involved, and not every evil can be traced to the 60s. In fact in many ways the 60s corrected some of the sins of American life. Consider the example the author gives of the Bergstroms:

Like many children of the ’60s, Arne and Marie Bergstrom rebelled against the expectations of their middle-class families. In 1970, halfway through their undergraduate studies at the evangelical Bethel College in St. Paul, Minn., they dropped out, got married, sold all their possessions and went to do God’s work. Their journey took them to Papua New Guinea, Sudan and the Philippines (where they adopted two girls; they had two sons as well). When they settled back in the U.S., Arne’s beat was disaster relief: He went to Rwanda, Kosovo and Turkey (after a massive earthquake), to refugee camps at the Iran-Afghanistan border. Marie became an award-winning fifth-grade teacher.

A couple of months ago, our church in Wheaton, Ill., had to bid the Bergstroms goodbye. They were moving again, close to Seattle, where Arne took a position at World Vision, the Christian relief and development agency. If you had seen them standing in front of the congregation, you could hardly have failed to recognize them as aging hippies–Marie’s long straight hair, Arne’s grizzled beard–and they are both runners, thin as rails.

If that’s not a life lived in worship of the living God, than what is? And it happened as a direct result of the effect the 60’s had on this couple.

Is it really so important to the church that we glamorize the past at the expense of truth? How long can we keep looking longingly back to the 50s as a panacea? At some point we need to face up to the fact that there were problems in both the church and society in every age? That tracing every major problem to the hippies of the 60s is a lie, and it fosters a sinful attitude of “not my problem”. Even if it were true hippies caused every problem we have today, the church is not Pier One, there is no “you break you buy it” policy in place. Instead there’s a “its broken, now do the work of the gospel” policy in place.

Its time to stop looking in the rear view mirror, put the car in drive and start moving forward.