“The Jesus Movement was certainly courted by conservatives, even though we didn’t realize it at the time,” remembers Marsha Stevens-Pino, who performed at Explo ’72 with her band, Children of the Day. (Stevens-Pino spoke with me over the phone in 2023.) “We were made to feel special, these kids who’d been disparaged by the media, and in our homes. We were outcasts, and now we were made to feel like we were on the inside of something. And Explo ’72 was really a launching point for a lot of political people to cash in on us, because it was an election year and we were now of voting age.”
Many conservative evangelists, like Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart, denounced Christian rock, but Billy Graham saw Explo ’72 as an opportunity to evangelize to young people about the dangers of sex and drugs, and why America is the greatest country on Earth. He called it “a religious Woodstock,” but many of the original Jesus Freaks refused to participate because of its affiliation with right-wing groups like Campus Crusade. Though the dissenters were in the minority, as this was the direction the movement was headed.
While it may seem like these Christian hippies should’ve gravitated toward the social gospel of Jimmy Carter, the doomsday prophecies and distrust of government preached by conservative fundamentalists jibed well with the Jesus Freaks.
“The Jesus People didn’t leave counterculture behind; they thought that adopting fundamentalism was to swim upstream,” says Brad Onishi, a religious scholar and the co-host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast. He also spoke with me over the phone in 2023. “Back then, mainline Protestant churches were seen as the establishment; they were the ones that helped give us the New Deal, helping build the Great Society. The Jesus People viewed them as ‘The Man,’ as they had the money and power, they were the ones who got invited to the White House.”
This was what drew Janet away from the Methodist Church her parents had raised her in—with its pews, hymnals, and stained glass—and toward the Assemblies of God Church, with its young people playing electric guitars while sporting bell-bottoms and denim vests. AG leadership had denounced rock and roll throughout the fifties and sixties, only to embrace it by the late seventies, when it proved to be an effective recruiting tool for young people.
Though Jimmy Carter was technically an “evangelical,” his brand of evangelizing—caring for the poor, showing compassion to your enemies, striving for world peace—would, in the years ahead, be replaced with a new kind, one that would forever alter the meaning of the word in the public consciousness.