Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  Kent had just crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and was heading north out of the city on Highway 101. The song came on as his car was approaching the Seminary Avenue off-ramp in central Marin County. Kent was in his second year of studies at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, selling shoes at J.C. Penny’s, and serving as the part-time pastor of a tiny Baptist church way out in Byron, a farming community about fifty miles east of San Francisco. There were no hippies in Byron. It wasn’t happening in Byron. It was happening in the Haight, and that’s where God wanted Philpott to go.

  All across the nation

  Such a strange vibration

  People in motion.

  Philpott wasn’t sure where the Haight was, but the next day he headed back into the city to find out. He’d been raised in southern California, joined the military, and converted to Christianity through the work of a Baptist preacher at Travis Air Force Base northeast of San Francisco. Now, at age twenty-five, Kent was on his own mission from God.

  “San Francisco,” MacKenzie’s sentimental ode to peace and love, was an instant worldwide hit when it was released in the spring of 1967. Now everyone knew about the strange vibrations emanating from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets.

  There was a cultural revolution erupting in this blue-collar neighborhood of dilapidated Victorians and struggling shops. Rents were cheaper than over in North Beach, where the edgy artists, Beat poets, and assorted hangers-on were losing their monopoly on hip. In Berkeley, on the other side of San Francisco Bay, the revolution was political and had a harder edge. It was mellow in the Haight. Golden Gate Park was just a few blocks away. What would come to be known as “the San Francisco sound” was taking shape in the form of rock bands like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. And there was this little chemical called LSD.

  Philpott got the call from God just weeks before the official opening of the Summer of Love. By then, the advance guard of the hippie movement—led by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters—had already put on the Trips Festival, a drug-fueled celebration held in January 1966 at the Longshoremen’s Hall near Fisherman’s Wharf. A year later, there was the Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg chanted “We are one!” Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor and psychedelic evangelist, made his first public appearance in San Francisco. Hare Krishna devotees danced in ecstasy. Thousands of revelers poured onto the Polo Field, and the bands played on.

  That was just a warm-up for the summer of 1967, when the scene got very crowded and very crazy. Suddenly, it seemed like all the loose screws were rolling into San Francisco from across the nation and around the world. There was talk of peace and love, but there was also hunger, homelessness, rape, and lots of people strung out on drugs. For a freshly ordained street preacher, it was an evangelical gold mine.

  On his first day in the Haight, Philpott thought it wise to see what was happening—if anything—at an evangelical church close to ground zero. So he found his way to Hamilton Square Baptist Church and was looking in the window when a young man tapped him on the shoulder. “Would you like to meet someone who really knows God?” the man asked.

  Kent took the bait and began a lifelong friendship with David Hoyt.

  Hoyt had also grown up in southern California, but had a much rougher time of it than his newfound friend. He’d bounced around foster homes and juvenile halls and wound up in Lompoc Federal Penitentiary on a drug conviction. In prison, Hoyt passed the time reading about Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Eastern philosophies.

  Hoyt moved to San Francisco following his parole in September 1966. By the spring of 1967 he had become a disciple of Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, also known as the Hare Krishnas. That was whom David Hoyt wanted Kent Philpott to meet. Krishna was the god he was talking about. But that didn’t stop the Baptist preacher and the Krishna devotee from developing a close friendship. They got together often, Kent with his well-worn Bible and David holding his copy of the Bhagavad Gita. “He’d try to convert me to Hinduism,” Philpott recalled, “while I taught him scripture.”1

  When Hoyt moved into the Hare Krishna temple in San Francisco, he and Philpott continued their Bible study in the basement and drew in a few other students at the temple. “When the Swami heard about me, I had to explain what I was doing,” Philpott recalled. “He agreed to let me continue if I came to their worship—the kirtan— and stayed for an hour and a half of chanting. They’d go on and on dancing and chanting until they worked themselves into a frenzy. It was like being out on Hippie Hill on acid listening to the Grateful Dead, but it was a worship service. After the kirtan, David and I would go in the basement and study the Bible.”

  Jesus would prevail over Krishna, but it took a dream and a fire to seal Hoyt’s conversion. Asleep one night in the temple basement, David dreamt that he was missing out on the Rapture—that all the true Christians all around him were rising up into heaven while his feet stayed on the ground. Then he woke up to find his personal altar ablaze. “I always thought he just left a candle burning,” Philpott mused. “But David attributed it to God.”

  Hoyt moved into Philpott’s room at the Baptist seminary in Marin County and stayed through the Summer of Love. “We started an intense on-the-street ministry that summer,” Kent recalled. “We’d just walk up to people and tell them about Jesus. That was the whole thing. We didn’t even have any literature, but we sure went to town. We were there all the time.”

  They didn’t know it at the time, but Kent and David were helping birth the Jesus movement, a wave of counterculture conversion that would alter the face of American Christianity. Some called them “Jesus people.” Others preferred the term “Jesus freaks.” By the end of the year, another group of Marin County converts had opened up a coffeehouse in the Haight called the Living Room and soon took their mission down to southern California, opening two more Christian communes. Theologically, they were conservative evangelicals, but sociologically, they kept many of the trappings and the values of the emerging sixties counterculture.

  Across the bay in Berkeley, the Jesus movement took form as the Christian World Liberation Front. Jack Sparks, a Pennsylvania State University professor who had been involved with the evangelical Campus Crusade for Christ, started the group and an underground Christian newspaper called Right On, which blended the love of Jesus with the radical rap of the New Left. Here’s a sample from a Christian World Liberation Front tract entitled “The Second Letter to the Christians.”

  Dig it! God has really laid a heavy love on us! He calls us His children and we are! The world system doesn’t recognize that we’re His children because it doesn’t know Him. Right on, brothers and sisters, we are God’s children even though we’re a long way from being what He’s going to make us. Don’t get hooked on the ego-tripping world system. Anybody who loves that system doesn’t really love God…. That world system is going to be gone some day and along with it, all desire for what it has to offer; but anyone who follows God’s plan for his life will live forever. Dig it! This whole plastic bag is exactly what Jesus liberated us from.2

  Two of the fastest-growing evangelical churches of the seventies and eighties—Calvary Chapel and Vineyard Fellowship—were fueled by the Jesus movement of the late sixties. Chuck Smith, who started Calvary Chapel in late 1965, was not an early fan of the hippies. “These long-haired, bearded dirty kids going around the streets repulsed me,” he later wrote. “They stood for everything I stood against. We were miles apart in our thinking, philosophies, everything.”3

  To many Americans, the Jesus freaks were a contradiction in terms. The counterculture was supposed to be about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Evangelicals were supposed to be about piety and sexual purity. But evangelical Christians—especially before the rise of the religious right and its alliance with the Republican Party in the late seventies—were countercultural. In the late sixties and early seventies, a growing c
adre of avant-garde evangelicals found a receptive audience among the hippies, whose rejection of materialism and search for spiritual experience provided common ground. This was especially true in Pentecostal churches and charismatic Christian circles, where a lively style of worship and openness to religious ecstasy rang true for spiritual seekers of other stripes. Both the hippies and the evangelicals envisioned a world beyond the confines of ordinary time and space. Both practiced spiritual healing and were open to the wisdom of living prophets. In the end, it wasn’t a great leap from the Age of Aquarius to the Second Coming of Christ.

  Chuck Smith began to change his mind about the hippies when his daughter started dating one. His name was John. A few years back, before his Christian conversion, the young man had dropped acid and reveled in all that sin and sexuality up in San Francisco.

  “One night I opened the door and there was John with a long-haired, bearded kid with bells on this feet and flowers in his hair,” Smith recalled. “An honest-to-goodness hippie!”

  “Chuck,” John said. “I want you to meet Lonnie Frisbee.”

  Lonnie grew up in Orange County, left home as a teenager, and wound up in San Francisco for the Summer of Love. One of the first converts of the Jesus movement, Frisbee helped set up the Living Room in the Haight in late 1967, but headed home the following year. Lonnie still had the fire of a fresh convert when he showed up on Chuck Smith’s doorstep.

  “I put out my hand and welcomed him into the house,” Smith said. “As he began to share, I wasn’t prepared for the love that came forth from this kid. His love of Jesus Christ was infectious. The anointing of the Spirit was upon his life.”4

  Smith helped Lonnie rent a two-bedroom house on Nineteenth Street in Costa Mesa and open the House of Miracles, one of the first crash pads for Jesus freaks. Meanwhile, on the other side of Los Angeles, David Hoyt had rented an old sanitarium in Lancaster and founded The Way Inn, another early Christian commune. Frisbee had nearly two dozen converts the first week. He built bunk beds in the garage at the House of Miracles. One kid slept in the bathtub. It was the spring of 1968, and the Jesus movement was taking off.

  But Frisbee wasn’t the only young evangelist harvesting hippies in Orange County. He and other leaders in the fledgling Jesus movement had begun hearing stories about a zealous band of young Christian evangelists in nearby Huntington Beach calling themselves “Teens for Christ.” Frisbee, who was only nineteen years old at the time, asked two street preachers with a little more savvy—Kent Philpott and David Hoyt—to help check them out.

  Berg and his family had just arrived in Huntington Beach after their flop as the Berg Family Singers. They arrived at Virginia’s cottage in early 1968 with a few followers they’d picked up along the way. Two brothers had joined the troop at the New York World’s Fair. David Berg married one of them off to Faithy in February 1967 when his youngest daughter turned sixteen years of age. Another teenage devotee married Berg’s son, Aaron, in November. Berg’s oldest daughter, Deborah, had already married a man who met the Bergs at a Florida Bible college.5

  Lonnie Frisbee, Kent Philpott, and David Hoyt arrived late in the day for their meeting with the Teens for Christ. “Berg and his sons were sitting there with some other guys. What I remember most is that they were dressed in black suits. That was very astonishing to us. They looked like establishment-type people.

  “It was not like a conversation between brothers in Christ. It was more like, ‘Who are you?’ Sort of a suspicious tone,” Philpott said. “After the meeting, we recommended that Lonnie stay away from them.”

  Hoyt has a similar memory of the bad vibes in Huntington Beach. “It seemed a little strange to me,” he said. “There was a strange spirit there.”6

  Lonnie Frisbee listened to his Christian brothers’ wise counsel and stayed away from the Bergs. A few years later, David Hoyt would fail to take his own advice. It was a decision he’d regret for the rest of his life.

  4

  Gospel of Rebellion

  HUNTINGTON BEACH, CALIFORNIA

  March 1968 – The Light Club

  David and Jane Berg sit in front of three of their children (l-r) Aaron, Faithy, and Hosea in this 1964 photo. (Their oldest daughter, Deborah, is not pictured.)

  IT WAS JUST a small item in Alliance Witness, the official publication of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

  Information has been received concerning the homecoming of Mrs. Virginia Brandt Berg, in Huntington Beach, Calif., on March 15. Her death in her eighty-second year concluded more than fifty years of evangelism, gospel broadcasting and writing…. She is survived by a daughter, Virginia, and two sons, Dr. Hjalmer Berg and Rev. David Berg, director of Teens for Christ in Huntington Beach.1

  Mama Berg was dead, but mom was right. There was a sea of lost souls ready to be saved along the California coast.

  Things had not been going well for David Berg since his 1966 falling out with Fred Jordan, his old boss from the American Soul Clinic. Berg had traveled around the country in his mobile home with Jane and the kids, singing hymns and preaching about how all the churches were corrupt and the Endtime was at hand.

  Berg started using the name “Teens for Christ” in 1966, pushing his two sons, Aaron, nineteen, and Hosea, seventeen, into the limelight. “Here’s some good news about teens for a change. They like to witness instead of Watusi, preach rather than protest, and win rather than sin,” Berg wrote. “Would you like to have them at your church? Contact or write them today. Tomorrow may be too late!”2

  Early photos of the troupe confirm Kent Philpott’s memories. They show Aaron and Hosea in dark suits, white shirts, and ties. Berg had yet to realize that suits and ties were on the way out and the counterculture was on the way in. By the end of 1967 he and his family were broke and on the way to live at Virginia Berg’s house in Huntington Beach.

  What would one day become The Family got its start when Berg’s kids got a job singing one night a week at the Light Club, a youth ministry in Huntington Beach started by Teen Challenge, an arm of the Assemblies of God, one of the nation’s largest Pentecostal denominations. Before long, they had taken over the ministry.

  His mother’s death in March 1968 set David Berg free. He started sounding like a prophet, not an assistant pastor stuck in his mother’s shadow. Berg had finally found a following with his radical denunciation of “the system”—the established churches, the government, the business world, and all those clueless parents. It was us-versus-them. He was the Endtime Prophet. They were the established churches. They were the government. They were the corporations. They were all those parents who just did not get it. Berg was still growing up, still rebelling against mother. Notice how a fifty-one-year-old Berg uses the words “our parents” in a sermon delivered to “the kids” on March 8, 1970:

  The parents want them to follow in their footsteps in a selfish dog-eat-dog economy in which they not only murder one another, but they conduct massive slaughters of whole nations….

  The young people are sick and fed up with what really amounts to a pagan, cruel, whore-mongering, false Christianity. They’re trying to return to the peace-loving religions of old, including ancient Christianity, and the parents will have none of it….

  We are the true lovers of peace and love and truth and beauty and God and freedom: whereas you, our parents…are on the brink of destroying and polluting all of us and our world if we do not rise up against you in the name of God and try to stop you.3

  Early newspaper accounts on the Light Club began to worry local parents and church leaders. One night a reporter observed a sandal-clad David Berg performing “betrothal ceremonies,” including one between a twenty-one-year-old man and a sixteen-year-old girl. Faithy Berg explained the ceremony to the reporter. “It’s as good as getting married,” said Faithy, who was just seventeen years old and already betrothed. “You make the vows and everything. I guess it’s like an engagement, but stronger.”4

  Locals started calling the club “the hipp
ie church.” It was at 116 Main Street, just a few steps from Huntington Pier. There were colored lights, Bible verses written on the walls, patches of used carpet, folding chairs, and a half-dozen large telephone cable spools for tables. There was an elevated stage that served as a combination altar/bandstand.

  Potential converts walked in off the beach, passing under a white peace dove emblazoned over the door. The Light Club opened nightly at 8 P.M. and kept going until past midnight, fueled by free coffee. Aaron and Faithy would strum guitars and sing pop songs interspersed with spiritual phrases.

  Before long, the proselytizing would begin one-on-one. “How are you? Do you know Christ?” It could get intense, especially for those who just came for the free sandwiches. “They are always pushing this religion on us; they never leave us alone,” one visitor complained. “When you go in every night, it gets on your nerves.”5

  Berg’s early followers took his message to the beaches, parks, and college campuses of southern California. They demonstrated at local churches and accused them of heresy. In late 1968, six of the Endtime Prophet’s Christian revolutionaries were arrested and charged with trespassing when they refused to stop handing out religious tracts at a Huntington Beach college. Berg responded by sending eighteen robed members of his teenage shock troops back to the college to picket. Berg stayed in his car during the picketing and watched from afar.

  “We had sit-ins, march-ins, protests and everything the kids loved,” Berg would later brag. “Everything that was radical. It was just going great! Terrific! And I loved it! I was master-minding the whole thing from behind the scenes with Jesus!”6

  At first, most people saw Berg’s flock as just another part of the Jesus movement—hippies and political radicals who saw Jesus of Nazareth as the symbol of true revolution. “It was happening all across LA and California,” said Shula Berg, an early convert who would later have a child by Berg’s oldest son, Aaron. “God’s spirit was coming upon people. God was trying to reach the hippies and do a whole new thing with the church. The church had no clue what to do.”7