(BOOK EXCERPT) The women in flowing red dresses danced and twirled on stage as the rock band played on. I was four years old, transfixed by the color and movement. I danced to the beat of the drums and the bass guitar. Around me, adults sang their hearts out — eyes closed, hands raised to the sky, heads tilted back. They were seeking absolution, escape, salvation. I was oblivious. It was 1981.

Music was vital to our church. We did a lot of singing. Services were at least two hours long, and the first hour was always thirty to forty-five minutes of what we called “worship.” The second hour was for preaching. The sermon was usually close to an hour. Brevity was not highly valued. We called each sermon a “message.” The implication of that word? There was a messenger, and preachers were there to deliver a memo direct from the heavens. The adults sat at rapt attention, taking copious notes.

If we did more singing after the sermon, things stretched well past two hours. That was when things got most interesting. This was when you could get slain in the Spirit, drunk on the Holy Ghost. The leaders would “release” everyone who wanted to leave to go get lunch, but the band would keep playing. The hardcore folks stuck around to sing, pray, and have others lay hands on them. We believed God’s power could be transferred from one person to another this way. I spent most of my childhood merely passing time in church, waiting for the service to end. But sometimes the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I would jump up and down, close my eyes, raise my hands, and shed tears.

My parents were leaders in this church when I was a young kid. They entered the world of evangelical Christianity in the early 1970s, and I came along in 1977. I’m the child of a religious revival, a bona fide spiritual phenomenon that swept the nation that decade. My earliest years were saturated by this fixation with euphoric experience that had captured my parents’ generation. When I was twelve, I fell down to the floor and lay prostrate on the ground. I was at a youth retreat, with high schoolers playing guitar and keyboard to set the mood. Parents clustered together with their kids: standing, hugging, praying, singing, trying to save them from hell.

I was raised in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington, DC. We lived among the sprawling federal government workforce, full of middle-class families who commuted into the city each day. But we cocooned ourselves inside our church culture so tightly that we could have been anywhere: the plains of the Midwest or rural Appalachia. My dad was a pastor of this church, which he and his friends started from scratch.

We were taught that anyone not in the church was in “the world.” The world was, pretty obviously to us, a bad place. So it was better if we spent the majority of our time with people from church, doing church things, and not thinking too much about non-church things. 

The church meeting location moved around a lot. Many years we held our services in public high schools. Adults were praying out loud, saying something about demons in the building, even in the walls. They believed they were evicting demons out of that physical space by the power of prayer. My child’s brain concluded that we were all living on a knife’s edge, with invisible forces at work that could reach out and touch me. I read the Bible constantly. I started as a child with a picture Bible, a sort of comic book version with illustrations and narration. I moved on to the real thing. Most every morning Dad would read us a selection from the Bible at breakfast. Usually, it was from Psalms or Proverbs.

There is a lot of talk in Proverbs about how wisdom will protect us from “the adulterous woman,” and in an evangelical culture that obsessed over sex, this was a particular focus. But in Proverbs 2, just before the warning about the “wayward woman . . .”  there is another cautionary passage about a different sort of figure:

“Wisdom will save you from the ways of wicked men, from men whose words are perverse, who have left the straight paths to walk in dark ways, who delight in doing wrong and rejoice in the perverseness of evil, whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways” (vv. 12–15).

As a child, I was limited in my imagination of how this verse applied to real life. Little did I know, this warning would have increasing relevance as I grew older.

And I could not have comprehended that the Christian culture I was being raised in — separate from my instruction at home — was actually making me and others around me more vulnerable to manipulation by men “whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways.”

My dad often told me the story of how he became a born-again Christian. He left the Air Force Academy after marijuana was discovered in his possession. He was hitchhiking back home. In Iowa, he reconnected with a friend who took him to an evangelical church, and experienced a kind of church environment where people were friendly and seemed to be excited about Jesus. He heard, for the first time, that Jesus cared about him and wanted to be part of his life. Dad gave his life to Christ. When he got back to DC, dad found that some of his friends were also “high on Jesus.” Many young people were getting into this Jesus movement. My mom was part of that scene, and my mom and dad met up going to Bible studies, church meetings, and social outings.

They were swept up in something called the Jesus Movement, which had begun at the end of the 1960s and spread throughout the country in the 1970s. My childhood was dominated by the story of this revival that they and their friends experienced in the years before I was born. It was a national phenomenon, so much so that Time ran a cover story on it in 1971. The cover design featured a drawing of a bearded Jesus, his face shaded in purple, in front of a psychedelic background of bright red and yellow and a rainbow. Positioned above him like a halo, the headline read, “The Jesus Revolution.” And at the center of that revolution was this same thing I would be chasing two decades later: a personal, profound, emotional experience of God.

My dad’s best friend from high school was now “born again.” C. J. Mahaney had been an athletic type who came from a rough-and-tumble household. He was a pot smoker with long, scraggly blond hair, thinning even at a young age. C. J. found purpose in this new religious movement and turned his life around. He became the leader of a group of young people who were all drawn to whatever it was that was happening. There was something in the air, an excitement, an emotion you can still tap into most easily by listening to some of the music from that era. Find a live recording of the popular musicians of that time — Keith Green or Second Chapter of Acts — and you’ll hear the raw power. They were fed up with the conventionalism of their parents’ generation, with its emphasis on conformity, duty, stoicism, and bourgeois materialism. And they were unfulfilled with the free-love movement of the 1960s. So they took the hippie culture and merged it with Jesus’s teachings on loving their brothers and sisters in the faith and on returning to a communal ethic. They wanted to act out the vision in Acts 4:32–35 where Christians shared their belongings and devoted themselves totally to Christ. One leader told The Washington Post in 1981 that their community rejected “American individualism” and wanted to live communally.

While there were elements of hippie culture in the Jesus Movement, there was also a rejection of the purely hedonistic, live-and-let-live ethos of the 1960s. The 1960s had ended with assassinations, domestic terrorism, massive social unrest, incredible racial tension, and the peak of the Vietnam War. By the time the 1970s rolled around, America was in a dark, foul mood. My parents were coming of age as the nation wanted stability and reassurance that everything was going to be okay.

The Jesus Movement planted seeds of a radical Christian community. It promised to produce a Christian presence that had aprophetic edge in American life: captive to neither political party, speaking boldly for the poor, the weak, the unborn, the neglected, and the downtrodden. This Christian presence would not be swayed by the appeals to fear used by demagogues over the ages. These Christians questioned the myth of the American dream. They celebrated hard work, individual freedoms, and personal integrity, but they also rejected the consumption, hyper-individualism, and racism that were often part of conservative culture. They were no longer comfortable with the status quo as it related to racial and economic injustice.

The seeds of harm were planted with good intentions. The men who shaped my childhood, who formed my mental architecture and my inner life, simply wanted something real. There were women around, of course, but they were considered mostly irrelevant when it came to decision-making.

There must have been moments during those formational years when someone said something like this: “We don’t really know what we are doing. We need to join a larger group or institution or denomination. We need oversight and accountability and guidance.”

But that attitude did not prevail. If these young, headstrong men had more fully embraced all that history and tradition had to teach them, they might not have tried to reinvent the wheel. It would have spared many people some of the pain to come.

Reprinted with permission from “Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation”  by Jon Ward, copyright © 2023 by Jon Ward. Published by Brazos Press.

Jon Ward has chronicled American politics and culture for two decades, as a city desk reporter in Washington D.C., as a White House correspondent who traveled aboard Air Force One to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and as a national affairs correspondent who has traveled the country to write about two presidential campaigns and the ideas and people animating our times. He is a senior political correspondent for Yahoo News and has been published in The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Huffington Post, The Daily Caller and The Washington Times.