Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture
Many historians have focused ad nauseam on the most extreme religious movements of the 1960s, dissecting these small groups but ignoring larger trends. Oppenheimer, a staff writer for the Christian Century, asks a more provocative question of the 20th century's most radical decade: how did the 1960s influence ordinary people in mainstream religious traditions? As he shows in this competent, accessible study, people in "mainline" religions were deeply and irrevocably changed by the revolutions of the 1960s. (Oppenheimer uses the moniker "the 1960s" to denote a period that includes much of the 1970s, and he is sensitive to the transformations within this brief but tumultuous historical era: 1969, he reminds us at one point, was very different than 1974.) A rather bland opening chapter traces the bloodless revolution that led to the Unitarians' creating an Office of Gay Concerns in the early 1970s, while a second, more compelling, chapter discusses the stunning changes in Roman Catholic worship that resulted from the concurrent forces of Vatican II reforms and the rise of American folk music. Oppenheimer then traces the growth of Jewish havurot-small, communal gatherings of mostly young and urban Jews-and makes a compelling case that these Jews were deeply influenced by observing the Black Panthers, whose example prompted them to self-identify as a proud ethnic minority group. The author next examines the Episcopalians' battles over women's ordination in the 1970s and the responses of progressive Southern Baptists to the Vietnam War. American religion, Oppenheimer persuasively shows, is surprisingly flexible, incorporating dissent and welcoming new ideas.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.