Tag: culture

Posted in theology

1967’s ‘Summer of Love’; or was it the summer of hate?

Posted on by elizabethprata

By Elizabeth Prata

City Lights Books in San Francisco was the epicenter for the Beat Generation of the 1950s and helped spark the cultural earthquake that was the hippie movement of the ’60s. EPrata photo

It happened 59 years ago. It was summer, flower children ‘hippies’ were on the rise, the Viet Nam war had become full blown, and an entire subculture was born. It was dubbed the “Summer of Love”.

The generation born Post-WWII in the late 1940s and 1950s and their parents experienced economic prosperity, technological advances, and a feeling of hopefulness since the dark World War was ended.

As with any culture, the hopefulness evaporated as the Cold War entered. The cultural highs went to lows. Nuclear fears, Russia fears, and general feelings of concern with what rapid consumerism and technology was doing to the country sparked the now teenage and young adult Baby Boomer generation to “question authority” and reject the old way of living.

Then the Viet Nam war happened, and with it, the fairly new technology called television, showing its satellite images from jungles of death halfway around the world now added to the generation’s discontent. The newsman Walter Cronkite intoning at the end of every nightly newscast the number of dead and injured in the war added to the prevailing mood of uneasiness.

Cronkite, America’s ‘most trustworthy voice’ declared the war a stalemate in early 1968. In those days news broadcasters did not utter opinions due to the federal law Fairness Doctrine. His pronouncement of the war a stalemate crashed into public consciousness & altered the course of it.

The rejection of the way things were into a way the hippies wanted things to be, came together to ignite The Summer of Love.

The hippies were also called Flower Children. They advocated for peace and love, art and poetry, spiritual transcendence- usually drug induced- and community.

Sounds good, right?

Remember, anything obtained outside of God is vanity, empty, and vain.

The Summer of Love was an event where over 100,000 hippies converged on Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco. These were kids seeking a new way of life, some were drifting runaways, and others just came for the drugs. But they came, did they ever. They wanted to re-structure civilization through peace and love. “To find a new way for humanity” as the gentleman says below. Could they even “restructure society”? For a while, yes, they did. We still feel the effects of that summer today, nearly 60 years later.

Screen shot from PBS’ The American Experience: The Summer of Love

Part of that new way for humanity was the hippies were taught to “question authority” and “turn on, tune in, drop out” by LSD drenched counterculture-man Timothy Leary. Leary was-

“One of the most influential icons in the counterculture movement which formed in the late 1960s out of opposition to the Vietnam War’s escalation, Leary gained influence among much of the youth by advocating the use of LSD as a way of mind expansion and the revelation of personal truth.” (Source).

The truth of it is, the entire movement was demonic. The youth did drop out, of society, of college, from families. They wandered, spiritually and physically, into new realms. Realms of depravity such as experimenting with homosexuality and lesbianism. Realms of mind-altering drugs. Realms of different living situations such as polygamy or ‘free love’ communes.

It’s easy to write off the hippie movement as essentially unserious. Most of them were young; few of them were sober; they said things like “groovy” and “far out.” And in part, the hippies were animated by psychic impulses that weren’t new: the youthful rejection of the apparent mundanity of adulthood, and good old hedonism.

But lurking beneath the shallow motifs – flowers in the hair, acid [LSD] on the tongue – was a serious philosophical protest. “At the deepest level,” writes W. J. Rorabaugh, in one of the few good histories of the movement, the hippies expressed “a crisis of belief.”

Source above, essay “The Terrible Optimism of the Hippies” published in The Independent (UK) 2019.

The Preacher in Ecclesiastes teaches us something about the pointless search for meaning and a satisfying lifestyle that are apart from God.

Further, in W. J. Rorabaugh’s retrospective book, American Hippies (Cambridge Essential Histories) we read of the,

“massive upheavals of the 1960s, which included civil rights, Black Power, feminism, and gay liberation, as well as looser sexual mores, the end of censorship, street protests, political radicalism, and environmentalism. Collectively, these movements profoundly changed the United States. Second, the hippie counterculture was large. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans were, at least for a time, hippies, and millions adopted some if not all hippie beliefs and practices. The numbers mattered. Third, hippie values represented a generational break with traditional middle-class culture. When hordes of people concentrated in a single youth generation simultaneously adopted new thoughts and behaviors, mainstream culture was forced to pay attention. In the long run, hippies played a significant role in transforming American society.”

A LOT was going on in the 1960s! That ‘Summer of Love’ was a startling and visible opening to this upheaval. A crisis of belief. A yearning for something missing from American life. A seeking of a new way.

Don’t all of those reflect back to Ecclesiastes? King Solomon wrote of the yearning of the human heart and its vain seeking, apart from God. God defines love. Disaffected youths do not define love.

Swami Satchidananda giving the opening talk at the Woodstock Festival of 1969. By Mark Goff – my own collection, Public Domain

What is love? The hippies thought they had unlocked the secret to spiritual fulfillment. They believed, with the help of LSD and mushrooms, that they could access the transcendent divine, and become one with the universe, in love. Many turned to Eastern religions and their music sounded forth with flutes and zithers.

However, God defined love through His word. His is the only and the final word on the subject. The hippies, mainly middle-class white Americans, really did have it good. Two parent households with a mom and a dad, two car homes with garage, creature comforts, church-going, sexual normalcy, and clean living. Rejecting all that for a mystical union with a drug induced divine was for a time, unrestrained disorder nationwide.

What IS love?

Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant. It does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit; it is not provoked, does not keep an account of a wrong suffered, it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; it keeps every confidence, it believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails; … But now faith, hope, and love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13: 4-8a, 13).

God is love, and those who love Him know love, for God IS love.

The one who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and the one who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will reveal Myself to him. (John 14:21).

There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. (1 John 4:18).

I can’t overstate the rapidity with which the hippies’ concepts and philosophies changed America for the worse. Sadly, many of the hippies descended into homelessness and drug addiction. Others came up with sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. Others discovered that free love meant their loved one moved on to the next partner without a thought, leaving broken hearts and disillusionment in their wake. Free love, apparently, wasn’t free.

When humans define love it always misses the mark. As is natural with the natural man, the hippie culture descended quickly to depravity and a worship of self. Self-evolution, the divine within, freedom of self-expression, and a self-involved love were at the core, and thus, destined to fail.

The hippies’ counter-culture movement was historically a new approach. Not blind ambition of the Caesar era. Not Machiavellian scheming of the feudal lords. Not evil malevolence of the dictator times. This time, satan tried a gentle naivete that rushed the love culture into the American summer. For a while, it worked.

The Flower Power photograph by Bernie Boston, taken during the March on the Pentagon, October 21, 1967.
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37905458

The Preacher said in Ecclesiastes 12:1a, “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth,“… and Ecclesiastes 12:13-14,

Only God can change a culture for the good. Let’s conclude with the Preacher’s conclusion-

The conclusion, when everything has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.

Posted in discernment, Uncategorized

The Cultural Pendulum: From Victorian Seaweed Collecting to God’s Unchanging Design

Posted on by elizabethprata

By Elizabeth Prata

SYNOPSIS

A quirky Victorian fad—women collecting seaweed because botany was considered too risqué—reveals how dramatically cultural norms can swing. Such shifts remind Christians that culture cannot define biblical roles. God’s design for men and women transcends trends, offering a stable standard amid constantly changing social expectations.

Continue reading “The Cultural Pendulum: From Victorian Seaweed Collecting to God’s Unchanging Design” →
Posted in theology

For What It’s Worth

Posted on by elizabethprata

By Elizabeth Prata

Buffalo Springfield. 1966. For What It’s Worth. An anthem that captured a moment, a movement, a revolution. And it wasn’t about the Viet Nam war.

“For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound)“ (often referred to as simply “For What It’s Worth”) is a song written by Stephen Stills. Performed by Buffalo Springfield, it was recorded on December 5, 1966, released as a single on Atco Records on December 23, 1966. … The song is a staple of period piece films about 1960s America and the Vietnam War, such as Forrest Gump, and often used as a common shorthand to quickly establish the atmosphere of 1960s counterculture movement and protests.” (Wikipedia)

‘For What It’s Worth’: Inside Buffalo Springfield’s Classic Protest Song
Continue reading “For What It’s Worth” →
Posted in discernment, Uncategorized

The Forgotten Victorian Craze for Collecting Seaweed, and other biblical thoughts on women’s roles

Posted on by elizabethprata

I subscribe to a funky and interesting magazine called Atlas Obscura. The daily digest presents articles about little known places and events from today or the past and brings new life to them. For example, did you know that all the NY City Public Libraries were built with apartments in them, so the caretaker could live on premises? This was to keep the coal stoves burning, which had to be stoked constantly. Photos of the now-defunct spaces intrigued me. The empty, roomy apartments in the most contested real estate locations fire up my imagination.

I read yesterday of a fad in Victorian times (that’s the period Queen Victoria reigned from 1837-1901). It was seaweed collecting. Natural history was a huge endeavor back then. As travel became easier (trains, steam ships) and missionaries went abroad, so did flora and fauna collectors. Carl Linnaeus’ work as a zoologist and botanist led to the creation of modern-day biological nomenclature for classifying organisms. This work has led to Linnaeus’ distinction as the father of taxonomy, says the Carl Linnaeus page. Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution also fueled interest in classifying and organizing the world around us.

As the Atlas Obscura reports,

Nineteenth century Britain was a hotbed of biological enthusiasm. “Natural history was absolutely huge,” says Dr. Stephen Hunt, a researcher in environmental humanities who works at the University of the West of England. Households filled up with painstakingly stuffed mammals and birds. So-called “gentlemen scientists” traveled the world drawing, describing, and collecting plants and animals. As railway networks grew, and labor advances led to more leisure time, ordinary citizens got in on the trend. Microscopes became more affordable, and collecting clubs popped up across Britain.

Ease of travel and new theories sparked an interest in the natural world and the Britons ambled over hill and dale, mountain and sea to collect, classify, draw, press, save, and discuss what they had collected.

One can easily imagine the draw toward the seashore, in Victorian times as now. When I was traveling on a sailboat, I collected shells. I organized them in a fishing tackle box according to the taxonomy outlined by Linnaeus. It was fun to try and organize the world. It was interesting to connect to the sea creatures around me. Shells are fascinating and beautiful, and for the budding botanist, I suppose their fascination with the plant world equaled mine of the sea.

In Victorian times, the beach-going women wore their multiple layers of wool skirts to the ankle, parasols overhead, mincing delicately along the wavelets lest a female should fall and expose something, like a shinbone or that most enticing of cartilage, the kneecap.

The reason that there was not a Victorian-era craze of women collecting seashells or plants and only of seaweed collecting, is because of sex. Atlas Obscura continues,

Women, though, were still largely left out. The biggest natural history clubs of all, the Royal Society and the Linnaean Society, refused female members, and barred women even from their “public” meetings. Hunting animals was too dangerous, and digging up plants was, well, too sexy. “There was a taboo on botany, because Linnaean botany was based on the sexual parts,” says Hunt. “That was seen as controversial.”

The excessive prudishness and rigid, Pharisee-like adherence to gender roles (especially for women) of the Victorian era was a pendulum swinging response to the loose morals and licentiousness of the Regency period immediately prior to Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne. Cultural prohibitions against women collecting flowers because they might be unduly stirred by a stamen … seems excessive.

That is precisely why we don’t look to the culture for guidance as to male and female roles. The old chestnut that ‘back in Bible days women were regarded as chattel’ and ‘we have made advances in culture and societal understanding’ does not hold true. Liberals say, ‘Women can and should teach in church and even be pastors, not like in those dim old days.

We have a mere 70 or 80 yer life span on average. Sometimes it’s much shorter. We have no long-term cultural memory. We are too deeply involved in society to be able to have any sort of objective perspective on changing times, shifting morals, or what is considered a normal cultural standard.

After the Victorian era came the short Edwardian period, then the flappers, higher hemlines, women entering the workforce as secretaries, telephone operators, and nurses. The pendulum had swung again. Cultural changes happen more often and more rapidly than we think. In the United States, it only took 15 short years for all 50 states to change the high and narrow standard for allowing divorce to a no-fault, EZ, anytime divorce. That’s lighting fast.

God is called the Ancient of Days. He alone has the high perspective of us humans. He alone has the invention of time itself in His hand. He knows what we believers need. He instituted roles for men and women, youths and elders. He set the qualifications of deacons and pastors. He inspired scripture urging fathers and mothers to perform their respective roles. There are no cultural reasons for allowing women to teach in the structure of church and no cultural reasons for men to abdicate leading in the structure of the church. There are only biblical reasons and Godly standards. God’s standards are always best.

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. (1 Timothy 2:12).

Now go collect some plants and shells, you never know when the pendulum will swing the other way and those activities will be seen as too salacious. 😉