ABSTRACT
While conservative evangelicals tended to see the rupture of the 1960s as cause for concern, others – especially the long-haired, Levi-clad hippies, bikies and ordinary youth of the Jesus People movement – greeted it with enthusiasm. With particular reference to key leaders including John Hirt (born 1942), John Smith (born 1942) and Mal Garvin (born 1941), and drawing on participant interviews and a wealth of unpublished material, Chapter 5 explores the Jesus People’s colourful, conscientious, and at times contradictory response to both the end of Christendom and the rise of the counter-culture. Their ‘Kairos’ protest festival outside Parliament House just before Gough Whitlam’s new progressive government convened in March 1973 frames this book’s argument about the diversity of ways evangelicals related to the nation and reconstructed their identity within it. The Jesus People’s determination to present a form of evangelical Christianity that was ‘distinctively’ Australian – especially in a ‘gum-leaf theology’ – and their difficulty in doing so suggests how evangelicals were attuned to both the mood of ‘new nationalism’ and the struggle to give it compelling content. Their novel approach to progressive culture, imbibing as well as critiquing, laid some of the foundations for the remarkable rise of new and globally influential Pentecostal churches in Australia from the 1980s onwards, such as Hillsong.
