Religion '60s-style.(Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture)(Book Review)

Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture By Mark Oppenheimer Yale University Press, 304 pages, $30

The 2001 novel Paradise Park chronicles the spiritual journey of Sharon Spiegelman, a Jewish hippy folk dancer who, after being deserted by a boyfriend in the early 1970s, tries out every religious sect she encounters. This was the heyday of the Hare Krishnas, the Scientologists, the Jesus freaks, and cults aplenty. And Sharon takes us on a veritable whirlwind tour of counterculture "spirituality," from meditating in a Buddhist monastery to farming marijuana on a commune.

That's a common view of post '60s religion in America. But as Mark Oppenheimer points out in Knocking on Heaven's Door, the number of people who actually practiced these alternative religions was tiny. In a survey conducted in 1973 in California's Bay Area--a prime breeding ground for sects--61 percent of respondents said they knew nothing about Hare Krishna, 70 percent knew nothing about Zen Buddhism, and only 5 percent had tried transcendental meditation. Thus, Oppenheimer argues convincingly, accurate examinations of American religion in this era should be focused not on the fringe groups which captivated students, reporters, and novelists, but rather on the more traditional faiths that had broad following.

Traditional religions were changing in important ways during this time. The Unitarians decided to accept homosexual behavior among their members and leaders. The Southern Baptists briefly entertained pacifist voices in their ranks, ultimately rejecting the ideas of the counter culture. Oppenheimer chronicles the large and small revolutions of these types that swept five major religious denominations during the late '60s and early '70s.

Many of these narratives will be familiar to the general reader, but Knocking on Heaven's Door adds some fascinating details. In the chapter on the changes in the Catholic Church after Vatican II, for instance, Oppenheimer demonstrates how the church hierarchy actually facilitated the spread of the countercultural mass.

Parishes were originally organized by geography and sometimes by ethnicity and race, but in the '60s the church made another exception. In 1968, Oppenheimer notes, Catholics "who wanted an experimental mass with new music ... got an extraterritorial parish, based not on race, not on native tongue, but on worship style." This policy allowed the church to satisfy its more liberal elements, but this institutional separation also helped push along the divisions present in Catholicism today.

The chapter on the Episcopal Church's decision to allow women ...