These new church formations occurred in tandem with “the Movement” of the time, as Harlan Stelmach demonstrated in his fascinating work on the Berkeley Free Church (BFC).4 Initiated in 1967 as the South Campus Christian Ministry (SCCM) by church and local businesses around Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, the project was soon dubbed the “Berkeley Free Church” by the youths it served under the leadership of a young Episcopal priest named Richard York. Starting in June 1967 the BFC began its work in what had become a “full-fledged youth ghetto” by providing basic services to the hippies and countercultural youth who were flooding the area. Under its motto, “Celebrate life—Off the World Pig!” it became a significant institution of the emerging counterculture-New Left in Berkeley.
The ministry began as a paternalistic social welfare project aimed at controlling or mitigating problems associated with the emerging youth culture and so it provided a “crash pad,” health and crisis counseling services, food, and referral services. Some of these “ministries” eventually were spun off into the Berkeley Free Clinic, Berkeley Emergency Food Program, and others. Alongside, or perhaps within, this context a church began to grow up, with John Pairman Brown joining as its resident theologian in 1968. Soon Anthony Nugent, who, like York, had been a community organizer in Oakland and met York in seminary, joined the “mission” as a co-pastor, although Anthony noted in an email to me that York “very much needed to control, dominate, be the sole ‘leader.’”5 In the wake of the struggle for People’s Park, in which the Free Church played a key role, instigating, then mediating the conflict and, finally, serving as an emergency room for protestors wounded by the National Guard, the tensions between York and Nugent exploded. Anthony Nugent went off to form the “Submarine Church,” leaving York as the sole authority at the BFC.
As a result of the internal splits and a coordinated program of repression on the part of the US government’s COINTELPRO operations, by 1969 the fragmentation of the Youth/Anti-War Movement had begun in earnest and this was reflected in the BFC. Two currents ran increasingly in different directions, according to a quarterly report of the project directors of the BFC, with a divide “between ‘mysticism and action, accommodation and confrontation, Utopian and revolutionary.’”6 The “mystical, accommodationist, utopian” (hippie) side of what Stelmach called the “oppositional youth culture” inspired the growth of alternative spiritualities, the “back to the land” movement, and diverse lifestyle innovations throughout the following decades. The “activist, confrontational, revolutionary” current (New Left) flowed into burgeoning of the “New Communist movement” and an array of vanguard parties. That latter movement reached its peak in 1973—1974 from whence it began its slow decline.7
Into this context came the Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF) arriving in Berkeley in 1969 as a “ministry” of conservative Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ. No doubt Bright hoped to convert much of the Berkeley Left to Jesus and the “American way,” but the man he sent to organize the project, Jack Sparks, had different ideas—or at least he did once he arrived in Berkeley. The rather straight-arrow Evangelical ex-professor from Penn State quickly transformed into a long-haired, bearded “freak” indistinguishable, on the outside at least, from all the others who frequented the city. The ministry under Sparks also went “undercover” and appropriated all the trimmings of the counterculture—starting with a name that was designed to locate the organization amidst all the other “world liberation fronts.”
One might have expected the BFC and CWLF to engage with each other, or cooperate in some way, given they both considered themselves “disciples of Jesus,” but that wasn’t the case. The CWLF had landed right in the middle of what Richard York no doubt saw as the BFC’s turf. And even if the BFC was nominally ecumenical, York was Episcopalian, and certainly wouldn’t have defined himself as “Evangelical” nor would he have had any desire to associate himself in any way with the right wing Campus Crusade for Christ.
There were clear differences in style and substance between BFC and CWLF, and personal and territorial rivalries kept the two groups of radical believers separate as each “church” continued on its own particular trajectory. York’s BFC was far more integrated into the secular Movement as organized in Berkeley, and CWLF had, at best, an ambivalent and ambiguous relationship to the Movement it hoped to “save.” Swartz describes a confrontation that might have been typical in the early years of the CWLF. He wrote “ahead of leftist activists in October 1969, CWLFers reserved the steps of Sproul Hall for a lecture by Chinese refugee Calvin Chao on the evils of Mao and the virtues of Christ.” In response, the “inflamed antiwar activists and Maoists set up an amplifier next to Chao, threw rocks into the crowd, and set fire to the nearby ROTC Building.”8
Nevertheless, despite the early hostility of the Left toward CWLF—which included a spoof flyer headlined “Jump for Jesus! Leap for the Lord!” inviting believers to join CWLF in a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge—there was also a gradual accommodation, and even, on some issues, a convergence, of the secular Left with the CWLF and other radical Christians. For an increasing number of CWLFers engaging with the radical community of Berkeley, the meaning of “witness” gradually shifted from its Evangelical definition of “saving souls” to the more socio-political meaning it had had for those associated with the Berkeley Free Church.
The CWLF had split the year before I arrived in Berkeley when Jack Sparks and other Campus Crusade leaders decided to move toward affiliation with the Orthodox Church of America. Those who remained regrouped as the Berkeley Christian Coalition (BCC) and began to organize themselves less officially as the House Church of Berkeley (HCOB).
I soon found a place for myself on the margins of the BCC community and the HCOB, right where I wanted to be. I was perfectly happy to hang out in the basement of Dwight House, especially on Sundays during occasional long afternoon HCOB meetings that followed morning worship services (the House Church was meeting at Dwight House at that time). I suffered through only one of those meetings, and afterwards I fled downstairs where I joined a small group of ex-hippie, recovering, and not-so recovering, drug addicts, alcoholics, and other denizens, refugees from Telegraph Avenue and the four corners of the American Empire. There in the labyrinth of the basement we smoked cigarettes and had long, wandering, intellectual conversations such as nothing I’d experienced in Oklahoma, or anywhere else for that matter. Sometimes a few of us would wander down to Telegraph Avenue and hang out in a café, drinking espresso, and then, of course, the conversations would become even more animated.
I learned about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the German Confessional Church that resisted Hitler. I was introduced to Thomas Merton, and began reading Albert Camus, Soren Kierkegaard, and the other Existentialists whose books I found at Moe’s Bookstore. With the help of new “comrades-of-the-cross” I was able to revise my ideas of what Christianity was and explore new, unfamiliar traditions and trajectories others had taken. Unlike the Christian circles I’d passed through in the Bible Belt, here questions, doubts, and challenges were welcomed, and even expected. My new Christian friends laughed at Fundamentalism, yawned at Evangelicalism, sneered at liberal Christianity, and proudly embraced a worldly-wise and radical Christianity.
I spent evenings with these friends watching double-feature movies of world cinema at the local theaters. I was particularly moved by the Italian films of the seventies: Fellini, Wertmueller, Pasolini, Bertolucci; the French New Wave; Vietnamese, Chinese, Russian, Czech: every night a new double-bill of the best films in the world, and the tickets were only $2! A few of the rowdier in the church—and I was immediately one of them—would have regular parties in their rooms at Dwight House and one or two of us would often duck out to smoke marijuana and wander in a daze through the University of California (UC) campus. Together we formed a subculture under the