POLITICS & FAITH: State of protest: The counterculture and the religious right

Thoughtful academics have long been sensitive to the liberal origins of the Reagan Revolution. In the bestselling Why Americans Hate Politics, E. J. Dionne emphasized just how easy it was for pot-smoking hippies to grow into espresso-sipping yuppies. The liberal heritage of the neoconservative hawks who have circled around Republican administrations since 1980 is even less disputed. These intellectuals, after all, hail from radical socialist and communist backgrounds, and they carried their youthful idealism with them in their various campaigns to spread democracy.

One significant faction of the modern Republican Party, however, is usually situated well outside what Louis Hartz famously described as the American liberal tradition. Indeed, the Religious Right routinely gets compared to the Taliban and the KKK. Even more sober observers regard the Religious Right as an illiberal reaction to the convulsions of the Sixties.

As its great title suggests, Hippies of the Religious Right sharply disagrees with the conventional wisdom. In Preston Shires' rendering, today's conservative evangelicals owe a great debt to the Sixties. Indeed, many of them participated in the counterculture.

CT Books & Culture May/Jun 2008