For Ben, as for his parents, there was a clear distinction between the radical social reordering Jesus commanded and secular politics. Political protests, including those for the progressive causes Ben agreed with, could get in the way of following Jesus. “‘Social justice church’ is a brand I’ve always had misgivings about,” Ben said one afternoon in early 2020. He was taking a break from weed-whacking around the firehouse church. Over two dozen years, he’d watched so many fellow Jesus followers drift away from Circle of Hope when their commitment to a cause competed with their commitment to Jesus.
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“There’s a Venn diagram of the life of faith and the faith of social justice,” Ben added. “They’re the same until they’re different.” Herein lay the conundrum. At Circle of Hope, building the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth required addressing the world’s woes. Being in the world but not of it, as the Bible commanded, meant striking a difficult balance between separateness and engagement. Anabaptists didn’t retreat from the world, Ben argued—they showed up at their warehouse jobs at Amazon, Foot Locker, and Nabisco, and served as living examples of Jesus’s love. “We’re invasive separatists,” Ben said. “We’re different, in-your-face.” Referring to Paul’s letter to the Philippians, he said that Anabaptists were called to “shine like lights in a crooked and corrupt generation.”
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Ben had always wanted to be a pastor. His mom, Gwen, liked to tell the story of her four-year-old son climbing onto a stool to preach his first babbling sermon at the music stand his father used as a lectern. Unlike the vast number of pastor’s kids who resented the strictures of childhood church, Ben relished the shirtless freedom of growing up among Jesus freaks, who established some six hundred peace communes across the United States in the 1970s and ’80s as part of the larger Jesus movement. “The counterculture got saved, and they brought their weirdness to Christianity,” Ben said. “It was an awakening, a real revival, even if it was a revival for white hippies.”
College campuses were awash with Jesus freaks, many of whom…looked like free-love radicals but were in fact enacting what they believed to be an ancient form of rebellion.
Both Rod and Gwen grew up in 1950s Southern California families who weren’t particularly visionary or spiritual. Rod’s parents didn’t go to church but dropped him off with his sister at a local Baptist congregation for Sunday school, where Rod recalled first feeling the overwhelming presence of Jesus when he was five. Committed to church from then on, he began to catch rides with a kindly elderly lady in her Cadillac. Gwen was sixteen when she first attended Young Life, an evangelical organization that ran youth clubs, sing-alongs, and cookouts around the United States to encourage teens like Gwen to find and follow Jesus. Young Life had its own peer strategy.
“Go find the quarterback, the popular kid,” as Gwen put it. “Try to convert that kid. They’ll bring a ton of kids along.” One afternoon, she joined such a throng outside an overflowing municipal building in Riverside. Standing on tiptoe, she peeked into a window. “On that lawn, I heard that Jesus loved me, and I had never heard that anyone loved me,” she said.
Young Life was part of “the new evangelical movement,” an ambitious twentieth-century push to reach America with the gospel. Billy Graham, known as “the Protestant pope,” feared that Christianity was losing its influence in the United States. He and other evangelical pastors called for a new era of engagement: a revival. Graham’s crusades—evangelistic campaigns that were held at stadiums and other large venues and featured both preaching and music—called people forward to give their lives to Christ; attendees included the likes of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the budding theologian Elaine Pagels. The reach of Graham and other “new evangelicals” would alter American culture and politics. (Graham advised every U.S. president from Truman to Obama.) The new evangelicals created powerful organizations and media outlets, including the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today, along with Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, which Rod attended, and Young Life, the youth organization where Gwen found Jesus.
Gwen’s conversion experience on the municipal lawn in Riverside, California, transformed every aspect of a childhood marked by loneliness and disappointment. “Coming to Christ blew the doors off my life,” Gwen said. A powerful swimmer, she’d missed the 1968 Olympic trials by one one-hundredth of a second. The urgency of sharing her absolute faith in Jesus transformed Gwen’s despair into love. She marched against Vietnam and volunteered at a health clinic with Spanish-speaking patients. From a distance, with her cutoff dungarees and sun-bleached hair, she might’ve appeared as any hippie activist, but Gwen’s purpose was spiritual, not political, which she felt was very different. By the early 1970s, college campuses were awash with Jesus freaks, many of whom, including Rod and Gwen, looked like free-love radicals but were in fact enacting what they believed to be an ancient form of rebellion. “We rarely got sucked into the social left,” Gwen said. “Because we always wanted to be about Jesus.”
When Rod and Gwen met at a Jesus event in 1974 as undergraduates at the University of California, Riverside, Rod invited Gwen to a Bible study in his apartment. Within fifteen minutes, Gwen grew enamored by the ethereal young man with flowing hair and an oversized wooden cross slung around his delicate neck. The next week, she brought homemade cookies. Listening to Rod spin his “grandiose plans to change the fabric of the church,” Gwen fell hard. Rod saw evangelization as “just like a sport.” He believed the world was due for a new revival, which he would help lead. To prepare, he studied the First Great Awakening, the eighteenth-century evangelical movement that swept the American colonies. He wrote his thesis on one of its leaders, George Whitefield, a fiery Anglican orator. Meanwhile, Rod’s Bible study grew so popular that he and his roommates rented a neighboring apartment to accommodate a startling crowd of one hundred students, with Gwen at its center as an eloquent and eager participant.
Falling in love with each other and with Jesus, the two drove around Riverside. When they spotted Christian fish stickers on other beat-up cars, Rod and Gwen held up their right index fingers, the Jesus freak code that Christ was the “one way” to peace. This was the message of exclusive salvation—that only through Jesus could anyone reach heaven—which Billy Graham and the new evangelicals championed. Graham embraced the Jesus freaks, and they loved Graham. When Graham served as grand marshal of the Rose Parade, beaming Jesus freaks raised their index fingers as his float glided past.
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The 1980s marked a sea change in the image of American evangelicals. With the election of Ronald Reagan, an outspoken Republican, the roomier, soft-spoken evangelicalism of Jimmy Carter faded from view. Over the next forty years, as the term “evangelical” grew more aligned with the Republican Party, the values the Whites lived by came to represent a powerful fracture within the larger faith. Rod called Reagan “the devil,” and he believed that Reagan could be the Antichrist, come to signal the Apocalypse. “This could literally be the end-times,” Rod said. It wasn’t Reagan’s conservatism they reacted against; it was his embrace of capitalism in the name of Christianity. “It’s the worst capitalist takeover of the system, and he’s preaching it like it’s gospel,” Rod said. To Rod, this was idolatry: “Nancy was doing his horoscope, while he’s trying to be a Christian.”
For Rod and Gwen, battling the forces of evil didn’t mean simply backing progressive political causes. Jesus was calling for a far more radical transformation of society. “Jesus didn’t come to earth to dismantle the Roman Empire,” Gwen liked to say. “He came to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.”
This desire to transcend worldly politics was inspiring but complicated. Although Jesus freaks reflected hippie counterculture, they were also the spiritual children of the new evangelicals, which was, at its core, a fundamentalist movement upholding traditional social values and gender roles. Gwen was as gifted a preacher as Rod. However, as a woman, she was discouraged from preaching and teaching theology at Young Life. Instead, when Gwen married Rod, she taught public school to pay Rod’s way through Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. After he graduated, he became a youth pastor at a Baptist church in Riverside, a city of 170,000 about fifty miles east of Los Angeles. Gwen helped him grow the youth group from a handful of kids to over one hundred. Despite Gwen’s prodigious gifts with pastoring teens, the head pastor ignored her. He preached from the pulpit about a woman’s submission.
“This isn’t Jesus,” Gwen raged to herself and to Rod. Jesus was love, liberation, and freedom—not female servitude. So they started their own Christ-centered commune. In 1979, Rod and Gwen purchased the Flintstone House, their name for the gloppy brown ranch they bought, with a loan from Gwen’s dad, for less than $100,000. (Although Gwen didn’t know it until her dad died, she was a soda-bottle heiress; her family had made a small fortune selling their glass bottle company to a large corporation.) On their commune, Rod, then twenty-five, became the visionary leader. Gwen, a year older, organized volleyball matches and swam in their black-bottomed pool, where, over the next several years, Rod also baptized the two dozen members of the radical community they named the Sierra Street Household.
Although Jesus freaks reflected hippie counterculture, they were also the spiritual children of the new evangelicals.
Living according to the Bible’s book of Acts and its account of Jesus’s early followers, who renounced their worldly possessions to rid themselves of ties to the Roman Empire, Rod dispensed the salary he received as a youth pastor into a common purse, and Gwen cooked communal dinners called Love Feasts, which the Bible refers to (in Jude 1:12) as meals that Jesus’s disciples shared with one another. Each year on April 1, they reviewed the principles that bound them to one another and to God and posted them on the fridge.
Many other Jesus communes had no affiliation with a church, but Rod was attracted to the idea of radical reform and wanted to be part of a larger collective, so he ordered a directory of Anabaptist churches and organizations in Southern California and wrote to several. A bishop with the Brethren in Christ (BIC), a denomination of some twenty thousand people that was founded in Pennsylvania in the 1700s and is one of the oldest in the United States, wrote back.
“Before too long, we had the bishop in our living room,” Rod said. Observing their statement of formation, their Love Feasts, and their common purse firsthand, the bishop noted to Rod that the Sierra Street Household reminded him of the book of Acts. Rod and Gwen were tickled. The Baptist church where Rod had been serving as youth pastor had told them these same practices were communism. So the Sierra Street Household joined the BIC.
Some of their efforts to follow Scripture were wonderfully zany. To wrest the death and resurrection of Jesus away from both pagan fertility rituals and Hallmark, they outlawed Easter egg hunts. Gwen, who’d given birth to four rambunctious boys in four years, gathered three-year-old Ben and his fraternal twin, Joel; sensitive Luke, five; and Jacob, who at six was already their sharp-eyed leader. She smashed chocolate Easter bunnies with a meat tenderizer and ripped the heads off marshmallow Peeps, while the boys gleefully gobbled the ruined remnants of consumer culture. She also revived a medieval Christian tradition of baking hot cross buns for Easter sunrise, which they tore to represent the breaking of the cross and Jesus’s victory over death.
Life on the commune, however, wasn’t all swimming and smashing hollow chocolate bunnies. For Gwen, some aspects of building a Jesus-centered utopia proved harder. By the late 1980s, Gwen, who did most of the cooking and caring for people as a spiritual mother, was desperate for a change. Rod asked the Sierra Street Household members for permission to draw on the common purse to take Gwen to Palm Springs, where the Whites set a different course for their marriage and mission. God was calling them on a new adventure. Ben was eight years old when the Whites announced they were quitting communal life in California. Their departure signaled the end of blissful formative years spent tooling around the neighborhood on bikes with his three tow-headed brothers. For Ben, leaving the freedoms of Southern California would always mark an exit from paradise.
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Excerpted from Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church by Eliza Griswold. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc. Copyright © 2024 by Eliza Griswold. All rights reserved.