The End Is Near: Why Most Jesus People Weren't Organic Farmers

The bestselling book (The Late Great Planet Earth) and the top song ("Wish We'd All Been Ready") of the Jesus movement were both about the Rapture

Ever since I started researching the history of organic farming, I’ve been trying to find connections between Christianity and the organic movement. I have found connections with Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. But the type of church I’ve always attended—the evangelicals—is conspicuously absent. And the reason why has to do with the end of the world.

The modern evangelical church has its roots in the Jesus People movement, which started in California in 1969 as the hippie movement was waning. As Greg Lauri puts it in his book Jesus Revolution, the hippies were “desperate. They were willing to go to any lengths, or on any trip, to find what they were looking for.” And “when they heard the gospel—the good news about Jesus Christ, and that he was real and alive and loved the whole world—it blew their minds, to put it in ’60s vernacular. Their desperate search was satisfied.”

The born-again hippies called themselves Jesus People. They read the Bible and talked about Jesus all the time, but they still looked and talked like hippies. They launched Christian underground newspapers, wrote rock ’n’ roll songs based on Bible verses, and lived in communes. In fact, Timothy Miller says in his book The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond that the Jesus people had more communes—thousands of them—than any other single group. But most of those communes were urban, and I haven’t been able to find any evidence of large numbers of Jesus People going back to the land and farming organically.

Like pretty much everyone at the time, the Jesus People thought the world was going to end. Soon. Really soon. Before 1988, billions of people would die from nuclear war, pollution, urban violence, societal collapse, and overpopulation. But before things got too bad, Jesus would come back and take all the born-again believers up to heaven for seven years, while nuclear war would kick off all the plagues in the book of Revelation. Then Jesus would return with the raptured believers, fight the final battle of Armageddon, and set up his kingdom on earth.

Since they’d get raptured before the bad stuff started happening, the Jesus people focused on evangelism—which is why they became known as “evangelicals.” “Far from being pessimistic and dropping out of life, we should be rejoicing in the knowledge that Christ may return any moment for us,” Hal Lindsey wrote in his bestselling end-times book The Late Great Planet Earth. “This should spur us on to share the good news of salvation in Christ with as many as possible.”

I get a strange feeling when I flip through the yellowing pages of the apocalyptic books written in the 1970s. If their prophecies of doom had come true, I would have never existed, because my parents would have been raptured or killed before I was born. Instead, the Jesus People actually reversed many of the negative trends they thought were a sign of the end. Meanwhile, other threads of the counterculture worked to clean up the environment and develop an alternative food system.

It turned out that doomsday wasn’t inevitable. There was something people could do to postpone the apocalypse. That gives me hope for today, because none of the challenges we are facing are worse than those of the 1970s. Sure, Jesus still could return at any time and take things over—but until he does, we’re still the ones who have stewardship of the earth. And I’m hoping that the younger generations of evangelicals will realize that we need to take care of creation as if it will be around for generations to come.