From Slogans to Mantras, by Stephen A. Kent

Historians have generally avoided the topic of religion in the 1960s, while sociologists often treat religion with charts and graphs but with curiously little understanding of what it's like actually to believe in God. From Slogans to Mantras makes the typical secular assumptions--Stephen A. Kent never considers that religion might occasionally stumble onto the truth--but it has a concise, lucid argument: "The combined experience of growing frustration over the perceived failure of political and countercultural protests to end the Vietnam War was the predisposing factor for the massive youth religious conversions that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s." As young people saw that rallies would neither end the war nor topple the capitalist power structure, they turned to religion to achieve those goals.

This is an important twist to an old argument. Sociologists have argued that people look to religion for structure or meaning; according to this argument, burnt-out activists, bereft of purpose, would find a guru to worship in order to have a new reason to wake up in the morning. But Kent is suggesting that ex-activists who turned to alternative religions like Hare Krishna, Scientology or Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church were simply looking for new means to carry out the same radical politics. They turned to chanting or yogic meditation not because they had lost their political ideals but because they wanted to try all possible means of achieving them.

Kent's evidence comes mainly from alternative press articles and from 20 interviews with activists who, 30 years ago, turned to religion. The most persuasive passages show how the swamis and gurus themselves used the rhetoric of radical politics to attract disaffected activists. It's fascinating to read, for example, how Scientologists planted articles in a Los Angeles alternative newspaper attacking the IRS and the FBI; by attacking "the Man," Scientology made itself attractive to frustrated radicals. The Unification Church, "the Moonies," were anticommunist and pro-Nixon, but their emphasis on world peace made them, like the Hare Krishnas, appealing to antiwar activists tired of shouting at a Pentagon that would not listen.