40 Years Ago

This article is a reflection of how life was 40 years ago. We can see the turmoil that our congregation was born into and contrast that with our current time of turmoil even now. I hope you find this interesting.

1968-2008: Forty Years to a Lukewarm Society
A commentary by Randy StiverUnited Church of God pastor, Columbus and Cambridge, Ohio "The year 1968 is considered one of the most turbulent, and pivotal, twelve month periods in American history...a flashpoint for many of the social, political, and cultural transformations for which the overall decade of the 1960s is known" (History Channel, "1968 with Tom Brokaw," study guide introduction).Those 366 days forty years ago culturally transformed more than America. Timeline 1968:

January: North Vietnam launches the Tet offensive against US forces in South Vietnam. Though they overran allied military bases everywhere they lost the battle, but strategically they won the war. Tet revealed to the world that America was not winning the war. That revelation sparked a student led anti-war demonstrations across the country—weakening the nation's pride in its power (see Leviticus 26:18-19) and its "will to win," igniting anti-establishment riots, demonstrations, sit-ins and cultural mindsets everywhere.

March: "While the politicisation of Europe's youth had its roots in the United States hippie movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, in Europe it was in Poland that the first student uprising took place in March 1968" (Euro/topics, "1968—a European Movement," Meike Duffer, April 2008).Similar protests began in Czechoslovakia, creating the famous "Prague Spring," more a quest for freedom from totalitarianism than the pervasive anti-current-culture spirit of the West.

April: Black civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated launching violent race riots in many major cities across America.Student protestors demonstrated and occupied administrative and other buildings at Columbia University in the city of New York. This ignited a violent trend that plagued many other U.S. universities that year.

May: Thousands of French student protestors and some trade-unionists rioted, fighting street battles with police in Paris. German student protests also erupted."There were other student revolts in Europe and America, before and after May 1968. In no other country did a student rebellion almost bring down a government" (The Independent, "Egalite! Liberte! Sexualite!: Paris, May 1968," John Litchfield, February 23, 2008).

July: Abbie Hoffman's militant yippie movement disrupted the New York Stock Exchange and other centers in New York City.

August: The freedom-seeking "Prague Spring" student movement ended with 200,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops arriving to enforce an oppressive "normalization."At the end of the month yippies, hippies and others demonstrated and rioted at the Democratic National Convention.

September: Women's liberation groups demonstrated at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. This became the source of the term, "bra-burning feminist."

October: A student-led protest in Mexico City, only days before the Summer Olympics, is quelled by government police shooting several hundred demonstrators.

Cultural RevolutionWhile some protests, demonstrations and riots sought freedom from oppression or discrimination, the mood and spirit of 1968 was one of rebellion and revolution: a cultural revolution from which there was no turning back. Cultural freedom in 1968 meant mainly sexual freedom. In his book, 1968 as a Turning Point in Historical Thinking …, Historian Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas wrote: "…it is logical that what has changed since 1968, is much more the nature of the essential function of the three main institutions within which the modern culture is produced, generated, maintained and re-produced, that is to say: family, school and mass media" (p. 199).The hippie-student movement created the sexual and drug revolutions, hammering family and education. Militant feminism fostered family breakdown by pitting woman against man. An angry rebel phase of rock music and an explosion of interest in the occult thrived virulently, both infecting family and education.Mass media promoted it all, acting as enforcers of the cultural doctrines of political correctness derived from the philosophy of the "68ers." Amidst subsequent prosperity 1968 came to mean: We don't need you, God!Like that would impress Jesus. He saw it coming ages ago. He warned people with the '68er mindset: "So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold or hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth" (Revelation 3:16). Lukewarm because, though created in God's own image, they blatantly deny His power a trend also prophesied for end time religion (2 Timothy 3:15).The cultural revolution of the past 40 years has championed freedom from godly values instead of a cultural environment promoting them. If Jesus would send a corrective personal message to our society today, wouldn't it still be: "… you say, 'I am rich, have become wealthy, have need of nothing [especially God!]' and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked…" (v. 17)? There is a way out of spiritual apathy spawned in 1968.
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