From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam War Era

Religion and Politics

by Stephen A. Kent

Certainly, religious strains were evident through postwar popular culture from the 1950s Beat generation into the 1960s drug counterculture, but the explosion of nontraditional religions during the early 1970s was unprecedented. This phenomenon took place in the United States (and at the edges of American-influenced Canadian society) among young people who had been committed to bringing about what they called "the revolution" but were converting to a wide variety of Eastern and Western mystical and spiritual movements. Stephen Kent maintains that the failure of political activism led former radicals to become involved with groups such as the Hare Krishnas, Scientology, Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, the Jesus movement, and the Children of God. Drawing on scholarly literature, alternative press reportage, and personal narratives, Kent shows how numerous activists turned from psychedelia and political activism to guru worship and spiritual quest as a response to the failures of social protest and as a new means of achieving societal change.

Genres: Religion, History

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

Reviews

[Cailin Deery · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm very impressed with Stephen Kent's scholarship and painstaking detail -- especially because much of this was built piecemeal using his own network & interviews. I think many explanations of Eastern religions are heavy-handed, but Kent is very skillful at laying bare the hypocrisies, blunders & contradictions of many political-to-religious movements in the 1970s (especially the Hare Krishnas, the Scientologists and the Children of God). "From Slogans to Mantras" might be more useful as a reference work - I would be interested in reading an even more general study of political-to-religious conversions rather than crowd my brain up with ones contemporaneous to the Vietnam War. The footnotes could have been minimized, because though they're conversational and off-the-cuff, they're a bit too distracting for their frequency. Finally, even though this book has such strong scholarship, it is also witty: "As early as October 1967, a large body of demonstrators chanted away as they marched toward the Pentagon, in what became an unsuccessful attempt to levitate and exorcise the building."

[Emily Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok, but could have been better. Had some great connections as to how the antiwar protests and several religious sects connected or were born, but then got monotonous in some places on what and why each sect beloved what it did.