My Mother, the Hippie

Growing up in the counterculture led me to weird Christianity

Winter is always a hard time for me. It’s not because of snow and cold — until recently, Boston hadn’t seen much of those this year anyway — but because it reminds me of someone I loved. In February 2010, my mother died, just before my birthday. Her death was a suicide. The tail end of winter has never been the same since. How could it be? Even more than a decade later, I often hunker down for a week or two, unable to work up much enthusiasm for socializing or accomplishing more than the most basic tasks: work, eat, sleep. I can’t quite stop thinking about my mother, but I can’t really mourn her, either. It’s a limbo. I usually catch a cold that quickly settles deep into my lungs, lasts for weeks. I’ve got that cold now.

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My mother was, unsurprisingly, an extremely challenging person. Infuriating. And mourning a challenging, infuriating person is hard. Of course I remember good things — playing Parcheesi and Chinese checkers together in the lazy afternoons after school when I was in third grade, hikes in the pine forests of Wyoming, her infectious enthusiasm for American folk arts and quilting. But laced among those glowing memories are the far rougher ones: her alcoholic binges, out-of-the-blue screaming fits, the lengthy series of wrecked cars, trips to the county jail, police at the door.

I also remember her activist anger, omnipresent and smoldering. She was the feminist Fox News tells its viewers to fear: the aggrieved resentment against the world, the indignant rejection of authority, the bitter hatred of men betrayed by dependence on their approval and desire. She pulled me out of Cub Scouts in fourth grade, muttering darkly about “fascists.” Reading Aristotle was verboten — he was a bigot and sexist, just like his teacher Plato. So I never learned to tie good rope knots or start a fire in the rain, and I only discovered the genius of the classic philosophers in my thirties. But at least I wasn’t hanging out in Cub Scout dens with fascists.

We moved nearly constantly growing up, from state to state and region to region. There’s a philodendron plant in my house now that I’ve never put in soil. It lives in a pint glass of water, always ready for the next container, its roots untethered to any earth. That was me. I was always a transplant, never really belonging anywhere, never settling in one place long enough to put down roots. Each time we moved, my mother was sure that this time, it would be different. This new place, wherever it was, with its new (and surely better, more enlightened) people, would finally solve our problems. In the year before she died, she even separated from my stepfather to live on her own in the high desert of Oregon. Needless to say, she didn’t find peace there, either. Salvation was always somewhere else.

Meanwhile, there were the few constants: the sound of NPR’s “All Things Considered” playing in the kitchen as dinner sizzled and the scent of sautéed onions filled the air. Carl Kassel’s mellifluous, comforting voice authoritatively linking us to the outside world. The folk music playing on the stereo in the living room and the vaguely Navajo decorations on the bookshelf, and the lefty magazines — Utne Reader, Mother Jones — lying around, offering their naïve if cheery vision of universal transformation through science, spirituality, activism, and progress.

If you grew up with hippie parents, you probably know exactly the scene. You can even smell the stick incense.

Patchouli Tail, Establishment Dog

You probably didn’t grow up in hippie culture, of course. It’s a minority cult as far as raw numbers go. But it’s always been an influential one, dramatically overrepresented among artists and other creators of culture, making it disproportionately prominent in public consciousness. A lot of Hollywood is basically commercialized hippiedom by now; Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Goop” line of woo-woo therapeutic products could have been taken right out of ads I’d flipped through in the back pages of Utne Reader in the 1990s.

For this reason, the unique tragedy of my poor, addled mother’s life reflects a particular version of the American story for the past half-century. There’s the smashing of the patriarchy by college-educated women (my mom graduated from a state college in Colorado while pregnant with me), and there’s the complete eclipse of old-fashioned Christianity (she was raised Catholic) by the odd-couple syncretism of scientism and New Age woo. Her story was one of boundary-crossing, of endlessly open possibilities, horizons that never stop beckoning. It was American to the core, for good and ill.

The chronic rootlessness, the oppressive loneliness that results, and, finally, the crisis of addiction and self-destruction — everything that she lived through is now reflected in that profound national crisis we’re calling “deaths of despair.” Before that moniker was coined to describe the by now 200,000 or so people who die in this country each year from suicide, alcoholism, or drug overdose, my mother was one of them. She was the vanguard of the great crisis of meaning that, although generally given shorter shrift in established news sources than the Ukraine war, has quietly been ravaging essentially every American community outside the rare “super-ZIPs,” enclaves where the wealthy and upper middle-class live.

Incidentally, this self-segregation of elites helps explain why the suicide and overdose crisis doesn’t get quite the attention in the news media that, say, Donald Trump still does. People who live in super-ZIPs produce most news content and write the majority of magazine articles, and they’re still obsessed with Donald Trump. But few of them ever meet anyone who’s lost a family member or friend to opioid overdose, even though almost literally everyone from a working-class background has now probably lost at least one person this way.

We weren’t generically poor or working-class, though. No, I grew up in gentile poverty. We lived in a trailer park, but we listened to NPR at night and talked politics. We scratched together money for Christmases but took granola hikes in the mountains, and we looked down on the motorcycle tinkerers and working-class schlubs who were our neighbors. They weren’t readers, you know?

Hippies and Class

This pervasive, emotionally fragile classism wasn’t a contradiction or surprise. Hippiedom has a grungy reputation, but its origins tell a different story: first-generation hippies mostly came from money. My mom’s father, for instance, was a lieutenant colonel who spent his later career working at NASA. Their family wasn’t wealthy, but they were materially comfortable, and my grandfather moved in influential circles. Supposedly, my mom had to be ready to show off her perfect table manners if an invitation ever came for the family to dine at the White House. (It never did.)

One way to think about first-generation hippies, then, is that they were mostly upper–middle-class scions, educated and bred to eventually take on managerial and leadership roles, but they choose revolutionary idioms for doing so. Even as they decoupled themselves from the System and so (temporarily) lost access to formal positions of authority, they always expected to become the cultural leadership, because that’s what they were raised to be. Hence their moralism, their tendency to lecture others. The hippies’ penchant for peasant clothing and arts was always an aesthetic and ideological performance; even their experiments in back-to-the-land farming had an ideological core. They were fundamentally thought workers. And so the steamy atmosphere of politicized dinner-table critique in which I grew up was inevitable, in a way.

Taking this line of thought further, there’s a strange continuity between the Deweyian, technocratic establishment of the 1950s and the later hippie movement. Both centered on a utopian faith in progress, trusting in the powers of creativity and unleashed human potential to solve not just the workaday problems of the world, but its basic existential and spiritual quandaries. One group wore suits and ties to work; the other wore linen dresses and bandanas. But both were fundamentally modern movements, dedicated to “improving man’s estate,” in original techno-utopian Francis Bacon’s words, on the power of human ingenuity and emancipation from tradition. Even today, the motto for Utne (as the magazine now calls itself) is “Cure Ignorance.”

When hippiedom went mainstream in the 2000s and 2010s, morphing into the go-green “crunchy” aesthetic of well-heeled Whole Foods shoppers, this cycle came full circle. It was the zenith of public technocracy. Barack Obama, who once asked a crowd of Iowa farmers if they’d seen how expensive arugula was at Whole Foods, was a walking personification of everything the Utne Reader championed: diversity, science, utopian optimism, the melting of cultural boundaries, the triumph of rational progress over benighted superstition, bitter greens. But he was also the world’s premier technocrat, a rationalist who gained the nickname “Spock” for his preternatural cool and love of data-driven policy. In Obama, the 1950s and the hippie generation reconciled. (For the record, I voted for him twice.)

Around this time, I noticed many of the unique sights and sounds of my childhood proliferating all around me in pop culture. The natural products aisle in Whole Foods smelled (and still smells) just like a sanitized version of the grungy food co-ops my mom used to drag me to on shopping runs for carob chips and fruit leather. And the weirdly moralizing rhetoric that conquered media, universities, and HR departments starting around 2015 — the humorless patrolling of progressive ideas and an obsessive, totalizing attitude of radical social critique — was a particularly un-fun and technocratified version of the language I’d heard growing up from my mom and her magazines. The cultural revolution we’re living through, whatever it ends up amounting to, has seemed for me like a metastasizing of what was once private and particular out into the public domain. The entire country, or at least the blue-state half of it, is now my old trailer, with Carl Kassel replaced by Samantha Bee.

The Gifts of Hippiedom

It’s easy to roll your eyes at the bougie yuppies — Bohemian bourgeoisie or “BoBos,” as David Brooks called them — strolling down the aisles of Whole Foods, smugly plucking the ultra-expensive environmentally friendly detergent from the shelves. And it’s true that the commodification of hippiedom as a status lifestyle really is a travesty. Yuppies in chic coastal neighborhoods get to gorge on high-quality fake meat products and splash on essential oils without ever having had to listen, as children, to Peter Pan adults simper at them that their auras were a beautiful purple while failing to impart any basic life skills. It doesn’t seem fair, somehow.

But the commodification of hippiedom is a tragedy for an even deeper reason: the hippies were right about some important things. Exhibit A is that consumer culture really is toxic. I’m relieved that my parents limited television time and so the exposure my brothers and I got to advertising, and I’m glad for all those crunchy hikes they took us on while other kids were playing Nintendo. My mother could be paranoid, but she wasn’t wrong to distrust the shallowness of consumerism.

Her earthy approach to parenting also offered other gifts. She read Beatrix Potter to us, American folk tales like Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, the African-American stories of Brer Rabbit, the African folk tales that inspired them. Thanks to my stepfather, folk music recordings played nearly constantly — Celtic fiddle, British and American folk revival tunes, American Indian flute recordings. Homemade candles flickered in the evenings. We lacked geographic roots, but we got a taste of belonging through the perfusion of the earthy and folksy. We didn’t get to watch much television, but our imaginations were on fire.

Hippies aren’t known for flag-waving, but, paradoxically, all this crunchy counterculture somehow ignited in me a durable kind of patriotism. A relentless critic of America and its government, my mother nevertheless taught me to see the entire American story — European, American Indian, African-American, immigrant, native-born — as vital and rich with meaning, something living and lovable. For me, the Brer Rabbit stories are deeply, uniquely American. Black American history really is American history. These aren’t trendy political statements. They’re just true. If you grow up in America, you are a partial cultural heir of Africa. I don’t mean “I am African,” like in that dumb celebrity campaign. I just mean that you should probably know the stories of Anansi the trickster spider, just as you should know the folktales of the Brothers Grimm (which my mom also read to us with relish).

The songs of the slaves in the fields, the spirituals, the fiddle laments of the Civil War, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe and Phillis Wheatley — they are all our heritage, things we should know and treasure. I know these things because my parents were hippies. Hippiedom, with its often naïve, clumsy, and idealistic attraction toward the earthy and folksy, offers a richness of cultural experience, of smells and stories, that mainstream life in a consumerist democracy simply doesn’t and never will.

When she homeschooled us in Maryland, my mother took my brother and me on countless field trips to Civil War and Revolutionary War battlefields, to the Smithsonian, to the Inner Harbor of Baltimore where slaves were once traded and Frederick Douglass was forced to work. We knew that George Washington owned slaves and that this was evil. Mom spared no details about the American Indian genocides or the Trail of Tears. But we also knew that George Washington kicked the British Army’s butt and established the country, and this was — despite everything — something good. After all, ours was the country that set up a national shrine for a black leader, Martin Luther King, who spent his life publicly condemning our deepest moral failings. Not just any country would do that.

This seems like a naïve or even witless take these days, when race relations have plummeted to a multigenerational nadir and deconstructive criticism of American symbols and myths is a full-time obsession. But before her final collapse into alcoholism and self-destruction, my hippie mother taught me, despite herself, to love our country without looking away from its evils. The Latin root of the word humility means “soil.” My mom — a gardening, folktale-loving, crunchy alcoholic — wasn’t a paragon of humility herself. But she pointed me toward a quiet way of loving the land and its peoples that could outlast empires.

Hippies and Christ

I’m no longer of the hippie tribe. It’s been years since I opened a copy of Utne or lived with roommates who home-brewed kombucha. In my thirties, I converted to Christianity, was baptized at the vigil of Holy Saturday according to a tradition far older than Pete Seeger or even Walt Whitman. It was my mother’s death that pushed me to take the faith seriously. She rebelled against Christianity, rejected its message of forgiveness and self-control, of the union of heaven with earth in the person of a man. She dismissed the God of Israel as a tyrant, even a “demon.” But look what happened to her, the smallness and loneliness of her life. Maybe what she rejected was worth a second look.

What I found filled in gaps I hadn’t known were gnawing at me. The hippie worldview I grew up with — a faith, really — is a paradoxical mix of monism and dualism, or even gnosticism. Monism is the view that all distinctions are actually illusions, that the boundaries between apparently separate entities ultimately dissolve into oneness. Hippies love this idea. It might have something to do with drugs. Mushrooms and LSD break down internal boundaries in the brain, make what normally seems separate seem united. Whatever the reason, if I had a dollar for each time my mother or some hippie friend told me that “we are all one,” Boston housing prices wouldn’t trouble me so much. Most of today’s lefty yard signs (examples: “No human is illegal” or — my favorite — “Outside we look different, but inside we’re all the same”) are really just retreaded, upmarket expressions of hippie monism.

By contrast, gnostic worldviews are starkly dualist, depicting an unbridgeable divide between the impure material world and the pure reality of spirit and harmony where we really belong. But hippiedom’s passion for oneness actually pushes it this direction. The real world, with its obvious distinctions between things and between individuals, invariably fails to live up to hippies’ imaginative hopes. Frustrated and disillusioned, many hippies withdraw into idealism, doubling down even more strongly on visions of spiritual unity while unconsciously rejecting the actual world for its baffling refusal to get with the program. Voilà: monism mutates into dualism. The resulting existential disappointment is one of the central features of the inner life of many hippies. At least it was for my mom — and for me, before I escaped it.

Hippiedom, then, claims to offer a cheery, monistic vision of human nature unencumbered by original sin. But then its prescriptions for spiritual growth invariably seem to fall back onto gnosticism: greater spiritualization, dematerialization, a liberation of our true inner natures from the artificial prisons of society, bodies, culture. It can become a lust for escape from the prison of particularity, of existence itself. This lust eventually devoured my mother.

Christian orthodoxy offers a different, more concrete story, one I find more convincing. For well-catechized Christians, the material world is unqualifiedly good, a creation of an omnipotent God that, while fallen from its original condition, is in need of love and restoration, not something to escape from. Our bodies, while imperfect, are an intrinsic part of us. And so, therefore, are our cultures, which are a kind of extended embodiment.

According to Christian teaching, then, a soul without a body isn’t a human being any more than lines of binary code on a disc are themselves a movie. The code needs a complex material medium — DVD player, screen, and speakers — to realize itself as a “movie,” something that takes place in space and time, not just an immaterial notion. Just so, a human soul needs a body to be a human.

Along with this emphasis on the physical and material comes a far greater comfort with particularity and distinctiveness. We may all be one in Christ, but we’re not the same people. God is a Trinity, one but varied. Relationship is a permanent, eternal aspect of reality. This is why I can’t control your thoughts or limbs or know your thoughts as I know my own — but I can love you, precisely because you are different. Love is the embrace of the other. You can’t do that if we’re literally “all one.”

This realization was an enormous relief. My mother’s alcoholism made her particularly prone to breaching boundaries. You had to protect yourself from her; she would take up all the space in your life if you didn’t. Her seemingly spiritual idea of “oneness” really boiled down to projecting herself onto everyone else, onto the world. The hippie worldview simply lent a kind of convenient spiritual legitimacy to her preference for chaos and self-absorption. The alcoholic is always both the center and edge of her own universe.

Incense and Candles

It might not sound like it, but I miss my mom. I miss her enthusiastic passion for ideas and conversation, her fondness for rural folk cultures, her love of hiking, her howling laughter at the funny scenes in movies. I don’t miss her brittle insecurities, her chronic depression, her cutdowns and attacks, her self-destructive darkness. As they say, it’s complicated. This time of year always brings the complications to the fore.

Let me leave you with a different thought, though. Despite their gnostic leanings, hippies love material things: incense, crystals, colored cloth, patterns, folk music, oils. Their homes, like the ones I lived in as a child, are bedecked with feathers and dream catchers, and they smell of exotic ointments. Paradoxically, theirs is a spiritualized faith that revels in the material.

This is an aspect of my upbringing I wouldn’t trade.

We humans should relish material sights and smells and sounds. It’s a fundamental human trait that, from the traditional Christian point of view, reflects the basic goodness of material creation, the odd fact that God chooses to disclose himself through matter, not merely immaterial spirit. In C.S. Lewis’s words: “God likes matter. He invented it.” Hippies understand something of that truth.

Unfortunately, this puts them ahead of many modern Christians. American Christianity is often a strangely disembodied affair, with pared-down aesthetics and an emphasis on the individual, the decontextualized, the spiritual. We casually say that people “go to heaven,” implying that the afterlife is exactly what the gnostics claimed: a lasting freedom from matter and its constraints. But the Bible makes it clear that the Christian hope is in resurrection, not a disembodied afterlife. God promises a “new heaven and a new earth,” not an eternity of floating around on clouds. Matter is part of the eternal plan. Maybe even feathers and incense are, too.

My inherited hippie sensibilities, then, might have been why my own conversion to the faith could only happen after I encountered more traditional, “weird” kinds of Christianity. A grad-school trip to Cappadocia in Turkey, where ancient Eastern Fathers carved out caves and chapels from the living rock, opened my eyes to a deeper richness of the faith. Fifteen hundred–year-old red ochre iconography bedecked the cave walls; altars and crypts punctuated the floors. Stone spigots ran from the carved winepresses — just big enough for a small man to climb in and stomp the fresh grapes — into stone basins.

At the tail end of that trip, a friend and I attended Saturday Great Vespers at the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, in Istanbul (something like the Vatican of Eastern Orthodoxy). An hour of droning, unearthly chant, beautiful and mesmerizing, awaited us, backdropped by the stark contrast of shadows and gold, the intricately ornamented iconostasis with its seemingly endless patterns and icons. We stood the entire time, physically uncomfortable but enraptured. The smell of incense pervaded the air.

Well. Red ochre, burned tree resin, gold patterns, color, singing, and candles? This was the kind of Christianity that a hippie could get into.

Christianity claims to want to recapture the hearts of an increasingly gnostic and de-Christianized West, a society where formal religious participation is plummeting but where the hunger for spirituality remains as strong as ever. Christian apologists may worry about atheism, but they shouldn’t. Look at pop culture. It isn’t atheism that’s scooping up all the newly disaffiliated “nones,” the people who claim no religious identity. Competitor religions aren’t really conquering the market either, not even Buddhism. The big winner is clearly hippiedom’s odd amalgamation of New Age and reconstructed paganism, warped to fit the individualist and borderless experience of a globalized era.

Let me repeat: this diffuse spirituality of hippies is by now the major competitor religion to Christianity. It’s not Islam that’s displacing the ancestral faith of the West. It’s not atheism.

It’s consumable hippie woo.

The thing about woo is that it’s interesting, and some of it is even true. It claims that herbs can heal (often correct) and that dream catchers can protect against nightmares (probably not, but they’re nice to look at). It’s a gnostic faith that’s carrying on a secret love affair with the material world.

My bet is that only a truly materialized Christianity can offer a compelling alternative to this faith, could hope to attract the growing numbers of postmodern woo-lovers. Sure, the occasional ex-hippie converts to an evangelical form of Christianity that forbids material trappings and ornamentation in an effort to start again from a blank slate.¹ Some people are like that: they swing like pendulums.

But for the vast unchurched middle, which is getting to be a lot of people, the need and love for material things, for a connection to the earth, the love of beauty and pattern, isn’t going anywhere. It hasn’t gone anywhere for me. And that’s a good thing. It reflects the incarnation, God’s loving plan for the eternal entwining of matter and form. I still like incense. I still love patterns and folk music. I just burn better incense now, the kind blended by Catholic monks in Britain. And I’ve added Gregorian chant and Hildegard of Bingen to the listening rotation alongside Gordon Bok and Johnny Cash.

Ultimately, hippiedom, just like modernity, stumbles into contradictions as it tries to work out its contorted relationship with matter and form. My mom’s life reached a point of no return in its own contradictions. But in my life, the church helped resolve the riddles my mother left me precisely because I found the parts of the faith, hidden away in foreign lands and in modern-day monasteries, that still celebrate the material, the beautiful and profound and sweet-smelling liturgy of existence that celebrates God in the particular. It’s a liturgy that hippiedom, and my mom, pointed me toward but could not bring me to.

My mother’s chaotic, undirected, and ultimately tragic life convinced me to look elsewhere, away from hippiedom, for the meaning of existence. But the best values she imparted to me, in her teaching and her life, remain. I still think of African-American folktales and European-American pioneer tall tales as central to my heritage. I’ll always prefer a rich-smelling garden, loamy and wet, to a sterilized luxury cruise, a cheap hike in the woods to a weekend in Las Vegas. And I’ll always be grateful for beauty, for patterns and scents, for stories and music, for the conviction that the spiritual and the material are somehow entwined.

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

1. In fact, the hippie Jesus People movement in the 60s and 70s helped birth modern evangelical, nondenominational Christianity, with its guitar-driven worship music and entertainment-focused, theater-like church spaces. (Thanks to my friend David for inviting me to see The Jesus Revolution this past weekend, which inspired me to go digging and put this historical connection together. Kesley Grammer was great, even if he had to say some pretty dumb lines.) So in a real way, both hippiedom and evangelical American Christianity are fundamentally countercultural in the same way, which is to say that they’re both what Philip Rieff called “anti-cultural:” opposed to the reproduction of societal forms and rituals because focused relentlessly on the internal, the original, the timeless, and the purely spiritual. Neither is good at passing down a complete cultural heritage or forming adults, because for humans maturity is never just biological — it always means entering an adult role within a bounded, particular culture or society. Millennial and Gen-Z problems with “adulting,” while good fodder for comedians, are partly the result of a hippie revolution that upended the generational transfer of culture, and partly because much of the Christian church in the West is on a similarly misguided primitivist crusade, just with worse music. So nobody is teaching people how to be grownups or how to become the bearers of a living cultural tradition — which is redundant. But to return to the main point, by now the hippie counterculture (or its BoBo descendants) and nondenominational Protestantism have long forgotten their common origins, and only rarely do individuals now convert directly from one to the other. Ironically, the hippies are the ones who’ve retained the earthiness and folksiness, while the evangelical descendants of the Jesus People now often worship in sleek, auditorium-like spaces that most hippies wouldn’t enter if the only alternative were to eat only processed food for a year. Anyway, my read is that most religious “nones” are probably (if unconsciously) sick of both of groups and are hungering instead for something a bit materially richer, a bit weirder, more challenging, less anti-cultural. You can only tear down for so long. Building starts to look more appealing in the end.