I saw Jesus Revolution, a movie about the beginning of the Jesus Movement in 1970s Southern California and having grown up in Southern California in the 1970s and self identified back then as a Jesus Freak I thought, this should be interesting.  If you haven’t seen the movie and want my spoiler-free take on the movie click this link to go to my review. If you have seen the movie and/or just want to interact with my observations based on my own experiences and the movie’s portrayal of the Jesus Movement, here we go into episode 44 of JBB’s Final Thoughts: Jesus Revolution: Truth Seekers Part 2.

Also please check-out my blog that talks about “Faith Issues”: In Bad Faith

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Credits/images:

• music: Social Blindness – 22K by Smart Sound Music
• JBB’s DRP (Daily Reflection Prompt)
• All images and screen grabs by Joe Bustillos ©2023 except where noted
• Jesus Revolution, Image Stills, https://jesusrevolution.movie/  
• Welcome to Jonestown, By Jonestown Institute, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12374156
• Richard Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman, By OREA2000 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39902560
• Medill News21 (untitled), Medill News21 Pentacostal church cc 4841427516_6bfa346523_k, https://flic.kr/p/8nPzJd
• Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher, https://youtu.be/Jv3O8SseOio

Episode Notes/Script/Post:

Joe Bustillos here. 

As I mentioned in part 1, I commended the makers for not setting up any straw-men villains and for not adding something overtly supernatural as a pivotal element to the story. Maybe it’s with these bio-pix where Christian filmmakers have learned to keep the story grounded in their main characters’ journeys and not resort to the unrealistic characters/plot twists that plague movies like the the “God Is Not Dead” series. In this case, they focused on two main relationships, between Pastor Chuck Smith and Evangelist/Hippie Lonnie Frisbee and the beginning of the relationship between high school students Greg and Cathe. 

One thing that came up when discussing the movie with my friend, Debra, who was also raised in Southern California in the 1960s & 70s, was that she felt like they made the Jesus Movement to be way bigger than what she remembered. She remembered seeing a smattering of Jesus Freaks on the streets in L.A., but there were also just as many Hari Krishnas doing their proselytizing. But it wasn’t like all of the hippies eventually became Jesus Freaks or born-agains. That was an interesting observation that I might not have noticed. I mean, the movie makers began with a scene showing hippies going to a huge open-air concert with Janis Joplin singing and Timothy Leary speaking and then later in the movie showed a mass baptism at Pirate’s Cove, which could imply that these movements were of the same size. She was more familiar with the hippies and concerts and experienced nothing that would suggest that the Jesus Movement was comparable in size.

My experience was different in that I saw Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa in the early 80s, when they’d gone from the circus-tent featured in the movie to a big auditorium and I remember the Billy Graham rallies at Angel Stadium in Anaheim somewhat later. But obviously it was possible to be around Southern California in those days and not be aware that any of this was happening. In fact, even though I was there, somewhat after the fact, I never knew anything about the Chuck Smith/Lonnie Frisbee story until around 2005. 

I was attending a tiny Calvary Chapel in Long Beach and playing guitar in the church band when the music leader mentioned Lonnie as this crazy guy “blessed by the Holy Spirit” who did miracles but was also very controversial. Then I later heard that Lonnie had played a role in the founding the Vineyard Community church movement. Sadly when it came time for the main founder of the Vineyard, John Wilber, to write his book, Lonnie was written out of the story and only referred to in one passage as “the young man.”  So, as I watched the movie I wondered how much of this part of the story the filmmakers would go into. 

I was impressed that the filmmakers made Lonnie’s insights about how to reach out to hippies through music and acts of compassion, central to the movie. But as the movement grew, there’s a scene where Lonnie cries to God in prayer to keep using him, to not “leave him.” The thing about these kinds of movements is that people do respond in these huge gatherings, but what are they responding to, and more importantly, how do you keep that happening week after week? There were scenes where it was clear that Lonnie felt the pressure and looked like he was “crafting” his image as the hippie preacher. Whereas, at the beginning of the movie he came off as the sincere seeker of truth who had done it all and experienced it all and in the end he found his peace and fulfillment in the message of Jesus. But as things grew, he feared God’s power slipping away. 

I was a Biblical Studies student at Biola University when my Roman Catholic mom called me, after hearing about the Jim Jones massacre, worried that I was headed down that road. That seemed ridiculous but if I was honest, by that time I had already encountered multiple situations where someone presented themselves as speaking for God. Said “prophets” probably needed to spend more time talking with a mental health professional to help them with their “message from God.” 

There was one guy, a bit older than the rest of us, who dropped in on our Mission Viejo high school Jesus freak group during the school day, who presented himself as being even more into Jesus then anyone else and had gathered the interest of a few of the teenage girls. That was a bit cultish, in that it felt like this guy was trying to take control of this natural gathering of believers. Whatever his plans may have been, they were probably thwarted because none of us high schoolers were willing to do anything that might threaten our comfy suburban lives. 

Then many years later I came back to Mission Viejo and heard about the pastor of the local Calvary Chapel being drummed out when some questionable interactions with female church members came to light. My point is that these movements that are dependent on consistent experiential encounters with God also lend themselves to the abuses of leaders who were also looking to keep things going. But for all of the freaks and self-appointed prophets whom I’ve encountered, there have been innumerable sincere believers who found themselves in leadership roles who were just trying to support their brothers and sisters. You don’t hear those stories ‘cause they’re not controversial. But the danger of authoritarian/cultish behavior was definitely something to always stay vigilant against. 

In the movie, I found the scene of the interview with Pentecostal leader, Kathryn Kulhman, as Frisbee’s ministry was peaking, interesting because the filmmakers showed a clear indication of discomfort from other characters when Frisbee made the claim to be a prophet. For the uninitiated, the Pentecostal/Charismatic churches were known for ecstatic shouting and erratic movements (dancing?) that were called “the gifts of the Spirit”  while at the other end of the spectrum were the churches with lectures or study sessions from the Bible. The movie presents Chuck Smith’s church as being more of the latter, lectures from the Bible than being  open to the Charismatic ecstatic thing. 

From my own experiences with home bible studies, I remember that a good part of the beginning of the session was singing and then the next part was spent “studying” some part of the Bible and the remainder spent in prayer for the needs of the people in attendance. In fact it was at one of these home Bible studies in 1974 where the leader, who was probably only two or three years older than me, looked straight at me and said that God loved me just the way I was. The group prayed for me, and I’ve been on this very strange journey ever since…  

I find it interesting that the movie seems to be okay with the spontaneous stuff in the beginning of the movie but then used it as a clear indication that Frisbee has “lost it” when he tries to do the “someone is suffering” call to the congregation (cold reading?), later in the movie. Having only attended a couple formal Sunday services at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa back in the day, I don’t remember how open they were to the spontaneous stuff, but I’m pretty sure everything was done according to whatever was printed in the church bulletin they gave to you as you came in. In the movie, I found it interesting that they included a quote from Lonnie about how people (like Chuck Smith and later John Wilber) loved how the Spirit worked through him (Lonnie) but were quick to toss him aside as a person. The filmmakers included enough to make the split between Frisbee and Smith understandable, but then whitewashed things at the end of the movie, just referencing that  Chuck Smith and Lonnie were later reconciled and that Lonnie died in 1993. This version leaves at least half of the story untold.

The other relationship covered in the movie, the relationship between Greg and Cathe was a wonderful story about a kid living in a trailer on the beach with his alcoholic mom and the cute blonde living in the big house who invited Greg to a concert, then into “drugs,” then to Jesus. Smart, artistic, sensitive, Greg was a great “everyman” to tell the story of that generation looking for truth, rejecting society’s restrictions and trying to find their own meaning. 

The drug sequences moved the story along. Cathe’s sister aspirated and nearly died and that scared Cathe straight. Greg was semi-passed-out in a van and the driver of the van nearly got them into an accident and Greg has to jump out of the van onto a rainy highway and runs into Lonnie(?) and that convinces Greg to get off the path of drugs. My friend, Debra, noted that movies still don’t know how to convey what it’s like to experience LSD. But were they on LSD?  The girl nearly choking wouldn’t be from LSD or pot. Whatever they were on, the actual point was “drugs are bad.” 

Maybe we were too young, but drugs wasn’t a thing with my friends when we became Jesus Freaks. For my group of sheltered naive suburban kids, the crisis was kissing and making out with ones girlfriend/boyfriend and how that might conflict with ones new found Christian faith. Except for Lonnie’s reference to everyone “doing” everything when he was in San Francisco, the movie pretty much ignores anything sexual, well, except that Greg thinks Cathe is cute. The movie definitely focused on dealing with disillusioned hippies and uptight Christian Fundamentalists and nothing at all about horny teenagers. This is understandable, given that this movie was produced by a Christian studio interested in promoting the Christian message, all of which brings us back to the part of Lonnie’s story that they chose to leave out. 

For those interested in the part of the story Jesus Revolution left out, I found a documentary, Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher about his extraordinary role in the Jesus Movement and the Calvary Chapel/Vineyard church movements. According to the documentary, after what we saw in the movie, Frisbee came back to Calvary, less hippie and more associate pastor, but a rift again developed because Frisbee was still drawn to the use of the spontaneous Charismatic gifts and Chuck Smith wasn’t. Frisbee then moved on to John Wimber’s Vineyard church that was much more open to the Charismatic gifts. This arrangement worked out until Wimber caught wind that Frisbee wasn’t able to sufficiently contain his hedonistic side and was indulging in his homosexuality. In the documentary, some reported that Frisbee was known to party on Saturday but then get up and preach on Sunday. He was fired from the Vineyard when he admitted to being homosexual. He did some independent missionary work overseas and continued to try to preach. Sadly in 1993 he died as a result of an AIDS related illness. Thus, it was much grimmer than a simple “He died in 1993” title card would convey. I understand that the makers of Jesus Revolution want to shape their stories for their audiences. Just look at the last two movie-biographies about rock legends, Freddie Mercury and Elton John. The general facts of the stories were loosely maintained, but huge things are often glossed over or changed to serve their point of view and allow for the hero to emerge by the final credits. In the case of Lonnie Frisbee, life just wasn’t that clean, to be explained away with a reference to a reconciliation and death in 1993. 

There’s a part of me that wishes that things were as simple as I thought they were when I was 16 and made my prayer of Faith in 1974. I wish that all of my questions could be answered via the verses I read in the The Way, a paraphrased version of the New Testament. I have several friends who still hold to that kind of “simple” faith. More power to them. I wish that the world was as simple as I thought it was back then. Alas, my time and studies at Loyola Marymount University, Biola University, Fuller Seminary, various Calvary Chapels and Vineyard Churches and just interacting with my fellow human beings of every stripe and disposition has led me to believe that the Jesus Revolution was “real” but not necessarily the universal solution to the world’s ills that believers would want us to believe. 

In the documentary someone mentions that for several years after first meeting Lonnie, all of Chuck Smith’s sermons were about Love and acceptance. In the movie they even have him washing the feet of the hippies so that they don’t dirty the carpeting, but this is also a powerful demonstration of love and acceptance. I felt that as a young person trying to figure out who I was. There was this tremendous sense of being loved and that we were all messed up kids needing this love. Unfortunately, like most or many relationships, after feeling such love most of what I felt was how I didn’t measure up and would always be lacking because of my flawed human spirit. 

While the gospel invites us to love one another, it can be quite difficult to love one another when one finds it hard to love ones self. Here’s the sad and tragic part of this whole story, that this gifted messenger through whom God seemed to be working, over the course of his life probably hated himself because he loved in a way that was forbidden in the Bible and by those who said that they loved him. Thus, the movie rushes Lonnie off-screen and ends with the story of how Greg fulfilled Lonnie’s prophecy that Greg would preach and bring the gospel to thousands. Somehow the images of the huge Harvest Festivals did not feel like the early Jesus Movement gatherings and looked more like some televangelist production. But I’m sure that believers were encouraged by this ending. 

The early parts of the movie, where Chuck Smith let go of the cultural restrictions and let in these dirty strangers, that touched me and reminded me of those days of experiencing the miracle of love and connection to something greater than ourselves. But somehow we lose it, for a thousand different reasons, beginning with our innate tribalism and fears. Somehow we quickly go from “you are welcome here,” to “now do these things and don’t do these other things,” and by the way, nothing you do is of value if it doesn’t result in more people becoming part of our specific Christian tribe.  

I have had some accuse me of being a highly educated fool, as if the problem is that I continued to ask the questions and didn’t settle for “because” answers. I’m not about busting anyone’s pretty bubble. Like I said, more power to them. But at the same time, when it comes to issues of one’s Eternal Destination, issues where human blood has actually been shed, I’m not going to gloss over some fundamental problems with the gaps between the Promise of the Gospel and lived human history.  All of that said, I appreciate some parts of the gospel message, that we need to love and care about and for each other regardless of what tribe we might call home, that we need to humbly live our lives as part of creation and not claim some kind of “ownership,” that we need to forgive each other when we fail to live up to our own values and that we need to value the sacrifices made by our ancestors by trying to live a life of love and respect. 

One last thing, having rewatched the Frisbee documentary, it feels so dated that the thing that got Frisbee banished was that he admitted to being homosexual. Granted when I graduated from Biola in 1981 there were students who were “unenrolled” from the university for going out and dancing (which may well still be school policy…), so anything sexual between non-married partners, that’s bad enough to toss out someone who has made these movements happen. In the documentary someone pointed out that maybe God used someone like Frisbee to have a laugh at the things Biblical Literalists think are important. It would seem that the former cartoonist, Greg Laurie, may be held up as the hero of the story, but without the Clown of God, Lonnie Frisbee, there is no story. 

 So, until next time, this is Joe Bustillos with JBB’s Final Thoughts saying, Enjoy (and please subscribe to this podcast, wherever you find it or the video version on YouTube). Thanks and AMEN.

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