“Viajando em Jesus”: os evangélicos norte-americanos e a contracultura

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Axel R. Schäfer

Abstract

The political mobilization of conservative Protestants in the United States since the 1970s is commonly viewed as having resulted from a “backlash” against the alleged iniquities of the 1960s, including the excess-es of the counterculture. In contrast, this article maintains that conservative Protestant efforts to infiltrate and absorb the counterculture contributed to the organizational strength, cultural attractiveness, and politi-cal efficacy of the New Christian Right. The essay advances three arguments: First, that evangelicals did not simply reject the countercultural ideas of the 1960s, but absorbed and extended its key sentiments. Second, that conservative Protestantism’s appropriation of countercultural rhetoric and organizational styles played a significant role in the right-wing political mobilization of evangelicals. And third, that the merger of evan-gelical Christianity and countercultural styles, rather than their antagonism, ended up being one of the most enduring legacies of the sixties. In revisiting the relationship between the counterculture and evangelicalism, the essay also explores the larger implications for understanding the relationship between religion and poli-tics. The New Christian Right domesticated genuinely insurgent impulses within the evangelical resurgence. By the same token, it nurtured the conservative components of the counterculture. Conservative Protestant-ism thus constituted a political movement that channeled insurgencies into a cultural form that relegitimized the fundamental trajectories of liberal capitalism and consumerist society.

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How to Cite
SCHÄFER, Axel R. “Viajando em Jesus”: os evangélicos norte-americanos e a contracultura. HORIZONTE - Journal of Studies in Theology and Religious Sciences, Belo Horizonte, v. 18, n. 57, p. 924, 2020. DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2020v18n57p924. Disponível em: https://periodicos.pucminas.br/horizonte/article/view/25633. Acesso em: 14 aug. 2025.
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Artigos/Articles: Dossiê/Dossier
Author Biography

Axel R. Schäfer, Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

I was recently appointed to the new professorship in American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University. Prior to coming to Mainz I was Professor of American History and Director of the David Bruce Centre for American Studies at Keele University in the UK. As a historian, my research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century US intellectual and cultural history, with a particular emphasis on religion and politics, transatlantic social thought, and public policy. I’ve written three monographs: Piety and Public Funding: Evangelicals and the State in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) explores how the expansion of federal funding for faith-based foreign aid, health care, educational, and social welfare providers after World War II contributed to the resurgence of conservative Protestantism in the US in recent decades. Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) traces the evolution of the diffuse and pluralistic evangelical movement into the modern Christian Right. And American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875-1920: Social Ethics, Moral Control, and the Regulatory State in a Transatlantic Context (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000) charts how perceptions and translations of German social thought and reform shaped the profound intellectual sea change that engulfed the US in the late nineteenth century.  My most recent book publication is an edited volume American Evangelicals and the 1960s (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). It suggests that evangelicals did not simply reject the countercultural ideas of the 1960s, but absorbed and extended key aspects of the insurgent worldview.

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