1968-2008: Forty Years to a Lukewarm Society
A commentary by Randy Stiver
United 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 Revolution
While 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. To find the EXIT,
just request or download our free booklets, Making
Life Work and Transforming Your Life: The Process
of Conversion.
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