Ben had always wanted to be a pastor. His mom, Gwen, liked to tell the story of her four-year-old son climbing onto a stool to preach his first babbling sermon at the music stand his father used as a lectern. Unlike the vast number of pastor’s kids who resented the strictures of childhood church, Ben relished the shirtless freedom of growing up among Jesus freaks, who established some six hundred peace communes across the United States in the 1970s and ’80s as part of the larger Jesus movement. “The counterculture got saved, and they brought their weirdness to Christianity,” Ben said. “It was an awakening, a real revival, even if it was a revival for white hippies.”
Both Rod and Gwen grew up in 1950s Southern California families who weren’t particularly visionary or spiritual. Rod’s parents didn’t go to church but dropped him off with his sister at a local Baptist congregation for Sunday school, where Rod recalled first feeling the overwhelming presence of Jesus when he was five. Committed to church from then on, he began to catch rides with a kindly elderly lady in her Cadillac. Gwen was sixteen when she first attended Young Life, an evangelical organization that ran youth clubs, sing-alongs, and cookouts around the United States to encourage teens like Gwen to find and follow Jesus. Young Life had its own peer strategy.
“Go find the quarterback, the popular kid,” as Gwen put it. “Try to convert that kid. They’ll bring a ton of kids along.” One afternoon, she joined such a throng outside an overflowing municipal building in Riverside. Standing on tiptoe, she peeked into a window. “On that lawn, I heard that Jesus loved me, and I had never heard that anyone loved me,” she said.
Young Life was part of “the new evangelical movement,” an ambitious twentieth-century push to reach America with the gospel. Billy Graham, known as “the Protestant pope,” feared that Christianity was losing its influence in the United States. He and other evangelical pastors called for a new era of engagement: a revival. Graham’s crusades—evangelistic campaigns that were held at stadiums and other large venues and featured both preaching and music—called people forward to give their lives to Christ; attendees included the likes of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the budding theologian Elaine Pagels. The reach of Graham and other “new evangelicals” would alter American culture and politics. (Graham advised every U.S. president from Truman to Obama.) The new evangelicals created powerful organizations and media outlets, including the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today, along with Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, which Rod attended, and Young Life, the youth organization where Gwen found Jesus.