Michael Grasso / February 21, 2024

Near the end of Richard Nixon’s first term, the forces of conservatism and reaction were in the ascendancy in America. This public resurgence of “traditional values” was itself a counter-revolution against the turmoil unleashed by the young in their opposition to the Vietnam War and their support for the civil rights struggle, which had swept through America’s streets over the previous decade. America’s traditional power structures did not ignore this radical wave of change; under both Lyndon Johnson and Nixon, the government unleashed all the instruments of the state to try to quash these movements. And many parties on the side of the Establishment within this new generational “culture war” found themselves looking for ways to co-opt and capitalize upon the more superficial aspects of the youth revolution.

Nowhere was this more evident than in mainstream American Christianity. Upon seeing the counterculture’s exploration of new spiritual and numinous experience in defiance of their technocratic Cold War suburban childhoods, Evangelical Christian sects saw that in order to compete in America’s vaunted “marketplace of ideas,” they would need to divert idealistic youth, many of them exploring psychedelics and Eastern religions in search of deeper meaning, back to the bosom of church and pastor. A fusion of hip, Aquarian awareness with the radical promise of early Christianity had already begun to take root within pop culture on stage and screen, as well as within the various churches, communes, and outreach programs that comprised the nascent Jesus Movement. But the big Evangelical preachers and churches who had spent the years since World War II expanding their enterprises by way of mass media were largely outsiders to the Jesus Movement, which had grown from within the nominal grassroots of Evangelical thought, especially on the West Coast. Apocalyptic preachers were reaching out to the young by meeting them where they were: using music, comic books, and other elements of popular culture.

The Campus Crusade for Christ, which was founded by Evangelical candy magnate Bill Bright and his wife Vonette in 1951 at UCLA, had allied with postwar megapastor and confidante of presidents and celebrities Billy Graham (after the Brights’ falling out with ultraconservative Evangelical preacher Bob Jones Sr.). In the first two decades of its existence, the CCC had performed “conversion events” at campuses such as Berkeley that had long been hotbeds of left-wing activism. But by the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Campus Crusade for Christ was toiling in the same vineyards as the Jesus Movement—and reaping many fewer conversions. The old-school Evangelical power brokers were never going to have the broader, hipper, more ecumenical appeal that the Jesus Movement inherently possessed. What the more traditional Evangelicals did have going for them was their access to the traditional levers of media and to temporal and monetary power.

From Bright and his allies came the idea for Explo ’72, a mass meeting meant to bridge the gap between the new Jesus People and their older Evangelical forebears. Explo’s name was “meant to suggest a spiritual explosion,” but also evoked the recent worldwide success of Expo ’67 in Montreal and Expo ’70 in Osaka. Explo ’72 organizer Paul Eshleman, 30 years old at the time of the event, had been a crucial part of CCC’s activities during the late ’60s at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a campus that was one of the most fervent homes of protest against the military-industrial complex (in the person of Dow Chemical‘s recruiting of students). Eshleman was given the monumental task of organizing a week-long event that Bright envisioned would encompass tens of thousands of college-age evangelists, musical acts, pastoral instruction and networking, and a public relations program that would entice young people across America not only to come to Christ but “To evangelize the world in our generation.”

In The Explo Story: A Plan to Change the World, published soon after the June 1972 event held in the Dallas, Texas metroplex, Eshleman and co-author Norman Rohrer present highlights from the many activities and events at Explo. Bill Bright’s bombastic foreword dispenses with the occasional light-hearted humility of Eshleman and Rohrer’s text, celebrating the worldwide impact of the event. Bright eerily predicts that “Explo ’72 was part of a plan, part of a world-wide strategy dedicated to the fulfillment of the Great Commission by the target date of 1980.” While the entire world did not come to Christ in the next eight years, Evangelicals would elect a President in 1980 who would bring their millenarian dreams of Christian conversion and conquest to the fore of American society. 

To be fair to both Bright and Eshleman, the organizers of Explo ’72 did have a lot to celebrate; the event was a truly massive effort. (The final chapter, wittily titled “How God Did It,” is actually about how many individual members of CCC contributed to the event’s success.) While the text does kick off its first chapter by having a good-natured laugh at all of the logistical difficulties that the young participants experienced in accommodations and transportation, the remainder of the book takes up the mantle of Bright’s braggadocious joy. The photos included in the book run the gamut: crowd shots at the nightly revival meetings held at the Cotton Bowl, views of the Explo “campsite” set up for overflow after Dallas-area hotels had been filled (the chapter titled “Mud, Mosquitoes and Miracles” offers clear parallels to the much larger crowd at Woodstock three years previous), and intimate shots of young people singing and shouting praise together.

This foregrounding of the younger generation in the book is a constant. The Reverend Graham, in a press conference with Bright, makes the ironic statement that “Many of the great movements of world history have begun with students.” (Considering the youth revolts in the streets of the West and the Cultural Revolution sputtering to a close in the People’s Republic of China, one wonders if Graham’s evocation of left-wing youth insurgency on campus was wholly intentional.) Explo did succeed in co-opting one aspect of the Jesus Movement—its forays into Christian music. Giants of the Jesus Movement (and what would one day become known as Christian Contemporary music) such as Larry Norman shared the stage with giants of the mainstream: Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, and June Carter. All of them literally went on the record in support of Explo with the 1972 LP Jesus Sound Explosion. The threads of country, gospel, contemporary Christian rock, and old-time religion mingled freely on stages that evoked the new ’70s trend towards massive arena rock tours. Additionally, professional athletes and coaches made appearances to spread “the Message in Muscle.” Dozens of NFL players, current and retired, showed up, including Paul Eshleman’s father “Doc” Eshleman, then-chaplain of the NFL.

But whatever moments of joy and cultural relevance emanated from the Explo gathering, deep down the organizers knew what the event was all about: bringing the “lost sheep” of the Baby Boom back into the fold of conservative Christianity. All throughout The Explo Story, the anxieties of a world that had changed in the blink of an eye over the previous five years are laid bare. Eshleman and Rohrer are assiduous in making sure that the reader knows this gathering was designed to be multiracial and multicultural: “Explo drew the largest number of blacks and other minority groups of any Christian gathering of its kind in history.” Later in the text it is discovered that this “largest” percentage of Black Christians was “[a]pproximately three per cent—about 3,000 delegates—of the Explo crowd.” A frankly patronizing conversion story appears in chapter 4, “A City of ‘One Way!’ Streets,” where a young white woman overflowing with the “spiritual rekindling of Explo” met a Black man on the street who “held up both hands. ‘These are the hands of a criminal,’ he hissed. ‘Can your whitey God forgive me?'” Of course, the young woman evangelist prays with the Black man for twenty minutes, inducing him to release his worries of “selling out my people to believe in a white God,” and another soul is won for Christ.

Even more stark is the anxiety around the Vietnam War. The first half of 1972 saw the North Vietnamese Eastern offensive in response to the ongoing attempt of the Nixon administration to cut a retreat from Southeast Asia while declaring “peace with honor,” all while killing tens of thousands of civilians in the bombing of neighboring Cambodia and Laos. Around the edges of Explo, a real, if minority, Christian peace movement was present: placards reading “300 Gls killed this week in Vietnam won’t be reached in this generation” are mentioned by Eshleman and Rohrer dismissively. Routinely, Eshleman and Rohrer dismiss the “dissenters” at Explo, who “backed off when confronted with love and reason by our staff.” Throughout Explo ’72, rah-rah patriotism edges into Christian nationalism. The book cheerfully states, “Men soon to face enemy fire deserve priority in hearing the gospel and in receiving training to lead buddies to Christ.” During Explo’s “Military Seminar” and Flag Day celebrations, Pentagon higher-ups such as Army Chief of Chaplains Major General Gerhart Hyatt and Navy Chief of Chaplains Francis Garrett were featured speakers. Even the tiny minority of young people who sought recognition for their anti-war stance against the “shushing” of the crowd were performatively brought back into the Explo fold: “Chaplain Garrett was greeted by the protesters who asked, ‘Admiral, can you say you love us now?” Throwing his arms around several of them he replied, ‘Yes, I love you.’ This reply brought tears to many of the demonstrators’ eyes.” The Evangelical reliance on public profession and witnessing to bring new souls to Christ is a common thread in these anecdotal tales.

Ultimately, the real world of the 1970s couldn’t be kept from the cultural cloister of Explo’s star-studded seminar rooms, stages, and stadiums. The sinister Children of God cult was lurking at the conference (they were deemed “extremist” by the authors in the same breath as the anti-war protesters). In a startling piece of historical irony, the final night of Explo ’72 happened to coincide with the Watergate break-in. Billy Graham had been a Nixon confidante, his first-term Inaugural pastor, and his co-conspirator in professing virulent anti-Semitism. And on the final night of Explo ’72, he made the compact mentioned at the beginning of the book into a holy covenant with his young Evangelicals to remake America: “I am asking you to light a candle… and we will start a spiritual fire here tonight that could sweep the world… It could help evangelize the world before 1980. Let’s leave here tonight dedicated, committed and determined to change the world in the next eight years.” A lot can be said about the ridiculous, garish, and pandering elements of the vibe around Explo ’72, but no one can deny that, by 1980, America would end up changed by this movement and this generation of young Christian activists, and changed for good, well into the next century.

---

Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a writer, museum professional, and a lifelong Bostonian. You can follow him on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/mutantsmichael.bsky.social.