When former Campus Crusade for Christ staff member Jack Sparks and an eclectic team of folks who called themselves, rather boldly, the “Christian World Liberation Front” considered how to best present the good news of Jesus on the campus of UC Berkeley in the late 1960s, one of the means they chose was a Christian adaptation of the street papers that had become part and parcel of student unrest across the country. Sparks and the members of the Christian World Liberation Front, or “God’s Forever Family,” were not the only hippie Christians seeking to harness the power of countercultural media forms for their uses, but their street paper Right On (until its name was changed to Radix in 1976), was unique among the street papers of both the student protests and their Christian peers in the Jesus Movement. In its first decade the publication managed to set a course between the cocktail of revolutionary politics, crass sexuality, and jaded realism of street papers like the Berkeley Barb and The Rag while simultaneously avoiding the less intellectual style and limited subject range of Christian papers like Duane Pederson’s widely distributed Hollywood Free Paper.
What allowed Right On/Radix to outlast each of these efforts while simultaneously helping to shape an influential subset of Jesus People determined to think Christianly about all of life? One partial explanation is attentiveness. As Sparks and early editors like David Gill and Sharon Gallagher committed themselves to engaging their context with attentiveness to both the Gospel and the nuances and complexities of everyday life, they chartered a path that would help their fledgling publication leave a legacy of thoughtful engagement that played a part in shaping some of the most intellectually stimulating and socially engaged contours of the Jesus Movement and American evangelicalism more broadly.[i]
The Longstanding Call of Christian Attentiveness
An emphasis on attentiveness (or very similarly, watchfulness) has a long history in the Church. The call to cultivate awareness—both of one’s inner state as well as the onslaught of natural and supernatural external impulses and forces—occurs frequently in the New Testament. On multiple occasions Jesus demonstrates and encourages a watchful attentiveness to the good work of his Father and the evil temptations of the enemy. Later, both Paul and Peter call the Church to watchfulness and attentiveness in their epistles, in an effort to rouse Christians from their slumber (Ephesians 5:14-17) and remind them to stay alert and discerning in a world where good and evil are both active (I Peter 5:8).
During the following centuries of Church history, a number of Patristic writers picked up on these themes by highlighting how attentive watchfulness—the ability to live with one’s spiritual eyes and ears tuned to the frequency of the Spirit and alert to the subtle lies and temptations of the enemy—should play a central role in the life of one who seeks to live faithfully in the way of Jesus.
This kind of watchful attentiveness requires a willingness to listen—to tune one’s ear to the frequencies of the Kingdom while remaining simultaneously attuned to the vibrations of one’s own heart, as well as one’s spiritual and cultural milieu. It is a posture that requires intentionality, a posture that nurtures listening well before speaking, and a posture that many Christian institutions and individuals seem to have forgotten.
It is also a posture that marks the history of Radix—a history and legacy that has much to offer us during our current cultural moment.
Attentiveness in Action
From its founding in the summer of 1969, Right On was among the most robust efforts to harness the power of the underground press for Christian purposes. Unlike the staid portraits of a blond headed, white, well-groomed Jesus that graced many evangelical sanctuaries, the Jesus that emerged from early editions of Right On were attentive to Jesus’ middle-eastern origins, the Roman imperialism that defined his context, and the drastically countercultural impulses of his central emphasis, namely, the Kingdom of God, a reality that exerted a holistic influence on all of life. In the pages of Right On, Jesus emerged as the original revolutionary or, as a full-page wanted poster featuring Jesus’ image along with his aliases and “crimes” read, “the notorious leader of an underground movement.”[ii] Because Right On had no copyright in its early years, these images spread widely through the international Jesus movement. As they did, they helped shape the way an entire generation of young evangelicals understood Jesus’ life and work.
But for many of the paper’s early contributors it was not enough to be a Christian alternative to secular publications. As young leaders like David Gill and Sharon Gallagher (both named co-editor in 1971) began to mature, Right On’s earlier emphasis on relevance and evangelism became more nuanced as the paper’s focus shifted from a more narrowly evangelistic emphasis to one that aimed to help its readers engage a wider array of intellectual and theological considerations. By the early seventies this shift was becoming noticeable. Rather than emotive illustrations and an array of free-verse poetry of varying quality, Right On began to think of its primary audience not as street people or anti-intellectual Jesus Freaks, but as more thoughtful and intellectually engaged individuals—Christians and non-Christians alike.[iii]
Intellectual Cross-Pollination and Active Listening
As Gill and Gallagher steered the paper toward a wider range of topics and a larger influence, they leaned on two primary ways of cultivating attentiveness—intellectual cross-pollination stemming from their own natural curiosity and the communities of thinking evangelicals with whom they interacted, and, secondly, a willingness to cross standard evangelical boundaries by demonstrating a desire to listen to and engage important voices from outside the evangelical movement.
Long before they were at the helm of one of the Jesus Movement’s more innovative publications, Gill and Gallagher had moved beyond the sectarian emphases of their childhood faith (both grew up Plymouth Brethren) into a more socially engaged and intellectually curious form of evangelical Christianity. For Gill this broadening of horizons started during his student days at UC Berkeley where he was pulled into the unrest that gripped Berkeley and other campuses in the mid-sixties. Gill found that it was black power and the Black Panther Party that most challenged him to reorient his faith, life, and thought.[iv] Taking up a personal study of the history of race in America, he threw himself into a reading program that supplemented his experiences ministering to a diverse group of inmates at the county’s juvenile detention center.
For her part, Gallagher had expanded her intellectual horizons through formal study at Westmont College, an evangelical liberal arts college in southern California, and through friendships with intellectually inclined evangelicals like Ward and Laurel Gasque. Eventually Gallagher became a leading advocate for biblical feminism and evangelical egalitarianism through her writing, teaching, and leadership in the formation of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus, founded in 1974. Her prominence as the editor of Right On (a notable exception to the male-dominated leadership of many Jesus Movement efforts) and her attention to the social implications of the Gospel also led to her being invited to help draft the influential 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, which addressed American evangelicalism’s checkered history on issues ranging from poverty to race and gender equality.[v]
In addition to these experiences, both Gill and Gallagher found a stimulating array of intellectual conversation partners in other evangelical communities. From Francis Schaeffer’s Swiss L’Abri, to local conversation partners like Jack Sparks, Walter and Ginny Hearn in Berkeley, and some of evangelicalism’s best minds at Regent College and its extensive summer program (where Gallagher spent multiple summers in the mid-seventies), the two young editors found their natural intellectual curiosity strengthened, pushed, and expanded by teachers and peers in some of the most remarkable evangelical communities of the twentieth century.
What really made Right On special, however, was the way in which Gallagher, Gill, and the rest of the publication team managed to maintain a willingness to cultivate a posture of listening attentiveness, even as they developed their own intellectual and theological opinions more deeply. It was not that Gallagher and Gill listened passively. They seldom did. Rather, they listened actively, allowing a wide variety of voices to find space in the publication and giving those voices a fair hearing without neglecting to actively and attentively subject those voices to the scrutiny not of a political system or middle-class cultural sensibility, but to the full-orbed voice of Scripture and historical Christianity.
It was this attentiveness, this willingness to really listen both to a diverse range of voices and to the historic and countercultural resonances of Scripture that helped Right On/Radix carve out a unique and important place within the American evangelical landscape. A willingness to give ear not just to important heroes like C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Francis Schaeffer, but also to a diverse array of Christian and non-Christian voices, ranging from Gospel musician Edwin Hawkins and Black Panther leaders Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown to John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Paul Stookey, and William Pannell. Even Hal Lindsey—the author of the bestselling dispensationalist book, The Late Great Planet Earth—was offered an interview.
Attentive listening was not relegated to interviews. As the works of thinkers like Jacques Ellul, Theodore Roszak, and E. F. Schumacher came under discussion in the pages of Right On and Radix, readers developed a familiarity with a scope of ideas that far surpassed what they could expect to find in most evangelical churches and media. By paying attention to important voices—even when they came from outside American evangelicalism and, in some cases, Christianity—Gallagher, Gill and those who contributed to the publication demonstrated the far-reaching implications of the theological doctrine of Common Grace and offered a generation of American evangelicals an education that would serve them well in an increasing complex and politicized society.
The Legacy of Common (and Radical) Grace
Looking back almost a half century to the first ten years of what is now Radix, I am still struck by the creativity, intellectual robustness, scope, and general zest of a publication that out-thought and out-lasted virtually all of its peers. What stands out to me is the ability of folks like Sparks, Gallagher, Gill, and the writers they led to pay attention and to listen well to their context and God’s movement in it, and to the broader social, cultural, and intellectual currents that shaped modern life and yet were frequently avoided or completely unknown within evangelical churches.
By paying attention to Scripture, theology, and the history of the Church and theology while simultaneously engaging, even if not always perfectly or fully, a willingness to listen to thought leaders and artists in the wider culture, Right On proved it was indeed radical.
By evangelical standards the publication could be deemed radical for its willingness to chart a third way between the false political and theological dichotomies of conservative and liberal. As one former student-protestor-turned-Right On-contributor put it in 1974, “I will always walk the delicate tightrope between an idolatrous tendency to absolutize revolution and a pietistic copout. But it is on that kind of razor’s edge that a Christian must always stand, living in the tension of being ‘in the world but not of it.’”[vi] In as much as Right On/Radix walked and continues to walk this edge, it offers hope in time of seemingly endless fragmentation and polarization. But for the early writers and editors at Right On/Radix radical did not only mean revolutionary; it also carried the meaning of rootedness. It was this meaning that informed both David Gill’s decade-long column, “The Radical Christian,” and Gallagher’s decision to change the publication’s name to Radix in 1976. “We think that Radix, which means ‘root’, ‘base’, or ‘source’, more accurately describes who we are now and where we are coming from. Jesus Christ is the root of our faith, the root on which we base our critique of the culture and our life as his people.”[vii] This rootedness in the One who was the Way, the Truth, and the Life gave Gallagher and the team at Radix a foundation that allowed them freedom to explore a vast array of ideas and manifestations of God’s beauty, truth, and goodness without losing their way. It is this legacy of attentive rootedness that we still need so desperately today.
[i] For a more extensive treatment of this influence on the wider evangelical world, see Charles E. Cotherman, To Think Christianly: A History of L’Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Center Movement (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020) 152-188; David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 86-112).
[ii] “Wanted: Jesus Christ,” Right On 1, no. 2 (1969).
[iii] Donald Heinz, “Jesus in Berkeley.” Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1976. In ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, http://search.proquest.com.proxy.its.virginia.edu/pqdtglobal/docview/302807537/ 35C0C40DF132418EPQ/7 (accessed November 28, 2015), 283-84, 291-93.
[iv] Cotherman, To Think Christianly, 158-159
[v] Swartz, Moral Minority, 109.
[vi] Edith Black, “Rediscovery of Faith” Right On (January 1974).
[vii] Berkeley Christian Coalition, “Radix” (October 1976), 3.
Charlie Cotherman (PhD, University of Virginia) is planter and pastor of Oil City Vineyard Church and program director at Grove City College’s Project on Rural Ministry. He is the author of To Think Christianly: A History of L’Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Center Movement and a contributing editor of Sent to Flourish: A Guide to Planting and Multiplying Churches. He lives with his wife, four children, and a cat in historic Oil City, Pennsylvania.