How the Hippie Movement brought Eastern Religion to America
Most of us have had this experience more than once when we went to high school: Walking into the auditorium with our classes to see an alum give a speech.
But sometimes, when the speaker is famous enough to have their own Wikipedia article, it can get a little interesting.
While I was attending Deerfield High School in Deerfield, IL, it’s safe to say no speech was quite like the speech my junior year given by internationally renowned spiritualist, philanthropist, and author Radhanath Swami.
Before his return to Deerfield High in 2014, our principal had promoted his speech as a “potentially life-changing experience”. As I originally took my seat in the auditorium, I joked with my friend next to me about how absurd our principal’s pre-speech hype sounded. But when this Class of 1969 alum began speaking, I began to think, “boy, was I wrong”.
Radhanath Swami described his adopted worldview and interest in religion that led to his journey as a Hindu sannyasa. To this day, his accomplishments include developing communities, temples, hospitals, and programs to support the impoverished youth such as orphanages and hunger relief. He has also published multiple books on spirituality, including his bestselling 2011 memoir, The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami.
When it came time to leave the auditorium, Radhanath Swami got a standing ovation. In the end, it didn’t exactly feel “life-changing”. But it certainly did add to my understanding of how history is influenced by religion.
One of Radhanath Swami’s notable moments was when he described his upbringing in Chicago in a Jewish family of Eastern European descent and how his transformation into becoming a Hindu monk began after an unexpected phase in his life:
His life as a hippie.
His holiness, formerly known as Richard Slavin, was born in 1950, just five years before the war broke out in Vietnam. By 1965, the year he entered Deerfield High School, over 23,000 American troops were serving in Vietnam. Meanwhile, on the homefront, the Civil Rights Movement was nearing its end as the Voting Rights Act was passed that year.
In the 1960s, Radhanath Swami supported Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. He also, like many young Americans of his time, did not approve of the Vietnam War. Already dissatisfied with the deaths of his fellow Americans, he lost his friend when he was just sixteen years old. As a result, he began questioning the meaning of life. Following in the footsteps of his friends, our beloved guest speaker became a counterculturist — or as we know today — a hippie. He recounted in his speech, he quit eating meat, grew out his hair, and experimented with recreational drugs.
Eventually, after the man born Richard Slavin graduated from Deerfield High and enrolled in college, where he studied religion and philosophy. Even during this time, he continued rejecting society’s emphasis on materialism and continuing looking for his philosophical awakening. He began studying Eastern faiths and Transcendental Meditation. Still practicing a hippie-esque lifestyle, he attended a Jimi Hendrix concert in the summer of 1970, where he met followers of the Hare Krishna movement. After realizing he needed to find a guru in his life to accomplish his goal of understanding the meaning of life, he dropped out of college to pursue this realization.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
The transformation of Radhanath Swami, from materialistic teenager to hippie to world-renowned religious leader, isn’t the outcome for everyone who identified as hippies during the wartime counterculture movement. However, it does speak to a topic greater than any one human being in the world.
The fact that Eastern religions and philosophies had an unlikely group of people who helped them get started and popular in the United States:
Hippies.
So how did those who watched Woodstock while donning tie-dyes and peace signs help new religions establish their ethos in America?
While religion itself is a polarizing topic, one of the ways we can remove stigmas surrounding religion is to look back in time to see how it gave people new worldviews and perspectives in the past. So let’s take a trip back in time, shall we?
A little bit of background first. According to Time magazine in June 1968, perhaps the original inspiration behind the hippie movement was philosophy of monks and monasticism, which emphasized renouncing materialistic lifestyles to search for the meaning of life. Early monasticism inspired philosophers and intellectuals across the world as time went by, such as Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Hermann Hesse. And of course, other main inspirations behind American counterculture were iconic and revered figures in leading religion, such as Jesus, Buddha, and Mahatma Gandhi.
At the turn of the century in Germany, the country had its own group of counterculturists known as Der Wandervogel (“wandering bird”). This culture notably emphasized folk music, artistic clothing styles, travel, and health-conscious behaviors such as organic food and even yoga. They also emphasized opposition to formality and urbanization. This is considered to be the primary inspiration behind American counterculture.
During the 1960s, young adult and teenaged Americans had embraced a culture of going against the grain. In an era that featured the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, it became perhaps easy for Americans in this time to see that following the road most traveled would itself be a risky choice. In addition to opposing the war and the oppression of this time in history, counterculture supported sexual liberation, vegetarianism, environmental protection, and recreational drugs (such as marijuana, methamphetamine, and LSD). The era inspired numerous popular art forms, including folk, rock, and psychedelic music. What better example than The Beatles?
Of course, the hippie movement shaped a major chunk of history, with many notable landmarks to show for it. Between 1967’s Summer of Love and Woodstock in 1969, hippie culture (which never really went away) has influenced art, fashion, sexual behavior, and travel habits of Americans.
But what exactly influenced the hippie movement?
Once again; Religion.
In an era that included an overseas war and civil unrest on the homefront, Americans wanted to search for what exactly would provide them a happy life. At the turn of the century, Swami Vivekananda had arrived at the World’s Fair in Chicago, and his establishment of the Vedanta Society is considered to be the start of Hinduism in the United States. During the 1960s, Hindu and Buddhist beliefs were often adopted by the American counterculture as they seemingly allowed followers more freedom and emphasis on peace, mindfulness, and happiness than established religions in the U.S.. While several Americans who adopted Eastern religious practices still openly identified their religion as “hippie”, some went as far as converting to their new religions. In 1965, the band the Grateful Dead formed in California. After they became popular, they were often identified as symbols of the counterculture movement, with their psychedelic sound and recreational drug habits. However, the band’s guitarist Jerry Garcia refused to be considered a hippie and practiced Hinduism. After his death in 1995, his cremated ashes were notably scattered in India’s spiritually holy Ganges River.
In addition to Hinduism, several celebrities who lived to see the 1960s have adopted Buddhism. Acclaimed actor Jeff Bridges, who served in the United State Coast Guard Reserve for seven years during the Vietnam War, practices Buddhism to this day. Additionally, he portrayed a contemporary hippie character, Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, paying homage to the hippie movement. Additionally, during the Civil Rights Movement, Islam gained a larger presence in the country. As a result, there saw a notable rise of African Americans converting to Islam. Perhaps most notably, boxing legend Muhammad Ali converted to Islam in 1961. In 1966, he refused to be drafted and serve in the Vietnam War, citing that his adopted faith inspired him to be a conscientious objector and oppose the war. After he was criminally charged with draft evasion and stripped of his boxing titles, his comeback to boxing made him a heroic symbol of American counterculture. In addition, neo-paganism also rose in popularity as part of 1960s counterculture.
As history has taught us, religion entering a new land has often been spearheaded by a “God, glory, and gold”-style invasion. So how did so many new religions become popularized in the United States with little to no bloodshed on the homefront?
Truth is, they were in America for long to begin with. Hinduism had been in the United States since the turn of the century. Muslims had been present in the United States since African slaves arrived during the colonial and revolutionary periods. For long, they had simply never taken center stage. But now, America had rolled through one war after another since the 20th Century began. As a result, minority religions found their vehicle to become popular in an era of civil and foreign unrest: Counterculture.
For all Americans, counterculture was the way that younger people could go against the grain and refuse to follow the laws and cultures they disagreed with, whether it be the way everyday Americans were suddenly drafted and sent to Vietnam or the ways African Americans were treated in the Deep South. In order to find one’s own role in society rather than be told what to do by norms, young Americans attempted to embrace hippie lifestyles and use their behaviors to discover more. For some, it was a short life of sexual activity and drug use. But for others, like Muhammad Ali or Radhanath Swami, it was permanently embracing a religion that provided not only comfort through this hard time in the country’s history, but assurance that their questions will be answered once one can have a relationship with the Divine.
If I could say anything to my sixteen-year-old self sitting in the crowd before Radhanath Swami, I’d tell myself not to be so judgmental. I knew once upon a time, I was so naive that I assumed that the only way religions expanded was through invasion and conquest. The story of how Eastern philosophies became popular in America clearly displays otherwise.
In the end, a holy man like Radhanath Swami has so much to teach, whether it be about life as a student at Deerfield High or life in general. In spite of the tragedies and ups and downs of his past, he lived through a turbulent time in our country’s history and came out of it in one of the best ways possible: Enlightened.
A society involved in war will always see its consequence, regardless of the era in history in which it takes place. All the while, it shows it can still help said society find fruitfulness. After all, the Hippie movement and everything else that happened on the homefront during the Vietnam War may have appeared as an against-the-grain, short-term solution. But its impact on bringing new religious beliefs into the center stage of America changed the land of the free forever.
