Introduction
Likely the most well-known cultural movement of the American 1960s and 70s was the hippie counterculture. However, another similar subculture appeared alongside the hippie subculture which has deeply affected the country’s religious landscape ever since. In the mid-1960s, a movement emerged which was parallel to the hippie counterculture but diverged from the hippies in several notable ways. This new movement used the same aesthetics of the hippies but operated under the social and theological ideology of fundamentalist evangelicalism. They were called the Jesus People, and this movement was the precursor to the modern culture of American evangelicalism.
            The main goal of evangelicalism is to create as many converts to that branch of Christianity as possible in order to “save” them, and all of the activities the Jesus People engaged in were created with this mission in mind. One of the main methods the Jesus People used to evangelize was witnessing (also known as street preaching), where members would take to the streets and talk to the people they saw about Jesus. This primarily targeted homeless hippies and other youth in urban areas, but there were other tactics that could reach larger groups of people. Aside from street preaching, another prominent way to proselytize was by forming bands which drew on the styles of popular music at the time and infusing it with lyrics pushing the Jesus People’s fundamentalist theology. Some of the most famous musicians of the era included Larry Norman, Barry McGuire, and Phil Keaggy, along with bands such as Second Chapter of Acts, Love Song, and Resurrection Band.
            This study will focus on a small sample of songs and albums released by a few of these artists between 1965-1975 at the height of the Jesus People Movement. While many continued to make Jesus music afterwards and some are still working today, that music is outside the generally accepted timeframe of the Jesus Movement. Many bands and artists were working during this period but did not release formal albums until later, and they have also been excluded from the analysis. Through examining the music of the Jesus People, we can see how American evangelicalism seeped into the realm of popular culture and how the aesthetics of pop culture entered evangelical spaces in order to lay the foundation for modern evangelical culture.
            The Jesus People Movement created its own unique subculture at the intersection of 1960s youth counterculture and mainstream American evangelism by blending different pieces of each movement’s ideology and aesthetics. Because of its close ideological proximity to mainstream evangelicalism, the Jesus People movement was quickly reabsorbed into that branch of Christianity as its members aged out of youth culture and shifts in organizational leadership caused communes to dissolve. However, rather than simply being reabsorbed into mainstream evangelicalism, the Jesus People made a significant impact on evangelical aesthetics and contributed to the commercialization of American evangelical Christianity and contemporary Christian music in future years. Ultimately, this commercialization appealed to large swaths of the American population and evangelicalism’s aesthetic appeal combined with their strict ideology to open the doors for more dangerous ideologies with similar mechanisms of operation to infiltrate the evangelical religious space. 

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Analysis
Through a close examination of several songs by prominent musicians who were active during the time of the Jesus People Movement, we can see the ways in which evangelical theology pervades the messages of the lyrics. This group of artists embodies the main cultural demographic of the Jesus People, and their lyrics point to the theology and broader ideology accepted amongst the majority of the movement’s adherents. All three of these artists used rock, folk, and pop music with lyrics inspired by evangelical Christianity to reach youth inside the Jesus People Movement, and they may have been successful at getting their music out to an even broader audience and fulfilling their mission of converting large swaths of the American population.
 
Larry Norman. Larry Norman was a musician who initially wrote songs for the band People! in the mid-1960s and performed alongside stars such as Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and Janis Joplin. He was raised in Baptist and Pentecostal churches growing up and found the Jesus People movement when he moved to Hollywood for a job with Capitol Records, at which time he also began street preaching.
            By far one of Norman’s most popular songs is “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” from his 1972 album, Only Visiting This Planet. The song tells the story of the rapture, a large focus for Jesus Movement adherents [1] . More than other artists in this study, Norman’s lyrics are very specific and clear cut about what he believes theologically. Throughout the song, Norman makes allusions to various Bible verses which supposedly detail what will happen during the rapture; in particular, he imagines pairs of people in which only one disappears (supposedly in order to be “saved”) and the other is left behind. He laments, wishing that “we’d all been ready” so that everybody could have been saved during the rapture.
            The lyrics here primarily use fear and shame to direct people towards converting. Norman often repeats the lyric, “The Son has come and you’ve been left behind.” Here, Norman is referring to the Second Coming of Jesus, which is said to signal the beginning of the rapture [2] . Through the repetition of this line, Norman instills a deep fear in his audience that they will be abandoned, separated from their loved ones, and forced to face the horrors that he details about the chaotic world that remains all alone. They had better commit their lives to Jesus so that they can be saved because they never know when Jesus will come back. There’s a sense of urgency to convert that Norman creates by detailing the horrors of the rapture. However, despite its violent lyrics, the music is soft and gentle, lulling the audience in before they’re able to really process the lyrics.
            Another popular Norman song is “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” which stands in stark contrast to “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” with its upbeat tempo and lyrics. The song is similar in style to Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” or Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.” Not only does he make the music sound like secular music, but Norman makes several references to the pieces of secular culture and youth counterculture that he’s retained while being a Christian: he still listens to the radio, has long hair, and plays rock music. In this song, Norman is more focused on “feeling good” because Jesus took away his sadness rather than preparing for the coming rapture. In this way, he is attempting to position Jesus in a sort of friend role instead of someone coming to deal out punishment like in “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.”
            The figure of “the Devil” shows up in plenty of secular music as a metaphorical figure symbolizing rebellion, but the character has very different connotations in Christian music. By positioning “the Devil” as being in possession of the “good music” (here meant to be rock, blues, and related popular music), Norman is positioning those kinds of music, those artists, and its listeners as being in league with the Devil [3] , and therefore as extremely dangerous to the spiritual lives of Christians. Norman is likely not being hyperbolic in this case, and even if he is, his Jesus People listeners may not have taken the lyrics that way as Biblical literalism tends to bleed over into other forms of literalism. This was why it was important for the Jesus music to exist: in order for this type of music to be “safe” to engage with, Christian artists had to take styles from popular artists but make it overtly Christian in order to fend off the Devil and make it clear to listeners that the music was not being influenced by sin.
            Norman gets about three quarters of the way through the song before he suddenly mentions Jesus’ crucifixion: “They nailed him to the cross and they laid him in the ground / But they shoulda known you can’t keep a good man down.” No other context or lead up to this mention is given. No other lyrics in the song point to this as a reasonable or logical place to end up. Norman isn’t talking about Jesus’ life in the song, and he’s not even really talking about atonement or salvation. The tone of the song is so upbeat that when juxtaposed with these lyrics, the idea of Jesus’ death seems trivialized. This is a reflection of a larger pattern within the Jesus Movement and evangelicalism more broadly; Jesus, and in particular Jesus’ suffering, is made to fit into any and all situations. Because the Jesus People believed that Jesus should be at the center of one’s entire life, that idea bleeds over into their music. This pattern also appears throughout the history of Jesus music as a whole—violent imagery or mentions of Jesus’ death are put in places where the context doesn’t necessarily call for it. Though all branches of Christianity can at times normalize this violence purely through the act of repeated exposure, such as through iconography of the crucifixion in churches or through ritualistic words which mention Jesus’ death and resurrection, mainline denominations don’t often treat the crucifixion with this type of levity. The tonal disconnect between Norman’s song overall and the content of these two lyrics exemplifies the difficulties of smoothly combining religious content with secular aesthetics, and oftentimes the unbridled enthusiasm for the religious content can be overzealous.