Getting Saved from the Sixties

This groundbreaking study explores the ways young Americans today understand right and wrong, how they think out their morality, and how they live it out. It describes contrasting ethical styles in the biblical, utilitarian, and personalist traditions of our culture; first, as they structured the conflict between mainstream and counterculture during the 1960s, and second, as they have shaped the transformation of these values in new religious movements since the early 1970s. Coupling descriptive ethics with interpretive sociology, this study pursues biography and moral dialogue with sixties youth who participated in a charismatic Christian sect, a Zen Buddhist meditation center, and a human potential organization (est). It shows the significance of these movements for the adherents' changing ideas of their own identity; their relationships, sex roles, courtship, and marriage; and their politics and vision of society. It analyzes the cultural logic and the social location of their ideas, which break down, recombine, and find renewal in the course of conversion.

About the Author :
Steven Tipton teaches sociology of religion, morality, and culture at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, where he is Charles Howard Candler Professor and former Director of the Graduate Division of Religion. A native of San Francisco, he studied literature, philosophy, and religion at Stanford University (BA, 1968), then coupled cultural sociology with comparative philosophical and religious ethics for a joint degree in Sociology and the Study of Religion at Harvard University (PhD, 1979).

Review :
""Remarkable . . . [Tipton] documents how and why certain young people who participated in the counterculture, especially the drug and hippie scene, became part of the Pentecostal Christian fellowship, a Zen Buddhist meditation center and Erhard Seminar Training (est). . . [Tipton's] sympathy does not prevent him from mounting a thorough critique of the counterculture's ethical style or from arguing that the religious movements of the seventies provided its style with the structure and authority it lacked . . . Tipton manages to reveal not fads and trends, but the earnest efforts of human beings to determine what is right."" --New York Times Book Review ""Writing with extraordinary sensitivity and insight, Steven Tipton has captured and made credible the moral anguish of American youth. The great value of his book is that by combining disciplined sociological reporting with a firm sense of the larger cultural questions, it resurrects an older and still necessary mode of sociological inquiry--the firsthand account guided by theoretical reflection. A pebble dropped in the moral cross-currents of American life. A lovely book."" --Daniel Bell ""Richly insightful, laced with eloquent and revealing statements by participants in the three movements. [Tipton] strikes just the right balance between human empathy and critical distance. One will finish the book understanding the past two decades of American life far better than before."" --Christian Century