1968 - The Year When We Were Born Again

Stockholm in August 1968. A protest against
Soviet's invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Photo: Hans Sandberg

The year 1968 took us by storm, especially if you were a teenager. We had been awaken to the world's unfairness and now change was in the air. We followed the news about the Vietnam War, the May Revolt in Paris, Black protest movements in the U.S.A., and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. And we took to the streets to protest.

We were born-again even though we didn't believe in God. I had lost my childhood faith when I was eight years old. I cursed God and hid under my pillow, but nothing happened. That's how easy it was to see through the supernatural, but it was different with the Jesus, the human. I remember saying prayers, singing psalms in the morning and thanking God for the food at lunch time. It must have been in second or third grade. We had an illustrated blue textbook that told stories about the twelve-year-old Jesus who debated the learned at the temple, and how he as an adult fed the poor when the fishermen came in with their catch. Maybe most of all, I remember how he cast out the merchants from the temple.

The step from Jesus to Marx was not as long as one might think. This maybe even harder to understand here in the US, where religious sects and churches had grown through competition with other beliefs or interpretations. Christianity was the largest faith in this diverse religious marketplace, but it came to be dominated by a branch that drew narrow circles around the groups that were to be included in the “brotherly love." It was a Christianity that took part in, or closed its eyes to, the genocide of the native population, to the slavery, the oppression of women, racism and lynchings, exploitation, and imperialist wars. It’s true that there were other branches who fought against slavery and for equality, both before and after Martin Luther King Jr., but the loudest branch was the one that today takes Trump as its savior.

We who were awakened in the years around 1968 actually had a lot in common with the early Christian church and later popular awakenings. The Christian socialist and theologian David Bentley Hart recently raised the question of whether the first Christians were not in fact communists. They sold their property and shared their wealth so that everybody had what they needed. The rest was owned collectively. They loathed private property, which to many modern believers are more important than the Golden Rule. 

“The great John Chrysostom frequently issued pronouncements on wealth and poverty that make Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin sound like timid conservatives. According to him, there is but one human estate, belonging to all, and those who keep any more of it for themselves than barest necessity dictates are brigands and apostates from the true Christian enterprise of charity.” 

(Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?, David  Bentley Hart, New York Times, November 4, 2017) 

Marx may not have been as radical as Chrysostom, but he shares the first Christians' dream of an equal society. He borrowed words from the New Testament when he in 1875 wrote that the society of the future would “inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” 

Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that we let our hair grow and walked in Jesus sandals. The world I grew up in had taken shape after the second World War and its moral foundation had cracked in the shadow of the Vietnam war and 1968. This raised questions that the old generation and society could not answer, fundamental questions that were particularly challenging for us youths. Mark Lilla, an American author and professor, wrote about the process in a personal essay in 2005. He had grown up as a Catholic in Detroit during the 1960s and turned atheist at thirteen only to discover the Bible after having attended a Christian rock concert. He found faith after a night reading the New Testament and soon found himself among a group of born-again Christians. 

“This group was my substitute family throughout high school in the early 70's. I spent most nights with them, at prayer meetings, or guitar practice, or just sitting around on the shag carpeting of their living rooms, Bibles open on our laps. Ours was a rolling theological seminar devoted to interpreting the biblical message, and an open psychotherapy session where we helped each other adjust to being born again.” 

(Getting Religion, Mark Lilla, New York Times, Sunday Magazine, September 18, 2005) 

He described how the Bible became his only path at age fourteen. 

“Then I discovered the strange new world of the Bible. That discovery might have led me to other books, but there was no one to guide me onto that path. So the Bible became my only portal into the realm of ideas — ideas about morality, justice, cosmology, psychology, eschatology, mortality. The Bible posed all the important questions, questions that were vaguely forming in my adolescent mind, but that now took on shape and contour. And, of course, it answered those questions.” (ibid) 

For us young revolutionaries The Capital was our Bible and Mao’s Little Red Book our Small Catechism. We too sat around in circles with the books that explained everything in our laps. Lilla wrote that “all teenagers are dogmatists; a teenager with a Bible is simply a more intense teenager” and related how he would wander around in his school with a Bible at the ready, looking for sin and spiritual degeneracy, thinking that he did his victims a favor. I used to walk around with Mao’s Little Red Book at the ready, looking for bourgeois ideas.

Over time our passions ossified around Mao’s version of Marxism-Leninism. It became our canon and Beijing became our Jerusalem, just as Mecca, Paris, Washington, and Moscow had been to earlier generations. 

It was relatively easy to keep the faith when Mao was alive. He was like a living God who hadn’t hesitated to send a flood against the party he had founded, but ten years into the Cultural Revolution, we began to receive conflicting signals from the Middle Kingdom and Mao’s meeting with Nixon was followed by the Theory of the Three Worlds, which replaced the revolutionary class struggle with an international alliance against the two superpowers. Reactionaries and brutal dictators were now seen as allied in the struggle against the Soviet social imperialism. And when Deng Xiaoping had established himself as China’s leader a year after Mao’s death, the course shifted even more radically. China’s peasants were allowed to sell their surplus on free markets and foreign companies were welcomed to Special Economic Zones.

And as if that was not enough, Vietnam invaded Kampuchea at the end of 1978 and installed a puppet regime which led China to invade Vietnam in February 1979. Deng said that China wanted to “teach Vietnam a lesson.”

We didn’t immediately understand it, but it was the beginning of the end of Maoism. At first, we tried to patch-up our broken faith, but every time we thought we had the pieces right, the puzzle fell apart again. Everything was now open to debate. We had preached that wars were caused by capitalism and imperialism, but how could you then explain what was happening in IndoChina? And if Mao’s Cultural Revolution had not been able to prevent the corruption of socialism — was there any guarantee at all? We were convinced that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a democracy for the people and a temporary dictatorship over the former oppressors, but had not the people been oppressed during the Cultural Revolution? 

To a seventeen-year-old it was easy to live for the revolution. It felt meaningful to attend meetings, sell magazines, and lead study circles. The tiredness you felt when you came home from a long work session was not the tiredness of a wage slave, but the proud tiredness of a fighter. What others took as unselfish sacrifices was for the believer a pleasant duty. But when doubt set in, the many meetings and heavy tasks began to feel like sacrifices, colliding with other interests. 

“…the spell that transformed costs into benefits will be broken and the more usual kind of cost accounting will reassert itself. … As a result, the citizen will feel that he has vastly and unnecessarily overextended himself into the public domain and that a ruthless cutting down is in order.” 

(Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements, 1982, p 126) 

We had however invested so much in the revolutionary struggle that our first reaction was to persist and push harder than ever. And if a comrade slacked, the rest of us would step in. We read and debated even more in search of the correct analysis of the situation and the right path forward. We spent almost all our time at meetings and campaigns, why we didn’t see much of our families, friends or partners. 

A decennium had passed since 1968, and the revolution we had dreamt of never came. The cultural revolutions and protest movements of the 1960s had been followed by a reaction that gave us Reagan and Thatcher. 

Instead of saving the world, it was now about investing in yourself. 

 We tried to hold on to our faith as long as possible, but in the end you could not escape reality.

    Some switched side and became conservative, many became social democrats, while others tried to deal with their disappointment. Yet others came to wrestle with understanding what had happened. 

Posters in Stockholm. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1969.