Crossroads

To readers who were not alive during the 1970s, some of the intersections between Christianity and counterculture featured in Crossroads might be surprising. To many, the very word “counterculture” signals a spirit of rebellion that is antithetical to almost all institutions, including organized religion. Eastern religions with less rigid doctrinal proscriptions gained more traction at the time, as did activities traditionally frowned upon by Christianity, like recreational drugs and forms of sex outside monogamous, married, heterosexual couples. Moreover, in the contemporary era, the news media often highlights one particular form of American Christianity: white evangelicalism, with its institutional ties to political conservatism.

However, the counterculture movement of the 1970s made room for a wide range of faith expression, including Christianity. The Crossroads meetings that the Hildebrandt children attend look very different than the standard white evangelicalism that now dominates representations of Christianity in the news and entertainment media. Crossroads leader Rick Ambrose does not spend meetings teaching the teens specific Bible stories or dissecting biblical passages. Rather, he tries to impart the values Jesus embodied and help the teens better live out those values in their lives. He encourages empathy, honesty, and self-examination. The group confronts those who have done wrong firmly but with love, not unlike in an intervention; the youths even hold an actual intervention for Perry at one point. They welcome those considered “uncool” at high school with open arms. Most of the teens who attend find it easy to square their occasional drinking or marijuana smoking with the group’s ethos; while such activities are banned on church property, Rick does not spend time lecturing about them at meetings. He only intervenes with Perry, whose peers report he has developed a serious addiction. The fact that such a group could fit into the counterculture is best exemplified by Tanner Evans, one of the coolest kids in New Prospect. Tanner has plenty of friends, boyish good looks, and membership in a local band; when he starts attending Crossroads and grants it his stamp of approval, New Prospect’s teens can rest assured that Christianity must, on some level, be cool.

While Crossroads differs from many forms of contemporary white evangelicalism, it maintains the “white” part. The church is in a white suburb, and the group is attended by all white teens—hence, the reason for the annual spring trip to Arizona where the group completes manual labor on a Navajo reservation, an arrangement Russ has worked out with his Navajo acquaintance, Keith Durochie. While trips like these—often referred to as “mission trips” and often involving international travel to developing nations—have long been popular with white American churches, they have often come under criticism. Critics describe such mission trips as promoting band-aid solutions to large systemic problems just to make white Westerners feel they have been helpful. Franzen makes clear that the annual Crossroads trip is guilty of this, as the Navajo reservation is plagued with problems of poverty that the annual arrival of white teens does nothing to address. Despite its strong countercultural influence, this is the way in which Crossroads bears most resemblance to dominant forms of white evangelicalism.

In examining the intersection between American counterculture and Christianity, Franzen asks where the line exists between a counterculture-infused Christianity and a content-less Christianity. In other words, at what point does Christianity cease being a religion and start being just a mood, an ambiance, or even a therapy substitute. Rick worries the group is approaching this line, as he confides to Becky. When Laura Dobrinsky leads the coup against Russ, her main argument is that she dislikes when Russ prays. The reader later learns her friend, Sally Perkins, has a more personal complaint against Russ, but Laura and the group she marshals are overtly annoyed when Russ brings up the Bible or prayer. Rick has a difficult road ahead; he must establish whether Crossroads will be a group of countercultural teens who dabble in Christianity, or a Christian group that borrows from the ethos of counterculture.