Time For a New Counterculture

A new resistance is the need of the hour:

As many of you know, I was once heavily involved in the counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s. I was into everything that was happening back then: the drugs, the rock music, the protests, the rage against the machine, the eastern religions and new age thought, the hard left politics, and the fomenting of revolution.

Thankfully all that came to an end when I became a Christian in mid-1971. For those wanting all the juicy details, I recount that period of my life in a four-part article: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2019/10/26/the-dynamics-of-spiritual-life/

It was good for me that my wild child days came to an end since some of my young friends had already died of drug overdoses or suicide. I could easily have lost my life in the same way back then as a lost teenager. So I always marvel at God’s grace in getting me through those three or four hardcore years.

And I have often said that the whole Woodstock era was based on groundless utopianism. Yes, we wanted to see a better world, but we had no proper foundation on which to build it. So I often speak of the 60s as being a case of seeking to build a house on sinking sand, and not on the rock, which is Christ (see Matthew 7:24-27).

Having said all this, there is still a place for a right kind of rebellion – a right sort of counterculture. Christians have always been at odds with the world, but as the West especially gets increasingly post-Christian and even anti-Christian, then we most certainly need to stand against the surrounding culture.

And one volume I have been highlighting of late looks at all this in some detail. See my previous two pieces on the important new book by Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine:

https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/01/15/raging-against-the-machine/

https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/01/16/the-machine-ai-and-transhumanism/

In the book’s closing chapter, he looks at the old counterculture and the need for a new and better one – that is a thoroughly Christian one. He says this:

Once, there was a counter-culture. Back in the sixties, as the last of the old world crumbled, the marginal energies that had been building for nearly a century exploded into a revolution that still shapes us. The Man, the system, became the enemy. Strictures, limits, boundaries, norms, old ways: all would go. Free love, wild music, the end of the family, the end of all the old repressions and secrets and lies. The eclipse of religion by ‘spirituality’. The New Age. Aquarius rising. We had been hemmed in for too long.

 

People of my generation, the children of the boomers, grew up in the wake of this. We never got to experience Haight-Ashbury or Swinging London, but we got to see the backwash: the broken homes, the new drug culture, the abortions, the pop charts, the mockery of all authority, the easy sex and booze, the loosening of the rules, the strange sense that anything was permitted and yet nothing was centred or lasting. The counter-culture had, in its own way, taken aim at the Machine, at Mammon, at the military-industrial complex, but it had stood on the ground of extreme personal liberation, and that ground turned out to be too swampy to hold. It took two decades for the hippies to become yuppies; three for the simple-lifers to become Silicon Valley billionaires; four for ‘imagine there’s no countries’ to become the policy of the WEF and the WTO. Now everything is hanging out everywhere. The counter-culture has become the culture, and everyone is having a bad trip, man.

 

What would a new counter-culture look like?

 

I suppose it would have to avoid making the same mistakes. So it would not reject the past; it would not try to blank-slate its way towards some notional utopia. It would remember that every time this has been tried it has simply broken more of our bounds, uprooted us further and greased the path of the Machine. Instead, a new counter-culture would have to be rooted in the eternal things. It would need its feet on the ground and its face pointed to the Dreamtime…

He offers some words of hope in this regard:

Once, in a dark age a very long time ago, the Irish built monasteries. As the pagan armies flooded through the West, burning books and people, slaughtering priests and kidnapping villagers, the monks kept the manuscripts safe, and the teachings. Then, later, they emptied themselves and went out to the margins, to offer up those teachings to the barbarian kings. It was a ridiculous idea. As ridiculous as sending two halflings to throw a ring into a volcano under the nose of the dark lord. It was madness. But it worked.

 

Sometimes the ridiculous ideas are the only ones worth having.

 

I have come to the end now, and here is what I think: that the age of the Machine is not after all a hopeless time. Actually, it is the time we were born for. We can’t leave it, so we have to fully inhabit it. We have to understand it, challenge it, resist it, subvert it, walk through it on towards something better. If we can see what it is, we have a duty to speak the words to those who do not yet see, all the while struggling to remain human.

And he speaks how we have a need for 4 Ps:

People, place, prayer, the past. Human community, roots in nature, connection to God, memories passed down and on. These are the eternal things. We could form hedge schools to teach them. We could live them in any way we can. We could build communities. We could write books. We could plant trees. We could do anything, really. None of it will ‘solve’ all of the world’s problems, or all of ours. We are still going to die; and so, one day, is the Machine. But what will we do in the meantime? What will we do amidst the rise of the robots, amidst the ascendancy of all these tiny, laughable, tyrannical dreams?

What we do as believers in this age of the Machine is really up to us – and to what our Lord directs us to do. But it is indeed time to awaken from our slumber and join the resistance. A new and better counterculture is the way ahead for us.

Who will join me?

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