Calvary Chapel started in Southern California in the 1960s. From the beginning, the aesthetic was laid-back, casual, and welcoming--the type of place barefoot hippies and wet-haired surfers could find a church home. But below the surface a militant conservative theology and politics took shape. Fast forward half a century and Calvary Chapel is now a nation-wide network that is at the forefront of shaping the contemporary culture wars. By offering a ready-made circuit for Christian nationalist speakers like Charlie Kirk and Tony Perkins, it has become the vanguard of Christian nationalism at the denominational level.
Carly Fox, who grew up in Calvary Chapel churches and now runs "Calvary Chapel Watch," stops by to discuss it all with Brad.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I'm faculty at the University of San Francisco and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center.
I want to welcome a special guest, someone who I've gotten to know over the last couple months and consider a friend and colleague, and that is Carly Fox.
And so, Carly, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks so much for having me, Brad.
So Carly is an educator here in the Bay Area, is somebody who grew up, as we're going to talk about, in Calvary Chapel churches and in and around the Calvary Chapel denomination in California, is somebody who now runs Calvary Chapel Watch on Instagram, which some of you may be familiar with.
And in my mind, as kind of a go-to person when it comes to Calvary Chapel, I was just telling Carly that when I think of events happening in the Calvary Chapel denomination or what's going on in certain churches or certain places, I think of Carly as like, okay, I'm going to send Carly an email or see if I can't figure out what's happening from her.
With all that said, we're here today to talk about Calvary Chapel, and I think some of y'all out there will be kind of familiar with it, but some of y'all probably don't understand just how Calvary Chapel has become the vanguard of Christian nationalism across the country and at a denominational level.
One of the things, Carly, that we talk about a lot on this show is that Christian nationalism is not necessarily a matter of involvement at a local church, that there's many Christian nationalists who haven't been to church in years Perhaps haven't read the Bible in years and yet are what would be considered a Christian nationalist on Perry and Whitehead's survey or other metrics.
However, that doesn't mean there aren't denominations that don't have systematic efforts to instill a Christian nationalist vision across our country.
And Calvary Chapel, in my mind, is kind of the vanguard of that in the current moment.
And so, we're here to sort of talk about how that happened, where Calvary Chapel came from, and what has sort of led them to become the leader of this kind of movement at a denominational level.
So, with all of that said, could we just start with the history of Calvary Chapel?
You and I are both Californians.
I actually grew up going to a Calvary Chapel Bible study on Thursday nights.
I'm familiar with a lot of the history, but I know folks out there may not be.
So, where did Calvary Chapel come from?
Yeah, so Calvary Chapel comes out of a broader movement that's sometimes referred to as the Jesus Movement or Jesus Freak Movement.
These were essentially kind of hippies, Southern California hippies, and this is in the context of the larger kind of counterculture movement of the late 60s and 70s.
The first Calvary Chapel was founded by a man named Chuck Smith.
That is a name that, if you're around Calvary Chapels at all, you will hear a lot about.
It's a relatively new denomination, right, coming out of the 60s, so many of the pastors at Calvary Chapel churches today are sort of direct descendants from Chuck Smith.
So, you know, when I was growing up, I remember the pastor at my local Calvary Chapel talking about When I would talk to Chuck Smith or when I was in Bible college with Chuck Smith.
So he only really recently passed away.
His wife Kay, just in the last few years, I think, passed away.
So he is still very much, his spirit is still very much alive, in a sense, in the Calvary Chapel network.
He himself wasn't a hippie.
He was this really kind of, you know, buttoned up middle upper class guy in Southern California.
And I believe his daughter had a boyfriend who was maybe part of the hippie scene.
And he was, you know, in the height of the 60s in Southern California, he would walk by a lot of hippies on the streets.
And I think there's a lot of stories of him kind of, you know, calling them like these dirty hippies.
He didn't initially want to do outreach to them.
I think along with his wife and perhaps his daughter, he ended up attracting a lot of hippies to his church.
The other part of Calvary Chapel history that I'm really fascinated by, that I think is sometimes kind of written out of the story, is a guy named Lonnie Frisbee, who was this kind of itinerant, very charismatic hippie preacher Who started, I think he moved from San Francisco down to what was going on in Cosa Mesa down in Southern California at Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel.
And he was, by all accounts, really had a gift, drew people in.
And so it's my understanding that to a large extent, he is very responsible for making Calvary Chapel what it became and popularizing it.
The really sad part about Lonnie Frisbee's life is he later died of AIDS.
He was a closeted gay man, so queer man.
And, you know, kind of thinking as a historian, I hesitate to, in our modern moment, label someone who I'm not sure exactly how they would have seen themselves.
He did have relationships with men and did die of AIDS.
I don't know exactly how he would have seen his identity.
I imagine like a lot of other Given the kind of ways that he would have understood gender and sexuality, perhaps from people like Chuck Smith, I imagine he may have talked about it as, these are my struggles, right?
These are my sins.
So we don't know.
Perhaps if he was in a different context that was queer affirming, that queer identity would have been more embraced.
But I think to a large extent, especially since he later died of AIDS, He has primarily been written out of Calvary Chapel history.
So when I was growing up, I never ever heard the name Lonnie Frisbee, but I did hear the name Chuck Smith quite a bit.
So that's kind of the larger history.
It comes out of this Jesus Freak Movement in the 60s.
If folks have heard of like the Vineyard Movement, that also is kind of an extension of the Calvary Chapel Movement.
And it really is influential on this kind of larger cultural impact that the Jesus movement is having.
So in kind of like coffee shops and the Christian music scene.
I think this is a really big part of the 1960s counterculture that gets overlooked, right?
So I teach U.S.
History at a high school and in every textbook there's a section on On, like, kind of liberal hippies of the day, the love and free sex movement, and other social movements of the day.
But I never really see people talk about how there was this segment of hippie Christians that were also part of the counterculture in the 60s.
And to a large extent, they then grow into kind of what we think of as this mainstream white evangelical movement today.
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