Youth and Religion in the Context of the Counterculture 〔1〕

A perplexing and thought-provoking aspect of religion in society concerns the circumstances and vicissitudes of its change-change of both religion and society-which usually results in the emergence of new religious groups.Recently, a particularly strong thrust of social and religious fermentation has been witnessed during the 1960s in the United States of America, and to a lesser degree, in the other advanced industrial societies.The movement as a whole has been dubbed the counterculture.Because the new movement found its most fertile soil in the age bracket of youthful persons, I would like to discuss in this paper the relationship of youth and religion in the context of the counterculture.In order to do so, several aspects of the counterculture have to be touched upon.Any analysis ideally calls for a total clarification of the phenomenon concerned.This expectation arises from, among other things, the evident fact that new social phenomena occur within the given context of a certain society, which, seen a priori, should and can be explained by the various factors at work within the given context.However, this expectation is not easily fulfilled, because the social and cultural dynamics, or the convergence of the various factors, either are still unknown, or are becoming more and more complex in modern, pluralistic societies.These dynamics probably have to be understood as a dialectical process that produces an ever-changing situation the moments of which cannot be isolated without distorting the phenomena.Any explanation of such a process will be approximate at best, not only, for example, because of the shortness of the time perspective, or because of the paucity of the data gathered, as C. Y. Glock has suggested," but because of the sheer complexity and fluidity of the phenomena.Even an enumeration and a mere description of the facts that have constituted the counterculture seems to be quite difficult, because these facts are changing situations rather than individual facts.The statement, then, that there tends to be considerable disagreement concerning the causes of new religious movements comes as no surprise.2)The limited objective of this paper will be to review some of the literature on the subject and to inquire further into the role of religion in the counterculture and into the differential relationship of youth and the new religious movements : why were some