The God that died: The counterculture and the rise of the God of Love in the 1960s American Protestant church

This dissertation examines the role of the mainline Protestant church in the American counterculture from 1948 through 1974. Comparing three consecutive periods of time, 1950-1963, 1964-1969, and 1970-1974, demonstrates significant shifts in religious culture that both informed and responded to the sixties counterculture. This dissertation focuses on the published sermons of prominent Liberal and Evangelical Protestant pastors from the post-war period through the countercultural era. Pastors function as both cultural mediator and cultural progenitor. In those roles some pastors took on a generative role for countercultural religious reforms. Sermons were a major form of cultural transmission of that theological reformation, which was accomplished through countercultural critiques of post-war American culture. Despite the loss of Protestant hegemony and the bifurcation along political rather than religious lines, Protestant churches influenced the counterculture and were themselves influenced by it. The epicenter of this reformation was the popularization of the Death of God theologians in the mid-sixties. This marked a transition from post-war liberal theology and opened the door for a new theological framework centering on a God of Love, which transformed both the liberal and Evangelical churches through countercultural reforms.