re: #98 freetoken

The west-coast Jesus-hippy crowd, that eventually became the likes of Calvary Chapel, etc., are quite into escapist fantasies.

But, I will note here, America has always been ripe pickings for religious escapism and strange ideas.

Take Mormonism, for example.

Quite true but ideas like the secret tunnel network and mind control beams have a definite drug culture tinge to them. This is especially so in the latter case because it originates in actual CIA and military experiments in the 50s and 60s. The conspiracy part is that this technology was developed and deployed to an extent far beyond what is reasonably plausible. I first heard of both these CTs from counterculture oriented Evangelicals (eg “Jesus Freaks) way back in the mid 70s. At the time this was in the process of combining with the Charismatic movement, which had originated among very conservative mainstream Evangelicals in the early 60s, and which was actually just a middle class version of Pentecostal revivalism. With their open belief in magic, the Charismatics provided fertile ground for these imported counterculture ideas (another example of “crank magnetism”).
I first heard of Kenneth Copeland in about 1978, when a breathlessly excited Charismatic told me that Copeland’s ideas were so sensational and fantastic that they could not be shared with the general public. He implied that there was a government effort to suppress Copeland. That line of Evangelical conspiracism did not survive the election of Reagan, the Russians had not thought of the Deep State yet, but it remained latent, like a virus spore, and was revived during the Clinton Administration.