The Catholic Counterculture of the Sixties

It is striking how, although he almost single-handedly invented the 60s counterculture, which has now become the dominant culture, it has turned out to be something very different from what Jack Kerouac wanted or believed.


Some quotes and observations from his biographer:

"politics was not a major interest for any of them [the Beats], although they agreed on a vaguely anarchistic disdain for bureaucracy and the welfare state, a reactionary working-class perspective…"

"… [Kerouac] told a friend that rational psychotherapy was for him only another superstition, and he preferred the richer, deeper, sad peasant mysticism of Quebec Catholics."

He "disliked … the repetitious analysis of sex that seemed to preoccupy everyone."

"The city intellectuals of the world were divorced from the folk body blood of the land, were just rootless fools." – quoted.

He "revered the family…wanted to expand the nucleus, return to the traditional extended family…"

"As far as he was concerned, society was insane, an evil mistake."

Kerouac: "scientific psychology … [has] put a mechanism in the place of an organism."

Kerouac supported Taft in 1952. Eisenhower was too far to the left for him. In 1956, he supported Eisenhower for reelection against Stevenson.

"I'm a messenger from heaven."

Kerouac claimed the Beats were "an essentially religious movement … rooted in the Gothic style."

Later, he describes himself as a "lay Jesuit."

Asked to explain the phenomenon of being "beat," he cited Jesus's claim that, "to see the kingdom of heaven you must lose yourself."

Again, he said being "Beat" involved "absolute belief in a Divinity of Rapture." His desire in writing was to have "God … show me His face."

In another essay he defined "Beat" as believing "in beatitude, and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to it."

He wrote poems for the Catholic church magazine Jubilee. When he took up painting, "all of his subjects were Roman Catholic, most often the newly anointed Pope John, whom he loved."

“All I write about is Jesus.”

His diaries are filled with prayers (some for humility) and sketches of the crucified Christ.

According to Kerouac, On the Road
“...was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about.”
“Kerouac was wrongly accused of championing the fornication, adultery, car stealing, illegal drugs, and other sundry sins and vices he wrote about so matter-of-factly. It was an understandable mistake.”
- Culture Wars magazine - http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/1999/kerouac.html
Kerouac’s great virtue was forgiveness, compassion, mercy, charity.

The other beats are not all that different. Allen Ginsberg is probably the one who would have been happiest with the way the culture interpreted them. But William S. Burroughs was a right-wing gun lover.

Burroughs called liberalism "a sniveling, mealy-mouthed tyranny of bureaucrats, social workers, psychiatrists, and union officials." He considered the US a police state similar to that in the Soviet Union.

Burroughs, though homosexual, called homosexuality "a horrible sickness."


Left-wing critics of the day generally hated both Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg . The academic establishment hated them and tried to censor them. The one cultural sector that was welcoming from the beginning—and I think this is significant--was the Catholic Church.

Essentially, from the beginning, the counterculture was a Catholic movement. To Kerouac, this was absolutely explicit. But just look at the major figures who were from a culturally Catholic background. To being with, almost all of the original Beat poets:

Jack Kerouac
Gregory Corso
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Michael McClure
Phil Whalen
Neal Cassady

And so too these other figures generally identified with the counterculture of the sixties:

Marshall McLuhan
Timothy Leary
Jerry Garcia
John Lennon
Paul McCartney
Carlos Castenada
Frank Zappa

It is terribly ironic that the counterculture so quickly turned hostile to the Catholic Church. The devil quickly turns things to his ends.