Many young people heard the call to "Drop out of her, my children, and be ye separate!" back in the 60s, and walked off into the wilderness of America without knowing wither they went, armed with little more than a backpack and a guitar, proclaiming a spiritual as well as an ecological opportunity known as the Age of Aquarius.

They migrated out to the peripheries, to such places as Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury, where they came under enormous isolation and stress from the general population for practicing "free love" -- a form of sexual exclusivity based, oddly enough, on promiscuity. " Are you experienced?" was the password of the counterculture.

Some of them were reckless enough to drop acid with a stranger from the street, and woke up the next morning hippies and peaceniks themselves, changed in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye.

In my case, the young woman had conceived in her own mind what kind of man she wanted -- a peaceful one; and I found myself trying to be that kind of man with little or no "experience," and was born (kicking and screaming, to be sure!) into the new age.

The first thing I saw with my newly opened eyes was that one simply cannot be experienced in the Hendrixian sense and a fundamentalist Christian at the same time. The two are mutually exclusive, like light and darkness; good and evil; matter and antimatter. Being born again spiritually is inextricably intertwined with the way we are born again biologically. The two spiral around one another like a double-helix, they complement one another like right and left hemispheres -- the "Tree of Knowledge"; the "Tree of Life."

Unless one cultivates both, one is "incomplete." And so the real question in this "great cultural battle for the soul of America," is therefore not how powerful is fundamentalist Christianity; but rather, how powerful is the lack of experience.

Jimmy Swaggart, for example, once boasted that "The liberal news media in this country don't like me because I say this Book I now hold in my hand is the Constitution of these United States of America!" But in the end it was neither the liberal news media nor their opinion as to the true nature and location of the Constitution that brought Jimmy Swaggart down. It was a simple, uneducated, wholly apolitical prostitute from the streets of New Orleans, who had seen him on TV in her motel room one Sunday morning (attracted, no doubt, by one of his many tirades against prostitutes), and recognized the one who had brought all those people on their knees before "Him" now coming on his knees before her -- "coming with his fan in his hand," as it were, his "horn of honor high and lifted up!"

When a reporter asked her (during her fifteen minutes of fame) what she did when she saw who it was, the young woman shot back, "I laughed!" as if to say "of course!" In that one bright and shining moment, she had understood more about God's judgment than any fundamentalist Christian ever could, and knew (if she didn't already) that when it comes right down to it, fundamentalist Christianity is nothing but a piss-poor substitute for a shit-poor sex life.