issues with social justice concerns and critiques of capitalism and the state.
THE NEW ANARCHISM IN PRACTICE
In addition to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and the 2011 Occupy movement, Food Not Bombs and street medics are two examples of anarchist networks that have played a role at radical environmentalist protests and gatherings. Several activists I interviewed were involved with Food Not Bombs, an anarchist organization that helped organize the logistics of the Seattle protests.111 Since 1980 when it was founded by anarchists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Food Not Bombs has spread across the United States, feeding homeless people and protesters with vegan food from dumpsters and food banks. A mainstay at Occupy and other protests as well as some Earth First! gatherings, Food Not Bombs also helped arrange food for displaced people after Hurricane Katrina.112 During Occupy Wall Street, Food Not Bombs, along with other anarchist mutual aid organizations, provided support for protesters. The Food Not Bombs Boston chapter, for example, served hot meals every day at the Occupy Boston encampment.113
Some activists became involved with radical environmentalism and animal rights activism through Food Not Bombs and other anarchist projects. In 2014 I spoke with Rabbit, an activist and Earth First! Journal editor, about his experience working with Food Not Bombs. Rabbit grew up in Los Angeles and was active in animal rights protests after graduating from high school. He was a part-time activist at first, what he called a “weekend warrior,” joining protests against Huntingdon Life Sciences. While in college at California State University, Long Beach, he volunteered with Food Not Bombs for four years. It was not until this period of his life that Rabbit came to a realization: “It shouldn’t have taken me twenty-three years to realize that if there’s food in a dumpster and there’s hungry people, that I can give it to them, but because of the way I was raised in society, it took me that long to realize.” As well as being involved with Food Not Bombs, Occupy, and animal rights demonstrations, Rabbit spent a year working on homesteads and organic farms, and visited the Tar Sands Blockade in Texas. After college, he volunteered as a canvasser and fundraiser for Greenpeace following the 2010 Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill.114 Like other activists, he traveled through these networks of affiliation, many of which were shaped by anarchism, before he became involved with Earth First!
Food Not Bombs is one of many direct links between radical environmental/animal rights activism and the Occupy movement. Like a number of young activists I met, Rabbit also credits Occupy with having a significant influence on his and others’ radicalism: “It got a lot of people off their asses, many people who had never protested. Since then I’ve done nothing but activism and know so many people for whom that is the way it is.” For Rabbit, Occupy was an “awesome way for people to learn skills: how to march, how to chant. I learned how to break into foreclosed homes and open up squats.” Aaron, another Earth First! activist previously involved with Occupy, had worked on the 2008 Obama campaign as a teenager. He was disillusioned by what he saw as “Obama selling out,” which led him to radicalism. Although he was in college, he would go to class during the day and then spend the night with the Occupy encampment at a park in his Midwestern college town. After his time with Occupy, Aaron became active in Earth First! and involved with the 2012 Tar Sands Blockade in Texas.115
In a similar fashion to Food Not Bombs volunteers, anarchist street medics serve protests like those of the Occupy movement and Earth First!, as well as helping in disaster-stricken areas. They also have links to earlier streams of radicalism. Street medics originated in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and were also involved with the American Indian Movement in the 1970s.116 Many of the early twenty-first-century street medic collectives formed to meet a need felt during the 1999 Seattle protests.117 Some medics have formal medical training and are nurses, physicians, or EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) but others are lay people who had been through street medic training. Street medics ran a training I participated in at the Wild Roots, Feral Futures gathering, and they staffed the medic tent and supported a protest action at an Earth First! Rendezvous I attended. But they also traveled to New Orleans to volunteer their services after Hurricane Katrina and to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Others worked in free community clinics in large U.S. cities. In 2015, some street medic collectives supported antiracism protests in Ferguson and St. Louis, Missouri.118 Activists circulate through these various anarchist sites of learning and practice, sharing information and connecting each other to like-minded communities.
In all of these examples—Food Not Bombs, street medics, Occupy, Seattle—anarchism serves as a worldview that allows radical activists to create meaning out of their lives by linking activist practices to a broader movement for social and political change. Environmental activism in the late twentieth century was shaped by the confluence of anarchism and deep ecology just as animal rights was shaped by anarchism and critiques of anthropocentrism. But religious and spiritual movements also played a part, even while most anarchists were suspicious of institutional religious expressions and particularly of Christianity.
YOUTH MOVEMENTS AND AMERICAN RELIGION
SINCE THE 1960S
So how might we situate religion within this story of youth-led direct action movements since the 1960s? Because adolescents are no longer children but not yet adults, their religious commitments are usually not fully formed, which allows them to be open to new ways of understanding the world. Moreover, young people feature prominently in a number of developments on the post–World War II American religious landscape, such as the growth of Asian religions, new religious movements, evangelicalism, and the rising ranks of the religiously unaffiliated at the beginning of the twenty-first century.119
Like many new religions, animal rights and environmental organizations sometimes actively court young people, as PETA does with its “PETA 2,” targeted at teenagers and billed as “the largest animal rights group in the world.”120 Late twentieth-century animal rights activist Henry Spira urged his fellow activists to reach out to the young: “Our Coalition must connect with young people while they are still sorting out their values.”121 Conversion to new religions as well as to political and social movements like animal rights typically occurs during teenage and college years. One possible reason for this may be because teenagers are able to think abstractly and multidimensionally, calling into question received truths. However, because of “the yielding of the certainty of childhood,” they are not yet seen as fully formed adults.122 They are perceived as both vulnerable and potentially powerful because of their transitional status, unpredictable as they leave childhood behind and decide who they want to be, not necessarily following the dictates of their parents or other adults.123
Because of this liminal position of being both powerful and vulnerable, young Americans have been seen as innocents at risk and as potential converts in the context of new religious phenomena. Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards, for instance, was particularly concerned about the salvation of young adults. During revivals of the Great Awakening, the majority of conversions were young men and women, a fourth of them in their teens.124 Moreover, three out of four converts in nineteenth-century evangelical revivals were young women.125
In the 1970s, young adults were again imagined as both spiritually powerful and defenseless, sometimes posing a threat to other youth and to social stability. During the 1960s and 1970s, transplanted Asian religions and new religious movements gained popularity among a generation of youth open to spiritual experimentation. However, youth interest in these new religions was countered by the anticult movement of the 1970s.126 Young converts were seen by many American adults, often including their parents, as victims of so-called cults, such as new religions like Krishna Consciousness, the Unification Church, and contemporary Paganism.
For new religions like contemporary Paganism, an umbrella terms that includes Witches and Druids, youth interest was a boon. While teenage religious experimentation was magical for the youth who found it, these occult traditions were also the target of
