I can't recall much of what I did after the first driver who picked me up in Los Angeles dropped me off next to a beach in Orange County in the early evening before sunset, where I figured I would sleep for the night before hitching another ride eastward after the sun reappeared the next day. But what I still recall is that, within a short time, a young white guy in his late teens or early 20's approached me and began chatting with me in a friendly way, as we both sat on the beach sand. To my surprise, once he realized I didn't have a place to stay for the night in that particular Orange County town and planned to to stay on the beach for the night, he invited me to stay for the night in the house where he lived with other "people like us;" rather than spending it on the beach "where the local cops might kick you off the beach or arrest you for loitering if they notice you," before I hitched a ride out of the town the next morning.
Since the young guy seemed cool and friendly, I decided to accept his generous offer. And as the sun was setting, we walked together for a few blocks from the beach to where the house that he lived in was located. Once in the house, I was invited to put my knapsack down in the living room and join two other young white guys and an older white man, who looked to be in his early 30's, for a spaghetti dinner. After dinner, however, the older guy began to start talking religion with me, and I realized that the house was being used as a recruitment place for some kind of "born-again Christian" or "children of God"-type sect, that especially hoped to recruit runaway teenagers and hippie street people in their late teens or in their 20's.
Once the liberal ideology that the U.S. corporate mass media/tv and the U.S. public, private or prep school system pushed into the brains of post-1945-born baby-boomers no longer seemed to explain accurately why U.S. society and the world in the late 1960's and early 1970's seemed fucked-up morally and enslaving personally to most baby-boomers in their late teens and 20's, large numbers of U.S. young people in the 1970's seemed to look again for religious explanations for the state of the world; and for religion-related ways to obtain personal freedom, personal and collective salvation and personal fulfillment. And the same corporate mass media that had publicized New Left political activism in the late 1960's, seemed to start providing less daily tv time news coverage to Black Liberation Movement political activists and white New Left political activists and more mass media publicity and promotion to less politically threatening religious groups, sects, or cults in the 1970's.
Hence, when the apparently politically burn-out, former New Left SDS activist and U.S. anti-war movement activist (who had been a member of the Chicago 8 Conspiracy trial defendants charged with conspiring to cross state lines to incite a riot in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention), Rennie Davis, joined an Eastern religious group like Divine Light Mission in the 1970's, a lot of mass media publicity was given to his conversion from being a New Left anti-war politico to now being a religious cult member.
Within the religious cult house in southern California that I now started to feel trapped in for the night while on the road, the older white guy, who seemed to be the manager of the religious cult members who lived in the house (who seemed to be mostly runaway white male youth in their late teens or early 20's) debated with me for a few hours after dinner, before it came time to go to sleep. After I responded to his attempts to get me to promise to "accept Jesus Christ as the savior," with some of my political arguments that explained why having religious debates related to whether Jesus actually existed or not "wasn't my thing" and didn't interest me, he still continued to express concern that I would "end up in hell" unless I accepted Jesus Christ and religion. And after everybody in the house had awoken the next morning and I ate breakfast with the cult members, the older guy declared that he would not let me leave the house and go back on the road again, unless I first swore that I now "accepted Jesus Christ as my savior" and now believed in the religious views he had been trying to push on me.
Feeling now that I might end up now being held a hostage in the house by the religious cult members, unless I could convince them that the older guy had really converted me by his religious arguments and preaching to me, I then felt I had to start quickly pretending that, after a night's sleep, I now "accepted Jesus Christ as my savior," as I stood next to the cult members in a circle in the the living room, while the older guy who managed the cult members in the house asked: "And do you now, Bob, believe in Jesus Christ?"
"I do believe in Jesus Christ," I replied piously with as much religious fervor as I could then fake.
"Then let us pray that when Bob resumes his journey, Jesus Christ, our savior, will watch over him until he reaches the end of his journey," the older, culturally straight-looking white guy then said, while closing his eyes and praying with us for about a minute more.
Once the minute of praying had ended, the cult manager of the house no longer seemed interested in keeping me hostage in his house. So I then quickly picked up my large knapsack, thanked everybody for their hospitality and for helping me "see the truth of Jesus" and hurried out of house to a spot near the a road that eventually connected to an interstate highway east, stuck out my finger and waited util I was picked up by another culturally-straight-looking white guy with short hair and glasses, who looked like he was in his mid-to-late 30's.
