I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou has tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars . . .
Revelation, 2:2
LATE IN 1978, SO THE STORY GOES, GOD FOUND BOB DYLAN IN A hotel room in Tucson, Arizona. Stranger things have happened. The deity had hovered in the haunted wings from the beginnings of the singer’s career, but the relationship, ebbing and flowing, was always tricky. Sometimes in the early days it had seemed that the songs mocked belief; sometimes that only the hypocrisies of institutions were held culpable. At other moments, particularly in his apprentice work, Dylan had appeared to adopt the tropes of the old hellfire blues without a second thought, as many did. Nevertheless, to the sort of people who understood the sort of thing being said in the songs they liked best, it was unthinkable – beyond belief, in fact – that an artist without an ounce of deference in him, one who took nothing at face value, one who saw the masters of war conscripting God to their side, could simply and sincerely believe all the old Bible crap. In the late 1970s, unbelievers formed a devout majority of the artist’s fans.
By the time he got to Tucson, it made no difference. On or around 19 November, Dylan sensed ‘a presence in the room that couldn’t have been anybody but Jesus’. Then the artist felt a hand placed physically upon him: ‘I felt it. I felt it all over me.’ Then his ‘whole body’ began to tremble. The room itself seemed to move. ‘The glory of the Lord,’ as he would later testify, ‘knocked me down and picked me up.’ Describing the experience two years later, Dylan would deny that he had been ‘down and out’ or miserable at the time. Supposedly he had been ‘doing fine’ and was ‘relatively content’. But he had been hearing a lot about Jesus. Later, perhaps a month or so later, he would indicate to ‘a very close friend’ that he was ‘willing to listen’ to the Christian message.1
That’s the tale, at any rate. As with so many Dylan stories, it requires the suspension of doubt, if not of disbelief. He turned to evangelical Christianity: this much we know. But he had been making God-noises for years before that silver cross flew from the darkness to lie glittering, presumably, in the radiance of the San Diego spotlight. Desire’s ‘Oh, Sister’, if it was not Jacques Levy’s doing, was hardly the work of an artist oblivious to the deity. It was one example among many.
The sequence of supernatural events is also as neat as a movie plot: first the cross appearing amid Dylan’s gloom, then the Pauline moment in a hotel suite. The anecdote involving the little silver cruciform trinket is an interpolation, in any case, of statements gleaned from a single concert bootleg, not from any of Dylan’s statements-for-the-record of what led him to become a Christian. When he felt like talking on stage he came up with a lot of strange stuff. There are no witnesses to say that the story of the cross was any more true, or any less metaphorical, than the story of the geek.
You needn’t question that Dylan experienced something profound, meanwhile, to wonder why he never actually identified the time or place of his transformation. Tucson? Judging by his 1978 concert schedule, it’s close enough. Dylan would certainly say, and later regret saying it, that he ‘truly had a born-again experience’.2 The last tiny mystery is this, however: if Jesus made personal, room-rocking contact on a winter’s night, why was there any need for evangelical tutelage? That, nevertheless, was what Dylan sought and what he got.
*
In its edition of Saturday, 3 November 1979, the San Francisco Chronicle carried a review by Joel Selvin of the opening night of Dylan’s latest concert tour. As soon became clear, the rock critic – as certain showbiz writers were then styled – was not entirely impressed. One clue was in the headline above the piece. It read: ‘Bob Dylan’s God-Awful Gospel’. The artist was about to suffer for his new-found faith.
‘These are strange times,’ Selvin began. ‘Gas costs a dollar a gallon. Someone built a pyramid in San Francisco. And Bob Dylan converted to Christianity.’ Clearly, the last sentence was taken to be a self-explanatory illustration of how peculiar some portents can be. Dylan had come to God and God had emerged with a celebrity scalp. Amid weird events, this was the weirdest. The reviewer continued:
The ironies flew thick and fast Thursday at the Warfield Theater, where Dylan took the capacity crowd by surprise with an opening-night performance composed exclusively of his singing praises to the Lord.
He never touched the likes of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘Don’t Think Twice’, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘Just Like a Rolling Stone’ [sic] or any of the many other songs that secured his fame and allowed him to sell out each of his 14 Warfield shows far in advance, with tickets scaled sky-high at $15 and $12.50 apiece.
Having warmed up, Selvin described an audience behaving ‘with admirable restraint’. Catcalls and boos certainly ‘echoed throughout the 2,200-seat former vaudeville palace’, but for the most part the audience sat through a two-hour concert in ‘stunned silence’, granting only ‘modest, polite applause’ to Dylan’s 17 songs.
The review thereafter was quietly murderous. First Selvin noted, as an odd but interesting truth, that Dylan ‘displayed no joy in singing the gospel according to Bob’. While he gave ‘humble thanks for his own deliverance’, he was ‘short of convincing’, the writer decided, in his humility. There was no ‘beatific aura’. His hatchet well whetted, the journalist then went seriously to work. The observations were brutal, given the topic at hand, but not necessarily inaccurate.
‘Anesthetized by his new-found beliefs,’ wrote Selvin, ‘Dylan has written some of the most banal, uninspired and inventionless songs of his career for his Jesus phase.’ The lyrics were founded on ‘ridiculous rhymes and images’, the message was neither uplifting nor joyous, and Dylan was content merely to repeat that temporal existence suffers a ‘dearth of meaning’. Then Selvin headed for the big finish.
Dylan . . . once wrote songs that expressed the outrage and alienation felt by an entire generation. His desertion of those ideals in favor of fundamentalist Christian theology symbolizes the confusion and chaos that generation found in its search for answers.
Years from now, when social historians look back over these years, Dylan’s conversion will serve as a concise metaphor for the vast emptiness of the era. Dylan is no longer asking hard questions. Instead, he turned to the most prosaic source of truth on Earth, so aptly dubbed ‘opium of the masses’ by Karl Marx.
All those years from then, it is possible to look back and say that, in fact, Dylan was asking hard questions indeed. For one thing, his choice was not a metaphor for anyone’s emptiness but his own. Nevertheless, you could also say, as Selvin said, that as pieces of writing the ‘gospel’ songs from the album Slow Train Coming were simplistic, even banal. This most complicated of writers had surrendered complexity for the sake of personal salvation and composed doggerel to express his gratitude. He had elected to subordinate himself. Worse, the bounty of song he had gained in return was pitiful. He was saved, but his art, the art that counted for so much to so many, seemed all but lost. Whatever else is still believed of Dylan’s encounter with the triune God, it need not involve poetry.
Christ didn’t make a Gerard Manley Hopkins of the artist when He interceded. Jerry Wexler, the best studio producer then available, a Jewish atheist unimpressed by news of Jesus, could not alter the fact. Many who bought the album, Christian or otherwise, would disagree sincerely, but those were some dull, ill-written songs. Worst of all, they floated on fervent waves of righteous cliché. ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ could have been written by any one of a host of godly, ghastly Californian hacks trading rock and roll’s sins against future redemption at the end of the 70s when all the drugs began to wear off. That was our chief objection, back then.
You may be a construction worker working on a home
You may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome
You might own guns and you might even own tanks
You might be somebody’s landlord, you might even own banks
The Nazarene, in the Bible’s account, was alert to class, to what it means and what it does to humanity. In ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ Dylan’s late-American born-again conservatism requires the fiction that all will be as one, brick-hauler and mansion-dweller alike, when the judgement bell sounds. The distinction between the meek and the rest is abolished. The song is explicit: ‘You may be rich or poor, you may be blind or lame.’ It became the most notable feature of Slow Train Coming: no trace of human compassion, not an ounce, not even a hint. ‘Human’ had ceased to be the preoccupation of a writer who had once found an inexhaustible fascination in the chaos of mortal existence, in what we are. Selvin was right about the absence of any sign of joy in this ‘gospel singer’. As represented by the artist, being saved was not a lot of fun.
Dylan’s idea of redemption involved the least-worst choice: accept or go straight to hell. Even among the godless, who didn’t necessarily know any better, his pitiless relish at the prospect of eternal suffering for those not saved was akin to a parody of superstar heaven. Most other versions of Christianity would have been far easier for audiences to accept, even in 1979, even in a San Francisco that did not yet blink at a misused Marxian cliché in the local newspaper.
A word is missing, nevertheless, from Selvin’s famously damning (in some circles) review. The word is ‘Jewish’. Dylan might have affronted the remnant counter-culture with his ‘doses of Bible-thumping’. At the time, few paused to wonder how his discovery of a messiah, the veritable confirmation of ancient prophecies, would sit with the faith into which he had been born. It was, after all, the faith that held the worship of such a messiah-type to be, straightforwardly, idolatry.
Most of the tales of born-again Bob are shaped around the alienation of the secular erstwhile Christians who had once bought his records. The meaning of his conversion for Dylan himself, and for his fugitive, vaporous identity, is far more interesting. Selvin, like several of the reviewers who witnessed that first gospel tour, accused the artist of betrayal, as though a sincere conviction could also amount – the joke within the joke – to bad faith. The deeper truth is that Dylan believed he was reuniting the fragments of his identity, this Jew in a Christian world, through messianic Judaism. Some would account that a delusion and the most complete betrayal of all. For him, nevertheless, it was very real. And how did that happen?
*
On 13 November 1979, Dylan and his band were performing the 11th show in their hard-fought 14-date run at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco. The former governor of California was meanwhile in New York City. At the old vaudeville joint on Market Street, where the quizzical ghost of Charlie Chaplin ambled, Dylan was achieving a version of a song called ‘Covenant Woman’ that is still admired by some bootleg fans. At the Hilton New York, in a gargantuan dormitory-tower looming over the Avenue of the Americas, the genial ex-governor was announcing his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.
While Dylan and his troupe were asking ‘When You Gonna Wake Up?’ and the singer was assuring his fans that ‘God don’t make promises He don’t keep’, Ronald Reagan had this to say:
I believe this nation hungers for a spiritual revival; hungers to once again see honour placed above political expediency; to see government once again the protector of our liberties, not the distributor of gifts and privilege. Government should uphold and not undermine those institutions which are custodians of the very values upon which civilization is founded – religion, education and, above all, family. Government cannot be clergyman, teacher and patriot. It is our servant, beholden to us.
Reagan, by then 68, went on tell his party and prospective voters that a ‘troubled and afflicted mankind’ was pleading with them to keep a rendezvous with destiny, uphold familiar moral principles and become ‘that shining city on a hill’ surveyed, planned and claimed outright by their putative Puritan forebears. Back in San Francisco, Dylan was singing a song entitled ‘Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)’. One part went: ‘Don’t wanna burn nobody, don’t wanna be burned / Don’t wanna learn from nobody what I gotta unlearn’. Afterwards, the artist thanked those who had applauded and said: ‘You know you read about that situation in Iran, but we’re not worried about that because we know the world is going to be destroyed. We know that Jesus is coming back.’ Candidate Reagan was not yet ready to share that news with the electorate.
*
Dylan was in a bad way towards the end of the 1978 world tour. Sheer exhaustion played its part, of course, but his recreational habits were not what any doctor ordered. The usual lurid allegations of drug use and hard drinking have been made. Anomie is not, in any case, a condition that is diagnosed easily or often. Dylan had done the proper, professional thing and repaired his finances in spectacular style during all those months on the road. Whatever his habits, he had imposed an unusual degree of discipline on himself. But, city by city, sports arena by sports arena, the early enthusiasm had given way to a kind of self-disgust. He was making money at the expense of his music.
Dylan was perfectly capable of doing what was expedient, but he was no hypocrite. Besides, he understood the law of diminishing creative returns. When it became obvious that an artist had ceased to care about his work, customers stopped showing up. They were fickle enough to begin with. Barely four years after the deluge of ticket applications for Tour ’74, the final American leg of the excursion around the world had been a hard sell from the start. In 1978, sceptical concert-goers who knew nothing else knew Dylan as the pretentious creator of that dumb unwatchable movie, as the maker of the ‘lazy’ album Street-Legal, as the formerly dissentient street poet who had ‘gone Vegas’ with his chick singers and his slick band. If his performances seemed only to confirm those accusations, Dylan was done for. As 1978 began to give way to 1979, with his silver cross in his pocket, he was asking a lot of questions about himself, his art and his life. Jesus picked his moment to show up.
The truth was probably more complicated. Dylan was undoubtedly at a low ebb, but his band was full of people who had ‘received Christ’. The guitarist Steven Soles and the young multi-instrumentalist David Mansfield were both enthusiastic converts to Christianity in its evangelical Californian guise. Roger McGuinn had gone with God, as had Johnny Cash (in that case a short trip) and assorted members of bands such as Poco, America, Santana and others besides. Helena Springs was a believer. Carolyn Dennis had been raised on gospel. Mary Alice Artes, still another companion – ‘girlfriend’ barely begins to describe a member of the circle of women around Dylan at this point in his life – had just been born again. She was, it seems, the ‘close friend’ to whom he turned after his experience in or around Tucson. There was no shortage of people in Dylan’s life for whom evangelism mattered. In the spiritually promiscuous milieu of late-’70s California, non-belief was fast becoming the devilish exception. Christianity, modernised and glamorised, was the rising faith in the music business. In any case, Dylan had never been a non-believer.
Even a cursory examination of his work since 1967’s John Wesley Harding showed evidence of an interest in matters of religion at every step of the way. Several of that album’s songs would not have existed without the Book of Revelation and the Book of Isaiah. Blood on the Tracks, Desire and Street-Legal had been flecked and stained deeply with biblical imagery. The fact that Mary Alice Artes was connected with the Vineyard Fellowship, a small but fast-growing evangelical group in the San Fernando Valley, only provided what seems, in one version of hindsight, like the last link in the chain.
In January of 1979, after a Sunday service, Artes spoke to Kenn Gulliksen, a leading pastor at her church. It was, to begin with, familiar stuff about how she wanted to ‘rededicate’ her life to Jesus rather than persist with a different kind of superstar relationship. Then Artes asked if there was anyone available to have a serious talk with her ‘boyfriend’. Her boyfriend turned out to be Bob Dylan. Two other pastors, Larry Myers and Paul Emond, were dispatched – their precise velocity has not been calculated – to an apartment in the West LA suburb of Brentwood.
Dylan had been seen wearing a cross of some description during the final dates of the 1978 tour, but as he later told the story he had not rushed into the arms of Christ after his hotel room experience. When the Vineyard pastors arrived at the apartment he was ‘kind of sceptical’ but ‘also open’. Though he had a lot of questions – chiefly to do with the perplexing nature of the claimed Messiah – he ‘certainly wasn’t cynical’.3 What did the preachers mean by ‘son of God’? What was the meaning of this claim ‘dying for my sins’?
These were Jewish questions. Conversion to Christianity had a baleful, immemorial significance for many of Dylan’s people because, historically, it had so often been accomplished through persecution. In modern times, equally, conversion was often derided by faithful Jews as a purely self-interested attempt at assimilation, a surrender to the majority culture for the sake of acceptance or a career. It was also apostasy. Jews simply did not buy the fundamentalist claims made on behalf of the wonder-working Essene from Galilee. In any case, Dylan had not been raised as a secular Jew. He had studied; he had learned his Hebrew; he had enjoyed his weeks and months at a Zionist summer camp. His parents had been leading lights in Jewish organisations. As a child he must have asked about the differences between himself and all the Christian kids. In 1971, he had spent some time ‘investigating’ what Judaism meant to him and had paid a visit both to Jerusalem’s Western Wall – on his 30th birthday – and to the Mount Zion yeshiva, Diaspora Yeshiva Toras Yisrael. In January 1979, Dylan was asking basic questions of the messengers from Jesus. In essence, they led to one question: how could he be Jewish and become Christian? The answer, when it came to him, would be a little out of the ordinary.
Larry Myers would remember his first encounter with the artist. Speaking in 1994, he recalled meeting ‘a man who was very interested in learning what the Bible says about Jesus Christ’.
To the best of my ability I started at the beginning in Genesis and walked through the Old Testament and the New Testament and ended in Revelation. I tried to clearly express what is the historical, orthodox understanding of who Jesus is. It was a quiet, intelligent conversation with a man who was seriously intent on understanding the Bible. There was no attempt to convince, manipulate or pressure this man into anything. But in my view God spoke through His Word, the Bible, to a man who had been seeking for many years. Sometime in the next few days, privately and on his own, Bob accepted Christ and believed that Jesus Christ is indeed the messiah.4
Conversion was not easy, Dylan would say later, and you are inclined to believe him. Interviewed by an Australian journalist in 1980 he would call the process ‘painful’ and compare it to a baby learning to crawl, observing:
You have to learn to drink milk before you can eat meat. You’re reborn, but like a baby. A baby doesn’t know anything about this world and that’s what it’s like when you’re reborn. You’re a stranger. You have to learn all over again.5
In the same interview, Dylan would make the guess – ‘gently’, as the journalist noted – that ‘He’s always been calling me. Of course, how would I have ever known that?’ Yet even after talking to the two Vineyard pastors he remained reluctant to commit himself to fully fourteen weeks of intensive Bible study.6 Then, in his telling, he woke early one morning feeling compelled to show up at the classes in the fellowship’s improvised school in the town of Reseda, 30 or so miles from his Point Dume compound.
*
In the 1960s and 1970s secularism in art, pop and rock was taken for granted. John Lennon’s 1966 remark, wholly uncontroversial in Britain, that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’ – and that the disciples were ‘thick and ordinary’ – had defined one side of the argument. The bonfires made of the band’s records in some Southern states that year had formed the evangelical rebuttal. Rock and roll was not virtuous, not chaste, not obedient, not respectful and not necessarily in accord with each and every commandment. Dylan, it was presumed, would never surrender himself to mere uncritical faith, or to the ‘conservative values’ that seemed always to be part of the deal. Sing a white man’s gospel? Preach like some polyester-clad TV hellfire evangelist? Actually believe that Armageddon was imminent (turn right at Tel Aviv) and insist that only those born again in Christ could hope to be saved? For the hip, record-buying true believer this was blasphemy, or a hideous joke, or (yet again) the last straw. Ostentatious faith was the preserve of those who embraced every right-wing cliché available. For Bob Dylan to squander his art on the banalities of the modern revival show was preposterous, depressing, insulting, or more evidence that he had lost his wits. ‘Christian rock’ was a contradiction in terms. In 1979, as always, the deep-dyed Dylan fans were convinced they knew him better than he knew himself.
This was foolish. Hindsight says that the only surprise lay in how long it took for a highly moral and moralising writer to act on all the clues in certain of his most self-righteous songs. Wasn’t Dylan insistent on fundamental truth? Didn’t he mistrust the surface appearance of material things? Wasn’t his a restless intelligence forever seeking a deeper understanding of existence? Had he ever said a single word, in any case, to suggest that he harboured doubts about the omnipresence of a deity? And wasn’t he given to saying that something was very wrong with the flimsy world of man? By converting to Christianity, Dylan stuck the counter-culture’s note of scepticism back in its bottle and cast all upon the waters.
From start to finish his verses have been littered with the language of religion. ‘I’d Hate to Be With You On That Dreadful Day’, a poor song assembled from damnation clichés in 1962, might never have made the cut for an album, but it was unambiguous. He was barely 21 when he sang:
Well your clock is gonna stop
At Saint Peter’s gate
Ya gonna ask him what time it is
He’s gonna say, ‘It’s too late’
Amid the basement tapes there was, conspicuously, ‘Sign on the Cross’ and a singer ‘worried’, though Jewish by birth, by what the Roman insult pinned to Christianity’s symbol might have signified. As mentioned, John Wesley Harding is studded throughout with religious imagery, each instance – at least five dozen of those, they say – recorded scrupulously by adherents. During his remarkable researches for The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, researches so assiduous they could only have been pursued by a Protestant theologian who happened to be a fan of the artist, the late Colbert ‘Bert’ Cartwright found no fewer than 387 biblical allusions in the 246 Dylan songs and sleeve notes published between 1961 and 1978. Significantly, perhaps, Cartwright also recorded that the references were apportioned almost evenly between the Bible of the Jews and the Bible known to Christians.7
Even five decades after he started out, his commitment to specific creeds having abated somewhat, Dylan was still declaring that he was trying to get to heaven before they closed the door. The righteous anger had dissipated slightly, but still he invoked the ‘Spirit on the water / darkness on the face of the deep’ on the 2006 album Modern Times. He still talked of paradise and belief; clearly, contrary to every nonsensical rumour, he still believed. The only surprise is that anyone had ever reached any other conclusion.
In 2012, late in the day, Dylan would introduce the album Tempest to interviewers with the explanation that he had set out to write something else entirely. His initial ambition, he would say, had been to write ten purely religious songs, songs akin to the old ‘Just a Closer Walk With Thee’, but the concentration required had eluded him. In the course of the ritual interview with Rolling Stone that October, Dylan would further assert that ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’, Blonde on Blonde’s apparent ode to the sacrament of dope back in 1966, had been misunderstood – people are strange – by those ‘that aren’t familiar with the Book of Acts’ and what it truly means to be stoned. At one point he would claim the ability to see God’s hand in all things, yet tease his interviewer with the thought that people can have faith ‘in just about anything’. Few of them would explain their lives and careers as an example of actual ‘transfiguration’, however. Dylan did so in the interview in all (apparent) seriousness before accepting, as a statement of the obvious, that his songs are shot through still with biblical language.
Of course, what else could there be? I believe in the Book of Revelation. I believe in disclosure, you know? There’s truth in all books. In some kind of way. Confucius, Sun Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, the Koran, the Torah, the New Testament, the Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and many thousands more. You can’t go through life without reading some kind of book.8
Of all the books you could stumble across, and of all the 27 accepted texts in the New Testament compendium, the one attributed to the fevered cave-dwelling John of Patmos is, let’s say, a revealing first choice. The Christian Bible’s big finish – visionary, apocalyptic, supremely resistant to a single interpretation – is a poem made for a certain kind of poet, and for a particular sort of believer. This piece of theologically incoherent art has a specific contemporary resonance, equally, for born-again Americans with a taste for prophetic utterances who set their spiritual watches by the end times, ‘rapture’, Armageddon and vindication. Several of those who were influential within the Vineyard Fellowship in the 1970s and 1980s were of that persuasion and industrious in spreading the news. By the twenty-first century, if not before, Dylan had come to believe that ‘disclosure’ is to be had from John’s verses and all they portend. So God, presence and idea, had permeated the singer’s every fibre and utterance in 1979. It was a very particular version of God, however.
*
Dylan then studied in the School of Discipleship under Kenn Gulliksen and at least four other competent pastor-teachers, including myself. We met in a comfortable conference room that was part of a suite of offices, which served as the church offices. The church worship services were held on Sunday afternoons in the sanctuary of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Reseda, so it was necessary for us to occupy offices elsewhere. There was a real estate firm occupying the first floor suite of offices. Bob attended the intense course of study along with other students for three and one-half months.
Larry Myers, 19949
In one of its histories, the Vineyard Fellowship says that the church ‘finds its roots in the unique period of the 1970s when a lost generation met a sovereign move of God. This generation that included a counterculture and anti-establishment dynamic sought a living faith, marked by simplicity of structure, vitality of contemporary music, personal experience of God’s love, and an invitation to make a real difference in a lost world.’10 When Dylan encountered them they were a friendly bunch, too, and fond of music. They were very fond of famous musicians. That isn’t quite the whole story, however, of this version of neo-charismatic third-wave church-planting evangelical Christianity.
The fellowship had not been in existence for long when Dylan came its way. Gulliksen had been an assistant pastor with Calvary Chapel, a group of evangelical churches founded on a belief in the ‘inerrancy’ of the Bible and on sola scriptura, the conviction that ‘the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God, fully inspired without error and the infallible rule of faith and practice’. In 1974, Gulliksen and his wife had moved from Texas to Los Angeles to launch a new ministry. Bringing together various Bible study groups, he soon began holding Sunday services among the downtrodden of Beverly Hills. Believing that God had instructed him, the pastor gave the name Vineyard to his emerging congregation. In 1977 or 1978, Gulliksen joined his forces with those of another disaffected Calvary Chapel ‘affiliate’ named John Wimber, an individual who was to prove charismatic in every sense, though Wimber did not assume the organisation’s leadership fully until 1982.11 One way or another, in any case, the Association of Vineyard Churches, these days an international movement claiming 1,500 outposts, was born.
In his ‘three and one-half months’ of study Dylan was exposed to specialised teaching. The Vineyard is keen, to take the most conspicuous example, on what is known as kingdom theology, the belief that all history turns on the struggle between God and Satan, a struggle that will be concluded by the second coming of Christ, but only after the Antichrist, paradoxically enough, has brought a deceptive peace to humankind. (Critics denounce radical versions of this thinking, which take the struggle to be altogether literal, as ‘militant Biblicism’ and ‘holy war theology’.) For now, the kingdom is here, it is argued, but not complete, a matter of ‘the already and the not yet’ as believers say. Some of those believers have a taste for ‘signs and wonders’, for evidence of supernatural events involving the laying on of hands, for the alleged healing of the sick and the casting out of demons. A minority are not averse to glossolalia, to ‘speaking in tongues’. At times in its short history the Vineyard movement has also produced a remarkable number of individuals blessed with the gift, albeit not the unerring gift, of prophecy.
It is taken for granted that humanity is born in sin. It is believed – and Dylan went for this one in a big way – that the Devil is real, actual and everywhere active among us. Chiefly, however, and to simplify greatly, everything is pinned on the return of the Messiah and the End of Days, the time of punishment and reward. The idea is taken for granted among most dispensationalist evangelicals, though they quibble over precise definitions of ‘the rapture’, that moment when the Almighty will snatch true believers from the face of the earth. Apparently there is some argument over the precise timing of this event, whether amid, before or after ‘tribulation’. Another part of the Vineyard creed, not the least important, is ‘justification’ before God, accomplished by faith in Jesus alone.
Dylan did not hesitate over that aspect of belief. But then, after a more intensive course of study than he had endured since high school, it seems he did not hesitate over much that he was told. In his gospel songs he would part from other Vineyard adherents only in seeming to skip over the benign manifestations of this version of Christianity. The central tenet, the cleaving to a messiah first and last, gripped him. It grips him still. Everything in the Bible is the literal truth. This world is coming to an end. Judgement will follow.
It speaks to character. Dylan is a dogmatist until the minute he changes his mind. When he is in thrall to one idea all competing ideas are, by definition, false or – that word from his youth – phoney. It is as though he starts from the assumption that Bob Dylan would not take an interest in anything that isn’t supremely important.
So his beloved antique folk and blues music ceases to be just a thing of abiding wonder and becomes a key to life’s mysteries, something akin to a philosophy, even a creed. It is notable that when he ceased to preach, if not to believe, Dylan began to tell interviewers that music had always been the most meaningful thing in his life.
Equally, when he declined to be used on behalf of political causes in the 1960s there would be no appeal against his judgement that all organised politics is a deceit and a waste of time. By 1984, he would be framing his opinion in the terms he understood best: ‘politics is an instrument of the Devil.’12 Dylan might refuse to be anyone’s leader, but he does not hesitate to lay down the law. When he accepted the evangelical Messiah as fundamental to the nature of existence, therefore, there could be no deviation, no doubt, no holding back. Say this much for the artist (or for his state of mind): any thoughts of the likely damage to his career did not impede him in the slightest. As Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times would be informed in November 1980: ‘When I believe in something, I don’t care what anybody else thinks.’ That was never entirely true, but as a declaration of faith it would stand.
Gulliksen assigned Myers as a full-time guide and minder to the most prominent of the Vineyard’s show-business converts during the artist’s studies in the ‘school of discipleship’. The measure was intended, supposedly, to protect Dylan from the media types clustering daily in Reseda. In 1999, when he was entreating believers to ‘intercede for Bob, to pray without ceasing that God will access his heart so that he will be open to responding again to the truth’, Gulliksen would give an insight, unwittingly no doubt, into the Vineyard’s real attitude towards the catch it had made for Jesus. As to celebrities, the pastor – who had by then returned to the Calvary Chapel flock – said:
The three best known of that decade were Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, and Bob Dylan. Two of them were killed and Dylan was the only one left. So you are not talking about just a celebrity, you are talking about ‘the’ remaining celebrity.13
The Vineyard church was both star-struck and pragmatic. You could also mention opportunistic. Music, smiles and ‘contemporary worship’ were intrinsic to its effort to connect with the ‘counterculture and anti-establishment dynamic’. Who better embodied all of that than Dylan? If the main business at hand was the winning of converts among the entertainment-industry types of Southern California – and among their millions of fans – he was the perfect advertisement for the Vineyard Jesus. The pastors cared about Dylan’s soul, too, of course. As Myers saw fit to insist, as though he might have said it once or twice before, it would not have crossed their minds to ‘attempt to convince, manipulate or pressure this man into anything’. Heaven forfend.
The Book of Revelation was at the heart of everything Dylan learned. Or rather, the interpretation placed upon the visionary writings ascribed to ‘John of Patmos’ by the Vineyard folk was central to what was taught in the conference room of a real-estate business. Modern textual analysis suggests there might in fact have been three Johns at work in compiling the Patmos book, and that the trio were not always in agreement theologically, but such details were no impediment to students in the San Fernando Valley who heard they were getting a glimpse, 1,900 years after the prophecies were inscribed, of an imminent apocalypse. In Dylan’s childhood pointless Cold War civil-defence advice had urged him to ‘duck and cover’ when doomsday arrived. That, he learned in 1979, would be worse than foolish when the angelic trumpeters, the scorpion-tailed locusts, the Four Horsemen, the False Prophet, the Whore of Babylon and the Archangel Michael hove into view. It was all true. Once ‘decoded’ the Book of Revelation told it, as Californian evangelicals probably said, like it was, or certainly would be.
The decrypting of an inerrant biblical text was a fruitful line of research. Beyond question, it also helped some people to sell a great many exciting books of their own. This meant that students such as Dylan could spend as much time on contemporary ‘interpretations’ of things the Bible could be made to say as they spent on Scripture itself. A flood of speculative literature had been unleashed amid the fashion for being born again. Modern American religiosity gets much of its reputation, in Europe at least, from its appetite for this theological equivalent of junk food.
The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970) by Hal Lindsey (‘with Carole C. Carlson’) is an uncomplicated sort of work. It takes ‘dispensational eschatology’ for granted. It therefore does not quarrel with the possibility, never mind the argument, that the Bible is not necessarily prophetic in a simple, predictive sense. Lindsey’s glossing of holy writ is never so dull. He treats the good book as a cosmic countdown. All the stuff that’s in there, suitably interpreted, will happen in this world and in our times. So what might bring about rapture, tribulation and the Second Coming?
The author invites readers to look closely at current (c. 1970s-’80s) events. The Antichrist is just around the corner if he’s not actually already in charge of the conspiracy known as the European Economic Community. Meanwhile, there’s an awful lot of bad stuff – earthquakes, famines, wars – going on. And what about those Soviets (strangely earning no mention whatever in Scripture)? They would probably invade Israel if they could; in fact, that’s probably exactly what they will do. All real evangelicals know what that would mean: Armageddon, scheduled by the inerrant Bible for a hillside 20 miles outside of Haifa. In Lindsey’s somewhat provisional reckoning, meanwhile, the messiah was supposed to return within a generation of the refounding of the State of Israel. Quick: fetch a calendar.
Dylan was not the only sophisticated, intelligent and well-read individual, before or since, to fall for the claptrap that passeth understanding. In fact, he was in no sense unusual. Doubts have been cast over how much of The Late, Great Planet Earth Lindsey wrote in a mundane, physical sense – the prolific but elusive Carlson also worked on a follow-up, Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth (1972) – but the Wikipedia oracle maintains that 28 million copies of The Late, Great . . . apocalypse fantasy had been sold by 1990. Lindsey, the self-styled Christian Zionist, was meanwhile an influential presence in and around the Vineyard church, for a while at least. Dylan studied his book closely. Then he studied it again. Judging by his subsequent statements, the artist took this pseudo-scriptural disaster-movie synopsis very seriously. Its bizarre predictions became the core of his end-of-the-world view. Doom seemed to matter rather more to him than the Beatitudes.
*
He was only one part, though a well-publicised part, of a religious revival. Or rather, Dylan was caught up in still another of America’s periodic upsurges of demonstrative faith amid all the usual omens of decadence, decline and fall. It had become almost a national habit. In their 2004 book, The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge make the telling point that revivalism has rarely been absent from the history of the republic. ‘Some people think America is in the middle of its Fourth Great Awakening,’ they write, ‘but the truth is that these great awakenings have been so frequent and prolonged that there has never been a period of sleep from which to awake. Revivalism does not need to be revived; rather, it is a continuous fact of American life.’14
Statistics tell one part of the modern story. In the course of the 1970s membership of the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention grew by 16 per cent, that of the Assemblies of God by 70 per cent. In contrast, the established churches fell back: the United Presbyterian Church saw the number of its adherents diminish by 21 per cent; membership of the Episcopal Church fell by 15 per cent. By 1980, the two dozen largest individual churches in the United States were evangelical in style or doctrine, with immense wealth and huge numbers of potential volunteers ready to further God’s work through the right candidate. The Christian Broadcasting Network was the fifth-largest cable TV network in the country, boasting 30 million subscribers.15 Preachers of the ‘Religious Right’ such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had meanwhile become significant political players, men entirely at ease in the media and the corridors of power. Voters were being registered by the Right in their tens of thousands.
In 1979, just as Dylan was joining the choir, the Moral Majority was founded to articulate a collective conservative rage against the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, against gay rights, against women’s rights, against affirmative action and – a perennial favourite – obnoxious ‘liberal’ textbooks. There was a simultaneous demand from the evangelical lobby for a rewriting of the Constitution to permit ‘voluntary’ prayers in schools. Such attitudes had long been part of the fabric of American life, but in the late 1970s and early ’80s they began to dominate public debate. Evangelicals had once made it a point of principle to steer clear of organised politics. When they took up the challenge – more in anger than in sorrow, it seemed – the effect on the lordly Republican Party was revolutionary. Utterly uncompromising in any matter capable of being defined as an issue of religious belief, the new conservative Christians began to talk as if they alone were authentically American, the sole heirs to the nation’s first principles and founding ideals. Faith and ideology began to seem indistinguishable.
It is a mistake, then, to view Dylan’s experiences only through the prism of Bob Dylan. His conversion is significant for what it meant to his art, for the nature of the faith he chose, and for what it said about his identity as a Jew. But his response to born-again religion was entirely of its American place and time. The Vineyard’s teachings –Dylan’s understanding of them, at any rate – came with an amount of political baggage. It is no coincidence that he too became – what shall we say? – less tolerant in his outlook just as conservatives were beginning to wield a renewed influence in his country. When Dylan began to preach, such people were convinced they had found their candidate for president.
In many ways, Ronald Reagan and Bob Dylan were not so very different. (I’ve typed funnier sentences, but not many.) Both men could fairly claim to have sprung from the small-town heartland, from the tradition of Democratic politics, and from the role-playing business of entertainment. Both were susceptible to nostalgia for a lost American past. Both possessed personalities that were, at best, opaque. Both made a point of being extraordinarily hard to decipher. After the first youthful flush of enthusiasm for justice and liberty, Dylan did not set out to bring down anyone’s evil empire, Satan’s aside, but in 1979 he and the man running for president shared a talent. In neither case was it possible for anyone easily to state the real nature of the person.
Reagan began as a faithful believer in Franklin Delano Roosevelt and ended up as the patron saint of American neo-conservatism. Once a Hollywood trade unionist opposed to nuclear weapons – though an FBI informer against ‘Commies’ too – he heard the chimes of conservative freedom just before Barry Goldwater made his doomed run for the presidency in 1964. Reagan had been helped along on his political path by the California business types who became his mentors and sponsors, but he had only joined the Republican Party formally in 1962. In his new political home, he wasted no time, opposing both Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). Reagan took the unapologetic view that it was an individual’s right, when selling or renting a property, to discriminate against ‘Negroes’. That kind of record did a presidential candidate no harm in the Southern states.
By the end of 1979, Reagan had the votes of the Religious (which is to say Christian) Right sewn up. Most evangelicals had come out for Jimmy Carter, the devout Sunday school teacher, in ‘76. But the belief that ‘Satan had mobilised his forces to destroy America’ – not to mention the Carter administration’s threat to deprive their schools of tax-deductible status on the grounds of discrimination – cooled the ardour of these Christians.16 They persuaded themselves that the Carter White House and Democrats generally were a threat to ‘traditional moral values’. Reagan understood the Religious Right perfectly. He especially knew how to sound as though he understood everything about them, their hopes, fears and iron beliefs. Whether he was ever truly one of them is open to question, however.
His mother had adhered to the Disciples of Christ, a Protestant church blending Presbyterian and Congregationalist traits, but one with an overriding insistence on the acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. If needs be, Reagan could speak the Christian Right’s language. His upbringing in religion had in fact been entirely conventional, but by the end of the 1970s the candidate was a supreme exponent of the art of blending folksy nostalgia for a former, better, more moral America with the evangelical conviction that the country was going straight to hell for want of faith. By the time he achieved the presidency he was calling himself born again, though this did not seem to involve attending a church with any great frequency.17
Reagan made everything simple. Sometimes he could even make reactionary politics sound like an affable comedy routine. Paradoxically, the ability to fake likeability came naturally to him. There is no doubt, for all that, that this candidate had sensed a mood in the country. Suddenly the conservative zealot who had been dismissed by liberals throughout the ’60s, even after his coup in winning the governorship of California handsomely in 1966, was looking and sounding like a mainstream politician. Or rather, he was being accepted by voters across middle America as the reassuring voice of their mainstream opinions. To begin with, even the patricians in his own party didn’t believe it was possible. Reagan’s adopted state had taught him a lot.
Contrary to any impression given by Hollywood, California had been a home-from-home for evangelical belief long before the Dust Bowl migrants began stumbling in with their meagre possessions and their old-time religion during the 1930s. The astoundingly popular preacher and faith healer Aimee Semple McPherson, nominally a Pentecostalist, had set up shop in Los Angeles after the First World War. By 1923, her gigantic Angelus Temple in Echo Park, boasting the biggest set of church bells on the West Coast and a pair of 30-foot-high ‘Jesus Saves’ neon signs to pull in the customers, was capable of seating over 5,000 people. Others in the City of Angels were busy with their missions and moral crusades, whether to establish Prohibition or kick out a mayor. While McPherson was performing her miracles, Pastor Robert P. ‘Fighting Bob’ Shuler was broadcasting to radio audiences from the bastion of his Southern Methodist church in the Downtown business district. Shuler specialised in vicious attacks on all the usual scapegoats, whether politicians, Jews, Catholics, black Americans, or ungodly books. His chats were hugely popular. Beyond the Hollywood Babylon, Angelinos were morally, socially and religiously conservative.
Interestingly enough, that hasn’t changed much. In August of 2005, a survey was released by the Barna Group showing that Los Angeles contained a greater number of evangelical adults than any other American metropolis.18 As the researchers put it: ‘The city that produces the media often criticised or boycotted by evangelicals is also home to nearly one million of those deeply devout Christians. In fact, there are more evangelical adults in the Los Angeles market than there are in the New York, Chicago and Boston metropolitan areas – combined!’ The survey, based on interviews with 24,000 individuals, also estimated that California as a whole was home to almost two million committed evangelicals. There were plenty of them around when Dylan made his choice of faith. They were prominent features, too, of Californian society in the 1950s and 1960s. In conservative Orange County, in particular, there was a lot of talk about God’s purpose for America while Beats, freaks and guitar-playing hippies disturbed the peace. In those days, amid unprecedented economic growth in the state, only one condition remained to be fulfilled to allow the rise of Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Its theological justification was always vague. Naive readers tend to conclude, in fact, that the New Testament contains nothing to suggest that the pursuit of riches is reconciled easily, if at all, with Christianity. There is no ‘prosperity gospel’. Nevertheless, when Reagan began to harbour political ambitions in the mid-1950s the idea was becoming common ground between some evangelicals – others, to be fair, objected vehemently – and Republican political operators trying to complete the conservative circle. The simple idea was to prove that it was all right to get rich. Soon enough, in fact, pastors and politicians alike could be heard arguing that the defence of wealth and American capitalism was a Christian’s civic duty. As ever, biblical texts could be found as required. In 1947, a struggling Oklahoma preacher named Oral Roberts had come across the second verse in John’s Third Epistle. I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth,’ it reads. Roberts, soon to become filthy rich in the God business, had been delighted to hear that. Elsewhere, notions of ‘divine reciprocity’ were beginning to be combined in the 1950s and ’60s with the so-called laws of faith. ‘Give and it will be given back unto you’ could be combined conveniently with ‘ask and ye shall receive’. All of this was going on while Dylan was singing of freedom’s bell ‘Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked’.
In due course, Reagan’s presidency would provide happy days for those capable of reading Scripture as a guide to financial planning. By the time he was announcing his candidacy and Dylan was preaching to the unconverted at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, evangelical Christianity was identified – had indeed identified itself – as a reliable front-line battalion in the conservative political insurgency. Politics and the deity had become entangled. By the twenty-first century no one among the ‘empowered evangelicals’ of the Vineyard would think it odd in the slightest if a ‘conversation with God’ involved a request for a job, admission to a particular college, or even a sports car.19 Presumably it is not polite in such a circumstance to mention voodoo. For his part, to his perhaps eternal credit, Dylan would complain in a 1986 interview that he had ‘heard a lot of preachers say how God wants everybody to be wealthy and healthy. Well, it doesn’t say that in the Bible.’20 The remark would be prompted by a mention of the word ‘conservative’.
Candidate Reagan was, if a little belatedly, opposed to abortion, in favour of capital punishment, no friend to the environmentalists, an opponent of the long-contested Equal Rights Amendment intended to guarantee equality for women, a supporter of prayer in schools, and, as already noted, a chuckling character who had spoken out against civil-rights legislation. By 1979, most of this met the requirements of most of the people with whom Dylan had allied himself. Reagan would go on to designate 1983 as the ‘Year of the Bible’. In 1982, by way of a preface, Congress would pass a joint resolution recognising the book as beyond doubt the Word of God, further declaring that it had made ‘a unique contribution in shaping the United States as a distinctive and blessed nation and people’.
It is sometimes forgotten that Reagan’s most famous speech, one culminating in an assault on the Soviet ‘evil empire’ – while rejecting a freeze on the nuclear-weapons programmes that were liable to hasten one version of Armageddon – was in fact delivered to a gathering of the National Association of Evangelicals. In March 1983, the president gave this crowd what they wanted to hear with his thoughts on abortion, prayer in schools and ‘the tried and time-tested values upon which our very civilization is based’. In his terms, the battle with godless state Communism was ‘not material but spiritual’. Twice, to the audience’s evident delight, the president declared that ‘America is in the midst of a spiritual awakening and a moral renewal’. It was, indeed, ‘a renewal of the traditional values that have been the bedrock of America’s goodness and greatness’. It was no accident that this politician had inaugurated the presidential ‘tradition’ of concluding speeches with the phrase ‘God bless America’.
That Reagan was the choice of most of the people most of the time during the ’80s is beyond argument. In 1980, in his third attempt to become president, he was awarded 50.7 per cent of the popular vote against Carter’s barely respectable 41 per cent. In 1984, Reagan’s mandate was renewed with an unambiguous landslide, granting him 58.8 per cent of the vote to swamp Walter Mondale’s 40.6 per cent. That result counted as Republican vengeance for Lyndon Johnson’s crushing of Goldwater in ‘64, 61.05 per cent to 22.58 per cent, but the Reagan presidency had a greater significance. Just six years and three months after Richard Nixon’s disgrace and resignation had seemed to destroy the American Right, here they were, back, hugely popular, grinning contentedly, and in charge. With God on their side.
This – conservative, faith-driven, patriotic, disinclined to listen to bad news or to complicated explanations – was the America in which the artist found himself born again. The liberal rock critics would just have finished savaging a Bob Dylan album entitled Saved when in 1980 the remains of Fritz Mondale’s political career were being buried, piece by charred piece, in a shallow grave. Back at the Warfield in San Francisco on 9 November, five nights after the election, Dylan would perform a song he had been playing since a show in Toronto in April. ‘Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody’ is not one of his works that reads well on the page and it would not find a place in the artist’s Lyrics 1962–2001 (2004). By November of 1980, meanwhile, Reagan had no use for a campaign song. Still, Dylan sang:
I can persuade people as well as anybody
I got the vision but it caused division
I can twist the truth as well as anybody
I know how to do it, I’ve been all the way through it
But it don’t suit my purpose and it ain’t my goal
To gain the whole world, but give up my soul.
But I ain’t gonna go to hell for anybody
I ain’t gonna go to hell for anybody
I ain’t gonna go to hell for anybody
Not for father, not for mother, not for sister, not for father, no way!
It is almost as if the artist picked his Jesus moment. Perhaps Dylan was proving himself to be just another ordinary American after all. You could also say, however, that he discovered convenient truths at a convenient time. He could twist those truths as well anybody. If you are one of those who understand Dylan’s career in terms of calculated moves and deliberate ‘reinventions’, the ‘born-again phase’ can seem like a very neat set of coincidences, even if it did not work out exactly according to plan.
Equally, he didn’t need to be told that the ’60s were over and done, that his participation in the events of the decade had been misunderstood and misrepresented, that his allegiance to the counter-culture had been provisional at best, that his patience with hippies (and the rest) was always limited, that his true loyalty was to the old music, rooted in Christianity, of the heartland. On that reading, his conversion was more than just a statement of belief. This was not the theological equivalent of making a baffling country album in Nashville. Dylan was throwing in his lot with a distinctive American constituency just as that constituency was blessing Ronald Reagan.
An obsession with God was, as it remains, part of the nation’s character, the paradoxical result of being founded on Enlightenment principles. Giving liberty to all religions, the Founding Fathers – a couple of them might have been dismayed – encouraged every possible variety of faith to emerge and compete in the belief market. The result, perplexing to most of the rest of the world, was a liberal theocracy, a spiritual free-for-all in which, nevertheless, His presence was one of the things held to be self-evident, thereby rendering America a special case among nations. Among the western democracies, the United States is uniquely religious. In 1979, just for once, Dylan was part of the majority.
These days, American evangelicals often claim to fear for the future of their movement. Their political power has diminished sharply since Reagan’s era. In one pastor’s account, ‘evangelicalism as we knew it in the twentieth century is disintegrating’.21 Which is to say that a mere 20 million people, 7 per cent of the population, identify themselves as belonging to evangelical churches. Only those raised to take America’s religiosity for granted could understand the fundamentalist talk of crisis. In 2001, the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) found that 76.5 per cent of people called themselves Christians; in 2002 the Pew Research Center put the number at 82 per cent. By 2008, ARIS noted an increase in those with no religion, up from 8 per cent to 15 per cent in 18 years, but still found 76 per cent of respondents calling themselves Christians. Such, so it seems, is the catastrophic decline.
In 2012, meanwhile, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life discovered that fully 41 per cent of Americans had switched religion at least once in their lives, but also found that 36 per cent attended a religious service at least once a week. ARIS further reported, in 2008, that 45 per cent of Christians (and 34 per cent of the adult population) considered themselves to be ‘born-again or evangelical’. Belief that there is ‘definitely a personal God’ took care of 69.5 per cent of Americans, while a further 12.1 per cent went for a ‘higher power’. A mere 2.3 per cent decided that there is ‘no such thing’ as God. By European standards, each and every one of those statistics remains remarkable.22
In the years after Dylan accepted Christ, evangelicals would turn the American Protestant world upside. By 1986, according to Gallup polls, 31 per cent of the population, fully 55 million people, were ‘comfortable’ to be called born-again or evangelical. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, according to the data provided by the General Social Survey, the proportion of Americans ‘strongly affiliated’ to religion went up from 38 per cent to 43 per cent. Dylan was catching a wave, in other words. The only thing that made him different from any other entertainer enduring a spiritual crisis, inhaling a dose of premium-grade fervour, or hitching his star to popular sentiment, was a matter of origins.
*
The death of Dylan’s father Abram (‘Abe’) Zimmerman at the age of just 56 in the summer of 1968 affected the singer profoundly, they say. It appears also to have awakened, or reawakened, an interest in his Jewish heritage. In the years that followed he visited Israel several times and studied Judaism with apparent intensity. That should probably count as predictable: this was the faith of his fathers and, after a fashion, he would return to it. But that heritage suggests an issue mentioned too rarely when talk turns to born-again Dylan: just why did this Jew become a Christian? What was in it, spiritually speaking, for him? And why a Christian with a pronounced taste, utterly alien to Judaism, for world-ending collective punishment?
If he truly needed a route to God, the disavowal of his own identity was shocking to a lot of his fellow Jews. It was no small matter, to put it mildly, for one of his background, however ‘secular’, to accept Jesus as Messiah and personal saviour. Nor did Dylan take up with Christianity in one of its self-effacing, ingratiating forms. The hard-line evangelising brand he adopted isn’t known for sweet ecumenical reason, or for genuine tolerance, despite the Vineyard’s energetic attempts to embrace pop-style music and laughter. Its revealed truth allows no exceptions, no ‘you’re right from your side and I’m right from mine’.
Judaism is in error and Jews will not be saved unless and until they accept Christ. Ditto Muslims. (These days the Vineyard advertises itself as ‘uniquely poised and prepared to bless Muslims’.)23 Ditto Hindus, non-reborn Christians, Buddhists, Jains and all the rest. Ditto you-name-it. Hence the usual list of forbidden human states and choices: drink, drugs, adultery (tricky for Dylan), homosexuality, abortion. The Vineyard Fellowship, the church that gave the singer his full-immersion baptism and consequent rebirth-in-Christ, was entirely hardcore behind its handy ‘Satan shields’. Yet for Dylan, descendant of those who had fled a Tsar’s pogroms, acceptance of Jesus was a wholesale rejection of his historic identity and of his family. He had rehearsed the same gesture amid all his other evasions during the ’60s, telling journalists that he was not Jewish, or that he didn’t ‘feel’ Jewish, or that his origins were of no importance. By the end of the 70s, it was as though he was trying to discard a part of himself entirely, once and for all. Dylan, so it seemed, was making an irrevocable break with the past. This time he was leaving Hibbing, Minnesota, behind for good.
The obvious point is always worth repeating: Bob Dylan was born a Jew, which is to say born of a beloved Jewish mother. In the religion’s law, that’s what counts. Perhaps it didn’t matter much to Dylan in his childhood and youth, but the faith was an enfolding fact of his life. He was raised Jewish, too, in a place that knew few of his people. In 1941, year of his birth, religious affiliations in Hibbing were divided between overwhelmingly preponderant Roman Catholics and Lutherans of various flavours. Nor were Jews gathered in numbers in Minnesota as they were in the great cities. The North Country was far from the communities in which American Jewry achieved its cultural critical mass. Still: Robert Zimmerman was Jewish, circumcised and named within days of his birth. At 13, he had marked his religious majority and become a bar mitzvah, a son of the commandment, thanks to an old rabbi shipped in from New York to help the boy memorise his texts. In May of 1954 the congregation had chanted the old words – ‘This is the Torah which Moses placed before the children of Israel’ – and Robert was given responsibility for his own religious observances.
You can throw these things aside, no doubt, if you fail or cease to believe. Discarding them for the sake of Christianity, the sect that has been the source of so many Jewish woes, is another matter. Besides, as far as Judaism is concerned the prophesied events presaging the coming of the Messiah have not occurred. Demonstrably, it is argued, those events did not occur in the first century. So Jesus/Yeshua ain’t Him.
For good measure, the Christian idea of the Trinity, the belief that God is divisible, counts as heretical for Jews. The belief that it is the Messiah’s job to save the world from its sins is also rejected. Jews have no truck with the idea that God could be made flesh, or with the weird notion of praying to this Jesus. They are opposed profoundly to what is called replacement theology, ‘supersessionism’ – the Messiah’s advent means that older stuff can be dumped – and its motives. For most, it is very simple: anyone who claims that Jesus is his saviour is no longer properly a Jew. In this contest over the one God, the gulf between the two sides cannot be bridged. The solution adopted eventually by Dylan would be no defence against the charge of apostasy. For those who believed as his forefathers had believed, it would only make matters worse.
In any case, the artist did not ‘receive Jesus’ thanks to just any New Testament study group. Irrespective of any peculiar political alliances then being formed between the American Christian Right and Zionism, the Vineyard crowd were not inclined to split theological differences. To accept one supernatural story, Dylan had to reject alternative versions. The Vineyarders were happy to welcome allcomers as grist to the conversion mill, but for evangelicals the deal rested, obviously enough, on one unbreakable condition: the acceptance of Jesus as Messiah.
It’s just possible that Dylan saw things differently. He might have felt that the gulf between the Torah and Christian fundamentalism was neither wide nor important. If so, he had part of a point. As one rabbi and scholar has put it: ‘To be a Jew means first and foremost to belong to a group, the Jewish people, and the religious beliefs are secondary, in a sense, to this corporate allegiance.’24 The writer adds, however, that the ‘contrast with Christianity is self-evident’. Christians are denned by their beliefs. And Dylan found himself believing, head over heels, before he was ducked in a California swimming pool. The act of submersion and submission could not be overlooked or ignored. Those ‘flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark’ are powerful still, it seems.
Others had followed the twisting path before Dylan. Conversion to Christianity by Jews had become a minor American phenomenon in the ’70s thanks in part to the relentless work of the evangelicals. Al Kasha, a former Brill Building songwriter and a double Oscar-winner in the early part of the decade, was a celebrity Angelino who had parted from his Brooklyn Jewish roots for the sake of born-again Christianity. Thanks to his work for CBS Publishing in the 1960s and to the songs he had written or co-created for numerous performers – Aretha, Jackie Wilson, Bobby Darin, Neil Diamond, Donna Summer and more – Kasha was a music-industry player. That wasn’t what interested Dylan.
Though having become an ordained Southern Baptist pastor after ‘praying to receive Jesus’ during a bout of agoraphobia, Kasha was also what is known as a messianic Jew, a follower of Christ who nevertheless considered himself Jewish. In 1979, he and Dylan met at the Vineyard. Subsequently, the artist would become a regular participant in the ‘Bible study’ held at Kasha’s Beverly Hills home. In 2011, the evangelical journalist Dan Wooding was given one version of Dylan’s conversion. Kasha said:
Bob’s nature is that he’s a very much a seeker and he was interested to see why a fellow Jew would come to know Christ. He started at the Vineyard church and then, when we met there, he came to a first Bible study. And at the second Bible study he gave his life to the Lord.
I prayed the prayer of confession, which he repeated, about his sins and that Jesus was the Son of God and is God . . . I pointed out to him in John 4 that ‘salvation shall come through the Jews’ and that Jesus came to this earth as a Jew. I’m a Jewish believer now going on since 1978, so it’s a long time. That Bible study started in ‘79 and never ended until this past year.
Bob would stay until three or four o’clock in the morning asking me questions beyond my knowledge. The interesting thing is that he felt a comfort that I was a fellow songwriter.25
Presumably it was in Kasha’s home, therefore, that the artist made the decision, ‘privately and on his own’, alluded to by Larry Myers in 1994. If that’s the case, Jesus was accepted in the presence of a Jewish convert. In a later interview with Wooding, Kasha would say that Dylan ‘came to the house every week for six months’ – given the artist’s known whereabouts in the first half of 1979, this can’t be exactly true – and that he was baptised near Malibu by ‘Vineyard people’.26 The composer would also claim that Dylan wrote Slow Train Coming ‘mostly in our home. I gave him a key and I’d be sleeping upstairs with my wife and he’d come in at three or four o’clock in the morning, and I’d hear him picking as he felt a kind of holy spirit comfort.’ At this point Dylan was also writing under the gaze – supervision might be a better word – of his Vineyard pastors. Myers was sticking closely to him. Whether the artist was actually having his songs vetted for their fidelity to the church’s understanding of Scripture is unclear. That’s how they would sound to many listeners, nevertheless.
In his interview with Wooding, Kasha would have a couple of other interesting things to say. In 2011, when the popular account still insisted that Dylan had long since put aside his born-again experiences, his former host would be able to state, with apparent confidence, that the singer ‘has never renounced his faith’. As Kasha explained it, ‘once you’re saved, you’re saved forever’. But he also had this to offer:
If you want to know the truth, and I always try to be as honest as possible, I think some Christians took advantage of him. They would tell him, ‘Go out and sing for nothing.’ Why should he sing for nothing if he’s being paid by other people? So I think that that bothered and hurt him.27
Cajoling Dylan to work for free – but with no gain for the Vineyard? – does not sound like the worst kind of naked exploitation. Nor does it sound like the whole story of his parting from the fellowship. Thanks to long and sometimes bitter experience, Dylan was sensitive to anyone trying to take advantage of his name and fame, but a few free shows would not have killed him. It might even have counted as that favourite celebrity hobby ‘giving something back’. Disenchantment, if that’s what it was, would come later, in any case, and probably had more to do with the fact that some in the Vineyard sect proved too eager to drop his name when advertising their spiritual wares.
Dylan had begun to put Scripture into rhyme – the most generous description of the Slow Train Coming songs – almost from the instant Jesus had shaken up his hotel room. His band had heard versions of ‘Slow Train’ during the last days of the 1978 tour. The audience at the Hollywood Sportatorium in Florida had meanwhile been granted the sermon entitled ‘Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)’ on the global roadshow’s final night, 16 December, as a strange sort of preface to the Judaic ‘Forever Young’. Jesus was accepted into Dylan’s life in January of 1979 and work on the album began in the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, on Monday, 30 April. In the interim, therefore, the artist was putting the Word into bad verse and interrogating Al Kasha on ‘why a fellow Jew would come to know Christ’. Plainly, conversion had not answered every question.
This might have been Dylan’s meaning when in May 1980 he told a journalist that being born again ‘is a hard thing’, a ‘painful’ thing. Joy and exultation were not mentioned at any point in the interview. Dylan also said that ‘I’m becoming less and less defined as Christ becomes more and more defined’.28 The person disappearing had once been Jewish. Dylan was supposed to relinquish himself in being born again – that was, for what it was worth, the idea – but he did not quite manage it. Instead, he effected a distinctive sort of compromise. It holds to this day.
When the album Saved appeared towards the end of June 1980 its inner sleeve carried a quotation from the Bible. The verse from Jeremiah (31:31) reads, ‘Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah.’ Why this passage? There are complicated arguments over these two ‘houses’, over the ten lost tribes of the ancient Kingdom of Israel who might (or might not) have emerged from captivity to become the Gentile ‘multitude of nations’, and other arcane issues besides. One point is more or less agreed: for house of Judah read ‘the Jewish people’. Dylan was pointing to God’s deal with humanity, but drawing specific attention to himself, a Jew, and to the ‘new covenant’ that had been offered to him and his community. You could say the artist had been searching the small print for a way to justify his position. On the Saved album, typically, he would find a personal meaning in God’s promise and express it in the song ‘Covenant Woman’.
Covenant woman got a contract with the Lord
Way up yonder, great will be her reward
Covenant woman, shining like a morning star
I know I can trust you to stay where you are
Jews for Jesus and messianic Judaism are not one and the same thing. Members of the former organisation, founded in 1973, are one part of the latter movement, but the movement itself is more diverse than the activities of a single group of evangelicals might suggest. There are those born Jewish who recognise Yeshua as the Messiah but refuse to recognise him as God, or who draw the line at the strange idea of a three-in-one deity. There are also those who accept the claims made for Christ, but who detect the unwelcome hand of Protestant evangelicals interfering in Jewish debates. Jews for Jesus, it is often alleged, is just another front for Christian missionaries engaged in the age-old effort to detach Judaism from its faith, traditions and roots.
Whether Dylan understood as much, or cared, in 1979 and 1980 is not clear. Whether the differences truly matter is, equally, not our problem in these pages. In its modern form, the phenomenon of Jews accepting Christ had only been evident for a few years when Dylan was writing Slow Train Coming. Nevertheless, it seemed to solve the problem he had posed to Al Kasha. Through messianic Judaism he was able to go on living as a Jew and regarding himself as a Jew while recognising Jesus as his saviour. Everything he has said and done since involving religion, whether turning up at Hasidic synagogues for the High Holidays or extolling the Christian Book of Revelation, accords with a dual affiliation. At a press conference in Hamburg at the end of May 1984, Dylan would be asked, ‘Bob, are you Christian or Jewish?’ The entirely truthful answer: ‘Well, that’s hard to say.’ Pressed on the matter, the artist would simply respond, ‘It’s a long story.’
When messianic Judaism first began to appear in the early 1970s its proponents differed from earlier ‘Jewish Christians’. The young men who established Beth Messiah in Cincinnati and Beth Yeshua in Philadelphia might have launched their congregations as offshoots of familiar Christian ‘missions to the Jews’, but they soon asserted their independence. The point, as the converts realised, was to be both Jewish, even ostentatiously Jewish, and Christian. These followers of Jesus were not prepared to be assimilated. As their critics still argue, they wanted it both ways, retaining most of the outward forms of traditional Judaism while participating in the all-singing, all-dancing evangelical charismatic Christian revival. The messianic Jews would retort, as one history of America’s alternative religions has put it, that they were ‘working to “make things right” and bring together the truth and beauty of both religions: the faith in Jesus, or Yeshua, with the belief in the special role of Israel in history and the traditional symbols of Judaism’.29 That’s probably a fair enough summary of Dylan’s position in the months after his conversion.
Perhaps predictably, Christian evangelicals and some messianic Jews have described the coming together of two traditions as uncomplicated, as though recognition of Jesus solved every possible problem. In a 2006 book on Dylan and the Protestant God, for example, Stephen H. Webb, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College in Indiana, makes this faintly audacious statement:
Many people attracted to the Vineyard were Jewish, and they actually became more Jewish when they became Christian. Like many evangelical churches, the Vineyard emphasized Christianity’s connection to Judaism and treated authentic Judaism as compatible with Christian faith in Jesus the Messiah.30
They actually became more Jewish? You could call that a large claim. If you happened to be Jewish, even of the messianic persuasion, you could probably call it a few other things. Webb, who describes Dylan as ‘best understood as a musical theologian’ and as one of the rare American artists ‘to develop an essentially conservative view of Jesus’, does not give much attention or weight to the singer’s Jewish upbringing.31 The professor, himself from an evangelical background, prefers to believe that Dylan was in some osmotic manner rendered unconsciously Christian by his surroundings years before he (or anyone else) came to terms with the fact. Given numerous other known facts, particularly the facts of the artist’s life in the aftermath of his time among the Vineyarders, that counts as presumptuous, but not untypical of evangelical Christian attitudes. So the Vineyard ‘treated authentic Judaism as compatible with Christian faith in Jesus the Messiah’? By setting aside just one small technicality, presumably, after the church had decided what was ‘authentic’. Dylan was never so cavalier.
In the 1970s, politics was also at work. The pioneering young ‘Jewish believers in Jesus’ (as the contemporary compromise term has it) were avowedly conservative refugees from counter-culture decadence. Drugs, alcohol, sex before marriage: these delights were forbidden. The attitude was appealing, predictably, to the Christian evangelical movement. The 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, fought out by Israel and its Arab neighbours, had meanwhile given right-wing charismatic Protestants a renewed interest in any Jew who might be won for Christ. The evangelicals’ obsession with imminent Armageddon – among the ‘dispensationalist’ wing, that is – played a very big part in encouraging a collaboration.
The Christians were afflicted by the old notion, cobbled together from two faiths, that the Jews had to possess their own country before Jesus could return and the last battle could commence. Israel therefore became essential to the promised final showdown between good and evil, even if Judaism’s conception of Acharis HaYomim, the ‘End of Days’, doesn’t quite accord with the fantasies of the ‘Armageddon lobby’. Dylan’s 1983 song ‘Neighborhood Bully’, defending Zionist Israel against allcomers, would be one expression of the new alliance. Israeli governments were meanwhile delighted to fund hundreds of ‘familiarisation’ trips to the biblical lands for evangelical pastors at a time when the Christian Right was influential in Washington. Jews prepared to accept Jesus and charismatic worship were part of a grand political bargain as the last days of this planet earth, ‘rapture’ and all, approached. Unswerving American conservative support for the Zionist-dominated state, it is too often forgotten, has a ‘theological’ basis.
In the summer of 1984, even after his supposed return to secular music, Dylan would still be confirming his belief in the literal truth of the Bible, still talking about Revelation and end times – though those had been postponed for ‘at least 200 years’ – and still discussing ‘the new kingdom’. He would assure his interviewer that he could ‘converse and find agreement with’ Orthodox Jews and Christians alike.32 Dylan’s quoting of Jeremiah on the Saved sleeve, his song ‘Covenant Woman’, his public statements and much else besides, had by then provided plenty of evidence of his messianic Judaism. It was no private eccentricity. Nothing else explained his choices or his rhetoric.
In July of 2005, the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations (UMJC), a grouping founded in 1979, significantly or not, would publish a statement attempting to define its collective beliefs. The statement would speak of ‘congregations and groups committed to Yeshua the Messiah that embrace the covenantal responsibility of Jewish life and identity rooted in Torah, expressed in tradition, and renewed and applied in the context of the New Covenant’. Boldly, the UMJC would assert that together ‘the Messianic Jewish community and the Christian Church constitute the ekklesia, the one Body of Messiah . . .’ Further: ‘Messianic Judaism embraces the fullness of New Covenant realities available through Yeshua, and seeks to express them in forms drawn from Jewish experience and accessible to Jewish people.’33
That might have counted as a working definition of Dylan’s Christian faith were it not for the fact that, as ever, he resists definition. In the summer of 1986, for example, a slightly startling report would appear in the New York Daily News. This would state that Dylan had spent ‘parts of the last four years’ living and worshipping among Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Members of the community would tell the newspaper that the artist had been ‘taking instruction from Talmudic scholars and listening to talks by Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson’. Pressed on Dylan’s activities, a spokesman for the Chabad-Lubavitch sect would reply: ‘He is a very private person and we respect his wishes to remain so. You never know when he will drop in – he can come or go at any time.’34 In fact, by that date the diarist for New York magazine had already published a small, overlooked item (on 6 June 1983) to much the same effect and received a ‘no comment’ from Dylan’s representatives. By the end of 1983, nevertheless, one of the Lubavitch rabbis would be talking freely to Christianity Today about the 40-something student who had made his way to Brooklyn.35
All of this could be reconciled with messianic Judaism, no doubt, but for one difficulty. Among other things, Chabad-Lubavitch, perhaps the biggest of the Hasidic sects, styles itself as a Jewish ‘outreach’ operation. As such, it has devoted a good deal of its time and energy over the years to counteracting Christian missionary work among Jews. Dylan’s presence in Crown Heights between 1982 and 1986 would come about as the result, direct or indirect, of a determined effort to reclaim him for Judaism. A Lubavitcher from Minnesota, one Rabbi Manis Friedman, an individual later to be condemned universally for voicing grotesque opinions on child sex abuse, would get most of the credit for waging the campaign to win the artist back for the home team.36 Hence the widespread belief in the early 1980s – a belief not discouraged by Columbia Records – that Dylan had given up on the born-again Christianity fad and returned to his secular (if Jewish) ways.
This, though, is where things become a little more interesting. The venerable Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who would be 84 in the summer of 1986, was a determined evangelist for Judaism, but also, simultaneously, a keen promoter of efforts to ‘hasten the messianic age’. By the time Dylan came to make contact with the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, many of Menachem Schneerson’s followers would be proclaiming the belief, unprecedented in Judaism, that the rebbe was the Messiah. Within the wider faith the assertion would prove controversial, to put it no higher, but it remains the case that the sect has failed to replace its rabbi since his death in 1994 – again, a decision without precedent – while claims made for his status have accumulated, both in Israel and in America. A headstone beside his open-air mausoleum in the New York borough of Queens refers to Schneerson in Hebrew as ‘the Messiah of God’. Some have further alleged that he acknowledged this supposed fact while still alive.
As it is, the idea of a dead Messiah is unthinkable to traditional Jews. In 1996, the Rabbinical Council of America passed by an overwhelming majority a resolution declaring: ‘In light of disturbing developments which have arisen in the Jewish community, the Rabbinical Council of America in convention assembled declares that there is not and has never been a place in Judaism for the belief that Mashiach ben David (the Messiah, son of David) will begin his messianic mission only to experience death, burial and resurrection before completing it.’
The fact remains that by the time the Daily News carried its report on his four years of intermittent study and worship in Crown Heights, fully a decade before the council spoke out, Dylan would be spending a lot of his time with people who believed the Messiah was among them. In 1986, bluntly, the artist would be listening to talks from the alleged Messiah himself. So the figure of a saviour and the idea of salvation would linger in Dylan’s life and thought while Chabad-Lubavitch worked to reclaim him for Judaism. Whether He turned out to be Jesus or an aged rabbi, what would matter most for the artist during and after his Vineyard interlude was this ineluctable figure, this mystery, the Messiah. In practice, it would amount to a subtle change in theological emphasis. In his interview during the summer of 1984, irrespective of the shifting balance of religious allegiances in his own mind, Dylan could sound for all the world as though he was still as one with the evangelicals on a central point of belief. As he would tell Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder:
But what’s going on today isn’t gonna last, you know? The battle of Armageddon is specifically spelled out: where it will be fought, and if you wanna get technical, when it will be fought. And the battle of Armageddon definitely will be fought in the Middle East.37
Little more than a year later, it would seem to most readers of Spin magazine that the bloodcurdling theme had persisted. In September 1985, Dylan would lay it all out for Scott Cohen.
The messianic thing has to do with this world, the flesh world, and you got to pass through this to get to that. The messianic thing has to do with the world of mankind, like it is. This world is scheduled to go for 7,000 years. Six thousand years of this, where man has his way, and 1,000 years where God has his way. Just like a week. Six days works, one day rest. The last thousand years is called the Messianic Age. Messiah will rule. He is, was, will be about God, doing God’s business. Drought, famine, war, murder, theft, earthquakes and all other evil things will be no more. No more disease. That’s all of this world.38
In this interview, Dylan would recite his lessons and recite them almost word for word. The point is that these were the lessons, wholly unexceptional, of conservative Judaism, not of the Armageddon-obsessed Christian evangelicals. Talking to Spin, Dylan would fail to make that distinction clear. The battle at the End of Days due to be incited by Messiah refuseniks is not a major part of Jewish teaching. Instead, the passing of 6,000 years is seen almost as a stage in human development. In his telling of this version, you’ll notice, Dylan would make no mention of a Technicolor apocalypse, clashing armies, mass destruction and the promised eradication of one-third of humanity. The six-from-seven schema mentioned was lifted by the fundamentalist Protestants for the seven ‘dispensations’ – this one is number six, of course – which an ingenious God has devised, supposedly, to run tests of obedience on humanity. But by 1985, if not before, Dylan would have transferred his allegiance to old Jewish prophecy.
He would tell Cohen that when the time came there would be ‘a run on godliness’, that people were ‘gonna run to the Jews’ for the word of God and that Jews, embroiled in worldly things, ‘ain’t gonna know’. That sounds like Schneerson talking. Nevertheless, thanks to the Lubavitchers, Dylan would discern an important difference between the big fireworks promised in The Late, Great Planet Earth and his own tradition’s long-held views on the messianic age. You could equally say that he would make a choice of superstitions, that he would wind up choosing between two irrational fairy tales to make his life seem more rational. But they would be his choices.
Dylan would be consistently inconsistent in the years ahead. He does not practise systematic theology. He does favour obedience to instinct and emotion. He is as creative in the matter of fundamentalist superstition as he is in everything else. That he remains the religious fundamentalist he became in early 1979 is, meanwhile, self-evident. His habits of thought are eclectic, however. As we have seen, the Book of Revelation, a text not easily reconciled with Schneerson’s teachings, far less with the rebbe’s alleged status as Messiah, would go on exercising a profound fascination in all the decades to come during the long effort to unite art with faith. Dylan is a messianic Jew but, thanks to Chabad-Lubavitch, a lot more Jewish than Christian.
The singer Helena Springs, who knew him as well as anyone in 1978 and 1979, would later assert that in converting the artist was simply ‘exploring Christianity. He didn’t give up being a Jewish person, but he learned how to pray. And when he’d learned all he could learn, he went on to something else.’39 These days, Dylan makes his observances in synagogues, not churches, while proclaiming his belief in Revelation to passing journalists. Just to keep professors of comparative religion on their toes, he is also the unabashed author of an album entitled Christmas in the Heart. As ever, he does not care who is left puzzled.
In 1979 and 1980 he would accept the Vineyard’s fire-and-brimstone sermons with little apparent argument. Soon enough, nevertheless, he would begin to prowl again through the thickets and lush pastures of esoteric wisdom. It seems likely, too, that Dylan failed – and who can really blame him? – to get every version of the end-times tale straight in his head. For all that, the single, fixed messianic idea became embedded in his Judaeo-Christian thinking in 1979 and it would not shift.
You could give Dylan, or Chabad, some credit for sophistication. As it turns out, there is a way to read Revelation simply as a rewrite of old Jewish apocalyptic literature. You can make the argument, too, that one of the rewriters, stuck on an island off the Turkish coast in the first century, was a good messianic Jew whose lurid allegory was intended as propaganda to prevent the cult of rabbi Yeshua from opening itself up to Gentiles, as the apostle-apostate Paul was then demanding.40 With all that in mind, someone who might have been burned by importuning twentieth-century evangelical Californian Protestants could these days treat Revelation as ‘essentially an anti-Christian polemic’ and as good Jewish literature.41 For someone with a messianic outlook, the strange book’s code – a Dylan word, if ever there was one – conceals the story of a persecuted Jew’s struggle to proclaim the Messiah while remaining Jewish. The controversies over Menachem Schneerson would then be relevant. The puzzles over Bob Dylan’s meandering path to faith would certainly be relevant.
A lot of points need to be stretched to reach that conclusion. For one, Dylan didn’t know any of that stuff when he went under in a Santa Monica swimming pool. Mainstream Judaism finds Revelation interesting, at best, but unacceptable. There was a lot of apocalyptic literature around, in any case, when the book was being written. Many scholars meanwhile reject the anti-Christian interpretation of the text. Cut away all the possibilities and you are left with the simple fact that Dylan’s top text to this day is the finale of the Christian Bible. His faith is messianic; religions are secondary.
So the joke is hardly worth resisting. One at whom the word ‘messiah’ had been tossed so often for the sake of irony or a tabloid headline acquired a conviction involving the alleged real deal. At the end of another strange decade Dylan was living, writing and performing as though in the last days of the world. But try explaining that to a rock and roll audience.