Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (32 page)

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’.