by Bell, Ian
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.
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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, Dyla
n 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.
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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 a
gainst 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.