by Bell, Ian
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 awa
kened, 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.