Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (33 page)

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:

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’.
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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.
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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.

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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’.)
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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.’
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The writer adds, however, that the ‘contrast with Christianity is self-evident’. Christians are defined 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: