Bob Dylan’s Twenty Minutes as a Christian

I’ve decided I need to lighten up a bit with these posts. Too many heavy topics—hell, doubt, skepticism, Bonhoeffer. So how about a bit on Bob Dylan’s twenty minutes as a Christian?

Actually, I think Dylan called himself a Christian for a couple of years at least, which is better than Kris Kristofferson did (remember him?). The excited word went out in evangelical circles that Kris K–singer, song writer, actor (dubious), and former Rhodes Scholar–had become a Christian (this was in the 1980’s maybe). For some reason that excited a few fans of the Christian celebrity circuit.

I never heard much more until a few years later when an interviewer asked him about it. His reply: “Yah, I got drunk one night and came to Jesus. But I sobered up by morning and that was the end of that.” Oops. (“Time to look for another banquet speaker, Marge.”)

But Dylan was more serious about it, even if relatively briefly. So when I decided to use some of my post-teaching life to read a bio on Dylan (I’m attracted to singers who sound like a cement-mixer), I was especially looking forward to how they were going to treat Dylan’s dalliance with Christianity.

I decided against going right to that part of the bio, figuring I’d work my way up to it and see how his shot at faith fit in the flow of his life. So imagine my consternation when Daniel Mark Epstein in his The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait, after dragging me through minute descriptions of his, his mother’s, and his sister’s reactions to the Dylan concerts they had attended, gets to the Christian Dylan and says, “This is the point . . . where I lost him. Or rather he lost me, and most his fan base. . . .” Epstein, who probes every recess of Dylan’s psyche for hundreds of pages, covers his two years as a Christian in five paragraphs, dismissing the music as “fire-and-brimstone gospel tunes of the most fundamental, doctrinaire, and judgmental ilk.”

Epstein claims it “was not his religion that put me off” but the fact that he let it affect his songs and performances. (Gasp, an artist’s view of reality affecting his or her art! Outrageous!) This is the classic privatizing religion line. “Believe whatever you want, but keep it to yourself—out of the public square and out of your songs.”

Of course Epstein abandons his responsibility as a biographer (he could have titled these two pages as “Dylan’s Icky Fundy Phase”), but it serves to warn me against doing the same thing myself. There are certain causes, slogans, and points of view against which I react instinctively and viscerally. Dismissive words arise quickly in my mind: foolish, idiotic, laughable, benighted (a fine word), and so on. My subculture encourages this. We are among the great mass producers of ‘straw men’—describing people and positions in such a way that we can knock them over with a rhetorical feather.

Here is a good question to ask yourself whenever you find yourself so tempted: “What is it in that person’s life experience and understanding of the world that might have brought them, quite logically even, to that position?” It’s a form of the “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes” principle. Might be even better to ask in the form of “What could have happened in my life to make me see the world the way that person does?”

Hopefully that will keep us from being as “fundamental, doctrinaire, and judgmental” as Epstein is about Dylan’s twenty minutes as a Christian.