I first heard Bob Dylan back in 1973, with the song; Knocking on Heavens Door. I took little interest in him until I heard Like a Rolling Stone one Sunday in the Summer of 1979, while walking with my radio in Fountainstown, Cork, a nice beach resort that we spent a lot of time at as kids.
Then, in the Autumn of 1979, I heard that he’d become an evangelical Christian. I had met some evangelical Christians, but I thought I could never become one because I wasn’t the right personality type. As often happens, we have stereotypical views of people. I wasn’t the happy clappy type 😀.
Then, in the Spring of 1980, I bought Slow Train Coming. My favourite song on the album was I Believe in You.
Despite Ireland being a “Christian” country, there was much social pressure against expressing a love for God and a desire to follow Jesus. Few wanted to be seen as “holy”. If you were, people thought that you should go off and become a priest or a monk or a nun. There was the charismatic movement, but I saw it as being a little silly. Sometimes, you’d get trendy priests or vicars trying to appeal to young people through pop music, but “cool” people tended to just laugh at them. And I desperately wanted to be cool 😀.
But I Believe in You was a deeply devotional song and it was one of the things that spurred me on to committing my life to Christ some months later. I remember buying his second Christian album in June of that year – Saved. After his 1981 album, Shot of Love, he didn’t record anymore Christian albums. Dylan never liked been seen as a prophet or a spokesman for any movement. And there’s plenty of things about the evangelical scene that even evangelicals criticize or dislike. But it’s Jesus who we are committing ourselves to. As for evangelical celebrities and movements, we can choose which ones are helpful to us and which ones we’d prefer to distance ourselves from.
For example, I never met any evangelical who defended these scandalous TV evangelists that you’d hear about in the 1980s or scandalous megachurch leaders nowadays. But people don’t talk much about the legitimate people. I remember Billy Graham, who was well respected, comparing it to aircraft crashes. If you only ever hear about aircraft in the context of crashes, you’d probably never want to fly. But what about all the planes that never crash 😀.
I can understand why Dylan moved on from proclaiming his faith so publicly , but he still has personal faith, though he isn’t as vocal about it. Nonetheless, all these songs are still very special to me. And in later years, I got into his secular music.
Here are a few others songs from his Christian albums:
Hibernia Gospel 