Intégrité Fall 2019

VOLUME 18 NUMBER 2

INTÉGRITÉ FALL 2019 Special Issue on Country Music Jesus Guest-Edited by Darren J. N. Middleton

PUBLISHED SEMIANNUALLY BY

MISSOURI BAPTIST UNIVERSITY Saint Louis, Missouri 63141-8698 www.mobap.edu/integrite

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Editor John J. Han, Missouri Baptist University

Editorial Review Board Matthew Bardowell, Missouri Baptist University Todd C. Ream, Taylor University C. Clark Triplett, Missouri Baptist University

Advisory Board Bob Agee, Oklahoma Baptist University & Union University Jane Beal, University of La Verne Andy Chambers, Missouri Baptist University Jerry Deese, Missouri Baptist University Arlen Dykstra, Missouri Baptist University Hyun-Sook Kim, Yonsei University Darren J. N. Middleton, Texas Christian University Janice Neuleib, Illinois State University

Editorial Assistants Mary Ellen Fuquay

Grace Hahn

Marie Tudor

Webmaster Coral Christopher

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal (ISSN 1547-0474 and 1547-0873) is published in spring and fall by the Faith & Learning Committee and the Humanities Division of Missouri Baptist University, One College Park Dr., St. Louis, Missouri 63141. Published both online <http://www.mobap.edu/ integrite/> and in print copy, the journal examines historical, philosophical, theological, cultural, and pedagogical issues related to the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. All submissions are critically reviewed for content and substance by the editor and the editorial review board; in some cases, scholars in specific fields are invited to evaluate manuscripts. The opinions expressed by individual writers in this journal are not necessarily endorsed by the editor, editorial board, or Missouri Baptist University. Intégrité (pronounced IN tay gri tay) is a French word translated into English as “totality,” “integrity,” “honesty,” “uprightness,” or “integration.” Publication of the print edition of Intégrité has been made possible by funding from Missouri Baptist University.

SUBMISSIONS: Submissions of scholarly articles, short essays, review articles, book reviews, and poems are welcome. Send your work as an e-mail attachment (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. We accept submissions all year round. For detailed submission guidelines, see the last two pages of this journal.

SUBSCRIPTIONS & BOOKS FOR REVIEW: Intégrité subscriptions, renewals, address changes, and books for review should be mailed to John J. Han, Editor of Intégrité, Missouri Baptist University, One College Park Dr., St. Louis, Missouri 63141. Phone: (314) 3922311/Fax: (314) 434-7596. Subscription rates: Individuals $10 per year; institutions $20 per year.

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INDEXING: Intégrité is listed in the Southern Baptist Periodical Index and the Christian Periodical Index.

Volume 18, Number 2, Fall 2019 © 2019 Missouri Baptist University. All rights reserved.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Volume 18

Number 2

Fall 2019

Special Issue on Country Music Jesus Guest-Edited by Darren J. N. Middleton

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 3

Hillbilly Heilsgeschichte Darren J. N. Middleton

ARTICLES 14

Pastor Cash: An American Prophet of the Evangelical Left Joe Blosser

31

Something in the Water?: Using Country Music to Introduce Students to Theological Debates about Baptism (in Muddy Water) Clodagh Weldon

43

Defamiliarizing and Finding Christ Today: A Reading of Christ in the Music of Hayes Carll and Craig Finn James M. Cochran

54

Country Music, Rodeos, and Cowboy Church: How the West Was Won for Christ Jake Harris

BONUS TRACK 73

Soundtracking Sin and Salvation in Country Music Darren J. N. Middleton

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REVIEW ESSAY 78

Gimme That Old Time Religion: Notes on Evangelical Bob Dylan 1979-1981 Andrew Grant Wood

BOOK REVIEWS 82

Clay Walker, Jesus Was a Country Boy: Life Lessons on Faith, Fishing, and Forgiveness John E. Winters

85

Jessi Colter with David Ritz, An Outlaw and a Lady: A Memoir of Music, Life with Waylon, and the Faith that Brought Me Home David M. Buyze

89

Bill C. Malone with Tracey E. W. Laird, Country Music USA: 50th Anniversary Edition Darren J. N. Middleton

LYRICS AND POEMS 91

“Shout Heaven Down” Hunter Erwin

92

“Far from the Country Crowd” Laura S. Witherington

93

“When Sharing Was Enough” Stephen Newton

94

“Sweet Lord” and Other Poems Dike Okoro

97

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

100

CALL FOR PAPERS AND BOOK REVIEWS

Darren J.N. Middleton

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 2019): 3-13

INTRODUCTION

Hillbilly Heilsgeschichte Darren J. N. Middleton Jesus is no stranger to the high priests in country music’s roadhouse religion, which explains why many Christian scholars—myself included—find the genre such an instructive resource for thinking theologically.1 Always restless and always changing, this country music Jesus is an adroit figure, given to doings and sayings of redemptive power that touch and then transport multiple listeners from hard times to Heaven, Curtis W. Ellison claims (102-60). This call to grandeur and knowing the depths of misery, both of which are part of our experience, are central to country music’s narrative culture. Personal peccancy shows up in songs that recount everything from failed marriages (Clark) to habitual lying (Green) and from unremitting intoxication (Watson) to brotherly brawls (Rice). Salvation surfaces in songs about affectionate parents (Bates), steadfast spouses (Jewell), honky-tonk confessions (Howard), and penal epiphanies (Strait).

Jesus focalizes this hillbilly Heilsgeschichte: “Yes, Jesus is a cowboy, you ask how I know / He rode into the city on an unbroken colt / Yes, Jesus is a cowboy, oh brother can't you see / He travelled this world just setting men free / And He’s still riding drag, just for you and me” (The Brady Wilson Band).

Emptying himself of the right to serve as life’s point man, this country music Jesus rides behind the world’s wayward herd, pushing it forward, even as He accepts the dirt and dust that comes with his position in the drive.

Country music artists uphold as well as teach the sin and salvation story, studies show (Burke; Fillingim; Sample; Veith and Wilmeth). Yet, there are some commentators, like Don Cupitt, a Life Fellow at Cambridge University, who seem to question the narrative’s explanatory power for our postmodern times: Can anyone claim that the body of Christian stories, from Genesis to Judgement day, still has any more moral and religious mileage in it than the Arthuriad? Does the old way of seeing all of cosmic history as the working out of a mighty drama of Fall and Redemption still grip us at all? I fear that it does not. It may be culturally valuable to be able to decipher the world view that is built into our medieval cathedrals, but it no longer makes a practical difference to the way anyone conducts her life. (34)

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Anyone? This claim seems needlessly stingy.

Cupitt’s critics—myself included—lament his apparent reductionism, even as they concede how his words recognize the demise of Christian discourse in today’s United Kingdom, where Cupitt has spent his professional life (155-63). But what hath Cambridge to do with Nashville? I am British, have worked in the American South for the past quarter century, and experience teaches me that Dana Jennings is largely right when he holds that country music testifies to the Christian story’s continuing influence on U.S. culture: [Country music is] two-stepping rats, poverty-stricken existentialists, and gravel roads that wash out each and every spring. It’s patches on the knees of your britches, voices coarse as rasps, and a Depression that lasted thirty or forty years—now that’s a Great Depression. It’s music heard from the back of flatbed trucks at laundromats, drive-in movie theaters, and quartermile stock car tracks. It’s living for overtime up at the mill, and living for your weekend case of Schlitz down home. It’s tremoring at the kitchen table at four in the morning, in the grip of a George Jones moaner, as you wonder where the years of your life have flown.

Are you listening?

It’s crazy arms and cold, cold hearts, heartaches by the number and setting the woods on fire… It’s the wreck of the Old 97, a wreck on the highway, and that honky-tonk angel who made a wreck out of you… It’s waltzing across Texas in thrall to the ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and the ‘Kentucky Waltz’… Seeing the light, preachin’, prayin’, singin’, and hearing Mother pray…

Listen!

With the deepest country music, there are no casual listeners because the music is curse and redemption, the journey and the homeplace, current events and ancient tales. The very best country music is prayer and litany, epiphany and salvation. That’s why it’s still with us.” (9, 10) Hank Williams personifies this vibrant paradox; he emptied himself in songs of dark dejection and in songs that bask in newly discovered illumination, as David Fillingim notes (43-67). Hank delved deep into his soul, in other words, and arrived at the source(s) of its sunny as well as stormy meterology. He was an internally divided figure (Escott). Was Hank ever really comfortable naming the Name? Or was an imprecise heliotrope enough? Opinion on this matter appears divided, though Jennings stresses how Hank’s music crackled with an indefinite

Darren J.N. Middleton 5 spiritual energy, his Saturday night rashness conjoined in a rapture with Sunday morning regret: It’s hard to tell whether ol’ Hank ever got that intimate with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. He saw the light, he sang the light, but toward the end of his short, incandescent life he’d sometimes refuse to sing ‘I Saw the Light,’ because he was lost in the darkness that you can touch and he could no longer see any light at all.

All we know for certain is that we were left an enduring hymn forged by an enduring hell-rake.

Amen, brother. (210) This amen reverberates throughout today’s country music, as in the case of artists such as Jake Kellen (“Jesus and Hank”), Stephen Padilla (“Hank and Jesus”), James Payne (“Hank, I Saw the Light”), and Mike McCarroll (“Somewhere Tween Jesus and Hank”). Each singer positions his soul between the Son of God and the Hillbilly Shakespeare. Marked by a spirituality that seems as transparent as their transgression, The Cadillac Three also use the Hank-Jesus motif to hint at the tussle, which seems to roil within us all, between competing parental influences: Well, I wasn’t born this way It was handed on down Moses, Bocephus both coming on down From the mountain, I was lost and found then I was baptized in a whiskey fountain Thank daddy for Hank Thank mama for Jesus Between the vinyl and the Bible It was everything I ever needed It was six strings on a Saturday night Sunday morning seeing the light Thank daddy for Hank Thank mama for Jesus, oh yeah. (“Hank & Jesus”)

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Figure 1. “Hank Williams” painting, no title. Nashville TN, 2016.

Photo by Darren J. N. Middleton Other country artists use similar dualisms—“a cowboy and a saint, cross and the open range”—to tell the old, old story, often identifying with an array of flawed American figures before referencing Jesus’s saving power: Famous Motel Cowboys (“John Wayne, Babe Ruth and Jesus”); Charlie Hewitt (“Jesus, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe”); Lance Miller (“George Jones and Jesus”); and, the Charlie Shafter Band (“Jesus & James Dean”). The most spiritually adept and emotionally astute country music almost always displays this soulful disorientation. “Somewhere between Jesus and John Wayne / A cowboy and a saint, cross and the open range / I try to be more like you Lord, but most days I know I ain’t / I’m somewhere between Jesus and John Wayne,” the Gaither Vocal Band intones. Such music endures because it amplifies as well as versifies our

Darren J.N. Middleton 7 troubled interiority, the way we oscillate between life’s many sadnesses—family discord, romantic failure, disorderly conduct, extramarital entanglements, etc.— and transcendent optimism. This optimism shows up as the hankerin’ for forgiveness and the yearnin’ for paradise, twin desires born of God’s Spirit.2 As Ken Burns’s eight-part, 16-hour film shows, Johnny Cash internalized such theological anthropology (Duncan and Burns). He knew the depths of misery and he heard the call to grandeur, having proceeded out from drug-addled rock star to outlier evangelist in the course of what many biographers see as an intricate, life-long spiritual journey (Beck, Hilburn, Laurie, and Urbanski). This messy and often public theater, from ego-drama to theo-drama, played itself out in Cash’s songs, a film, a novel, an autobiography, and through testimonies at countless Billy Graham Crusades (Olsen). Like Hank Williams, Cash was a tragic troubadour who “acknowledged the lure of the flesh with the hunger of the spirit,” and several recent musicians have appealed to the Man in Black, this wayward country catechumen, if only to take up and then address their own heartbreak and faith (Hobbes, 52). For example, Tim Ash declares, ‘Cause it ain’t one or the other, life ain’t that black and white Can’t always be wrong, and you won’t always be right There’s a little bit of good and a little bit of bad in every one of us That’s why I’m learning to live like Jesus and Johnny Cash Well, we all need a hero, and these are two of mine I’ll carry the Cross, and always Walk the Line. (“Jesus and Johnny Cash”) And Tyler Lewis implores, So I pray to Jesus Christ and Johnny Cash ‘Cause right now that’s all I have You’re gonna help me make it through I need the touch of a holy hand And the voice of a mortal man To show me a little bit of truth Help me, oh Lord help me. (“Jesus Christ and Johnny Cash”) To listen to such songs is to hear artists consumed by their souls’ contest between facticity and possibility, between what they are in any given moment and what they might become, between violence and grace, as was the case with Johnny Cash. Graeme Thomson writes, The man in black was never black and white. Conflict ran through him. Conflict between wired and straight; God and the devil; the Saturday night sin and Sunday morning hair shirt; loving patriarch and wayward son; country conformist and eternal rebel. Jack and

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal John. And on it goes. He was always trying to resolve this essential contradiction in his music. Every testament of faith has a quiver of doubt; every hymn a whiff of cordite; every original sin comes with the certainty of an Old Testament bolt of judgment.

(38)

Figure 2. John R. Cash and June Carter Cash Graves. Hendersonville, TN, 2016.

Photo by Darren J. N. Middleton

In the lead-off essay in this special issue of Intégrité, Joe Blosser paints a portrait of Cash’s active-if-beleaguered faith through a close look at his life and work. Blosser’s work historicizes Cash’s Christianity, placing it in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, showing how the then-emerging U.S. evangelical movement fostered Cash’s faith formation and where he diverged from it. Readers will realize that Cash presents a counterculture Jesus, and hopefully they will secure an appreciation for the highs, lows, and sheer depths of Cash’s Christian faith and

Darren J.N. Middleton 9 how it reflected the outlaw approach he embodied in most of the other aspects of his life.

One struggles to understand Cash without Christianity, Blosser notes, and one labors in vain to comprehend Christianity without its sacred actions. Baptism and communion were two of the earliest Christian rituals, initiating new members into the Jesus movement and, over time, binding believers together with a mythos and mission. Later theologians explored the meaning of such sacred actions, often by assembling architectonic thought-structures, yet artists have also articulated the faith, sometimes pushing beyond theology’s typically dry or cold prose to furnish flesh-and-blood descriptions of ultimate concern. Perhaps most medieval Christians took their theological cues from Giotto’s frescoes, not Aquinas’s analysis, despite the brilliant Dominican’s general reputation as the Common Doctor. And perhaps country music songs are our neighbor’s hymnal.

Clodagh Weldon appears to think so. In our issue’s second essay, she plunges into the different theologies of baptism in the work of selected country artists, including Trace Adkins and Carrie Underwood, emerging with the belief that country music lyrics inspire students to dive deeper into Christianity, especially its theological texts and debates surrounding baptism.

Country music cultivates an attentive listening for the theological, which exists beyond the classroom, as Weldon reminds us, yet this genre also remixes and de-familiarizes traditional Christology. Whereas conventional theologies picture Jesus as God’s Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, country artists model Jesus in more commonplace or run-of-the-mill ways. If Jesus appeared today, then He would be a hillbilly (Jackson) or a country boy (Walker), an outlaw (Dakota Jennings), or a straight shooter (Boland). Jesus would be the unassuming Lord of Ryder trucks (Burkhart), tractors (Curth), team roping (The Bellamy Brothers), gridiron football (Zaruba), Duct tape (Harvey), and riding shotgun (Larsen). If one listens to such songs, then it seems like “these Cowboys want to keep Jesus earthbound, home on the range rather than sitting on His saddle in Heaven,” one student once told me (Burgess). Normality is the calling card of Country Music Jesus. But this Jesus of barrel racing and beers defamiliarizes the customary Christian, unsettling established images and contesting time-honored traditions. James M. Cochran, our journal’s third essayist, showcases two recent country musicians, Hayes Carll and Craig Finn, and describes how they remake biblical stories and reimagine Christ for a contemporary audience. After considering this process of de-familiarization in Carll’s and Finn’s work, Cochran outlines their ecclesiology, especially their understanding of the Church’s mixed nature or flawed character. In the last analysis, Cochran argues that Carll’s and Finn’s songs should stimulate all Christians to transcend any narrow definitions of Christ and the Church to see Christ in the face of the Other, particularly the marginalized Other.

My recent visit to The Cowboy Church of Ellis County, which is located in Waxahachie, Texas, offered me a case study in one of U.S. Protestantism’s fastest growing forms, and it tendered proof to Don Cupitt’s lie that the Christian story of sin and salvation “no longer makes a practical difference to the way anyone conducts her life” (34). Situated just beyond the suburbs of Dallas,

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Waxahachie is the county seat of Ellis County, and much of the 1983 country music movie Tender Mercies was filmed here. When they have finished attending recovery groups or grief-share sessions, folk in this place may be found thrumming to country music, especially in Arena Church on Monday evening.

Believers gather for worship in boots and jeans, the PA system pipes Alan Jackson, and almost all stay for team roping practice at the conclusion of the service. The Cowboy Church of Ellis County partners with the American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches (AFCC), and Jake Harris’s essay, the final one in this special issue, draws on fieldwork in other AFCC-affiliated congregations to explore what he takes to be the three main features of the Cowboy Church movement: Its history as an effort to minister to rodeo riders in Texas, its reliance on American country music songs as hymns, and its desire to increase male church attendance. Whether in the Southwest or elsewhere in the U.S. and Mexico, this maturing movement is an instructive outlet for the faith formation of its members, because it allows their spiritual as well as rural sensibilities to commingle, Harris concludes.

Our special issue honors Christianity’s vibrant paradox, the way each follower of Jesus somehow learns to coagulate sin and salvation’s impulses within their own besieged, believing soul. Tales of fall and redemption pulsate within Christian hearts as vital concomitants, and the best of all country music versifies as well as soundtracks the complete story. “The music has a way of applying, no matter how often the culture changes,” Gene Edward Veith and Thomas L. Wilmeth claim. “[and] the faith seems as authentic as the sinning” (181).

Oscillating between the Bible and the bottle, then, the Christian of country faith embodies this hillbilly Heilsgeschichte, as George Strait makes clear: God and country music are like whiskey and a prayer Like Johnny Cash’s arm around Billy Graham God and country music They both never really change You find ’em when you need 'em Where you stand There’s always lost in the found And darkness in the I-Saw-the-Light It’s living in those small towns In some church and backroad honky tonk tonight It’s a dance between the sin and the salvation Come hell or high water There's two things still worth saving God and country music. (“God and Country Music”)

Notes The idea for this journal’s special issue came from the intellectually curious and spiritually energetic “Silver Frogs” in my Texas Christian University (TCU) 1

Darren J.N. Middleton 11 Extended Education classes, “Country Music Jesus” (Fall 2018, 2016) and “Johnny Cash, Theologian” (Fall 2015). I am most grateful for their contagious enthusiasm, tireless support, and lofty literacy level in all things country.

Additionally, I offer special thanks to the good folk who work hard to make TCU’s Extended Education such a lively place of learning: David Grebel, Sheri Familiari, Julie Lovett, and Trisha Obregon.

2

A late nineteenth-century gospel tabernacle, now the Mother Church of Country Music, the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville once served as the stage for many captivating revivalists and homespun preachers, everyone from Samuel P. Jones to Dwight L Moody, and such men were united, for the most part, by the desire to bluntly stress this Christian story of sin and salvation (Eiland et.al., Nashville’s Mother Church, 5-26; Ellison, Country Music Culture, 3-25).

Works Cited American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches. americanfcc.org/. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.

Ash, Tim. “Jesus and Johnny Cash.” Round 3 EP. A&M Productions, 2013.

Band, Brady Wilson. “Jesus Was a Cowboy.” For the First Time. The Brady Wilson Band, 2011.

Band, Charlie Shafter. “Jesus and James Dean.” 17th and Chicago. Charlie Shafter Band, 2007.

Band, Gaither Vocal. “Jesus & John Wayne.” Lovin’ Life. Spring House Music Group, 2008.

Bates, Jeff. “Mama Was a Lot Like Jesus.” Leave the Light On. BMG Music, 2006.

Beck, Richard. Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash. Fortress Press, 2019.

Boland, Jason and The Stragglers. “Jesus and Ruger.” High in the Rockies: A Live Album. Apex Nashville/Proud Souls, 2010.

Brothers, Bellamy. “Rodeo for Jesus.” Pray for Me. Bellamy Brothers Records, 2012.

Burgess, Elissabeth. “Re: Your Class.” Received by Darren J. N. Middleton, 30 Oct. 2018.

Burke, Ken. Country Music Changed My Life: Tales of Tough Times and Triumph from Country’s Legends. Chicago Review Press, 2004.

Burkhart, Karen. “You, Me, and Jesus in a Ryder Truck.” You, Me, and Jesus in a Ryder Truck. Karen Burkhart, 2010.

Burns, Ken. Country Music: A Film by Ken Burns. DVD. PBS, 2019.

The Cadillac Three. “Hank & Jesus.” Legacy. Big Machine Label Group, 2017.

Clark, Brandy. “Pray to Jesus.” 12 Stories. Warner Records, 2014.

Cowboy Church of Ellis County. www.cowboyfaith.org/. Accessed Oct. 6 2019.

Cowboys, Famous Motel. “John Wayne, Babe Ruth and Jesus.” Garden City Skyline. Famous Motel Cowboys, 2013.

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Cupitt, Don. Emptiness and Brightness. Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 2001.

Curth, Sven. “Jesus Loves Tractors.” Jesus Love Tractors. Sven Curth, 2009.

Duncan, Dayton, and Ken Burns. Country Music: An Illustrated History. Knopf, 2019.

Eiland, William U., with additional contributions by Craig Havighurst and F. Lynne Bachleda. Nashville’s Mother Church: The History of the Ryman Auditorium. Second revised edition. Nashville: Grand Ole Opry LLC, 2014.

Ellison, Curtis W. Country Music Culture: From Hard Times to Heaven. UP of Mississippi, 1995.

Escott, Colin with George Merritt and William MacEwen. I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams. San Francisco: Back Bay Books, 2015.

Fillingim, David. Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology. Mercer UP, 2003.

Green, Pat. “Jesus on a Greyhound.” Songs We Wish We’d Written II. Sugar Hill Records, 2012.

Harvey, Trafton. “Duct Tape and Jesus.” A Shot of Whiskey. Trafton Harvey, 2015.

Hewitt, Charlie. “Jesus, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.” Jesus, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe EP. Charlie Hewitt, 2016.

Hilburn, Robert. Johnny Cash: The Life. Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

Hobbes, Thomas Alan. “JC: Johnny Cash and Faith.” Walking the Line: Country Music Lyricists and American Culture, edited by Thomas Alan Holmes and Roxanne Harde. Lexington Books, 2013, pp. 51-63.

Howard, Rebecca Lynn. “Jesus and Bartenders.” Forgive. MCA Nashville, 2002.

Jackson, Alan. “If Jesus Walked the World Today.” Good Time. BMG Music, 2008.

Jennings, Dakota. “Jesus Was an Outlaw.” Tattoos & Wives. Independent Recordings Nashville, 2009.

Jennings, Dana. Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music. Faber and Faber, 2008.

Jewell, Buddy. “Jesus, Elvis and Me.” I Surrender All. Diamond Dust Records, 2011.

Kellen, Jake. “Jesus and Hank.” Jesus and Hank, 2013.

Larsen, Lacy. “Jesus Riding Shotgun.” Real Texas Country: Volume 3. Resnik Music Group, 2012.

Laurie, Greg with Marshall Terrill. Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon. Washington, D.C.: Salem Books, 2019.

Lewis, Tyler. “Jesus Christ and Johnny Cash.” I’m Coming Home. Duck Duck Goose Productions, 2007.

McCarroll, Mike. “Somewhere Tween Jesus and Hank.” Twanglish. Mike McCarroll, 2015.

Middleton, Darren J. N. “Relational Theology in the Second Axial Age: A Response to Don Cupitt’s Religious Theory.” The Future of the Christian

Darren J.N. Middleton 13 Tradition in the Second Axial Age, edited by Robert J. Miller. Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 2007, pp. 155-63.

Miller, Lance. “George Jones and Jesus.” Back in the New School. Lofton Creek Records/Big 7 Records, 2007.

Olsen, Ted. “Johnny Cash’s Song of Redemption: How the Coolest Man in the Music Industry Became That Way While Singing about Jesus and the Cross.” Christianity Today, Nov. 2003, pp. 60-62.

Padilla, Stephen. “Hank and Jesus.” Hank and Jesus. Lovable Losers Music, 2018.

Payne, James. “Hank, I Saw the Light.” Greatest Hits: 20 Years of the Hits. Jpm Records, 2008.

Rice, Chase. “Jack Daniel’s and Jesus.” Dirt Road Communion. Dack Janiels Music, 2012.

Sample, Tex. White Soul: Country Music, the Church, and Working Americans.

Abingdon, 1996.

Straigt, George. “God and Country Music.” Honky Tonk Time Machine. MCA Nashville, 2019. _______. “I Found Jesus on the Jailhouse Floor.” Honkytonkville. MCA Nashville, 2003.

Tender Mercies. Dir. Bruce Beresford. Perf. Robert Duvall and Tess Harper.

Universal, 1983.

Thomson, Graeme. The Resurrection of Johnny Cash: Hurt, Redemption, and American Recordings. London: Jawbone Press, 2011.

Urbansi, Dave. The Man Comes Around: The Spiritual Journey of Johnny Cash.

Lake Mary: Relevant Books, 2003.

Veith, Gene Edward, and Thomas L. Wilmeth. Honky-Tonk Gospel: The Story of Sin and Salvation in Country Music. Baker Books, 2001.

Walker, Clay. “Jesus Was a Country Boy.” Jesus Was a Country Boy. Curb Records, 2013.

Watson, Aaron. “I Met Jesus In a Bar.” Barbed Wire Halo. BIG Label Records, 2007.

Zaruba, Frank. “Let Jesus Be the Quarterback.” Traditional Country Music, Volume 4. AudioSparx, 2011.

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Pastor Cash: An American Prophet of the Evangelical Left Joe Blosser “Don’t go mixin’ politics with the folk songs of our land,” sang Johnny Cash (“The One”). And he took his own advice (Hilburn 385). In fact, Cash is believed never to have voted in an election. His image and music, however, helped herald a new religious movement and likely influenced many voters.

When Republicans in the 2004 Presidential election tried to align themselves with Cash’s legacy and music, they were met with black-clad protesters who more closely captured Cash’s own political and cultural legacy (Rothberg). The “Man in Black,” as he was often called, was a prophet of the new evangelical left.

Cash’s voice, lyrics, music, movie, books, TV show, crusade appearances, and the very commitments of his life heralded a more progressive, evangelical Christian faith to the nation.1 Once driven by a lifestyle that many would claim denied Christ, Cash found a new love for Jesus in the late 1960s. Under the encouragement and tutelage of Billy Graham, Cash began publicly expressing his faith, becoming one of the key celebrities supporting the then evangelical resurgence.2 Cash modeled himself as a modern-day Saint Paul through his conversion experience, prolific writings, traveling testimonies, and deep awareness of sin. In 1977, he earned an associate degree in theology from The Christian International School of Theology, and shortly thereafter, he was ordained by the college president, Dr. Bill Hamon. Hamon remarked that Cash “wanted to baptize some people in the Jordan, and so we ordained him so that he would feel free to do it” (Turner 160). “Cash also used his new status as an ordained minister,” according to Steve Turner, “to conduct the weddings of a few close friends” (161). Though he would admittedly falter and struggle with incredible guilt and addiction, Pastor Cash returned again and again to his faith.

While Cash’s view of Jesus reflected many of the dominant evangelical beliefs of the late twentieth century, his Jesus differed by standing in solidarity with the downtrodden and by raising a call for social justice. Weaving the trials of his upbringing into his religious understanding, Johnny’s Jesus, more than that of most evangelicals, was a Jesus of Matthew 25: a Jesus found in the face of the needy, the face of the stranger, and the face of the prisoner. Johnny’s Jesus knew the “Folsom Prison Blues” and wiped away “Apache Tears.” Cash may have walked in step with Graham on stage, but he, like a Hebrew prophet, also proclaimed a new trail—a trail traveled by other progressive, evangelical Christians.

Joe Blosser 15 Growing Up a “Country Boy” Cash begins his last autobiography, Cash, not with his own life, but with that of his ancestors. He traces his lineage from Scotland through his grandfather, a circuit-riding preacher who “rode a horse and…carried a gun” (Cash 4). Johnny Cash (as he later was dubbed for all time by record producer Sam Phillips) was born J.R. Cash in Kingsland, Arkansas, during the winter of 1932. The fourth child of Ray Cash and Carrie Rivers Cash, J.R. grew up with the Depression in the air. As one of Cash’s grandsons, Dustin Tittle, recalled, “His family, the only way that they survived was the Franklin Roosevelt New Deal. They got a plot of land in Arkansas and cultivated it.” Upon his death, The New York Times wrote that after moving onto “20 acres of fertile land” in the Dyess Colony of northeastern Arkansas when he was three, Cash “spent the next 15 years, working in the fields and learning the plain-spoken stories of sharecroppers in the area” (Holden). Cash acknowledged that “a way of life produced a certain kind of music” (Cash 17). With the themes of endless work, seen in songs like “High Cotton,” and the power of nature, seen in songs like “Five Feet High and Rising,” Cash never forgot his beginnings. Even when wealth and power sat comfortably in his Jamaican vacation home, Cash continued to align himself with the “poor and the beaten down / Livin’ in the hopeless hungry side of town” (“Man in Black”).

Though many evangelicals regard Cash as a “born-again” Christian and he did too, he always saw himself as a believer: “I’m still a Christian, as I have been all my life” (Cash 9). His mother’s allegiance to the Pentecostal Church of God likely shaped his early religious sensibilities. But his autobiography suggests the person of greatest spiritual influence on his life was Jack, his older brother and “hero.” When Jack died at the age of fourteen, falling victim to a saw blade while working to raise money for the family, Cash recalls how Jack had “felt a call from God to be a minister of the Gospel” (Cash 30). Cash would dream occasionally about his brother throughout the rest of his life. In the last recorded of these dreams, Johnny saw Jack as “a preacher, just as he intended to be, a good man and a figure of high repute” (Cash 39). Jack’s young death may cause some to question the power of his life to alter Johnny’s, but Johnny had no such question: “[H]is influence on me was profound. When we were kids he tried to turn me from the way of death to the way of life, to steer me toward the light, and since he died his words and his example have been like signposts for me” (Cash 38).

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Figure 1. Johnny Cash Boyhood Home. Dyess, AR, 2019.

Photo by Darren J. N. Middleton Jack’s most significant influence may have been the change his death exacted in his father’s life (Turner 144). After Jack’s death, Ray Cash “quit drinking” and “took on duties as a deacon of the church” (Cash, Cash 321).

Nearly fifty years later, Johnny recalled the words his father spoke in his first sermon: “‘You’ve called on me to preach today and I can’t turn you down, but I don’t deserve to be here. I’m an evil man. I always have been. I don’t deserve to stand in this pulpit” (Cash 321). Though much of Johnny’s relationship with his father appeared conflicted, Johnny remembered being proud to see his father in the pulpit. Imagine the scene—the troubled, toilsome life of a cotton-pickin’, openly sinful father preaching of God’s forgiveness to his young son (Cash, Cash 321). While Cash eventually liberated himself from bearing the sins of his father, he appeared to have carried on Ray’s conflicted soul—a man knowing both God’s forgiveness and his deep need for it.

After graduating from high school, spending less than a month in “Detroit workin’ on assembly line,” and a few years with the U.S. Air Force as a radio operator, Cash finally met up with the future “Tennessee Three” and began making music (“One Piece”). Cash’s mother had encouraged his singing and even sacrificed to pay for voice lessons—though his voice teacher told him,

Joe Blosser 17 “Don’t ever take voice lessons again. Don’t let me or anyone else change the way you sing” (Cash, Cash 72). Cash’s passion for music began paying off in 1955 with the release of his first record, including “Hey, Porter” and the hit “Cry, Cry, Cry,” which spent a week at number 14 on the Billboard charts (Cash 406).

Cash’s popularity grew rapidly throughout the 1950s, but Sun Records refused to allow him to record a gospel album. Cash recalled that he “wanted to record gospel music, and [he] wanted it badly” (Cash 112). So in 1958, Cash made the move to Columbia Records because they promised him he could record gospel.

He “would remain [with Columbia Records] for the next 28 years” (Holden). By 1959, Cash released the album Hymns by Johnny Cash, and so began his legacy for mixing religion with his increasingly popular music (Turner 151).

Mirroring the tumultuous air of the 1960s, Cash’s life and career began suffering when he acquired an addiction to amphetamines (Hilburn 123-124). His addiction resulted in many missed concerts, some near death experiences, a few nights in various jails, a California forest fire, and the end to his marriage to Vivian Liberto. But happily, it was in these years that Cash connected with his future wife, June Carter (Urbanski 53ff).

After touring with June for a while in the mid-1960s, Cash recalled a night when they were together in Toronto: “I was nothing but leather and bone; there was nothing in my blood but amphetamines; there was nothing in my heart but loneliness; there was nothing between me and my God but distance” (Cash 191).

It was on that night that June gave up on Johnny, but Johnny gathered up all her clothes and brought them into his room, leaving her with only a towel. Through her tears, June promised to stay if only Johnny would give back her clothes—he did: “And through all the trials to come, before and after she became my wife, she never tried to leave again” (Cash 227-228). Throughout his early years, he constantly struggled through the work, toil, and addictions of life, but he never did so alone. These struggles were matched with the love of family, friends, and a sometimes silent but always present belief in God. Evangelical “Redemption” As the 1960s rolled along, many in the drug counter-culture began trading drugs for Jesus. Johnny Cash numbered among these converts. Finding himself sober, in a new marriage, and with a refreshed understanding of faith, Cash felt called, like Saint Paul, into new life (Twomey 227). During these years, Cash made the acquaintance of Reverend Billy Graham who stood close to Cash, leading him into a deeper understanding of evangelical faith. Cash’s beliefs about Jesus solidified as he incorporated prayer and Bible study into his life and found creative ways to express his beliefs. As Cash’s grandson, Tittle, notes, “[C]reative expression for [Cash] was extremely important, especially through song and songwriting, and that’s how he, I think for the most part, conveyed [his faith], in song. Like off the album, the song ‘When the Man Comes Around.’”

Throughout the rest of his career, Cash would testify as he toured, becoming one

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal of the few celebrities able to be openly evangelical without being blacklisted from mainstream culture (Turner 161).

Igniting a popular resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the 1970s were groups like the “Jesus Freaks,” who emerged out of San Francisco’s HaightAshbury district in 1967. Led by Elizabeth and Ted Wise, this movement “pleaded with speed freaks and heroin addicts to drop out of the drug culture and turn on to Jesus” (Prothero 126). In the same year the Jesus Freaks began passing on drugs, Cash “[performed] straight for the first time in more than a decade at the high school in Hendersonville” (Cash 234-35). While there appears to be a radical shift in trading drugs for Jesus, Robert Ellwood argues that “the transition from psychedelia to Jesus was not as radical as it seemed on the surface—or to the converted…Most of the characteristics of the psychedelic culture…are also characteristic of evangelicalism and have been carried over into the Jesus movement” (One Way 18). These new-found Christians prized the “subjectivity” found in both psychedelic highs and “[t]he living presence of Jesus” (Ellwood, One Way 18). They likewise believed “[t]he goal of life is a ‘high’—the joyous assurance of knowing Jesus” or taking drugs (Ellwood, One Way 18). One additional parallel seems important in Cash’s conversion: Expression through music is central to evangelicalism and so are the visual symbols of the Bible, carried about, read, and venerated, and to a lesser extent the cross. Reference to an idealized rural past, the days of the “old-time religion,” is as important as the communalisitic hedonism of the psychedelic culture. (Ellwood, One Way 18) These similarities between the drug and Jesus cultures likely made the transition easier for Cash, requiring less a change of personality than a change of lifestyle (perhaps one could say, a change of addiction). This change, however, resulted in drastic inward and outward differences.

Like many prodigal sons of the era, Cash’s recommitment to God allowed him to love himself again. Cash recalled knowing that he didn’t have “soft-core, pop-psychology self-hatred; it was a profound, violent, daily holocaust of revulsion and shame, and one way or another it had to stop” (Cash 245). Though he attempted a darkened trip to death by going into Nickajack Cave, Cash felt in the stillness of that cave the breath of God, and he left with “a sensation of utter peace, clarity, and sobriety” (Cash 231). Cash later claimed the God who once seemed so distant had stood near all along, often through the faces of those who loved him. Time and again, his friends and family had intervened in his life. In one such instance, Cash recalled thinking, “This is my salvation. God has sent these people to show me a way out. I’m going to get a chance to live” (Cash 245).

The recommitment he made in the fall of 1967 marked an upswing in Cash’s life.

Within a year, he married June Carter and reignited his music career with the hit record Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (Hilburn 331).

With his personal life coming together, Cash began making positive contributions to the public face of religion in the U.S. In May 1971, he made a

Joe Blosser 19 public commitment to follow Jesus at Evangel Temple, a Pentecostal church outside Nashville (Turner 145). He later proclaimed, “‘I don’t have a career anymore. What I have now is a ministry.… I’ve lived all my life for the devil up ‘til now, and from here on I’m going to live it for the Lord’” (Conn 29). Only a year before, Graham had contacted Cash and the two drew together as friends and crusade colleagues. At the 1970 Knoxville Crusade, Cash told the 62,000 in attendance, “When you take drugs, you may be in ecstasy for a few minutes, but you’re soon on the ridge of terror. Take it from a guy who’s been there, it ain’t worth it” (Graham 66).3 Echoing the evangelical themes of “waywardness” and “redemption,” Cash, as a prized “prodigal son,” broadcast the evangelical message to thousands.4 Perhaps the largest Crusade of the era was held in 1972 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. Explo ’72, or as Graham called it, a “‘religious Woodstock,’” drew 80,000 people “for a week of singing and sermons” (Prothero 145). Cash and Graham appeared together on stage, mirroring the Jesus Generation cry with a single finger pointed toward the heavens and the words “One Way – the Jesus Way!” being chanted throughout the crowd. The power of Cash’s presence and testimony at this event became the introduction to Charles Paul Conn’s 1973 book, The New Johnny Cash. Conn records a young girl boarding a plane after attending Explo ‘72 and saying, “I guess the guy that really zonked me out the most was Johnny Cash.… He told how much it meant to him to be a Christian, and quoted Scripture verses between songs. When he sang, he got that whole place to jumping!” (10). Though evangelicals “retain the old rhetoric of opposition to the world” (Balmer 133), Martin Marty recognizes that “they do not shun the world and are extremely celebrity conscious, parading the Pat Boones and Johnny Cashes as prize converts” (Nation 113). Cash became a mouthpiece for a growing evangelical movement.

Following The Gospel Road As Cash became more comfortable with his faith, he sought new, creative modes of expression. Perhaps the most significant of his creative projects was the production of the 1973 film The Gospel Road. Cash spent a great deal of time in personal Bible study in order to help write the music and screenplay for the film.

Released in the same year as Jesus Christ Superstar, the two films represent some of the only “Jesus movies” of U.S. cinema to be shot on site in Israel. Though both contain the popular music of the day, that is where their similarities cease.

Cash’s film is a devotional, reflecting his personal faith life and belief in Jesus. It begins with a brief testimony by Cash who then sings and narrates the remainder of the film (the characters rarely speak). Jesus is depicted as an outlaw—much like Cash himself. Though Jesus eventually calls disciples, many scenes show him walking alone through a jagged wilderness. He even cleanses the temple alone, without the disciples even around. This Jesus is a maverick—a son of God forced to go it alone in the world. No one hears his Sermon on the Mount, and no

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal one celebrates his entry into Jerusalem—he rides, like a lone cowboy, into a deserted city with just the noise of the crowd in the air.

Mirroring a dominant evangelical tenant, Cash believed humans had committed an infinite offense against God and only the infinite gift of Jesus’ sinless death can redeem humanity. In The Gospel Road, John the Baptist proclaims that Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

Substitution atonement rings clear as the audience watches the lone Jesus carry his cross to Calvary. No one else is in the shot: no idle spectators, no soldiers demanding Jesus’ death, no crowds mocking him—just Jesus walking through an empty city, carrying a cross up a hill. The Christology of the film brings the words of evangelical Max Lucado to mind: “Had Jesus been forced to nail himself to the cross, he would have done it. For it was not the soldiers who killed him, nor the screams of the mob: It was his devotion to us” (74). In the song “Redemption” recorded years later, Cash sang, “And the blood gave life / To the branches of the tree / And the blood was the price / That set the captives free…And we are redeemed by the blood.” A remarkable parallel exists between Cash’s “Redemption” and the hymn used by Graham to call people forward to commit their lives to Christ: “Just As I Am,” which includes the lyrics, written by Charlotte Elliott in 1834, “Just as I am, and waiting not / To rid my soul of one dark blot. / To Thee whose blood can cleanse each spot, / O Lamb of God, I come, I come.”5 Emphasizing the importance of the blood of Christ shed at his death on the cross, Cash has Jesus die four times at the end of his film. With each death, the background changes to another modern-day city. Cash shows that Jesus died for all sinful humanity. Though he claimed to know little about theological doctrine, his personal study and reflection led him to hold clear theological positions (Turner 152). As he would later write in Man in White, Cash, speaking through the mouth of Saul, said that in the self-sacrificial offering, [Jesus] died to bear the sins of any who call upon his name. So it is without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. The Lamb of God is our final blood sacrifice. Without the cross there is no crown of glory, but by his crucifixion and resurrection if we come to him and live in the bond of his love, we are joint heirs with him in the kingdom of heaven.

(139) The power of the sacrificial cross over sin dominates Cash’s Christology.

Yearning for the Man in White Looking through the sinfulness and redemption in his life, Cash came to see a similarity to the life of Saint Paul. The addictions and self-loathing of Cash’s past pricked him, like a “thorn was given [him] in the flesh,” as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 12:7. Cash drew a parallel between his falling victim to

Joe Blosser 21 the talon of an eight-foot-tall ostrich and Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus: “Like Paul when he was struck by the Light, I fell flat on my back, but unlike Paul, I broke two more ribs on the rock I fell on” (Cash, Man 9). The ostrich wound demanded morphine and a return to Cash’s drug addiction, signaling the depth of his thorn. This attack in the early 1980s caused Cash to set aside his partially completed novel, Man in White, which reconstructed the life of Saul and his conversion to Saint Paul (Cash 312).

Both Cash’s film and novel speak to his understanding of revelation—the way humans know God. In accordance with the evangelicalism of his day, Cash’s primary mode of knowing God was personal revelation, mediated through prayer, scripture reading, dreams, and nature. Though June was the acknowledged “prayer warrior” in the family, Johnny stopped “[a]t some time during the day…to recite the Lord’s Prayer” (Cash 313-4). The audience of The Gospel Road witnesses this practice as Cash stands before them at dusk on the precipice of a cliff, clinging to his Bible, and praying every word of the Lord’s Prayer.

Cash’s clutch on a black leather Bible throughout the film reveals its importance in his faith life. Balmer notes that after evangelicals encountered Darwinism they turned to a literalism that placed “an emphasis on the inerrancy of the Scriptures” (xiv). In the last words of the “Introduction” to Man in White, Cash writes, “I believe the Bible, the whole Bible to be the infallible, indisputable Word of God” (16). In his autobiography, Cash expands on his use of the Bible, which he learned from other evangelicals, like Graham. Whenever Cash encountered a problematic passage of scripture, he would “chase it down in the concordance and the chain references until [he] learned what it [meant]…” (253).

Spending endless hours with the Bible and other reference books, Cash developed his personal understanding of Jesus.

Though not acknowledged as widely as prayer and Bible reading, Cash’s faith also grew through the personal revelation he encountered in dreams and nature. Dreams fit with the intense subjectivity and individualism that pervade evangelical faith, and since evangelicals mostly “preferred the safety of rural areas and small towns,” the power of God in nature was close at hand (Balmer 249). Cash’s dreams revealed song lyrics, allowed him to commune with his deceased brother, and possibly even held glimpses of the divine as they did for Saul in Cash’s novel.6 Speaking of the power of nature, Cash wrote that “[n]ature at work isn’t itself God, but it is evidence of Him…I can come near to Him: see the glory of His creation, feel the salve of His grace” (Cash 274). Cash incorporates the revelation of nature into his versions of both Saul and Jesus as they roam the wilderness endlessly, finding strength in nature’s solitude and understanding in the brilliance of light. As Saul encounters “pure light” on the road to Damascus, The Gospel Road shows Jesus continually checking the sun, which repeatedly blazes into the eyes of the viewer (Cash, Man 118). Differing from mainline Protestants and Catholics, who often perceive God’s revelation through liturgy and communal worship, Cash, like other evangelicals, placed great authority in personal revelation.

An individualistic understanding of faith permeates evangelical circles.

While individualism has long pervaded American culture, the escapist security of

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Figure 2. Johnny Cash Boyhood Home [interior]. Dyess, AR, 2019.

Photo by Darren J. N. Middleton

evangelical individualism tended to push away the worries of the world. Graham noted during the 1970s that “‘[t]he human mind cannot cope with the problems that we are wrestling with today…. They turn to all sorts of escapisms. Some will turn to alcohol. Others will turn to religion in want of security and peace— something to hold onto’” (Marty, Modern 283). Evangelicals often believe that social and structural evils depend on individual conditions of sinfulness and salvation. “This emphasis on personal salvation,” according to Ron Flowers, “has caused twentieth century conservatism to avoid the kind of social action that has been characteristic of liberalism” (54). Thus, the answer to social problems for evangelicals usually resides in individual faith.

Individualism and escapism were not, however, how Cash saw his faith in the world. In the song “No Earthly Good,” Cash takes to task the useless otherworldliness of Christians. Twomey sees a strong Pauline impulse in Cash’s faith, pushing him to address structural evil. Referencing “No Earthly Good,” Twomey suggests that “the problem with the heavenly-minded, in Cash, is that they’re failing to engage socially by satisfying the ‘thirst’ and ‘hunger’ of the needy” (237). He sees that Cash “would encourage a more socially-engaged reading of Paul’s pastoral advice about the need to employ ‘gifts’ and ‘service’ and ‘activities…for the common good’ (1 Cor. 12:4-7)” (237). Certainly, Graham and other evangelicals shaped Cash’s understanding and creative expression of

Joe Blosser 23 Jesus, but Cash was not a strict social conservative. He professed a prophetic and socially progressive understanding of Jesus that addressed the real lives, problems, and struggles people faced in the world, which Cash knew all too well.

The Prophetic “Man in Black” Though Cash’s theology of Jesus’ death fit the prevailing evangelical satisfaction theory, he also believed in the importance of Jesus’ teachings and lifestyle. The Jesus in whom Cash believed showed humanity how to fight for the world’s liberation—how to achieve victory over evil. His Jesus always rooted for the underdog. While evangelicals “retreated to an otherworldly theology,” Cash appears more like “liberals [who] became convinced that the gospel mandated efforts to reform social institutions” (Balmer 35). While Cash became widely known as an “outlaw,” he was not a solitary outlaw of pietistic faith—no, he was an outlaw, like a Hebrew Prophet, wandering the highways of the U.S. Having experienced God through human relationships and not just by “[talkin’] to Jesus every day,” this outlaw stood in solidarity with those in need, offering his voice to their pain (Cash, “Talk”). In this way, Cash emulated the life of Jesus as he understood it, and he modeled for other Christians a socially progressive kind of evangelicalism.

The themes of the Hebrew Prophets can be traced throughout Cash’s work. Isaiah 61:1-2 may be taken as a paradigmatic prophetic scripture since it captures many of the themes echoed throughout the prophets: The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn.

Using similar prophetic language, Cash answered questions about his wardrobe and lifestyle in the 1971 hit song, “Man in Black.” Wearing black for Cash proclaimed his solidarity with …the poor and the beaten down / Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town / I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime / But is there because he’s a victim of the times / I wear the black for those who’ve never read / Or listened to the words that Jesus said…. I wear it for the sick and lonely old / For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold / I wear the black in mournin’ for the lives that could have been / Each week we lose a hundred fine young men….

Echoing the prophets’ insistence on caring for those without a voice, those held captive by life circumstances, Cash broke away from the dominantly pietistic faith of most evangelicals and modeled a socially concerned evangelical faith.

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal When many people pointed to prisons as dens of evil, Cash heeded the words of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets by aligning himself with these outcasts.

He had done prison concerts for a decade before he came to Folsom, and he would perform in many more afterward. But in 1968, he performed “Folsom Prison Blues” live inside the prison walls.7 In this same year, Eldridge Cleaver published his book Soul on Ice, which was written from within the same prison only three years earlier. Cash’s performance broke down the walls between mainstream culture and prison culture. Every night he performed in a prison, if even just for that night, he stopped Americans from “othering” prisoners. If just for that night, he brought Cleaver’s words to life: “The price of hating other human beings is loving one-self less” (29). Cash knew what it was like to hate oneself; now he tried to show people how to love one another. In his second live prison album, San Quentin, coincidentally another prison where Cleaver served time, Cash sang in the last stanza of the titular track: “San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell. / May your walls fall and may I live to tell. / May all the world forget you ever stood. / And may all the world regret you did no good.”

Cash didn’t just use his voice to sing to prisoners. He also raised it on their behalf in Washington. In 1972, he appeared before a Senate sub-committee to advocate for prison and parole reform, and he would later take his views to President Nixon (Hilburn 438-9). Like the emerging progressive evangelicals, he was not afraid to connect his beliefs to political positions—but he tried to avoid aligning himself with partisan politics. Though he only did a little time in jail (never prison), Cash modeled Jesus’ concern for outcasts and prisoners by offering his soulful voice to their cause.

Native Americans compose another group cast out by most evangelicals that Cash sought to reclaim. Balmer records a paradigmatic evangelical response to Native American faiths through the voice of a reservation church pastor who “dismisses all this as paganism and quite unworthy of anyone who considers himself a Christian” (221). Cash, on the other hand, did not proselytize Native Americans—he brought their plight into mainstream music. In his first protest album, Bitter Tears, released in 1964, Cash sang about the pain of Native Americans. The biggest hit off of the album, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” received little airtime until Cash took “out a full-page ad in Billboard magazine challenging disc jockeys to show some ‘guts’” (Cash 431). In another song off the same record, “Apache Tears,” Cash aligned himself with Native Americans by singing that “The red men the white men no fight ever took this land / So don’t raise the dust when you pass here / They’re sleeping and in my keeping are these Apache tears.” For generations, Americans have looked upon Native Americans as heathens and enemies, but Cash’s prophetic voice broke down the walls of otherness, introducing the plight of the oppressed into mainstream culture.8 As Graham and other evangelicals supported the war in Vietnam, Cash, again, voiced his opposition. Though far from as progressive and anti-war as evangelical leaders like Mark Hatfield, Ron Sider, and Jim Wallis, Cash’s opposition was hard-earned. Though a fierce patriot inclined not to question his country, his USO tours took him to many hospital bedsides, talking with wounded soldiers, and raising the question in his mind if American soldiers were dying for

Joe Blosser 25 a just cause (Hilburn 344-45). When Nixon invited him to sing at the White House in 1970, Cash accepted the invitation but pushed back. Nixon had wanted him to sing “Welfare Cadillac,” but Cash refused. Rather than embarrass the president, Hilburn writes, Cash publicly stated he wasn’t going to sing the song because he hadn’t written it, but in reality “he felt the song made fun of poor people” (384-85). As part of his set, Cash played the protest song “What is Truth,” which was widely seen as a rebuke of the war. Hilburn notes that Cash— not wanting to be too political—“softened the mood by saying respectfully that he hoped the president could bring the boys home as soon as possible” (386).

Threading the political needle, Cash’s White House visit established him as an advocate for the poor, a protestor of the war, and yet, still, a supporter of the president (Turner 154). He was not a political activist, which probably made him more widely respected, but he held clear, and public, positions of solidarity with the most vulnerable people in American society.

Cash firmly believed in the saving power of Jesus, but unlike other evangelicals, this did not lead him to dismiss other faiths or see his Christian faith as superior. According to his grandson, he “never really doubted the beliefs of others” (Tittle). His openness, though, was not reflected by the growing evangelical right, including Franklin Graham, Billy’s oldest son, who preached Cash’s eulogy in 2003. As Tittle laments, at the funeral Franklin preached a lot of “his own personal ideology, much of which seemed far removed from who I knew my grandfather to be.” Franklin pushed Jesus as the only way to salvation, even though Cash’s personal beliefs were not so limited. Tittle recalled that Cash was always very respectful of other people and he embraced other faiths. He received humanitarian awards from the Jewish National Fund, B’nai Brith, the United Nations, and completely subsumed the plight of the Native Americans in an effort to bring the injustices inflicted upon them to the national stage. I’ll never forget being a teenager and having my grandfather ask me one day, out of nowhere, whether or not I went to church. With a knot in my stomach, I confessed to him that I did not. I was silent, waiting for his response, and all he said to me was, “well, that’s all right, son.” Possessing little to no faith at the time, I still managed to find acceptance in him.

Cash himself was often uncomfortable in church (Turner 144). While he proclaimed Jesus as the way to salvation, he seemed too compassionate to rule out salvation for all.9 This all placed him, once again, on the wrong side of most evangelicals.

In 1977 Cash wrote and recorded a song that signaled his dissonance with some of the Christians he encountered. The song, “No Earthly Good,” includes the lines: If you’re holdin’ heaven then spread it around / There are hungry hands reaching up from the ground / Move over and share the high

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal ground where you stood / So heavenly minded and you’re no earthly good.

Sounding like a liberation theologian, Cash urged standing in solidarity with the oppressed as the way to change the world. Many evangelicals did not respond well. Cash recalls how he began receiving as much flack “for playing in Las Vegas, consorting with the whores and gamblers, as [he] did for doing prison concerts. [His] response was that the Pharisees said the same thing about Jesus: ‘He dines with publicans and sinners.’ The apostle Paul said, ‘I will become all things to all men in order that I might win some for Christ now’” (Cash 300).

Cash humbly referred to himself a “signpost” for other Christians (Cash 300).

His music and his life became a beacon, lighting the way for others to emulate the kind of liberation Jesus intended for the world.

Most evangelicals since the 1970s, including Billy Graham, have not heeded Cash’s call for social justice. In the 1950s, Graham began blazing a wide trail that united pietistic faith with conservative politics when he proclaimed that “the United States was the hand of God for defeating the communist evil” (Ellwood, 1950 160). Unlike Cash, Graham often pushed “the conservative Republican agenda” (Ellwood, 1950 199). Graham knew the problems of the world, but while liberal Protestants “[attempted] to convert sinful social institutions as well as sinful individuals,” Graham and most evangelicals “channeled their efforts into mass evangelism” (Balmer 249). Grassroots crusades dominated over a half-century of Graham’s ministry because he believed that “[w]hen Jesus enters the human scene, we discover that togetherness and hope are things that happen immediately” (177). The world can experience “permanent transformation” if only enough people will accept Jesus (Graham 34).

Social change done by way of personal salvation freed many evangelicals from concerning themselves with the poor, the afflicted, and the outcast.

Cash, however, could not distance himself from the pain of the world.

Countering the highly individualistic mode of evangelical revelation, Cash noted that “[God] had revealed His will to me through other people, family and friends” (Cash 235). Perhaps these relationships helped Cash to see his connection to other humans and his responsibility to work for justice within the human community. Johnny’s Jesus called people to be faithful and, in that faith, to strive for liberation in this world and the next. Though he was not as progressive as other evangelical leaders in that era, he showed how the evangelical faith could make a positive difference in real people’s lives.

A Prophet “Unchained” Cash became a herald of an evangelical form of Christianity that sought rebirth in individual lives and justice in communities. Numbering among the initial progressively minded evangelicals, Cash’s voice and public stature cleared this pathway for others. The “New Evangelicals” slowly began to emerge in the 1960s (Swartz).

Joe Blosser 27 Though always a minority within the more conservative evangelical subculture, progressive evangelicals rose to the attention of scholars in the late 1960s. Paul Knitter wrote that “[d]uring the 1960s and 1970s further developments in the Evangelical camp took place,” resulting in a “‘New Evangelical Left’ which insists that one cannot follow Jesus without being actively and politically involved in trying to bring justice to the oppressed” (21).

Harold Ockenga, a leader among evangelicals, noted in the 1970s how “neoevangelicalism” differed from the Religious Right: The new evangelicalism embraces the full orthodoxy of fundamentalism, but manifests a social consciousness and responsibility which was strangely absent from fundamentalism.

The new evangelicalism concerns itself not only with personal salvation, doctrinal truth and an eternal point of reference, but also with problems of race, of war, of class struggle, of liquor control, or juvenile delinquency…. The new evangelicalism believes that orthodox Christians cannot abdicate their responsibility in the social scene. (Streiker and Strober 112) Though the New Evangelicals retained much of evangelical methodology and theology, they differed by using these to issue a call to social and political action.

Cash had been living out his progressive evangelical faith for years when the New Evangelicals catapulted into the lime-light with the 1977 inauguration of one of their own, President Jimmy Carter.10 Most evangelicals at this time “viewed politics with suspicion as a ‘worldly’ domain unworthy of their participation beyond mere voting,” but Cash and other progressive evangelicals were starting to connect their faith to social issues in a public, and political, way (Balmer 172). The “Freestyle Evangelicals,” as Steven Waldman called the New Evangelicals, “helped usher Jimmy Carter into office in 1976 and gave Bill Clinton 55 percent of their vote in both 1992 and 1996” (McGarvey 42). Though muffled by the dominance of conservative evangelical groups (e.g., the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition), the freestyle, new, progressive, left-wing evangelicals represented a political force in U.S. society.

While Cash was not alive for the November 2004 election to cast his vote, his true fans worked to keep his legacy clear of the Republican agenda.

Reminded of Cash’s Depression upbringing, his grandson Tittle said, “Everything my grandpa ever thought about right and wrong, morality and depravity, justice and injustice, can be found in the songs that he wrote and performed. I think how he’d feel about so much of what’s happening in the world right now is evident if one just opens one’s eyes.” Cash’s daughter, Rosanne Cash, claimed in 2004 that had his health not been failing, her father would have publicly denounced the 2003 invasion of Iraq, just as he had taken a public stance against Vietnam.

Though he didn’t like partisan politics, he did stand up for his beliefs (Rawstory).

It seems Cash sided with his cousin-in-law, President Carter, in regards to Bush’s presidency: “To Jimmy Carter, preemptive war and politics toward the poor are the two things that ‘starkly separate ultra-right Christians from the rest of the

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The life of Johnny Cash has become not only a musical legend but a religious signpost. The lyrics of his song, “Unchained,” ring true: “Take this weight from me / Let my spirit be unchained.” Once confined to his body, the spirit of Cash, now unchained, pervades the lives of all he touched through his many creative expressions of faith. Perhaps the freeing of his spirit is seen best through the music video to his cover of the song “Hurt.” The video mixes in clips of Cash’s powerful and successful youth with the withered and aging Cash as he sings. In a cacophony of images concluding the video, Cash punctuates his own spiritual release through fleeting images of Christ’s death from his film, The Gospel Road. As Peter Candler writes, “[t]he climax of the film comes when Cash, with a crystal goblet full of red wine lifted and trembling in his enfeebled right hand, turns the cup over and empties its contents over the table, baptizing the sumptuous banquet laid out before him” (6-9). No longer enfeebled but freed, Cash’s prophetic outlaw spirit stands as a signpost, offering evangelicals a new view of their savior – a view that continues to gain followers.

The power of Cash’s legacy may be seen not only in his musical achievements, but also in the faith lives of Americans who have heeded the call of Cash’s Jesus to work in this world for both personal salvation and communal justice.

Notes The term evangelical will be used throughout this paper as “an umbrella term” referring to groups of conservative Christians who “generally believe that a spiritual rebirth, a ‘born-again’ experience…during which one acknowledges personal sinfulness and Christ’s atonement, is necessary for salvation” (Balmer xvi, xiv).

1

2

In addition to touring and vacationing together, Cash also featured Graham reading scripture in his song “The Preacher Said: ‘Jesus Said.’”

Graham’s The Jesus Generation is one of several books he wrote while occupying “the Billy Graham Room” at Cash’s home in Jamaica (Cash, Cash 283).

4 Randal Balmer notes, “Such themes as waywardness and redemption provide the grist for countless evangelical sermons; the parable of the prodigal son, I am convinced, is one of the most popular texts in the evangelical subculture” (93).

3

5

6

See Balmer 251-52.

While Cash speaks of dreams throughout his autobiography, he specifically notes in the “Introduction” to Man in White that “[d]reams have always played a

Joe Blosser 29 role in my affairs from time to time” (12). In one of Saul’s dreams, “the Voice” shows a wandering Saul his next destination, the home of the apostle Peter (Cash, Man 152).

7

Originally written in 1958, the album and title track each spent four weeks at number one on the country charts and topped the pop charts at number 13 (Cash, Cash 413-14).

8

It should be noted that Cash apparently claimed, without evidence, to be part Cherokee for some of his life. He eventually stopped making this claim (Hilburn 166).

Recalling the lyrics to “Man in Black,” Cash sang that he wore black for “those who’ve never read / Or listened to the words that Jesus said.”

9

10

Cash records a dialogue he had with Loretta Lynn shortly after Reagan took office: “‘It just doesn’t feel right, does it, Johnny?’ ‘What doesn’t?’ I replied.

‘Reagan in the White House,’ she said. I had to agree. ‘Yeah, it felt pretty good with Carter here, didn’t it?’” (Cash 290). Even though Reagan subscribed to an evangelical faith, he, by no means, was part of Carter’s camp of more progressive evangelicals.

Works Cited Balmer, Randall. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. New York: OUP, 1993.

Cash, Johnny. Cash: The Autobiography. With Patrick Carr. HarperPaperbacks, 1997. _______. Man in White: A Novel. Harper, 1986. _______. “Apache Tears.” Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, Columbia, 1964. _______. “The One on the Right is on the Left.” Everybody Loves a Nut, Columbia, 1966. _______. “What is Truth.” Columbia, 1970. _______. “I Talk to Jesus Every Day.” Man in Black, Columbia, 1971. _______. “Man in Black.” Man in Black, Columbia, 1971. _______. “The Preacher Said: ‘Jesus Said.’” Man in Black, Columbia, 1971. _______. “Just As I Am.” Sings Precious Memories, Columbia, 1975. _______. “One Piece at a Time.” One Piece at a Time, Columbia, 1976. _______. “No Earthly Good.” The Rambler, Columbia, 1977. _______. “Redemption.” American Recordings, Columbia, 1994. _______. “Unchained.” Unchained, Columbia, 1996. _______. “Hurt.” American IV: The Man Comes Around, American Recording Studios, 2002.

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Cash, Johnny, and Larry Murray, writers. The Gospel Road. Dir. Robert Elfstrom. Perf. Johnny Cash, Robert Elfstrom, and June Carter Cash. SJR Productions DVD, 1973.

Candler, Peter M., Jr. “Johnny of the Cross.” First Things 138 (2003): 6-9.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. Dell, 1968.

Conn, Charles Paul. The New Johnny Cash. Old Tappan: Fleming H. Revell, 1973.

Graham, Billy. The Jesus Generation. Zondervan, 1971.

Ellwood, Robert S. 1950: Crossroads of American Religious Life. Westminster John Knox, 2000. _______. One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning. Prentice-Hall, 1973.

Flowers, Ronald B. Religion in Strange Times: The 1960s and 1970s. Mercer UP, 1984.

Hilburn, Robert. Johnny Cash: The Life. Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

Holden, Stephen. “Johnny Cash, Country Music’s Bare-Bones Realist, Dies at 71.” New York Times, 12 Sept. 2003, Internet version, 27 April 2004, www.nytimes.com/2003/09/12/obituaries/12CND-CASH.html. Acessed 9 July 2019.

Knitter, Paul F. Introducing: Theologies of Religions. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002.

Lucado, Max. God Came Near: Chronicles of the Christ. Sister: Multnomah, 1986.

Martin Marty. Modern American Religion: Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960, Vol. 3. U of Chicago P, 1996. _______. A Nation of Behavers. U of Chicago P, 1976.

McGarvey, Ayelish. “Reaching to the Choir.” American Prospect, vol. 15, no. 2, 2004, pp. 41-44.

Prothero, Stephen. American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Rawstory. “Johnny Cash Disturbed about Iraq Invasion before His Death,” 24 Sept. 2010, www.rawstory.com/2010/09/johnny-cash-distressed-iraqinvasion-death/. Accessed 9 July 2019.

Rothberg, Peter. “Johnny Cash Was Not a Republican.” The Nation, 24 Aug. 2004, www.thenation.com/article/johnny-cash-was-not-republican/.

Accessed 4 June 2019.

Streiker, Lowell D., and Gerald S. Strober. Religion and the New Majority: Billy Graham, Middle America, and the Politics of the 70s. New York: Association, 1972.

Swartz, David R. Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism. U of Pennsylvania P, 2012.

Tittle, Dustin. Interview by Joe Blosser. 22 Jan. 2019.

Turner, Steve. The Man Called Cash: The Life, Love, and Faith of an American Legend. Bloomsbury, 2004.

Twomey, Jay. “The Biblical Man in Black: Paul in Johnny Cash/Johnny Cash in Paul.” Biblical Interpretation, vol. 19, no. 2, 2011, pp. 223-52.

Urbanski, Dave. The Man Comes Around: The Spiritual Journey of Johnny Cash.

Lake Mary: Relevant, 2003.

Clodagh Weldon 31 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall2019): 31-42

Something in the Water?: Using Country Music to Introduce Students to Theological Debates about Baptism (in Muddy Water) Clodagh Weldon Introduction Theology has traditionally been defined as “faith seeking understanding” (St. Anselm). But as theologian Stephen Bevans reminds us, “Faith has more ways of seeking understanding than that of cold prose and human words” (Bevans 59). For undergraduate students, often averse to cold prose (and especially in a required theology class), the challenge to find hooks to draw them into theological conversation is real. If done well, it can ignite in students a desire to read the cold prose of which Bevans speaks, and of which the Christian tradition is a rich and plentiful treasury. This essay will explore the ways in which country music offers one such way to introduce theology, in particular theologies of baptism, to students. Further, it will show how, pedagogically, the use of country music can serve to draw students deeper into the classic theological texts and debates surrounding baptism, and encourage the cultivation of an ear attentive to the theological realm beyond the classroom.

Using Music to Teach Theology?

I teach in a Roman Catholic university, rooted in the Dominican tradition.

Most of my students are first generation college students; a majority are Catholic and Hispanic with varying degrees of religious background and commitment. A small number come from Catholic high school or religious education programs, but for most this is their first experience of theology: one required core area class in Theology which may be selected from any one of thirty or so possibilities ranging from “Intro to Theology” to “The Mystery of Evil” and “Flawed Families of the Bible.” As research from PEW and HERI (Higher Education Research Institute) affirms, my students belong to a generation which is increasingly antidogmatic, with a third identifying as “nones,” a diverse group that includes atheist, agnostic, SBNR (“spiritual but not religious”) and the religiously unaffiliated. The teacher of theology is thus faced with a new and challenging reality, even in religiously affiliated institutions, namely that of “the restless and roving agnosticism” of those “in ‘no-man’s land’ between religious and secular commitments” (Hopps 80). It is in this space that we must meet our students.

Given the power of music in the lives of our students (Hopps 80), consciously and

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unconsciously informing and transforming their worlds, music affords a fruitful way to facilitate an encounter with theological ways of thinking.

The efficacy of music in the theological classroom is well documented in the literature on effective pedagogy. First, music creates an affective space (Partridge 23) which “entails significant emotional engagement, through which a person can be shown to be doing more than just enjoying the moment” (Marsh and Roberts 16). In particular, it is a place where the student can imagine, reflect, and remember. David Fillingim has argued that “popular music reflects the religious imagination unfettered by the chains of doctrinal propriety” (Fillingim 3). Nate Ridson takes it a step further, suggesting that it is not just a reflection of the religious imagination of the lyricist, but that which draws in the imagination of the lyricist and the listener, allowing the song to function as “Mid-rashic exercise,” a kind of imaginative “‘fill-in-the-gaps’ of the Biblical story” which in turn offers a lens for us to read the text(s) in a new way (Ridson). Gavin Hopps writes about popular music as a reflective space for the listener, and how it often “serves as a metonymic repository or aide-mémoire,” which accentuates its use pedagogically (87). If music, often associated with time and place, brings back memories, and music is used to introduce students to theological studies, then the teaching does not end in the classroom. Students will hear the song(s) again long after the class is ended—and think about theology.

The second point focuses on music’s capacity to express theological ideas, like the transcendent (Hopps, 80), an idea which is well articulated in a magnificent scene from the movie Shawshank Redemption. Andy Dufresne, an innocent man wrongly convicted, hijacks the prison sound system, blasting the ‘Duettino Sull’aria’ from Mozart’s opera Le nozze di Figaro over the loud speakers of the prison. When fellow prisoner Red hears the music he is deeply moved by it, and remarks, I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a great place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Using music in the classroom allows students to hear theology and cultivates an ear attuned to theological beliefs and ideas. Further, it opens up new possibilities for a student to consider. As Hopps notes, “…for a contemporary non-believer with no interest in or contact with religious teaching, the epiphanies elicited by popular music may constitute a fecund opening,” fecund in that they offer “new possibilities for being in the world” (Hopps 88).

Clodagh Weldon 33 Why Country Music?

Country music is a popular genre which offers rich and engaging texts to introduce students to theology. Born of the experience of the working class rural south (Malone), country music articulates a contextualized theology in story form (Fillingim 19), and, as Fillingim notes, “…sometimes expresses truths as profound as those found in the theological tomes to which professors and their students usually devote their attention” (Fillingim 2). Functioning as both text and hook, country music seems especially appealing for use in the theology classroom, and here I address four reasons why.

The first is that it comes from the mainstream rather than a theological treatise or a Church hymnal, thus mitigating the resistance to dogmatic statements with which many students enter the classroom. As Maxine L. Grossman observes, “…the desire to reach a mainstream audience—and to speak in universalist terms—contributes to smoothing over of explicitly Christian messages in favor of a Christian-compatible religiosity with universalist pretensions” (Grossman 99). Like the oft-times cryptic images in the parables of Jesus, discovering a Christian message in secular music then becomes, through a participatory pedagogy which draws them in, a mystery for curious students to unlock.

Second, the realism and sincerity in country music (Grossman 85), and its vivid depictions of the messiness of life, offers “….an ‘everyday’ theology that both articulates and underwrites the sitz en lieben (sic) of millions” (Grimshaw 94). As Grossman notes, the cliché “My life is like a country song,” is a cliché precisely for its resonance, precisely because “the implication is that pain, heartache, and misery abound” (Grossman 86). Faith is situated in the context of this messiness: in the tensions between sinner and saint, the juxtaposition of Saturday night and Sunday morning (Edwards 273), in the experience of being “…torn by the conflicting influences of Puritanism and hedonism” (Malone 28).

This struggle of the self against the world, and the internal struggle of self against the self, though rooted in an “implicitly Protestant Christian sensibility” (Grossman 84), resonates with all students who are “struggling to make sense of a fallen world” and who find themselves caught in an oscillation between repentance and rebellion (Grimshaw 100). It is the archetypal pattern of flawed humanity in need of redemption, longing to return home—and Home. This longing of which the psalmist writes (Ps. 42:1), and of which Augustine’s restlessness reminds, is ever present in country music. As Michael Grimshaw writes, “The dislocated singer is the prodigal seeking a return” (Grimshaw 99).

And given that this is where many of our students are, situationally, it affords tremendous possibilities for teaching students not what to think but how to think—and how to think theologically.

Third, country music is told in narrative form. It tells a story about real persons, of their joys and their hopes, their griefs and anxieties (to borrow a phrase from Gaudium et Spes). It is often a spiritual autobiography (Edwards 273). From childhood, we connect with stories: they draw us in, we remember them, and we tell them to others. In stories, we realize the truth of which C.S.

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Lewis’s character speaks when, in the movie Shadowlands, he says, “We read to know we’re not alone.” Or as Grimshaw says of country music, “An epiphany occurs where the words and music ‘speak to you’” (Grimshaw 100).

Finally, country music creates a space for the imagination of the listener, to use Michel de Certeau’s image: the rented apartment which we inhabit for a moment (Grossman 106). The listener “becomes the occupant of that song” and so “…the song is about us, or it is for us, or it tells a truth in which we can find a (temporary) home” (Grossman 106). As students inhabit these stories of the suffering of life, and the existential questions which they provoke, they discover that “country [music] is a theology of the questioner, the wanderer…” (Grimshaw 101). And what better place to start a theological journey than with real life and big questions.

Baptism in Country Music It is not surprising, given the Protestant genre (Malone 28) and the omnipresent old man/new man motif, that baptism should appear in the lyrics of country music. Several popular country music songs are all about baptism: The Oak Ridge Boys’s “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor” (1978), Kenny Chesney/Randy Travis’s “Baptism” (1999), Trace Adkins’s “Muddy Water” (2008), Rascal Flatts’s “Changed” (2012), Carrie Underwood’s “Something in the Water” (2014), and Brantley Gilbert’s “Three Feet of Water” (2017). The songs share a common theme: transformation from an old way of life (with the prominent appearance of drinkin’, gamblin’, and women) to a new (clean livin’) existence. It is to these songs that I now turn.

1. The Oak Ridge Boys, “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor” (1974) Written by Sanger D. “Whitey” Shafer in 1973 for Johnny Russell, and covered by various artists over the years, The Oak Ridge Boys’s “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor” (for which they won a Grammy Award in 1974) is the story of a “hard livin’ male” (Harper 89) whose sins are washed away in baptism. After a life of drinkin’, cheatin’, and steppin’ out, “the scars on Jesse’s knuckles” and “the black eye of the law” tell a story in the imagination of the listener. So bad is Jesse Taylor that everyone will be affected by his conversion: the local taverns, the local women, the gamblers, and “the county courthouse records.” As Ryan P. Harper notes, “In his sin, Jesse is personally, fatally active. In his transformation to sainthood, he is passive. They baptized Jesse Taylor” (Harper 90).

As we hear of the implications of Jesse’s transformation (“Now Jimmy’s got a daddy and Jesse’s got a family, and Franklin County’s got a lot more man”), the music builds to a crescendo and “Franklin County’s got a lot more man” dramatically jumps an octave. Harper has suggested that this musical ascent points to the intended punchline of the song (Harper 90). But if it is the punchline, it is ambiguous. Is this a man who rejected what Harper terms his “mangressions” which gives to Franklin County “a lot more man”? (Harper 91).

Or is Jesse Taylor a man who brings the fullness of his hard livin’ disposition to

Clodagh Weldon 35 his new found faith? It is a question which draws the listener in, and leaves us thinking, theologically, about the nature of the transformation which took place in his baptism.

Jesse Taylor is man justified. The song’s vague venture into the post-baptism life only snatches the relatively low-hanging fruit of evangelical (and country western) American morality: no more heavy drinkin’, gamblin’, runnin’ around with women. The justified man is changed in these ways. He is also changed in other ways which listeners can only imagine. (Harper 93) Again in the chorus the Oak Ridge Boys blast out the “Hallelujah,” the music as much as the lyrics conveying the deep faith of the “They” who baptized Jesse Taylor. They rejoice “when Jesse’s head went under, ’cause this time he went under for the Lord.” As Caset Cep notes, You not only hear, but believe both sides of the story: old man and new man, prodigality and piety, sin and salvation.

The simultaneous desire for and fear of drowning only works when you know what kind of man is being washed away, so it’s the gambling as much as the goodness that makes “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor” such a good song. A whole life lives in those verses because nothing is not worth mentioning, including “the county courthouse records [that] tell all there is to tell.” (Cep) 2. Kenny Chesney, “Baptism” (1999) Leaving more to the imagination on the former life washed away is the Kenny Chesney (feat. Randy Travis) hit song “Baptism” (1999). The song tells the story of “Daddy in his good hat, Mama in her Sunday dress” on the banks of a river for the baptism of their returning prodigal who, after a “long and dusty” road, finds himself immersed in the river (“Water up to my chest”), his toes sinking into “that East Tennessee mud.” The catchy chorus (“And it was down with the old man, up with the new/Raised to walk in the way of light and truth”), repetitively reinforces a central motif in Pauline theology: “We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life” (Romans 6: 3-4). The prodigal’s sins “are washed away and gone” but, as the songwriter sees it, it is the saving work of Jesus on the cross by which the sins are taken away (“the preacher spoke about the cleansing blood”). Further reiterating this belief, he says his sins are “washed away and gone/Along with a buffalo nickel,” adding that a lost nickel is “such a small, small price to pay,”—a contrasting allusion to the price paid by Jesus on the cross.

The song began with the child of “Daddy in his good hat, Mama in her Sunday dress” returning to them and to the Lord, and baptized in the river. It ends with that child proclaiming: “…I felt like a newborn baby, cradled up in the arms

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of the Lord.” It is a powerful line which at once evokes a return to innocence and echoes Nicodemus’s conversation with Jesus in the Gospel of John: Nicodemus said to him, “How can a person once grown old be born again? Surely he cannot re-enter his mother’s womb and be born again, can he?” Jesus answered, “Amen, amen, I say to you, no-one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” (John 3: 4-5) 3. Trace Adkins, “Muddy Water” (2008) From the album X, which is “an album of changed and unchanged men” (Heaton), Trace Adkins’s “Muddy Water” is another prodigal-son-returns story.

The album sets the context for a man in need of redemption: his battle with alcohol addiction (“Sometimes a man takes a drink / Oh but sometimes a drink takes the man”) and his declaration “Happy to Be Here” as he looks back at a reckless life (Perales). “Muddy Water” is another story of the prodigal’s journey home: “It’s a long way from where I been back to my home town.” He hitches a ride on a Sunday morning (“Eighteen wheeler dropped me off at the city limit’s sign”) and “Made [his] way to church at the end of the dirt road.” There is, he says “a man in me I need to drown.” He sees “the saints out back on the riverbank” and “forgiveness calling out [his] name,” and he is baptized: Baptize me in that muddy water Wash me clean in amazing grace I ain't been living like I aughta Baptize me in that muddy water.

Like many country music songs, “Muddy Water” tells a story, but it is in the repeated chorus that we hear the heart of the message which the story conveys: redemption (Grossman 93).

4. Rascal Flatts, “Changed” (2012) The title track of the album Changed, this Rascal Flatts song draws its inspiration from Neil Thrasher’s experience of witnessing his daughter’s full immersion baptism while at the beach on vacation (Wyland). Thrasher penned what he saw that day, in an account which is replete with echoes of the baptism of Jesus (Mark 1:10): I came up out of the water Raise my hands up to the Father Gave it all to him that day Felt a new wind kiss my face Thrasher later sang this verse to Gary LeVox, and as LeVox inhabited the lines (to use Michel de Certeau’s image), it became his story of transformation,

Clodagh Weldon 37 and “Changed” was born. Although LeVox, Thrasher, and Wendell Mobley fleshed out the lyrics together, LeVox credits divine inspiration with authorship, declaring in an interview: “The three of us just held the pen and God kind of wrote the whole thing” (Evans Price 30). The song and its central message of redemption are thus framed as the work of God. Like other baptism songs of country, the song offers a contrast between the old man and the new. LeVox sings, I got off track, I made mistakes Back slid my way into that place where souls get lost Lines get crossed And the pain won't go away While these lines capture “the old self of [the] former way of life” (Ephesians 4:22), the listener does not know the details of the mistakes and the backsliding. But that imaginative space is powerful, for it is precisely here that the human person sees a reflection of the self.

As the song reaches its climax in the chorus, this “old self” is cast off, and “the new self” is put on (Ephesians 4:22, 24), or as LeVox intones, I hit my knees, now here I stand There I was, now here I am Here I am, changed Hitting his knees, he stands with Ezra and Daniel and Solomon and Paul, part of a long tradition of those who fall before God in prayer with a contrite heart (Ezra 9:5, Daniel 6:10, Acts 20:36). Here he stands (and, Luther might add, he can do no other!), his “Here I am” not only a statement of his presence, but also a reminder that his “mistakes” and backsliding could, but for the grace of God, have led him to a place where he was not. On another level, his “Here I am” is a powerful echo of Jacob and Moses and Samuel and Isaiah, great Biblical figures who responded to the voice of God, and who in so doing were themselves transformed: “Changed.”

5. Carrie Underwood, “Something in the Water” (2014) Released in September 2014, Underwood’s “Something in the Water,” which she co-wrote with Chris DeStefano and Brett James, spent seven weeks at number one on the American Country Music charts. The song tells of Underwood’s own baptism in Checotah, Oklahoma, and expresses her belief that something profound and life changing happened on that day. It all begins with a preacher: He said, “I’ve been where you’ve been before Down every hallway’s a slamming door No way out, no one to come and save me Wasting a life that the good Lord gave me.”

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Underwood’s experience resonates with that of the preacher. He tells her to have faith, “just a little faith,” and her eyes are opened. She follows the preacher “down to the river,” and now she’s “changed.” Then one night a couple of days later she’s thinking about what happened and “it hit [her] like a lightning”: Couldn’t fight back the tears so I fell on my knees Saying, “God, if you're there come and rescue me.”

Felt love pouring down from above Got washed in the water, washed in the blood And now I’m changed And now I’m stronger There must be something in the water Oh, there must be something in the water.

As Underwood repeats the refrain that there’s “something in the water,” the listener, drawn into the reflective space created by the song, contemplates that “something” (is there something?) until we hear a contrapuntal rendition of John Newton’s Amazing Grace. Whatever happened in that water, she’s seen the light, and “there’s no turning back”: Ever since that day I believed I’m changed.

6. Brantley Gilbert, “Three Feet of Water” (2017) In Gilbert’s words, “Three Feet of Water” is about “forgiveness, mercy, grace… those are things that I believe in... I know what my relationship with God is and on every record, you know they are chapters of my life, I feel I would be sellin’ people short if I didn’t tell ’em about my faith. ’Cause that is a big part of my life and that [this] song is that song for this record” (Gilbert). The song narrates Gilbert’s journey home to mama and the river with “a whole lot of years/ And a whole lot of pain.” He hears the preacher baptizing in the river and he wonders, “Can I really leave it all/In three feet of water?” But the messiness of his life brings a counter-argument to the internal dialogue which he is having with himself: I can’t unbreak the laws Straighten out the rules I’ve bent Take the broken dreams and hearts Make ‘em all whole again.

He knows he can’t fix “the messes that [he’s] made.” And he realizes what St. Anselm realized centuries before: that only man should do it but only God can do it and so He sends Jesus, the God-man. As the story progresses, we hear Gilbert move from asking “Can I leave it all / In three feet of water?” to “Who’d’ve thought I could leave it all / In three feet of water?” to “I could leave it all / In

Clodagh Weldon 39 three feet of water” (my italics)—his journey from doubt to faith travels from verse to verse. The song concludes, You took my cross so I could leave it all In three feet of water Hmm in three feet of water hmm So it’s that simple, huh?

Teaching Strategies Listening to these country music songs about baptism, students are exposed to narratives which are familiar: stories of sin and suffering and redemption which lie at the heart of the human condition. But the stories are also unfamiliar: full immersion baptism of adults in a muddy river, wherein “…baptism comes as result of an individual choice to leave the lost highway for the straight and narrow way” (Fillingim 56). For most of my students, the baptism they know and have seen is that of babies in white garments brought to Church by their parents, baptized by a priest or deacon who pours water over the head (CCC 1256) and anoints them with sacred chrism (CCC 1241). Ritually, it is far removed from three feet of water in the East Tennessee mud!

Theologically, most of my students are rooted in a Catholic understanding of baptism: that it is a sacrament of regeneration and renewal (CCC 1213, 1262) by which all sins are forgiven (CCC 1263), that it is connected with faith (CCC 1226) and brings salvation (CCC 1217-1222), and that in baptism the baby becomes a “new creature” in Christ (CCC 1265) and is incorporated into the body of Christ, the Church (CCC 1267). As students listen to the texts of country music, baptism as a ritual and a sacrament with which they were familiar, is defamiliarized (Weldon 117). But defamiliarization opens up new spaces for exploration, as James M. Cochran shows elsewhere in this journal’s special issue, bringing with it a more conscious awareness of the lenses they bring to the text, and a readiness to put on new ones (handing out colorful plastic glasses for the students to put on and remove dramatically reinforces this point, and in a way that the students will remember!)

Country music songs can be used in a classroom lecture in multiple ways: to illustrate a point, to draw a comparison with scripture, to challenge familiar beliefs, to help explain a difficult text, to contextualize theologies, to spark a discussion about interpretation, and so on. But they can be used in other ways, too. In one exercise, I invite students to choose any one of the baptism songs above, and, using de Certeau’s image of the song as a rented apartment (Grossman 106), to inhabit the song for a moment. Students enter into the song, explore the space, sit still, ask questions. Why does Underwood say “washed in the blood”? Is it the blood of Jesus or the water which saves? Does this have a biblical foundation? Why does Adkins say “Wash me clean” not just in water but “in amazing grace”? How is Rascal Flatts’s baptized man changed, and who or what brings the change? Why does Chesney feel “like a newborn baby”? The

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questions then become the basis for interactive lecture and discussion on various theologies of baptism.

A variation on this exercise is to choose one song to listen to in class, Carrie Underwood’s “Something in the Water,” for example, and ask students to write down, on a notecard, an answer to a specific question, such as “what is the ‘something’ in the water?” These are collected in and read back to the class, interjected with comments and discussion, whilst connecting with various Christian traditions and theologians. “There is nothing in the water,” writes the skeptical student. “Heresy!” says one who questions the efficacy of water to bring salvation. “Ephesians 5:25-26” writes the Evangelical Christian in the class.

“The Word?”, someone tentatively asks. This is an effective exercise for multiple reasons: (i) it gives immediacy of insight to the teacher vis à vis student understanding; (ii) it allows, in the read back moment, for a public comment on the diversity of student belief and interpretation in the classroom; and (iii) it authenticates student voices by identifying their insights with the scholarly community, with scripture, and with great thinkers in the Christian tradition (Weldon 120).

To take the conversation to the next level, students are assigned to teams of four versus four to formally debate some of the various theologies which have emerged from studying these country music songs. Debate topics might include whether there is something or nothing in the water; whether baptism is essential for salvation; whether the Bible teaches baptismal regeneration; whether baptism is an ordinance or command which believers obey (Matthew 28:18-20); and, whether baptism is a sacrament wrought by the power of God (ex opere operato).

Essential to the success of this strategy is guiding students in research and preparation for debate day. John Armstrong’s Understanding Four Views on Baptism, which takes a dialogical approach to the exposition and critique of different positions on baptism, is an instructive starting point in this respect.

A variation on the debate is to invite students to participate, as delegates, in an in-class version of an ecumenical dialogue. The Baptist-Catholic International Dialogue Joint Commission which took place recently at Domus Internationalis Paulus VI in Rome, where students serve as delegates of either the Baptist World Alliance (BWA) or the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, might offer one such model. Again, guiding students in research and preparation is essential to the success of this teaching strategy. The advantage of conducting the discussion of debated aspects of baptism theologies in this way is that The Baptist-Catholic International Dialogue Joint Commission met December 10-14 in Rome in 2018, and thus students can situate themselves in the academic conversation, and can continue to read and engage the material. A follow-up exercise in which the class Skypes an actual delegate with unresolved questions can make for a terrific classroom experience.

In a final assignment, students are encouraged to find their own theological voice and write their own spiritual autobiography in the style of a country music song. Once written, the lyrics are posted online, and students must read all the songs and pose one theological question for each author. Students are

Clodagh Weldon 41 given a set time frame to respond to all questions received, and in so doing must use sources proper to theology, like sacred scripture.

Conclusion I have by no means exhausted the possibilities here, but I hope that I have shown that country music is a rich resource for introducing students to the diversity of belief when it comes to theologies of baptism. Perhaps Will Campbell said it best in an interview with Tex Sample, when responding to a question, he just picked up his guitar and said, “…I figured I’d just sing some country songs as a way of talking about what theological education oughta be” (Sample 191).

Works Cited Adkins, Trace. “Muddy Water.” X, Capitol Records, 2008, track 12.

Armstrong, John. ed. Understanding Four Views on Baptism. Zondervan, 2009.

Bevans, Stephen B. An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective.

Maryknoll: Orbis, 2009.

Catechism of the Catholic Church. Ligouri: Ligouri Publications. 1994.

Cep, Caset N. “Baptism by Song.” The Awl. www.theawl.com/2015/05/baptism-by-song/. Accessed 26 May 2019.

Chesney, Kenny. “Baptism,” Feat. Randy Travis. Everywhere We Go. BNA Records, 1999.

Edwards, Leigh. “Country Music and Religion.” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music, edited by Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg. Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 269-77.

Evans Price, Deborah. “Changed Men.” Billboard 31 Mar. 2012, pp. 30-31.

Fillingim, David. Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology. Mercer UP, 2003.

Flatts, Rascal. “Changed.” Changed. Big Machine Records, 2012.

Gilbert, Brantley. “Three Feet of Water.” The Devil Don’t Sleep. Big Machine Label Group, 2017. _______. “The story behind ‘Three Feet of Water’ from Brantley Gilbert’s interview at 94.9 The Bull Lounge Private Listening Party in Atlanta, GA. (18:20-24:15).” https://genius.com/Brantley-gilbert-three-feet-of-waterlyrics. Accessed 26 May 2019.

Grimshaw, Michael. “Redneck Religion and Shitkickin’ Saviours?: Gram Parsons, Theology and Country Music.” Popular Music, vol. 21, no. 1, 2002, pp. 93-105.

Grossman, Maxine L. “Jesus, Mama, and the Constraints on Salvific Love in Contemporary Country Music.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 70, no. 1, 2002, pp. 83-115.

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Harper, Ryan P. The Gaithers and Southern Gospel: Homecoming in the TwentyFirst Century. UP of Mississippi, 2017.

Heaton, Dave. “Trace Adkins: ‘X’” in Pop Matters. www.popmatters.com/65597-trace-adkins-x-2496104074.html. Accessed 26 May 2019.

Hopps, Gavin. “Theology, Imagination and Popular Music.” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music, edited by Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg. Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 77-89.

Malone, Bill C., and Laird, Tracey E. W. Country Music USA. 50th anniversary edition. U of Texas P, 2018.

Marsh, Clive, and Vaughn S. Roberts. Personal Jesus: How Popular Music Shapes Our Souls. Baker Academic, 2013.

The Oak Ridge Boys. “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor.” The Oak Ridge Boys.

Columbia, 1974.

Pareles, John. “Critics’ Choice: Trace Adkins.” New York Times, 24 Nov. 2008. https://archive.nytimes.com/query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage9C02E6DC1E3EF937A15752C1A96E9C8B63.html. Accessed 26 May 2019.

Partridge, Christopher. “Emotion, Meaning and Popular Music.” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music, edited by Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg. Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 23-31.

Partridge, Christopher, and Marcus Moberg, eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music. Bloomsbury, 2017.

Pew Research Center. “America’s Changing Religious Landscape.” Pew Research Center. 12 May 2015. www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/Americas-changing-religious-landscape/.

Accessed 26 May 2019.

Risdon, Nate. “Popular Music and Theology: Strange Bedfellows?” www.transpositions.co.uk/popular-song-and-the-biblical-narrative/.

Accessed 26 May 2019.

Sample, Tex. “Will Sings about Home.” Perspectives in Religious Studies, vol.

39, no. 2, 1 June 2012, pp. 181-91.

Underwood, Carrie. “Something in the Water.” Greatest Hits: Decade #1. 19 Recordings Limited, 2014.

Weldon, Clodagh. “God on the Couch: Teaching Jung’s Answer to Job.” Teaching Jung, edited by Kelly Bulkeley and Clodagh Weldon. Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 111-25.

Wyland, Sarah. “Rascal Flatts Share Story Behind ‘Changed’” www.wrhi.com/wrhm/2013/01/rascal-flatts-share-story-behind-changed/.

Accessed 26 May 2019.

James M. Cochran 43 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 2019): 43-53

Defamiliarizing and Finding Christ Today: A Reading of Christ in the Music of Hayes Carll and Craig Finn James M. Cochran In her 2005 song “Jesus, Take the Wheel,” Carrie Underwood’s speaker cries out to surrender her life to God’s providence: “Jesus, take the wheel ./ take it from my hands / ‘Cause I can’t do this on my own.” While Jesus’s name appears in Underwood’s song, he is a fairly distant figure, one whom people call upon or to whom they pray in a time of serious need. In other country songs, however, Jesus makes a more embodied appearance: Johnny Cash’s “It was Jesus” recounts the Gospel narratives, the life and death of the “man that walked on earth nearly two thousand years ago.” Underwood, Cash, and others demonstrate the longstanding relationship between country music and Christianity in American popular culture. As Dan W. Clanton, Jr., remarks, “It should not surprise anyone with ears to hear that Jesus looms large in both country and bluegrass music” (48).

This essay, then, turns to some more recent embodied representations of Christ in two country songs, Hayes Carll’s 2008 “She Left Me for Jesus” and Craig Finn’s 2012 “New Friend Jesus.” Unlike in Cash’s “It was Jesus,” which recounts the Gospel narratives set two thousand years ago, Carll and Finn imagine Christ as a character living in today’s world. In “She Left Me for Jesus,” Carll’s speaker angrily recounts his girlfriend’s recent conversion to Christianity because he mistakenly believes that his girlfriend has left him “for some other man” named Jesus. Unlike Carll’s hostile speaker, the speaker of Finn’s “New Friend Jesus” happily celebrates his recent conversion and his new friendship with Jesus.

Unlike Cash’s fairly safe song about the Gospel events, the subject of Carll’s and Finn’s songs might be considered edgy or boundary-pushing to some.

Creatively representing Christ is no simple task, and Carll, in particular, has faced backlash for “She Left Me for Jesus” as some critics have condemned the song as profane or blasphemous. Part of the shock value of “She Left Me for Jesus” is that Carll’s representation of Christ is not one with which we are familiar or comfortable. Like Carll’s Jesus, who seems involved in a love triangle, Finn’s Jesus, who performs in a band and hangs out at bars, similarly holds the potential to shock listeners.1 Explaining the context of his song and describing the common negative reactions, Carll explains, [“She Left Me for Jesus” is] not aimed at anyone’s religion…. It’s aimed at intolerance and poking fun at somebody who calls himself a Christian and yet would beat up Jesus if he walked into a bar right now. That was the idea behind it…. There were a few

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal folks who didn’t get the joke in this song, but most people were in on it….. We had a few random threats and I’ve had people that didn't take it well, that didn’t get it…. Jerry Falwell's son, I think, wrote something about it. But I’ve had countless ministers and rabbis come up to me and say, ‘I’m a minister and the song’s hilarious to me. (Interview with Dan MacIntosh)

Carll notes the backlash that he has faced from some Christian leaders, particularly Jonathan Falwell. The essay that Carll mentions is Falwell’s 2008 “Mainstreaming Blasphemy” in which Falwell laments that “our nation has lost any clear notion of who Jesus is” because of the increasing impulse to “poke fun at and ridicule Jesus, no matter how offensive it is to Christians.” However, Falwell’s criticism of Carll’s song as “mainstream blasphemy” trades nuanced and charitable reading for lazy outrage. As Carll himself notes, his song is not intended as an offensive attack “aimed at anyone’s religion [as a whole],” nor, we can infer, as an attack on religious figures like Christ. “She Left Me for Jesus” and “New Friend Jesus” offer more than just “mainstream blasphemy.”

The aim of this essay, then, is to resist simplistic outrage and offer a more charitable reading of Carll’s and Finn’s songs. Rather than treat these songs as blasphemous, I argue that Carll and Finn participate in a long Christian tradition of re-imagining Christ. Instead of mocking Christ, as Falwell suggests, these songs actually push listeners toward Christ, the Gospels, and the Christian tradition. First, I consider how Carll and Finn defamiliarize Christ for listeners by presenting him in a way that sharply contrasts the image of Christ that many of us have uncritically inherited. Second, just as Carll and Finn present Christ in shocking ways, they also imagine Christ’s community as distinct from whom we might like in that community. That is, Carll and Finn remind us that the Church is composed of sinners, as well as saints. Next, returning to how Carll and Finn imagine Christ, I argue that by representing him as a person living today, rather than recounting the Gospel narratives, as in Cash’s “It was Jesus,” Carll and Finn insist on Christ’s presence in the “here and now.” Such an insistence should encourage Christians to live out more caring and hospitable lives with eyes toward Jesus and the “least of these” in today’s world. In closing, I reflect on the possibilities of cultivating “caring and hospitable” lives in the English classroom.

Carll’s and Finn’s songs demonstrate the ethical good of dwelling with and charitably listening to (or reading) others, even those whom we would prefer to ignore. Both their readings of Christ and my reading of their songs offer models for charitable and critical strategies of listening and reading.

Rethinking Christ I first want to focus on how Carll and Finn encourage listeners to unlearn their assumptions about Christ. To help frame my discussion, I turn to the critical conversation around the 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. While significant differences exist between the country songs of Carll and Finn and the

James M. Cochran 45 famous rock opera, the backlash toward these purportedly blasphemous songs recalls earlier criticism toward Jesus Christ Superstar. Describing the depiction of Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, Peter Malone argues, “The coming of Jesus as Superstar at the end of the 1960s and in the carnival and vaudeville atmosphere of Godspell shocked many devout people, believers or not, because they had come to believe that the Western art tradition was real and that it should be revered.

Anything else was, as many claimed at the time, ‘blasphemous’ ” (3). According to Malone, Jesus Christ Superstar reimagined Christ outside of the “Western art tradition,” and because many Americans were only accustomed to understanding Christ through that tradition’s lens, all other depictions were seen as attacks on the Gospel. Put another way, Stephenson Humphries-Brooks emphasizes the opera’s reversal of the audience’s expectations: “Jesus Christ Superstar destabilizes and overturns American religious prejudices, especially our own sense of perfectibility” (65). While Carll’s and Finn’s songs differ from the rock opera, what Malone and Humphries-Brooks describe regarding Jesus Christ Superstar equally applies to the songs of Carll and Finn. By casting Christ as a fairly shocking American figure in today’s world, Carll and Finn distance listeners from their comfortable ideas of Christ gleaned from the “Western art tradition” and other cultural sources.

Carll’s “She Left Me for Jesus” presents a naïve speaker who does not appear to carry the prejudices Malone describes. When his girlfriend tells him that she has decided to follow Jesus, he is confused, jealous, and angry because he is unaware that Christ is a religious figure and not necessarily a threat to his relationship—at least not a direct threat in the way that the speaker imagines.

Because his girlfriend no longer “go[es] out on the weekends” or “drink[s] til” she “drown[s],” the speaker mistakenly suspects that the girlfriend has “found her, some other man.” When “she says that he’s perfect,” he wonders, “how could I compare?” Clearly, the speaker is naïvely jealous. After his girlfriend shows him a picture of Christ, presumably one from the “Western art tradition,” the speaker just stares at “that freak in his sandals with his long purty hair” and even wonders if “he’s a commie or even worse yet a Jew.” Ironically, the speaker’s remark, meant to be condescending and antisemitic remark, moves listeners toward a better understanding of who Jesus is: a first-century rabbi who called for the first to be last and the last to be first (Matthew 20:16).

Just as the speaker’s description of Jesus as a “commie” or a “Jew” helps listeners better understand Jesus’s identity, the speaker’s mistaken framing of Christ as his girlfriend’s lover helps orient listeners toward Christianity’s longstanding tradition of comparing Christ to a lover. Writing about the hymn “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” Mary De Jong explains, Christ as Lover and Bridegroom derives from the Song of Solomon (permeated by Lover imagery, which commentators insisted on interpreting as symbolic of Christ), passages in Old Testament prophetic books that portray Israel as God’s wife (Jeremiah 3:20, Hose 2:19-20), and various New Testament verses (2 Corinthians 11:2, Ephesians 5:22-23) that envision Christ coming to wed the

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal faithful. These metaphors have been meaningful for centuries because they characterize Christ as desiring and seeking union, the Christian as beloved. (84)

Remembering the longstanding tradition of metaphorically comparing Christ to a lover, we can recognize that Carll’s portrayal of Christ in the midst of a love triangle is far from “mainstream blasphemy.” Instead Carll underscores the speaker’s girlfriend’s “sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3) and the speaker’s inability to imagine “Christ coming to wed the faithful.”

The speaker of Finn’s song “New Friend Jesus” adopts a more welcoming attitude toward Christ. Finn’s speaker is enthusiastic about Jesus and clearly recognizes him. Unlike Carll’s antisemitic speaker who despises Christ, Finn’s speaker repeatedly declares his love for Christ: nine times, the speaker repeats, “I’ve got a new friend, and my new friend’s name is Jesus,” and six times, “I wish I was with Jesus when you loved me.” Even with the speaker’s openness toward Christ, he, like Carll’s speaker, re-imagines Christ as seemingly distinct from the “Western art tradition.” For Finn, Christ seems interested in leisurely summer fun: Christ and the speaker drive “around all summer long,” park “behind bars,” and try to play sports.

Carll and Finn offer two models for reimagining Christ. On one hand, Carll’s speaker adopts a naïve position, not fully comprehending the significance of his girlfriend’s new friend; on the other hand, Finn fully embraces Christ but presents him in an equally unfamiliar way. Instead of reacting with outrage toward their unfamiliar representations of Christ and condemning “mainstream blasphemy,” we should approach these songs more charitably and recognize the theological work that these songs perform. By presenting listeners with an unfamiliar representation of Christ, Carll and Finn encourage listeners to reconsider their knowledge of Christ’s identity. Carll and Finn suggest that other, new ways exist to imagine God outside of the “Western art tradition.” These songs remind us that while we think we know who Christ is and what being a Christian means, our knowledge of God is never complete. Carll’s and Finn’s songs challenge Christians to dismantle any theology that assumes a totalizing perspective. Rowan Williams describes the importance of not assuming that we have a complete understanding of God: “Religious and theological integrity is possible as and when discourse about God declines the attempt to take God’s point of view (i.e. a ‘total perspective)’ ” (“Theological Integrity,” 6). Regarding the difficulties of fully knowing God, Rowan Williams also remarks, “Mark’s gospel, in particular, presents a Jesus who insistently refuses to use his own miracles to prove his status, and a company of disciples who are chronically incapable of understanding Jesus’s challenges. It seems to recognise the irony that the more you say about Jesus the more you risk getting it wrong” (“The Gospel”). While Carll and Finn, then, run the risk of “getting it wrong,” their representations of Christ also challenge listeners’ own conceptions of Christ’s identity and urge listeners to recognize that “the narrative of Jesus is not finished, therefore not in any sense controlled, even by supposedly ‘authorized’ tellers of

James M. Cochran 47 the story” (Williams, “Between,” 193). The “Western art tradition,” Carll and Finn remind us, does not have the final say about Christ’s identity.

Rethinking Christian Community Just as Carll and Finn challenge us to reimagine Christ, they also ask us to rethink the composition of the Christian community. The Church is composed of all God’s people, sinners as well as saints: In an essay on Christian historical fiction, which is just as applicable to Christian country music, Darren J. N. Middleton argues, “Protagonists as well as antagonists often appear severe as well as gracious, ruthless as well as tender, which is to say that they are neither impossibly saintly nor unsatisfyingly sinful—just human, all too human” (5). Or, stated another way, Herbert McCabe suggests, “Jesus did not belong to the nice clean world…. He belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, adulterers and liars. He belonged to us and came to help us” (329-30). Too often, we imagine the Church as a place for perfect people. Carll and Finn instead remind us that the Church is “all too human,” full of people with whom we might not want to associate. The community that Jesus moves among, in Carll and Finn’s representations, is not composed of the ethically pure, the socially acceptable, or the elite members of society; instead, those who Christ lives among are social outcasts and marginal figures.

In the music video for “She Left Me for Jesus,” Carll presents Jesus’s community as a “white-trash” one on 2 Timerz, a Cops- or To Catch a Predatorstyle hidden camera investigation show that aims to catch partners in the act of cheating. The opening credits for 2 Timerz (and simultaneously the introduction for Carll’s song) shows the side-burned host, wearing aviator sunglasses and a leather jacket, attempting to calm crying and fighting spouses and their extramarital partners. Carll presents the main couple of the song as high school sweethearts, with country twangs, who “have been dating since high school and…both just stuck around, having fun.” By placing Christ in the middle of a purportedly romantic conflict caught on 2 Timerz, Carll calls attention to Christ’s community as “white trash” or socially outcast.2 Finn’s “New Friend Jesus” similarly presents a protagonist who was interested in just “having fun.” Listeners learn that Finn’s narrator has a seemingly dubious past, one that still haunts him in the present. The narrator mentions “creeps [who] came after him” so he pays “off all his bills.”

Presumably these creeps are drug-dealers to whom the narrator owes money, but because of his recent conversation to Christianity, he pays off his bills in an attempt to stay clean. Even if the narrator has converted to Christianity, he is far from a perfect member of society. Finn’s speaker stands in sharp contrast to an American Christianity that glorifies hard work, productivity, and economic success. As Anna Servaes argues, “The Protestant American communities attached religiousness to productivity in order to promote a work ethic that would coincide with religious ideals. Capitalism in Protestant society developed one’s relationship with God. The more that an individual was successful, the closer this

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individual was to God” (10). Instead of being productive, the speaker and Jesus spend most of the song relaxing: they drive “around the whole afternoon” and “set up on the strand.” Finn makes clear that the pair’s leisurely driving is not a onetime occurrence but a habit of theirs “all summer long.”

Even more troubling is Finn’s speaker’s relationship problems. By the end of the song, the speaker has arrived at his ex-girlfriend’s house, presumably begging her to take him back because of his recent conversion to Christianity.

The speaker announces, “Now I’m on your doorstep and you’re asking me to leave. / You say you don’t believe I could change so quickly. / You say you’ll call the cops but even if you do / I’ll just love them all the way that Jesus loves me.”

This final moment of the song should leave listeners uncomfortable. Despite the speaker’s conversion and his new knowledge of Jesus’s love, his actions are deeply troubling as he harasses his ex-girlfriend to the point that she threatens to call the police. Finn’s speaker’s flaws remind listeners that sinners make up the Church and that Christ came to “call not the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:32).

Presenting the Church as a body of sinners and saints seems to be a part of Finn’s larger project, even outside of “New Friend Jesus.” Biblical characters, saints, and other religious characters litter his songs, and these figures often contain major character flaws. Although Finn presents biblical characters living in today’s world and while Finn’s characters seem to be distinct from their biblical counterparts, Finn’s representations of these characters should prompt us to recognize the flaws present in the original characters. Finn’s sinful characters remind listeners that the Bible is filled with unscrupulous figures. For example, the judge and military leader Gideon becomes a gang member who makes a “pipe made from a Pringles Can” (“First Night”) in Finn’s music. Finn’s Gideon’s flaws are obvious, but they should remind us of the biblical Gideon’s own flaws: “The people do not remain faithful to Yahweh during Gideon’s lifetime; rather, Gideon’s own construction of a golden ephod (that is worshiped as an idol) becomes a snare both to him and to his family” (Alexander). Likewise, Finn’s St. Paul is a drug dealer who “had it all when we called” and was “maxing out on medicine” (“Sweet Payne”). By today’s standards, Finn’s Paul is deeply flawed, but he again should remind us of the biblical Paul’s flaws, namely his persecution of the early Church: “Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison” (Acts 8:3).

Instead of reacting with annoyance or anger that Finn has represented Gideon and Paul as gangsters and drug deals, a charitable reading recognizes how Finn’s representation of these characters recalls their actual flaws as depicted in the Bible. By casting Gideon and Paul as potentially nefarious characters, Finn reminds us that “sinners and tax collectors” make up the Church. Finn forces listeners to abandon their idealized images of biblical characters and the Church and instead reflect on who represents these “sinners and tax collectors” in our contemporary age. In this manner, Finn’s recasting of the biblical narratives enlivens our reading of the Bible but also calls us to live out the Bible and be more attentive to the needs of those who are despised, neglected, or condemned in our world.

James M. Cochran 49 Finding Christ Today Throughout this essay, I have argued for a more charitable reading of Carll’s and Finn’s songs, one that does not lazily assume their malintent but instead seeks to understand how these songs reflect and remind us of the Gospel.

By casting Christ and other biblical characters into today’s world, Carll and Finn offer a radical re-enactment of the biblical narrative. This re-presentation is akin to what Walter Brueggemann, in a slightly different context, calls “doing the text” or “to entertain, attend to, participate in, and reenact the drama of the text” (1).

This is a dynamic model of reading the Bible, one that sees the Bible not as an ancient, lifeless text but as a living, present text in which Christians can constantly participate. “Doing the text” means fostering new imaginative models and practices that witness to God’s grace in the present world. By placing the biblical characters in the contemporary age, Carll and Finn demonstrate that the Christ of the Bible is just as relevant for our present and future time, as he is for the past. As Peter Hodgson explains, Christ is not merely a significant figure of the historical past but a “saving event”—indeed, the saving event, which happened not just then and there but also happens here and now. This is what is meant by calling him “the Christ,” the Anointed One, the Messiah of Israel.

The “here and now” of Christ as saving event is at the heart of what Christians believe about Jesus as risen from the dead. We entrust our salvation or redemption not simply to a past memory but to a present, contemporary reality. (104) The announcement of Christ “as a saving event” in the “here and now” should not be a contentious or profound claim for most Christians. When Carll and Finn imagine Christ as a person living today, as someone in a love triangle or someone who cruises around in cars, they proclaim the Easter message: “Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen, indeed!” The Christ that Carll and Finn imagine is not a dead Christ, one belonging to the historical past, not one who only lived a short time in Galilee; instead, their representation of Christ is of a living Christ, one who is just as alive now as he was two thousand years ago.

In an interview with Luke Winkie, describing the meaning of “New Friend Jesus,” Finn comments, Yeah, I was just thinking about in High School and your friend gets a new friend, and he keeps talking about that new friend. I was thinking about making Jesus that new friend. There’s always something attractive about writing about Jesus as a real person. I like putting him in that vernacular. It’s funny, there’s a lot of comedy around Jesus.

On one hand, Finn includes the modern image of Jesus as part of the song’s “comedy,” but the song is more than just comedic; Finn’s imagining of Christ as a

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“real person” should reorient listeners to find Christ in people living today.

Likewise, Carll’s and Finn’s songs ask us to wonder who Christ would be “hanging out” with today. What does it mean for Christ to establish community with the “white trash” couple on the show 2 Timerz. or for Christ to “hang out” at the beach or the bar? What does it mean for Christ to be in the midst of troubling relationships? Imagining Christ with these people, at these places, should encourage Christians to remember that Christ is with the “least of these” (Matthew 25:40).

Finn’s attention toward the marginalized and socially outcast runs throughout his music. In an interview about his 2017 album We All Want the Same Things with Andy Walton, Finn underscores the heart of his faith: Obviously Jesus in the Bible does not cast out immigrants, does not shun people because they’re poor or disenfranchised, does not throw addicts in jail…. Those [The Gospels] were the Bible stories that always appealed to me. I felt like it was obvious. In all these parables he’s being good to the poor, the prostitutes, the tax collectors. It’s funny that does not translate to real life and there’s a kind of hatred for the poor that comes out that seems wildly against Christian values.

I read Finn’s reflection on Christianity—and American Christians’ failure to live up to its ethical responsibilities—as central to his songwriting. The characters of Finn’s “New Friend Jesus” are people with which “good” Christians do not associate, and the places of Finn’s song are places that “good” Christians do not visit. Y et, Christ travels to those places with those people, “the poor, the prostitutes, the tax collectors.” Carll’s interview quoted earlier in this essay reflects a similar sentiment toward the marginalized: “She Left Me for Jesus” is “poking fun at somebody who calls himself a Christian and yet would beat up Jesus if he walked into a bar right now.” Carll urges us to care for and recognize Jesus in the stranger, the marginalized, and the outcast.

Christ in the Composition Classroom As an English teacher at a Christian college, I wish to conclude with a reflection on how my reading of Carll’s and Finn’s representation of Christ embodies the kinds of reading and thinking practices that I encourage my students to value. One of my central aims in teaching is to cultivate in my students a deep commitment to hospitality and charity. My commitment to hospitable and charitable reading practices draws from the significant work of other Christian educators and thinkers. For example, in his 2018 essay, Aaron Lumpkin recognizes the biblical basis of hospitality, as the extension of “grace, the unmerited favor of God” that welcomes “sinners into his family,” and he outlines the spiritual, economical, social, and political components of hospitality in Christian higher education (46). Lumpkin draws heavily from Elizabeth

James M. Cochran 51 Newman’s 2007 essay on “untamed hospitality” in which she argues against secular definitions of hospitality and outlines an understanding of hospitality as dwelling with God’s people: “Christian hospitality does not aim for selffulfillment through autonomous choice, but for staying put with Christ in the places we are given. It aims not for detachment from people, institutions, and traditions, but for allowing God to re-create us through the places and people we are given” (16). Newman’s definition of hospitality as embracing the “places and people we are given” recalls Carll’s and Finn’s attempt to reorient listeners toward the marginalized and socially outcast through their depictions of Christ at bars and beaches, with “white trash” couples and bar bands. Carll and Finn ask us to love and find Jesus in the “places and people we are given.”

In the composition classroom, hospitality translates to charitable reading practices. To read charitably means to embrace critical conversation with the “people we are given,” instead of immediately rejecting their arguments as foolish, unintelligent, or blasphemous. In Theology of Reading, Alan Jacobs notes that charitable reading involves “a commitment to hope…a wager on the graciousness of God and on the imago dei present in the writers of books (148).

David Smith similarly argues for designing pedagogy and reading practices that are charitable through “slowing down, learning to avoid swift judgments, and suspecting human depths below the surface” (59).3 In taking Carll and Finn seriously and in thinking about their songs as theological, I hope to have modeled the charitable reading strategies that I aim to foster in my students. In my classroom, I ask my students to entertain ideas that seem strange or even foolish and to suspend their disbelief of opposing argument.

Peter Elbow famously calls this mode of reading or listening the “believing game,” a practice in which we “listen and try to experience each one [proposal] and enter into it” (xxiii). A dismissive reading of Carll and Finn as blasphemous is too easy, too simpleminded; only by suspending our disbelief and entering into their songs can we take their representations of Christ seriously—and only then— can we recognize the theological value of reimagining Christ today.

Carll and Finn have much to offer thinkers and writers in the English classroom. While Carll and Finn find Christ in bars on the beach, students can find Christ in their classroom. Finding Christ in the classroom means listening fully to each other and to the texts we read. Carll and Finn demonstrate the value of reflecting on and spending serious time with difficult or even off-putting ideas.

Finding Christ in the classroom means fostering inclusive conversations that value the “least of these.” Finally, by re-presenting Christ as someone living today, Carll and Finn remind us—students and educators—of the limits of our knowledge (of God, of the world, and of each other). Indeed, Carll and Finn demonstrate the value of listening to others, even those with strange ideas, because they can bring us to a better understanding of God. Notes One of the more shocking lines of Finn’s song imagines Finn’s speaker and Christ passing a ball to each other. The speaker explains, “People say we suck at 1

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sports, but they don’t understand / it’s hard to catch with holes right through your hands.” The easy reaction to these lines is to be angry at Finn’s mocking treatment of Christ’s wounds. A more charitable reading, however, would understand these lines as an attempt from the Catholic Finn to dwell on the material reality of Christ, who experienced the physical resurrection of his body.

Carll’s positioning of Christ also relies on a common trope in country music: romantic encounter is often a site of redemption or destruction. In his study of country music as theology, David Fillingim notes, “In country music as in the blues, romantic love serves as a crucible in which one can encounter the ultimate and either be transformed or destroyed” (4).

2

Smith’s essay, in particular, has been influential on my pedagogical practices.

In a brief essay on charitable listening and longform podcasts in the composition classroom, I have similarly argued for the importance of encouraging “students to listen more carefully in the classroom and also approach all texts—aural or visual—more critically.”

3

Works Cited Clanton, Dan. “Here, There, and Everywhere: Images of Jesus in American Popular Culture.” The Bible In/And Popular Culture: A Creative Encounter, edited by Phillip Leroy Culbertson and Elaine Mary Wainwright. Society of Biblical Literature, pp. 41-60.

Cochran, James M. “A Pedagogy of Long-form Podcasts: Teaching ‘Slow Listening’ and Composition through Podcasts.” www.digitalenglish.com.au/2018/06/25/a-pedagogy-of-long-formpodcasts-teaching-slow-listening-and-composition-through-podcasts/.

Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.

Humphries-Brooks, Stephenson. Cinematic Savior: Hollywood’s Making of the American Christ. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006.

Brueggemann, Walter. Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a ThreeStoried Universe. Abingdon Press, 1993.

Carll, Hayes. Interview with Dan MacIntosh. www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/hayes-carll. Accessed 1 June 2019. _______. “She Left Me for Jesus.” Trouble in Mind. Lost Highway, 2008.

Cash, Johnny. “It Was Jesus.” Hymns by Johnny Cash. Columbia, 1959.

De Jong, Mary. “Textual Editing and the ‘Making’ of Hymns in NineteenthCentury America.” Sing Them over Again to Me: Hymns and Hymnbooks in America, edited by Mark A. Noll and Edith L. Blumhofer. U of Alabama P, 2006, pp. 77-97.

Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. Oxford UP, 1998.

Falwell, Jonathan. “Mainstreaming Blasphemy.” www.wnd.com/2008/07/70567/. Accessed 5 May 2019.

James M. Cochran 53 Finn, Craig. “Baseball, Indie Rock, and Long Talks about Depression: An Interview with Craig Finn.” Interview with Luke Winkie. www.austinist.com/2011/12/09/craig_finn_interview.php. Accessed 25 March 2019. _______. “New Friend Jesus.” Clear Heart Full Eyes. Full Time Hobby, 2012. _______. “We All Want the Same Things... Craig Finn Talks Trump, the Gospels and his Brilliant New Record.” Interview with Andy Walton. Christianity Today, 20 April 2017, www.christiantoday.com/article/we-all-want-thesame-things-craig-finn-talks-trump-the-gospels-and-his-brilliant-newrecord/107674.htm. Accessed 10 May 2019.

Fillingim, David. Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology. Mercer UP, 2003.

Hodgson, Peter Crafts. Christian Faith: A Brief Introduction. Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.

Jacobs, Alan. A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love. Routledge, 2018.

Lumpkin, Aaron. “Hospitality: A Mark of Christian Higher Education.”

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, Fall 2018, pp. 4449.

Malone, Peter. Screen Jesus: Portrayals of Christ in Television and Film.

Scarecrow, 2012.

McCabe, Herbert. “The Genealogy of Christ.” The McCabe Reader, edited by Brian Davies and Paul Kucharski. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 32530.

Middleton, Darren J. N. “Scenes of Patristic Life: Contemporary Literature and the First Christian Theologians.” Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, Fall 2018, pp. 3-14.

Newman, Elizabeth. “Untamed Hospitality.” Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, 2007.

Servaes, Anna. Franco-American Identity, Community, and La Guiannée. UP of Mississippi, 2015.

Smith, David. “Reading Practices and Christian Pedagogy: Enacting Charity with Texts.” Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning, edited by David I. Smith and James K. A. Smith. Eerdmans, 2011, pp 43-60.

Underwood, Carrie. “Jesus, Take the Wheel.” Some Hearts. Artista Nashville, 2005.

Williams, Rowan. “Between the Cherubim.” On Christian Theology. Blackwell, 2000, pp. 183-196. _______. “The Gospel According to Philip Pullman.” www.abc.net.au/religion/the-gospel-according-to-philippullman/10101836. Accessed 6 June 2019. _______. “Theological Integrity. On Christian Theology. Blackwell, 2000, pp.

3-15.

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 2019): 54-72

Country Music, Rodeos, and Cowboy Church: How the West Was Won for Christ Jake Harris “Country music is three chords and the truth.”

— Harlan Howard “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

— Matthew 28:19-20 (New International Version)

Introduction With hundreds of affiliated churches in nine U.S. states and Mexico, the American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches (AFCC) emphasis on reaching members by blending traditional understandings of the Gospel message with core elements of American Western culture has become a touchstone of faith for many rural Americans. Through ethnographic fieldwork and personal interviews in the North Texas region (specifically Sunday service visits in AFCC-affiliated congregations in Decatur, Plano, Fort Worth and Balch Springs), this essay will explore three key elements of the Cowboy Church movement: its history as an effort to minister to rodeo riders in Texas, its reliance on American country music songs as hymns, and its mission to see more men in church.

Tracing its roots back to the American Texas rodeo circuit in the 1970s, the AFCC began as an outlet for cowboys and farmers to express their faith among like-minded folk—men who didn’t mind if you worshipped the Lord while smelling like you just came from the farm. Throughout the 1990s, the movement grew even as the number of stereotypical cowboys waned, thanks in part to the Church’s aim to minister specifically to men and in part to its reliance upon contemporary and classic country music songs that were sung as hymns in church.

Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried,” Waylon Jennings’s “Good-Hearted Woman,” and Brad Paisley’s “He Didn’t Have To Be” are sung as worship songs right alongside typical Southern Gospel standards like “Victory In Jesus” and “Are

Jake Harris 55 You Washed In the Blood?” The pattern here is that artists who sing about rural, hard-working folk, per the Protestant Work Ethic, are the most popular.

While recent studies reveal that men routinely attend church less often than women, many AFCC churches in North Texas report a higher attendance rate for men; as one pastor put it, “We know how tough it is to get men to come to church, and this way we accept them the way they are and we don’t make them feel pressured.” Although the church is a small denomination compared to other Christian groups, for many Americans in the South, it is an instructive outlet for their faith because it allows their rural and spiritual sensibilities to commingle.

The Trail to Christ American country music traces its roots to a combination of English ballads, Scottish fiddles and folk songs, French square dances, African banjos, early black culture, and Spanish guitars (Cosby 87). American culture’s signal contribution to the genre is combining all of that cultural influence with a Protestant religious tradition. As the nation expanded following the Antebellum period and more and more Southern states resisted industrialization, the music of the region began to reflect the ideals of Southern culture: The importance of faith and the elevation of an independent, rural home (Cosby 87). The bucolic nature of rural living was seen as the ultimate ideal: Increasingly cut off from the currents of change in a nation rapidly succumbing to the blandishment of urbanism and industrialization, responding to the rhythms of agriculture, and clinging to an evangelical Protestantism that encouraged Bible literalism and orthodoxy, southerners adhered to that which was familiar and comfortable, and to the maintaining of traditions once the common property of Americans everywhere (Malone and Laird 3).

Following the Great Revival of the early 1800s and its message of universal salvation for all who would ask, rural southerners were taking the tunes of secular music, infusing them with hymnal lyrics, and using them as worship music at “camp meetings” and other church services. This religious influence, combined with the above-mentioned instruments, were some of the earliest forms of American country music, where hymns and folk songs were intertwined, and religion impacted every aspect of Southern life. In fact, church was where many people learned to sing: Country music has been subjected to no greater influence than southern religious life, which affected both the nature of songs and the manner in which they were performed. Country music evolved in a region where religion was pervasive and where the church and its related functions touched the individual’s life in a hundred different ways. Rural southerners generally learned to sing in

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal church, or in a milieu that stressed religious music, and they absorbed values in the same settings that colored the lyrics and the performance of even the secular songs they sang. (Malone and Laird 12)

Out of this tradition came many of American country music’s early standards that reflected the cultural values of the time, with songs like “When the Work’s All Done This Fall,” “The Homestead on the Farm,” “What Would You Give In Exchange for Your Soul,” “Keep on the Sunny Side,” and “Can The Circle Be Unbroken.” Later on, it became clear that for as much as the American West and its culture shaped the American church, other areas’ perceptions of Western culture shaped country music in a reciprocal loop: From New York to California, individuals responded to the western myth, and “cowboy” singers and groups sprang up in all sorts of unusual places. “Western” became a rival and often preferred term to “hillbilly” as a proper appellation for country music. It is easy to understand, of course, why “western” would be preferred to the seemingly disreputable backwoods term.

“Western,” specifically, suggested a music that had been developed by cowboys out on the Texas Plains or in the High Sierras; more generally, it suggested a context that was open, free, and expansive. In short, the term fit the American self-concept.

(Malone and Laird 179-80) That the cowboy himself seldom contributed to the country music canon was beside the point. Pop culture conflated the two, and ever since, the cowboy has been linked to “country and western” music.

At the same time, songs about faith were becoming rapidly more and more popular in country music, especially in the uncertainty of a post-WWII world. In fact, there has not been a time in American culture when religious songs were as prominent on the country music charts as they were in the 1950s, when acts like the Masters Family, the Johnson Family, the Chuck Wagon Gang, and Mac Odell only performed Gospel music, and acts like the Louvin Brothers started their careers singing Gospel before moving onto other fare (Malone and Laird 82).

Come As You Are The American Cowboy Church was born out of this centuries-old tradition linking a bucolic lifestyle with early American Protestantism. But trying to pinpoint the movement’s origins is like trying to nail down what exactly happened in a Wild West legend that’s only been told orally for years. Depending on whom you ask, the Cowboy Church as an evangelization tool began in the early 1970s on the Texas rodeo circuit (Ellis County Cowboy Church). Others say it began in the same timeframe in the Fort Worth Stockyards (Roberts), or through a Jonah-

Jake Harris 57 esque vision in Austin, Texas (Smith 1). Still others have said that they attended Cowboy Churches out in west Texas in their youth in the 1950s, but didn’t have a name for it (Roberts).

For this essay, I will be focusing on the American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches (AFCC), a non-profit Protestant denomination that began in 2000 in Ellis County, Texas, as a way to minister to rodeo riders and cowboys and became formally realized after the Texas Fellowship of Cowboy Churches merged with the Alabama Fellowship of Cowboy Churches to form the American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches (Roberts). The AFCC boasts hundreds of affiliated churches in nine states (Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, with some on the way in Nevada) and Mexico, and has maintained its growth by doing three things: catering to Western culture, repurposing country songs for worship music, and directly targeting men to come back to church.

The main purpose of the Cowboy Church is to evangelize to rural people in a “relaxed, ‘come as you are’ atmosphere where everyone is welcome,” according to its website. Indeed, walking into a Cowboy Church is disarming.

For my part, I attended Sunday service at four Cowboy Churches throughout the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Most services take place in a barn or a building made (often by the congregants themselves) to resemble a barn. There are no pews; congregants instead sit in folding chairs. Concrete flooring and wooden exteriors are the norm. At one church, canvas paintings of Western vistas hung on the walls where stained glass windows would be in other churches.

Outside, there is typically a chuckwagon where congregants drink coffee and chat. If a church has the means, a riding arena and bullpen will be located on site; if not, there will be other rodeo paraphernalia, like roping dummies, outside.

Some Cowboy Churches in the area don’t have enough land to have an arena, but congregants still regularly attend and enter rodeo events at places that do.

Dress is country casual; the fanciest dresser on any given Sunday is usually the preacher, decked out in a starched button-down tucked into nice Levis, wearing his Sunday-best cowboy boots and a cowboy hat (removed for prayers, of course). Some women wear dresses, but many wear jeans and boots. The people were very friendly and welcoming, and each service I attended had free coffee and donuts available to whoever wanted them. At one service I attended, a dog was allowed to roam freely during the sermon. No offering plate is ever passed.

Instead, whiskey barrels at the back of the sanctuary are available for people to discreetly tithe their money.

“The objective is to try to stray away from anything that’s recognized as church,” Cowboy Church of Tarrant County pastor Jimmy Roberts said. “The reason why that is, is you get the cowboy to relax, or the unchurched person to relax. Because then they don’t think you’re going to pound them with something, they’re going to come in and relax, and when they’re relaxed, that’s when the preacher gets in there and preaches and hits ‘em with the gospel.”

A significant part of getting the cowboy to relax, according to Roberts, is to make sure the music coming from the church band is the same music the cowboy would hear in his pickup truck on the way to the service. Ideally, this

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would be the traditional country music that the cowboy probably grew up hearing that reinforced his view of the world. And preferably, that music would be the songs of people who also grew up in church and used their commercial popularity to sing Gospel songs—artists such as Hank Williams, Randy Travis, George Jones, or Johnny Cash. Music that is familiar to the cowboy is used both as an entry point to the unchurched and as an evangelization tool later on in the sermon.

“He needs that same beat, that same rhythm,” Roberts said. “So if it’s like, Jason Aldean or something like that, I’m sure a lot of young ladies would like it, but you’re not going to reach him. That would reach your rodeo crowd but you wouldn’t reach him, your hardcore cowboy.”

In the AFCC, music is used as a supplement to the sermon every Sunday.

For instance, when I attended the Cowboy Church of Tarrant County, Shane Smith and the Saints’ “All I See Is You,” The Martins’ “The Promise,” Willie Nelson’s “Family Bible,” and the Pure Prairie League’s “Amie,” as well as the traditional hymn “How Great Thou Art” were all performed by a house band consisting of three guitarists, a bass player, a drummer, a tambourine player, and multiple vocalists—one of which was a woman, a rarity in the churches I visited.

Roberts’s sermon was about a man who has lost his way in the desert.

Roberts used Jesus as a metaphor for the oasis the man finds and uses to change his sinful ways, despite the hard road ahead. The sermon also tapped into part of the church’s strong preference for individual relationships with God, with Roberts telling the crowd after quoting Romans 6:23 (“For the wages of sin is death”) that “God don’t send you to hell. You send yourself. He lets you choose.”

Band leaders are allowed to pick the songs based on a general outline of what the pastor’s sermon is that week. “When it comes to the song service, I look at it as its own song, its own message,” Roberts revealed. “We give the band parameters and we say, ‘This is the direction we want to go,’ and so you’ll find that some have a mix of old country songs and old hymns and those go hand in hand.”

This was the same at every church I visited. Some locations, like the Wise County Cowboy Church, repurposed old country songs from Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings into hymns, much like the early adapters of country music did; “Mama Tried” became “Mama Prayed,” and “Good Hearted Woman” became “Good Hearted Savior” (Harris). Every service I attended ended with a hearty rendition of Roy Rogers’ “Happy Trails.” Other churches, like the Dallas County Cowboy Church in Balch Springs, mixed more contemporary songs into the service. There, I heard Cody Jinks’ “Church at Gaylor Creek,” George Jones’ “Taggin’ Along,” and the Gaither Vocal Band’s “Somewhere between Jesus and John Wayne,” as well as “When We All Get to Heaven” and Hank Williams’ standard “I Saw the Light,” among others.

The Dallas County Cowboy Church is unique among the churches I visited in that it sits within the city limits in its own building off a heavily trafficked road. That makes it one of the largest Cowboy Church congregations in the area—deacon Mike Hammers told me the church averages around 280-350 attendees every Sunday.

Jake Harris 59

Figure 1. Dallas County Cowboy Church. Balch Springs, Texas, 2019.

Photo by Jake Harris Like the music it used, the Dallas County Cowboy Churchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s layout is much more modern than that of the Wise County Cowboy Church or the Cowboy Church of Tarrant County. This was the only church I visited that had video screens as a part of the stage so that congregants could follow along with Bible verse text slides. It also had a gift shop up front with merchandise available to purchase.

The building layout was still barnlike, with concrete flooring and chairs for seating. The Western vistas I mentioned earlier were located at this church.

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Figure 2. Western painting, untitled. Dallas County Cowboy Church.

Balch Springs, Texas, 2019.

Photo by Jake Harris The Dallas County Cowboy Church also had tracts out front from the Cowboys for Christ organization. They were meant to be given to people with an affinity for Western culture, or people who ride at the rodeo for a living. The tracts have titles like “Your Entry Fees Are Paid” and “FREE Professional Tips To A Winning Ride.” They also take pains to emphasize that “the good news of the Christian Gospel is simply that someone has paid in full everyone’s entry fee for the National Finals up in the sky.”

Jake Harris 61

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Figures 3-6. Assortment of Christian tracts. Dallas County Cowboy Church.

Balch Springs, Texas, 2019.

Photo by Jake Harris

Jake Harris 63 The house band at the Dallas County Cowboy Church consisted of all men—three electric guitars, one acoustic guitar, a drummer, and a bass player. In addition to the above songs, the band also played an introductory hymn of “I’ll Fly Away,” but performed in the rockabilly style of Marty Stuart. Even that little flair was on purpose, as a way to get people to pay attention, Hammers said. “A lot of people think when you go into a service, [the music is] entertainment, and it’s really not,” he noted. “That’s part of the worship service, and it’s God’s word that you’re about to hear.” Hammers reiterated what Roberts said about how the songs were picked that Sunday, for a sermon about growing in one’s relationship with God, with aid from 1 Peter 2:1-3 (“crave pure spiritual milk […]”).

The most popular names thrown out when I asked which country artists the house bands liked the most were Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, George Jones, Johnny Cash, and Merle Haggard—people who sang about the hardscrabble ups and downs of rural life and who often infused their songs with Gospel music, or just covered gospel songs outright. That’s no coincidence. All of the above artists reached their peak levels of fame around the same time Western culture did in the eyes of America at large, and catering to the Western culture is another part of the Cowboy Church’s mission. This starts with church planting, Roberts told me. According to a quarterly balance sheet on the AFCC’s website, the church spent $14,000 in “new starts and new affiliates” in the first quarter of 2019, while bringing in a total revenue of $210,000.

Living for the Brand In order for the AFCC to start a church, there first needs to be a desire for Western culture already in place in the area—rodeos, a big farming/ranching culture, and so on. Then, when a church is started, Roberts said the church employs the “Bullseye Method” to get people to come to church: When you’re target shooting, if you aim for the bullseye, you hit the target. If you aim for one of the outer rings, you miss the whole thing. So the bullseye for us is the working cowboy. He’s the center ring. So we aim for him. We aim for him through arena events, team roping, the music in the church, those are all pointed at the working cowboy. Then you have the rodeo people, then the ring outside of that is the cattle people, then the horse people, then the Western enthusiasts, so if they’re influenced by turning on the TV and watching a Western, then all the way out on the outer ring of the target is your idealist, who just likes the idea of simple country life. They may not even live in the country, but if you aim for that, you hit all those marks.

The outer ring missional strategy, for want of a better phrase, is crucial. Indeed, most of the people at the churches I attended don’t ranch or farm, simply because of where they live and because land costs too much. Many churches in the AFCC

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do boast rodeo champions, however. But many of the congregants said that they just enjoy the Western culture, the style of dress, the music, and the ideals of a simple country life.

What it comes down to, for most members, is preserving a way of life they see as rapidly declining, especially in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. A 2018 news story in D Magazine claimed that Texas has experienced the largest average growth rate of any state since 2010, and demographers estimate that Dallas-Fort Worth will grow by 4.5 million more people by 2030. The Cowboy Church, for many members, is a reminder of an America that’s slowly dying. This said, candles are being lit in the darkness. Yank Underhill, a member at the Wise County Cowboy Church, told me that while he used to run cattle, he now runs a trucking company (Harris). “The cowboy church people are my people. That’s what drew me to them,” he said. “I’d been to Baptist churches and looked around at a bunch of other places, but this one was the only one that really struck a chord with me.”

It was at the Dallas County Cowboy Church where I realized just how close the movement’s relationship is to Baptists in America, whether some would admit it or not. Many cowboy churches, including the Dallas County Cowboy Church, were built in part with funds from local Baptist churches nearby (Hammers). Many of the key tenets of belief—there is only one God, who reveals Himself to us through the Holy Trinity; a satisfaction theory of atonement in Jesus’ death and resurrection; the literal reading of the Bible, which is seen as God’s holy Word; salvation through faith alone; the expression of faith through baptism by immersion (in the Cowboy Church’s case, this is usually done in a horse trough or a stock tank); the church exists as an evangelical tool to reach all nations; a premium placed on a work ethic, for those who can work; and the earth is but a temporary home for us all—resemble the convictions of the Southern Baptist Church. With such beliefs and its mission to evangelize to a population forgotten by mainstream churches, the Cowboy Church is, for some observers, an extension of the Baptist church in America, just with rodeos and horses.

However, that would be a misnomer for these churches, which are showing growth in their own right apart from the Baptist-related organizations that may have funded them in the first place.

Many of the attendees of Cowboy churches said they previously went to Baptist churches, including Mike Hammers: The Cowboy Church is, to me, just a great movement, in helping reach a whole group of people that normally wouldn’t be in a regular Baptist church, or people who kind of got burnt out going to a traditional church. I was one of them. I was getting burned out going to regular church. I didn’t go for a pretty good while, and found this place, and the rest is history. Maybe it’s just me, but I can relate better to a guy in a pair of jeans and boots on than I can in a suit. I’ve never worn a suit, I’m just an outdoors kind of country guy.

Jake Harris 65 Hammers’s attitude for evangelizing to people where they are at is a key ingredient of the church’s mission statement, and to a man, it is the item every congregant I interviewed said was most important about Cowboy Church. More specifically, Jimmy Roberts is working on a fictional story to be used as an outreach tool to illustrate the target demographic for his church.

Roberts’s story begins with a cowboy named Joe, who is up early on a Sunday delivering a calf after staying out too late the night before shooting pool and drinking beer with his friends. He comes home to his wife and children ready to go to church—only this Sunday they’re going to a Cowboy Church, and Joe is coming with them. He grudgingly accepts, wary of the fact that he is dressed in his clothes from delivering the calf: He could hear the thump, thump of the music as he stepped onto the porch. He looked to his right and could see old men sitting drinking coffee in the rockers. Well, so far, unconventional, he thought. As he walked through the doors he noticed how that thump thump of the music matched the rhythm in his head from the night before. Country music in church was the first thing that went through his head. Still with his guard up as his memories from childhood church were still slipping through his mind. He remembered how he was forced to conform to what the ideal Christian boy looked like. Now it seems as though he wasn’t asked to conform, at least not yet…. As they took their seats the band played a welcome song, “Mountain Music,” by Alabama. What’s going on? Joe thought. Cowboy hats, country music, just what kind of church is this? (Roberts, “Cowboy Church Story”) Besides evangelizing those who may have been turned off or become disaffected by traditional means of worship, Robert’s still-developing story also illustrates another feature of the Cowboy Church: Get the men to show up.

Real Men Pray “We all knew our neighbors, everyone there was friends / And the preacher worked the timber like all other men / We were baptized by water, we were washed in the blood / I don't remember much money, but recall lots of love” — Cody Jinks, “Church at Gaylor Creek” A recent Pew Research survey from 2014 entitled “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” found that American women are more likely than men to say that religion is “very important” in their lives (60% vs. 47%) and also found that American women are more likely than men to say they pray daily (64% vs.

47%) and attend religious services at least once a week (40% vs. 32%) (Pew).

Cowboy churches I have visited embody such statistics. “A lot of churches say

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‘Come as you are, and we’ll accept you,’ but they don’t really live by it,” Wise County Cowboy Church pastor Ron Geeslin told me. “We know how tough it is to get men to come to church, and this way we accept them the way they are and we don’t make them feel pressured” (Harris). Mainline churches are trying to reverse this trend, of course, and here I note a news article published by Deseret News in 2015 that described a scenario in an Illinois church where liturgy, theological aesthetics, and even dress code, were designed to be more masculine in an effort to bring in men as the head of the household, with the thought process being that if you bring in the man, the family will follow (Deseret News).

Roberts has been adopting similar strategies in Tarrant County since he first started: Roping events, rodeo trips, horse riding, and community service events are all a part of the missional outreach. From the looks of his congregation, he’s succeeded: Most of the people in the church were men: We have a women’s ministry too, but if you’re in there, you’ll notice there’s no flowers, no flowerpots on the stage, and that’s because we need to take on a masculine appearance. And our ladies do a great job here, but we live in times when it’s hard to get men to go to church. And the other side of that argument is that ‘Oh, women do everything in church,’ but the reason is because the men quit. And so you see the progression over the years, there are pictures of the leadership on the [church] walls, and you see it slowly goes to women because the men quit. Something happened in the household to stop men from being men, so we encourage men to be men. But we encourage them to be men of Jesus. And we’ve done a pretty good job of that, I think.

Roberts’s observation notwithstanding, perhaps the opposite of the masculine Christian cowboy ideal is personified in Glenn Smith, a cowboy church advocate who is one of the many who claim to have started the Cowboy Church movement in the 1970s (Smith 2).

Smith died in 2010, but his memoir Apostle, Cowboy Style: The Emergence of Cowboy Ministry paints himself as a Jonah-figure told to minister to a specific people, and after refusing the call, eventually relents and starts a Cowboy Church. His book then tells a tale as vast as the American West itself, featuring may incidents of “name it and claim it” theology (indeed, the book’s foreword is by Kenneth Copeland, who in 2019 went viral online for an interview in which he defended his private jets), unexplainable coincidences, and prosperity Gospel messages (Smith). Smith’s ideology resembles nothing like the Cowboy Churches I attended, but his influence in starting some of the earliest churches in the movement and ministering to rodeo cowboys at pro rodeo events cannot be ignored.

Another way that the masculine aspect of faith is highlighted in the Cowboy Church is through the emphasis placed on non-religious holidays like Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Father’s Day, and Veterans Day. At the Narrow Trail Cowboy Church in Plano on Memorial Day weekend, a traditional Cowboy

Jake Harris 67 Church song service was largely eschewed in favor of patriotic hymns and American patriotic standards like “America the Beautiful” and “The StarSpangled Banner.” There, interim pastor David Keller preached a sermon on being “a mighty man of valor,” culling from Judges 6:12-16 (the story of Gideon and Israel defeating the Midianites).

Narrow Trail contrasts with the other Cowboy Churches I visited because it is not actually located in a church. It is located at the Love & War in Texas restaurant in Plano, a roadhouse chain restaurant that serves Southwestern food and has live music on weekends. Shiner Beer and Coors Light signs plaster the walls next to ads for the cowboy church and upcoming musical acts, promoted through the restaurant’s Shiner Sunday series. Through a deal with the restaurant’s previous owner (White), the Narrow Trail Cowboy Church has been allowed to meet at the Plano spot for more than a decade. The outdoor live music stage is used as the preaching stage, congregants sit at patio tables or bar stools, and the house band is allowed to use the restaurant’s sound system. Preaching to about 50 people (mostly men), Keller and the house band led the congregation in an introductory bout of songs that included “America the Beautiful,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a moment of silence for America’s deceased veterans, and a reading of a special poem about veterans. A sermon handout included the death toll from every war America has been involved in. A table by the stage was adorned with a folded flag, an empty chair, an open Bible, a turned up glass, and an unloaded service revolver.

Such patriotism is a part of country music’s history. Patriotic themes and Gospel choruses and country songs have all been closely intertwined, and sometimes all in the same song, like in “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Roberts and Keller were veterans themselves. Many other Cowboy Church members are, as well. Hammers told me that veteran attendance is one of the things he’s most proud of about his congregation.

Mainstream country music’s popularity with American service members dates back to at least WWII, because the music’s idealization of America provided a much-needed morale boost to troops stationed overseas: Obviously, the music appealed to many people who had neither southern nor rural backgrounds, an apparent morale builder that seemed to be a powerful reminder of home. A US Army record buyer was quoted as saying: “Country and western strikes the troops as part of the American heritage, and the troops prefer it to sophisticated, schmaltzy music.” (Malone and Laird 321) This is a tradition that would continue for decades, cuminating in an apex of patriotic country songs by artists such as Alan Jackson, Toby Keith, and Darryl Worley following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

At Narrow Trail Cowboy Church the weekend I went, the only nonpatriotic songs sung were “Come On In,” (an original welcome tune written by the band leader, Russ Lowry) and “Me and Jesus” by George Jones. After the

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service, Lowry told me that while playing country music is important to reach the congregation, he didn’t believe the music was the point. “For instance, I love to sing [Chris] Stapleton’s ‘Broken Halos,’” Lowry said. “It’s a beautiful song if I could’ve just sung it straight, but toward the end of it I get a little Ray Charles, Otis Redding thing going on, where I tack on some more soulful bents to it. And that takes away a little bit from the country Gospel, and the people like the song, but I tend to stay away a little bit from those.”

I should add that the church’s location at Love & War in Texas provides it with another built-in chance to evangelize: Shiner Sundays. Member Steve White said an important part of their ministry is attending Shiner Sundays and visiting with people, praying with them, and just having conversation with others. “We do a good job of supporting the music scene, because that’s what brings a lot of people to us, is the music,” White said. “The music brings people in, but it also relaxes people.”

Lest all of this sound like a stereotype of Western-leaning Texan folk starting a church to reminisce about their bull riding days or as an excuse to sing country music in church, the Cowboy Church has an impact beyond its walls and various rodeo ministries. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller is an elder at his local Cowboy Church, and his church membership is highly touted on his website. Many churches have impacts in their communities through outreach programs like prison ministries or cancer prayer ministries.

And the work the church has been doing inside their communities has been noticed, especially by local extension agencies. Academic studies have been done on how the Cowboy Church and local extension agencies might work together in a way to continue enriching local communities through programs like nutritional advice, 4-H and FFA Clubs, animal science, and equine management (Journal of Extension). Furthermore, rodeo pros have even highlighted the good the church has done in their lives. Richie Champion, the first American rodeo cowboy to win $1 million at a single rodeo, has written about his experience with the Cowboy Church and how it changed his outlook on life: At first, I went for the bucking horses. But I got to know people and grew close with the community. The next thing I knew, I was looking forward to the church service and praying at the rodeos.

We’d come home late Sunday night, go to school the next morning and look forward to going back the next weekend. The routine felt comforting…. I hesitate to call it providence. Then again, I did discover my gift for bareback riding at church…. These days, I’m not an avid churchgoer. I couldn’t quote the Book to you, but I have a relationship with God. I suspect that Champion’s last sentence captures the sentiments of so many Cowboy Church members.

Jake Harris 69

Figure 7. Gift shop souvenir, Waxahachie, Texas, 2019.

Photo by Darren J. N. Middleton

Conclusion “O Lord I can't even walk / Without you holding my hand / The mountain’s too high / And the valley’s too wide” —Cody Johnson, “I Can’t Even Walk” Country music, that most American combination of sounds from cultures African and European, Appalachian and Western, essentially comes down to a celebration of the common man and all of his struggles and triumphs, fears and bravado, hopes and lamentations. For hundreds of years its promise to the common man was that with this genre of music, one could tell one’s own story in a way that resonated with one’s shared community. With the rise of industrialization and other influences, the genre changed, and hasn’t stopped changing. Personal stories are still being told (the present moment in the genre’s

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history excluded, unless every modern country artist truly is sitting at a tailgate whilst cracking a Coors Light and leering at unnamed girls with “painted-on jeans”).

Perhaps the most enduring aspect of modern country music is the way in which its performers relate their music to matters of faith. Modern country performers such as Texans Cody Jinks, Aaron Watson, and Cody Johnson (himself a former pro rodeo rider) often sing about faith, or themes related to faith and salvation. Others, like Brad Paisley, Alison Krauss, Randy Travis, Alan Jackson, Wade Bowen, Emmylou Harris, Carrie Underwood, Blake Shelton, Vince Gill, and many more, continue to cover country Gospel standards or write songs about religion. Still other, less mainstream country artists like Parker Millsap, Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price, Whitey Morgan, Eric Church, Maren Morris, Tyler Childers, Hayes Carll, and Ashley McBryde, explore faith through a postmodern lens. Songs about faith are not leaving the country music canon any time soon.

The image of the American Cowboy, popularized and mythologized by American culture, has also endured after all these years, despite our culture’s romanticization of an occupation that is just as brutal as it is rewarding. Aaron Watson told me upon the release of his album Vaquero that the cowboy is timeless. The legends will never die. As the interview subjects in my fieldwork have pointed out, not many people who attend the Cowboy Church are actual, honest-to-God cowboys, but the ideal of American pastoral lands and the image of the cowboy as a paragon of American rural masculinity are ideals that they would like to preserve. The way that this is done through music and culture in church is no different from any other denomination’s singing of its forebears and prophets to reinforce its central message. The Cowboy Church is one of only a handful of American religious denominations to start wholeheartedly in America, and the truths it holds dear are the things rural Americans hold dear. To look upon a Cowboy Church service is to see a microcosm of what southern America once was in its infancy.

In the future, the Cowboy Church will expand to more states as needed— there is already a church plant being considered in Nevada (Roberts). As far as music goes, the hymns and old standards sung in Texas churches today will still be sung in Texas churches in the future, and maybe the songs of a select few from Texas will become new standards—artists like Watson and Johnson are the most logical candidates. Those two bridge the gap between sacred and profane, traditional and trendy, and I suspect their catalog would be equally at home in a bar or in a Cowboy Church service. They also portray the rural lifestyle espoused by the Cowboy Church, as well as the church’s traditional views on gender and masculinity. “If you see me out, I’ll have a beer in my hand and I’m not afraid of a scuffle, and I think we all have a few things we can work on, but I just know that when I pray daily and I give thanks to the man upstairs, my life works out pretty well, and when it’s just Cody trying to control Cody, it don’t work out too well,” Johnson said. “Even though I gotta be me, the only way I can be me is because God lets me be me” (Harris).

Jake Harris 71 No other American church ministry has so freely embraced the culture it was born out of and had the staying power the Cowboy Church has had. Cynics may scoff at this form of worship, but it has endured since its rodeo roots because of an embrace of the world that Christians feel uneasy about (John 15:19). While never losing sight of the evangelical nature of its Gospel message, the Cowboy Church does not denigrate its members, nor does it say that their hobbies or interests are detrimental to their relationship with God. By embracing the humanity of its members through rodeo and through traditional country music, the church has seen an uptick in male church membership and a high retention rate among the men who choose to become members (Geeslin, Hammers, White). It might be hard for an outsider to take seriously at first, but these members take their church seriously, and the subjects interviewed say they take their relationship with God seriously. In a time when churches are worried about a lack of attendance among younger generations, the fact that a rural ministry would actively cater to a subculture by simply listening to it is a radical notion. Other churches might do well to follow suit.

“Happy trails to you / Until we meet again / Happy trails to you / Keep smiling until then” —Roy Rogers, “Happy Trails”

Works Cited American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches. “Our Mission Statement of Faith & Bylaws.” American Fellowship of Cowboy Churches, 2019: americanfcc.org/about/mission-statement/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2019.

Champion, Richie. “Salvation at the Cowboy Church.” www.thecowboyjournal.com/stories/salvation-at-the-cowboy-church.

Accessed 1 Oct. 2019.

Cosby, James A. Devil's Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll. McFarland, 2016.

Cowboy Church of Ellis County. “Cowboy Church of Ellis County | Waxahachie TX, Home,” 2019, www.cowboyfaith.org/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2019.

Geeslin, Ron. Personal interview. 2 May 2015.

Hammers, Mike. Personal interview. 17 March 2019.

Harris, Jake. “Cowboy Church Caters to Western Culture.” www.wcmessenger.com/articles/cowboy-church-caters-to-westernculture/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2019. _______. “Gone Country: Cody Johnson Is the Most Genuine Guy in Country Music Today.” music.blog.austin360.com/2016/09/22/gone-countrycody-johnson-is-the-most-genuine-guy-in-country-music-today/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2019. _______. “'The Cowboy Is Timeless:' Aaron Watson on New Album Vaquero.”

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music.blog.austin360.com/2017/02/24/the-cowboy-is-timeless-aaronwatson-on-new-album-vaquero/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2019.

Kellner, Mark A. “Bringing Men Back to Church.” www.deseretnews.com/article/865630609/Bringing-men-back-tochurch.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2019.

Lowry, Russ. Personal interview. 26 May 2019.

Malone, Bill C., and Tracey E. W. Laird. Country Music USA. 50th anniversary edition. U of Texas P, 2018.

Miller, Sid. “Texas Agriculture Commissioner.” www.millerfortexas.com.

Accessed 1 Oct. 2019.

Roberts, Jimmy. Personal interview. 10 March 2019. _______. “Cowboy Church Story.” N.d. Tarrant County, Texas.

Smith, Glenn. Apostle, Cowboy Style. Lake Mary: Creation House, 1998.

Underhill, Yank. Personal interview. 2 May 2015.

White, Steve. Personal interview. 26 May 2019.

Wick, Allison. “A City of Sprawl Goes Urban.” www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2018/dallas-and-the-newurbanism/a-city-of-sprawl-goes-urban/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2019.

Williams, Katy, et al. “Expanding Cooperative Extension's Audience: Establishing a Relationship with Cowboy Church Members.” Journal of Extension, vol. 51, no. 6, 2013. https://joe.org/joe/2013december/pdf/JOE_v51_6rb7.pdf. Accessed 1 Oct. 2019.

Wormald, Benjamin. “America's Changing Religious Landscape.” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project, 7 Sept. 2017. www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/.

Accessed 1 Oct. 2019.

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Bonus Track

Soundtracking Sin and Salvation in Country Music Darren J. N. Middleton

The overall goal of all my Texas Christian University (TCU) undergraduate courses, understanding religion, is a large one. However, in my introductory class, The Bible’s Three Worlds, I inform students that we will narrow our focus to a study of scripture as a means to achieving this goal. Thus, over any given semester, students are required to read many Biblical texts, stories with which they are probably familiar. But here, we begin to explore them in light of traditional and contemporary scholarship. While we move through the Hebrew and Christian Bibles chronologically, we also consider three critical approaches to studying these texts: 1. the historical approach, which investigates the events and situations shaping the Bible as it was being written and interpreted; 2. the literary approach, which examines compositional aspects of the Bible such as story, myth, and symbol; and, 3. the contemporary approach, which explores how people receive and use the Bible today.

To use my introductory class’s presiding metaphor, our three approaches represent the Bible’s three worlds. And we journey through each world during our time together.

Traveling through the Bible’s “contemporary world” often leads to what Christian Hauer and William Young call “a sensitivity to the variety of ways that the Bible enters into the world of modern experience” (331). Judging by the students’ enthusiasm on those days when Maren Morris and Chris Stapleton are being piped through the classroom speakers, listening to country music seems to be an instructive, fun way to explore and then assess scripture’s relevance to our lives. Morris’s hymn to highway FM radio redemption, “My Church,” often secures a sing-along amen from the “spiritual but not religious” folk in the room, even if students who attend regular, organized worship then use the Apostle Paul’s Corinthian correspondence to question individual approaches to faith.

I am often asked to recommend song titles to download, especially songs about Fall and Redemption, twin themes in the Christian story. What follows is my personal playlist, an attempt to soundtrack sin and salvation in country music.

Doubtless, other professors will want to remove certain titles and feature others.

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Here, I include only what I know has helped or inspired listeners to create their own meaning and value in relation to a fluid network of “texts”: the Bible, country music, and the lived experience of the listener-reader. I have selected artists and titles that address one or more ideas about humankind’s errant character, Jesus’s accessible-yet-divine personhood, and the communal as well as personal forms of salvation. Some country artists have left a deep impression on me and on students as well, and this explains why I mention two or more of their songs. In the end, though, there is no Hank Williams on my list. Put simply, the Hillbilly Shakespeare’s music is a given. If it is true that all Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, then all country music is a series of footnotes to Williams, which is why I often urge students to listen to him on their own. I advise them to heed his entire discography, if possible, and then to take up some, if not all of the tunes on the following 85-song list (arranged alphaetically): 1. Aaron Jackson, “I Met Jesus in a Bar” 2. Aaron Lewis, “Sinner” 3. Alan Jackson, “If Jesus Walked the World Today” 4. The Bellamy Brothers, “Rodeo for Jesus” 5. Bob Lovelace, “John Wayne, Jesus Christ, and Elvis” 6. Bobby Bare, “Dropkick Me Jesus” 7. The Brady Wilson Band, “Jesus Was a Cowboy” 8. Brandy Clark, “Pray to Jesus” 9. Brian Lambert, “Country Music Jesus” 10. The Burress Family, “I Found Jesus at a Wal-Mart” 11. Charlie Hewitt, “Jesus, Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe” 12. Charlie Shafter Band, “Jesus & James Dean” 13. Chase Rice, “Jack Daniel’s & Jesus” 14. Chris Stapleton, “Daddy Doesn’t Pray Anymore” 15. Clay Walker, “Jesus was A Country Boy” 16. Cody Chapman, “Jesus and Whiskey” 17. Cody Jinks, “Church at Gaylor Creek” 18. _______, “I’m Not the Devil” 19. Cody Johnson, “Jesus Ain’t Watching” 20. Confederate Railroad, “Jesus and Mama” 21. Dakota Jennings, “Jesus Was an Outlaw” 22. Dale Watson, “Burden of the Cross” 23. Dan Weber, “Hank and Jesus” 24. Eric Church, “Country Music Jesus” 25. Famous Motel Cowboys, “John Wayne, Babe Ruth and Jesus” 26. Flying W. Wranglers, “Cowboys for Jesus” 27. Frank Dycus, “Jesus and Hank” 28. Frank Zaruba, “Let Jesus Be the Quarterback” 29. George Jones, “Family Bible” 30. George Strait, “God and Country Music” 31. _______, “I Found Jesus on the Jailhouse Floor” 32. The Highwomen, “Heaven Is a Honky Tonk”

Darren J.N. Middleton 75 33. Hunter Erwin, “Bible Totin, Scripture Quotin, Preacher Man” 34. _______, “Maybe Jesus Was a Cowboy” 35. _______, “Whiskey Stained Glass” 36. Jake Gill, “Guts, Guns and Jesus” 37. James Otto, “Soldiers & Jesus” 38. James Scott Bullard, “Jesus, Jail, or Texas” 39. Jarrod Birmingham, “Jesus and Johnny Cash” 40. Jason Boland & The Stragglers, “Jesus and Ruger” 41. Jason Isbell, “God Is a Working Man” 42. Jeff Bates, “Mama Was a Lot Like Jesus” 43. Joel Melton, “If Jesus Had’ve Been from Texas” 44. Johnny Cash, “It Was Jesus” 45. Jordan Rains, “If Jesus Was from Tenneessee” 46. Julie Roberts, “Arms of Jesus” 47. Kacey Musgraves, “The Trailer Song” 48. Kalee Hric, “If Jesus Was from Nashville” 49. Karen Burkhart, “You, Me, and Jesus in a Ryder Truck” 50. Kate Campbell, “Jesus and Tomatoes” 51. _______, “Lord, Help the Poor and Needy” 52. Keith Urban, “John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16” 53. Kelly Joe Phelps, “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed” 54. Kenny Chesney, “Jesus and Elvis” 55. Kid Rock, “Jesus and Bocephus” 56. Lacy Larsen, “Jesus Riding Shotgun” 57. Lance Miller, “George Jones and Jesus” 58. Larry Michael Ledford, “Mamma, Jesus, Elvis, and You” 59. Lin Butler, “Jim Beam, Jesus and Me” 60. Maren Morris, “My Church” 61. Margo Price, “Four Years of Chances” 62. Mark Marchetti, “Face of Jesus” 63. Merle Haggard, “Misery and Gin” 64. Nora Eckler, “George Strait & Jesus” 65. Norma Jean, “Jesus Is a Cowboy” 66. Pat Green, “Jesus on a Greyhound” 67. Patrick Henry, “Jesus and John Deere” 68. Ray Flannery, “Dr. Pepper and Jesus” 69. Rebecca Lynn Howard, “Jesus and Bartenders” 70. Shawn Nelson, “Jesus and the Honky-Tonk Queen” 71. Shelby Cobra, “Plastic Jesus” 72. Steve Warner & The Rolling Coyotes, “Beer with Jesus” 73. Sturgill Simpson, “All Around You” 74. “It Ain’t All Flowers” 75. _______, “Life of Sin” 76. Thomas Rhett, “Beer with Jesus” 77. Tim McGraw, “Drugs or Jesus” 78. _______, “Touchdown Jesus”

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Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal 79. Tobacco Rd Band, “Jesus & Guns” 80. Trafton Harvey, “Duct Tape and Jesus” 81. Trevor G. Potter, “Jesus, Heavy Drinkin’ and Hard, Hard Living” 82. Tyler Lewis, “Jesus Christ and Johnny Cash” 83. Watsui Rodeo, “Football & Jesus Christ” 84. Waylon Jennings, “I Do Believe” 85. Wynonna & The Big Noise, “Jesus and a Jukebox”

This is a serviceable selection of country songs—mostly contemporary but some classic—that have worked for me in the classroom. Some of them are satirical, some ironic, and almost all of them are poignant appeals for religious or spiritual meaning. Each song tells a story of lost and found, how cheatin’ hearts meet amazing grace, and how divine mercy reacts to human fraility. Conversations with country musicians have underscored this observation, even as their words complicate matters. “When you are raised believing in Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, and that He is with you wherever you go and in whatever you do, then Jesus is going to be part of your songwriting,” Kate Campbell told me recently. “The operative word is ‘personal’: Jesus is approachable, and ‘Jesus loves me this I know,’ which means, to me at least, that Jesus is not as scary or as removed as ‘God the Father’ or, indeed, as ethereal as ‘the Holy Spirit.’”

Country music domesticates transcendence, some might say, and many artists find this move helpful, because it seems like a winsome way to communicate theologically. But this move concerns other performers. “There are two kinds of country music,” Hunter Erwin claims, and “one focuses on style, the other on song-writing.” Developing his point, he declares, Country music style shows up in those secular artists who have an album cut that’s worldly, so to speak, and perhaps negative (profanities or compromising situations) but then, later in the same album, they perform a song that’s largely positive, may even mention Jesus, God, or the Lord. That’s great and all but I, as a Christian, think you are either in or you are out; really, you can’t ride the fence and compromise with the world. Style has shortcomings, to me.

And honestly, I think that universalism or the-everyone’sgoing-to-heaven-mentality is the clear and present danger. And it’s my sense that country music has embraced this way of thinking across the years. Mainstream country music needs to re-read the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans. We are all sinners, though saved by His grace alone. Once saved, we should not or cannot compromise. Our daily choices must reflect our commitment to Jesus. No need to think all religions are the same. My belief is simply this: If you compromise your faith, perhaps to accommodate peoples of other faiths, then I think you need to evaluate your relationship with the Lord.

Darren J.N. Middleton 77 I do not compromise. Those who do make it big.

Compromise in today’s country music means the lyrics that I write—all positive—do not reach a wide audience. No big radio stations play me. I wind up on specialty internet music stations or on the kind of radio that airs when people are in worship. I’m largely unknown, until I pull up at a church, perform, and then folks applaud me, say “wow,” and tell me my music should be on some big FM station. I have heard this so many times!

What I do is different to the country music style crowd. I have been doing what I do, full time, since 2007. I sing in hope that the Lord will use my writing and my music to bring all kinds of people to Him. I also do what I do to touch those who know Him already. Honestly, I am my own booking agent; driver; guitar player; record producer; sound man; and, my own secretary.

Really, I have been a one-man band since I started. But that’s okay. I believe the Lord equips the called and calls the equipped.

I mostly sing what I now call “Christian Country Music,” which is for the saved to enjoy and for the lost to understand.

When all is said and done, I suspect there remains more than enough room for variety in country music. It works best as a broad church. Put differently, perhaps it is not Hank Williams or Luke the Drifter; it is both/and. Perhaps country music may best be seen as emerging across time both in and through the play of lively souls, sin-sick and saved souls, not always in agreement and yet deeply committed to making sure the genre’s spiritual, moral, and biblical traditions remain alive and well.

Works Cited Campbell, Kate. Personal Interview. 12 Sept. 2019.

Erwin, Hunter. Personal Interview. 5 Sept. 2019.

Hauer, Christian E., and William A. Young. An Introduction to the Bible: A Journey into Three Worlds. Pearson, 2012.

Morris, Maren. “My Church.” Hero. Columbia Nashville, 2016.

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Review Essay Gimme That Old Time Religion: Notes on Evangelical Bob Dylan 1979-1981 Andrew Grant Wood

Dylan, Bob. Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 1979-1981.

CBS/SONY, 2017. 8 CD + 1 DVD. $115.42 Heylin, Clinton. Trouble in Mind: Bob Dylan’s Gospel Years—What Really Happened. New York: Lesser Gods, 2017. 320 pages, $28.00 Marshall, Scott M. Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life. Washington, D.C.: BP Books/WND Books, 2017. 304 pages, $26.95 Bob Dylan is arguably one of the most important and ever-changing American artists of our time. For well more than a half-century, he has produced a vast body of work that includes a wide array of popular songs, writings, film, and visual art. In 2017, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Keeping with his notorious joker man character, he largely failed to acknowledge the accolade, eventually asking New Jersey punk poet-priestess Patti Smith to travel to Stockholm to accept the award for him.

Despite (or perhaps because of) his iconic status, Dylan has long remained a very private person. His family and personal relationships are closely guarded and, it seems, his most intimate thoughts are largely kept to himself. Typically, he prefers to speak through his music and carefully crafted verse.

Yet there was a curious and highly creative period in the artist’s career when Dylan was more revealing about his beliefs. This was during his so-called “Gospel Years” in the late 1970s/early 1980s when he temporarily left behind his older material in favor of proselytizing—“rapping” (as the Bobcats say) about Jesus, God, the Devil, and such. This time is marked by the CBS release of three explicitly religiously-themed albums starting with Slow Train Coming issued in late 1979 and continuing with Saved (1980) and Shot of Love in 1981.

The history is fairly well known: in late 1978 and early 1979, Dylan threw himself into an intense period of Bible study followed by a seven-month tour during which he revealed his newfound (and somewhat shocking) deep commitment to evangelical Christianity. At shows and in occasional interviews, Dylan pontificated extensively—not always making much sense to those who heard him. For those who witnessed his fire and brimstone sermons at concerts

Andrew Grant Wood 79 across the United States and Canada, it was if he had suddenly become possessed by an old-time religious preacher. Nevertheless, impresario Bill Graham mostly stood by him. Rolling Stone went along for the ride. Long time friend Allen Ginsberg was open minded, appreciating at least the fact that Dylan spoke out against war criminal Henry Kissinger (Heylin 122). On the other hand, there were those who definitely did not care for what Dylan was doing—perhaps most significantly, his own employer, CBS records.

Born on May 28, 1941, and raised in a Minnesota Jewish household by Russian immigrant Abraham Zimmerman and Beatrice Zimmerman, young Bob is said by his father (when interviewed by Robert Shelton of the New York Times) to have known over “400 Hebrew words [and that] he could speak Hebrew like they do in Israel” (Marshall 2). Then, as related in Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life, the Minnesotan’s developing grown-up spirituality can be traced back to the early 1960s and to songs such as “Quit Your Low-Down Ways,” “Long Time Gone,” and “Let Me Die in My Footsteps”—all containing references and quotes from the Bible (Marshall 8). Many other compositions that would follow also refer to Jewish and Christian literature. Still, Dylan’s late 1970s was an extraordinary time for the songwriter.

Influenced in his crossover to evangelical Christianity by singers Mary Alice Artes and Helena Springs as well as musician friends (including significantly members of his 1978 backing band) T-Bone Burnett, David Mansfield, Stephen Soles, Dylan during these “Gospel Years” is not merely engaging spiritual themes and holy texts solely for clever poetic/literary or even just personal, purposes. He lived and acted the part of a truly (although he eschews the term) “born again” Christian.

As the story goes, it was Artes who introduced Dylan to the Vineyard Church—an evangelical hotspot based in Tarzana, California. In particular, it was pastors Larry Myers and Paul Emond who visited Dylan’s Brentwood home in early 1979. As Vineyard founder Ken Gulliksen remembered, “[they] went over to Bob’s house and ministered to him. He responded by saying Yes, he did in fact want Christ in his life and he prayed that day and received the Lord” (Heylin 25).

Dylan’s assuming a full-blooded Christian worldview understandably caught many by surprise. Some unsuspecting fans walked out of concerts, grumbling about Bob’s “God-Awful Gospel.” Yet despite the fact that the artist fully immersed himself and those around him in evangelical waters, Dylan nevertheless made manifest a virtually unpreceded spark of renewed creativity during the period. According to the all-Bob-knowing Clinton Heylin, it was a virtual “cerebral explosion [that was only] barely reflected within the grooves of the trilogy of albums” (Heylin 7).

Now with a couple of new books on this period of Dylan’s life and career along with the recent issuing of the Trouble No More: Bootleg Series #13 eightdisc CD/DVD set, inquiring hearts and minds can revisit Dylan’s “gospel period” in considerable depth.

For his part, Heylin’s treatment attempts to reconstruct, as his subtitle aspiringly asserts, “what really happened.” In this undertaking, Trouble in Mind does not disappoint thanks to the author’s access to audience concert recordings,

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vast amounts of archival material, interviews, and media reportage from the period. Readers are taken through the “Gospel Years” nearly month by month, blow by blow, as Dylan and his band square off with critics, concert crowds, and colleagues. Through it all, Dylan is unrepentant—pressing forward with Christian inspired creativity even at times when the going gets tough. Heylin’s approach quotes the dramatis personae regularly and often at some length in critically revisiting key—sometime embarrassing—events.

Blunders, bloopers, and cross concert wires notwithstanding, Trouble in Mind makes it clear the fact that Heylin considers Dylan to be largely at the peak of his creative powers during this time. The album Saved is disparaged, but overall 1979-1981 is judged a dynamic era—reminiscent of Dylan’s fruitful collaboration with members of the Hawks (soon to become The Band) during the summer of love (1967 for all you youngsters) in West Saugerties, New York.

Listening to Bootleg #13, one is transported to the land of Dylan sonic salvation. With 8 discs and probably about 100 hours of listening material, there is bound to be some filler and unneeded duplication. My favorite cuts are the two or three pre-tour rehearsals that include a horn section (i.e. “Slow Train” and “Gotta Serve Somebody”). Unfortunately, Dylan decided not to bring horns on tour, making the overall sound of the sets more a traditional late 1970s rock group with a vibrant ensemble of soulful backing vocalists added in. For my money, Dylan could have infused a bit more of the Leon Russell “blend of […] country music, down-home rhythm & blues and black Pentecostal-church elation” in shaping his own gospel.1 Certainly with Spooner Oldham and Terry Young on keyboards, Tim Drummond on bass, Fred Tackett on Guitar, Jim Keltner on drums, and singers Regina Havis, Helena Springs, Mona Lisa Young and later, Carolyn Dennis and Regina Peeples (replacing Springs), there was no shortage of talent available. Sadly, Dylan did not go the Leon Russell revival route, instead sticking to a relatively safe musical repertoire of rock, blues, white man reggae, and gospel lite. Still, the material is fairly enjoyable to listen to even if one wishes to largely disregard the heavy Christian lyrical content and the fact that the music was produced back in the early 1980s—nearly ancient history in the music world. Neither Blood on the Tracks (1975) or Desire (1976) nor his dynamic, newer stuff beginning with Oh Mercy (1989), this is serviceable, mid-career stuff with Dylan not endlessly cranking out old, Woodstock-nation bits from the old days but instead trying something completely different and, sometimes, bravely breaking new ground. As Heylin encourages, one has to at least respect the guy who started out imitating Woody Guthrie in dimly lit Greenwich Village coffee houses for trying something out of the ordinary, not to mention highly unpopular and commercially ill-suited for the mainstream.

Taking readers up to, through, and then beyond the “Gospel Years” in a career-length investigation of Dylan’s “spirituality,” Scott M. Marshall’s book is highly engaging and thoughtful. Marshall sees Dylan as a deeply thoughtful thinker successfully weaving both Jewish and Christian traditions into his life’s work from the early 1960s up until 2016. Nicely complementing Heylin’s book, Marshall follows Dylan closely over the more than three decades since the

Andrew Grant Wood 81 “Gospel Years,” carefully considering recordings, interviews, special events, and a wide range of perspectives on the artist.

Yet for all the detail, documentation, and discussion of Dylan the man/artist, neither of these books give much of a sense of the larger social and historical context. Virtually nothing is said of the wave of right-wing evangelicalism that swept the U.S. and other parts of the world in the early 1980s.

Influential preachers such as PTL club hosts Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and televangelist Pat Robertson are not mentioned in relation (however indirectly) to Dylan’s frothy religious zealotry of the same time. As one who lived through those “end times,” conservative Christianity was most definitely in the air.

Perhaps Clinton Heylin, Scott M. Marshall, and Jeff Rosen (largely responsible for the Bootleg series) would rather forget those unhappy [Reagan] years—in favor of (re)making a more productive and profitable use of the Dylan past for present day purposes.

Note David Fricke. “Remembering Leon Russell, Rock’s Behind-the-Scenes Mad Dog.” Rolling Stone, 22 Nov. 2016.

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Book Reviews Walker, Clay. Jesus Was a Country Boy: Life Lessons on Faith, Fishing, and Forgiveness. Howard Books/Simon and Schuster, 2015. 256 pages, $16.99 Reviewed by John E. Winters

Born in Beaumont, Texas, Clay Walker is an American country music artist, someone who has been crafting hit songs since his 1993 debut single, “What’s It To You?,” first rose to the top of the Billboard charts. He is a husband, a father, and a son. These relational terms matter greatly for probing his music and writing, because such roles often define themes in his songs and for people in their everyday lives. His career has been impressive (to date), with eleven albums released. Of the thirty singles he has showcased, six have scored number one hits. This twenty percent ratio qualifies him as an important voice of his generation, and it gives him an extraordinary platform from which to speak.

This book’s title mirrors one of Walker’s own recordings. In both song and text, Walker plainly states that he is neither a pastor nor a theologian. His goal is simple: he urges his readers to look to Jesus as an example of what it means to live an honorable life, focused on the things that truly matter rather than on fleeting consumerism. To be clear: Walker is not constructing a new Christology. Instead, he emphasizes that people, especially church folk, need to abandon the materialism that pervades contemporary American Christianity; Walker favors a radical return to the Jesus he sees revealed in the Gospels.

Walker writes with a folksy, whimsical style. He also structures his book into three sections taken from the iconic “Live, Laugh, Love” slogan sold in so many southern Christian bookstores. This mantra, I should add, is also the title of one of his popular songs from 1999. His three book sections are labeled “Jesus Knew How to Live,” “Jesus Knew How to Laugh,” and “Jesus Knew How to Love.” By mixing in examples of Jesus’s life as told in the Gospels along with anecdotal stories from his own life, Walker shows how he lives his faith as best he can within the Christian worldview as he understands it. To be Christian means to be country at heart, whether living in a big city or on a farm. He states, “. . . being country is simple: a loving heart, a helping hand, an open mind, poor in spirit” (11).

In “Jesus Knew How to Live,” Walker claims that Jesus knew how to treat people, that He was not afraid of a fight, and that He had deep roots in the land.

These three themes are well cited from the Gospel accounts, and Walker provides poignant examples of how Jesus should be imitated by people who would claim His name and then follow Him. I think the third chapter in this section is the

Book Reviews 83 book’s strongest. By pointing out that Jesus was born in the midst of livestock, that He worked with His blue-collar father, that He “hung out” with fishermen, and that He taught using rustic images with which good, country folk would easily identify, Walker connects his intended audience to Jesus. Walker judges Jesus to have been plainspoken, humble, and a hard worker. He declares Jesus to be the ideal country boy. And Walker appears branded by this image of the Man from Nazareth.

There is at least one move that Walker makes in both the book and the song that, to this reviewer, strikes at a core conviction of historic or traditional Christianity. Walker displays an aversion to church attendance; participating in a local congregation is, for him, not a prerequisite for displaying or having a vibrant faith. To be sure, it is a very different thing to have a living faith than it is to merely attend a church service. However, Walker comes close to loathing what an organized congregation represents, the Body of Christ in its spiritual form.

This move, an almost spiritual-but-not-religious move, seems to stem from his respect and hopes for his own father, especially his father’s ultimate fate.

Walker’s father was a man of humility, strong work ethic, high morals, and loving to his family. In the book’s conclusion, not forgetting his song’s second stanza, he discusses his daddy. He writes that his “daddy never cared much for religion” and that he was far more prone to be fishing on Sundays than in a church. Walker’s mother found this behavior troubling. As though attempting to set aside the doubts of his mother and those of all his readers, Walker goes to great lengths to justify his father’s lack of church affiliation yet still maintain that his father was a Christian. It is certainly not anyone’s place to make a determination on the verdict here, but the point or question remains intriguing: is there salvation outside the church? Throughout the book, Walker admonishes his readers to be like Jesus, and the Gospels are filled with accounts of Jesus being actively involved in “religious” gatherings, including synagogue and temple. Walker maintains, however, that when it comes to an eternal destiny, “it’s not who you are, it’s who you know.” And daddy knew, Walker proclaims.

Let me be clear and say that I am not judging Walker’s spirit. Rather, I am simply struck by a disparity—an apparent gap between his homespun admonitions and his own application of the same.

There is more. Having grown up in the rural South, country also flows through my veins. It is often the tendency of southern, Bible-belt Christians to assume that “country” as it stands in the South of the United States is equivalent to what it would have meant in the first century C.E. And it is a common theme for “good ol’ boys” to hold to a faith that they know little about, and then shrug off any responsibility to think it through: “I’m not a preacher or a theologian,” they often say, like Walker does. Experience teaches me, though, that it is highly questionable to declare doctrinal humility, as it were, only to then make strong theological and exhortative claims about how people should live.

One final observation: Walker appears to overlook the traditional Christian hope of the resurrection. He writes of Jesus dying and beautifully discusses Christ’s forgiving heart while on the cross, yet I struggle to see a bold or robust belief in a general resurrection for which Christ’s own coming back from

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the dead is the template. This conviction is not as pronounced as others in Jesus Was a Country Boy. This book is worth reading: Clay Walker has lived a densely textured and immensely rewarding life, one that repays close attention. Anyone not from the South will also discover aspects of what cultural Christianity looks like below the Mason-Dixon Line. I admire Walker’s transparency, and his sincerity shines through his prose. While he may prove several times that he is not a theologian, or even interested in “talkin’ all that high theology,” when he encourages people to live more like Jesus, he commands my respect.

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Colter, Jessi with David Ritz. An Outlaw and a Lady: A Memoir of Music, Life with Waylon, and the Faith That Brought Me Home.

Thomas Nelson: 2017. 304 pages, $26.99 Reviewed by David M. Buyze

When your parents die, that invisible wall that has appeared to protect you from alien elements seems to fall. Your sense of vulnerability sharpens. You are left alone. You feel a sadness you have never felt before. I felt all these things. Yet the feeling I remember the most wasn’t one of fear but rather one of gratitude.

It was my parents who taught me to face fear with equanimity. It was my parents who taught me to walk through fear. They exemplified courage. They exemplified perseverance. Thus I persevered. I persevered through the challenges of a professional and personal life that became, all at once, as exciting as it was complex. (182-83) This highly resonant existential moment in Jessi Colter’s text, An Outlaw and a Lady: A Memoir of Music, Life with Waylon, and the Faith that Brought Me Home, captures the indelible impressions of solitude and the unbearable weight of being that occurs when both of one’s parents have died. It is perhaps only over time that one is able to consider such immeasurable loss with more profundity in permitting contemplations of complexity on mortal and ephemeral life. Such a moment in Colter’s text is amplified when she writes, “Death marks the end of innocence. To the young, death is a remote concept unconnected to our reality.

But then death comes to your home, that reality is shaken and the world feels very different” (39).

Death certainly does have the unshakeable power to entirely shatter perceptions of reality and how one understands the world amidst the conditionality of consciousness and life itself, and in this manner there is another transcendent moment in this text. Yet, unfortunately such contemplative moments in Colter’s ghostwritten book with David Ritz are few and far between as the reader aches for more distinctive degrees of insight on the human condition amidst the life of this country music legend and her relationship with Waylon Jennings.

The most significant further issue in this memoir is that dimensions of the religious and the secular are rather carelessly pivoted as being framed through a tension of good and evil with faith being indicative of the only path to being religious and good. This reifies a rather unremitting tendency in this text to characterize the salvific sense of faith and religion as the only course of sustainable meaning, when it could be argued that the religious and secular are not separate realms of meaning as they can be very entwined in one’s ordinary search for existential orientation and validity of one’s being in trying to create significance in life. The tautology of good/evil as reflecting faith/religion and

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non-faith/secularity is also extended to lightness and darkness in following standard Christian lines of interpreting morality, which is surely amiss as Friedrich Nietzsche’s immense critique in this regard should at least be brought into this conversation. It can be nonetheless assumed that the reader of this text might not be looking for more attuned and complex ways of thinking about morality, but might it not be useful to offer alternative ways of thinking about the complex conditions at hand in being human, rather than only offering reductions of religion as faith as the only moral high ground?

Rather regrettably, this strictly local American text attempts to attain superficially measured great heights on the power of faith in a very American sense, and in this sense it could be suggested that this is where it ultimately fails.

There is no doubt that this mass market book will provide fulfillment for many ardent American Christian fans of Colter and perhaps significantly less so for fans of Jennings as his proclamation of faith on his deathbed is highly unconvincing.

Ultimately, one wonders if he really desired to be painted in such a frame of faith.

There is some required mention of his drug use with Johnny Cash, but that is abruptly terminated. It would have been much more fascinating to hear more of the struggles that wrought all of their relationships, rather than constant nascent tropes of Jesus and God that are reoccurring throughout this memoir. A discerning reader and interpreter could easily recognize that there is much that is unsaid within the register of doubt and skepticism. How did Colter experience doubt and was she ever skeptical about her faith? When reading this memoir, it would be significant to think about how Colter’s experiences are rather glossed and designed to fit within a very specific Christian narrative that is only designed to simultaneously affirm faith and repress the feelings, ideas, and experiences that would cast doubt on that narrative.

The marketing of this text as a Christian memoir is certainly without doubt, but what is most amiss is that this is a music memoir about country musicians, and the reader cannot at all feel the passion about music and neither really about religion either unless one finds meaning in well trod tiring reflections about how faith somehow made life possible. Informal allusions to Ayn Rand do not provide any further substance as to how faith can be understood in this text, as the reader does not know how faith can be grasped in this context. In this regard, one is also not sure what Colter is leaning on for support. A much more interesting moment that does explore an emotional degree of questioning occurs when she writes, I praised God for every day, for every breath, for every good thought that came my way. Mostly, though, I praised God for informing my heart of the very concept of praise. Without shouting his praise, whether silently or out loud in the full-gospel glory of the Greater Apostolic Christ Church, I’d never have been able to get past the brambles and thorns of fear and despair. (205) This is certainly a strong affirmation of faith, but it would certainly be compelling to hear much more of what constituted such continual degrees of “fear and

Book Reviews 87 despair.” The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard explored such questions with paramount insight through his momentous text Fear and Trembling, and in America, the Spanish-American philosopher Georges Santayana contemplated such concerns through a very different lens in his pivotal text Skepticism and Animal Faith. It would have been fascinating to see thinkers such as these brought into conversation in this text, but then that is probably asking for too much when one considers the market audience for this memoir, yet perhaps this audience as well would have wanted to hear more about what it meant for her to experience and feel “fear and despair.”

A further particular concern in this book is the use of the phrase secular music (41), which pitches another binary that is not useful in contemplating the trajectory of her music nor that of Jennings, as certainly one can find avenues of interpreting their music in which questions of doubt and existential tensions are exposed but not textually or emotionally explored in this memoir. I wonder if these tensions essentially revolve around a particular dynamic of Colter’s perception of her own psyche which can be contemplated in this instance: I was working on two critical endeavors at the same time: my marriage to Waylon and my renewed relationship with God. Both endeavors were complicated, both involved internal conflicts, and both deeply influenced the music I was making.

In the midseventies, I was writing two albums at once. They each carried my name, although the names were different. One album was called Jessi, the other Mirriam. Jessi was the wife of Waylon and the artist who had recorded two secular albums. Mirriam was the follower of Christ returning to her faith. Because I was both Jessi and Mirriam, I could not give up one for the other. All I could do was allow each to have her say. (145) Given such remarks, one suspects there is also a problem from Colter’s perspective as to how she is decidedly making one form of music that is secular and another form that is religious, and one wonders how the creative process of music can be compartmentalized in such a manner. In the creative processes of music and writing, the most remarkable insights can happen when consciousness is not restricted, and fractured unconscious ideas and feelings are able to come to the conscious surface and inform patterns of thinking and creating. A particularly intriguing sentence in this quote highlights the complexity at hand in regard to “internal conflicts,” and it would have been remarkable to know more about these conflicts but this is not fully expressed (145).

That instance seems indicative of a continual problem in this memoir where the reader is always left with the desire of wanting to know more about a particular problem or tension in Colter’s experience, but it seems that the real thoughts are never fully expressed as they remain hidden and textually repressed.

That is the sad and unconvincing process of reading this memoir which is decidedly censoring what led to her proclamation of faith. Had this memoir included her pain, struggles, and provided expression to her conflicts with

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unrestrained detail in full disclosure, and without the necessity or compulsion to adhere to a particular Christian narrative of experience, there might have been something very immersive and thought-provoking to contemplate about music, faith, doubt, and existenceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;yet, that is not this text.

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Malone, Bill C., and Tracey E. W. Laird. Country Music USA. 50th anniversary edition. University of Texas Press, 2018. 768 pages, $45.00 Reviewed by Darren J. N. Middleton

September 2019 saw the PBS premiere of Country Music, an eight-part, sixteen-hour film, which director Ken Burns, writer Dayton Duncan, and producer Julie Dunfey designed to recount the music’s American origins and international appeal. Malone’s study began as a 1965 doctoral dissertation, was released in book form in 1968, and now, filled with more than seven-hundred pages, marks its golden jubilee with fulsome praise from Burns and Duncan. “Country Music USA still stands as the most authoritative history of this uniquely American art form,” they say on the book’s front cover. “We feel lucky to have had Bill Malone as an indispensable guide in making our PBS documentary; you should too.” It is hard to do justice to this magisterial study in this review, so I will narrow my focus, touching on the book’s enthralling treatment of country music’s indebtedness to the Christian story.

“Country music evolved in a society where religion was pervasive and where the church and its related functions touched the individual’s life in a hundred different ways,” Malone and Laird note (12). The genre’s foremothers and forefathers were rural southerners, folk who often felt their region to be Christ-haunted, to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, and they learned to sing in congregational settings and acquired their moral sense from faith-based communities. Stories of sin and salvation surface in almost every era of country music’s history, from the early period of commercial hillbilly music (chapter 2) to the 1946-1953 boom period (chapter 7) and from the 1960-1972 reinvigoration of modern country music (chapter 9) to our own century’s iteration of the genre (chapter 13), even if the new millennium has created space for some intriguing changes in country music’s use of religion.

Readers who consult Country Music USA for the details on Christianity’s influence will not leave disappointed. They will find informative discussions of country music’s engagement with camp meetings; gospel music and harmony singing; Methodist circuit riders; the Holiness-Pentecostal revival; and, various iterations of evangelical Protestantism, as it shaped the life and musical art of the Bailes Brothers, Martha Carson, Red Foley, Jimmie Rodgers, and more besides.

The results are fascinating. Malone and Laird describe, for example, the lively play of sin and salvation in the labyrinthine life of George Jones, the Texas honky-tonk revivalist: “His hard-working father (a log truck driver, an oil worker, a shipyard worker) often sought solace from disappointment and poverty in music and the bottle; his mother, on the other hand, found her comfort in sobriety and fundamentalist religion” (335). Attributes from both parents coalesced within the Possum’s embattled soul. He sang in the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Kountze, Texas, which served as his mother’s house of worship, but he preferred listening to Roy Acuff and swilling whiskey, like his father.

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Similar observations surrounding other artists—too numerous to know where to begin, frankly—mark this landmark study. The prose crackles with verve, the insights are as deep as they are funny, and perhaps never more so than when Malone and Laird tackle country music’s current and future trajectory. The topics covered are, once again, legion. But they remain crucial to the genre’s directionality. What often occurs at the complex intersection of race, politics, and gender in twenty-first century country music lies outside this review’s remit, for example, even though Malone’s and Laird’s commentary (546-562) repays close attention.

Religion remains pervasive in American society, even if it is changing, and I want to close my review of this detailed and accessible book by noting my appreciation for the ways Malone and Laird, like pilot fish announcing the imminent arrival of the Big One, help readers and listeners anticipate what is coming, religiously and musically. Consider the case of Sturgill Simpson (562571). Raised in small-town Kentucky, Simpson—“among the best country singers of the early twenty-first century”—profoundly understands Christianity’s customary emphasis on sin and salvation, but, as Malone and Laird take pains to point out, he’s not your average God-fearing git-tar picker, since his “funky-tonk” backed lyrics reference everything from string theory to Tibetan Buddhism (562).

Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (2014) is deep calling unto deep, sort of like Waylon Jennings sharing corn-liquor with the Dalai Lama, and this seems to be a far cry from all previous and so-called official country music.

Times are changing. I think Simpson is one of the most exciting performers to happen to country music in the last decade, and his sonic gestures toward the sacred make me stop what I am doing and then ponder the holy in the everyday.

Simpson is a compelling artist, and Country Music USA is a brilliant book.

Lyrics and Poems 91 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 2019): 91-96

Lyrics and Poems Shout Heaven Down Hunter Erwin Yeah, this one’s for the folks who really mean business Spend more time praying than they do wishin.

Bible in their hands and cross on their back Man, it don’t get any better than that.

This one’s for the folks who stand when they’re singing eyes closed, hands raised, singing like they mean it.

If we got a few here who wanna get loud Revival might start right now.

Chorus: Somebody shout heaven down.

Somebody yell “Jesus Saves.”

Somebody say they want stop till everybody knows His name.

Somebody live a life that makes.

All the lost want to be found.

Somebody shout heaven down.

Tag: Are you gonna walk that line, are you gonna run that race, Cause you might be the only Bible people read today.

So will you live a life that sings, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.

Some body shout heaven down.

Some body shout heaven down. © Hunter Erwin Music: www.huntererwin.com

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Far from the Country Crowd Laura S. Witherington

Church was my religion As I came of age in the eighties.

Awkward in junior high school, Baptist rules made more sense.

But as we sang hymns, Sometimes the cognitive dissonance Sounded a harsh chord.

Our suburb had no sheaves to bring in.

I knew the word only because Gabriel Oak Had helped Bathsheba Everdene with hers.

Jimmy Brumly sat behind me in English, Where we read Madding Crowd.

Narratives of his weekend exploits Shocked me more than those we read about.

He knew exactly how to sneak A pint of Jack Daniel’s Into a Bocephus concert By sliding it into his boot But also carrying a near-empty decoy bottle In his Wrangler pocket so it could be discovered and discarded.

If heaven weren’t to be like Dixie, Jimmy would rather stay home.

Comparing New York City to Hell Seemed like blasphemy.

But Jimmy was nice, never caustic, Never petty or condescending About my naiveté.

Somehow Jesus turned up often For Jimmy and Hank.

Maybe they knew about sheaves.

Lyrics and Poems 93

When Sharing Was Enough Stephen Newton

I used to play guitar in bars, and they were not nice places where church people might go.

These were the other side of the street, the places with the dim lights, fast people, and loud music.

Often there would be a long row of motorcycles out front next to a string of pick-up trucks.

I played a lot of different kinds of music, rock and roll, bluegrass, jazz, and country.

I occasionally sang, and when I did, it was almost always “Lost Highway” by Hank Williams.

This is a story about a man who has lost his way in life, and he is telling the listener to repent, lest he follow the singer.

I grew up going to church and Sunday school, but I am now—or was then, at least—more like Hank.

Hank Williams died at the age of 29, in the backseat of a Cadillac driving from Tennessee to a gig in Ohio.

It’s always been a bit mysterious, but it appears he overdosed on morphine, chloral hydrate, and whiskey.

When I sang his song I felt that I understood his story, the way that he had found himself forsaken in life.

I can’t say that I found redemption. I wish that I could say that, I think, but even today, it seems that I am not sure about much of anything in life, much less what comes next for all of us.

Hank Williams and Johnny Cash both struggled with drugs and alcohol and sought some kind of higher truth.

It was their ongoing struggle, I believe, that makes their songs so compelling, not the story of their spiritual success.

Looking back, singing those country songs was a kind of prayer, shared with a room full of sinners on Saturday night.

It was probably nothing more than that, but maybe that sharing, as loud and raucous as it was, was enough.

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“Sweet Lord” and Other Poems Dike Okoro 1.

Sweet Lord --after Kenny Roger’s “Sweet Little Jesus Boy” Those Sundays after church, my father hummed to Kenny Roger’s song narrating the story Of Jesus; his large hands firm on The steering as the ride home Seemed endless in the congested Traffic. We backed up His lead like a choir, mama’s soprano Cutting in every now and then, relieving Father of his fading baritone like A performer in need of a break so His backup singers would allow him get A breather. If a song were a garment, we Imagined Roger’s lyrics about Sweet Little Jesus Boy one, as we ignored the occasional Coughing triggered by dust creeping in through The open windows, knowing nothing seemed More fulfilling like praising the Lord After worship on a Sunday afternoon.

2.

After Dolly Parton’s “Jesus and Gravity” Oh yes, we all do get to that point When we admit we’ve come far but Fall short of saying we know it all.

It all amounts to His grace in the race Of life we partake in, each day we set out Like the birds of dawn, cleaving To dreams because we refuse to be Left out of the beautiful adventure Called life, but knowing no matter How often the sky drops rain on us Or how often we are stranded in

Lyrics and Poems 95 The desert of indecisions, Somethinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lifts us up and gives us Wings, like Dolly Parton would say, and We never wonder in awe why we are so Blessed, because the more we Take His blessings for granted the Closer we are to feeling rescued by His grace!

3.

Anointed Years ago, I promised my mother I would be a good son, no matter What my life amounted to, seeing how Each day she struggled with a cane, Making it to YMCA where she Broke swimming records for septuagenarians.

Impressed, I borrowed from her faith in prayers Lessons to nurture my kids today about how Not to lose belief in Jesus, when The struggles of world make us want To view earth as the end of it all. Then One day I was driving down a lonely Road and Carrie Underwood came on The radio singing Jesus, take the wheel, Take it from my hands. In that moment I promised myself, even when the sky Mumbled, threatening to thunder and it Seemed like the end days had come, I would Be mighty happy knowing Jesus lives in me.

4.

Praise the Lord Like Hank Williams Jr, I too saw the light When I wandered, in those days when God allowed me to survive all the wrongs I did that I thought were the right things.

Nothing and no one stopped me From crossing the roads in the dark, but

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I knew the light was with me, guiding me, Leading me to the gate, the turning point Where all worries surrendered to the calling Of the name Jesus. And today when I look Back, I nod in agreement: Hank Williams Jr Was right. Now I’m so happy, no sorrow In sight!

Notes on Contributors 97

Notes on Contributors Joe Blosser <jblosser@highpoint.edu> is the Robert G. Culp Jr. Director of Service Learning and Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy at High Point University. He also directs the university’s Bonner Leader Program, AmeriCorps VISTA Program, and the Civic Responsibility and Social Innovation degree. He is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and obtained his M.Div. at Vanderbilt University and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His work explores the ethical implications of economic theory and Christian theology for community transformation. He has published articles in Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory, Encounter, Homiletic, and others. He lives in High Point, NC, with his wife and two children.

David M. Buyze <d.buyze@tcu.edu> is Associate Graduate Faculty in the Master of Liberal Arts program at Texas Christian University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, Canada. He is interested in cultural, social, and political issues of marginalization/oppression, and how existential, social, and national forms of liberation can occur within forms of cultural and artistic production. He has published articles on postcolonialism, Edward W. Said, Orhan Pamuk, and Carmen Boullosa, a co-edited book entitled, Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk: Existentialism & Politics (2012), and most recently “The Question of Nationalism & Belonging,” which was published in the journal Religions (2018).

James M. Cochran <cochranj@hartwick.edu> is the Interim Coordinator of the Writing Center at Hartwick College. He completed his Ph.D. in English at Baylor University in 2019. His research and teaching interests include first-year writing, digital composition, ecocriticism, and the intersection of twentieth-century and contemporary American literature, religion, and popular culture.

He has published essays in Label Me Latina/o, Word and Text, the Journal of South Texas English Studies, Religion and the Arts, The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness, and New Voices in Jewish-American Literature.

Hunter Erwin <hunter_erwin@yahoo.com> is a southern boy, hailing from Walker, Louisiana, and he has been on the road singing Christian Country music since 2008. He has been fêted by the Christian Country Honor Awards (CCMNow) for multiple years, as “New Artist of the Year,” “Male Vocalist of the Year,” “Album of the Year,” and “Video of the Year.” One can find Hunter in concert and traveling with his wife, Heather, and two daughters, Lakelyn and Emery, on any given day by noting dates on his website at www.huntererwin.com.

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Jake Harris <mr.jacob.harris@gmail.com> is an award-winning digital journalist at WFAA Channel 8 News in Dallas, Texas. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Texas Christian University in 2014. His reporting and writing on faith and country music have appeared in several publications, including The Nashville Scene, the Austin American-Statesman, Austin 360, the Victoria Advocate and the Wise County Messenger. He lives in Dallas with his wife Taylor Tompkins, a data journalist at the Dallas Business Journal. For Harris’s personal website, see: www.jakeharrisblog.com.

Darren J. N. Middleton <d.middleton2@tcu.edu> is John F. Weatherly Professor of Religion and Director of the Master of Liberal Arts program at Texas Christian University. Born and raised in Nottingham, England, he has published books in the areas of theology and comparative literature as well as religion and the arts, including George Eliot, Illuminated by The Message: Literary Portals to Prayer (2019); Approaching Silence: New Perspectives on Shusaku Endo’s Classic Novel (2015); Dangerous Edges of Graham Greene: Journeys with Saints and Sinners (2011); Mother Tongue Theologies: Poets, Novelists, and NonWestern Christianity (2009); Theology after Reading: Christian Imagination and the Power of Fiction (2008); and, Broken Hallelujah: Nikos Kazantzakis and Christian Theology (2007). He lives in central Texas with his wife, Betsy, an American religious historian, and their son, Jonathan. For Middleton’s personal website, see: www.darrenjnmiddleton.com Stephen Newton <newtons@wpunj.edu> is Professor of English at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. In 2005-06, he was a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of American Studies at the University of Graz in Graz, Austria. Some of his recent publications include “Dark Visits” in Dark Tourism and Pilgrimage, edited by Daniel H. Olsen and Maximiliano E. Korstanje (2019); “No! in Thunder: American Wildflowers Reborn” in Tom Petty: Essays on the Life and Work (2019); and “Just Neighbors” in The Examined Life Journal (2017).

Dike Okoro <okorod@hssu.edu> holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is currently an associate professor of English at Harris-Stowe State University, St. Louis, MO. His awards include a Sam Walton Fellowship and a Newberry Scholar-in-Residence Award. In 2016, he shortlisted for the Cecile De Jongh Literary Award (Poetry). He is the editor of multiple anthologies of poetry, including Speaking for the Generations: Contemporary Short Stories from Africa (2010); A Long Dream (2013); and We Have Crossed Many Rivers: New Poetry from Africa (2013), a book shortlisted by Human Rights Magazine, UK, as one of the five Vocal Human Rights Poetry Books Inspiring Change. Okoro is the author of two poetry books: In the Company of the Muse (2016) and Dance of the Heart (2007).

Notes on Contributors 99 Clodagh Weldon <cbrett@dom.edu> holds a D.Phil and M.A. from the University of Oxford, England, and is Professor of Theology at Dominican University in River Forest, Il. She is the recipient of Dominican University’s 2005 Mother Evelyn Murphy Excellence in Teaching Award and is featured as a case study of highly effective undergraduate teaching in Barbara Walvoord’s Teaching and Learning in College Introductory Religion Courses (2007).

Weldon is the author of Fr Victor White OP: The Story of Jung’s White Raven (2007) and co-editor, with Kelly Bulkeley, of Teaching Jung (2011).

John E. Winters <jewinters@bhcti.edu> is currently finishing his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the B.H. Carroll Theological Institute in Irving, TX. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Biblical Studies from Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He lives in Central Arkansas with his wife, Alexi, and their sons. He has taught undergraduate students for eight years, and his research interests include the intersectionality between philosophy, religion and popular culture, specifically with an eye toward helping Christians articulate their faith in a whimsical, approachable manner. Having been raised by a Southern Baptist pastor, both southern Christianity and country music are in his blood. Living on a lake, he spends every moment he can on his back porch studying, writing, and being immersed in the rural landscape that has shaped so much of country music's understanding of Jesus.

Laura S. Witherington <laura.witherington@uafs.edu> earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Arkansas. She is an associate professor of English, Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, where she teaches courses on composition, American literature, Victorian literature, popular culture, and pedagogy. She has published multiple essays on HBO’s Girls, on economic theory and literature, and on instructional practices. Her teaching was recognized in 2014 with the Lori Norin Faculty Appreciation Award.

Andrew Grant Wood <andrew-wood@utulsa.edu> is Stanley Rutland Professor of American History at The University of Tulsa. He was born in Montreal, Canada, and he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on the history of Mexico. He has published on a variety of social and cultural topics: urbanization, immigration, grassroots collective action, housing, regional politics, civic ritual and celebration, tourism, film, and popular music.

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Call for Papers and Book Reviews

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Published Semiannually by the Faith & Learning Committee and the Humanities Division of Missouri Baptist University St. Louis, Missouri 63141-8698 Intégrité (pronounced IN tay gri tay) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal on the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. Founded in the fall of 2002 with the Institutional Renewal Grant from the Rhodes Consultation on the Future of the Church-Related College, it is published both online and in print copy. Interested Christian scholars are encouraged to submit academic articles and book reviews for consideration. Manuscripts should be sent as e-mail attachments (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu.

Articles must be 15-25 pages, and book reviews must be 4-8 pages, both double-spaced. Articles should examine historical, theological, philosophical, cultural, and/or pedagogical issues related to faith-learning integration. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:         

the current state and/or future of the church-related college history of Christian liberal arts education Christianity and contemporary culture a Christian perspective on multiculturalism and diversity service learning academic freedom in a Christian context implementation of Christian truths in academic disciplines Christian education in the non-Western world global Christianity.

Articles must engage in faith-learning issues or controversies in a scholarly, critical manner. We generally do not consider manuscripts that are merely factual, devotional, or sermonic. Due dates are March 1 for inclusion in the spring issue and September 1 for the fall issue.

Articles are expected to be research-based but must focus on the author’s original thought. We typically do not consider articles that use more than twentyfive secondary sources; merely present other scholars’ opinions without

Call for Papers & Book Reviews 101 developing extended, thoughtful analysis; and/or use excessive endnotes. Direct quotations, especially lengthy ones, should be used sparingly.

Considering that most IntĂŠgritĂŠ readers are Christian scholars and educators not necessarily having expertise on multiple disciplines, articles and book reviews must be written in concise, precise, and easy-to-understand style.

Writers are recommended to follow what William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White suggest in The Elements of Style: use definite, specific, concrete language; omit needless words; avoid a succession of loose sentences; write in a way that comes naturally; and avoid fancy words.

For citation style, refer to the current edition of MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Articles should include in-text citations in parentheses, a list of endnotes (if applicable), and an alphabetical listing of works cited at the end of the article. Book reviews need only page numbers in parentheses after direct quotations.