Reading Lynskey’s account of protest music’s heyday in the 1960s, it’s clear that his preferred brand of progressive idealism will soon peak and then fade from the scene. What he doesn’t tell us is that the real success story of political pop in recent history is the saga of Christian rock, a genre that originated in ’60s counterculture, filtered into the mainstream, and was co-opted by conservatives. In No Sympathy for the Devil, author David Stowe quotes an interview with Hollywood pastor Don Williams from the Christian magazine Guideposts: “Look at the mob that went to Woodstock. Jesus wasn’t there. The kids spent a week getting stoned and smashed and pregnant. I feel that love died at Woodstock for the kids who were there. I doubt that rock could ever pull off another Woodstock. But rock-gospel could. And Jesus would be there.”
Stowe follows Christian pop music as it evolves from sound-tracking the left-leaning countercultural Jesus movement, with its saucer-eyed teen burnouts baptized in the surf of ’60s Corona del Mar, California, to mobilizing Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the Reagan Revolution. Stowe’s narrative shares themes with Lynskey’s: Both authors recount the dilemmas of songwriters tightening—and often losing—their grasp on their message as they chase or abdicate fame. And Dylan is, of course, a star of both books.
Stowe finds the roots of Dylan’s 1978 conversion to evangelical Christianity in his turn to conservative family values as early as 1966. The sexual mores of Woodstock Nation, which, Dylan complained, “seemed to have something to do with me,” were, to him, “the sum total of all this bullshit.” Meanwhile, he embraced Christian music’s traditional themes, and he performed with a missionary’s zeal for the music’s proper reception. Trailblazing long-haired Christian rocker Larry Norman watched Dylan during a postconversion performance and observed that he was “kicked around” by skeptical Christians, while fans who came to hear his godless oldies booed him. Dylan taunted them: “I said the answer was ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ and it was. I’m telling you now Jesus is coming back and He is!”