A Meditation on Bob Dylan’s ‘Man of Peace’

I was about seventeen when I got into listening to Dylan, and quite apart from his effect on me as a writer, he profoundly influenced my attitude towards culture, politics and religion.

My first purchase was his Masterpieces three-LP compilation, which I think was only released in Australia and New Zealand.

My second was the album he had just released: Infidels, (1983). On it was a song, ‘Man of Peace’, which spoke to me straight away.

I had been brought up in an atheist household, and I was full of questions about Christianity. I had been brought up to see Christianity as an unreasoning, authoritarian religion that deprived people of free thought.

And there was Dylan singing, “Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace… Could be the Fuhrer, could be the local priest…” 

Here was a man who had recently identified himself with Christianity, but who was quite willing to testify that the forces of evil might sometimes work through the church, or through the entanglement between religion and politics.

I had an explosion of interest in Dylan, and saved my pennies to buy every album.

In his recordings from the early Eighties, I found a very different conception of Christianity, centring around a Jesus who made moral demands. 

Whether I believed it or not, there was something about Dylan’s uncompromising voice in those songs that drew me, and seemed to me to be totally consistent with the Dylan who sung about Medgar Evers, Emmett Till and Hattie Carroll.

It was the voice of the Sermon on the Mount; the voice of Jeremiah crying in the wilderness.

It clashed with what I saw of institutional Christianity.

Over the years, it has clashed more and more, and the words of ‘Man of Peace’ have rung truer and truer. The blight of paedophilia in the church has lent the song new force.

So has the appropriation, by the forces of racism and bigotry, of the New Testament as a political tool.

The verse about the “man of peace” exerting his sexual magnetism for evil ends (“He knows just where to touch you, honey, / and how you like to be kissed.  / He’ll put both his arms around you; / you can feel the tender touch of the Beast”) has become more and more relevant in a world in which powerful men who pay lip-service to Christianity use sex as a means of extending their power.

But one other thing brought that song into focus for me. I wanted to be a historian, and I ended up writing a doctoral thesis on Second World War cultural history. 

That was when that “Fuhrer” reference in the song really came into focus for me.  I was reminded of the song again by this image.

John Heartfield’s anti-Nazi poster, ‘The Cross was not yet heavy enough’ is a satire on a hideous perversion of Christianity known as the Deutsche Christen, the mutation of Protestantism which served as the “Church” of the Nazi state.

The “German Christians” grotesquely magnified the anti-semitic tendencies which had always been a problem in Lutheranism.

They quoted Luther himself in order to legitimise the most murderous manifestation of anti-Semitism ever seen, and they purged their Bibles of Jewish elements.

They emphasised Romans 13 over the Sermon on the Mount in order to procure fanatical obedience to the Nazi State.

They adopted the ‘Aryan Paragraph’ which defrocked clergy of Jewish descent, and their symbol was a cross with a swastika at the centre.

Whilst this Frankenstein’s monster of a “Church” served the fundamentally vicious needs of Nazism, other Protestants formed the Confessing Church, which was one of the principal sources of resistance to the Nazis inside Germany.  Its leader, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was eventually hanged by the Nazis for being part of an assassination attempt against Hitler.  Bonhoeffer had contacted the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, asking him to act as an emissary between the conspirators and the British government. 

He wanted an assurance from the British that if Hitler was assassinated, the conspirators would be permitted to form a provisional government without the Allies invading and tearing Germany apart.  When Bell’s letter, pleading on Bonhoeffer’s behalf, crossed the desk of the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, the minister dismissed the proposal utterly.

Apparently, it was all right for thousands of bombers to pulverise civilians in German cities, but it was not all right to help Germans assassinate their dictator.

Similarly sharp dichotomies can be seen in the story of the Catholic Church under Nazism.

The Pope himself failed to publicly condemn Nazism, the official reason being that he feared that doing so would merely provoke further Nazi reprisals against the Jews.  Some Catholics became collaborators, including the monstrous anti-Semite President of Slovakia, Josef Tiso, who co-operated in the deportation unto death of Slovak Jews, but was never excommunicated.

Yet the Nazis knew that Catholics whose convictions were genuine, just like many secularists and people of other faiths, were a significant danger to the totalitarian state, and that is why there were 2,579 Catholic priests imprisoned at Dachau, and many thousands of other Catholics in concentration camps.

Heartfield’s photo-montage, in which a Nazi converts the cross of Christ into a swastika, never seems to lose its power to shock.

Nothing could be more blasphemous, to a Christian of genuine conviction, like Bonhoeffer, or the Roman Catholic priests who condemned Nazi racial ideology from their pulpits, or, I believe, Dylan, no matter how he melds his spiritual influences these days, than the naked cynicism with which Hitler mutilated the Christian faith.

The image provides a powerful object lesson which must not be forgotten: when the State seeks to gain a monopoly over belief, untold atrocities may be committed in the name of a religion that has ceased to believe in a single one of its founder’s original precepts.

“Well, the howling wolf will howl tonight, 

The king snake will crawl

Trees that’ve stood for a thousand years 

Suddenly will fall”

sings Dylan, and like all good apocalyptic, it’s not just about the end of the world. It’s about how hellishness works its way into reality here and now – and especially, it’s about the way it uses falsely appropriated religion as a means of spreading hatred, bigotry and persecution.

I listen once more to this song, and look at this image, with new ears and eyes today.

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