Oh, Ye of Little Faith

Disgruntled fans rejected born-again Dylan in 1979, but a new boxed set of his gospel songs might nally convert them

- Jim Farber

HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A fan scorned. In 1979, when Bob Dylan issued Slow Train Coming, an album that made plain his born-again conversion as an evangelical Christian, devotees felt disillusioned, if not duped. How could such a committed skeptic, a man possessed of endless probing and independent thought, buy into this or any orthodoxy? What place did the nuanced observation of Dylan have in the rigid script of the believer? Slow Train found him paraphrasing Scripture in ways that struck the agnostic as condescending, condemning and small.

Of course, Dylan had pulled stark switcheroos before. In 1965, he stunned many by going electric, but the boos soon disappeared. Five years later, this avatar of originality frustrated fans again with the release of an album of tepid covers, Self-Portrait, inspiring one of the most stinging first lines of a Rolling Stone review: “What is this shit?” Six months later, Dylan redeemed himself with the beautifully ruminative New Morning.

But Dylan’s three born again albums, released between 1979 and ’81 (including Saved and Shot of Love), soured many for years. I was a teen then, and my Dylan freeze lasted until 1989’s Oh Mercy. In the wake of what followed—years of superb music and performances—there seemed little reason to revisit what many would call Dylan’s lost period.