Bob Dylan Says He Was Changed Forever by Billy Graham

In an interview with AARP magazine, 60s rock icon Bob Dylan praised Billy Graham. He said, “Billy Graham was the greatest preacher and evangelist of my time--that guy could save souls and did. I went to two or three of his rallies in the ’50s or ’60s. This guy was like rock ’n’ roll personified--volatile, explosive. He had the hair, the tone, the elocution--when he spoke, he brought the storm down. Clouds parted. Souls got saved, sometimes 30- or 40,000 of them. If you ever went to a Billy Graham rally back then, you were changed forever. There’s never been a preacher like him. He could fill football stadiums before anybody. ... Long before Mick Jagger sang his first note or Bruce strapped on his first guitar--that’s some of the part of rock ’n’ roll that I retained. I had to. I saw Billy Graham in the flesh and heard him loud and clear” (“Looking Deeper into Dylan,” AARP the magazine, Feb.-Mar. 2015). This is a strange statement. Dylan was changed forever in the 1950s and 1960s by Graham’s preaching? Dylan, the drug user who taught the 1960s generation that there are no answers to life’s mysteries (e.g., “Blowin’ in the Wind”), who included Tarot cards and Buddhas on his album covers, who made a profession of faith in Christ in the 1980s only to repudiate it? Even rock historian Steve Turner, who has attempted to justify Dylan’s apostasy, admits: “The womanizing and drunkenness that Dylan once saw as evidence of the old life have apparently continued almost uninterrupted” (Turner, “Watered Down Love,” Christianity Today, May 21, 2001). An article in the San Luis Obispo (California) Register for March 16, 1983, quoted Dylan as saying: “Whoever said I was Christian? Like Gandhi, I’m Christian, I’m Jewish, I’m a Moslem, I’m a Hindu. I am a humanist.” Actually, Bob Dylan well represents a large percentage of Billy Graham’s converts. Multitudes of people professed faith in Christ, but biblical evidence of the new birth was rare. Graham helped Christianize America, but it was a house built on sand.

(Friday Church News Notes, March 27, 2015, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

---