Well, ALL Christians are born again Christians, by definition. And in this interview he seems to be maintaing that commitment. In his own Dylanesque way. I think Dylan gets a bit of a bad rap on FR, in that he broke from the Hippies early on, distancing himself from them and even ridiculing them in interiews and songs. He definitely marched to his own beat and, accoringly, has ticked off just about everyone on both sides of the spectrum somewhere along the line. I always liked a lot of his music (Pat Garrett, Blood on the Tracks) and found him interesting.
Dylan and Vietnam.
This is from The Weekly Standard.
It’s an interesting paradox. Looking at the record, Vietnam should have been the wedge that forced the left to reject Dylan as a matter of dogma, because he failed to give them anything that they demanded from him, and actually gave them the opposite of what they wanted.
Instead, the Vietnam war is the seemingly unbreakable link that ties Dylan to the left in the popular consciousness. Consider: Dylan wrote no songs about the Vietnam war during the 1960s. Zero. The songs Dylan wrote that antiwar protesters later seized upon (from Blowin’ in the Wind on down) were written when the Vietnam war was little more than a twinkle in John F. Kennedy’s eye.
A close study of those songs would also reveal, as Dylan himself has stated in so many words, that they are not “antiwar” songs, as such. Just as with all his best work, they are based upon an almost unerring sense of human nature and a remarkable ability to ask questions that provoke revealing answers in the listener.
Consider also: Dylan never spoke out against the Vietnam war in the 1960s. Not once. It was not for want of being asked. At a 1965 press conference in San Francisco he was asked if he would be participating in an anti-war protest later that day. He replied, “No, I’ll be busy tonight.” The tape shows that he was all but laughing while he said it.
With America’s name at a low-water mark in the world and in the minds of the protesters at home, Dylan recorded Nashville Skyline, an album of sweet country music that can also be heard as love songs to a simpler America, and one that was certainly very far from Dylan’s front door.
Despite the heat he took, he backed down not one bit. In an interview in Sing Out! magazine in 1968, Dylan was pressed on how any artist could be silent in the face of the war. Dylan talked about a painter friend of his who was in favor of the war, and said that he “could comprehend him.” Pressed further on how he could possibly share any values with such a person, Dylan responded:
I’ve known him a long time, he’s a gentleman and I admire him . . . Anyway, how do you know that I’m not, as you say, for the war?
The topic was dropped there.