Johnny Cash and the Prophetic Imagination

Johnny Cash a n d

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Considering an American icon through the theological lens of Walter Brueggemann b y T ony Blair

Cash’s role as both representative and critic of American Christianity was recently explored in book-length form by Rodney Clapp in Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for a Soul of a Nation (Westminster, 2008). In it he says,

I’ve been listening to Johnny Cash with fascination ever since I became a fan at the tail end of his career. Growing up, I was aware of him, mostly as a television performer, but didn’t truly discover his work and heart before delving into his startling American Recordings albums, released over the last 10 years of his life.

While Cash possessed a deep faith in Christ, he was a sinner of biblical proportions, with a spiritual journey as winding and rutted as King David’s. And while he sinned like an Old Testament king, he also railed like an Old Testament prophet.

Cash called the American church to be more than and different from what it was; although he died in 2003 at the age of 71, that call continues to resonate.

In cultural terms Cash became as big as he was because he tapped into something bigger than music. There was something about his presence, about how he said and sang things, about his authenticity and humility, about his story and how he lived it that connected with multiple generations of people

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Andrew Hench

ery few figures in recent history are seen as more repV resentative of American identity than Cash. His music was included in a space capsule the USA shot into outer space. He played Abraham Lincoln in a television miniseries and was a major player in the celebration of the country’s bicentennial. His has often been suggested as the face that should be added to the select pantheon on Mt. Rushmore. But in addition to his profound Americanness, the late and still celebrated country singer and songwriter, in his life and work, provides several lamps to shine into the neglected, shadowy twists and crevices of the caverns of America’s current religious, cultural, and political predicaments.

abandoned his wife and their four daughters to chase after June, who was then married to someone else. And all of this while (not before!) professing Christ!

from all walks of life in many countries.

Perhaps nothing more accurately represents Cash’s authenticity than his cover of “Hurt,” a Trent Reznor song that he so poignantly made his own on American IV:The Man Comes Around, the final Cash album released during his lifetime.

The song itself is haunting, in a postmodern, all-is-meaningless sense, but the video is more so. I will let you down, I will make you hurt, Cash groans in his raspy voice, itself merely a shadow of the powerful instrument it once was. You can have it all, my empire of dirt, he offers as footage of Cash in his heyday flashes across the screen. This whole career, all the fame and money, is worthless on the day of dying. I have achieved little and hurt many, he laments. And the screen fills with images first of June, Cash’s wife, who died after heart surgery just months after the video was made, and then of Jesus, carrying the cross. Clearly Cash is confessing, “I gave you that cross. I crucified you. I hurt you.”

The melody is accompanied by a pounding piano track, increasing in intensity, hammering as the song reaches its climax — hardly the typical country music sound. Cash is seated at the piano, his once handsome face now wide and haggard, his hair wispy gray, his large hands now weak and trembling. Near the end, he picks up a wineglass and shakily pours the wine over the piano, as if his own blood were being spilled in propitiation for the pain he has caused. And then, as the music fades, he closes the keyboard cover. In the silence, with the camera focused solely on his hands, he rests them on top the cover.

Beyond the music and personality is the faith of Johnny Cash. For decades he was American music’s most visible, vocal, and volatile believer. It is difficult to describe how explicit Cash was about his faith without making him sound preachy or pompous. He wasn’t, and yet he included altar calls in some of his concerts and toured with Billy Graham. He sang gospel and included at least one explicitly Christian song on every album. He had fellow rockers over for dinner and asked them to join hands and pray around the table. At the height of his fame, he took a two-year correspondence course on the Bible.

His two posthumously released albums are called My Mother’s Hymnbook and The Gospel of John.

And yet his reputation as a bad boy never went away either, which is why he remained such a mysterious contradiction.

He struggled with drug addiction and identified with prisoners. He defied the censors on his own TV show to sing a song about getting stoned and got kicked off the stage of the Grand Ole Opry for being high and stomping out the footlights. He was one of the first artists to be bleeped in a live album for his language, and he ran a full-page close-up of himself extending his middle finger to express his views of the Nashville establishment. His first marriage ended when he

Johnny Cash through a theological lens In his profound first book, The Prophetic Imagination (1978), Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann examines the Scriptures as drama and explores the role of the imagination in understanding that drama. In it he contrasts what he calls the “royal consciousness” with the “prophetic consciousness.”

The royal consciousness is represented in the Old Testament

by Solomon and his dynasty, which subverted the freedom of the Mosaic system in order to impose imperial rule on the people. This imperialism — whether in Solomon’s era or in contemporary America, focuses on satisfying the material cravings of the majority of the subjects so that they do not object to the violence and tyranny upon which royal power so heavily relies. It oppresses some while satiating others, enclosing and nullifying God by narrowly defining his role and controlling how he is worshiped. Under the royal consciousness, God is utilized as a means of perpetuating power.

The prophetic consciousness, on the other hand, is represented by those who remember the Mosaic formulation and stand on the margins, calling forth with both memory and imagination. Brueggemann sees two primary, almost contradictory activities of the prophetic imagination — prophetic criticizing and prophetic energizing.

Considering the work of Johnny Cash through the theological lens of Walter Brueggman is a rich exercise, because the dual prophetic functions Brueggeman identified are the very functions that the “Man in Black” performed for American music, American culture, and, more specifically, American evangelicalism, during his long career. Cash selfconsciously assumed the role of a prophet, inveighing against the royal consciousness of the music establishment, of the social structures, and even of the church, offering both criticism and redemption, both condemnation and hope, all borne out of his own awkward, contradictory faith experience.

Johnny Cash as critical prophet “The royal consciousness leads people to numbness,” writes Brueggeman, “especially about death. It is the task of prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death.”

If there’s anything that Johnny Cash was criticized for, particularly by fellow believers, it was his articulation of death and grief, which they too often (wrongly) associated with a glorification of violence. It was exactly the opposite for him.

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It was putting himself (and thus his listeners) in the uncomfortable position of the dying person or, worse, the one who causes others to die. His insistence on first-person narrative in many of his songs led people to believe that he, Cash, was living out these activities or fantasizing about them. But they missed the point. He embodied those people for the length of a song in order to help us embody them, to allow us to encounter the horror, fear, and evil, and thus to confront our own humanity.

This use of imagination was present from the beginning in Cash’s music. “Folsom Prison Blues,” perhaps his signature song, contains a memorable line, so much more shocking in 1956 than it is today: I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Cash didn’t want to kill anyone; he wanted to imagine the worst thing that one person could do to another, to get inside that head and confront that reality — and force us to confront it along with him. Those who miss that point will also miss the next line of the song: When I hear that lonesome [train] whistle, I hang my head and cry. This is a song of confession and regret.

One of my personal favorites is his cover of a Nick Cave song called “The Mercy Seat,” sung from the point of view of a man in an electric chair, contemplating his life and God as the power is switched on:

voice is that of the murderer and the murdered, the criminal and the victim, the destroyer and the destroyed — and in that moment we encounter truth. That is me in that chair, says Cash, for this moment at least, for I, too, am afraid I told a lie.

That is me in there, for I, too, must approach the mercy seat of Christ one day. That is me in there, for I, too, am a guilty man in need of redemption.

Johnny Cash spoke truth to us in that song, forcing us to confront our own sin and its consequences, forcing us to come to terms with the darkness and despair of our own character, compelling us to sit in the electric chair and there seek mercy. Fortunately, there was another side of Johnny Cash, which corresponds to Brueggemann’s other aspect of the prophetic imagination — prophetic energizing.

Johnny Cash as energizing prophet Brueggemann contrasts this prophetic energizing with royal consciousness:“The royal consciousness leads people to despair about the power to move toward new life.” So could the prophetic critique, if there were no counterbalance to remind us of what God is up to. “It is the task of prophetic imagination and ministry to bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God,” writes Brueggeman. He suggests three actions: to “offer symbols that are adequate to contradict a situation of hopelessness in which newness is unthinkable”; to “bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there”; and to “speak metaphorically about hope but concretely about the real newness that comes to us and redefines our situation.”

For Johnny Cash, this energizing message occurred, almost paradoxically, by his explicit identification with the marginalized.

He sang in prisons and about prisoners so often that many people mistakenly thought he had done hard time.When no one else was paying attention to Native Americans, he identified with them and even did an entire theme album on the topic, enraging and alienating his producers and many of his fans by taking on something so controversial and off the beaten path.

Cash also took on the Vietnam War, standing in opposition to it while remaining a friend of Richard Nixon and being perceived as a patriot to his country, a difficult balancing act that few pulled off. Describing himself as “a dove with claws,” he sang to the troops in Vietnam and later wrote about his harrowing travels there. In the late 1960s, when his good friend Merle Haggard was singing “Okie from Muskogie” against the hippie movement, Cash sang “What is Truth?,” advising older folks to shut up and listen to the young because what they were saying needed to be heard.

I n Heaven his throne is made of gold / The ark of his Testament is stowed / A throne from which I’m told / All history does unfold. / It’s made of wood and wire / And my body is on fire / And God is never far away. /…

And the mercy seat is smoking / And I think my head is melting / And in a way it’s helping / To be done with all this twisting of the truth. / An eye for an eye / And a tooth for a tooth / And anyway I told the truth / But I’m afraid I told a lie.

The narrator’s voice continues as the switch is pulled and the electricity surges through him, and in the end, as he approaches the mercy seat of Christ, we finally hear the truth about his crime: I’m afraid I told a lie. In that moment, Cash’s

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Cash’s kinship with society’s marginalized stretches back to the days when his family were cotton sharecroppers on Arkansas bottomland. Even when he had earned the respect of (and membership in) “the establishment,” he was always on the outside, peering in, and inviting others to peer in with him. His life made the common man feel that if Johnny Cash could succeed, could make a difference in the world, they could, too.

Written at the height of his fame in 1971, during the Vietnam era, Cash’s “Man in Black” articulated not only the reason for his color of choice but also his philosophy of life and his role as a prophet:

within the contours of classic evangelicalism, and he had a persistent habit of singing, even writing, music that many evangelicals of his generation considered to be the work of the devil. He associated with people most evangelicals considered to be on the wrong side of the kingdom, supported social causes that were not popular among white evangelicals of his time, and embraced believers (and nonbelievers) who approached God sincerely in ways different from his own. In short, he refused to preach or proof-text or become a spokesman for evangelicalism. He would talk about Jesus, yes, but he never claimed to represent a church, denomination, or movement. He resisted such efforts, partly out of humility, partly because of a legitimate concern of being co-opted.

And, finally, when pushed, he could be critical of his fellow believers. You’re so heavenly minded you’re no earthly good, he sang to them in one caustic song. Sinners loved him for it.

His faith did not come easily to him, nor was it sustained without difficulty. He doubted, challenged, examined, and wandered away; he approached God with both fear and love; when he finally claimed redemption, he did so with sincere reservations about whether he could hold onto it and whether he was too weak, unstable, and sinful to belong to God. My parents were Johnny Cash fans in the 1970s — fans of the newly born-again Cash; the southern gospel, been-tohell-and-back Cash; the non-offending, “I won’t swear anymore” Cash who sang pretty or humorous songs.Today I, too, am a fan, but for very different reasons. I am a fan because in his music Cash does offend, because he cries out in pain, because he doubts, and because, in the end, he discovers the same redemption that I claim as my own.

For that I am grateful, and because of that I recommend him to you — the critical prophet, the energizing prophet, the voice that expressed both the best and worst of our faith over five decades and whose wisdom will continue to light the decades to come. n

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down / Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town / I wear it for the prisoner who is long paid for his crime / But is there because he’s a victim of the times /I wear the black for those who never read / Or listened to the words that Jesus said / About the road to happiness through love and charity / Why, you’d think He’s talking straight to you and me / … I wear it for the sick and lonely old / For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold / I wear the black in mournin’ for the lives that could have been / Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.

The tone of this song is exceptionally somber, the voice wavering and sometimes off-key, and yet the mere articulation of the words gives hope. Someone knows. Someone gets it.

Someone speaks for me. And so, ironically and paradoxically, his somber voice became an instrument of hope, of energy for change, of renewal and redress, of justice and redemption.

When Johnny Cash sang it, his listeners could believe that it might actually come true.

Johnny Cash and American evangelicalism Johnny Cash was both a representative of the evangelical movement and a contrarian prophet to it. Raised in a Pentecostal home, he learned his first songs from his mother’s hymnal.

He experienced the standard evangelical conversion narrative, including a recommitment to the Lord in the late 1960s as he emerged from his worst drug-induced haze. He spoke openly of heaven as his goal, most conspicuously in his original song “Will You Meet Me in Heaven?” He took the Bible literally and studied it assiduously. He attended church faithfully, and his music, particularly his own songs, was permeated with biblical language. He even produced a movie about Jesus, The Gospel Road (1973). Evangelicals loved him for it, claiming him as their own.

But Cash was consistently wary of claiming them as his own. His view of the kingdom of God never fit comfortably

Tony Blair is an associate professor of Leadership Studies at the Campolo College of Graduate and Professional Studies at Eastern University and a pastor at Hosanna Fellowship in Lititz, Pa.

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