‘Jesus put his hand on me’: When Bob Dylan was born again

In 1978 Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity astonished the world. But, writes Sean Smith, the apocalyptic imagery in some of his greatest hits show it was only the endgame of a process that had taken years

Dylan performing in 1978, a few months before the events that would lead to his conversion (AFP/Getty)

Bob Dylan has never acknowledged  that the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana may have triggered his dramatic conversion to evangelical Christianity but both events unfolded over the same weekend in November 1978 .

Prior to 9/11, the mass murder-suicide of more than 900 members of  the Jim Jones cult represented the single greatest loss of civilian life in American history. A third of the casualties were children. It was apocalyptic and Dylan would have been primed to see it that way.

Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth was one of the best selling non-fiction books of the 1970s. It combined biblical prophecy and recent harbinger events to calculate that the world would end in redemptive carnage in the 1980s when Christ would return to reign for a thousand years. That idea inspired a new generation of born again Christians and Dylan had been gravitating towards them for years.