Rough-riding cowboys in the Holy Ghost Corral

Not only are we and the Americans divided by a common language, but also by a common religion

For someone who did not exactly treat his body like a temple and who spent quite a lot of his adult life behind bars, the country singer Johnny Paycheck had a fine sense of timing. Just as his version of David Allan Coe's great blue-collar anthem "Take This Job and Shove It" caught the mood of industrial rebellion in the mid-1970s, so his death last week provided a tiny, distant echo to the great moral debate thundering across the world from Washington to Rome and London concerning whether God and moral virtue are on the side of the hawks or the peaceniks.

It is possible, I suppose, that some people have never heard of Paycheck. Musically, he was not one of the greats: his few chart successes were cover versions of other people's songs, and his voice – somewhere between those of Tom Waits and Merle Haggard – never made for easy listening.

But whereas many country stars had their image as outlaws and wild men honed by the publicity departments of record companies, Paycheck was a genuine renegade with a genius for self-destruction. He served his first jail sentence in the 1950s while he was in the navy – he made the mistake of assaulting his commanding officer – and, 30 years later, he was back inside after an altercation with two men in bar in Hillsboro, Ohio. According to legend, there was a disagreement over the virtues of turtle soup and deer meat, during which Paycheck drew a pistol and, with the words "I don't like you, I'm gonna mess you up," shot one of the men, wounding him in the head.

In between these two events, Paycheck's rough and rowdy ways had taken him through three marriages, some rather longer relationships with the bottle, a conviction for fraud and a tangle over taxes – almost obligatory for country stars. Apart from "Take This Job and Shove It", his most famous songs tended to be crying-in-your-beer confessionals about being the only hell his momma ever raised and staying away from the cocaine train. Increasingly and inevitably, religion played an important part in his repertoire.

There was a downhome simplicity to many of these songs of faith. The rather brilliant "Rhythm Guitar", in which Johnny Paycheck complained that "Nobody wants to play rhythm guitar behind Jesus/ Everybody wants to be a lead singer in the band," bears comparison with other great revivalist country hits of the late 20th century – Bobby Bare's "Drop-Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life", "There's a Man Walking on the Water" and "I've Been Roped and Thrown by Jesus in the Holy Ghost Corral".

For those of us who have not personally been drop-kicked, roped or thrown by Jesus, these songs contain an important secondary message. Far from being comedy numbers, they represent the America way of faith. For many of the 90 per cent of Americans who are believers (over 80 per cent believe in miracles, apparently), the figurehead of their belief is not a lord of peace but essentially a hard-living, shit-kicking, red-necked good ole boy who one minute may be playing in a band, the next is a football jock, and then can be a rough-riding cowboy in the Holy Ghost Corral.

Right now, it is particularly relevant to bear in mind that not only are we and the Americans divided by a common language but also by a common religion. Whereas our version of Christianity is cerebral and anxious, the sort of gently anguished world-view that might be articulated by the Archbishop of Canterbury or Prince Charles, theirs is full of action and aggression. It's a tale of the frontier in which Jesus is a Clint Eastwood character – a good guy but one who knows that sometimes you have to kick some serious ass along the path of righteousness. In America, as a recent polls confirmed, the Son of God is not only among the top 10 personal heroes, but he is only a few places above John Wayne and Michael Jordan.

It should be no surprise that, when President Bush was asked his favourite philosopher, his unhesitating reply was "Jesus Christ". After all, his biography comes straight out of the country singer's lifestyle manual, from the problems with alcohol, the confusion of his youth, to the fervent, aggressive born-again religious belief cut with an affection for hard-line politics and capital punishment – indeed, Paycheck's song "Pardon Me, I've Got Someone To Kill" could have been the theme tune to Bush's tenure as governor of Texas.

So, as the Pope, the archbishops, the Prime Minister and the President jostle their way to the high moral ground over the coming weeks, the ghostly voice of Johnny Paycheck, singing about nobody wanting to play rhythm guitar behind Jesus, provides the perfect soundtrack: "It's hard to get a beat on what's divine/ When everybody's pushing to the head of the line/ I don't think it's working out at all the way He planned."

terblacker@aol.com