Dolly Parton’s Outlaw Christianity

Dolly Parton grew up steeped in Scripture and hymns, and a congregation was her first audience; her faith and her talent were forever inseparable. But by the time she could afford to buy anything like Sunday best, she was not much to be found in her grandfather’s church or any other. A curious thing about the woman who I would argue is one of America’s most Christ-like Christians is that she did not particularly like going to church. Dolly called herself a Jezebel, and indeed she belongs to a beloved category of mine: the outlaw Christian, the kind for whom you can positively see the dust rising from the line Christ would have drawn in the sand for her, daring the rest of us to cast stones.

I love worship, but I’m fascinated by these outlaw Christians, and wonder what it says about Christianity that deeply good people like Dolly find no home in Christian communities. Here was a woman who, despite her flirtatious persona, remained faithfully married to the same man for almost sixty years, a woman who considered the heart of Dollywood to be a little chapel she built in honor of the preacher-doctor who delivered her, a woman whose daily routine involved waking up at three in the morning to pray. “Every single day, before I do anything, I wake up and I thank God for the night and ask Him to bless the day and to bring all the right things,” the singer once told RuPaul—yes, RuPaul—in an interview. “And just to guide me, lead me. And I always pray that He’ll let me uplift mankind and glorify Him.”

Unlike so much of the country, country music never really lost its faith, but Dolly Parton’s fandom extended far beyond the fenceposts of that genre. And yet, without anyone taking much notice, much less taking offense, Dolly Parton went around in interview after interview invoking the name of Jesus more often than the Pope. And that’s to say nothing of her gospel albums, full of her own original praise music and recordings of popular hymns, plus some truly spectacular spiritual duets: the fly-away-to-heaven-ballad “When I Get Where I’m Going” that she recorded with Brad Paisley, her last No. 1 hit, and the rescued-me-from-hell-on-earth confession “There Was Jesus,” with Zach Williams, for which she won the last of her ten Grammys. Even on the albums that were country or pop or whatever exists in the space between the two, she kept sneaking religious songs onto the track lists: “God’s Coloring Book,” on the platinum “Here You Come Again,” and “Calm on the Water,” on “Burlap & Satin.”

My favorite of these is the last track on “White Limozeen,” a cover of a super-power ballad called “He’s Alive,” written by Don Francisco. If you don’t know the Christian classic, it’s a first-person account from the Apostle Peter of what it was like to wait in shame and sorrow in the final hours of Holy Saturday before Mary arrives to tell him that Christ’s tomb was empty. Imagine if someone told Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to explain soteriology with eight verses and an electric guitar—it’s an awesome song, and not even an atheist can keep from headbanging when, after nearly four minutes and a suspenseful keyboard interlude, Dolly finally belts a triumphant chorus that you feel like you yourself have been waiting the whole long Triduum to hear: “He’s aaa-liiive! / Yes, He’s aaa-liiiive / Yes, He’s aaaaliiiiive and I’m forgiven! / Heaven’s gates are open wide!”