THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:
The shadow of the thorn tree: Christian culture must combine tradition and modernity (Sebastian Milbank, 3 April, 2026, The Critic)
These thoughts were brought to me powerfully by one of my favourite songs — “The Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash. It’s a remarkable song, with a remarkable backstory. Released only a year before his death, in 2002 when Cash was an old man, it was the fruit of an improbable musical resurrection. After years in the musical wilderness, music producer Rick Rubin, known for his work with rappers and heavy metal bands, formed an improbable partnership with Cash, who produced much of his best work in the twilight of his life and career. Rubin, a secular Jew with an eclectic spirituality, got on remarkably well with the evangelically Christian Cash, and the pair would “take communion” together every day, with Cash describing the eucharist over the phone to Rubin.
The song itself is suffused with the words of Job, Acts and Revelation, but its origins, strangely, were in a vision. Cash dreamed that he was in Buckingham Palace, where he met Queen Elizabeth, who turned and said to him “Johnny Cash, you’re a thorn tree in a whirlwind”.
Cash is a late flowering of a very old tradition: the popular musical and religious imagination of the English-speaking peoples, and it’s nowhere more evident than in that song. From “terror in each sip and in each sup”, to “it’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks”, the poetry of the King James Bible vibrates through his music. At once sinister and joyful, sublime and homespun, it’s a song about the end of the world and it is impossible not to feel a chill as Cash sings of “measured hundredweight and penny pound/When the man comes around”.
I love it because it is a 21st century song plugged directly into the crackling electricity of the soul of English religiosity.