When British folk singer Bill Fay released Time of the Last Persecution in 1971, the world was littered with religious music whose artistic worth was perhaps incidental (at best). While some wigged out to cultish psychedelia, the phenomenon known as "Jesus music" was beginning to coalesce in Southern California. Spearheaded by artists like Larry Norman and Phil Keaggy, as well as bands with names like Agape and the All Saved Freak Band, the movement was both a creative outlet for the recently converted and a very explicit means of evangelism. Jesus music artists tended to gravitate toward the apocalyptic, mystical impulse that makes regular appearances in American Christianity. The Lord was a source of great joy, ready and able to deliver you to the sublime. He would also be returning soon, and his approaching shadow cast the world in an ominous light. A freak-haired hippie singing about the end times wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in the L.A. of the early '70s.
Fay’s England was not immune from the influence of Jesus music (though it carried the formidable name of "gospel beat" in the UK). Somehow, though, Fay was. Despite appearances, Time of the Last Persecution shares little with the Jesus music of its day. Fay never seems anxious to leave this world in a flash of rapture. His music is hardly transcendent; the nervous weight of Ray Russell’s shuddering blues leads makes sure of that. Even the title track, which was written in response to the massacre at Kent State (which occurred 45 years ago this week), shies away from Left Behind-style histrionics; a line like "It is the time of the Antichrist, know what I say" reads differently when the state is killing nonviolent protesters.
The gap between Fay’s aesthetic and that of the Jesus music movement may seem minute, and perhaps it is. But the theology that fills that gap is mighty. Fay writes as someone who lives on Earth and wants to see life here improve. He hardly avoids the truth; his staring into the void is the only thing that allows him to mourn its existence. Just as importantly, he longs for the life of the world to come, and he testifies to its quiet creep into the present. "You were born, though you need not have been born here at all," he sings on Persecution’s "Plan D". "And is that not some cause for worship, being born among these trees?" Existence—existence in this life, that is—not only matters, but is in itself a blessing, a gift that is inherently good. He writes about nature the same way that the great English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins did; every bird as it arcs and every wave as it crests willfully traces the outline of a mysterious and gracious God. And while that God is indeed going to return, he’s returning to make the world new again, to make human life livable.
As he’s aged, Fay’s ability to articulate the tension between all that is good and all that is bad about human life has sharpened. On Who Is the Sender?, released last week, he shuttles the listener between these two poles so deftly that they begin to lose their distinction. "War Machine" begins with a lulling stroll through a forest—"The hills are alight/ Feels like the first day of your life"—that gently bends into a meditation on the military industrial complex. There’s an ache in Fay’s voice as he implicates himself in his country’s long relationship with war, and it’s only partially resolved by the coda’s benediction: "There won’t always be the war machine." A few songs later, he’s acknowledging the apparent absence of mercy and hope in the world over a threadbare melody and a sketch of guitar while reminding his listener of an ever-present, ever-shining light.
This is worn-out, tired music, the kind of thing that naturally comes to you when you’ve lived for seventy years without closing your eyes. But no matter how exhausted Fay gets, he never grows weary—of the possibility of a restored world or of the goodness of being alive. Unlike many, many religious musicians before him, Fay’s Christianity isn’t something the listener has to get past or learn to live with in order to enjoy his music; it is the seed from which all of his music’s complexity and nuance, lamentation and joy, ultimately grow. It’s something exceedingly rare: religious music that is artistically successful precisely because it’s religious.
Who Is the Sender?’s penultimate song, "World of Life", is buoyed by strings and a fanfare of horns. Fay delivers the opening verse like he’s toasting an heir. He’s hardly singing as he turns his gaze outward: "This can’t be all there is," he says, and there he is saying that at his age with a sense of wonder that will just about liquify you. Fay’s brothers and sisters—and make no bones about it, they are his brothers and sisters—in the Jesus music movement longed for transcendence, for the chance to escape even momentarily from this world. But it’s transformation that Fay longs for. "May gates be thrown open wide to receive you," go the last lines of the song, "into the world of life." It is, in the truest sense of the phrase, a redemption song.