Johnny Cash — the Forerunner of Christian Zionism?

Is it possible that the Man in Black was America’s first Christian Zionist?  So says Professor Shalom Goldman in this article from the Jerusalem Post excerpted below:

Way before the modern-day Christian Zionist movement became a bastion of  American support for Israel, there was the Man in Black.

Johnny Cash, the  all-American country music great whose career spanned six decades, carried on an  ardent love affair with Israel for most of that time. Cash, a devout Christian  who died in 2003 at the age of 71, visited the country five times from 1966  through the mid-1990s along with his wife June Carter Cash and their children.  And it wasn’t only with his footsteps that he he demonstrated his connection to  the country – he recorded complete albums of inspirational hymns about the holy  land and made films about his journeys to Biblical sites.

Cash’s ties with Israel have long fascinated Shalom Goldman, a professor of religion at Duke  University. The author of the book Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea  of the Promised Land, Goldman theorized that Cash symbolized American Christian  enthusiasm for Israel before it became labeled as a far-Right  movement.

For the last year, he’s been giving a presentation mostly on  college campuses: In The Holy Land with Johnny Cash: Christian Zionism and  American Popular Culture, a lecture about the religious aspects of Cash’s life  and work – including his baptism in the Jordan River – augmented by slides of  his pilgrimages to the holy land and live performances of a selection of his  Zion-flavored gospel songs.

“Cash was a Christian Zionist for at least a  decade before the Christian Right moved into a place of political power in the  late 1970s,” said Goldman, speaking from a summer cabin in Georgia last week  before heading to Israel, where he’ll give his Cash presentation on Tuesday  evening at the Tmol Shilshom bookstore in Jerusalem, accompanied by local folk  singer Hila Tam.

Click here to read the entire article, “The Man in Black’s Zionist roots”