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August 26, 2026

This edition is sponsored by Christianity Today's Church Resource Guide

Hello, fellow wayfarers … Why Dolly Parton stood out in a culture of shame and shamelessness … How to know when to leave and when to stay … One of y’all asked for a Desert Island Watchlist of movies and TV, so why not? … A hobbit-friendly Desert Island Playlist … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.

Dolly Parton Didn’t Need You to Love Her (and That’s Why Most of Us Did)

Sometimes, when telling someone how to get to my house, I will say, "I’m just down the road from Dolly Parton." For almost everybody in Nashville, that is almost a better locator than a pin on a GPS map. And it has never occurred to me, ever, that when I say that, someone might reply, "Who’s Dolly Parton?" It also never occurred to me till Tuesday afternoon—when my phone buzzed with friends and family just hearing about Parton’s death—that I would ever refrain from saying that out of fear that someone might say, "I hate Dolly Parton."

Even those who think "Taylor Swift" when they hear "country music" know Parton mattered in American culture. And in a time when we are polarized about virtually every public figure, from the president of the United States to reality television contestants, Dolly Parton seems to belong to all of America. I could not write more than even a sentence at a time of this essay because my phone was pinging constantly from friends and acquaintances all mentioning the death of Dolly.

Why?

Part of it, of course, is that she was a songwriting genius who also had a voice in a class with very few others—Aretha Franklin, for instance—in memory. Part of it is that whatever other disagreements we might have, very few could object to Parton funding schoolbooks and literacy programs for poor children or providing relief to those in her native East Tennessee who had suffered the loss of their homes from fires in a way that FEMA couldn’t match.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Few would argue The Beatles were untalented, but even those who acknowledge their talent argue about who was better: Paul or John. Almost no one would argue whether Michael Jordan is an epic athlete, but mentioning him will still half the time get someone in an argument about whether he or LeBron James is the "greatest of all time."

Without taking away from any of the rest of it, let me suggest one other reason why Parton seemed so unique in this time: the jokes.

In his song "No Show Jones," parodying his own tendency to miss concerts due to his drinking, George Jones went through the reasons for the fame of his contemporaries in the country music world. "Loretta is the coal miner’s daughter," he sang. "Johnny wears black and stands there alone." When he came to Parton, though, Jones sang, "Dolly’s got two good reasons she’s well known."

Someone might rightly say, "Dolly Parton has been at the top of the songwriting and performing game for at least a half century. Why are you reducing her to a crude joke about her, um, physical attributes?" Jones and his songwriters knew, of course, that Dolly had far more significant reasons for her fame—and that’s part of why he made the jest. It would not surprise me if, when he played it for her, Dolly Parton roared with laughter and insisted he keep the line in the song.

Several years ago, a video of a 1978 interview of Parton by journalist Barbara Walters went viral. Even in the short excerpt, you can feel Walters’s condescension as she asks Parton about her "hillbilly" background, her gaudy clothes and hair, her … um … physical attributes that were lampooned by countless comedians and that implied Parton was a joke.

"People have thought the joke was on me, but it’s actually been on the public. I know exactly what I’m doing," Parton said. "I’m very real where it counts."

In another interview with the late Larry King, Parton said people asked her if she was offended when people assume she’s a "dumb blonde." She replied, "I say no because I know I’m not dumb and I know I’m not blonde." She was often quoted as saying, "It costs a fortune to look this cheap."

That was more than just good media training. Parton showed she was more cunning than those who looked down on her: She didn’t seem the least bit offended by the questions, nor did she seem to be the least bit shaken in who she was.

When people think others look down on them because of their background, they typically respond in one of two ways: shame or resentment. Shame works itself out with a kind of desperation to get away from one’s roots so as not to be lumped in with whatever is made fun of back there. Resentment expresses itself as "If you dare think you’re better than me, I’ll make you pay."

Parton knew some people would find lots of things about her embarrassing and uncultured—her accent, her appearance, her background in mountain poverty, her religion rooted in Southern revivalism. What made her different is what she did with that awareness, and that was to avoid even the slightest bit of impersonating shame or resentful defensiveness.

Parton spoke of her "first deep hurt" as being made fun of for her clothes. Her mother had sewed together rags for her to wear to school. Parton said,

When she made that coat, she told me that story about Joseph in the Bible. And, boy, I thought I would just really look just like Joseph, and I was so proud of it and wore it to school. And the kids all laughed and said it was just rags, and I didn’t look like Joseph and that we’re poor and all that. Of course, they were poor too, but I guess we were poorer. But anyway, I remember crying so hard and hurting and was even hurt at Mama ’cause I felt like she’d kind of deceived me somehow.

The fact that she remembered that "deep hurt" is a clue to her psychology. There was no "How do you like me now?" mentality toward the peers who humiliated her. In fact, she seemed sympathetic to those kids: "They were poor too." And, ultimately, of course, this story became one of her earliest hit songs, "Coat of Many Colors":

But they didn’t understand it,
and I tried to make them see
That one is only poor
Only if they choose to be.

Parton was in Sunday school enough to know Joseph’s coat was a tragedy. His brothers resented it. They dipped it in animal blood to convince their father he was dead. Yet she was also in Sunday school enough to know Joseph’s coat was ultimately a comedy. Joseph’s story was not the approval of his brothers, and it wasn’t his success under Pharaoh. His story of faith was not just that he overcame the plots of his enemies, nor that he triumphed in saving the world from famine. It was that he asked his brothers to carry his bones for him into the Promised Land (Heb. 11:22). In other words, his story was part of something far bigger—a story we know as Jesus. Realizing that keeps us from pride, yes, but also from shame and resentment.

People say shamelessness is a superpower, and there’s a lot of evidence for that. We live in a time ready-made for sociopaths—people who are invulnerable to what others think of them, who refuse to apologize or even to acknowledge their own vice or hackery or foolishness or cruelty. What made Parton different is that she was unashamed but she was not shameless. She could laugh about herself because she knew what mattered to her and what didn’t. And in doing that, she exhibited something rare in these days: self-respect.

By self-respect, I mean not "I’m special" self-esteem but something deeper. Joan Didion once described self-respect this way:

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

That’s the actual superpower. Parton knew it.

When she did her first bluegrass album (her best, in my opinion)—an homage to her mountain roots—that she always wanted to do, Parton told The New Yorker, "I had to get rich in order to afford to sing like I was poor again." She was, in other words, free. It’s the way she always was that made her different.

Parton decided not to live based on Walters’s opinion of her. And she decided to live in a way that didn’t make those who looked down on her suffer. She knew that would give all those people ultimate power over her. She decided instead just to be Dolly Parton. She decided to wear the coat.

Dolly Parton didn’t need us to love her, and that’s why almost all of us did.

What Happens When We’d Rather Be Mad Than Sad

This month, we decided to help people through August with our favorite episodes of the podcast, ending with the most listened-to episode ever. Beth Moore and I did a live event here in Nashville in 2021, just after both of us decided to leave a denominational context that had been home for both of us all our lives. What ended up happening, though, was a conversation more about a broader question: What does it mean to make the decision to leave or to stay—a church, an institution, a job, whatever? How do you know when you have stayed too long? Or left too early?

Two key things happened in that conversation that have stayed with me ever since. One was from Beth. She said sometimes we stay too long in unhealthy or even harmful contexts because "we’d rather be mad than sad." I had never thought of it that way, but it summed up completely what I’d been feeling and struggling for the words to describe.

The second is a comment from an audience member. People came from all over—some driving hours to get there—and a lot of them had experienced some really hurtful situations with churches or religious institutions. One of them said, "I thought I knew what to expect. I expected to grieve. I didn’t expect to laugh. There was so much laughter and happiness here."

It made me think of Frederick Buechner’s anecdote about hearing in a New York City congregation one ad-libbed line from a sermon that he said changed his life. The preacher, George Buttrick, was describing Jesus’ rejection of the crown the Devil offered him in the wilderness temptations. Then Buttrick said Jesus is nonetheless crowned in the hearts of those who received him. That crowning happens, Buechner recalled Buttrick saying, "among confession, and tears, and great laughter."

"It was the phrase great laughter that did it, did whatever it was that I believe must have been hiddenly in the doing all the years of my journey up till then," Buechner wrote. "It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon."

This conversation—and that observation about it—did a similar thing for me. Sometimes even in the wilderness we can be surprised by joy. I think you’ll find the same thing.

You can listen to the conversation her