As election day approaches, truth to tell, I feel more dread than hope in my general vicinity. Halloween horror has been usurped by a much more pervasive anxiety.

On those rare occasions when I talk to family members back in Texas about politics, I hear about fear. One of my cousins told me that she considers Barack “a Muslim terrorist who hates this country.” On the opposite team, here in the gold-leafed, blue-state paradise of Northampton, Massachusetts, the anxiety runs the other way. Sarah Palin is the white devil woman who talks about Jesus and oil, and her coming may launch an exodus.

If there ever was a moment for everyone in this country to start singing “Kum Ba Yah”, that old campfire standard, it’s right now. Believe it or not, I’ve been thinking a lot about that song lately, in large part because its naive sensibility, its religious peacenik vibe, have become so discredited in the last 30 years that even mentioning the tune invites a laugh.

Consider that an open invitation for the next few hundred words. I’ve got “Kum Ba Yah” on the brain, and it’s time to unburden myself.

Twenty years ago, about the time that my evangelical Christian faith began to die, my sister Molly introduced me to a band called Guadalcanal Diary, who played an amazing punk-rock version of the old spiritual, a raucous, jubilant, angry and outrageous stomp through one of the most boring pieces of music ever written. Whatever remained of my belief in Jesus called out to me in that stormy arrangement. I decided that I had to share it with my Bible-thumping buddy Craig.

It was 1986, the heyday of the mix tape, and I set about putting together a musical account of my spiritual crisis. Craig Detweiler and I had been born-again Christian roommates during our sophomore year at Davidson College in North Carolina, but unlike me, the brooding apostate, Craig had gone nuclear with his Christianity.

While I had prayed with Muslims in Kashmir and genuflected before the Dalai Lama in Bodh Gaya, he had moved to Japan in an effort to win over the very believers that I wanted to emulate. In Craig’s own words, he had gone on “a mission. I was a missionary.” By the time I heard Guadalcanal Diary, his letters from the Gospel front line had begun to fill me with repulsion.

My mix tape for Craig, recorded in the waning years of the Reagan administration, at the very moment when the Moral Majority was enjoying its first fruits of political success, was basically a break-up letter in the form of a playlist, and it would be one of the last communications with my old friend for many years.

Among the selections: a furious comedy bit by the late, lamented Sam Kinison, a child of the wilder side of American Protestantism, in which the comic speculated in his trademark screaming style about the life of Jesus as a married man. It was obscenely funny, and it cut deep against any reverence. Take that, Detweiler!

My peace offering was “Kum Ba Yah”. It wasn’t a wholesale musical rejection of Craig’s faith, but rather an adaptation of a folk standard to a pissed-off new style. I must have put it there for a reason, maybe to say to Craig, no matter how far apart we drift, we will always have this in common. Craig wrote me from Japan and thanked me for the tape, for that song, in particular, and not long after that, we lost touch.

For every friendship I have, for almost every relationship, there is a story about a song or a singer flavoring my sense of it. A young Elvis Presley once sang “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” to my mom over the phone. My brother sparked my love of country music by introducing me to George Strait’s “Amarillo By Morning”. My first girlfriend forced me to go to a Christopher Cross concert and thereby torpedoed the relationship. My wife won my heart – in part – when she showed me her jean jacket signed across the front by Johnny Cash himself.

Guadalcanal Diary’s version of “Kum Ba Yah” holds a special place in this pantheon, though, because it charts the course of an entire friendship, marking both its death and unexpected resurrection – yes, I’ll use that loaded word. More than that, as time passes, the song has come to embody my own attempt to reopen a dialogue with people whose view of the world I once shared and then came to revile.

Ten years after Craig got back from Japan, long after we’d both married and settled down, we met in Los Angeles for a coffee, and a three-hour conversation about music, movies, books and women rekindled the connection. We didn’t address the topic of faith. Neither of us needed to explain. I had walked away and wasn’t coming back. Craig had stayed and wouldn’t be throwing in the towel.

Fast-forward to the wake of the 2004 presidential election. After the Bush victory, as liberal Democrats sighed by the rivers of an American Babylon, as conservative Christians reveled in their moment of political transubstantiation, Craig and I both began to feel the tension of trying to live in two worlds at once.

He worked in Hollywood, where the culture was still reeling from the perceived anti-Semitic messages in Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ, and where Christianity was a dirty word. I lived and worked in New York City, where I was a card-carrying and godless member of the mainstream media, with close family connections back in Texas. Most of my family admired George W. Bush, supported the war, and didn’t mind Jesus.

Goaded by these contradictions in our own lives, Craig and I reached for the ultimate quixotic gesture, though at the time neither of us knew just how quixotic. We decided to put our differences and our sympathies on camera in a documentary called Purple State Of Mind, an attempt to have a conversation across the religious line. The idea wasn’t to find a soggy middle point. The idea was to argue like hell, to stake out our different and irreconcilable positions, but to do so with respect, giving the other guy his due.

On our first day of shooting, we talked for three hours on the soundstage of the Mass Communications Department of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. We didn’t address doctrinal issues. Mostly, we talked about the past. What happened? Why did I leave Jesus? Why did he stay? It was cathartic and strange. I’d never explained myself in such depth to anyone, not even my wife. Among other things, Craig apologized for driving me away from Jesus.

At the end of the day, driving home through the streets of Los Angeles, neither of us had much to say. Craig popped a cassette tape into the deck, and out came the first quiet chords of Guadalcanal Diary’s “Kum Ba Yah”. I hadn’t heard the song in years, hadn’t bought a CD of the album, and when I asked him where he had found it, thinking he must have downloaded the song off iTunes, he told me it was the very same mix tape that I’d sent him years ago in Japan.

By the time the song ended in an explosion of frenzied, tumbling metal, I felt something like euphoria. Time had collapsed. A part of myself had been restored – not belief, but something much more profound. I might even call it love.

In the end, the song meant so much to us that we used it in our documentary, a musical bridge to help tell the story of our friendship. Its joyous, unfettered spirit informed the whole experience of making the movie. And yet, looking back, that Guadalcanal Diary moment now represents a vanished optimism.

In fact, on a bad day, the whole Purple State effort smacks faintly to me of the ridiculous. Despite the fact that tiny but enthusiastic audiences across the country embraced it, despite many e-mails of support and encouragement, the documentary basically failed to strike a chord. Most film festival juries, secular and Christian, uniformly rejected it. Most critics didn’t review it. Most people will never see it.

In hindsight, the reason seems obvious. Right now, most Americans don’t want reconciliation. With Sarah Palin and John McCain doing everything in their power to stoke the fears of the electorate, with voters telling National Public Radio that they fear what will happen if their candidates lose, implying deeper division and even violence, Purple State Of Mind has begun to feel like the old, musty, sentimental version of “Kum Ba Yah”, the one only a small child can endure.

We have strife, because most Americans want strife. Their blood is up, and they yearn for the bloody takedown. Hatred and conflict feel like the good life. Our little conversation, and the reconciliation it enabled, looks more like a sideshow in a kiddie circus, meant for those who can’t take the brutal and even pleasurable reality of the age.

I have a lot of sympathy with this view, but whenever I feel myself about to succumb to it, I think of Guadalcanal Diary’s version of “Kum Ba Yah”, how the band refashioned an insufferable platitude into something like a call to revolution. Part of our problem in this country is that so many of us have come to see reasonable dialogue as a bore and a waste of time. We no longer hear the urgency, the drama, the struggle for power and meaning, the dance with danger and mortality that are contained in the best conversations. That, for me, is the heart of the purple state, and it’s my best hope for the future of this country on the day after we vote for president.

It’s the only version of “Kum Ba Yah” that I can abide.

Bonus footage: see John Marks’ recollections of Lone Justice’s Maria McKee in this deleted scene from Purple State Of Mind: