After co-hosting the ACM Awards Thursday night alongside country star Garth Brooks, Dolly Parton debuted her new single, a song about America’s turn from God and the chance to make it right.
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The new song, “World on Fire,” is a blend between rock and country. In it, Parton does not shy away from making bold declarations about God’s removal from American culture. The song opens and closes with these lines:
Liar, liar, the world’s on fire
What you gonna do when it all burns down?
Fire, fire, burnin’ higher
Still got time to turn it all around…
In one verse, Parton sings: “I don’t know what to think about us / When did we lose ‘In God We Trust?’ / God Almighty, what we gonna do? / If God ain’t listening and we’re deaf, too?”
The song goes on: “Now tell me what is truth / Have we all lost sight / Of common decency / Of wrong and right? / How do we heal this great divide? / Do we care enough to try?”
“Billy got a gun / Joey got a knife / Janie got a sign to carry in the fight / Marching in the streets with sticks and stones / Don’t you ever believe words don’t break bones?” she sang of the violence plaguing much of the country.
Toward the end of the song, Parton shifted toward a resolve, singing, “Can we rise up? / Can we show some love? / Do we just give up or make a change? / We know all too well / We’ve all been through hell / Time to break the spell, in heaven’s name.”
You can listen to the full song — which contains one swear word — below:
As CBN’s Faithwire has reported, Parton has become increasingly outspoken about her faith.
“My faith impacts everything that I do, because I do believe that, through God, all things are possible,” the 77-year-old entertainment legend recently told Fox News. “And so I always ask God to bless everything that I do and the people that I work with and to bring all the right things and right people into my life and to take the wrong ones out.”
Parton made headlines at Christmastime, too, for her performance of “Go to Hell,” a cheeky song rebuking Satan and the presence of evil in this world.
In the song, she told the devil to “go to hell,” singing, “Take your wars and your politics, your lust, and your greed, and go to hell in a handbasket, ’cause heaven waits for me. You’re a cheat, you’re a liar, you’re a scoundrel and a thief.”
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