U2 and God

In a fractious political climate, Maddy Fry asks what can be learned from U2’s approach to faith, and why it matters - now more than ever

Author’s note: I appreciate not every U2 fan once heard “40” and felt the need to reassess their life choices. Therefore, to quote a certain Paul Hewson, “For those not interested in God, please pass by.”

About two years ago, I was talking to the small cluster of under-40s at the church I sometimes go to. One of them mentioned that the priest had recently discussed Bono in her sermon. 

“He turned up to morning prayer,” my friend Felix said casually.

My head snapped towards him faster than anything in The Exorcist. I had been away for most of the summer. How could I have missed this? 

“When?” I asked. 

He shrugged. “Sometime last month.”

When I (gently) cornered the priest later, clamouring for details, she said that Bono had asked her if she was ready for the coming “revival.” 

I chuckled with weary affection. I assumed my hero was just slipping into hyperbole again. 

And yet, was he?

It was an emotional moment, knowing that he had worshipped in the same building as me. Coming from an irreligious family, I’d had a series of low-key Damascene moments as a teenager when the spiritual themes in the band’s music became hard to ignore. I was briefly sucked into an evangelical circle at university but extracted myself when I realised how much it was imitating U2’s trajectory with Shalom (more on that below for the unfamiliar). I eventually ended up in a community that hosted drag acts at weekends and was occasionally denounced by Breitbart. I stayed. 

It also helped that the church was, and still is, next door to the enormous book shop where I first met the band, back in 2006 for the launch of U2 By U2. Sixteen years later, there Bono was again. It felt like it was all meant to be. 

My religious journey has been mostly a private one. I’m always painfully conscious that any belief in the metaphysical puts me in a minority. Yet, Bono’s talk of some impending faith-based frenzy came at an odd time in the UK. 

This recent piece from The New Statesman argues that a re-think about faith has been on the uptick. Although the grassroots statistics don’t lie - writer Madeleine Davies acknowledges that just over 1% of people in Britain would describe themselves as belonging to the Church of England - a number of prominent, mostly conservative, thinkers have talked about converting, or toying with converting. Davies mostly focuses on writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali and psychologist Jordan Peterson as prominent examples. 

Ali has cited the “menacing foes” of “woke ideology” and atheism’s inability to see them down as the reason behind her conversion, while Peterson recently did an entire series of lectures about the Bible. Although both are based outside the UK, their comments have apparently been warmly received by their British fans.   

I’m a little sceptical of this premise. It’s not difficult to find a handful of famous figures in any country who are quietly religious if you look hard enough. Two deceased examples I recently wrote about were Shane MacGowan from Irish band the Pogues and the murdered Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Among the living, American comedians Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon have been open about the role Catholicism plays in their lives. Within popular music, the spiritual thread has been so prominent that journalist Steve Turner wrote a whole book, Hungry for Heaven, about it that was updated and reissued multiple times. U2 got more than a few nods. 

U2 at the Sphere in October 2023. Somehow, the religious imagery wasn’t hard to find. (Source: Maddy Fry)

What struck me the most about the examples used by Davies was that progressive voices were mostly absent. People like YA author John Green, film director Scott Derrickson and even Taylor Swift don’t get a mention - perhaps because their attraction to religion isn’t based on right-wing fretting about the supposed decline of ‘the West’ (read ‘whiteness’) or vacuous anti-wokeism. It’s therefore troubling to me that overt displays of Christianity by the great and the good are becoming associated with a right wing pseudo-intellectualism fused with anti-Muslim sentiment. The people Davies highlights seem to see faith as a way to reverse an imagined civilisational decline rather than a chance to take seriously the message of the gospels. It begs the question of whether any “revival” is one that should be encouraged. Jordan Peterson has even been called out by Biblical scholars for warping the text for his own hyper-machismo ends. He’s not the first of his tribe and, I suspect, won’t be the last. 

If that’s the new religion, then frankly count me out. 

Yet given how much U2’s views on religion have shaped my own, I’m now re-thinking what role their faith has played in their politics - and what it might have to say to our current political climate. 

U2’s faith journey is familiar to anyone who has watched them closely. The band (sans Adam) were briefly members of the charismatic Christian group Shalom, who were part of an evangelical wave in the ‘70s that was in some ways a push back against the perceived excesses of the ‘60s; yet the band left when the group became too insular and controlling. Although the October album took U2 perilously close to Christian rock, since then the faith references in their lyrics have tended to be hiding in plain sight. 

Politically, songs like “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” were aggressively anti-sectarian (Gerry Adams notably once called Bono “a little shit”) while on a more ethereal level, the “is it God, is it a woman” trope was so present in their lyrics that Bono once irritably pushed back when it was raised during a 2005 Rolling Stone interview. He pointed out, reasonably, that you shouldn’t have to choose between the flesh and the spirit. 

Whatever you might think about the band’s politics (and people down the years have had many, many thoughts), U2 were never about policing people’s bodies, or appealing to narrow nationalist interests based on fears of ‘the other,’ shown by the global-minded causes they embraced (from Amnesty, to Greenpeace, to AIDS awareness).

In their music, fundamentalisms have often been railed against or satirised. “Exit” and “The Wanderer” are thematic twins; both protagonists are armed with a zealous certainty, which is almost as dangerous as the firepower in their pockets. The narrator in “Zooropa” has “no religion” but seems confident that ambiguity can be its own roadmap to salvation, while the person at the centre of “The First Time” throws away the key to “the kingdom coming,” only to come back in “The Playboy Mansion” to find that he’s no longer the prodigal son. Someone changed the locks - maybe the very being in “Wake Up Dead Man” whose hands suddenly “aren’t free.”

Perhaps most saliently, in Bono in Conversation the U2 frontman explicitly says that Christianity reverses the idea that the wealthy and powerful should come first. It makes for strange, contradictory reading from the lead singer of a band that were never shy about their thirst for success and all its trappings.

And yet, this willingness to embrace ambiguity, live with contradiction, and not just see faith as a reason to protect your own tribe are important lessons - now more than ever.

The Guardian Angel Cathedral in Las Vegas, where Bono was spotted during U2’s residency. (Source: Maddy Fry)

One of the few progressive voices in Madeleine Davies’ cabal of new ‘believers’ is the celebrated novelist-turned-historian Tom Holland. She highlights how his relationship with faith has been complicated. He remains agnostic about the more supernatural parts, but emphasises why exactly certain Judaeo-Christian values might still matter - in his words, the importance of St Paul’s edict that a deity chose “the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” His views seem to suggest that any interest in faith shouldn’t be about different sections of the human family fighting for dominance; rather, it’s about whether we want a world where the weak don’t just go to the wall and the poor are protected from the violent excesses of the wealthy. 

When I read Holland’s words, they reminded me of a certain someone. Bono said something very similar 20 years ago (when Holland, for the record, was mostly writing vampire fiction): “I will say this for the Judaeo-Christian tradition: we have at least written into the DNA the idea that God created every man equal, and that love is at the heart of the Universe.”

It’s depressing that Europe and the U.S. seem to be moving away from this. It’s even more troubling to see how often racist and anti-immigrant sentiments are being packaged as a defence of some nebulous notion of Christianity, one that’s lamented for no longer being a dominant cultural force rather than for its elevation of the voiceless.

In the recent riots in Stockport in the north of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury hit out against the use of Christian symbols by the far right. It’s deeply depressing that he felt the need to do so. Rather than being praised for giving faith another look, the likes of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson should be asked to take a harder look at some of the company they keep. 

I hope both Holland and Bono keep pushing back against this noxious trend. We need it, now more than ever. 

© Fry/ U2andUS (2024).