She Moves in Mysterious Ways: Christian Reflections on the Music of U2 (VI)

One of the unsolved mysteries that occasionally got debated in my youth group as a kid was whether or not U2 was a “Christian Band.” I’ve already alluded to this question in a couple of posts in this series on the music of U2, but I thought it might be worth a deep dive of its own.

On the one hand, there are enough tracks in the U2 catalogue that explicitly refer to God, Christ, the Church, or passages of Scripture, that you could easily make the case that Bono and the Lads are about as Christian as you could expect a chart-topping supergroup to be. In “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” Bono declares it boldly that he “believes in Kingdom Come,” and (presumably) that Jesus “carried the cross of all [his] shame.” Similarly, in “When Love Comes to Town,” he confesses that “[he] was there when they crucified my Lord.” In “Until the End of the World,” he imagines the Last Supper through the eyes of Judas, and in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” he sings about "[claiming] the victory Jesus won.” And the list goes on: he asks God to take his soul and make it sing, in “Yahweh”; he extols grace as a “thought that changed the world” in “Grace.”

On the other hand, however, the band has always been somewhat aloof about their faith, and many of their songs reveal a deep ambivalence towards matters religious. In “Peace on Earth,” Bono asks ironically if Jesus can’t take the time to throw a drowning man a line. In “For the First Time,” he talks about leaving “his Father’s mansion, where there are many rooms to see,” sneaking out the back door and throwing away the key. In Pop’s “Wake Up Dead Man,” he sings about being alone and helpless in God’s abandoned world, and in “If God Will Send His Angels” he wonders out loud if God’s got his phone of the hook, and if he’d even pick up if he could.

So there are two definite sides to the coin that is “U2’s Christianity.” They’re the type of band that can put Psalm 40 to music so evocatively (in their 1981 masterpiece, “40”), so evocatively, indeed, that Contemporary Christian artists wouldn't hesitate to include it in a worship set (as Michael W. Smith did in 2002); yet they’re also the kind of band that can put out a song imagining the world through the eyes of a psychotic killer (their 1987 “Exit”), and sing about going out “to taste and to touch, and to feel as much as a man can before he repents” (as they did in 1993’s “The Wanderer”).

In the tight-laced youth group that I spiritually came of age in, back in the 80s and 90s, this ambivalence made U2 suspect. They were safe listening, compared to Motley Crue or Ozzy Osbourne, but they were still somewhat dubious, as far as “Christian rock” went. Their music was a bit too secular to be sacred.

Youth group leaders have a lot of stake-holders to keep in mind when they make musical recommendations to their charges, so perhaps the very tentative endorsements my leaders gave U2 back then were justified. I don’t know. From a theological perspective, though, there is something deeply and profoundly Christian, I think, in the ease with which U2 seems to belong in both worlds, the sacred and the secular.

In his masterful treatise on Christian Ethics, Deitrich Bonhoeffer writes about the implications of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, when it comes to the human tendency to divide the world into sacred and secular spheres. If it is true, Bonhoeffer suggests, that in Christ God really has brought together His divine life with our human life, then there can no longer be any real division between the sacred and the secular. Because of the person and work of Christ, he says, it is no longer possible to think "in terms of two spheres,” the divine and the worldly, the holy and the profane, the Christian and the un-Christian; for the believer, now, there is only the single reality of the world reconciled to God in Christ.

“Whoever professes to believe in the reality of Jesus Christ, as the revelation of God,” he writes, “must in the same breath profess his faith in both the reality of God and the reality of the world; for in Christ he finds God and the world reconciled” (Ethics, p. 198). In another place, he makes these two realities inseparable, claiming that:

In Christ we are offered the possibility of partaking in the reality of God and in the reality of the world, but not in the one without the other. The reality of God discloses itself only by setting me entirely in the reality of the world, and when I encounter the reality of the world it is always already sustained, accepted and reconciled in the reality of God. (Ethics, p. 193).

This is a truth, I think, that contemporary Christians, especially evangelicals, often fail to grasp. Despite the claims of the Gospel, still, we tend to think in terms of “two realities”—the one, claimed and explicitly devoted to Christ, the other opposed or turned away from him. If Bonhoeffer is on to anything, however, the “reality” that seems, ostensibly, opposed to God, is still, in Christ, claimed by him and destined for redemption. Christians cannot abandon it as irredeemably secular, and, indeed, by manifesting the presence of Christ in that sphere which is, to all appearances, god-forsaken, we evidence the fullest truths of the Gospel: that Jesus is the true Lord of the whole world, sacred and secular alike.

This is easier said than done, though. I don’t personally think that “manifesting the presence of Christ in the secular sphere” means simply plastering John 3:16 bumper stickers on your car and wearing your Jesus Saves T-Shirt everywhere you go. I think, rather, it means embracing the world with all its foibles, failures and fractures as precious to God, viewing it empathetically with the eyes of Christ, and responding to it compassionately as a “reality” that Christ came to love and died to redeem to himself.

What this looks like in practical terms is hard to describe, because it depends entirely on each believer’s individual context. If you wanted to image what it sounds like, though, to reunite the sacred and the secular in Christ, you could take a listen to any number of U2 songs that attempt to do just that, from the one about the girl with crimson nails swinging Jesus round her neck, to the one about an invisible ultraviolet light that illuminates the world, whose love is “like a secret that’s been passed around.”

Maybe learning to see the world the way the best of U2's lyrics describe it, could be a first step towards experiencing the fullest meaning of the Gospel: that God was in Christ reconciling the World to Himself.

What More in the Name of Love?: Christian Thoughts on the Music of U2 (V)

I am ordained as a Free Methodist minister, and have served in this denomination for the whole of my pastoral ministry. Historically, the Free Methodist Church has always placed a strong emphasis on ministry to the poor, the disenfranchised, the down-and-out. The denomination emerged in the 1860s in America, being birthed out of anti-slavery protests and calls for religious reform in the Methodist denomination of the time. B. T. Roberts, one of the founding leaders of the Free Methodist Church, was famously expelled from the Methodist Church for his work advocating—or agitating, as his detractors had it—to bring slavery to an end, and for calling out the Methodists for its complicity with the practice.

This original concern for social justice is woven deeply into the Free Methodist ethos. Traditionally the “Free” in Free Methodist signaled, among other things, that the FMC was about “freedom for slaves” and wanted “free pews,” that is, equity for the poor. It was an impulse towards compassion and social reform that traces all the way back to John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement. He is famous for his conviction that “works of mercy” are, in fact, means of grace, for his claim that “there is no holiness but that of social holiness.” By this he meant that the transformation that the gospel is meant to effect in the believer’s life must play out “socially” for them—in their relationships, their neighborhoods, their country and communities. This was a conviction that the early Free Methodists took deeply to heart.

I did not grow up Free Methodist, finding my way to the FM when I was looking for my first ministry appointment after graduating with my Masters of Divinity, back in 2008. The tradition I grew up in was much more focused on the “spiritual” dimensions of the Gospel—the justification by faith and the salvation by grace that the scriptures promise all who confess with their mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in their hearts God raised him from the dead. It actually had little time for “the Social Gospel,” and more than a little suspicion of it. Wasn’t “social justice” what the mainline denominations worried about, at the expense of evangelism, and because they’d lost their biblical moorings? Wasn’t it dangerously close to a “works-based-righteousness” that flatly contradicted the glorious truth that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and explicitly not by works? And if that were true—that good works are unnecessary to salvation—well, to put it bluntly: why bother?

I should add that for a space of time in my young adult years, I participated in a Christian Youth Ministry that was heavily focused on social justice and social transformation—the so-called “Social Gospel.” They were so focused on it, in fact, that the hand-wringing over neglecting evangelism and/or watering down the Gospel that the Christians in the churches of my childhood might have done, would have been lost on them. Worse than lost on them: it would have been distasteful. For many of the friends I made in this Youth Ministry, the Gospel was social justice, worship was social action, and anything that took things like sin, sanctification, the atonement, or the Holy Spirit too seriously risked losing sight of the real work of the believer: to be about the work of the Kingdom: giving water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, and solace to the harried.

I’ve lived in both religious extremes, is my point: the liberal Social Gospel extreme, and the conservative sola fide extreme. Which is why, when I first became a Free Methodist minister, I found this denominations “both/and” when it came to social justice and personal devotion so refreshing. In Free Methodism, both works of mercy (social action for the sake of Jesus) and works of piety (personal devotion guided by the Holy Spirit) are both means of grace, and equally important.

This may be why I’ve always appreciated the emphasis the band U2 has always placed, through their music, on making a real difference in the world: their recognition that their massive platform has given them a massive voice to speak up on social issues, and their willingness to use that platform to promote a worthy cause.

In saying this, I acknowledge that this is also a feature of U2’s music that has turned off many a would-be fan. The band—and especially their lead singer, Bono—is just too damned preachy. Their penchant for supporting the “flavor of the month” when it comes to social issues was hilariously parodied when they appeared, as themselves, on The Simpsons. When Homer interrupts their concert to discuss waste management, as part of his bid to become Springfield’s next Sanitation Commissioner. The audience boos uproariously, Bono gives him the stage, because, in his words, “waste management affects the whole damn planet!”

On a serious note, however, there’s this poignant and earnest denunciation of the 1987 Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen, Ireland.

Musically, I was raised on the Beatles and the Beach Boys, as a child, and came of age as a teen listening to acts like White Snake and Van Halen. When I first encountered U2 in the late 80s, I was listening almost predominantly to glam metal, with all its hedonistic anthems to debauchery echoing in my head. In those days, encountering a band like U2, that took its vocation as a rock band so seriously, was world transforming for me. Here was a band that believed, actually, that songs should be about something, striving towards something, calling for action to something, and that that something ought to be something important.

As my musical education grew, I would learn that this impulse towards using music, and rock music, especially, to channel the rebellious spirit of youth towards social justice traced back much further than U2, to the protest songs of Bob Dylan, Elvis’s determination to cross racial barriers, or the folk tunes of Woody Guthrie.

What U2 did, however, that none of those who went before them did—or at least, they did it more explicitly and more successfully—was to marry their passion for social change with a spirituality that was always latently Christian, and at times explicitly so. As much as it is possible to do so in a genre as full of contradictions as rock music, U2 brought together a cry for social justice and a yearning for spiritual transcendence in the same place.

A song like “Pride (In the Name of Love),” or “Sunday Bloody Sunday” are great early examples of this; songs like “Where the Streets Have No Names” are more classic examples; songs like “Crumbs from Your Table,” “Walk On,” and “Yahweh” are instances from much later in the U2 catalogue.

In a previous post, I discussed Contemporary Christian Music’s musical debt to U2. What CCM never borrowed, however, is U2’s conviction that music should not only reach up, towards the divine, but also reach out, to the oppressed, the down-trodden, the exploited. In my opinion, the worship music of the modern evangelical church is the poorer because of it. Almost all modern worship songs adopt a “just-me-and-Jesus” posture, telling Jesus how much we love him and how much he has done for us. I can’t remember ever hearing a song telling Jesus that we were going to give a cup of cold water to a parched child, or clothing to the naked stranger, because we knew that in doing so we’d be expressing out love for him.

Maybe that’s too much to ask for, in a corporate worship setting, but if the contemporary evangelical church was going to borrow more from U2 than simply some haunting chord progression and the creative use of guitar effects pedals, it could do worse than to borrow their belief that works of mercy and acts of piety are not at odds. They are, in fact, two beautiful sides of the very same worshipful coin.

Rock and Roll Stops the Traffic: Christian Thoughts on the Music of U2 (IV)

I almost never listen to Contemporary Christian Music. This sometimes comes as a surprise to those who know me, since as a pastor, I am very passionate both about my faith and about music. But the truth is, I mostly feel frustrated and alienated whenever I listen to CCM, as a genre. I find it musically redundant, theologically simplistic, spiritually superficial, and lyrically unsophisticated. To clarify: we do sing a lot of contemporary Christian music in our church, and I do appreciate the genre (at least some of it) in that corporate setting, but outside of that context, most contemporary Christian music leaves me bone dry and spiritually dissatisfied. Musically it almost never strays from one of about five variations of the classic I-V-vi-V chord progression, played over plaintively strummed guitars, surreally chorused synths, and a standard 4/4 rock beat. And lyrically, it almost never varies the formula of talking about how Jesus meets my individual felt-needs. It's the spiritualized version of the worst kind of formulaic corporate country music—another genre that I can’t hardly bear.

But this is not a rant. It’s actually a blog post about the music of U2.

The reason I’m talking about CCM is only because I believe that no other musical force had more influence on the evolution of contemporary Christian music than the musical force that is U2. I don’t have hard evidence for this, except for many times I’ve listened to a popular CCM tune and reached the end thinking either “U2 did it better,” or “U2 did it first.” They were one of the first bands to popularize the I-V-vi-V chord progression, for instance, which they used with great success on their chart-topping hit, 1987's “With or Without You.” Although this musical pattern is so ubiquitous in pop music today that it’s almost become white noise, it was not actually that common the 50s, 60s, or 70s. Songwriters used it from time to time (e.g. “Let it Be,” by the Beatles, “Africa,” by Toto, or “Beast of Burden,” by The Stones), but it did not become the staple of songwriting that it is today until the late 90s and early 2000s.

This fascinating video by David Bennett helpfully lays out the history of this chord progression. According to his analysis, the I-V-vi-V pattern doesn’t show up in earnest until the early 90s. The bar graph showing its frequency in pop music shoots up suddenly in 1991, four years after the release of “With or Without You.” Notably, in the years prior to the mid-80s, the progression was almost always worked in with other chords, and almost no songs were based entirely on a looping progression of those 4 chords, the way “With or Without You” was. By the 2000s the form was so common that it had almost become a musical cliché.

David Bennett does not attribute this development in pop music to U2’s use of the chord progression on “With or Without You.” He traces it, instead, back punk bands like The Clash, that used it from time to time in the early 80s. However, in their early days, U2 styled themselves as an artsy expression of the punk genre, and have identified The Clash as one of their earliest inspirations, so perhaps there was some cross-pollination in this regard.

At any rate, I’m not saying U2 invented the progression, or single-handedly popularized it. My point, rather, is to explore U2’s influence on contemporary Christian music, and it’s fascinating for me to notice how the evolution of CCM unfolded in the Christian world around the same time, and roughly at the same pace, as U2’s star was rising in the world of pop music. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Contemporary Christian Music today defaults so consistently to the I-V-vi-V pattern in its songwriting, given how common this overly-simplistic approach to songwriting was for U2, one of the only “safe” rock bands that Christian kids could listen to back in the 80s. (I’ve already shared how the ambiguity about U2’s status as a “Christian group” made them standard listening in the youth group I grew up in).

I don’t have hard evidence of this, either, but I’m willing to bet that The Joshua Tree was played on regular rotation in the musically-formative years of most of the biggest worship music songwriters of the early 2000s—guys like Matt Redman, Chris Tomlin, and Paul Baloche. And their legacy as CCM pioneers still lives on today in the music of CCM juggernauts like Hillsong and Elevation.

There’s an irony here, that a musical genre I find mostly uninspiring has its roots intertwined with the musical legacy of a band that was, in my youth, one of the most inspiring acts I’d ever heard. I can still remember hearing The Joshua Tree album for the first time, and feeling like I was touching the tip of something archetypal, music I’d always known but never heard before.

I sometimes wonder what Bono and the lads think of contemporary Christian music. I once heard Bono say in an interview that when rock music ceased to rebel against established forms, it will devolve into folk music. I think he said it shortly after Achtung Baby had come out, and fans everywhere were shocked by the sudden left turn, musically speaking, that the band had taken with that album. His point was that rebellion is woven into the DNA of rock music, and when the genre ceases to startle our musical sensibilities, it will fossilize.

The rebellious nature of rock, of course, is one of the aspects that made it so threatening to most Christian leaders in the early days, especially because that rebellious spirit so often found its expression in obscenity, licentiousness, and hedonism. In U2’s music, though, the spirit of rebellion was channeled in the direction of social justice and world peace (more on that in a later post). This made it risky in a different way, perhaps, but because these themes were often couched in spiritual terms, the risk was never fully felt.

And so, whether intentionally or simply by osmosis, contemporary Christian musicians started absorbing and reiterating the musical sentiments of what would become one of the biggest bands in the world. For better or for worse, U2 loaned their paired-down, atmospheric approach to music-making to the contemporary Christian genre. I’m sure there have been some ways in which this has made it better, but given the state of Christian music today, my sense is that there are a lot of ways, too, that it’s made it worse.

Very, very few popular Christian songs today do anything original musically; they all seem sadly unwilling to rebel against the paste-pudding repetition of tonic, dominant, relative minor and sub-dominant chords. And I can’t think of many that come close lyrically to matching the yearning brilliance of a song like “One Tree Hill” or “Ultraviolet.” Contemporary Christian Music adopted the forms that a band like U2 was popularizing, back when it was still rebellious to do so, but then, unlike U2 itself, CCM simply stopped rebelling.

There is something rebellious in the Christian message, of course. Not for nothing did the early Romans fear and despise the Christians the way they did. In Roman eyes, Christians were antisocials and misfits of the worst kind. Perhaps the lack of innovation that we see in CCM speaks to a deeper malaise in contemporary evangelicalism, that it has lost its prophetic role, indeed, its prophetic ability to speak against the status quo. If so, perhaps more than adopting the musical style of a band like U2, contemporary Christianity might do better to learn from the rebellious spirit they embodied.

I Believe in Kingdom Come: Christian Thoughts on the Music of U2 (III)

The other day I was talking with a friend of mine who is in his early twenties about the Christian metal I used to listen to when I was a kid. I don’t remember exactly how we got on the topic, but I started telling him about one of the bands that got regular play time on my cassette player, a Christianized version of Motley Crue called Stryper.

One of Stryper’s greatest hits was a tune called “To Hell With the Devil,” a song it sang with as much unironically literalism as you can achieve, belting out the phrase against crunching guitars, wearing skin-tight spandex and teased out hair. (I remember my father finding my To Hell With the Devil album in my cassette collection and preparing to give me a good talking-to about it, until he realized that they meant the song sincerely, and, after all (he said) there’s probably no better place for the Devil than that.)

So I was reliving the oldies with my Gen-Z friend, like I say, and a half hour later we’d covered any number of Stryper tunes. It was a bit embarrassing for me, to realize how bad my musical taste was at sixteen, though in those days I thought Stryper were virtuosos at their craft (and, to their credit, if you can see past all the corny costumes and glammy make-up, they were actually pretty talented musicians as far as the hair-metal genre goes).

But what stood out to me on this 40th-year reunion with the music of Stryper was how theologically clunky their songwriting was. It never occurred to me, at sixteen, that a line like “Speak of the Devil, he’s no friend of mine / to turn from him is what we’ve got in mind” was not exactly elegant poetry.

Here’s the opening verse of another Stryper classic, “Soldiers Under Command.”

We are the soldiers under God's command
We hold His two-edged sword within our hands
We're not ashamed to stand up for what's right
We win without sin, it's not by our might
And we're fighting all the sin
And the good book -- it says we'll win

It’s not exactly subtle. But neither was the theological impulse of a band like Stryper. Essentially, the group—and the Christian metal genre more generally—was attempting a kind of Christian coup of utterly secular cultural expressions, baptizing all the hedonism and pseudo-occultism of the heavy metal genre with a veneer of religion, so that Christian metal fans could eat their cake and have it to.

I say this with a good deal of fondness for Stryper. As a yearning sixteen-year-old raised in a devoutly Christian home and trying to find his way in a decidedly un-Christian world, music that had all the energy and urgency of the stuff my friends were listening to, without any of the guilt I got when I listened to Iron Maiden, was, quite literally, a God-send.

But I also say it by way of contrast to the music of U2, the band that this series is actually about. One of the huge questions swirling around U2 when I was a teen, and this was especially asked by the same youth group leaders that recommended the music of Stryper to me—the most important thing to know about the band—was: Is U2 a Christian band?

The jury never returned a verdict on that one. Certainly, much of their music, especially the earliest outings, were replete with spiritual references, Christian allusions, and religious subtexts. And even without these more direct nods to the stuff of faith, their music never offered any pagan peons to Satan, or celebrated debauchery and dissipation the way so many of their contemporaries did. If they weren’t overtly Christian, then at least they were “Christian friendly.”

That said, they were also very evasive about their religious convictions. They never openly declared allegiance to any church or creed, never explicitly stated their faith, never tossed Bibles into the crowds at their concerts (a staple at Stryper concerts). Yes, Bono sang passionately in his belief in “Kingdom Come, when all the colors bleed into one,” but that’s a far cry from announcing that he was going to “fight all the sin,” because the “good book says we’ll win.”

As one music critic put it, U2 is “the greatest Christian band that never was.”

When held up against a band that is so brashly “Christian” as Stryper, U2’s ambiguity about their Faith raises some profound questions about the role of Christian artists, the relationship between faith and culture, and, especially, what makes Christian art “Christian” anyway.

In his book, Christ and Culture the renowned Christian theologian Richard Niebuhr offered a succinct framework for understanding the different postures different Christians take when it comes to the relationship between faith and culture. He described 5 distinct positions: 1. Christ against Culture (standing opposed to culture as irredeemably secular), 2. Christ of Culture (uncritically embracing developments in culture as being of Christ), 3. Christ above Culture (seeing your Christian faith as something separate from culture, with no conflict and very little contact between them), 4. Christ and Culture in paradox (seeing culture and faith as irreconcilably in tension with one another, but participating faithfully in both without resolving the difference), and 5. Christ as the Transformer of Culture (believing that culture is redeemable, and working faithfully to transform it in a way that brings glory to God).

Using Neibuhr’s framework, I would argue that, although a band like Stryper was attempting to adopt the fifth posture—Christ as the Transformer of Culture—what actually happened when it tried to Christianize the tropes of Heavy Metal was closer to the first posture: Christ against Culture. I say this because of the view implied by a song like “Soldiers Under Command,” that the only thing that can make a musical genre like heavy metal acceptable is if it is “co-opted” for the purposes of the Gospel. This explains the blunt-force with which the message is delivered in Stryper’s music. The whole approach suggests that the only acceptable musical expressions are those that are explicitly, unambiguously, even aggressively clear about the faith that has motivated it.

By contrast, U2 tends to adopt Posture Four in their music: holding Christ and Culture in tension, somewhat reveling in the paradox, and refusing to resolve the ambiguity. Christ is certainly present in their art, but not in its entirety, nor are they willing to pull back the veil and show where he is or is not standing. The deep irony—and it’s an irony we will explore more in coming posts—is that while adopting a “Christ and Culture in Paradox” posture, U2 has had a far more profound and far-reaching impact on culture than Stryper ever did. In adopting Posture Four, that is to say, they found themselves standing in Posture Five.

In her beautiful book, Walking on Water, Madeline L’Engle shares thoughts on being a Christian and an artist, arguing that we do a disservice to faith and art both when we assume that the thing that makes Christian art “Christian” is the number of times it refers to Jesus, and/or the clarity with which it makes those references. When we do this, she says, we end up both exploiting Jesus and corrupting art. What makes Christian art truly Christian, she argues, is the faithful lens through which the artists views the world, the mercy and love with which they engage what they see, and the freedom and the honesty with which they attempt to convey that in their art.

Whatever else the music of U2 offers us, it is an intriguing object lesson in L’Engle’s claims on this point. Consider, for instance, a song that attempts compassionately and mercifully to step into the agony of a heroin addict—like their poignant “Running to a Standstill”—or a tune urging us to acknowledge the difference that divides us and carry each other all the same—like their achingly beautiful “One”—or a lyric playfully celebrating the mystery of grace—like their tongue-in-cheek “Daddy’s gonna pay for your crashed car.” Perhaps tunes like these bring far more glory to God, despite the fact they never mention the name of Jesus, than four spandex-clad metalheads ever could, belting out at the top of their lungs that “In God we trust, in him we must believe, In God we trust, His Son we must receive.”