Not So Easy on His Knees: Balancing Faith with Celebrity (Part Three)

By Laurie Britt-Smith

December 2, 2008

Editor’s Note: With this installment, Dr. Britt-Smith documents the influence of Dr. King and the African-American church on Bono’s religious rhetoric. 

There has been a lot of speculation about the status of Bono’s religious faith over the years for many reasons and some of his harshest critics come from certain members of the Christian community who believe he fails to meet some standard of what a true believer should look like, sound like, and think like.  It is that sort of criticism, along with his own experiences with religion and faith that lead him to make statements like,

“I believe in the poetic genius of a creator who would choose to express such unfathomable power as a child born in ‘straw poverty’; i.e., the story of Christ makes sense to me . . . I guess that would make me a Christian. Although I don’t use the label because it is so very hard to live up to. I feel like I’m the worst example of it, so I just kinda keep my mouth shut.”

He is both and neither Catholic or Protestant, but has been affected by the theological conceptions of love, guilt, and salvation from both camps.  He once stated that he wished he “could live up to Christianity. It’s like I’m a fan; not actually in the band.”

However uncomfortable Bono may claim to feel about professing or living a life that exemplifies his beliefs, Christian Discourse is firmly embedded into Bono’s primary literacy, and is an established part of his social identity. Paired with the acquisition of that Discourse was the seed of his prophetic rhetoric, based in a vision of God’s compassion and justice.

This vision of God’s compassion and sense of social justice was taught to him first by the members of the Shalom fellowship who held very traditional views of acceptable personal behavior but were also anti-materialistic and lived in voluntary poverty much in the vein of Dorothy Day. The connection between spiritual belief and the need to purposely live a life which reflects it solidified when he came into contact with African American churches and their involvement in social justice causes and the fight for equality. He claims reading Let the Trumpet Sound, a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., shortly after they first arrived in the States in the early eighties “changed my life.”

Steve Stockman, a Presbyterian minister in Ireland who has long used U2 songs in his sermons, writes of how important a figure King became to the band as they struggled to find a foothold for their faith in the face of rejection from the conservative Shalom Fellowship and exposure to more of what American culture had to offer under the large umbrella of “Christianity.”  The band as a group and as individuals struggled to incorporate new faith discourses into their own personal and corporate beliefs. As Stockman puts it, “After a time of dealing with the inner soul . . . born again gives way to growing up again.”

The writings of Dr. King, which were based on the same Biblical ideas of social justice they were already drawn to because of the cultural/religious struggles in Ireland, became a theological and ideological life-line, and King’s words and ideas became more evident in U2′s songs, quite famously in “Pride (in the Name of Love)” on The Unforgettable Fire (1984) album and in Bono’s political activism.

In addition to incorporating King’s ideas into his own literacy, Bono has also been deeply affected by his exposure to expressions of African American spirituality. He states whereas other believers make him “nervous and twitchy,” when he is with the Black church, “I feel relaxed, feel at home; my kids – I can take them there; there’s singing, there’s music.”

In black music, he found spiritual themes and rhythms that relate to his own ethnicity. The Irish have long held to the idea of being the black sheep, the outsiders of Western European culture. Bono bluntly states, “Yeah, it’s the Irish, we are the white niggers” while discussing why U2 has been so active in pointing to black artists as being influential to their musical development.

In the work of artists such as Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, and Stevie Wonder, he finds “the search for the ecstatic, the trauma of religious experience.” In another conversation about musical influences Bono explains, “The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt. So the blues, on one hand-running away; gospel, the Mighty Clouds of Joy-running towards.”