“We’re more popular than Jesus now.”
This might be the most provocative statement ever made by a rock star – and that is saying something. The above quotation is by John Lennon in March 1966, back when the Beatles were alive and well, when he was interviewed by journalist Maureen Cleave for the British newspaper, the London Evening Standard. Unlike the usual routine, Cleave interviewed each of the four Beatles individually rather than collectively.
The interview raised few eyebrows until it created a firestorm when the interviews were reprinted in the American teen magazine Datebook in July 1966, with the John Lennon quotation placed on the magazine cover. On August 5, 1966, the story made the front page of the New York Times. Some radio DJ’s publicly announced that they would play no more Beatles songs, and there were bonfires of Beatles records in some areas; even the Ku Klux Klan joined in the protests. There were also protests in Mexico City, and Beatles songs were banned on national radio stations in South Africa and Spain.
The Beatles embarked on what would become their final American tour in August 1966; the animosity toward the band on that tour contributed to the decision by the Beatles to quit touring and become strictly a studio rock band. From Wikipedia: “According to [John] Lennon’s wife, Cynthia [Lennon], he was nervous and upset that he had made people angry simply by expressing his opinion.” Their manager Brian Epstein first attempted to smooth things over by holding a press conference in New York City at the start of the tour, to no avail.
Again, from Wikipedia: “The Beatles attended a press conference in Chicago, Illinois; Lennon did not want to apologize but was advised by [Brian] Epstein and [Beatles press officer Tony] Barrow that he should. [John] Lennon quipped that ‘if I had said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it’ but stressed that he was simply remarking on how other people viewed and popularized the band.”
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John Lennon made the Beatles an easy target by his remark, but the fact is that church attendance was declining in England and elsewhere in Europe, a pattern that continued in the US some years later. Although Pope Paul VI denounced Lennon’s statement (and actually Pope Benedict XVI apologized for this church stance in 2010), there were few church leaders joining the denunciation of the Beatles, since the Church was going through an intense period of re-examination in this time period. For example, the Jesuit newspaper America wrote about the controversy: “[John] Lennon was simply stating what many a Christian educator would readily admit.”
Earlier that year, on April 8, 1966, the cover of Time magazine famously asked: “Is God Dead?” Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962, an earthshaking event in the Roman Catholic Church that attempted to re-frame Catholic teachings in a modern context, leading (among many other major changes) to services being conducted in the language of the people attending rather than Latin. The ramifications remain strongly controversial to this day.
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John Lennon himself had been reading extensively about religion before making his ill-advised statement, and Maureen Cleave noticed a copy of The Passover Plot by Hugh J. Schonfield on his bookshelf during her interview. This scholarly work, which was published in 1965 (and informed many of Lennon’s views toward Christianity), was the Da Vinci Code of its day and portrayed Jesus and His closest disciples as having planned the events leading to the Crucifixion so that He could be taken down from the Cross after a few hours by well-connected individuals (such as Joseph of Arimathea) before He was actually dead and then nursed back to health.
As reported in Wikipedia: “In 1963, the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, John A. T. Robinson, published a controversial but popular book, Honest to God, urging the nation to reject traditional church teachings on morality and the concept of God as an ‘old man in the sky’, and instead embrace a universal ethic of love.” John Lennon quoted this book in his Chicago press conference.
Also gaining currency in the 1960’s was the notion of loving Jesus Christ and what He stood for, but not wanting to become involved in the Christian Church. John Lennon echoed these sentiments when he was asked to look back on the controversy in an interview in Canada in 1969 (from Wikipedia): “He repeated his opinion that the Beatles were more influential on young people than Christ, adding that some ministers had agreed with him. He called the protesters in the US ‘fascist Christians’, saying he was ‘very big on Christ. I’ve always fancied him. He was right.’” Also in 1969: “In a BBC interview . . . [John] Lennon called himself ‘One of Christ’s biggest fans’, talked about the Church of England, his vision of heaven, and unhappiness over being unable to marry Yoko Ono in [the] church.”
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While the quotation itself faded quickly – particularly after the band released their monumental Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album the following year – its effects never really went away. Here is the chorus in the Beatles’ final #1 single, “The Ballad of John & Yoko” (and clearly John Lennon is addressing Jesus, not voicing an oath): “Christ, you know it ain’t easy / You know how hard it can be / The way things are going / They’re gonna crucify me.”
“Imagine”, perhaps John Lennon’s best known song – certainly among his solo recordings – opens with: “Imagine there’s no Heaven” – but I actually heard an evangelist once attempt to recast “Imagine” as a Christian song. In another of his songs, “God”, John Lennon recites a long list of disbeliefs, beginning with “I don’t believe in magic” and ending with “I don’t believe in Beatles”, with Jesus (along with other religious leaders) appearing about halfway through.
In a 2005 reminiscence by Maureen Cleave, called “The John Lennon I Knew” (published in The Daily Telegraph), she recalls a 1978 interview (as reported in Wikipedia) where Lennon said: “If I hadn’t said [that] and upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas! God bless America. Thank you, Jesus.”
Mark David Chapman, the man who assassinated John Lennon in 1980, became a born-again Christian in 1970 and had been incensed by the “more popular than Jesus” remark, as well as the sentiments in “God” and “Imagine”.
(September 2014)
