God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You (4)

As Robert Beckford pointed out the history of rock & roll is shot through with divides or splits between sacred and secular, flesh and Spirit but the artists we have thinking about in this series are saying that there are no splits and are bringing these unneccesarily divided concepts back together. They look towards the reconciliation of opposites, towards wholeness and affirmation, but recognise that, although we know of the existence of wholeness because of Christ, we are not yet whole ourselves. Like the characters in Flannery O’Connor’s novels we are, at best, incomplete – even the good, she felt, has a grotesque face, because “in us the good is something under construction.” One band who exemplify this approach to raising issues of faith in their music are U2.

In their songs, U2 celebrate the possibility of becoming one, of building a bridge between the sea and land, of coming home, of going where the streets have no name and, of believing in the Kingdom Come when all the colours will bleed into one. Theirs is a spirituality in which everything can be affirmed because everything can be transformed by grace. But they also affirm the ugliness and failure in our world, and in people like themselves. So, they sing of falling down, of being out of control, of losing their way in the shadows where boy meets man, of falling from the sheer face of love like a fly from a wall. In common with the Psalms, they mourn and rail at the pain and division experienced in the world - Ireland’s bloody Sunday, El Salvador’s bullets in the blue sky and Argentina’s Mother’s of the Disappeared.

In their hands these two poles are not opposed instead, both are embraced. The Edge has said that: "We never did resolve the contradictions … And probably never will. There's even more contradictions now ... but it's a contradiction I'm able to live with". Contradictions that you are able to live with. This is where U2 take us - to an affirmation of both the goodness and fallen-ness of human beings. Into the still centre at the heart of the storm of contradiction to give a different take on reconciliation. Bono echoed the same theme in talking about their albums Achtung Baby and Zooropa: "I decided that the only way was, instead of running away from the contradictions, I should run into them and wrap my arms around them and give 'em a big kiss".

Their song The Fly was written as a phone call from Hell, a description of the world as we know it - in darkness, the stars falling from the sky, the Universe exploded because of one man’s lie. In this dark world we live in the middle of contradictions with much that we’d like to rearrange although often all we achieve is to kill our inspiration and sing about the grief. In performance on the ZooTV tours these contradictions were magnified through the projection of aphorisms onto monitors symbolising the overload of information we receive in an IT age.

This embrace of contradiction reflects our age and challenges it, at one and the same time. U2’s idea is to use the energy of what's going against us - and by that they mean popular culture, commerce, science - to defend ourselves. Rather than resistance in the hippie or punk sense of the word, we try to walk through it, rather than walk away from it. To describe the age can be to challenge it. The job of artists is to describe the problem, the contradictions, "to describe what's going on, describe the attraction, and be generous enough not to wave your finger at it as it’s going by". U2 look for 'diamonds in the dirt', shining, transcendent moments; sex and music as places where you glimpse God. They trawl through the state of confusion that is the contemporary moment - reflecting, mocking, embracing, describing, describing your attraction to it - in order to glimpse God, resist or mock the devil and be a harbinger of grace. To cling to the face of love and shine like a burning star.

“Rock & roll was born in the American South,” writes Bill Flanagan, in his book Written On My Soul: “The whole history of rock & roll could be told in southern accents, from the delta bluesmen and country troubadours to the Baptist gospel singers and Okie folkies.” The contradictions between sacred and secular, flesh and Spirit that Jerry Lee Lewis and Al Green felt and which U2 embrace derive from the American South because, as Flannery O’Connor wrote, the South “is Christ-haunted.” To see the extent to which this is true watch the film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus in which alt. country singer-songwriter Jim White takes you on a tour of the South as he knows it.

Jim White shows us desperate people with a hell-fire religion and a God who will whup the ass of those prefer the sinful flesh over the Holy Spirit. But here, he claims, you also feel the presence of the Spirit – it’s alive and awake and in the blood of those who live in the South. The musicians that we have thought about in this series have taken this understanding of Christianity, with its divide between flesh and Spirit, secular and sacred, and instead of falling into that divide, as people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley did, have used its strengths to speak powerfully about the reality of sin, the holiness of the ordinary and the partial reconciliation of contradictions. In doing so, they have taken the route that T. Bone Burnett signposted of writing more about what you can see by the Light of Christ than about the Light itself.

How have the musicians mentioned in this series made use of the cultural understanding of Christianity that they gained from the American South in their music?

Do you think they have used that cultural heritage to present a more nuanced understanding of Christianity than that that is commonly found in the American South?

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U2 - The Fly.