Tryin' to throw your arms around the world (6)

Sunday Bloody Sunday

When writing about U2’s Christianity, it became common for journalists to get stuck in the period around the release of their second and third albums. This was the period when their beliefs and their church seemed to be arguing that they could not have both their faith and their band. It was a period in which it seemed like the band might break up and the period in which they reacted by being most explicit and strident about their faith. Both ‘With A Shout (Jerusalem)’ and ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ took the listener to “the side of a hill” where “blood was spilt, [and] we were filled with a love” to “claim the victory Jesus won/On a Sunday Bloody Sunday”. Songs such as ‘Gloria’, ‘Rejoice’, ‘Drowning Man’ and ‘40’, celebrated personal change brought about through encounter with Jesus Christ, and Bono felt able to state:

“It is my belief in God that enables me to get up in the morning and face the world. I believe that there is a reason and a logic to everything. If I didn’t believe that and thought that everything was simply down to chance, then I’d be really afraid.”

Perhaps most influential in the formation of the Christian faith that is shared by three members of the band has been the Psalms. Bono has written about the way in which at the age of 12, he was a fan of King David because of the honesty, even to the point of anger, that he discovered in the Psalms. Their “[w]ords and music did for me what solid, even rigorous, religious argument could never do - they introduced me to God, not belief in God, more an experimental sense of GOD. Over art, literature, girls, my mates, the way in to my spirit was a combination of words and music. As a result, the Book of Psalms always felt open to me and led me to the poetry of Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the book of John.”

From War to Rattle and Hum they gained a reputation for a bombastic earnestness. This was partly linked to their Christianity, although after War they spoke less, and less explicitly, about their faith, and partly due to an interest in political statements and symbolic gestures. After Rattle and Hum, to escape the stereotype of earnest rock preacher/politicians, they re-invented themselves as pop’s techno ironists mocking both the darker side of themselves, faith and society. While this endeared them to the music press and furthered their success in the charts and on concert stages, parts of the church now became critical of what they viewed as backsliding. As Bono has noted, “quoting scriptures and then swearing” has “always confused people”.

However, this was to ignore the extent to which Christianity continued to feature strongly in their music. In ‘Until The End Of The World’, Bono assumes the character of Judas and evokes a forgiving Jesus who will wait for him “until the end of the world” while, in ‘If God Will Send His Angels’ he assumes the character of a boyfriend belittling the beliefs of his girlfriend in a way that uncovers a nostalgia for faith. U2 here are exploring faith from the underside, from the perspective of the non-believer. They can do this convincingly because their acknowledgement of personal failure enables them to empathise with those for whom faith is difficult or impossible. In addition, in writing from the perspective of a non-believer, Bono is able to express some of his own dissatisfaction with the established church.

Dissatisfaction with institutional religion, however, cannot mask the extent to which each element of U2’s spirituality derives from Christianity:

• movement, from the Fall and pilgrimage;
• improvisation, from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit;
• allusiveness, from the fragments of story that have been meshed together to form the canon of scripture; and
• reconciliation, from the theme of surrender that is central to the Crucifixion.

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U2 - If God Will Send His Angels.