“The world’s biggest rock star tours the heartland, talking more openly about his faith as he recruits Christians in the fight against AIDS in Africa.”
No poet—and Bono, the 42-year-old lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, considers himself a poet—enjoys having his verse scrutinized. And no musician likes to have to explain what a song means.
Nevertheless, for more than 20 years Bono's fans have been attempting to gauge his spiritual well-being by what he sings, what he says in interviews, talk shows, and awards programs, and what he does or doesn't do in public.
For many Christians of a certain generation, combing through the lyrics of U2 songs (nearly all of them written by Bono) in search of biblical images or references to Jesus Christ and his teachings is almost a sport. Consider it a cross between exegesis and Where's Waldo?
He doesn't attend church regularly. He prays frequently. He likes to say grace before meals. He tries to have a "Sabbath hour" as often as he can. His favorite Bible is Eugene Peterson's paraphrase, The Message. He hangs out with Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, but on a recent visit to Nashville he spent the morning palling around with Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant.
Bono knows the subject of his personal faith is of great interest to others, although he's certain that interest is misplaced. The inquiries don't seem to bother him—Bono seems comfortable with who he is. He just celebrated his 20th wedding anniversary with his high-school sweetheart, Alison Stewart, his band had one of its most successful years artistically and professionally, and he has found his calling, on and off stage. Rarely has Bono talked explicitly about his faith and beliefs. But as he has begun to recruit churches this past year in the fight against AIDS in Africa, that seems to be changing.
'Hi. I'm Bono.'
Born Paul David Hewson in Dublin, Ireland, to a Roman Catholic father, Bob Hewson (who died of cancer in August 2001), and a Protestant mother, Iris Rankin Hewson (who died when Bono was 14), he has long carved his own path to Christ irrespective of institutional religion.
Bono, a moniker given him 30 years ago by his longtime friends and taken from the name of a hearing-aid store in North Dublin, has always straddled Protestantism and Catholicism looking for a "third way."
He attended Mount Temple High School, Ireland's first nondenominational coeducational school, which was designed to educate Protestant and Catholic children together in Ireland's troubled sectarian society.
After his mother died unexpectedly, Bono, David Evans (who is now known as U2's guitarist The Edge) and Larry Mullen Jr. (U2's drummer) were all involved in Shalom, a loose evangelical group that met for song, worship, and Bible study.
But when Shalom evolved into something more structured, more akin to the institutional religion he finds uncomfortable, Bono, and soon the others, left.
"I just go where the life is, you know? Where I feel the Holy Spirit," Bono told Christianity Today. "If it's in the back of a Roman Catholic cathedral, in the quietness and the incense, which suggest the mystery of God, of God's presence, or in the bright lights of the revival tent, I just go where I find life. I don't see denomination. I generally think religion gets in the way of God.
"I am just trying to figure it out. Everybody wants to make an impact with their life, whether it's small scale with friends or family—that's really big, is the truth—or whether it's on a grand scale, in changing their communities and beyond. I just want to realize my potential." He recalled one pastor's recent advice: Stop asking God to bless what you're doing. Find out what God's doing. It's already blessed. "That's what I want," Bono said. "I want to align my life with that."
Bono's spirituality is more than just a reflection of antisectarianism, said Steve Stockman, a chaplain at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and author of Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2 (Relevant, 2001). "At the time Bono was involved with Shalom, something unique was happening in Dublin," he explains. "There was a movement of the Holy Spirit that you simply cannot deny. In some ways I think it was the Jesus Movement hit Dublin eight years late. That radical, almost hippie attitude at some level, that this is a radical thing to live in the Spirit … It gave Dublin something that was vibrant and exciting and trendy, almost. Bono and [Alison] were certainly caught up in the middle of that. They've never been able to get over that, no matter how their faith has changed. The roots of what they're doing now are in whatever the Spirit was doing back then."
When expressed in private, one-on-one conversations, Bono's faith in Christ is anything but trendy.
"The idea that there's a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with, if you believe it. Actually, maybe even far-fetched to start with," Bono said. "But the idea that that same love and logic would choose to describe itself as a baby born in s— and straw and poverty is genius, and brings me to my knees, literally. To me, as a poet, I am just in awe of that. It makes some sort of poetic sense. It's the thing that makes me a believer, though it didn't dawn on me for many years."
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And though he tends to distrust religion, he appealed to religious institutions during his recent weeklong speaking tour of the American Midwest with his humanitarian organization, Debt, AIDS, and Trade in Africa (DATA). At Wheaton College, students couldn't help trying to read between the lines of his challenges to intervene on behalf of Africans devastated by AIDS.
"I had students afterward ask me, 'Do you think he's a Christian?' " said Ashley Woodiwiss, a political science professor at Wheaton who helped organize Bono's appearance at the college.
"I just said, these times of prayer that I took part in and observed, these were off-stage. This was the man, not the performer at all. To see that vitality, and yet, he's not going to be captured by anybody. He's not going to be 'Our Saint.' He's not going to be an evangelical for us."
'God is on his knees'
A few weeks before Christmas, the singer also met with Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, during the Chicago stop on his Heart of America tour.
Hybels told Christianity Today about his impression of the rock star: "After a two-hour private meeting in my office, I came away convinced that Bono's faith is genuine, his vision to relieve the tragic suffering in Africa is God-honoring, and his prophetic challenge to the U.S. church must be taken seriously."
"This is the defining moral issue of our time," Bono repeatedly told church congregations during the tour, which was designed to raise people's awareness of the one-two punch of AIDS and profound poverty that is claiming the lives of 6,500 Africans every day.
"This generation will be remembered for three things: the Internet, the war on terror, and how we let an entire continent go up in flames while we stood around with watering cans. Or not," he would say, sometimes pounding his fist for emphasis. "Let me share with you a conviction. God is on his knees to the church on this one. God Almighty is on his knees to us, begging us to turn around the supertanker of indifference on the subject of AIDS."
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From Nebraska to New York City, in city halls and union meetings, in diners and truck stops, at colleges and churches, and more than once from the pulpit itself, Bono tossed a gauntlet at the feet of the American church.
"It brings out the best in the church, like you see today in response to these children suffering HIV," Bono told pastors, parents, and children gathered at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport a few weeks before Christmas as part of an airlift of 80,000 gift boxes to HIV-infected children in Africa, organized by Franklin Graham's Operation Christmas Child. "But if we're honest, it has also brought the worst out of the church. Judgmentalism, a kind of sense that people who have AIDS, well, they got it because they deserve it. Well, from my studies of the Scriptures, I don't see a hierarchy to sin. I don't see sexual immorality registering higher up on the list than institutional greed (or greed of any kind, actually), problems we suffer from in the West.
"This is a defining moment for us: For the church; for our values; for the culture that we live in."
Is Bono a modern-day prophet? He'd be the first to say no. He's a rock star and makes no bones about it.
"There's nothing worse than a rock star with a cause," he said, as actors Ashley Judd and Chris Tucker, fellow speakers on the Heart of America Tour, stood by. "But celebrity is currency and we want to spend it this way. … It's preposterous and absurd that you have to listen to it from us. But that's how the news media works."
Bono is similarly self-effacing about his faith. He doesn't even like to call himself a Christian, although it is apparent to anyone who has spent any time with him—or even just listened to his lyrics—that his faith is rooted in the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ.
"I'm a believer," Bono usually says when asked about his faith. "I don't set myself up as any kind of 'Christian,' " he said as his gleaming silver and chrome tour bus motored east from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Iowa City. "I can't live up to that. It's something I aspire to, but I don't feel comfortable with that badge."
It's no denial of Christ. And Bono is not trying to play hide-and-seek with his Christianity. He wants to avoid becoming an idealized poster-child for Christ when people should be looking to the Savior, not some rock star, for their example.
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A few days later at Northeast Christian Church in suburban Louisville, Kentucky, he told reporters: "I'm not a very good advertisement for God. I generally don't wear that badge on my lapel. But it certainly is written on the inside, somewhere."
It's a self-deprecation, something he's fond of indulging in, whether the subject is his faith or his success as a musician.
Self-deprecation is a national trait in Ireland, the singer told Oprah Winfrey on her TV talk show in September. "In Ireland, people have an interesting attitude toward success; they look down on it," he said. "In America, you look at the mansion on the hill and think, 'One day that will be me.' In Ireland, people say, 'One day, I'm going to get that b—d.' "
Still, critics have said Bono is somehow ashamed of his faith; otherwise he would make it clear in plain language that anyone could understand. The singer, they say, is hiding his light under a bushel.
"I think for evangelical Christians, there's a problem when Bono says that kind of thing," Stockman says. "I think you have to go back to [U2's song] 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.' … He's almost denying what he believes himself, because if [he believes] in grace, then wearing the badge is not a pride thing."
But, Stockman adds, Bono's reluctance to be labeled a Christian, or at least a Christian artist, probably has more to do with a lack of faith in journalists than in Jesus Christ.
"I call it the Messianic secret," Stockman said. "He's still not wanting to say too much in case he's misrepresented. Somewhere in the '80s he got a belly full of misrepresentation and thought, 'All right, let's disguise it a bit.' " The band seemed to try to shed its image as rock music's conscience. "Even though they tried to go light, they can't go light because he's always asking cosmic questions, and that's because of his faith."
The Rock Star Preacher
The seven-states-in-seven-days Heart of America tour kicked off at St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, before a Christmas-size crowd.
The Rock Star, as he often refers to himself sarcastically, wearing a dark suit and his trademark blue glasses, somewhat timidly mounted the platform.
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The first thing he did was make fun of himself.
"Rock Star in the pulpit shot—nope," he quipped, moving away from the raised wooden lectern.
"I'm not often so comfortable in church," he said. "It feels pious and so unlike the Christ that I read about in the Scriptures."
Still, when the microphone on his lapel began to fail, the Rock Star moved to the pulpit, where he slung his arm over the side, casually, and looked thoroughly at home.
"I've always wanted to get into one of these," he said.
During the next week, he would mount several more pulpits and take more than a few shots at Christians in the United States and Europe.
Speaking to reporters at Wheaton College, the evangelical Mecca outside Chicago, he was asked if evangelicals are reluctant to engage the AIDS issue.
"Somewhere in the back of the religious mind," he said, "was this idea [that people with AIDS] reaped what they sowed—missing the entire New Testament, the New Covenant, and the concept of grace. Evangelicals in a poll, only 6 percent thought they should be doing something about the AIDS emergency. … I'm sure that made you, as it made me, wince."
Still, Bono believes addressing AIDS is at the core of the church's purpose and at the core of how outsiders see the church.
"I think our whole idea of who we are is at stake. I think Judeo-Christian culture is at stake," he said. "If the church doesn't respond to this, the church will be made irrelevant. It will look like the way you heard stories about people watching Jews being put on the trains. We will be that generation that watched our African brothers and sisters being put on trains."
Privately, Bono's critique of the church, in which he includes himself, is even more caustic. "It's absolutely clear what's on God's mind. You just have to read Scripture," Bono told CT as he rode in a chauffeured SUV down Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan.
Those who read Scripture and don't come away with God's preferential concern for the poor are "just blind," he said, noting that 2,103 verses of Scripture are about the poor.
"People have been perverting the Gospels and the Holy Scriptures since they were first written—mostly the church. This AIDS emergency actually is just such a valuable example of everything that's wrong and perverted about Christianity today," he said as he headed toward a Manhattan recording studio to lay down some tracks for "American Prayer," a song he debuted on the Heart of America tour.
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"There should be civil disobedience on this. You read about the apostles being persecuted because they were out there taking on the powers that be. Jesus said, 'I came to bring a sword.' In fact, it's a load of sissies running around with their 'bless me' clubs. And there's a war going on between good and evil. And millions of children and millions of lives are being lost to greed, to bureaucracy, and to a church that's been asleep. And it sends me out of my mind with anger.
"This is what's important and why I would be doing this interview with Christianity Today, to implore the church to reconsider grace, to put an end to this hierarchy of sin. … All have fallen short. Let's stop throwing stones at people who've made mistakes in their life, and let's start throwing drugs."
There is little hope for most HIV-infected Africans, Bono told crowds on the Heart of America tour, because they cannot afford the $1 a day for medications that are readily available in the U. S. and Europe.
"People are dying for the stupidest of reasons: money," he said.
Dreary Numbers
Each year, sub-Saharan African nations spend $40 million on debt payments to the United States and other wealthy nations, according to statistics from data (www.datadata.org). Africa spends $14.5 billion annually repaying debts, and only receives $12.7 billion in aid, including $1.2 billion from the United States. The U.S. aid to Africa is proportionally the lowest among the wealthiest nations of the world.
More than 28 million Africans are HIV-positive, and 2.3 million died of AIDS last year, according to United Nations figures. Were it not for HIV, the average life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa would be about 63. It's now about 47.
More than 6,500 Africans die every day from HIV and AIDS. Another 9,500 become infected with HIV each day. Most Africans have no access to antiretroviral and other drugs that slow the progression of the virus. Families who can afford some drugs almost assuredly cannot afford them for all the HIV-positive members of their family, Bono said. Parents must decide which child receives the drugs (and a chance to live).
Because there's no hope for treatment, Bono said, many choose not to be tested at all and continue to infect their sexual partners and children.
Ten billion dollars a year in aid from the wealthiest nations of the world, including about $3 billion a year from the United States, could put 3 million people on antiretroviral drugs, keep 10 million people from becoming infected, and provide care for 12 million AIDS orphans by 2005, Bono said, citing figures from the newly formed Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, created by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2002.
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data is not asking people to contribute more of their own money. In fact the organization, nearly entirely bankrolled by Bono, Microsoft's Bill Gates, and Ed Scott (another Silicon Valley mogul) doesn't accept cash donations.
"We're not asking for money here," Bono said. "We feel we've already given the money. We're asking you to give the President permission to spend the money on this problem."
To that end, during the Heart of America tour, data distributed more than 10,000 "action cards," red and black postcards to be signed and sent to elected officials, urging them to intervene financially to stave off the AIDS crisis in Africa.
"Two and a half million Africans are going to die next year because they can't get ahold of drugs that we take for granted," Bono would say over and over again during the tour. "That's not a cause. That's an emergency."
Standing amid thousands of Operation Christmas Child gift boxes at jfk airport on the last official day of the tour, Bono was indignant.
"These children that are going to receive these boxes for Christmas, this may be their last Christmas, a lot of them," he said. "And that makes me feel sick in the pit of my stomach. I think it's absolutely unacceptable. I don't think we should have it. I don't think our Father in heaven will have it. All of our work is made meaningless in the face of this most wicked of plagues."
Bono and former Eurythmics member Dave Stewart have composed a song that reflects the rocker's hope that America, and American Christians in particular, will respond to the AIDS crisis.
Bono debuted "American Prayer," a work in progress, during the Heart of America tour.
In early December, Bono sang:
These are the hands / What are we gonna build with them? / This is the church you can't see / Give me your tired, your poor and huddled masses / All are yearning to breathe free / American prayer, (This is my) American prayer.
It's one song that Bono is happy to explain. "My prayer is that this country, which has unparalleled economic, technological, military, and cultural power, will rethink its humble origins, the purpose that made it great," Bono told CT. "There are millions and millions of lives hanging in the balance in parts of the world, that depend on decisions made a long way from them. And there's the prospect of war around the corner. I'm not saying I know what to do, or what anyone should do. America has got to make up its own mind about all these problems and potentials, but it will make better decisions if it revisits the cauldron of ideas that the country came out of."
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The Inquisition
Bono's latest comments—even his talking to Christian media—will surely be scrutinized by many fans seemingly obsessed with the "is he or isn't he" question. But why?
"There are two camps: Those who are dying to call him their own … [and] those who are dying to bring him down and prove that he's not," Stockman said. He thinks it's a tragedy. "We want to be very black and white about who's in and who's out. We want to demonize those who are out."
Perhaps the kind of Christianity that Bono represents is threatening, Stockman posits.
"If Bono is one of us, then we have to take on the challenge of what he's saying. But if we can ostracize him and say he's not one of us, we don't have to think about the marginalization, we don't have to think about postmodernity, we don't have to think about the challenges he's laid before the church. If this guy is right, then I have to sort out my life," Stockman said.
"I think Bono is very culturally aware of who he's trying to reach. I don't think he's saying these things to make the evangelical church realize he's a Christian," he said. "He's willing to sacrifice the understanding of evangelical Christians in order to take God into a broader context. Can you tell me a role model that's bringing God into culture better?"
Michael W. Smith, a Bono-level celebrity within contemporary Christian music, met with the Irish rocker in Nashville in December.
"Obviously, something has happened to him," he told CT. "If you really look back at the early days of U2, I hate putting labels on things, but they really were a Christian band. I think he got really frustrated with the church and became really bitter. I think he's probably sorry for the way he reacted, to a certain degree."
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"I really can't judge him for what he does. Everyone's got to work out their own salvation," Smith said. "I think that he has got a bit of a new lease on life. Maybe he's found another place in this world and what he's supposed to do in life. He's been preaching this for a long time, but to know that we might actually be able to pull this thing off [saving Africa from destruction]—I think [this] does wonders for his soul and for his heart."
"I think he would probably love to have that as his legacy, rather than being one of the biggest rock stars of all time."
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Mother Africa
Bono's involvement in Africa began shortly after he performed with U2 at the Live Aid concert in London in 1985, a fundraiser for famine relief on the continent.
Over the years, he and his wife, Ali, have worked in the field and behind the scenes on behalf of Africans. In 2000, Bono was a leading force behind the Drop the Debt campaign which sought, in the spirit of the biblical teaching of the Jubilee, to forgive billions of dollars owed by Third World countries to the developed world (see "How to Spell Debt Relief," May 21, 2001, p. 64).
When he is asked, though, why he has chosen to give his energy to the aids crisis in Africa, he reminisces about a time just before U2's megastardom, when he was a young, impressionable man who just wanted to help.
"All of this started for me in Ethiopia in the mid-'80s, when my darling wife and I went out there as children, really, to see and to work in Africa," he told the congregation at Louisville's Northeast Christian Church.
World Vision marketer Steve Reynolds played a key role, he says. "Honestly there is no chance that I would be here if he hadn't called me up and asked me to make that journey. It's a journey that changed my life forever.
"I remember waking up in the mornings and watching mist lift, as tens of thousands of people would be walking. They would have walked through the night to come and beg for food, to come and leave their children.
"I remember one man, this beautiful man with a beautiful boy, his son. He was so proud. And he came up to me and said, 'Please. Will you take my son? My son will have no life if I look after him. He is sure to die. But if you take him, he is sure to live.' And as Steve Reynolds will tell you, you can't do that. You had to say no. Well, it's the last time I'm saying no."
Cathleen Falsani is the religion reporter and a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.
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