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

By Laurie Britt-Smith

November 18, 2008

Editor’s Note: Now, another installment in the serialized work of Dr. Laurie Britt-Smith from her exploration of Bono’s rock-n-roll rhetoric. In this post, she further explores issues related to the tension between faith and celebrity with a discussion grounded in the concept of a Discourse community as introduced in this post.

Bono’s primary Discourse community was his mixed marriage Dublin home; Protestant mother, Catholic father.  He has commented many times on how this, as well as the violence and political upheaval that religion has caused in Ireland, has made him a spiritual person who absolutely loathes organized religion. He once stated, “I have this hunger in me . . . everywhere I look, I see the evidence of a Creator.  But I don’t see it as religion, which has cut my people in two . . . Religion to me is almost like when God leaves-and people devise a set of rules to fill the space.”

Bono’s parents were not particularly devout followers of their belief systems. Although he remembers his mother taking his brother and him to chapel on Sunday while his father waited outside, and that his father’s Catholicism did influence their relationship-the difference between father and son’s spiritual ideas was an occasional topic of conversation, most of what he learned about faith from his parents is “the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.”

Much of Bono’s theological literacy was acquired through social interaction with his peers.  In his early teens he came into contact with a belief system that was a bit of a novelty in Ireland, Pentecostalism. He met lifelong friend, Derek “Guggi” Rowen, whose charismatic Christian family’s beliefs influenced his understanding of and appreciation for scripture, which continues to influence his song writing. He says that the Bible “sustains me” as an influence on his songwriting as a belief, not just a literary device, declaring, “I’m the sort of character who’s got to have an anchor.”

Making reference to a well known parable, Bono continues, “I want to build my house on a rock, because even if the waters are not high enough around the house, I’m going to bring back a storm, I have that in me. . .  . I let it [the Bible] speak to me in other ways. They call it rhema . . . a Greek word that sort of means it changes in the moment you’re in. It seems to do that for me.”

As a teenager he temporarily joined a fairly radical Christian community, the Shalom Fellowship, where he made a commitment to Christ, if not to any one form of Christianity. He was intrigued by the idea that God was interested in him, and that Jesus had commanded his followers to love others. The church, which Bono describes as a “group living life like it was the first century A.D,” was communal. Members shared whatever assets they had and their teaching reminded him of that earlier time with Guggi’s family. He “hung out” for awhile until it all became just a little too intense, too much like “a holy huddle” with he and his fellow band-mates Larry Mullen Jr. and Edge, increasingly on the outside. (Adam Clayton tolerated this Christian thing, but was not a believer.)

When Bono came to the States in 1981, he was a bit shocked at the used car sales techniques he saw many televangelists using. He remembers the moment quite well, “You think, oh, my God. But their words sound so similar…to the words out of our mouths. So what happens? You learn to shut up.”

That form of Christian literacy was not-is not-the same as what he had learned from his interactions with the faith community and his interpretation of the Bible, and he was afraid that Americans would throw him in with that lot of “traders in the temple” if he called himself a Christian. This fear of being understood or interpreted as religious instead of spiritual, which can be traced to experiences within his primary discourse communities and his initial interface with that particularly American evangelical style, is still evident in interviews where he will go to great lengths to talk around applying a particular religious label to his belief system and justice work.