‘God’: John Lennon’s sequel to his “bigger than Jesus” remark
It was never going to be easy for John Lennon to backpedal from being one of the biggest enemies of Christianity circa 1966.
He had picked the wrong faith to mess with once he went back to the US, and he was more than happy to apologise at every opportunity for his remarks about the band being bigger than Jesus. But even if there was a lot of backlash to it, there wasn’t really that much need to cause a fuss when you look at what Lennon would be doing only a few years later.
Yes, the band needed to do a bit of damage control, but it’s not like Lennon wasn’t correct in some respects when he said that. Christianity had started to take more of a priority in young people’s lives over religion, and no matter how many fanatics had tried their best to silence Lennon for what he said, he wasn’t exactly going to downplay how he felt for the sake of the cameras in his face, either.
If anything, the next few years were him doubling down on everything that he thought could be considered controversial. What he was doing was punk-rock-style subversion before that had even existed, and he was more than happy to do whatever it took to bend his celebrity status. Staging bed-ins for peace? Sure. Talk about his drug use? Absolutely. Pose naked on the front of one of his album covers? Why are you still asking questions at this point? Of course, he did it.
But when looking at his solo career, half of his solo album, Plastic Ono Band, was about him getting rid of all the facades that he had over himself for so many years. He was a much different person than he was back in his mop-top days, and while the Fab Four dream that everyone had for themselves was now a thing of the past, the song ‘God’ touched on something far greater than being a condemnation of what The Beatles were.
Sure, everyone remembers the line ‘I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me,’ but every other line in between is a doubling down of what Lennon had hinted at with his “bigger than Jesus” comments. There are many people who would have never touched on religion again after that kind of backlash, but it was important for him to shed that skin and say that he didn’t believe in Jesus at all, or for that matter, Buddha, kings, or any other higher power that seemed to pop into his head.
Then again, does that mean that John Lennon is an atheist? Well, yes and no. It’s hard to think of the same person who sang about the triviality of religion eventually telling his son to say a little prayer before he goes to sleep on ‘Beautiful Boy’, but Lennon’s view of religion was a bit more nuanced than most when you look at the way that he looked at the concept of faith.
Lennon never claimed to have all the answers, but considering how many times he started to find his vocation in something greater than himself, it was almost as if his idea of faith was a combination of different teachings he had learned along the way. His viewpoint wasn’t exactly born and bred in a certain tradition, but it was okay for him to take some of the teachings he had learned from everywhere and make up his own mind about what life could be like beyond this world.
So while ‘God’ is bound to ruffle a few feathers when he describes him as a concept by which we measure our pain, Lennon didn’t seem to be derogatory about religion as a whole by any stretch. His faith could just be a lot more elastic than others, and while a lot of people might not have been ready to hear that at the time, it was better for him to be honest about how he saw his spiritual side than worrying about alienating chunks of his fanbase.
