In 2000 years, will The Beatles be bigger than Jesus Christ?
In 1966, John Lennon remarked that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”. He wasn’t far wrong. Only 21 years earlier, humanity had hit the height of its power. We considered ourselves gods, and all we could do with that technological omnipotence was drop a few atom bombs on Japan. The spiritual stasis that rose along with the mushroom cloud caused a cold recoil in our view of the world. In the West, church attendance waned, and an eerie uncertainty abounded. Suddenly, Christianity did feel a lot smaller.
By stark contrast, The Beatles were barreling towards their pious pomp. Lennon might have drawn a slew of detractors for his flippant remark, and it may have even contributed to his untimely end in the long run, but by and large, the backlash did little to halt their progress. In 1967, a matter of months down the line, they performed to an audience of 200 million people via a ground-breaking satellite link-up. At the time, that was not far from 1/16th of the global population. Additionally, considering electricity had only become widespread in their native Britain some 30 years earlier, that feat was nothing short of miraculous.
But it wasn’t just the reach of these newly idolised pop stars that seemed to dazzle the public—to their fans, they were capable of inhuman triumphs, and their cause was a worthy one to dedicate your life to. That’s still the case now. Pop culture continues many of the deifying traits of religion. The Beatles might have broken up over half a century ago, but their star continues to ascend. David Bowie was never as relevant in life as he has been in death. On your street, it’s highly likely that you find a few shrines to Taylor Swift. In all honesty, skinny jeans and Converse trainers were the cassock and frankincense for converts to the church of indie rock ‘n’ roll in the 2000s.
As Leonard Cohen once said, “Music is the emotional life of most people”. I believe you can easily substitute ’emotional’ for ‘spiritual’ in that quote.
So, does that mean that the golden icons of today’s pop culture will go on to be tomorrow’s Gods? Will the cynical children of the future render Jesus Christ a myth that we can’t be sure truly existed, like Milli Vanilli, while bona fide purveyors of exultancy, like Bob Dylan or John Denver, go on to be hailed as heroes from on high, their religiosity logged on analogue acetate for unquestionable posterity. With pictures of these stars standing before a gathering of thousands at Washington Square or next to partners way out of their league to prove it, I think the thought stands a chance.
“Maybe the ’60s prophet we should turn to understand that coming world isn’t Lennon, it’s John Wimber.”
Professor Philip Jenkins
To validate this hunch, I sought the thumbs-up of a revered scholar in the field. I turned to Professor Philip Jenkins, the first ‘religious expert’ that Google serves up—as any online journalist knows, that also makes him the foremost. His initial response wasn’t hopeful. “I don’t think that rising popular music will eclipse or outgrow religion,” he rebuffed. “Rather, religion will co-opt it as it always does, and the two will thrive together. There is absolutely no conflict between the two.”
My thesis dashed, I pulled out the stats: in the 21st century, Bibles are printed at a rate of about 80million per year, whereas The Beatles receive well over a billion streams. While even I would be the first to admit that I’m cooking the books on the compatibility of those comparisons, it still felt like a bit of a green tick. Moreover, the Fab Four have now sold well over 600 million albums—that’s 20% of the world’s population at the point of their formation—and the figure continues to grow. Maybe it will grow and grow forevermore until the band are effectively canonised. Maybe the Cavern Club will be a new Mecca if it can survive the austerity cuts to the arts.
As for the floundering status of Christ, all I had to go off was the fact that barring Christmas Eve, basically nobody I knew gave a damn about the poor fellow these days. Was this assumption correct, or was I trapped in an echo chamber? Yes, in short, I was. “In The Beatles’ Britain of the ’60s, there were things that everyone knew about the steep decline of Christianity in its very faith-based and fundamentalist forms. That was obvious and undeniable,” Jenkins admits. “The future of faith, if it had one, would be liberal, secular, sceptical, and highly oriented to secular improvement.”
But the form of its present resurgence proves that “the only thing that can reliably be expected of religion is the unexpected”.
Jenkins adds: “Looking back from the 2020s, however, those fundamentalist, supernatural models were the versions of faith that, in fact, were most successful. By far the most successful ideology of the 20th century—far more influential than fascism or communism—was Pentecostal Christianity, which relies on a deep belief in the Holy Spirit and the power of healing, of divine signs and wonders. It began in 1906, and now commands some 650million believers worldwide. The number swells annually. Not too shabby.”
Who knew that damn Pentecostalism had its own Beatlemania, but rather than screaming girls, it was millions of accountants in badly-fitted slacks joining in droves? Well, Jenkins knew—and he continues to espouse the expansive march of Christian denominations by explaining, “The most successful Christian story of the era was its growth in Africa, from ten million people in 1900 to 500 million by 2015, and a likely billion in 2050 when Africa will be the numerical heart of the faith, followed closely by Asia.”
He adds: “The main problem the Vatican has is that it is 2000 miles too far north, when it should be at the heart of the coming Catholic world, in Africa. By 2050, Christianity will still be by far the world’s largest religion.”
But will pop culture match its stride?
Will the Fab Four jostle alongside it like the Blur to God’s Oasis? Well, like the Gallagher brothers, the Almighty is enjoying an uncanny comeback. “Not just do way more people believe in Jesus, but they believe in a more fundamentalist and faith-based way, with healing and signs and wonders. What has come close to dying is the liberal and well-intentioned secular Christianity that seemed to be so flourishing in the 1960s,” he says.
Admittedly, the times do seem to be a-changin’, as a prophet of the ’60s once said. Maybe I had got it wrong. Maybe it was the death of The Beatles rather than their transubstantiation to deities of the future that my tea leaves were trying to convey. Maybe one day soon, we will wake up and see that all divinity has eroded from ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, and what we will be faced with are the inane ramblings of the cringiest dad in rock history. And as for his pal, maybe we will realise that Lennon wasn’t a messiah, but just a very naughty boy.
“Maybe the ’60s prophet we should turn to understand that coming world isn’t Lennon,” Jenkins posits, “it’s John Wimber, who guided the Righteous Brothers before going off to found a great worldwide Pentecostal denomination, the Vineyard, which is grounded in signs, wonders, and healing. Wimber and the Vineyard led a revolution in Christian worship music, which brought the best ideas of ’60s and ’70s rock music into every thriving Pentecostal church and megachurch. Just go around London and listen at any Pentecostal church—which will probably be full of African and Asian people, with a few white faces as a minority. Listen to the music they are playing.”
I did. Or at least I went to City Church Newcastle, a self-described “Jesus-centred community”. I saw a band that sounded like Bon Jovi and looked like Coldplay. So, while religion taking the “best ideas” of rock ‘n’ roll remained questionable, Jenkins was certainly right that they were co-opting the most populist. In fact, the inverse is also true, whereby we often imbue the best of music of today with a sense of religious divinity. I always co-opt words like ‘biblical’ to describe a new group of students from Leeds.
As Jenkins adds, “I think a lot of people find immense spiritual riches in rock and pop. Just witness the songs that end up being played at weddings and funerals around the world. My own funeral, when it comes, will have as its centrepiece ‘You Set the Scene’ from Love’s Forever Changes, which is the greatest album of the 1960s,” Jenkins asserts, tolerating no further arguments.
“There are plenty of people who think that ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ is one of the finest pieces of spiritual music of the last century or so, in any genre.”
Paul Simon himself has even referred to it as a hymn. So, in 2000 years, will the diminutive folk star be seen as a disciple of the Lord rather than a folk radical revered as a doll-like figure who has risen above the realm of religion, according to the borderline alcoholics here at Far Out?
Sadly, the former was beginning to seem more certain. As John Cooper Clarke once said, “All the best musicians started out in church; Jesus invented rock ‘n’ roll”. Perhaps he’ll reclaim it in time.
“Stop asking God to bless what you’re doing. Find out what God’s doing. It’s already blessed.”
Bono
But then, gathering the remnants of my shattered thesis, the face of Sid Vicious seemed to appear amid the crumpled notes. How can something like that be co-opted? Now, I was remembering my initial argument. It wasn’t grounded in stats, which is terribly time-consuming. It was fundamentally based on the virtues of providence. When Lennon said that The Beatles were bigger than Christ, he was buoyed by the fact that the big man had all sorts of ungodly, unfurling horrors to answer to. Meanwhile, the Fab Four professed to be nothing more than working-class lads from Liverpool trying to rouse a little semblance of peace and love. They did so in a revolutionary way that relied on nothing more than humanity.
In 2000 years, if big red buttons have been pressed and climate change has ravaged the lands, but ‘A Day in the Life’ still resounds as a source of joy, is it not only natural that people will pray for Lennon’s return? Will holy wars be held to account while Ziggy Stardust is hailed as a hero who did no wrong? Is religion not simply just blossoming in regions where pop culture is yet to boom, and when Lennon and company descend on the newly developing world, “All you need is love” will be a more favourable propaganda to subscribe to than the diktat of religion?
As it turns out, the antithesis is possibly true. All evidence suggests that religion is boosted radically by events that God would otherwise do well to prevent. As Jenkins adds, “Disasters certainly contribute, and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 mightily fed the emerging Pentecostal movement, which was just getting started elsewhere in California. Something similar happens these days but for very different reasons, namely that in many parts of Africa, it’s the most Pentecostal and supernatural-oriented churches that do the best job of organising and channelling aid. International NGOs love dealing with them. In the US, the Mormon church has what is probably the world’s best disaster relief operation.”
Concluding, “The lesson is obvious. Trust the churches, however bizarre what they say might appear—they are the ones who can supply your material needs in the present world.”
I was stumped but also not entirely satisfied. After surrendering the argument and returning to writing about bands, I began to realise how wildly unprecedented the great figures of the 1960s truly were. The Beatles were the first of their kind, not even Christ could claim that, thanks to pesky figures like Moses, Anu, and Inanna. In his lifetime, as stated in the Acts 1:15 section of his biography, The Bible, he had gathered around 120 devout followers. The Beatles had 56,000 people at Shea Stadium alone, and not one of them could hear a single note. Facetious remarks aside, the truly transcendent nature of their rise and rise surely can’t dispel the possibility that they will be seen as manna from heaven so Promethean that they eclipse the saints of today in time.
And when they do, anthems like ‘Imagine’ and even the “we’re bigger than Christ” itself remark surely can’t be co-opted, can they? Once again, Jenkins proved unrelenting in his appraisal of the church’s plasticity and suggested that I ask a priest about whether the church had an interpretation that could reframe Lennon’s aesthetic anthem. So, following a recent funeral I had attended, I took the opportunity to ask a favour of the Father.
John Lennon: a prophet or just another fraud in round spectacles?
He asked to remain anonymous for reasons known only to himself, or perhaps because he was surprised to be solicited by a journalist so suddenly after said journalist had delivered a eulogy. But he explained curtly that swathes of Ecclesiastes read like agnostic existentialism, preaching peace in the here and now without any thoughts of divine rewards or punishments. So, in the church’s view, ‘Imagine’ can be seen as a handy thought experiment extolling the notion of brotherhood without guidance.
As Jenkins added, the puzzled Father wasn’t alone in his view, “A great many listeners ignore the atheist message, and sink totally into the visionary millenarian message. We can create a perfect world where everyone lives in peace—it’s wonderful, won’t you try? For many, it becomes ‘Just pretend there’s no heaven’—whether or not there is isn’t really relevant. Core takeaway: They hear the idealism, not the theology.” So, if even ‘Imagine’ can’t compete and has its heresy stripped, maybe the church will motor on while The Beatles, Bob Dylan, David Bowie and so on do, indeed, steadily fade, becoming figures more akin to Jim Croce than Jesus Christ.
Crestfallen after more back-and-forths with the church than the average inquiry, I began to feel like the Pete Best of my own story. As the person who first posed the question, what do I think? As someone who has studied the persistent traffic potential of The Beatles and analysed cultural trends for a living, what is my final thought? Well, from where I’m standing, it may well come down to whether the Fab Four’s future estate is better at manipulating algorithms than the Catholic faith.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.