Faith Journal

with Ray Waddle

This has been a summer of nostalgia for Beatlemania. It was 40 years ago that the Beatles released their Sgt. Pepper album, which enthralled the world and infused pop music with new dimensions of ambition and awe. But zeal for the Fab Four had a dark side, and I can't help remembering John Lennon's famous quote at the height of their fame:

"Christianity will go," he declared to a London journalist in 1966. "It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

As everyone knows, the response to this reckless theological riff was outrage, especially in the U.S., where sales were equally bullish for Bibles as for Beatles. In the South, DJs and preachers presided over anti-Beatle boycotts and bonfires, vainly hoping Beatlemania would die.

I always thought Lennon got a bad rap. It was an arrogant remark for the 25-year-old pop idol to make, but his critics missed his point. He never claimed the Beatles were greater than Jesus. He was not boasting but making an embarrassed observation about something obvious: the public obsession with the Beatles had made millions of fans more passionate for "I Want to Hold Your Hand" than for Christianity.

Was Lennon wrong? Forty years later, people worry that European Christianity is fading, losing confidence, getting too tepid to stand up to secularism and Islam.

In America, signals are mixed. Christianity seems as public as ever, infiltrating politics and media in provocative ways. But some researchers say American churchgoing goes overreported and has actually been in decline since the 1960s registered its disillusion with institutional religion.

The writer E.M. Cioran once declared: "Obsessions are the demons of a world without faith." What are today's obsessions? What excites conversation these days? Real estate, Blackberrys, immigration, Paris Hilton. Is church and worship on that list of passionate subjects? Maybe Lennon, who needless to say died by the gun of an obsessed fan in 1980, was a reluctant prophet after all, even a martyr to his insight.

But then I think of another Englishman, G.K. Chesterton, who in 1925 said the long turbulent history of Christianity has witnessed at least five times the faith's death and resurrection:

"Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave."

I would adjust his numbers: Christianity rises again five times a day, or five million times. It is always dying and rising. It collapses under human weakness, theological schism, violence, revenge, fear, inertia, self-doubt, boredom and distraction. It rises again whenever a person or congregation reads the Gospels yet again, or takes communion, or reaches out to the neighborhood and connects with truth.

When I read the Gospels, I forget the (dire) sociological trends and realize the renewal of Christian faith is a daily possibility, a daily chance to get it right. When I manage to escape the day's distractions, scripture works its own power. It calls me back to Jesus' shadowy first steps, the outlines of a life — Son of Man, Son of God, purveyor and surveyor of the Reign of God — news pouring onto the weary planet and the battered heart. Reading the Gospels, I find Jesus there in the corner of my eye, swift-moving, coming in fast — a bulwark against the fleeting enthusiasms and false promises of our own nonstop pop marketplace.

Forty years after the Beatles' high mark of creativity, one cannot fail to notice their slow passing from the scene. But for 2,000 years the church of Jesus the Christ has survived every mistake and sorrow in religion's name, every put-down, cop-out and massacre.

One reason why: though the body of Christ is a mystical idea, it is also practical. The body of Christ is each human body carrying around the divine word and image on earth. It's a matter of action, a matter of getting the body moving in certain directions, following the Christ figure. The caustic controversies of pop music gods, and their critics, don't matter.

Columnist Ray Waddle is author of Against the Grain: Unconventional Wisdom from Ecclesiastes.