This Day in Music History

March 4, 1966—The London Evening Standard featured an interview with John Lennon in which the Beatle’s outspoken comments on his group—“We’re more popular than Jesus now”—led to a belated media firestorm.

It’s fascinating to read the original article by journalist Maureen Cleave, a favorite of the band and an intimate of Lennon (very intimate—a rumor through the years has held that the Beatle wrote “Norwegian Wood” about her), then examine the resulting controversy from different angles—from what was happening at the time in Lennon’s life, how the comment became distorted, how Lennon thrashed about between explaining and apologizing for his quote, and what his views on religion might really have been.

As Beatlemania was entering its third year, Lennon was questioning virtually everything—government secrecy, his marriage, and manager Brian Epstein’s constraints on the group’s comments. He had been unable even to speak of the death of his mother for years. The sudden death of friend and former bandmate Stu Sutcliffe might have left him with even more toxic feelings, since Sutcliffe began suffering disabling headaches after two beatings – one by a gang, the other when Lennon became angered by his decision to leave the band. (Newsman Larry Kane’s Lennon Revealed observed that Lennon was haunted by the true cause of Sutcliffe’s death for months, even years.)

I would also point to Lennon’s confusion about why the class system he had long resented and mocked was now showering him with more possessions than he knew what to do with—a Rolls Royce, a Ferrari, a Mini-Cooper, a hilltop Tudor, a swimming pool, and leather-bound volumes of the world’s great writers.

The autodidactic Lennon, according to Cleave, was now reading one religious tract after another in search of answers. As the musician escorted the writer through his home, he unburdened himself on the sterility of modern organized religion. End of story.

Or so it seemed for four-and-a-half months. Then an American teen magazine, Datebook, picked up on the article and trumpeted a sensational statement on its cover: JOHN LENNON SAYS, “BEATLES MORE POPULAR THAN JESUS.”

By the end of July, Beatles records were being burned in Birmingham, Alabama, and within a few more weeks it had gotten worse: a community bonfire of their records, anti-Beatles editorials every hour at a Reno station, Beatles albums set on fire by South Carolina’s Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, radio station boycotts in several states, even assassination threats against Lennon in Memphis, one of the stops on the Beatles’ upcoming tour.

At first, Lennon was adamant about not backing down in the face of the uproar. After a long, intense discussion with Epstein, however, he came to feel—touchingly, in view of the acrimony that eventually destroyed the Fab Four—that his continued opposition was only hurting his friends—and, with the singles “Yellow Submarine” and “Eleanor Rigby” about to receive serious airplay, a needless distraction.

In subsequent news conferences, Epstein spun Lennon’s comments artfully while the Beatle seesawed between outright apology and justification (“I never meant it to be a lousy antireligious thing. I apologize if that will make you happy.”).

What really was the comment that caused all the fuss and fighting? Here it is, in its entirety:

“Christianity will go. 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.”

It’s impossible to read the original quote and the background to the imbroglio without four decades of intervening history in mind: the “death of God” school of thought that became fashionable in a number of theology schools; Muslim fatwas against Salman Rushdie and the Danish cartoonists; the increase in Americans unaffiliated with any religion; the presence of atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on the bestseller lists; and, of course, the fulfillment of the assassination threats made against Lennon, but from a wholly unexpected quarter (Mark David Chapman was obsessed with J.D. Salinger rather than the Ten Commandments).

Viewed in this light, some of what Lennon said was, as he rightly claimed, a mere description of reality. Fans were more ecstatic about the Beatles than about sitting still for an hour or longer in a church, thinking about a man they would never see. So yes, the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now.”

At the same time, the full remarks are not as inoffensive as his supporters claimed.

Lennon not only predicted that Christianity would “vanish and shrink,” but that it was beyond discussion—“I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right.” That tone is more than a bit reminiscent of atheists of recent years who have taken on the charming self-description of the “reality-based community.” (Implying that your opposition is deluded is a sure way to win friends and influence people!)

“Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary.” Which disciples? Which of His opinions did they distort?

“I don't know which will go first--rock 'n' roll or Christianity.” This was virtually the only sentence in this paragraph not shot through with certainty. (Though it must be said, how did Lennon like the chances of rock ‘n’ roll any better than those of, say, the classical, jazz or American standards music that rock ‘n’ roll was displacing on the airwaves?)

So, what were Lennon’s religious beliefs? As the Cleave article noted, he was intensely interested in spirituality, so much so that when the Beatles journeyed to India in 1968 to meet Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Lennon was only surpassed by George Harrison in his interest in Transcendental Meditation, according to Bob Spitz’ The Beatles. (Eventually he grew savagely disillusioned with the Maharishi, too.)

We have scattered hints in two post-Beatles songs of his spiritual condition after the breakup of the group. In “God,” he announces, then repeats the lyric, “God is a concept/By which we can measure/Our pain,” then lists a number of items in which he does not believe, including “bible,” “Jesus,” “mantra,” “gita,” and “yoga.” In “Imagine,” he conjures up a world with no heaven: “It’s easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us only sky.”

There’s a reason why “Imagine” has been covered by one artist after another—it’s an astonishingly beautiful, inspirational melody. You’ll forgive me, though, if I honor Lennon’s skill and sincerity in longing for peace while not subscribing to his wish for an irreligious world.

Lennon evinced the usual fault of the non-believer—that is, a willingness to ascribe all kinds of fanatical violence to religion without acknowledging the same of atheism. He forgot that the greatest murderers of the 20th century were communists professing a particularly aggressive form of atheism—Stalin, Mao—or by Hitler, a neo-pagan who abandoned the Catholicism in which he was raised to make of himself what has been called “the psychopathic God.”

So, at the time of this notorious interview, Lennon was a cauldron of contradictory emotions and thoughts, attempting to make sense of a world in which he could not find a place, yet unable to find answers in his personal life or philosophy. That kind of person is less the secular saint created by the public—something that this bitingly satirical skeptic would have disdained—than a kind of musical Hamlet.

All of this makes what Lennon said a bit more understandable—and, in any case, if people were bothered by his comments, they simply had the option of not attending a Beatles show or buying any of their records—they didn’t have to resort to commercial pressure or downright physical threats.

It’s no disparagement of Lennon to say that his religious feelings were not organized, well-articulated or especially mature—he was still only 25, for heaven’s sake! And maybe with enough time and the wisdom sometimes bestowed not just by years but by suffering, he might have come to realize that the love he subsequently experienced through Yoko and his son Sean was the manifestation of a divine presence, against the odds of his painful upbringing, at long last in his troubled, God-haunted life.