Posted on 12/31/2004 6:50:47 PM PST by freedom44
About three months before the release of Mel Gibson's hugely popular and controversial film, The Passion of the Christ, a new Beatles album hit the street.
Let It Be Naked was, of course, a reissue; but unlike so much of the Fab Four material released during the previous decade, it was an important album. Let It Be might not have been the best of the mature Beatles, but the unadulterated version -- stripped of Phil Spector's baroque production and free of the shameless clunkers (mostly from McCartney) that spoil more recognized classics like The White Album and Abbey Road -- stands up, track for track, as a remarkably solid listening experience.
Yet the album came and went with barely a buzz. The dream, alas, was most definitely over.
By contrast, Gibson's movie about the last hours of Jesus sent shockwaves around the world. Even measured in pop culture terms, there was no question that Jesus was far, far more popular than the Beatles -- or any passing pop fancy, for that matter (A website two years ago declared Jesus "now more popular" than the Beatles based on their respective number of Google hits).
But 2004 also showed how wrong John Lennon was about Christianity itself when he made that infamous claim in a March 1966 interview with the London Evening Standard.
"Christianity will go," Lennon said. "It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now ..."
How wrong could one man be?
Christianity will go? Less than 40 years later, just look at the prominent, perhaps pivotal role the candidates' espoused Christian faith and adherence to Christian values played in the U.S. presidential election campaign. And look who won.
"President Bush has been called the most openly religious president in modern history," said Raney Aronson, producer of a PBS Frontline report called The Jesus Factor, which chronicled George W. Bush's "personal journey" as a born-again Christian and examined the immense political influence of the more than 70 million evangelical Christians in the United States.
Even in Canada, where secular liberalism has ruled for decades, 2004 has seen an unprecedented outpouring of scriptural argument as part of the national debate over same-sex marriage. Never in recent history have so many Canadians publicly stated their unswerving commitment to Christian principles.
And, less significantly but as part of the same trend, for the past weeks in both countries pundits have been trying to one-up each other in condemning politically correct attempts to substitute "holiday" for good old-fashioned Christmas. (My favourite had to be Ezra Levant's column which began, "Allow me to be the first Jew to say to you 'Merry Christmas'.")
Part of this new, vocal Christianity is undoubtedly a reaction to the rhetorical zealotry -- and actual threats -- of Islamic extremists. And part of it has to be a reaction to the increasingly shallow popular culture that surrounds us.
In trying to live down his notorious remark, Lennon later conceded, "I should have said television was more popular than Jesus, then I might have got away with it ..."
Lennon was hardly being an iconoclast when he pronounced Christianity moribund -- in England the comments went unnoticed; it wasn't until they were reprinted out of context in the U.S. that all hell broke loose. Lennon knew that the steady drift of Western art and thought during the first half of the 20th century was toward rationalism, and that spirituality was being rediscovered in Buddhism and other world views "untainted" by Christian concepts.
By the 1960s even popular entertainment was confidently reflecting Nietzsche's "God is dead" stance. It seemed absolutely conceivable that Christianity would "vanish and shrink."
It just wasn't God's plan, that's all.
In the same interview, Lennon also said, "Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."
Considering the views held by so many self-described Christians -- whether on the war in Iraq or same-sex marriage -- one might argue that Lennon's analysis was philosophically quite valid, even if he was way off the beam historically.
But that, as they say, is another column entirely.
posted already.
"Posted already" but who cares...can't ever get enough of Jesus...thx for posting this!
Christianity hasn't risen. It's always been there. 2004 just made people who have forgotten, remember.
"Christianity will go," Lennon said. "It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now ..."
Eh, Lennon sounds like the typical arrogant secular supremacist that cockroach most any message board that discusses religion these days.
Lunkhead Lennon was engaging in wishful thinking......the pseudo-intellectual exercise of the undiagnosed braindead.
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