(RNS) — Bono was far from the first non-American Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, but he may be the most existentially American recipient. Not in the sense of where he was born, but in the sense of his obsessions. Bono has never become an official U.S. citizen, but maybe this slight remove has allowed him to see America a little more clearly. Because when his band, U2, is operating at its peak, it’s capable of dissecting this nation with a rare and effective ruthlessness. And nowhere is this talent more on display than U2’s handling of America and religion.
U2 was a lot of things to a lot of people, and one of those things was a “non-Christian” band Christians were allowed to like. “Non-Christian” is a bit of a misnomer here, because the U2 guys are nothing if they’re not Christian. But they weren’t Christian,™ which meant they were secular, and in the ’80s and ’90s, being secular meant you were on the wrong side of a cosmic battle for the soul of all reality. Some of you reading this know what I’m talking about.
Many evangelical kids were raised to see the world as divided piecemeal between “Christianity” and “Mainstream,” and truly good Christians were maybe sometimes allowed to look but could not touch Mainstream stuff, because that was giving Satan a foothold. Secular movies, TV and, above all, music were gateway drugs to drinking, premarital sex, abortions, being gay and, well, actual drugs. But never fear, Christian kids! Thanks to the Evangelical Industrial Complex, you don’t even need to be tempted to listen to evil secular music, because we’ve got Christianized versions of it. No need to listen to “Paul’s Boutique” when you’ve got “Jesus Freak.” Why listen to Madonna when you could spin Rebecca St. James? These figures and many others were bricks in a wall built between the Christian bubble and all the other bubbles, and they did their job passably well.
Except for U2, who must have been aware of this wall but certainly never gave it any credence. The band’s very existence proved how unnecessary this wall was, and whether the group knew it or not, their ongoing impact was a chief factor in tearing it down.
The “Contemporary Christian Music” scene was in its infancy in 1976, when a 14-year-old Irish marching band geek named Larry Mullen posted a notice to his school’s message board to see if any other musically inclined kids wanted to come over and jam. His notice was answered by four other kids. A charismatic bassist named Adam Clayton and his buddy, a slightly aloof guitar enthusiast named David Evans. They were joined by an artsy weirdo named Paul Hewson, a member of a surrealist street gang that gave each other creative nicknames. This gang had taken to calling Hewson Bonovox, after a local hearing aid store. Hewson hated the name at first but warmed to it when he found out it was Latin for “good voice.” At some point, it got shortened to Bono.
Mullen has since joked that he’d hoped the band would be called something like The Larry Mullen Band, but that was clearly out of the cards the second Bono stepped into the room. Bono had gravitas. Bono had energy. He didn’t know anyone else there, but he had ideas. The guys were thinking of calling themselves Feedback and playing Clash covers, but Bono was already thinking bigger.
America welcomed U2’s early efforts with open arms, as “Boy,” “War” and “The Unforgettable Fire” saw the band graduate from scrappy punk outfit to something more grandiose. The band retained punk’s revolutionary spirit and channeled Bono’s bleeding heart for current events into soaring anthems of beauty and terror.
While the band was touring America, its success led it to rub shoulders with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt, all of whom deepened the band’s appreciation for American blues and country. At the same time, Bono was reading Flannery O’Connor, Norman Mailer and Raymond Carver while driving across the U.S.’ vast, empty spaces. Evans, who by then was being called The Edge, was getting inspired by Hank Williams and Howlin’ Wolf.
U2’s love affair with America was matched only by the band’s disdain for the country’s politics. This infatuation and outrage were all spun into a single whole by producer Brian Eno, and the result was “The Joshua Tree,” U2’s finest hour.
What can you even say about these songs? “The Joshua Tree” opens like a movie, The Edge’s guitar noodling sounding like a soundtrack soaring through the “for spacious skies” and over the “amber waves of grain” that inspired it, a twinkling echo that becomes a roar that becomes a pulsing sprint so bright and gorgeous that the only possible human response is the exact one Bono sings, the first words on the album: “I want to run!”
From there, you’re off on a series of songs so awesomely majestic that no amount of radio overplay or bad mainstream Protestant Sunday morning church covers have been able to defang them. The more action-packed front half finds Bono at his most reflective and spiritually introspective, while the quieter Side B has more of the fiery political calls to arms the band cut its teeth on. “Red Hill Mining Town” is about the U.K. miners’ strike, and “Mothers of the Disappeared” is about the missing political dissidents of Argentina. “Bullet the Blue Sky” is an outlier, a searing screed of U.S. meddling in Central America that really does sound like The Edge had been listening to some good blues music.
It’s thrilling stuff, and it’s not their fault they made it sound so simple it inspired thousands of youth group kids to try to duplicate the whole thing, copy and pasting the explicitly Christian stuff and largely ignoring Bono’s concern for the well-being of Black and Brown people in South America and Africa. It’s an interesting riddle of history that U2 captured the hearts of Christian America at around the same time Ronald Reagan captured their loyalty. The latter’s influence proved a lot more durable, unfortunately.
“Joshua Tree” paved the way for the worship boom, which spread from churches like Vineyard and the JPUSA communities across the country, eventually leading to Passion and Hillsong. Worship musicians are hardly the only artists to draw copious inspiration from Bono, but it is a shame that after U2 handed Christians the keys to moving beyond “Christian rock,” those keys just got melted down and used to make a new wall.
But this was all far outside U2’s concern, and it all sort of dissolves anyway once you pop on, say, “With or Without You,” a patient, twinkly lullaby that starts out with Bono growling like a tiger. As The Edge slowly starts throwing flashy spears of shimmery echoes, the song arches skyward and Bono goes with it, howling to the sky. It’s the blueprint for a hundred worship songs, but it never sounded better than right here.
That’s because U2 knew how to write a good rock song, sure. But it’s also because the band had a keen understanding of the spiritual realm and the earthly one, and how to trouble the waters between the two. Bono knows Americans demarcate what is secular and what is religious in peculiar and nonsensical ways. But he also knows those boundaries are only as real as you make them, and the right guitar note can shatter them altogether.
(Tyler Huckabee is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and dogs. Read more of his writing at his Substack. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)