In the late 1960s I was embarrassed, being a fan of the Beatles (who of my generation wasn’t?—or rather, isn’t?), almost every time John Lennon got himself in the newspapers that my parents read. Drugs, including LSD (briefly, as it turned out), the divorce and a very avant-garde second wife, the album cover that disappeared almost as soon as it appeared, and most of all, this one, little, out-of-context quotation, which enraged Americans but was practically unnoticed in England and Europe, originally published in an interview for the London Evening Standard in 1966:
Christianity will go. 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; I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.
Before judging Lennon harshly—especially those of you who have come across these words for the first time—note that Lennon also said, when asked about this, that he did not approve of that much popularity, and that he could as easily have said that television was more popular than Jesus as that the Beatles were. More importantly, he said repeatedly that he was talking only about his native country, England, and nowhere else.
Moreover, three years later he said, “I’m one of Christ’s biggest fans, and if I can turn the focus on the Beatles on to Christ’s message, then that’s what we’re here to do.” Sadly, Lennon’s understanding of that message may have amounted to little more than his own anti-war message of “peace and love.”
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