The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture

Abstract

Within the last decade, many fans and members of the popular press have labeled Bono, lead singer of the band U2, a “Rock ‘n’ Roll Messiah,” because of his global humanitarian efforts and relentless effusion of theological and political messages in song and concert. Focusing on the relationship between religious practice and secular activism, I argue that Bono has performed a secularized soteriology–a public prescription of spiritual and economic salvation unbounded by religious institutions–that conjures an imagined World Polity; and this message has been packaged and delivered in ways that blur distinctions between show business and modern revival techniques.

Introduction

[1] In February 2006, Bono, lead singer for the Irish Rock band U2, presented the keynote speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, an event organized by an evangelical Christian foundation. After admitting to a crowd of over 3,000 people, including President George W. Bush, members of congress, and a sampling of world leaders, that, “there’s something unnatural… something unseemly… about rock stars mounting the pulpit and preaching at presidents,” Bono gave a homily (his term) on the virtues of aiding the sick and poor in Africa. Making reference to a “higher law,” he called world politicians to move beyond religion, “because it often gets in the way of God,” and embrace the “era of grace” that began with the new Millennium, the year of Jubilee (Lev. 25-27).[1]

[2] Bono’s speech at the prayer breakfast is just one example why fans and members of the popular press have labeled him a “Rock ‘n’ Roll” Messiah. While Bono has infused theological and political messages into U2 songs since the 1980s, he has transformed these lyrical homilies into relentless political action within the last decade. Africa has been at the center of this action. Toward the end of the twentieth century, Bono joined Pope John Paul II and others in the Jubilee 2000 movement, or Drop the Debt Campaign. Invoking the Levitical tradition of a Jubilee year, when debt was forgiven without penalty, these religious leaders called first world nations to drop the debts of poor third world countries. Bono has continued this movement in the new millennium. In 2002, Bono founded DATA, a non-profit organization that has advocated heavily for debt relief on behalf of African nations and has been highly successful, to the surprise of many. Since that time, Bono has frequently “mounted the pulpit” as front man for DATA, preaching to presidents and politicians.

[3] Although Irish, Bono has focused on the United States as his primary media outlet. Politically, Bono has followed a path similar to U2, which remained rooted in Ireland but traveled to America to discover global musical success. This pattern, of course, is not peculiar to U2. The rise of the Irish band merely illustrates the transatlantic ties to the “American production” of rock ‘n’ roll. But Bono adds another element to the equation. Not only does he stand with U2 in cultural streams of American music, he also stands with DATA in fields of American evangelists. Bono’s methods of advocacy and his techniques of political conversion resemble the modern revival techniques of American evangelists perfected by Charles Finney in the nineteenth century. And like his American evangelical counterparts after Finney, from D.L. Moody to Billy Graham, Bono has toured both sides of the Atlantic and traveled the globe preaching his message of debt forgiveness for Africa. In terms of form and effect, Bono is close company with American revivalists.

[4] Through his advocacy for Africa, Bono has fused strands of American rock ‘n’ roll and revival into a religious politic. This fusion, however, involves more than just music and religion; it is also an ideological imagining of a politically and economically integrative process. In his work with DATA, Bono advocates for the inclusion of African nations within an emerging U.S. led World Polity. This inclusion, in turn, is predicated on the global expansion of democracy and capitalist markets. Bono’s promotion of World Polity is an example of what sociologists have called “ideological globalization from above.”[2] Further, Bono’s attempt to integrate African nations into this polity is part of a modern secular project. It assumes that nation-states are sovereign (they can regulate defined borders) and that this sovereignty is based on Enlightenment Reason, not religious tradition or practice. Jose Casanova has argued that the modern global public sphere, or World Polity, that emerged in the late twentieth century has exhibited a rationalized Enlightenment impulse. In order to participate in this polity, social actors, understood by Casanova as mainly nation states, must adapt to the demands of modernity born out of this impulse. For Casanova, this is especially true for religion. He argues, “that only a religion which has incorporated as its own the central aspects of the Enlightenment critique of religion is in a position today to play a positive role in furthering processes of practical rationalization.”[3]

[5] If the integration of African nations into a World Polity is understood as an example of “practical rationalization,” then Bono plays the role of religious broker in this process. He is an agent for African nations in global political and economic markets and his primary methods of negotiation are religious. Bono’s project of nation building in Africa through DATA, an explicitly secular process, is also an implicitly religious practice. Bono’s advocacy for Africa illustrates practically what Talal Asad has argued theoretically about the “the concept of the secular,” that it “cannot do without the idea of religion.”[4] Through his advocacy for Africa, Bono has preached a “secularized soteriology,” a public prescription of spiritual and economic salvation unbounded by religious institutions.[5] Performing religious practice as secular activism and secular activism as religious practice, Bono promotes a U.S. led World Polity with evangelical flare and eschatological expectation.

[6] In this paper, I describe the “elective affinity” between Bono’s message of salvation for individuals and nation-states and the “rationalized” political and economic order of World Polity. My understanding of elective affinity and soteriology as an explanation of “what one must do to be saved” is indebted to Max Weber.[6] Linking Bono’s lyrical soteriology of individual salvation to his political prescriptions for “what an African nation-state must do to be saved,” my interpretation of Bono’s work with DATA corresponds to three aspects of Weber’s theoretical description of soteriology. First, Weber argued that a social agent could not conceive of salvation or redemption without a coherent “image of the world,” which is provided by the dominant society. But Weber also believed that the “germ” of this theodicy, or rationalized conception of a totalizing moral world, was found in “the myth of the redeemer.” And finally Weber maintained that, “almost always … some kind of theodicy of suffering has originated from the hope for salvation.”[7]

[7] Following this three-part structure, I argue in the first section that America is the dominant manufacturer of a soteriological “image of the world” (of democracy and free markets within a World Polity) and that Bono seizes upon these ideals and strives to remake them in his own interests.[8] For Bono, the “idea of America,” like the “idea of religion,” is that which must be overcome. In the second section, I examine Bono’s Messianic promotions as one “germ” of World Polity and I compare his religious politic and his techniques of conversion to American revivalists.[9] In the third section, I propose that Bono’s soteriological aspirations for Africa provide one form of theodicy for World Polity. In other words, Bono has explained the spread of democracy and the expansion of capitalist markets in Africa in terms of its hope for political and economic salvation for those suffering across the continent. Finally, I conclude by suggesting that like many American revivalists before him, Bono has provided a religious solution to a moral and economic dilemma.

Overcoming America: Bono Preaches Global Politics

[8] Although Bono is not native to the United States, like many of his immigrant predecessors he has been inextricably linked with America. In terms of his political relationship to America, Bono is somewhere between the “Liberator” Daniel O’Connell, who sent out an appeal from Ireland in 1841 to the Irish in America to join the abolitionist cause, and John Riley, the Irish-American soldier who defected to the Mexican side in the Mexican-American war.[10] Like these Irish compatriots before him, Bono has preached against the injustices of America both home and abroad. In U2 songs, Bono has often juxtaposed biblical images of human struggle with God against global examples of human struggle with America. For example, “Bullet the Blue Sky,” one of Bono’s earliest sermons to America, contrasts biblical allusions of human entanglement with God– “In the locust wind, comes a rattle and hum, Jacob wrestled the Angel and the Angel was overcome”–with images of U.S. military involvement in Central America in the 1980s .[11] In this cacophonous song, lead guitarist, “the Edge,” imitates the rattle and hum of fighter planes while Bono describes them, “spraying bullets on women and children in tin huts and city streets” across the hills of San Salvador. For Bono, the Salvadoran disappeared have run “into the arms of America.” Throughout “Bullet the Blue Sky,” Bono moves across time and space: across national boundaries, from El Salvador to the United States, across historical markers, from Jacob to John Coltrane, and across geographic location, from rural hills to city streets. This is an image of Bono lyrically tangled up with America.[12]

[9] Now cut to 2001 at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, where Bono is at work in concert.[13] The front section of the wrap-around upper deck of the Continental Airlines arena is lined with advertisement boards. Bono has positioned himself at the apex of the heart-shaped walkway that extends from the stage. U2 is in the middle of “Bullet the Blue Sky,” and Bono has grabbed a spotlight. In the darkened arena, he shines it across the advertisement boards and cries out against the evils of capitalism. He then chides America for hoarding its wealth and ignoring the AIDS crisis in Africa. The homily ends, the refrain begins, and the song climaxes. Seconds later, Bono announces that Bill Clinton and a United Nations representative are in the house, along with the Beastie Boys. Bono praises them for their humanitarian work, and he calls for more funding for AIDS research and more aid to Third World countries.[14] This is an image of Bono politically tangled up with America.

[10] Born Paul Hewson in 1960 to a Protestant mother and Catholic father in Ireland, Bono is no stranger to religion and politics.[15] His religious renderings are fused with political conviction. Though Irish, Bono embraces America and more importantly, he calls on America with religious fervor. America is Bono’s spiritual wilderness, a land of religious promise and political possibility.[16] In contrast to his political message, however, Bono’s spiritual convictions are amorphous. I do not attempt a history of Bono’s spiritual journey here.[17] Rather I reference lyrics, concert performances, and speaking engagements, as they relate to Bono’s current political activism, continually emphasizing his religious imagination. In the public performance of his religious politic, Bono often plays a role similar to public theologians. Martin Marty, historian of American religion, has defined public theology as “an effort to interpret the life of a people in the light of a transcendent reference.” In the sense that he publicly articulates moral causes–Third World debt relief and an international fight against AIDS in Africa–in light of transcendent references, God and America, Bono performs the role of a public theologian.[18]

[11] Bono has called on American politicians, economists, theologians, and religious and social activists, particularly evangelicals,[19] to help him with his causes. His political buddies have ranged from Jesse Helms to Bill Clinton.[20] In 2002, he went on a tour of Africa with U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.[21] He has met frequently with Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs.[22] He has pleaded his causes on the Oprah Winfrey show[23] and in front of an evangelical audience at Wheaton College.[24] Pat Robertson has voiced his support for debt relief; Franklin Graham has helped him deliver Christmas gifts to African children;[25] and Melinda and Bill Gates have helped fund DATA, the organization for debt relief and health funding in Africa that grew out of the Jubilee 2000 campaign.[26] Of course, Bono has engaged public figures outside the United States, from Pope John Paul II to Desmond Tutu to United Nations councils, but his primary allies are American. And for Bono, America consumes the global anyway. Bono has said, “I live in America. Everyone lives in America.”[27] Indeed, America is Bono’s congregation; it is his pulpit.

[12] If America is Bono’s pulpit then what is his message? Bono draws on American symbols of the Constitution, the American “Idea,” and the rhetoric of universal freedom, human rights, and participatory democracy to imagine a global civil society or World Polity comprising these values. Bono told USA Today, “America is not just a country; it's an idea. It's like it's hardwired into America: the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence.”[28] He then envisions social change as the integration of social agents, from individuals to nation states, into this polity. In his Harvard commencement address in 2001, Bono discussed America’s responsibility to Africa and then told the graduating class, “Isn't ‘Love thy neighbour’ in the global village so inconvenient? God writes us these lines but we have to sing them ... take them to the top of the charts, but its not what the radio is playing–is it? I know.”[29] Referring to a transcendent moral authority, Bono makes a plea for global communal compassion on behalf of Africa. Invoking a prophetic discourse familiar to historians of American religion, Bono calls America to an equality that, according to him, is as yet unsung.

[13] Martin Luther King, Jr. once proclaimed to his opponents that, “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force.”[30] In a Protestant fashion resembling King, Bono emphasizes a spiritual freedom inside each individual that is impossible to regulate with external control. You can regulate bodies, but you can’t regulate souls. This is what Bono means when, referring to the incarceration of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, he sings, “outside are the prisoners, inside the free.” Like the apostle Paul in his Roman cell, Mandela remains inwardly free in spirit and mind; it is the jailers outside, those representing apartheid that are prisoners of their own injustice. And invoking King, who was also concerned with fair labor practices–after all, he was involved in a workers’ strike in Memphis on the eve of his assassination–Bono strives to “set the prisoners free,” both inside and outside the economic “iron cage.” While distributing his message of love on the waves of global economic flows, Bono shakes loose change from the pockets of the world’s bankers, brokers, and politicians. Bono hopes that the redistribution of wealth, in the form of first world philanthropy and debt forgiveness, will free third world countries from their economic shackles. Moving towards an imagined horizon of economic possibility, where the world’s poor can release their spiritual colors on a global stage, Bono promotes a moral rendering of World Polity and transparent expansion of capitalist markets.[31]

[14] In sum, Bono religiously promotes an emerging U.S. led World Polity. This polity is marked by an incomplete international civil society that emphasizes certain “shared” values expressed in multiple human rights discourses. Further, this World Polity is an extended imagining of U.S. civil society and exhibits all its internal contradictions of promise and discontent. As theological performer, Bono sees himself as a moral conscience of this polity, labouring for the realization of globalization’s promises. Again, Bono’s hope in the promises of globalization is rooted in his belief that love can conquer all; this includes God, America, and capitalist markets. For example, even on U2’s most self-indulgent album, Pop, which took ironic aim at the “bubble gum” marketing of globalization, Bono sang, “You can reach, but you can’t grab it. You can’t hold it, control it. You can’t bag it. You can push, but you can’t direct it. Circulate, regulate, oh no. You cannot connect it–love.”[32] For Bono, it is love and only love that can rattle the “iron cage” of late-modern capitalism.[33] In other words, Bono, like King, hopes that the liberties of the few will become liberty for all. And, as Bono sings in a song dedicated to King, he also believes that the best way to spread such liberties is through a message of love.[34]

[15] It is perhaps symbolic that his high school peers named Bono after a hearing aid, because this is exactly the role he sees himself performing today on the global scene; he believes he is helping first world countries, especially the United States, hear the pleas of the third world. And curiously, the name of the hearing aid device, Bono Vox, is a derivative of Bona Vox, which in Latin means “good voice.” Bono “listens” to the “cries of the oppressed,” the voices of those suffering in Africa that may go unheard in America, and gives “voice to these voiceless.” But Bono, as his critics are quick to point out, also makes quite a bit of money representing the underrepresented.[35] Bono is a culturally concerned pragmatic and benevolent capitalist.[36] He, like his American counterpart Oprah, who according to historian Kathryn Lofton is a priestess of spiritual capitalism in America, has nothing against making money.[37] Yes, Bono advocates the redistribution of wealth to African nations, but like Oprah this redistribution is through philanthropic gift; it is only for the purpose of leveling the economic playing field, enabling individuals and nation-states to become self-determining. While lyrically and politically tangled, Bono is also economically tangled up with America.

[16] So Bono wrestles the Angel, but is the Angel overcome? The biblical allusion to Jacob in “Bullet the Blue Sky” can be extended metaphorically to Bono. As the narrative in Genesis suggests, Jacob wrestled a messenger of God during the night. Wrenched together at daybreak, the messenger asked Jacob to be released. But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” The man asked him, “What is your name?” “Jacob,” he answered. Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.”[38] Performing Jacob, Bono struggles symbolically with God and the United States. Bono understands both God and America as that which must be overcome. For Bono, America is a messenger of God’s potential goodness, God’s grace, understood here as the ability to forgive debt. And like the messenger in the story, America has the power to name: it has the power to grant or dispose a nation state. Bono, through DATA, recognizes this power and calls on it on behalf of God’s people. Wrenched at daybreak with America, Bono demands grace. With reference to God, he requests a new covenant of fairness at the edge of economic possibility.

Overcoming Religion: Bono Blurs the Lines Between Rock ‘n’ Roll and Revival

[17] On U2’s “Vertigo” tour, Bono wears a headband in concert that includes the major symbols of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity–a Crescent, the Star of David, and the Cross–within the word “Coexist.” Bono dons the headband, which some have referred to as the “rock messiah bandana,” during “Love and Peace or Else” and keeps it on for other tunes, including “Miss Sarajevo,” a song that asks, “Is there a time for first communion? Is there a time for synagogue? Is there a time to turn to Mecca, beauty queen before God?” Bono concludes by reflecting, “Is there a time for shared values … a time for human rights?” As one fan recounted in an online blog, during “Bullet the Blue Sky,” Bono “slips his rock messiah bandana over his eyes and gets down on his knees with his hands over his head.” This fan continued to write, “I think he's trying to make a point about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.”[39] And in what some refer to as the “We are all children of Father Abraham” sermon, Bono explains the significance of the headband to the audience by pointing to each symbol while delivering in cadence, “Jesus, Jew, Muhammad; It’s true, all sons of Abraham.”[40]

[18] As mentioned earlier, Bono’s performance of “Bullet the Blue Sky,” was one of his earliest sermons to America. During a break in the song, Bono would launch into a prophetic homily, as he did in the 1980s on the “Rattle and Hum” album and tour. Back then it was about American militarism or, in other songs, apartheid and South Africa. Later, at the turn of the new millennium, on the “Elevation” tour, it was the moral dangers of materialism, the failure of the European Union, or the AIDS crisis in Africa. And on the “Vertigo” tour, it has been a post-9/11 message of religious transcendence. In each case, the message is reproduced, packaged and delivered in a rationalized fashion. The content may change, but the method stays the same. The lights dim, Bono shines a spotlight around a packed stadium. Bono breaks out his “messiah headband.” Bono calls out visiting politicians seated in a luxury box. Bono runs around a heart-shaped stage. These are techniques of show, yes, but they also resemble the modern revival techniques perfected by nineteenth century American evangelists.

[19] Flashback to upstate New York in 1830, to an area referred to by American religious historians as the “burned-over district” because of its sweeping religious fervor, where evangelist Charles Finney declared to a captive audience of mostly middle-class Christians that, “God has made man a moral free agent.” Finney’s homily that November day at the Third Presbyterian Church in Rochester was the culmination of five years of revival work. And, as Paul E. Johnson argued, it signaled a revolution in American religious thought and practice, a turn away from divine providence to human agency.[41] Finney-led revivals were part of a larger cultural and theological shift, one predicated on the premise that humans played a role in personal and collective salvation. This is why revivals were so important for Finney: they were necessary vehicles of Christian conversion, regeneration, and social purification.

[20] For Finney, the prosperity of the church depended upon revivals and he asserted that, “no doctrine is more dangerous” than the Calvinist notion that revivals were a miracle, and as such beyond “the ordinary rules of cause and effect.”[42] In other words, it was not enough, as Jonathan Edwards had done, to just preach the word and leave it to God to sort through the sinners. Like a farmer, the revivalist must sow his seed and, with the help of God, he should soon harvest a crop. In contrast to miracles, Finney argued that revivals were, “The right use of appropriate means.” Like crops, revivals required methodical action and followed set “stages of conviction, repentance, and reformation.” In each revival, Finney employed a repertoire of rhetorical and material techniques, including the famous “anxious bench,” where seekers were called to ponder their eternal souls in full gaze of all gathered.

[21] With his pioneering “modern revival techniques,” Finney overcame the dominant Calvinist theology preached in the Protestant churches of his day. Initially, Finney stood outside those churches, rebuking them with prophetic voice. His opponents, in turn, denounced Finney’s excessive emotional promotions and his disregard for God’s providence. But eventually, a number of his critics were converted, including Lyman Beecher, a Presbyterian minister in Boston and sworn enemy of Finney. Beecher, who had once vowed to “call out the artillerymen” if Finney ever brought his revivals to Boston, welcomed him into his pulpit in 1831.[43] The impact of Finney’s preaching, felt in churches from Boston to Rochester to Philadelphia, illustrates the institutional connections between the revivals and congregations. As historian Donald Mathews put it, “… one cannot have a revival without churches.”[44] Through revivals, Finney helped broaden the scope of a number Protestant churches in America, expanding their membership from the elect to the converted.

[22] I spend so much time on Finney because his revivals symbolize a larger historical phenomenon of the Second Great Awakening, the series of revivals from the 1780s to the 1830s that Mathews argues was a “nationalizing” force in America. According to Mathews, these revivals helped organize a geographically dispersed group of people into a national body through the formation of “thousands of [similar] local organizations that helped to create ‘a common world of experience.’”[45] What the Second Great Awakening did was, in the words of Nathan Hatch, “democratize” Christianity in America. The revivals brought the principles of democracy, individualism, and self-governance, to the people through the church. During this time, preachers, the voices of the popular church, “fanned the flames of religious ecstasy” from the pulpit and were accompanied by “rousing gospel singing.” For Hatch, the revivals of the Second Great Awakening were, “the very incarnation of the church into popular culture.”[46]

[23] Focusing on their cultural impact, I compare the religious work of American revivalists, like Finney, with Bono’s political activism. Bono’s political work mirrors the religious work of select American revivalists since the nineteenth century; it has a similar net effect. For example, Bono’s work with DATA, moralized in concerts and speaking engagements, promotes the same principles–democracy, individualism, and self-governance–that were distributed, or made “incarnate in popular culture” by Second Great Awakening revivalists. And by comparison, Bono’s methods of distribution and strategies of conversion, his concert antics and rhetorical tropes, highly resemble those of Finney, as well as later evangelists, such as D. L. Moody, Sam Jones, and Billy Sunday, who took religious showmanship to new heights.[47] Like these revivalists, Bono is out to make converts. In his address at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton, U.K., Bono confessed, “If you're already converted, you don't need me preaching at you. Though I must admit I enjoy it.”[48]

[24] Similar to Finney, Bono has his own conversion techniques. For example, when Bono calls out visiting politicians at his concerts, including Bill Clinton and United Nations representatives, he is putting them on his version of the anxious bench. He is placing them in the political gaze of his audience until they convert to his cause. In terms of conversion tactics, Bono is comparable to Finney, who believed that after conversion at a revival a new believer:

… will be filled with a tender and burning love for souls. They will be in agony for individuals whom they want to have saved; their friends, relations, enemies. They will not only be urging them to give their hearts to God, but they will carry them to God in the arms of faith, and with strong crying and tears beseech God to have mercy on them, and save their souls from endless burnings.[49]

Finney moved believers spiritually and emotionally towards conversion and Bono has had a similar effect on his political converts, including Jesse Helms, the long-time North Carolina Senator known for his staunch conservatism. After attending a U2 concert and meeting Bono in person, Helms was reportedly moved to tears and later became a strong supporter of the fight against AIDS in Africa.[50]

[25] In each revival, Finney tried to bring his audience closer to God, giving them a taste of heaven, to induce repentance and conversion. Finney describes the effect of this technique:

A revival breaks the power of the world and of sin over Christians. It brings them to such vantage ground that they get a fresh impulse towards heaven. They have a new foretaste of heaven, and new desires after union to God; and the charm of the world is broken, and the power of sin overcome.[51]

After showing the purity of the divine, Finney then called Christians, both old and new to clean themselves up, including body and soul, and go out and convert others. If they were diligent in their task, together they could usher in the millennium in a few short months. Likewise, Bono attempts to “elevate” his audience, lifting them to a place “where the streets have no name.” For example, on the “Elevation” tour in 2001, Bono proclaimed, “The goal is soul!” and encouraged the audience to “turn this song into a prayer.”[52] Through albums, concerts, and endless speaking tours, Bono tries to foster social conditions that allow for salvific bodily expressions on earth. And although Bono does not expect to usher in the new millennium in three months, as Finney did, he does demonstrate a similar type of dispensationalist fervor, working diligently for the political realization of a biblical Jubilee, the “era of grace.”

[26] Bono’s delivery of religious messages and symbols in concerts also resembles the methods of revivalists like Dwight L. Moody, who incorporated gospel singing into his revivals. Song leader Ira D. Sankey almost always accompanied Moody on his itinerant tours, first in Great Britain and later throughout the United States. Sankey worked from his own songbook, the “Moody and Sankey Hymn-book,” which a New York Times reporter, who attended a Moody revival in 1875, described as, “… the best for congregational use ever printed. Its words are full of the Gospel, its tunes express the thoughts they are allied to, and are so simple and yet positive in character that any one can sing them after once hearing them.”[53] Of course, not all of U2’s songs are “positive,” but many are straightforward and simple. Some are even gospel-like, such as the anthem dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pride (In the Name of Love),” or the version of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” recorded with the Harlem Gospel Choir. And few would dispute that almost the entire audience can, and does, sing along with Bono in concert. Although Bono distances his music from contemporary Christian “praise and worship” songs, what he calls “happy clappy,” that are more direct descendents of the “Moody and Sankey Hymn-book,” he does admit that his songs “proclaim Christ.” Referencing the biblical description of creation as a natural reflection of the divine, Bono asserts that U2’s music has its “own proclamations” of God.[54] In concert then, Bono often performs the dual role of gospel song leader and evangelist; in a way, he is a rock ‘n’ roll Moody and Sankey in one.

[27] In addition to musical and rhetorical techniques, one of the most striking similarities between Bono and American revivalists is his continued attempts to “overcome religion.” As I mentioned earlier, Bono expressed at the 2006 prayer breakfast that he felt like “religion often gets in the way of God.”[55] Bono interprets his resistance to “religion” as a lesson learned from growing up in an Irish home with a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. So on one level, Bono’s attitudes towards “organized religion” are shaped by his Irish context. In the battles between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, Bono refused to take sides. But on another level, Bono’s determination to work outside religious institutions is related to his evangelical disposition. With the exception of bassist Adam Clayton, U2 members were actively involved in evangelical Christian groups in their early years. They were so involved, in fact, that it became an issue for the band. At one point, Bono, Larry Mullen, Jr. and the Edge contemplated whether to continue in rock ‘n’ roll or take on more overtly Christian pursuits.[56] They, of course, chose the former. But it is clear that their evangelical impulse did not die with that decision. Bono, in particular, has continually privileged the “religious” individual over corporate “religion” in his Messianic rock ‘n’ roll work.[57]

[28] Bono’s emphasis on the individual relationship with the divine as the proper religious model of salvation is what makes his work so similar to Protestant revivalists in America. Like these revivalists, Bono preaches a message of individual faith over institutional sacraments. In Protestant fashion, Bono “protests” against clergy, those “staring at the sun.”[58] His suspicion of organized religion echoes the words of Billy Sunday, “faith in Jesus saves you, not faith in the Church.”[59] For Sunday, Jesus is the only way. For Bono, Jesus is his way but not the only way; it is up to the individual to find a personal path for the soul. Bono’s soteriological prescriptions are secular because, for him, religious individuals, and not church institutions, are sites of salvation.

[29] In other words, in the Roman Catholic Church the Eucharist is a vehicle of salvation; it is made sacred as “real presence” through the charisma of the office, not the individual.[60] The priest has power because of a relationship to the church, through apostolic succession. Bono protests the priestly authority of the church, opting for individual choice over institutional obligation. In the song “Acrobat,” recorded on Achtung Baby, Bono quips, “Yeah, I would break bread and wine if there was a church I could receive in.”[61] Bono’s lyrical insistence on the primacy of soul-freedom, of individual sovereignty or self-determination, harkens Finney’s assessment that “man is a moral free agent.”

[30] Remarkably, Bono’s attitude towards the Eucharist resembles even the likes of Sam Jones. In a revival sermon, Jones once asked rhetorically, “What must I do to be saved?” As part of his answer Jones said:

I might advise a man to take the sacrament of the Lord’s-supper. This is one of the sacraments of the Church of God … yet I see how a man may take communion regularly, may partake of the sacrament once a month, and die and be lost at last.[62]

For Jones, only individual belief in God’s grace can save a person from being “lost” and in danger of the fires of hell, not the sacraments of the Church. While Bono may not share Jones’ opinion that salvation “is not a song” but simply “deliverance from sin,” he does share an evangelical rejection of sacramental salvation.[63] This rejection, along with his emphasis on individual moral freedom, is what makes Bono’s message a “secularized soteriology.” Like American revivalists from Finney to Jones, Bono has preached a message of individual salvation without church mediation and has distributed this message using similar revival techniques.

Overcoming Globalization: Bono Prays for Africa

[31] In “Bullet the Blue Sky,” Bono dealt with the dark side of America, but not all of his sermons linger there. Others are much more optimistic about America’s latent goodness. Bono may uncover the sins, but he quickly recovers the sinners with grace. U2’s album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, is perhaps the band’s most optimistic and straightforward work.[64] Songs titled “Peace on Earth,” “Grace,” and “Beautiful Day” paint a portrait of human reconciliation and possibility. While “Peace on Earth” is Bono’s utopian prayer, “Grace” is his moral mantra; it is his prescription for proper disposition for the faithful while they await utopian arrival. Bono sings, “Grace finds goodness in everything … Grace finds beauty in everything … Grace makes beauty out of ugly things.”[65]

[32] In “Beautiful Day,” Bono infuses this notion of grace with global images of economic progress:

See the canyons broken by cloud, See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the Bedouin fires at night, See the oil fields at first light
See the bird with a leaf in her mouth, After the flood all the colors came out.[66]

These are contrasting images: the environmental costs of economic progress set against a romantic spiritual optimism. The last line, a reference to the story of Noah and the flood in Hebrew Scriptures, implies a new world washed clean by grace and a new covenant of hope for God’s people. As evidenced by his political activism, this line also signals Bono’s hope that the utopian potential of globalization will soon overcome its discontents. Grace makes beauty out of everything.

[33] Bono’s formula for social change is clearly revealed in the goals of DATA. According to the DATA website, which has a photo of Bono pointing at the viewer, “DATA is a new organization which aims to raise awareness about the crisis swamping Africa: (DATA stands for) unpayable DEBTS, uncontrolled spread of AIDS, and unfair TRADE rules which keep AFRICANS poor.”[67] Bono, via DATA, is “asking that the governments of the world's wealthy nations–the United States, Europe, Canada and Japan–to respond quickly and generously to this emergency.” In order for African nations to receive this funding (and this is key) African leaders are required to adhere to the other meaning of the DATA acronym. They are asked to practice “DEMOCRACY, ACCOUNTABILITY and TRANSPARENCY–to make sure that help for African people goes where it's intended and makes a real difference.”[68] Thus, in order to receive foreign monetary aid, African nations must shape themselves in the image of America.

[34] United States foreign aid, though, is not just a humanitarian gesture; it is also a political tool.[69] U.S. foreign spending on world poverty was at its highest during the Cold War when the U.S. saw fighting poverty as preventing communism. Foreign aid fell sharply after the Cold War in the 1990s but has picked up again after September 11. Economists Lael Brainard and Robert Litan argue:

The campaign against terrorism has provided a potentially powerful political rationale for foreign assistance–namely, that by strengthening foreign economies, aid may help weaken incentives for their residents to turn to terrorism … (September 11) reinforced the direct interest of the wealthier nations in strengthening the trading system by rectifying the perceived inequities that prevent millions of the world’s poor from reaping the potential benefits of globalization.[70]

U.S. foreign spending in the form of developmental aid is one mechanism for expanding global markets and is justified by the rhetoric of a war on terrorism. President George W. Bush has vowed that “The terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, and we will defeat them by expanding and encouraging world trade.”[71]

[35] Bono uses similar anti-terrorist rhetoric to gain support for DATA. He claims there are “potentially another 10 Afghanistans in Africa” and that the U.S. should “prevent the fires rather than putting them out.”[72] He likens the U.S. to a brand that has lost its shine and links this image to the war on terror. Bono:

If the United States is a brand–and all countries in a certain way are brands–when was the brand of the USA the most sparkling? The answer is, of course, after the second World War. My father looked to America like Ireland was a part of it; he was so proud. Europeans were. That was after the Marshall Plan, which was not just about liberating Europe, of course, but about rebuilding Europe. Again, not just out of mercy, but as a bulwark against the Soviets in the Cold War. Well, this is a bulwark against Islamic extremism in the hot war. They are analogous.[73]

Bono’s reference to the Marshall Plan is telling because it reveals a great deal about his religious politic.[74] Using the Marshall Plan as a model, Bono’s formula for social change draws on a tradition that envisions America as a beacon of peace and democracy to the world. It is a tradition that interprets America’s political and economic errands as religious ones. Though America may stray at times, it is still called to protect the world from all threats to freedom, democracy, and the market, whatever form these threats may take, whether communism, atheism, or Islamic extremism.[75]

[36] Over a half-century before Bono preached his message of “love thy neighbour in the global village” at a Harvard commencement, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall outlined his own American errand to the Harvard class of 1947. In his commencement address, Marshall famously advocated for U.S. political and economic involvement in the post-war reconstruction of Europe. Justifying involvement with reference to the economic benefits to America and the world, Marshall told the Harvard students that:

… the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.[76]

Marshall’s strategies for creating global stability by expanding American economic markets and promoting political consensus after World Ware II have been renewed in the late twentieth century by proponents of a “Global Marshall Plan,” including Bono and Jeffrey Sachs, who served as an advisor for Jubilee 2000.[77] Both Bono and Sachs believe that the same model of political and economic integration applied to Europe in the mid-twentieth century should be applied to Africa in the new millennium. Gesturing to their predecessor, Bono and Sachs believe that the best way to assure stability at home and abroad is for the U.S. to fight global poverty with aid and ideology, not to police other nations with military might.

[37] As a component of the Global Marshall Plan, DATA is a vehicle of democratization and the expansion of capitalist markets. In his promotions of this plan, Bono has employed a religious rhetoric of universal human rights and economic responsibility. Overlooked in Bono’s celebrations of a Global Marshall Plan and his visions of an emerging World Polity or global village, however, are problems of missionary endeavour, problems of political and economic occupation, problems of bureaucratic overlay, and problems of totalizing eschatology. And all of these problems are tied to a history of European and American colonization of Africa. Elevating Africa today is not the same as reconstructing Europe yesterday. Some scholars may feel, as I do, that the “stuck in a moment” myth of economic transparency ignores legacies of wealth and their material histories; it forgets earlier extractions of African labor and resources by American and European powers. Bono, though, would not deny this historical memory loss. In fact, he promotes it. Bono hopes that the political and economic integration of Africa into “transparent” global markets will not only eliminate poverty, it will also erase history. Bono, like Tutu in South Africa with the reconciliation committee, preaches a policy of forgive and forget–to ‘forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors’–in order to move forward. In other words, Bono truly believes in spiritual and economic rebirth, that history can be removed from history by God’s grace and America’s gift. After the flood all the colours come out [m1] .

[38] Many in Africa have embraced Bono’s pragmatic optimism, calling on him as their spokesman and employing a similar rhetoric in the interest of progress. For example, Bono has been referred to in the Africa News Service as “a passionate champion of Africa.”[78] Some Africans even see Bono as a vehicle of nationalist progress. In a letter to the editor, Hamid Sirdar, a citizen of Zimbabwe wrote:

We must be able to hold the Zimbabwe flag with pride. We must seek to know the national anthem and sing it when appropriate. … We cannot have selective acceptance of citizenship. I pray for the future of our country and hope that God will give us the courage to do what is right to improve the lives of all our people. We need the likes of Bono here, although he is fighting an international battle on our behalf.[79]

As advocate and mediator for African citizens like Sirdar, Bono has manufactured his own “myth of the redeemer” and this myth has been bought and sold throughout Africa to justify the integration of nation-states into imagined international political spheres and expanding economic markets across the continent. Bono hopes that the diffusion of his message of love within the networks of political and economic integration can open doors of global opportunity and elevate African nation-states and their citizens, enabling sovereignty and self-determination.

[39] In his global prescriptions for spiritual salvation through economic integration, Bono conjures an imagined World Polity, or global civil society, where nations are collectively judged by the standards of a universal human rights discourse. Saskia Sassen has described how this global civil society is potentially empowering for wage-labour women:

The ascendance of an international human rights regime and of a large variety of nonstate actors in the international arena signals the expansion of an international civil society. This is clearly a contested space, particularly when we consider the logic of the capital market–profitability at all costs–against that of the human rights regime. But it does represent a space where women can gain visibility as individuals and as collective actors, and come out of the invisibility of aggregate membership in a nation-state exclusively represented by the sovereign.[80]

While Bono does not theoretically replicate Sassen’s more Marxian feminist position–where the material conditions of labour and not the ideal interests of love are the real movers of history–he does preach a message of sovereignty, of self-determination for both individuals and nation-states that mirrors Sassen’s description. In the context of World Polity, the individual is universally sacred and the nation-state is the proper mediator between the most sacred of personal acts, the ability to sell one’s labour at the altar of the global market.

[40] According to Sassen, the nation-state is still an important actor in a global market economy, even if transnational networks and flows, which have produced shifting coalitions of interested social actors in globalized systems, have reconfigured it. Sassen defines sovereignty as the ability to regulate a defined region of power in accordance to an agent’s will or self-interests. The nation-state has usually been a good example of this type of sovereignty. A national government can exercise its will (whether self-defined or representative of the will of “the people”) upon its citizens who live within a geographic (physical) and/or ideological (imagined) territory. Using coercion, states can levy taxes, enforce legal codes, and regulate economic exchanges, among other things. Sassen proposes though, that globalization disrupts sovereignty, fracturing political identities and dislocating both coercive and consensual will. In the example of the nation-states, governments no longer, if they ever did, have absolute control within the spheres of power they occupy. Instead, they share these spheres with a number of global actors.[81] In his advocacy for Africa and his work with DATA, Bono hopes these disruptions will provide spaces for change; globalization will overcome its discontents: an emerging World Polity, or global civil society, organized around a universal rights regime, will triumph over the most powerful of nation states.

Conclusion

[41] During a concert in Chicago in 2005, U2 finished the song “Running to Stand Still” with Bono signing “halleluiah” beneath a digital banner that read, “On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Following the historic act the Assembly called upon all member countries to publicize the text of the declaration.” As the banner faded away, the band transitioned to the next anthem, “Pride (In the Name of Love),” with video clips of a woman reading the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shown overhead. At the end of “Pride,” Bono called out for the audience to “Sing for Dr. King, for Dr. King’s dream, for a dream big enough to fit the whole world, a dream where everyone is created equal under the eyes of God. Everyone!” Bono then carried his homiletic tune from America to Africa, announcing that Dr. King’s dream is “not just an American dream, or an Asian dream, or a European Dream; it is also an African dream!” At that moment, digital flags of African nations were lowered above the stage as U2 faded into “Where the Streets Have No Name.” As the intro gradually ascended, Bono rhythmically shouted, “From the bridge at Selma over the Mississippi to the mouth of the river Nile. From the swamp lands of Louisiana to the high peaks of Kilimanjaro. From Dr. King’s America to Nelson Mandela’s Africa, the journey of equality moves on.”[82]

[42] At the close of his 2006 prayer breakfast speech in Washington D.C., Bono made a direct plea for U.S. funding to African nations, saying, “To give one percent more is right. It’s smart. And it’s blessed. There is a continent–Africa–being consumed by flames. I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did–or did not do–to put the fire out in Africa.” In this paper, I have described Bono’s religious politic, his model for social change, and compared his public advocacy for Africa to the religious work of American revivalists like Charles Finney. In many ways, Africa is Bono’s “burned over district.” The continent stands at the center of Bono’s imagined political process: human rights discourses can integrate individuals and nation-states into a World Polity. Further, I have argued that Bono’s public advocacy for Africa, performed in concerts and speaking engagements, reveals a secularized soteriology, a public prescription of spiritual and economic salvation unbounded by religious institutions. Finally, this message has been packaged and delivered in ways that blur distinctions between show business and modern revival techniques.

[43] I conclude here by suggesting that Bono’s emphasis on the “religious” individual over corporate “religion” goes hand in hand with the political and economic demands of an imagined World Polity: democracy, individualism, and self-governance. I have compared Bono’s political work to Finney’s religious work because, at least functionally, both have accomplished similar tasks; they have organized individuals religiously and integrated them economically into larger bodies. In Paul Johnson’s interpretation, Finney’s revivals were a religious solution to the moral dilemma of free labour in an industrializing society. In fact, Johnson believes that the moral dilemma and political impasse of free labor in mid-1820s New York “prepared the ground” for Finney. Business leaders and factory owners needed a solution for their inefficient labour force. Finney’s revivals were their answer. In short, the revivals “… healed divisions within the middle class and turned businessmen and masters into an active and united missionary army.”[83] This is why Johnson describes the 1830s revivals in the “burned over district” as part of “a shopkeeper’s millennium.” The revivals did not benefit society as a whole but served the interests of an industrialist class.

[44] So the questions become: “Is Bono’s advocacy of Jubilee, the ‘era of grace,’ part of a religious solution to the moral dilemma of Africa? Has the plight of Africa, of debt and AIDS, ‘prepared the ground’ for Bono?” In this short space, I tentatively answer “yes” to both. Recall that in 1949, another evangelist by the name of Billy Graham, who happened to preach an anti-communist message at a revival in Los Angeles, was thrust onto the American scene by the media efforts of William Randolph Hearst, who told his newspaper and magazine staffers to “Puff Graham!” That year, Graham appeared on the cover of Life, Time, and Newsweek magazines.[84] One could argue that Bono needs very little “puffing.” He does plenty of that on his own rock star time. But it is also important to remember that U2 burst onto the global scene through their participation in “Live Aid,” a series of benefit concerts for Africa in the mid 1980s.[85] And the work Bono and U2 began in Africa during the 1980s has become increasingly more relevant in a post-9/11 world. As the moral dilemma of free labor was to Finney and the threat of communism was to Graham, so are the challenges of debt, AIDS, and threats of terrorism in Africa to Bono.

[45] So what does all this mean in terms of evaluating the efficacy of Bono’s religious politic? Well, one thing is for sure: revivals, even the rock ‘n’ roll kind, do not equal political revolution. Instead, as I have tried to argue in this paper, revivals are integrative, in the most Durkheimian sense–they work in collaboration with existing religious and economic institutions (even when they prophesy against them) and renew them by extending their boundaries and imagining new configurations of sovereignty. Yes, some persons may benefit, working their way up into an expanding middle class, as they did in Rochester in the 1830s, but not everyone. Within this model of social change, capital, both cultural and economic, is never evenly distributed. With every political and economic expansion is a contraction. Or as theorists Michael Mann puts it, there is a “dark side” of democracy, a logic of coercion and cleansing that operates underneath the ideals of freedom and equality.[86]

[46] Take the example of Live 8, the most recent incarnation of Live Aid and another well intentioned display of global solidarity on behalf of the African poor. On 2 July 2005, crowds gathered at venues in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Africa and the Russian Federation. The goal of these benefit concerts was to help “Make Poverty History” by influencing world politicians. Towards this end, the estimated three billion viewers, more than twice as many as the initial benefit concert, were asked to give their names and not their money for the cause. The global display culminated with a concert finale, referred to by organizers as the “Final Push,” in Edinburgh, Scotland on 4 July, the first day of the G8 Summit meetings in nearby Gleneagles Hotel.[87] By most accounts, the concert series did sway political opinion. For example, DATA reported that the G8 promised to “increase aid to Africa by US $25 billion by 2010.”[88] Buoyed by this success, Bono described Live 8 as a “movement of church people and trade unionists, soccer moms and student activists” that gave “the poorest of the poor real political muscle for the first time.”[89]

[47] Unfortunately, however, the political muscle flexed on behalf of the poorest of the poor was not strong enough to hold politicians to their promises. A year after the summit, Oliver Buston, European Director of DATA, reported that the G8 had followed through on only half of its commitments made at Gleneagles.[90] At the present moment, in 2006, African nations are still struggling to compete in “transparent” global markets. Some may argue, though, that any positive progress is better than no progress. But as historian William Chafe concluded in his study of the Civil Rights movement in Greensboro, North Carolina during the 1960s, a “progressive mystique” may hinder real democratic progress, even when it champions the ideals of democratic discourse. As Chafe puts it, the civility of those in power will remain in tension with the civil rights of those in need “as long as those who take part in traditional political discourse do not begin from the same place and do not share the same resources.”[91] While Bono tries to counter the resource imbalance–to free African nations of debt and enable them to enter the global political discourse on equal footing as other nations–his work is dependent on the philanthropy and civility of those in power. And as long as those in power give some aid, but not enough, then they will continue to regulate the distribution of economic and political freedom, limiting it to an elect few while holding it out as a horizon of hope for the world’s poor.

[48] Put bluntly, I would have to believe that the realization of the “era of grace” will, in the long run, serve the interests of capital investors and industrialists more than it will benefit African nations and their citizens. This does not mean that “good things” will not and have not occurred. Rather it means that, calling out Bono’s more prophetic voice, “the rich stay healthy and the sick stay poor.”[92] Bono’s advocacy for Africa may bring health to many, making a few more rich and few less poor. But the distribution of economic salvation is still contingent on the benevolence of the rich. In other words, Bono has faith and hope in God’s grace and America’s gift. But it remains to be seen whether this will be an American Millennium or an African Jubilee. Bono wrestles America, but is America overcome?

Abstract

Introduction

Overcoming Globalization: Bono Prays for Africa

Conclusion

Notes