Bono, Christian Neoliberal (but also, Perhaps, a Little Bit More)

[I was asked to write about Bono's memoir for Current; my review is here, but, as usual, I've posted my longer version here, as a Christmas gift to U2 haters and fans alike. Enjoy!]

Bono’s raw talent as the lead singer, primary songwriter, and frontman for the rock band U2 for all its more-than 45 years of existence is–unless one is fervently committed to maintaining the absolute purity of one’s musical hipster or snob credentials–pretty much undeniable. His talent for striking much of his band’s audience as pretentious, outrageous, hectoring, and annoying is–as the above caveat makes clear–also pretty much undeniable. Bono’s famous, self-conscious rant (“Am I bugging you? I don’t mean to bug ya”), captured in the 1988 documentary Rattle and Hum (the accompanying album to which being, perhaps revealingly considering what I’m going to argue here, my single favorite U2 album) shows that his reputation was already becoming part of his shtick by the time the band was barely a decade old, and it has only grown since. Like him or hate him, acknowledging Bono’s enormous accomplishments, both as a musician and as a social activist–accomplishments which were celebrated when U2 were received the Kennedy Center Honors this year (the ceremony took place on December 4, and will be broadcast on December 28)–means accepting him for what he is. So this Christmas, let's ask: just who, exactly, is he?

Millions of words, both of praise and criticism, have been written about U2's music and Bono’s leadership in efforts to fight poverty and promote development around the world over the decades; Bono’s own memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, now adds to it. It’s a charming, revealing, and–in my opinion–only occasionally annoying book. Bono is skilled with words, and he relates with real thoughtfulness and often funny self-deprecation dozens of stories about his childhood, the formation of U2, his courtship of his wife Ali, and the ups and downs of song-writing, touring, recording, and making artistic and business choices (and sometimes regretting them) as the band became more and more successful; he has interesting, even intelligent things to say about all sorts of musicians and bands (from Joy Division to Johnny Cash, from Siouxsie and the Banshees to Frank Sinatra) that shaped Bono's personal musical milieu. And his sketches of the rich, the famous, and the notorious that he, his family, and his band have encountered along the way are a particular delight, even when they border on the glad-handing (aside from Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump–and maybe, just maybe, Prince–Bono is fulsome in his praise for pretty much everyone that gets a mention in the book, up to and including many leading members of the Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations). While his turns to introspection do eventually weigh down the text's lyricism towards the end, as he struggles with his own health and mortality, mostly the result is a fascinating and even poetic survey of the life of a man whose restless, searching, passionate mind is constantly pushing him onward. In what direction? Simply put, towards God. 

As Bono writes in an early chapter, while relating his pre-U2 memories of attending a “Holy Roller” church with a teen-age friend in Dublin in the mid-1970s:

[L]istening to the speakers at these meetings, I was...attracted to the God of the scriptures that they read from. I wasn’t sure I’d ever encountered such a presence in our lovely little Church of Ireland in St. Canice’s [Bono’s mother was a Protestant, his father was Catholic; as children, he and his brother attended Protestant services with their mother]....I did have a sense of the divine, but it was inchoate and formless, so when I started to uncover clues about the nature of this presence, I was fascinated. The Bible held me rapt. The words stepped off the page and followed me home....

I’d always be first up when there was an altar call, the ‘come to Jesus’ moment. I still am. If I was in a café right now and someone said ‘Stand up if you’re ready to give your life to Jesus,’ I’d be the first on my feet. I took Jesus with me everywhere and I still do. I’ve never left Jesus out of the most banal or profane actions of my life (pp. 47-48).

This isn’t a surprisingly revelation; despite the members of U2 having never identified themselves as a Christian band, and in fact having regularly rejected that label over the decades, the deep, however heterodox, Christian piety which has characterized so many of the songs Bono has written is hard to miss. This isn’t just something that U2 super-fans discuss on online forums; anyone who can use Google can find multiple articles (see here) and even whole books (see here) devoted to Christian explorations of the band, beginning with stories about the influence the Shalom Fellowship–a radical Christian movement which the young Bono, lead guitarist Edge, and drummer Larry Mullen were all members of (bassist Adam Clayton is the one secular member of the band)–had on their early history, including nearly ending the band while in the midst of preparing their second album, October, when the question of balancing burgeoning fame with a Christian vocation seemed impossible to navigate. (As related in Surrender, their manager reminded them that he had already, on the band’s behalf, signed off on all the arrangements for their upcoming post-album release tour, and that if the band broke up there would be legal ramifications; this led Bono--in a wonderful recreation of the confused yet straightforward, immature yet sincere, religious devotion of the young adults they all were at the time--to conclude: “Good point. God is unlikely to have us break the law”--p. 142.)

Still, Bono’s Christianity and his orientation towards the divine is an interpretive key many misunderstand, particularly when it comes to his activism. In a lengthy interview published in The New York Times Magazine on the occasion of Surrender’s release, Bono’s religious motivations are never mentioned. This is unfortunate, because inquiring into the connection between Bono’s faith and the way he has approached social activism tells us something about that faith, and its social manifestations, in a manner very relevant to our political moment, I think.

Central to that connection is Bono’s contempt for organized religion, and by extension almost any kind of institutionalized expression of an exclusionary ideological or moral or metaphysical claim, has to be placed front and center. The “Bloody Sunday” of January 30, 1972 (which Bono says is “tattooed on the mind of every Irish person of a certain age”–p. 164) inspired not only one of U2's most iconic songs but also grounded Bono’s rejection of both Catholicism and Protestantism, both nationalism and sectarianism. It’s not hard to see the connection between his dismissal of organized Christianity (“Was there any evidence Jesus even wanted a church?”) and his dismissal of his fellow citizens that attempted to draft U2 into taking a side on "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland (he describes shouting “This is not a rebel song!” during performances of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and the threats he and his wife received from Irish republican forces afterwards–p. 169). But if Bono’s deepest, and deeply universalist, Christian beliefs force him away from fully embracing any particularizing creed or community, to what does he acknowledging belonging to, if anything?

His struggle to articulate his own desires and doubts regarding how, and how much, and in what way he belongs to his wife and children, to his extended family and its complicated history (Bono’s mother died when he was 14, and before his father passed away at age 75, Bono learned that one of his childhood friends was actually his half-brother from an affair his father’s), and most of all to his fellow band members, is a consistent theme throughout Surrender. But that kind of belonging has no obvious social component to it. Instead, the belonging which has led him, from his young adulthood on, to feel enlisted in fights against global poverty is purely scriptural: as a believer, he cannot avoid the fact that “the poorest people are at the heart of Christianity,” and that “only once does Jesus speak about judgment, and when he does, it’s about how we treat the poor” (at which point he quotes Matthew 25:44-45–pp. 204-205).

The vocational connection to humanitarian service that many hundreds of millions have over the centuries felt called to is one of the greatest witness of Christianity, and Bono’s indefatigable involvement in, from the 1980s on, raising enormous funds for--and convincing governments to forgive even more enormous debts weighing upon--African countries is a tremendous example of such. But in being passionately, scripturally, connected to the acts of service themselves, and not to any community necessarily grounded in either providing, benefiting from, or even just understanding and adjudicating the impact of that service, leads to some interesting and, given the history of liberalism, perhaps predictable places. That Bono credits his fellow Irishman and longtime friend (and, incidentally, committed atheist) Bob Geldof--the musician behind the much-mocked Band Aid single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (not a bad song, I still insist!) and the celebrity-charity-defining concert-event, Live Aid--with being one of the primary catalysts in turning him to anti-poverty work is almost too easy, with the same accusations of historical ignorance, cultural condescension, and uncritical simple-mindedness which Geldof received having become a regular part of Bono’s reputation over the decades. (Though admittedly, that these two acts, and the organizational infrastructure they gave rise to, raised a quarter billion dollars, saved perhaps thousands of human beings from starvation, and established systems that continue to provide support to African communities in moving away from the legacies of colonialism today, is rarely mentioned by philosophically informed critics like myself today.)

As one who relishes an argument, Bono often in Surrender leans into this sometimes crudely transactional, sometimes blandly individualistic, liberal humanitarianism. “Fame is currency,” he writes; “I want to spend mine on the right stuff” (p. 357). He defends, despite the contention it causes, his friendships with billionaires and world leaders (when Bono received a humanitarian award from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom he had praised for his work in bringing peace to Northern Ireland, his own bandmate Mullen condemned the prize in the media the very next day, calling Blair a war criminal--p. 178); defends his monomaniacal focus on international development and whatever donors or developments, regardless of politics, might enable it to happen faster (leaving aside the post-punk posture of his early days, when Bono joined with other artists in support of Greenpeace, now he meets with scientists funded by Bill Gates to discuss nuclear power in Africa, much to the displeasure of his resolutely anti-nuke wife--p. 255); and defends the practical results of his work (after talking about his work with--and, I think, about genuine fondness for--such leaders as George W. Bush or Warren Buffett in pushing AIDS relief, debt assistance, and food aid to African nations, he adds it all up: “In the coming years, more than $100 billion of U.S. taxpayer money would be invested to ensure those children, women, and men did not lose their lives....One hundred billion dollars. That’s a lot of lentils”--p. 425). 

That Bono sees no essential conflict between his rootless, devout Christian humanitarianism and the complicated, often perverse realities of technological expansion and financial globalization is clear; the positive language which he uses to describe the transformative power of tax competitiveness and capital flows being just one example. Ireland, a “small rock in the North Atlantic,” realized that “ideas are more portable than objects,” and doubled-down on attracting businesses focused on pharmaceuticals and computer technology, thus turning--wonderfully, in his writing--“the land of saints and scholars” into “the land of sinners and software engineers, our once-light industry now entirely weightless” (p. 458). And as for the United States, which seems to dwell in Bono’s mind as the embodiment--at least potentially so--of Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount (“the light of the world”), its “entrepreneurial capitalism” is just part of the story. More than a nation-state to him, America is a mythological “dream,” the manifestation of a non-specific creed of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a “poetic idea in which we all have a stake” and “the greatest song the world has not yet heard” (pp. 463-464).

But despite all this (let’s call it “Christian neoliberalism”), it can’t be denied that Bono, in his memoir, also documents with real honesty his struggles with the limitations inherent to this kind of globalist vision. Sometimes these comments come ruefully and with humor (when he reflects on the bad press U2 received when they moved one of their companies to Holland for the tax savings, and how they defended themselves by saying it was not contradictory “to be tough-minded as well as high-minded,” he observes “Maybe there are some arguments that just by being in them you have already lost”--p. 479). But other times they come out of an earnest desire to come to a better understanding of what the best possible application of his Christian calling involves. He details the efforts he and others in the development community have taken over the decades to move from a charity-mindset to a justice-oriented one, to confront what he (and many others, particularly a new generation of African activists and thinkers who have pushed-back against Bono’s defense of globalization) calls White Messiah Syndrome. “I still believe aid is essential, but how it is decided upon and delivered is just as important as the money itself, as is listening to the people it is designed to support” (p. 451), is his conclusion. It’s not a sign he’s going to return to the punkish leftism he flirted with as a young artist, but it is a sign of ideological humility (in his interview with The New York Times Magazine, Bono, though still defending what he sees as the empowering, wealth-building force that is capitalist development, acknowledges that he’s been so focused on the massive inequality between developed countries and undeveloped ones that he’s not paid much attention to the--arguably more important, insofar as self-governance and democratic legitimacy is concerned--growing inequality within those countries themselves).  In one of Surrender’s most insightful paragraphs, he further writes:

I have often regretted that we didn’t stop to think a little more carefully about what right we had to take on this work, to barge our way into the corridors of power. We took it for granted that because the problems of global inequality were mostly created by the Northern Hemisphere, it fell to those of us in the north to solve them. I recognize now how arrogant this position was. I learned late the wisdom in a Senegalese proverb, “If you want to cut a man’s hair, be sure he is in the room” (p. 396).

U2's music, and Bono’s words, have helped bring light to the rooms of hundreds of millions around the world for decades, and the soft power he has gained from this accomplishment has been, overwhelmingly, used on behalf of a deeply Christian set of humanitarian principles. His universalist articulation of those principles, and especially their cultural implications, are not above criticism, and Bono, musical journeyman and mystical poet though he is, is at least grounded enough to hear those particular criticisms and struggle with them seriously. In the end, Surrender should be understood, at least in part, as a document of that struggle. The New York Times Magazine missed that part of the story; hopefully Bono’s many other readers will not.