In 1987, Island Records, a small record label founded in Jamaica, was not prepared for what was about to happen. The Irish rock band U2 was on a steady rise when their third album War became number one in the UK with “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)” topping the singles charts. Simultaneous to the rise of U2 in the eighties was the rapid growth of contemporary Christian music, a genre that had been surging since the late sixties, when the hippie movement met evangelical Christianity in the form of the Jesus People Movement. Evangelical Christians of the day had an uneasy and problematic relationship with pop culture generally and rock-n-roll specifically; but the emergence of contemporary evangelical music that was both sanctified and appealing to youth significantly changed the dynamic. Comparison charts, which matched Christian bands to secular rock bands, made it easy for parents and churches to get the right kind of music (music that sounded like rock) into the hands of teenagers. When U2’s Joshua Tree arrived, it was an international critical and commercial success that surpassed the record label’s ability to keep up with it, solidifying the band members as bona fide rock superstars. And then came the questions about the band: are they a Christian band or a kind of Christian band? Are they religious?
The first time Chad Seales heard of U2, he writes in Religion Around Bono: Evangelical Enchantment and Neoliberal Capitalism, was as a young teenager in the parking lot of a Southern Baptist Church in Florida. His parents, and the parents of his friends, had questions. Who is this band U2? Are they a Christian band? Among churchgoing youth, Seales recalls, listening to U2 was an easy way for church youth to engage in a kind of low-grade rebellion because the hidden Christianity of U2 was an open secret. U2, he writes, offered the world. They were a different kind of band, resisting labels, arguing against religion and mainstream evangelicalism, and yet uniting a fan base that blended secular and religious moral traditions within a shared humanitarianism. Seales’ captivating and engaging volume critically explores the questions that emerge at that intersection of emotion, music, and religion—arguing that a new kind of religion, a neoliberal religion, formed around Bono.
Seales is an editor of Penn State University Press’ “Religion Around” series. The series examines cultural icons as religious subjects —in this case Bono as a cultural icon of neoliberal religion. The series sets out to challenge what we think of as religious biography, and while Seales’ book includes biographical details about Bono and U2, it does so only insofar as it serves a larger aim: to ask what it means to sing about the good news, which is not only a religious question, but a political and economic one as well.
The book, according to Seales, is about a prophet with a band, a poet with a purpose. Bono as prophet and poet has also had an outsized impact as an activist—he was a leader of Jubilee 2000, which led to the cancellation of more than $100 billion in debt owed by poor countries, as well as the co-founder of the organizations ONE and RED, established to fight against extreme poverty and the spread of HIV/AIDS in developing countries, respectively. Reflecting on Bono’s activism, Seales asks what it means to believe we can change the world through consumption. For the author, this belief is at the core of “neoliberal religion,” a kind of millennial capitalism that advocates for soteriological consumerism—that is, buy this product to save others and solve moral crises (like poverty and famine in Africa), demonstrating the sincerity of your concern for those in need and in the end gaining something like salvific assurance.
Religion Around Bono effortlessly moves from historical description (chapters 1 and 2) to critical reflection (chapters 3 through 5), telling a story about how American evangelicalism is connected to corporate capitalism that produces a consumer religion, according to which humanitarianism, rock-n-roll, and consumption are themselves religious. Chapter 1 situates Bono’s message and his delivery techniques in a history of American revivalism and the tradition of white “muscular evangelicalism” (48). Seales’ point is that the very systems and religious traditions that Bono argues against and seems to break away from are in fact held intact by capitalist ideologies and the idea of racial difference. The emotion of the music, conjured by a prophet and poet, makes listeners feel as if they are rejecting and overcoming the unjust limits of circumstance and traditional religion. Chapter 2 describes how fans receive that message and how evangelicals hear the Gospel in the music of U2.
Chapter 3 confronts capitalist ideology (free-market principles, private property rights) and how it shapes social organizations. Seales critiques neoliberal religion and the power it holds in preventing us from seeing alternative economic possibilities. Chapter 4 shows how Bono applies religious power and activism to purportedly solve moral crises, specifically in Africa (where agricultural, infrastructural, and economic development is often only achieved through corporate intervention). What happens, though, when the solution is worse than the problem it tries to solve? Seales raises this criticism in chapter 4, but does fully address until chapter 5, where he discusses “love and debt.” In chapter 5, Seales argues that the neoliberal religion around Bono depends on an essentialist view of racial differences rooted in the history of blackface minstrelsy and romantic racialism. Religious activism then becomes a form of material consumption that increases the personal debt of western consumers to relieve the debt of others. In this way, the religion of Bono is one of love and debt.
Religion Around Bono is engagingly written, critically challenging, and offers a deeply satisfying look at consumer capitalism, rock-n-roll, religion, and activism. While Seales is critical in his analysis he is not writing as a disgruntled fan. Rather, he is asking us to listen deeply to, and critically question, the religion we find around Bono.
John Berard is a PhD student in practical theology at Durham University, UK.
John Berard
Date Of Review:
January 31, 2023