Crossroads Podcast: U2 Has Been Answering Faith Questions For 50 Years
It may have been the most important hand-scribbled note in rock ‘n’ roll history, with this simple message: “Drummer seeks musicians to form band.”
In September 1976, a 14-year-old Larry Mullen Jr., pinned that note on a bulletin board at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin., a historic Protestant institution linked to Church of Ireland (Anglican) parish.
Paul Hewson, David Evans and Adam Clayton responded. After experimenting with various stage names, and learning basic skills on their instruments, this garageband evolved into U2. Hewson became “Bono Vox” and Evans was “The Edge.”
The New York Times feature marking the band’s 50th anniversary — the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast — starts with U2 returning to Mount Temple to celebrate on the stage where the quartet did one of its first gigs. The lengthy interview: “50 Years In, What’s the Point of U2? Bono and the Edge Have Answers.”
God showed up very early in the Times interview. David Marchese asked this basic question: “When you say there are ideas that you want to be in the mainstream, what are they?” Bono replied:
The metaphysical thing, the gospel side of U2 — that was only allowed in rock ’n’ roll if you were Black. You can’t be white people talking about God, because generally white people who talk about God make our audience very nervous, you know? But not in the Black church in America. Coming to the United States, we’d just seen those televangelists, and we were like, Wow, these people are in deep trouble. Then you walk into a Black church and you hear the abandonment of the singing and that feeling — it’s fervor, but not freaky fervor. So being able to sing songs of faith and devotion and songs of doubt, to put the gospel with the blues, which is rock ’n’ roll.
That leads to this follow-up: “You said that talking about God in your music can be a little uncomfortable for your audience, but I would argue that U2’s religious impulse is hugely important to your audience. It’s a big part of why people feel so connected to the band.” The Edge responded:
I mean, yes, but we weren’t seeing it as a selling point. We were seeing it as the thing we have to speak about because it’s where we’re coming from. But people have said that we’re the band that people who don’t know that they believe in God like. It’s in the work in such a natural way. There’s no polemic there. It’s just our search, our inquiry. And it involves so much doubt. It has to, I think. Because if it’s not dogma, then it’s constantly in flux. I would say I’m agnostic about half of the week, and then the rest of the week I’ve got an incredibly strong faith. But it’s always changing, ready to be upgraded.
A “selling point”? This sounded rather familiar to me, for some obvious reasons.
I have told this story before here at Rational Sheep, but it’s interesting to flash back, again, to my 1982 interviews with Bono and The Edge to spot material linked to the Times piece. Readers need to know that U2 has faced the same faith-centered questions for decades and its amazing how similar the answers have been.
Thus, here is a key part of an earlier post, “For U2, faith has always been a hot topic,” which linked to a chunk of a GetReligion.org post (and an old podcast) about the 1982 interviews.
For years, I thought that my interview might have been the first in the North American mainstream press to include material in which Bono and The Edge openly discussed their faith. However, it now appears that it might have been the first mainstream news interview on the topic — period.
The massive reference book called “U2: A Diary” contains this entry:
“University of Illinois Auditorium ...
“After tonight’s show, U2 are interviewed by Terry Mattingly for CCM, a Christian music magazine. Although the band have gone out of their way to avoid talking about their faith up to this point, they speak candidly now. “It’s time to talk about it,” Edge says. One of the revelations in the article, which appears in the magazine’s August issue, is Edge, Larry and Bono use Bible study and prayer to help them “wind down” after concerts. Bono says U2 doesn’t want to be stereotyped as a “religious band,” but is confident that most fans understand the messages in many U2 songs.”
That clarification contains an important error, one linked — sort of — to those key passages in the new Times feature.
But first, let me clarify: I interviewed Bono by telephone before they reached town (I have given a digital copy to the U2 archives), then met with members of the band before the concert (before their soundcheck) and then hung around, with more conversations, way past midnight after the show. Yes, that included the Bible study.
But here is the key information: I didn’t interview the band for CCM, but for columns that ran in The News-Gazette in Champaign, Illinois. Using that material, I pitched a story to Rolling Stone, but the editors were not interested. They couldn’t believe that Christian faith had anything to do with this up-and-coming post-punk band. Esquire did print a short arts report based on my reporting.
It was beyond ironic that the flagship of Contemporary Christian Music (see “CCM digs deep into tmatt’s closet” at GetReligion) because one of the big ideas in the piece was that the members of U2 were determined to avoid being labeled a “Christian” band. After all, other believers in their circles were telling them they couldn’t be Christians and rock stars at the same time.
In response, Bono wanted to learn about other mainstream artists who were Christians and including religious imagery and themes in their music. I brought him a cassette tape with Bruce Cockburn’s “Humans” on one side and T Bone Burnett’s “Truth Decay” on the other.
In the years after that, Bono befriended both of those artists. In my subsequent contacts with U2, Bono called me “the guy who gave me the Bruce Cockburn tape.” During a conversation after one of the 1987 “Rattle and Hum” shows in Denver, a dressing-room conversation about Cockburn led to Bono inserting a key line from the Canadian star’s hit 1984 song “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” into an unfinished song. Here is what happened in U2’s “God Part II” (bold italics added):
Don’t believe the devil
I don't believe his book
But the truth is not the same
Without the lies he made up…Don’t believe in the 60’s
The golden age of pop
You glorify the past
When the future dries up
Heard a singer on the radio late last night
He says he’s gonna kick the darkness
‘til it bleeds daylight
I... I believe in love
This leads me, finally, to a byte or two from the “On Religion” column (“Glimpse of Bono as a young believer”) I wrote in 2012 marking the 30th anniversary of the Champaign-Urbana interviews. In the “Crossroads” podcast, I mentioned that Bono stressed that he wasn’t “a Christian musician.” He said he was a “musician struggling to be a Christian.”
The 20-year Bono told me that:
… U2 had no interest in being stereotyped as a “Christian band” or in allowing “Christian” to become a sad marketing term for its work.
“The band is anxious not to be categorized,” he said. “You know, if, for instance, people are talking about U2 in a spiritual sense ... that becomes a pigeonhole for people to put us in. That worries us.
“Also, from the point of view of coming from where we come from, Ireland is a place that’s been cut in two by religion. I have no real time for religion and, therefore, avoid those kinds of stereotypes. I would hate for people to think of me as religious, though I want people to realize that I am a Christian.” …
The goal, Bono stressed, is to avoid making preachy music that settles for easy answers while hiding the struggles that real people experience in real life. When writing a song about sin, such as “I Fall Down,” he stressed, “I always include myself in the ‘we.’ You know, ‘we’ have fallen. I include myself. ... I’m not telling everybody that I have the answers. I’m trying to get across the difficulty I have being what I am.”
The big idea in this week’s podcast (there’s so much additional material there) is that many of the questions and issues that Bono and The Edge discussed in this Times interview in 2026 were the same ones we talked about in 1982.
Back then, Bono was wrestling with the reality of evil in the world, including ancient questions about evil, sin, Satan, temptation and redemption. In the Times piece, he mentions that one of U2’s new songs has a line that says, “America will rise up against the people of the lie.” That final phrase may sound familiar. It’s a reference to a classic M. Scott Peck book, “People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil.” Bono said The Edge gave him that book 30 years ago.
Finally, let me note that podcast host Todd Wilken mentioned that the Times (#shockedshocked) managed to work President Donald Trump into the discussion. But that raised other familiar subjects.
In the early 1980s, Bono was already discussing his concerns about hunger in Africa, Third World nations crippled by debt and religious freedom. Note this part of my 1982 interview, when Bono:
… expressed disappointment that so many people — artists in particular — attempt to avoid the ultimate questions that haunt life. The doubts, fears, joys and grace of religious faith are a part of life that “we like to sweep under the carpet,” he concluded.
“Deep down, everyone is aware. You know, when somebody dies, when somebody in their family dies. ... Things that happen around us, they shock people into a realization of what is going down,” he told me.
“I mean, when you look at the starvation, when you think that a third of the population of this earth is starving, is crying out in hunger, I don’t think that you can sort of smile and say, ‘Well, I know. We’re the jolly human race, you know. We’re all very nice, REALLY.’ I mean, we’re not, are we?”
Even when discussing politics with the Times, Bono stressed that his activism has been helped by cultural and religious conservatives, as well as the political left.
In the George W. Bush era, Bono was received, and accepted, an invitation to address a closed-door retreat for all the Republicans in the U.S. Senate. I sat near him in a Capitol Hill hearing that ended with the late Sen. Jesse Helms, an arch-conservative if there ever was one, responding to Bono’s presentation by embracing the singer and saying, “I love you.” That’s in my notes, and I think he added, “and what you’re doing.”
Note this passage from the Times interview.
… If you can separate a discussion about this administration from a discussion about the left and the right and conservatives and liberals, then I’m fine to go ahead with it [discussing politics]. … I don’t want to put off good people who vote conservative, who vote Republican. Their party’s been hijacked, and it’s an aggressive takeover. I want to invite them back. I want them to return. People vote conservative for all kinds of reasons that are OK. So if we can talk about it without getting to the usual loggerheads — but this is a serious problem and I have serious personal dealings with this because of 25 years of work in development.
And finally, The Edge wove many of these issues together, when answering the big Times question of the day: “So what do you think the purpose of U2 is right now?”
We genuinely think that we might just write the best song we’ve ever written next week, or do the best show we’ve ever done next tour. When we talk about the best, we’re not thinking about rock ’n’ roll. We’re thinking about our favorite bands and what, if I’m in the audience at a show, would I want to see and hear. So it’s where rock ’n’ roll collides with activism, where rock ’n’ roll collides with ideas from fine arts. And I suppose a transcendent aspect as well. We’ve never thought it was necessary to hold back our own spiritual quests and questionings from our work. They are all expressed. And when we hit a song that has a transcendent quality, that’s the peak for me.
That’s all for now, although there are other topics worth mentioning.