The Post-C.S. Lewis Era?
Writer, Bono apologist, and university chaplain Steve Stockman graced our campus here at Regent last summer. Steve is an astute observer of popular culture, so when he makes cultural observations I take notice. While he was here he gave an interview to a local, alternative journal, Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice. In it he made the comment in response to the question:
What do you make of the way Bono is modeling spirituality and justice?
Stockman:
On their recent tour, Bono at one point addressed the crowd, “Did you
come here to play Jesus, because I did.” I don’t want to simply say he’s
a Christian.” I want to know, what he is saying that we are missing? What
is it that we can learn from them [U2]? …Regent is interesting, but there’s
a lack of pop-culture post-C.S. Lewis. He died between “She loves you yeah,
yeah, yeah” and “I want to hold your hand.” A lot has happened in pop
culture since then, but who has held the flag higher at that level? [ than U2?]
Having spent the last 17 years just inside the front door at Regent I don’t feel that I can objectively say much about Regent and pop culture other than to say that Regent is the kind of place that would sponsor a lecture on U2 by a Steve Stockman. (It was a great lecture and you can download it at www.regentaudio.com). Steve delivers a challenging message to the church, and uses Bono as an example of a Christian who reaches out to the world. According to Stockman, “He [Bono] will befriend those I would not befriend. He welcomes those I would want to push out. The other side is that evangelicals’ relationship to U2 is that so many are dying to prove they aren’t Christians. Why?”
These are good observations. In many ways Bono and his fight against extreme poverty has parallels with Wilberforce’s 19th century leadership in the fight against slavery. Bono effectively uses his voice and stature to catch the ears and eyes of prominent world leaders from George W. Bush to Kofi Annan. Whether the issue is hunger, AIDS, malaria, or TB, the cover story on Bono as a Person of the Year makes it clear that Bono is absolutely and unselfishly, relentless in his seeking to let the West know that it is our crisis.
It is clearly a Christian duty to respond to extreme world poverty and we all have much to learn from Christians such as Bono, or non-Christians such as Jeffrey Sachs, for whom Bono writes the introduction to The End of Poverty. Aid is needed, but there are still questions to be asked about the aid agenda that is in the media spotlight. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but a few questions come to mind. Take a best case aid scenario such as Katrina. Here you had a disaster within the most advanced society in history. As I recall, Congress has allocated over $200 billion for the rebuilding of the region that was devastated. Even with this kind of aid there were still people living in tents weeks after the disaster. Or take Iraq. Whatever your views on the subject, the U.S. has poured over $1 billion into the country per week with no end in sight. The tsunami is another example in which all the combined aid agencies had a very difficult time absorbing the amount of aid that came in. Without the assistance of the U.S. and Australian militaries there would have been an aid disaster.
One expert who knows something about worldwide aid is William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006). Eastley is a veteran economist who has spent his life in the trenches, working at development in Africa, Latin America, and Russia. The jacket blurb describes him as someone who “wears the good-humored but weary resignation of a lifetime idealist mugged at last by reality.” Easterley has the temerity to ask why, after the West has given $2.3 trillion in aid to the developing world over the last 50 years, there is so little to show for it. (In contrast the much-vaunted Marshall Plan was $213 billion in 2005 dollars). Easterley labels activists such as Bono and Sachs as the Planners who have big plans but seldom deliver what is really needed on the ground. In contrast, Eastlerley gives the nod to the Searchers. The Searchers don’t have it all figured out. Instead they tinker away on a smaller scale looking for practical schemes to help the poor and through trial and error find good solutions. Easterley makes for fascinating reading alongside Sachs. In the end I tend to think that we need a bit, make that a lot, of both approaches.
I am disappointed in one respect with Bono’s media campaign. The media (and the academy) put clear strictures on discourse about social ills in the world today. The approved “sins” are those that concern race, gender, global warming, AIDS, TB, malaria, hunger, etc. There are deep-seated protocols that confine social protest to these topics. Issues such as the global slavery that exist in the world today (I understand there are more chattel slaves today than in the days of the North Atlantic slave trade), and in particular, partial-birth abortion are verboten. (Notice even I am under the influence of these protocols in that I have mentioned third-trimester, partial-birth abortion rather than abortion in general). When U2 was in town last year, Bono, in the middle of the concert, berated the then Canadian PM Paul Martin for not delivering on his pledge of 0.7 % of GNP for foreign aid. Can you imagine the reaction if Bono had instead chastised Martin on the barbarous practice of partial-birth abortion and then displayed Martin’s cell # on the big screen? Would Bono have made a Person of the Year? I doubt it, although it would have been Story of the Year.
After reading the Time Person of the Year article on Bono I took a trip to the library to look at the Time cover story on C.S. Lewis from September 8, 1947. I love the cover caption: “Oxford’s C.S. Lewis. His Heresy: Christianity.” How would one compare Lewis to Bono? Maybe it’s a bad question, but one that I ask. The Lewis article bluntly describes his Christian beliefs on a variety of subjects. God, death, sin and the Devil, sex, and Christianity among the intellectuals. In the Bono article one does not overtly pick up his Christian beliefs. However, if one peruses the book Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas (Riverhead, 2005) his Christianity is splattered throughout the book. And one of his guides is clearly C.S. Lewis.
Returning to Steve Stockman and his comment about the post-C.S. Lewis era, I recently heard that someone had said that the C.S. Lewis for the post-C.S. Lewis era is C.S. Lewis. Hmm. With the release of the movie, The Chronicles of Narnia held down the #1 and #3 sales spots for books shipped by amazon over the Christmas season and even outsold Harry Potter (#2 was The World is Flat by Tom Friedman). All I can say, Steve, is that for the guy that left us between “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” that’s called staying power. Let’s let Bono have the last word:
"Grace"
She takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain
It could be her name
Grace
It's a name for a girl
It's also a thought that changed the world
And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness in everything
Grace, she's got the walk
Not on a ramp or on chalk
She's got the time to talk
She travels outside of karma
She travels outside of karma
When she goes to work
You can hear her strings
Grace finds beauty in everything
Grace, she carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl in perfect condition
What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things
Grace makes beauty out of ugly things
-Bono
Bill Reimer, May 23, 2006
What do you make of the way Bono is modeling spirituality and justice?
Stockman:
On their recent tour, Bono at one point addressed the crowd, “Did you
come here to play Jesus, because I did.” I don’t want to simply say he’s
a Christian.” I want to know, what he is saying that we are missing? What
is it that we can learn from them [U2]? …Regent is interesting, but there’s
a lack of pop-culture post-C.S. Lewis. He died between “She loves you yeah,
yeah, yeah” and “I want to hold your hand.” A lot has happened in pop
culture since then, but who has held the flag higher at that level? [ than U2?]
Having spent the last 17 years just inside the front door at Regent I don’t feel that I can objectively say much about Regent and pop culture other than to say that Regent is the kind of place that would sponsor a lecture on U2 by a Steve Stockman. (It was a great lecture and you can download it at www.regentaudio.com). Steve delivers a challenging message to the church, and uses Bono as an example of a Christian who reaches out to the world. According to Stockman, “He [Bono] will befriend those I would not befriend. He welcomes those I would want to push out. The other side is that evangelicals’ relationship to U2 is that so many are dying to prove they aren’t Christians. Why?”
These are good observations. In many ways Bono and his fight against extreme poverty has parallels with Wilberforce’s 19th century leadership in the fight against slavery. Bono effectively uses his voice and stature to catch the ears and eyes of prominent world leaders from George W. Bush to Kofi Annan. Whether the issue is hunger, AIDS, malaria, or TB, the cover story on Bono as a Person of the Year makes it clear that Bono is absolutely and unselfishly, relentless in his seeking to let the West know that it is our crisis.
It is clearly a Christian duty to respond to extreme world poverty and we all have much to learn from Christians such as Bono, or non-Christians such as Jeffrey Sachs, for whom Bono writes the introduction to The End of Poverty. Aid is needed, but there are still questions to be asked about the aid agenda that is in the media spotlight. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but a few questions come to mind. Take a best case aid scenario such as Katrina. Here you had a disaster within the most advanced society in history. As I recall, Congress has allocated over $200 billion for the rebuilding of the region that was devastated. Even with this kind of aid there were still people living in tents weeks after the disaster. Or take Iraq. Whatever your views on the subject, the U.S. has poured over $1 billion into the country per week with no end in sight. The tsunami is another example in which all the combined aid agencies had a very difficult time absorbing the amount of aid that came in. Without the assistance of the U.S. and Australian militaries there would have been an aid disaster.
One expert who knows something about worldwide aid is William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006). Eastley is a veteran economist who has spent his life in the trenches, working at development in Africa, Latin America, and Russia. The jacket blurb describes him as someone who “wears the good-humored but weary resignation of a lifetime idealist mugged at last by reality.” Easterley has the temerity to ask why, after the West has given $2.3 trillion in aid to the developing world over the last 50 years, there is so little to show for it. (In contrast the much-vaunted Marshall Plan was $213 billion in 2005 dollars). Easterley labels activists such as Bono and Sachs as the Planners who have big plans but seldom deliver what is really needed on the ground. In contrast, Eastlerley gives the nod to the Searchers. The Searchers don’t have it all figured out. Instead they tinker away on a smaller scale looking for practical schemes to help the poor and through trial and error find good solutions. Easterley makes for fascinating reading alongside Sachs. In the end I tend to think that we need a bit, make that a lot, of both approaches.
I am disappointed in one respect with Bono’s media campaign. The media (and the academy) put clear strictures on discourse about social ills in the world today. The approved “sins” are those that concern race, gender, global warming, AIDS, TB, malaria, hunger, etc. There are deep-seated protocols that confine social protest to these topics. Issues such as the global slavery that exist in the world today (I understand there are more chattel slaves today than in the days of the North Atlantic slave trade), and in particular, partial-birth abortion are verboten. (Notice even I am under the influence of these protocols in that I have mentioned third-trimester, partial-birth abortion rather than abortion in general). When U2 was in town last year, Bono, in the middle of the concert, berated the then Canadian PM Paul Martin for not delivering on his pledge of 0.7 % of GNP for foreign aid. Can you imagine the reaction if Bono had instead chastised Martin on the barbarous practice of partial-birth abortion and then displayed Martin’s cell # on the big screen? Would Bono have made a Person of the Year? I doubt it, although it would have been Story of the Year.
After reading the Time Person of the Year article on Bono I took a trip to the library to look at the Time cover story on C.S. Lewis from September 8, 1947. I love the cover caption: “Oxford’s C.S. Lewis. His Heresy: Christianity.” How would one compare Lewis to Bono? Maybe it’s a bad question, but one that I ask. The Lewis article bluntly describes his Christian beliefs on a variety of subjects. God, death, sin and the Devil, sex, and Christianity among the intellectuals. In the Bono article one does not overtly pick up his Christian beliefs. However, if one peruses the book Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas (Riverhead, 2005) his Christianity is splattered throughout the book. And one of his guides is clearly C.S. Lewis.
Returning to Steve Stockman and his comment about the post-C.S. Lewis era, I recently heard that someone had said that the C.S. Lewis for the post-C.S. Lewis era is C.S. Lewis. Hmm. With the release of the movie, The Chronicles of Narnia held down the #1 and #3 sales spots for books shipped by amazon over the Christmas season and even outsold Harry Potter (#2 was The World is Flat by Tom Friedman). All I can say, Steve, is that for the guy that left us between “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” that’s called staying power. Let’s let Bono have the last word:
"Grace"
She takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain
It could be her name
Grace
It's a name for a girl
It's also a thought that changed the world
And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness in everything
Grace, she's got the walk
Not on a ramp or on chalk
She's got the time to talk
She travels outside of karma
She travels outside of karma
When she goes to work
You can hear her strings
Grace finds beauty in everything
Grace, she carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl in perfect condition
What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things
Grace makes beauty out of ugly things
-Bono
Bill Reimer, May 23, 2006
1 Comments:
Along with the fact that Bono has been using the "aut deus aut malus homo" argument for the deity of Christ (with verbal echoes of Lewis' version IMHO) for over a decade, another obvious comparison would be the early-90s stage character MacPhisto, whom Bono has said was based on Lewis' "Screwtape Letters." In the only U2 song video featuring this character (as a cartoon), Bono is even pictured reading the book.
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