“We’re more popular than Jesus now.”
These words of John Lennon, published on this day in 1966, have become a famous—or infamous—part of cultural history.
Here’s the larger context: Lennon told an interviewer for the London Evening Standard that “Christianity will go.” He added: “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
His words sparked a furor in the United States. Radio stations invited listeners to bring their Beatles records to pickup points where they would be burned.
Lennon later apologized at a press conference in Chicago: “I’m not anti-God, anti-Christ or anti-religion. I was not saying we are greater or better. I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky.”
However, Lennon began his most famous song, “Imagine,” with the lyrics, “Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us only sky.” Later he asked us to imagine that there’s “no religion, too.”
Why parents are selling their children
In a world like ours, it’s easy to wonder if God is real or relevant.
Search and rescue efforts are intensifying this morning after a series of tornadoes ripped through Alabama yesterday, killing at least twenty-three people in one county. At least a dozen tornadoes touched down in Alabama and Georgia Sunday afternoon, according to the National Weather Service.
Two people were killed and seven more injured when the son of a New Orleans police officer drove his vehicle into a busy New Orleans thoroughfare Saturday night. Police are awaiting the results of a blood alcohol test.
More than 110 million people across the US are bracing for snowstorms. New…
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