60 Years Ago, Four Words by John Lennon Split America in Two
In March 1966, John Lennon, wearied by two years of Beatlemania and excessive touring and travelling, talked to journalist Maureen Cleeve for an interview with the British newspaper, London's Evening Standard.
A discussion about books Lennon has recently been reading led to an unprecedented backlash in the country the Liverpool band had used, and would continue to use, as their primary creative and commercial base, alongside their home country of England. Moreover, the reverberations from this controversy would eventually play a role in the musician's murder 14 years later, according to his killer, Mark David Chapman, who would cite the incident in his own interviews, after fatally shooting the former Beatle in December 1980.
John Lennon’s ‘More Popular Than Jesus’ Comment Made Little Impact in the UK — But Caused an Anti-Beatlemania in the U.S. South
After noting that Lennon had been "reading extensively about religion" and had been studying Indian music and culture with his fellow Beatles (namely, George Harrison), Cleeve included a comment the vocalist made about Christianity.
"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I'll be proved right," Lennon said in the Evening Standard. "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."
The newspaper interview received minimal attention in its home country, possibly interpreted by those in Lennon's native culture as a broader remark about idol worship regarding celebrity, as The Beatles had found themselves in following their triumphant invasion of America in 1964, rather than a boastful rock 'n' roller citing himself as a Christ-like figure.
Additionally, Lennon was one of the most vocal advocates for the band's announcement in the summer of 1966 that they would no longer tour or perform live, transitioning to an act focused on recording music that mid-century musical equipment could not replicate in an on-stage setting. The Fab Four had grown tired of their status as unwilling diplomats representing the waning British Empire. This came to a climax weeks after Lennon's Evening Standard interview, with the band's disastrous visit to the Philippines resulting in a violent exile from the country, directed by the dictatorship of the Marcos family, after a spurned invite to their home at Malacañang Palace.
In the midst of this growing impossibility to uphold the Beatles' growing mascot status, Lennon's comments about what he saw as an inevitable, impending death of rock 'n' roll would be unlikely to make the modern reader view his words as a gleeful sentiment or achievement. Rather, they make for a cynical commentary about the shallowness of popular culture, with the general public clinging on to clueless 20-somethings as a source of morality and optimism, as they had brought to the U.S. in the weeks following John F. Kennedy's assassination.
A charitable reading of his comments could discern that the church, in terms of organized religion, failed to embed the teachings of Christ in a meaningful way to its declining congregations, leading to a culture of commercialism and celebrity worship. However, American audiences, as the interview's excerpts spread across radio stations in the South, took the comments at face value.
Soon, "Beatle burnings" of merchandise and records, Ku Klux Klan crucifixions outside concerts, and radio stations prohibiting the playing of Lennon's records followed, mainly in the more conservative areas of the Southern States. In a subsequent press conference intended to fan the flames of the controversy, Lennon responded, "I suppose if I had said television was more popular than Jesus, I would have got away with it. I'm sorry I opened my mouth. I'm not anti-God, anti-Christ, or anti-religion. I was not knocking it. I was not saying we are greater or better."
The clarification, however, did little to change hardened hearts to the rock and roll takeover that had seemingly colonized good old-fashioned, Antebellum American Christian values, with Lennon and co.'s gender-ambiguous hairstyles, European dress sense, and African-American musical idols. Their June 1966 cover, Yesterday and Today, featuring butcher meat and baby doll parts embroidering the Beatles, was read by some as a Satanic protest against America's invasion of Vietnam to stop the spread of communism.
The Beatles' decision to stop touring shortly after Lennon's comments about Christianity may have been, although temporarily, a life-saving one. Retreating to the womb-like safety of the recording studio helped the band develop creatively, away from the world's often-unforgiving glare.
When a later ex-Beatle Lennon began ramping up his public appearances in a late '70s-1980 comeback, following the success of the Double Fantasy album, made in collaboration with his wife, Yoko Ono, his life was cut short. Not by mere coincidence or freak accident, but by what was once a young boy who had recently transitioned from Beatlemaniac to born-again Christian and found himself violently outraged by the comments, even in the maturity of adulthood.
Later interpretations of Lennon's interview rarely hold the same views of a more conservative past, with even the Vatican later admitting that the remarks weren’t "that scandalous," and that "the fascination with Jesus was so great that it attracted these new heroes of the time.” Perhaps this was in part influenced by John's murder and the violent cultural divisions it exposed, or perhaps celebrity scandal and what would later be referred to by some as "cancel culture" had grown tiresome for many.
Either way, the polarized responses to what was originally a standard celebrity interview were perhaps one of the earliest, and even now, most obvious examples of a divided culture, and why a growing number of celebrities, even now, fear how the public eye could potentially read their thoughts or beliefs.