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BONO SAYS JESUS AND MOHAMMED ARE BOTH TRUE (Friday Church News Notes, April 9, 2010, http://www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) –

Bono, frontman for the popular rock band U2, is held up as an idol by many Christians. But while he does make a profession of faith in Christ, he doesn’t have a biblical testimony, doesn’t attend church with any regularity, and has lived the worldly rock & roll lifestyle to the hilt. He is the ultimate “cool Christian,” but is he really a Christian? A couple of years ago I read the book Bono on Bono: Conversations with Michka Assayas (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), which contains an interview with a music reporter that extended over a long period of time.

Nowhere in this 337-page book does Bono give a scriptural testimony of having been born again, without which Jesus said no man can see the kingdom of heaven. He says that he believes Jesus is the Messiah and that He died on the cross for his sins and that he is holding out for grace, but the Pope says that much. Bono’s “grace” is a grace that does not result in radical conversion and a new way of life; it is a grace without repentance. Nowhere does he warn his myriads of listeners to turn to Christ before it is too late and before they pass out of this life into eternal hell. In fact, the only thing he says about heaven or hell is that both are on earth. “I think, rather like Hell, Heaven is on Earth. That’s my prayer … that’s where Heaven for me is…” (Bono on Bono, p. 254). It sounds like Bono has been listening more to John Lennon than the Bible, and in fact he says that when he was 11 years old he listened to Lennon’s album Imagine and it “really got under my skin, the blood of it” (p. 246). On this album Lennon sang, “Imagine there is no heaven above and no hell below.”

 As for church, Bono says that the older he gets the more comfort he finds in Roman Catholicism. “Let’s not get too hard on the Holy Roman Church here. The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there. … murmuring prayers, stories told in stained-glass windows, the colors of Catholicism–purple mauve, yellow, red–the burning incense. My friend Gavin Friday says Catholicism is the glam-rock of religion” (p. 201). Though he speaks positively of Romanism, Bono has nothing good to say about “fundamentalism,” falsely claiming that it is a denial that God is love (p. 167) and calling it vile names (p. 147).

He praises singers who have produced some of the filthiest music, such as Prince and Mick Jagger, insinuating that they are good people who are only making innocent art (pp. 153, 156). He says his favorite lyric in a song is Kris Kristofferson’s immoral “Help Me Make It through the Night” (p. 129). He admits that U2’s music is “sexual” and even pretends that “erotic love can turn into something much higher,” admitting that he seems “to segue very easily between the two” (p. 120). The truth is that Bono’s Christianity is a heretical mixture of Bible (the smallest part) and rock & roll philosophy (the largest part).

 He is a study in contradictions. On one hand he says that Jesus is the Messiah who died on the cross for man’s sins, while on the other hand making statements by his mouth and lifestyle that blatantly deny the Jesus of the Bible. In fact, he says that Jesus and Mohammed are both true.

At U2’s Madison Square Garden concert in 2005 Bono led the crowd in the chant “Jesus, Jew, Mohammed–all true. Jesus, Jew, Mohammed–all true.” Tara Cobble, who attended the concert, testified that this chant destroyed her ill-placed devotion to Bono. “He repeated the words like a mantra. Was Bono, my supposed brother in Christ, preaching some kind of universalism? As I looked around, I saw all the people standing and chanting with him–it was disgusting … When he stated that lie so boldly, it devastated me. It was, without question, the most disturbing experience of my life; I felt like I’d been covered in bile. The reality is that Bono held too high a place in my heart. And I don’t think I’m alone there. I’ve wrongly held him up as the heroic ideal–the cool representative for Christianity; he may have been my ‘Christian idol’, but he was my idol nonetheless” (Tara Leigh Cobble, “How to Dismantle an Idolized Bono,” Relevant magazine, Dec. 19, 2005). We appreciate her candor, but from a biblical standpoint there is no such thing as a cool representative of Christianity. If a man takes the Bible seriously,  he will not be cool by any worldly standard! In fact, he will be some sort of thrice-hated fundamentalist!