I am trying to write this short article in English so that Bono & Co. could understand.:-) The members of U2 know, of course, that their Christian fans are at a loss for a long time: being happy about early Christian albums of U2 such as October (1981) and, perhaps for the last time, about the explicitly Christian message of the album All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000), they must wonder about many other things.
There is a chapter "1990–93: Sliding Down the Surface of Things" in the book U2 by U2. From that time (the beginning of the 1990s) U2 are on the edge between the world of depth and the world of surface. And they seem to be gradually "sliding down" from a unique band connecting rock'n'roll with the Christian roots of the Western popular music to a commonplace one. According to John Waters, an excellent Irish rock journalist and expert in U2 for many decades, the album Achtung Baby (1991) "was the beginning of a Faustian pact, struck at the end of a very tricky tightrope".
Waters, in contrast to U2, is heading from a "cool" secular rocker of his youth to the searcher for spiritual truth. Now he published his article How U2 Betrayed Rock'n'roll on the internet on May 5, 2018. It is a sad article. Waters has to say, that U2, whose songs helped him to start his search in the 1980s, in the end "settled for less than they promised. Having become themselves by remaining aloof from rock's narcotics and narcissism, they gradually settled deeper into the embrace of the vacuity they had eschewed. More and more, their public stances seemed to be about attitude, about beíng cool, about remaining top of the league. Gradually, heartbreakingly, they went native, nestling deeper and deeper into the cultural Marxist groupthink."
In 2015, U2 supported "gay marriages" in an Irish referendum. They also identify themselves with an idea totally incompatible with the biblical understanding of marriage. Now, in May 2018, they made Christian part of their fans even more unhappy with their appeal for the elimination of the right to life of unborn children in another Irish referendum.
Bono, a supporter of children in Africa and many other poor and weak human beings around the world in the past, now wants his fans to vote in favour of (in the words of John Waters') "empowering the strong over the weak, the strident and demanding over the silent and docile".
I am thinking about the lines of Leonard Cohen's sarcastic song The Future: "Destroy another fetus now/ We don't like children anyhow/ I've seen the future, baby:/ it is murder." Bono & Co. seriously say something like that to their fans…
According to John Waters, U2 broke the hearts of at least half their fans. I am thinking not about the fans, but about U2 themselves. I am thinking about Bono and his song Until the End of the World. In this song, Judas says to Jesus: "I kissed your lips and broke your heart." Fortunately, there is hope even for Judas and Jesus will wait for him "until the end of the world".
It is hard to say where U2 stand with Jesus these days. I pray for them.
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