The Beatles were boomers, through and through. Their 1966 record Revolver features—along with paradigm-shifting studio trickery and subversive lyrics about pot—an earnest complaint about having to pay too much income tax (“Taxman”). John Lennon may have been investigated by the CIA as a suspected communist, but his leftist credentials were forever tainted by “Revolution,” a track which seemed to knock the wind out of Marxist sails with its hopeful prediction that “it’s gonna be alright.” They were not as revolutionary as some suppose.
The Beatles came, after all, from that last generation to be nursed by the institutionally robust England of Christendom. In the Beatles’ childhoods, Christianity formed an innocuous enough backdrop to life. The Liverpool of their youth meant a socially conformist atmosphere—this was no hive of Chartism or trade unionism. Manchester Man was the radical dissenter; Liverpool Man was a Tory. They attended boy scout meetings in parish halls, played their first gigs at church fêtes, and sang in choirs.
John was raised in suburbia by a prim-and-proper aunt, who enrolled him in Sunday school. (As an exemplary member of the Established Church, she never attended outside of Easter and Christmas herself.) His house was filled with books, and he was encouraged to debate. For Paul McCartney and George Harrison, childhood had an Irish Catholic dimension. While there had been sectarian struggle across the nineteenth century, time did its work, as well as mixed marriages, and Liverpool did not become Glasgow.
The boys became men, with no apparent affection for Christianity. In 1966, John appeared to relish pronouncing its end: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. . . . We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity.” But they responded to this loss in ways that shaped their life and art. They form, in fact, archetypes of the post-Christian landscape.
John is the deconstructor. We can see it as early as 1963, when he mentions an aspiration to write a musical “about Jesus coming back to earth today and living in the slums.” We know he devoured skeptical pulp like The Passover Plot, a treatment of Jesus’s life that would make The Da Vinci Code look doctrinaire, and was always fascinated by Christ as a figure. His controversial comments in ‘66 doubled down on this: It was Jesus’s fanboys who had “twisted” things. His own experience proved it—the Beatles had often been presented with disabled children on tours and asked to touch them, to heal them as if they had a divine touch.
The discovery that Christianity was a kind of misplaced fandom was not something to celebrate, though. He sensed the Nietzschean conclusion. It is often missed in his remarks that he implies that even rock and roll will “go” in the end. Nothing would last. It became an ever-expanding moral crisis for him, evolving into a nihilistic personalism that he could never quite square with his humanitarian impulses. His first solo record ended with “God,” a plangent piano track expressing his disbelief in all concepts—including God, Elvis, Dylan, and the Beatles themselves: “I just believe in me / Yoko and me / that’s reality.” John’s self-awareness that he was an icon would not save him—in fact, its apparent hypocrisy in the mind of a deranged man would lead directly to his death.
Paul is the nostalgic. All of his “religious” songs call his family to mind, even if subliminally. “Eleanor Rigby” initially featured a priest named Fr. McCartney (until he realized fan theories would abound unless it was altered). “Let It Be” was, as he often relates, a dream of his mother. “Lady Madonna” was an attempt to sacralize Scouse Catholic mums.
In Paul’s music is a longing to get back to a place of psychic warmth—some primordial, womb-like space where one feels loved and nurtured. Consider the music hall whimsy of “Honey Pie” or “When I’m Sixty-Four” (which garnered the uncharitable label “granny shit” from John). Songwriting often takes him back to Liverpool and, therefore, to church. “Eleanor Rigby”—often glossed as a song critical of religion—conveys the loneliness of a parish during the retreat of Christianity, as if it is only within this idealized community that an unvisited spinster or an unappreciated celibate priest can properly be seen as tragic figures. When explaining John’s “bigger than Jesus” comments, Paul spoke openly of a ruefulness about the situation: “We felt quite strongly that the church should get its act together. We were actually very pro-church.”
George is the apostate. His dismissal of Christianity entails a civilizational rejection. This trajectory began early; his parents were probably amongst the first ever to apply to have their child excluded from compulsory worship and instruction in Christian faith (stipulated in the 1944 Education Act) for reasons other than belonging to a non-Christian faith. He laid out his turn to Eastern mysticism later in life as real and experiential—in contrast to Western religion, which he dismissed as thinly-disguised mind control. “To go to an ordinary church is okay, it’s a nice feeling,” he allowed in 1969, “but they don’t show you the way to Christ consciousness.”
As if to prove the rule, Ringo Starr has been the exception in openly finding God, though he won’t be pinned down too much beyond “God is love.” That said, people who write this off as superannuated hippy pantheism would do well to remember it is a New Testament quote: 1 John 4:8. Nonetheless, he represents the subjectivist—the retreat of Christianity to the inner world of pure experience, where a thousand shocks cannot touch it.
We’ll always have the records. They were the productions of geniuses who turned away from the Christian sun, even while basking their backs in its warmth. Now we who hear their music turn back around, in search of what slipped over the horizon.
