Youth Sunday 2023, many of us at Maxwell Street Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Kentucky learned we had a rock band in our midst. While our services usually end with a grand organ postlude, this Sunday the organ led into the swirling electric guitar chimes of the U2 classic “Where the Streets Have No Name,” beautifully played by our pastor’s oldest son.
The offering of the leadoff track from U2’s 1987 masterpiece The Joshua Tree was a rousing finale to our annual youth-led service, where graduating seniors are recognized as they prepare to step into the next chapters of their lives. I was mildly amused and joked it was very Presbyterian that our students chose a 36-year-old song, and it was being praised as new and fresh.
Youth at Maxwell Street Presbyterian Church in Lexington, KY offer “Where the Streets Have No Name” by U2 to close out their 2023 Youth Sunday Service. Photo by Rich Copley for MSPC.
While I left church with “Where the Streets Have No Name” running through my mind, my thoughts quickly shifted to the song after it on The Joshua Tree and the complex feelings about faith and culture some of my friends and I had in the late 1980s, when I was starting college.
Almost as soon as U2 broke, there was chatter that some of the band members were devout Christians, and all you had to do was listen to the lyrics to hear that.
“Gloria,” the opening song on their second album, October, incorporates a Latin exaltation of God. Their third album War includes a direct reading of Psalm 40 in “40” (which should be in hymnals now). “Drowning Man” incorporates Isaiah 40. And “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”—the major flashpoint of recognition for many of us—contains the lyrics, “the real battle just begun, to claim the victory Jesus won,” an impassioned plea to stop sectarian fighting in the band’s homeland of Ireland. The song also contains several subtle Biblical allusions.
I could geek out on U2 and faith for a long, long time. War wasn’t even the band’s most spiritual album.
But at the same time we were buying every copy of Rolling Stone with a member of U2 on the cover—there were a lot—and sleeping out on the sidewalk at the mall to get tickets to the Joshua Tree tour, we were trying to reconcile the faith expressed by U2 with … well … U2.
This is where it’s important for me to note that I am not a cradle Presbyterian. I was raised in a conservative, non-denominational evangelical church.
In that context, some things U2 did were problematic, like those Rolling Stone interviews that often found the band members drinking and using a fair amount of profanity. Then there were some of the social justice stands the band took that didn’t quite rhyme with Christianity as I understood it. And, of course, they played “that devil music.” Our youth group really went to one of those talks where they told you there were satanic messages when you played Led Zeppelin backwards and that most rock ’n’ roll was designed to make you sin—you know, sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
A particular flashpoint for some U2 detractors was that second song off The Joshua Tree: “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” In it, Bono sings:
You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Oh my shame
You know I believe it
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
Well, some skeptics of U2 bandmembers’ faith said, “if they’re Christians, they should know Jesus, and that should be what they’re looking for. So, if they still haven’t found what they’re looking for, how can they be Christians?”
In a faith that relies on absolutes, there’s little room for this kind of wavering and questioning.
“What’s wrong with U2?,” I sometimes wondered.
At that point, I was really familiar with only one interpretation of Christian faith: a fundamentalist version practiced in the relative comfort of suburban, White America. I didn’t have the framework to understand that there are different interpretations of and approaches to faith in God. I was already seeing cracks in that framework at the time, but it would be another decade before I stepped into our first Presbyterian church and began understanding a different perspective on faith—that there are many perspectives even—and longer still before I would begin to understand the importance of context in how people approach their faith.
If your context is one where you are raised to love God but see violence and death in his name, the questions are perfectly understandable. If you are raised in traditions that understand wrestling with one’s faith as a part of growth and a part of life, then simultaneously expressing devotion and searching is expected. Faith in the face of oppression can be really complicated, even when we consider that is exactly how our faith began. When you understand that, “the Bible says it, I believe it, that does it,” is an immature approach, at best, to our complex faith and the real world, U2’s words start to ring true.
Certainly some are blessed to have found contentment, but many of us are still searching, and may always be. Some of us aren’t even sure what exactly it is we are looking for and have been surprised at the ways God has rerouted us.
Being confident in your faith doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions. In fact, if you care about it you probably should, and a life of searching can be abundant and fulfilling.
More than three decades on, I am blessed to love God, know that God loves me, and know that as God’s child, I can question, I must search, and God guides me on this journey.
“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” would still probably be verboten in a lot of churches. But if our little combo wants to offer it as a Youth Sunday encore, I’ll sing along to every word.
Rich Copley is a multimedia producer for the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s Communications Ministry. Prior to joining the Mission Agency in 2018, he had a 25-year career as an arts and entertainment journalist.