This Christian Life

Bono’s American Prayer

Recently my brother pointed me to this article. It is an interview that Christianity Today did with Bono. I’m impressed with him as he moves through America on a campaign to wake up the church to a worldwide cause of fighting AIDS. In it, he talks about the state of affairs of the church. The following are quotes taken from the article.

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The world’s biggest rock star tours the heartland, talking more openly about his faith as he recruits Christians in the fight against AIDS in Africa.
by Cathleen Falsani

Is Bono a modern-day prophet? He’d be the first to say no. He’s a rock star and makes no bones about it.

“I’m a believer,” Bono usually says when asked about his faith. “I don’t set myself up as any kind of ‘Christian,’ ” he said as his gleaming silver and chrome tour bus motored east from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Iowa City. “I can’t live up to that. It’s something I aspire to, but I don’t feel comfortable with that badge.”

“This is the defining moral issue of our time,” Bono repeatedly told church congregations during the tour, which was designed to raise people’s awareness of the one-two punch of AIDS and profound poverty that is claiming the lives of 6,500 Africans every day.

“This generation will be remembered for three things: the Internet, the war on terror, and how we let an entire continent go up in flames while we stood around with watering cans. Or not,” he would say, sometimes pounding his fist for emphasis. “Let me share with you a conviction. God is on his knees to the church on this one. God Almighty is on his knees to us, begging us to turn around the supertanker of indifference on the subject of AIDS.”

Evangelicals in a poll, only 6 percent thought they should be doing something about the AIDS emergency… . I’m sure that made you, as it made me, wince.”

Still, Bono believes addressing AIDS is at the core of the church’s purpose and at the core of how outsiders see the church.

“I think our whole idea of who we are is at stake. I think Judeo-Christian culture is at stake,” he said. “If the church doesn’t respond to this, the church will be made irrelevant. It will look like the way you heard stories about people watching Jews being put on the trains. We will be that generation that watched our African brothers and sisters being put on trains.”

Those who read Scripture and don’t come away with God’s preferential concern for the poor are “just blind,” he said, noting that 2,103 verses of Scripture are about the poor.

“People have been perverting the Gospels and the Holy Scriptures since they were first written—mostly the church. This AIDS emergency actually is just such a valuable example of everything that’s wrong and perverted about Christianity today,” he said as he headed toward a Manhattan recording studio to lay down some tracks for “American Prayer,” a song he debuted on the Heart of America tour.

“There should be civil disobedience on this. You read about the apostles being persecuted because they were out there taking on the powers that be. Jesus said, ‘I came to bring a sword.’ In fact, it’s a load of sissies running around with their ‘bless me’ clubs. And there’s a war going on between good and evil. And millions of children and millions of lives are being lost to greed, to bureaucracy, and to a church that’s been asleep. And it sends me out of my mind with anger.

Full Interview