Evangelicalism: February 2006 Archives

My thesis is done, I turned it in on my 25th birthday, and after I have orals on Tuesday, college is done forever. Hooray! You'll see some version of the final project up here at some point. Here's a bit about AIDS activism and the degaying of U2.

In many ways, the AIDS epidemic in Africa is an ideal issue for RELEVANT. First, the fight against AIDS is a cause to which many prominent musicians and entertainers from the secular world have lent their public support. By signing on to this cause, RELEVANT is able to associate itself with these celebrities and capitalize on their aura of cool. Bono, lead singer of the hugely popular rock group U2, has been a prominent leader on this issue and has particularly sought the assistance of evangelicals to join the fight. Bono agreed to a interview so he could talk about the importance of debt relief and fighting AIDS, and was featured on the cover of the March/April 2004 issue. Bono’s image has since been used repeatedly to advertise subscriptions to the magazine.

Second, AIDS is an issue where there is broad consensus, at least on the abstract level, if not in terms of policy goals. Unlike war, abortion, tax cuts, universal health care, and homosexuality, everyone agrees about AIDS; it is very bad. RELEVANT is able to fully embrace the hip progressive position, because there is no opposition except apathy. No one is likely to write angry letters to RELEVANT saying “I think AIDS is good! Cancel my subscription!” Christian advertisers are not likely to be scandalized; Bono had already been a cover subject for Christianity Today in March 2003. It’s a safe issue for RELEVANT to take a firm stand on.

That safety also comes with an aura of edginess. Because AIDS was associated with gays and intravenous drug users, evangelicals were slow to respond to the epidemic, and sometimes outright hostile to victims of the disease. Taking up this issue as an important cause rewards young evangelicals with a sense of rebellion against old-fashioned, vindictive conservative Christian attitudes. At the same time, by focusing on foreign elements of the crisis rather than domestic public health, and focusing on relief rather than prevention, RELEVANT is able to talk about AIDS without talking about controversies such as condoms or needle exchanges. And while Bono’s primary goals involve pressuring political leaders to take action, RELEVANT largely shifts the focus to the work being done by private charities.

RELEVANT, of course, never mentions that Bono has been criticized by some NGOs and leftist activists for encouraging multinational corporations to see the AIDS crisis as an opportunity to sow the seeds for new markets in developing countries, expanding globalization and opening these countries up to exploitative economic “development”. It also never mentions that the Bush administration has been has been described by Bono himself as one of the biggest roadblocks in addressing the crisis. Indeed, readers are given the opposite impression, when Bono is quoted as saying in “I believe the president is sincere in his convictions to put America up front in a way that hasn’t been done before on these issues.” RELEVANT fails to note that this quote was seven months old at the date of printing, and that Bush had since backed down on some of his promises. RELEVANT certainly never mentions Bono’s history of support for reproductive choice and LGBT rights.

To be fair, Bono hasn’t mentioned his feelings on these issues for a while either. U2 has made a calculated artistic retreat from the wildly creative if inconsistent 1997 album POP which saw the band playfully borrowing elements of house and techno music and indulging in campy Warholian appropriations of pop music and commercial imagery. Their 1997 POP-mart tour was themed around a critique of consumer culture; the stage was framed by a golden McDonalds arch, and a giant video screen featured the classic image of the ascent of man tweaked to include a man pushing a shopping cart as the ultimate step of evolution, The screen also displayed video footage of transgender performance artist Leigh Bowery bellydancing, and animated images based on the work of the late gay artist Keith Haring. Each night, the band would emerge from a forty-foot-tall lemon-shaped mirrorball, dressed as the Village People, to perform their hit “Discotheque”. That song, a synth-heavy departure from their classic sound, was based around a house beat of the sort popularized in gay dance clubs. However, by 2002, Bono was courting evangelical Christians for his causes; when U2’s Greatest Hits 1990-2000 was released, “Discotheque” was included only in a remixed form that had its squelching synths, filter sweeps and drum machines pulled out of the mix. The song now resembled stale Stones-y blues rock; it had essentially been degayed—stripped of any musical references to gay culture—and made more palatable for middle American evangelicals. The band also abandoned their campy, irony-laden stage show for straight-forward sincerity and scripture quoting. This suggests that just as evangelicals are changing the way they present themselves to better engage mass culture, mass culture may be changing the way it presents itself to better engage evangelicalism, though the motive in this case may have been noble.