On this date in 1940, John Lennon was born in Liverpool, England. A guitar player, Lennon first teamed up with Paul McCartney at age 15. In 1960 they founded the Beatles, a pop foursome that took the world by storm in 1962. On March 4, 1966, the London Evening Standard published an interview with John Lennon in which he claimed that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and I will be proved right. We are more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
Lennon’s comments were greeted in the U.S. with record burnings and boycotts and he eventually apologized.
Despite hit after hit, the Beatles broke up when McCartney left in 1970. Lennon married Yoko Ono in 1969 and released his hit album “Imagine” in 1971. When his son Sean was born, he became a famous “house husband.” In 1980 he came out of retirement to do some recordings. He was shot to death by Mark David Chapman outside his Dakota apartment building in New York City on Dec. 8, 1980. Sentenced to serve 20 years to life, Chapman in 2022 was denied parole for the 12th time.
In an interview Lennon and Ono gave to Playboy that was published posthumously in January 1981, he said, “[T]his whole religion business suffers from the ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ bit. There’s too much talk about soldiers and marching and converting. I’m not pushing Buddhism, because I’m no more a Buddhist than I am a Christian; but there’s one thing I admire about the religion: There’s no proselytizing.”
Lennon also wrote lyrics saying “I don’t believe in Bible” or Jesus: “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” (D. 1980)
PHOTO: Lennon the month before his death; Jack Mitchell photo for The New York Times under CC 3.0.
