Newspaper Taxis

Ever since The Gospel According to Peanuts arrived on the scene in 1965, a small corner of the Anglo-American publishing world has been dedicated to works that point out the connection between ancient spirituality and modern pop-culture phenomena, with varying degrees of success; everyone from J.R.R. Tolkien to Homer Simpson eventually earns his or her own spiritual biography, wanted or not.

Two more recent entries in this genre, Steve Turner’s The Gospel According to the Beatles and Dale Allison Jr.’s The Love There That’s Sleeping: The Art and Spirituality of George Harrison, seek to discover the individual religious and spiritual journeys that paralleled and influenced the development of the most famous band in history, the Beatles.

Turner’s book is much less about the gospels than it is about the Beatles, and despite the title the author does not restrict his scope to Christianity alone. Devoted Beatles fans will not find much that’s new in the biographies of each member of the group that are woven into the text, but Turner makes deft use of interviews, articles and the occasional song lyric to highlight the religious/spiritual dimension of the Beatles phenomenon.

Some of the revelations are quite striking – for example, John Lennon’s drug-addled letter to Rev. Oral Roberts asking him to help him “out of hell,” or the ways in which Yoko Ono’s many idiosyncrasies were accentuated by her dalliances into the occult. Despite a fairly large corpus of songs to work with, Turner relies more on anecdotes and events than individual songs to highlight the Beatles’ spiritual journeys.

In contrast, Allison’s The Love There That’s Sleeping looks much more closely at the lyrics of individual songs in support of his contention that erstwhile Beatle George Harrison’s religiosity “is not only noble but also his most interesting trait.”
Harrison, who grew up a Catholic but experienced numerous conversions throughout his life, was by his death a proponent of a philosophical Hinduism still strongly influenced by his early years as a Christian as well as by various other Eastern religious practices.

Concentrating largely on “the Harrisongs” of his post-Beatles works, Allison susses out religious and philosophical clues everywhere. Taken together, these lyrical clues allow the reader to envision a contemplative of great depth behind the facade of the “quiet Beatle,” as Harrison was long known.

Both books will provide a satisfying read to music fans, who will find in their pages a wealth of information about the oft-neglected subject of religiosity and spirituality in the lives of the individual Beatles. Both also include interesting references to other contemporary singers and personalities, including Bob Dylan and Timothy Leary, whose spiritual bent helped push the Beatles in that direction.

However, both books will also prove frustrating to those seeking a more in-depth treatment of the various (and often esoteric) religious and spiritual movements which caught the Beatles’ fancy, particularly in the 1970s.

In order to provide the maximum biographical information, it seems, both Allison and Turner neglect much of the background and underpinnings of the various religious ideas that are introduced throughout each book. While the typical American reader may not need a detailed introduction to Christianity, the same cannot be said about Hinduism, and the casual treatment of this and other religious traditions is a weakness in both books.

There are legions of Beatles fans, of course, for whom John Lennon’s notorious boast that “we’re bigger than Jesus” is only slightly an exaggeration; for these readers and other devoted musical enthusiasts, both The Love There That’s Sleeping and The Gospel According to the Beatles offer insightful new information about the lives of these four enormously influential Liverpudlians whose wide-ranging forays into alternative spiritualities were in many ways representative of an entire generation.