Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner and Paul David Hewson sound like the names of stuffy, upper-crust theologians, each on a different side of religious academia, shouting their platitudes and disagreements with British and Irish accents in turn. In truth, they are the given names of Sting (of The Police) and Bono (of U2), who held this very debate throughout the 80’s and 90’s - but instead of thumping Bibles at one another across a cold, steepled monastery on the foothills of a dark Scottish Loch, the two men howled Dad-Rock across the radio waves. Two men with radically different world views, yet good friends who taught us how to turn to God in times of grief: Bono with humility or hubris in turn, and Sting with utter disbelief but yearning. The yin and yang of the two got us through some trying times. Bono painted a picture of doubt paving the way to a stronger version of faith, while Sting spent such a high percentage of his lyrics questioning the very existence of God, he sounded quite desperate for it to be true. The uniqueness of their particular back and forth is that - though each represented a wide spectrum of belief over his career, they never aligned precisely at the same time.
Both gave us some of the most memorable poetic interpretations of personal faith (and often, Scripture) in a century - and inadvertently found their music utilized in church services to prepare for the eucharist. A punk rocker and an agnostic finding their art used in consecration? Bullocks! Yet, true. Let’s explore and see if we can find what we’re looking for.
1981 was the year the questioning began. Bono and U2 had grown up in Ireland around church-motivated Civil War, and Bono in particular had always viewed religion with skepticism, as if those people were just looking to beat someone over the head with a book, albeit a Holy one. Then, Bono and many of his bandmates experienced Jesus for themselves - and it felt like anything but religion. Having been asked if he was ready to give his life over to Jesus, Bono had been the first to his feet. This newfound relationship with the Savior would burgeon into U2’s plaintive and Christ-centered 1981 album October.
Sting, on the other hand, had already laid the lyrical groundwork for his emptiness. Sting would not clarify his stance on God until a 2010 interview when he stated, “I enjoy the mystery. I would never say I am an atheist. Let's say I am agnostic, and agnostic means 'I don't know. ' I embrace that 'not knowing'” This was clear from the onset as one of the first lyrics he penned was “Hole In My Life'“ off of 1978’s Outlandos d’Amour which stated, “There's a hole in my life. Be a happy man (I try the best I can), or maybe I'm just looking for too much.”
He followed this in 1979 with “Walked out this morning, don’t believe what I saw: hundred million bottles washed up on the shore. Seems I’m not alone in being alone. Hundred billion castaways looking for a home.” That, of course, is The Police’s “Message in a Bottle” from Regatta de Blanc (1979), putting a well-quipped pin into crowded universal loneliness. Sting was inadvertently proposing the question that if a rock star who can share his bed with anyone of his choosing is desperately alone, what hope have any of us except God?
While Sting was painting this picture of a yearning for far more than human love, Bono was painting a poetic revelation of commitment to Christ rooted in the not knowing. His flourishes were less promises than they were admissions of failed attempts: “I try to sing this song - I try to stand up, but I can’t find my feet. I try to speak up, but only in You I’m complete. I try to sing this song, I try to get in, but I can’t find the door. The door is open. You’re standing there, you let me in. Gloria In the domine, Gloria Exultate. Oh Lord - loosen my lips. if I had anything - anything at all, I’d give it to you.” The lyrics from “Gloria” (1981’s October) don’t read like a church service. They read like the homeless man on the street outside attempting to connect the dots of the hymns he is hearing. In “Rejoice,” off of the same album, Bono continues with his unanswered questions, “What am I to do? Just tell me what am I supposed to say? I can’t change the world but I can change the world in me. Rejoice.” His lyrics didn’t tend to doubt Christ - but they severely doubted the singer himself. Uncertain to the very end, Bono closes the album with "With a Shout (Jerusalem),” which pleads “Oh where do we go from here? To the side of a hill blood was spilt. We were still looking at each other. But we’re going back there?” - as if to urge, we must go back to the very moment Christ gave us His all - because we haven’t yet figured out how to walk away from that place, that moment. And most of us still haven’t.
That same year, on Ghost In the Machine (1981), Sting connected the loneliness he had often sang about with faith for the first time. On “Secret Journey,” Sting sings “I met a holy man - His blindness was his wisdom - I'm such a lonely man - You will see light in the darkness - You will make some sense of this - And when you've made your secret journey - You will find this love you miss.” Like most of us, Sting is still on that journey - still attempting to make sense of all this.
As the 80’s progressed, American Christianity became tainted with one parachurch ministry scandal after another. From the financial exploits of Jim Baker to the tawdry sexual secrets of Jimmy Swaggart to Oral Roberts locking himself in the prayer tower, rock stars were disassociating themselves with the idea of an American Christian and instead looking for some other moniker that better suited their evolving beliefs.
Sting sang directly to the Man upstairs in 1983’s “O My God” from Synchronicity: “Everyone I know is lonely with God so far away and my heart belongs to no one, so now sometimes I pray ‘Take the space between us - fill it up some way. Oh my God you take the biscuit treating me this way. Expecting me to treat you well, no matter what you say. How can I turn the other cheek? It's black and bruised and torn. I've been waiting since the day that I was born. Fat man in his garden, thin man at his gate. My God you must be sleeping. Wake up, it's much too late.”
Bono countered that same year, also speaking directly to God as he rephrased the Psalmist David, “I waited patiently for the Lord. He inclined and heard my cry. He brought me up out of the pit - out of the miry clay. You set my feet upon a rock and made my footsteps firm. Many will see, many will see and hear. How long? How long to sing this song?” (“40” from War (1993) Both men had the same concerns with the world at large, the same plaintive cry to God, but one man questioned the silence while the other cleared his own ears.
Neither would sing of these themes again for another four years, until The Joshua Tree and …Nothing Like the Sun (arguably both artist’s greatest works) were released within months of one another in 1987.
U2 had been formulating their rock much like the echoing Welsh hymns they had heard filling stadiums, aiming acutely for a very specific place between the brutal and the ecstatic. They finally landed it in “The Joshua Tree,” an eleven-track exploration of the sacred and the solemn across windswept America. Majestic harmonies and the sounds of battle planes. Bono mostly waxed poetic about the afterlife, comparing heaven to the most desolate, poverty-stricken - but beautiful locales in the world where they still feel God’s touch in “Where the Streets Have No Name,” admitting “we’re still building and burning down love” as a stark explanation as to why the human condition always forces a distance upon God. In “One Tree Hill,” Bono continues his penchant for painting beauty with violent touches as he half-prays to a loved one who died too soon, “I'll see you again when the stars fall from the sky and the moon has turned red over One Tree Hill.” But, once again, it is in the questioning - harsher this round - that Bono truly sums up the human condition as it applied at that moment in time to American faith. Perhaps the singular most quotable pop culture statement ever made about faith sharing a space with doubt, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” declared, “I have spoke with the tongue of angels. I have held the hand of the devil. It was warm in the night. I was cold as a stone - but I still haven't found what I'm looking for. I believe in the Kingdom Come, when all the colours will bleed into one. But yes, I'm still running. You broke the bonds and you loosed the chains, carried the cross of my shame - you know I believe it. But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.” In so doing, Bono put to words what so many of us had scarcely dared to imagine: “God, I know what you have done for me - I know that it’s true. But, it doesn’t change the fact that I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.” This doubt, exacerbated by wealthy televangelists and falling ministries, was causing a skepticism - perhaps not toward God - but certainly toward the humans who most frequently declared to be His besties. The world could not help but question if those who seemed to study Him the most were the most sinister of tricksters, what did that say about God Himself? Bono gave his version of an answer in the electric “Bullet the Blue Sky” when he harshly separated God from man: “Jacob wrestled the angel - and the angel was overcome. You plant a demon seed, you raise a flower of fire. We see them burnin' crosses - see the flames, higher and higher.” If that wasn’t direct enough, Bono added another spoken salvo when performing the song live, “The God I believe in isn’t short of cash, mister.”
That same autumn, Sting reciprocated with his own masterpiece …Nothing Like the Sun. Surprisingly direct, Sting hit the issue’s nail on the head on the track “History Will Teach Us Nothing,” when he sang, “If God is dead and an actor plays his part, his words of fear will find a place in your heart. Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse. Without freedom from the past, things can only get worse. Sooner or later, just like the world’s first day - sooner or later, we learn to throw the past away. And History will teach us nothing.”
The Nineties reared their heads and, suddenly, Sting and Bono found their roles reversed. In light of modern Christian faith becoming politicized in an agonizing way, Bono began to question the validity of believing more than ever. In the same moment, Sting’s parents passed away and the man named Gordon Sumner found himself faced with the bleak realities of his belief system. As is usually the case with art, their darkest days benefited us greatly as both artists began to put the same arguments and unsettled ideas to song that were wandering about our own heads. Suddenly, Bono was tainted and Sting was raw. Once again releasing extraordinary albums in the same year, Sting’s “The Soul Cages” came first, and we listened as he wrestled with his own demons.
Sting’s grief first surfaced on “All This Time,” where he sings, “Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth. Better to be poor than be a fat man in the eye of a needle. As these words were spoken, I swear I could hear the old man laughing, ‘What good is a used up world and how could it be worth having?’ As if to argue that God’s promises to those who are hurting is one big slap in the face. You’re going to give the poor and starving what they need when? In the end - when they no longer need it and it’s all used up? That every time we say, God, life is not good - His response is, You’re right - but wait. In that specific moment of grief and pain, it was all far too unfair for Sting, and he abandoned his agnosticism long enough to give some direct criticisms to God: “All this time, the river flowed endlessly like a silent tear. All this time, the river flowed. Father, if Jesus exists, then how come He never lived here?”
As the album nears its close, Sting places himself inside a fable. He had been raised in Newcastle, a ship-building town where the enormous structures cast literal ever-present shadows across the small otherwise fisherman’s village. His father had always spoken in the language of sailors, so in “The Soul Cages,” Sting crafted a tale of himself traveling by boat to face the devil in order to barter for his father’s soul: “He's the king of the ninth world. The twisted son of the fog bells toll. In each and every lobster cage: a tortured human soul. These are the souls of the broken factories, the subject slaves of the broken crown, the dead accounting of old guilty promises, these are the souls of the broken town. These are the soul cages.” In his unknowing, his lack of capital-f faith, Sting was desperate for a way to bring his father back - a fable that ended with a vision of resolve, “I dreamed of the ship on the sea. It would carry my father and me to a place we could never be found - to a place far away from this town. A Newcastle ship without coals, we would sail to the island of souls.” But, there would be no real resolve in Sting’s grief. His mother and father both died within a year of each other, and Sting skipped their funerals in order to forge ahead with his art. He later considered this an enormous mistake as he lacked closure in his grief, poetically expressed in the final track of the album, “When the Angels Fall:” “Take your father's cross gently from the wall. The shadow still remaining - see the churches fall in mighty arcs of sound and all that they're containing - yet all the ragged souls of all the ragged men looking for their lost homes, shuffle to the ruins from the leveled plain to search among the Tombstones.” Sting found himself more alone than ever before, searching for answers in his own lyrics.
That same November, U2 released the band-redefining Achtung Baby - and with it, a mask placed firmly over Bono’s earnestness. He places himself in the perspective of Judas for “Until the End of the World,” “In the garden, I was playing the tart. I kissed your lips and broke your heart. You were acting like it was the end of the world. In my dream, I was drowning my sorrows, but my sorrows they'd learned to swim. Surrounding me, going down on me, spilling over the brim. Waves of regret and waves of joy. I reached out for the one I tried to destroy. It was You. You said you'd wait till the end of the world.” Bono even famously created a devil’s advocate alter-ego he named McPhisto (an amalgamation of the Faustian demon Mephisto - i.e. the Mephistopheles Sting sang about in “Wrapped Around Your Finger” - and the American corporate devil known as McDonald’s). This “split personality” allowed Bono to question things he had previously never vocalized - and added more than a drop of sour to his spiritual outlook. A few examples:
“Have you come here for forgiveness? Have you come to raise the dead? Have you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head? Did I ask too much, more than a lot? You gave me nothing, now it's all I got. We're one, but we're not the same. Well, we hurt each other, then we do it again. You say love is a temple, love a higher law. You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl - and I can't keep holding on to what you got, when all you got is hurt.” ONE from Achtung Baby (1991)
“It's no secret that the stars are falling from the sky. The universe exploding 'cos-a one man's lie. Look I gotta go, yeah, I'm running outta change; There's a lot of things if I could I'd rearrange.” THE FLY from Achtung Baby (1991)
“And I'd join the movement if there was one I could believe in. Yeah, I'd break bread and wine if there was a church I could receive in. 'Cause I need it now. To take the cup, to fill it up, to drink it slow. I can't let you go. And I must be an acrobat to talk like this and act like that. And you can dream, so dream out loud - and don't let the bastards grind you down.” ACROBAT from Achtung Baby (1991)
Probably the best metaphor in pop music for the act of being an American Christian in the 1990’s: I must be an acrobat to talk like this - and act like that. It was this precise perceived two-facedness that was causing people to run from the church in droves. If they truly understood what the Gospel of Christ was really about (i.e. love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind - and love your neighbor as yourself), they were NOT seeing this truth in any news that was being reported about the American church.
As the nineties progressed, it was Sting’s turn to be optimistic as the depression brought upon by the deaths of his parents began to wane. His next single would provide the most uplift of his career, “You could say I lost my faith in science and progress. You could say I lost my belief in the holy church. You could say I lost my sense of direction. You could say all of this and worse, but if I ever lose my faith in you, there'd be nothing left for me to do.” (“If I Ever Lose My Faith In You” from Ten Summoner’s Tales (1993). It seemed as if Sting had turned the corner from being angry at the lack of answers to asking the powers that be to provide any, even if a little, revelation. In “St. Augustine In Hell,” he sings “If somebody up there likes me (if somebody up there cares), deliver me from evil. Save me from these wicked snares. Not into temptation, not to cliffs of fall. On to revelation, and lessons for us all.”
Meanwhile, U2 released Zooropa (1993), a companion album to Achtung Baby that doubled down on its skepticism and doubt. In the opening refrains of “Zooropa” itself, Bono cries, “And I have no compass. And I have no map. And I have no reasons to get back. And I have no religion. And I don't know what's what. And I don't know the limit - the limit of what we've got.” He then positions himself as the Prodigal Son, but gives the parable a very different and bleak resolve in “The First Time:” “My father is a rich man, he wears a rich man's cloak. He gave me the keys to his kingdom (coming). Gave me a cup of gold. He said "I have many mansions and there are many rooms to see." But I left by the back door, and I threw away the key.” Whether it was Bono or McPhisto singing, faith seemed to be gone - not necessarily in God, but definitely in humanity. In the album’s closer “The Wanderer,” U2 brought in friend Johnny Cash to sing these lyrics penned by Bono: “I stopped outside a church house where the citizens like to sit. They say they want the kingdom, but they don't want God in it. I went out there in search of experience - to taste and to touch and to feel as much as a man can - before he repents.”
At the close of the decade, the artists had completed their journey to become full-tilt opposites of one another, with Sting now bringing heralded earnestness and spirituality to his pop while U2 sang like God had abandoned them in the Garden of Gethsemane. Sting’s most tongue-out-of-cheek spiritual standard came on 1996’s Mercury Falling with the lead single “Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot:” “When the doctor failed to heal you. When no medicine chest, can make you well. When no counsel leads to comfort. When there are no more lies they can tell. No more useless information and the compass spins between Heaven and Hell, just let your soul be your pilot. Let your soul guide you. He'll guide you well.” And if there was any question who Sting was referring to as “he,” the matter was clarified on “Fill Her Up” from 1999’s Brand New Day: “You're gonna fill her up with madness. You're gonna fill her up with blame. You're gonna live with no tomorrow. You're gonna fill her up with pain. You're gonna fill her up with darkness. You're gonna fill her up with night. You gotta fill her up with Jesus! You gotta fill her up with light!”
U2, on the other hand, were getting bleaker by the minute in their assessment of the hopelessness of hope. Was this because they were truly having their darkest of days - or was it because in 1997, bitter, disillusioned rock sold best? Regardless, 1997’s Pop has provided some of their most poetic and thought-provoking statements about modern faith. In fact, the band defined the album as about “love, desire, and faith in crisis.” Yes, these arguments came in bitter pills, but are no less worth dwelling upon. From the cheeky “Mofo:” “Lookin' for to save my, save my soul. Lookin' in the places where no flowers grow. Lookin' for to fill that God-shaped hole. Mother, mother-suckin' rock and roll. Holy dunk, space junk coming in for the splash. White dopes on punk staring into the flash. Lookin' for the baby Jesus under the trash. Mother, mother-suckin' rock and roll.” To the no-nonsense “Wake Up Dead Man:” “Jesus, Jesus help me, I'm alone in this world, and a f***ed-up world it is too. Wake up, wake up dead man. Jesus, I'm waiting here, boss. I know you're looking out for us, but maybe your hands aren't free. Your Father, He made the world in seven. He's in charge of heaven. Will you put a word in for me?” The most accurate - and painful statement on the album comes from ballad “If God Will Send His Angels:” “God's got his phone off the hook, babe. Would he even pick up if he could? It's been a while since we saw that child hangin' round this neighbourhood. Jesus never let me down. You know Jesus used to show me the score. Then they put Jesus in show business. Now it's hard to get in the door.”
Above all, Sting and Bono had a compelling friendship - a relationship where they could disagree and agree in waves of discussion and argument. Bono, the young man of unquestioning faith was in-your-face with his commitment to Christ, but then matured into someone who questions, doubts, and eventually blows raspberries at the whole church establishment while begging to know where God went for all this folly. Sting, on the other hand, could admit no more than having an empty space inside that nothing he had experienced as a young man could fill. As he aged, his questions of God began filling the space until he yearned for more and more questions, finding joy in the “not knowing” of it all. After a season of denial, great loss, and grief - he came to the conclusion that one could both not know and believe - and that there may be just as much joy in the not knowing than there could ever be in the answers.
By traveling very different spiritual paths, beginning wide on opposite ends, and landing even farther apart on the far side, Bono and Sting have what all crucial and challenging God-given relationships should have: the challenge. The mindset that brings the best and worst out of one another by asking what the other won’t - or believing what the other can’t. At every point in their friendship, they were somehow at different far ends of a spectrum of belief - which meant that they never lacked the same thing - and that they never had the same thing. Instead, God used their relationship to poke and provoke one another. Each in season faithful, and each in season faithless - but never at the same time. If that isn’t proof of God at work, I don’t know what is.
As the new millennium broke, a new spirit settled on Bono and the boys - and though there would always be questions, the season of bitter dissection through song had ended. The earnestness of October and The Joshua Tree was back, but with the weathered questioning of Achtung Baby tucked just under wing. U2 returned at the height of societal bitterness with their most heartfelt single in two decades:
“The heart is a bloom, shoots up through stony ground, but there's no room, no space to rent in this town. You're out of luck and the reason that you had to care, the traffic is stuck and you're not moving anywhere. You thought you'd found a friend to take you out of this place, someone you could lend a hand in return for grace. It's a beautiful day, the sky falls and you feel like it's a beautiful day. Don't let it get away. Touch me, take me to that other place. Teach me, I know I'm not a hopeless case. See the bird with a leaf in her mouth. After the flood all the colours came out. It was a beautiful day.” - BEAUTIFUL DAY from All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000)
It was as if someone opened a window - and until they did, no one noticed how stale the inside was smelling. The band (and Bono in particular) were heavily criticized for too much saccharine in a culture that wasn’t looking for sunshine. Then, September 11, 2001 happened - and the world cried out. For love, for brotherhood, to God. The album, including its anthems Walk On, Stuck In a Moment, and Grace sold over 12 million copies and won 7 Grammy Awards. Since that day, both U2 and Sting have maintained that optimism, that earnestness, and that hope for something bigger than themselves inside their music.
In 2018, Sting admitted, though he hasn’t practiced his family’s Catholicism since he was a young boy, he has deepened his love for sacred music, saying “there’s something in the cadences and in the rhythm of the music in Latin that is very special,” and that the Church’s “music and the liturgy fed this artistic soul.” Pushed further to admit if he was still a true agnostic, Sting replied, “Eternity still horrifies me but at the same time being put into that philosophical conundrum was perfect to forge an artistic angst, an artistic struggle . . . I love what Pope Francis said about God: he said “God is mercy,” and I thought that was a profound and simple statement that people had kind of forgotten over the years . . . I’d probably seek out the sacraments at the end of my life.”
In his 2022 autobiography “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” Bono stated that his and his wife Ali’s shared faith in Jesus is the cornerstone of their relationship - as well as what has driven his music and activism. Understanding his faith is critical to understanding his motivations. In promoting the book, he told NPR, “If I was in a cafe today - and someone in the room said, stand up if you’re ready to give your life to Jesus - I would be the first on my feet. All over again.”
Next: "SONGS IN FULL COLOUR" (2024) A brand new long-form comedic essay by Mark Steele. Exclusively written for the Mark Steele Archive.
The music of The Police, Sting, and U2 - including the cited references to Outlandos d’Amour, Regatta de Blanc, October, Ghost In the Machine, War, Synchronicity, The Joshua Tree, …Nothing Like the Sun, The Soul Cages, Achtung Baby, Ten Summoner’s Tales, Zooropa, Mercury Falling, Brand New Day, Pop, and All That You Can’t Leave Behind are available wherever you find great music.