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List Price: $19.95 | | Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Salesrank: 272967
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| Media: Hardcover |
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Editorial Review:
Renowned British music journalist and author Steve Turner surveys the religious and spiritual influence of the Beatles, the band that changed the history of music forever. With new interviews, never-before-published material, and fresh insights, Turner helps the reader understand the religious and spiritual ideas and ideals that influenced the music and lives of the Beatles and helps us see how the Fab Four influenced our own lives and culture.
Chapters include the religious upbringing of John, Paul, George, and Ringo; the backlash in the United States after John Lennon’s "We’re more popular than Jesus" comment; the dabbling in Eastern religion; the use of drugs to attempt to enter a higher level of consciousness; and the overall legacy that the Beatles and their music have left. While there is no religious system that permanently anchored the Beatles or their music, they did leave a gospel, Turner concludes: one of love, peace, personal freedom, and the search for transcendence.
The Gospel According to the Beatles Reviews:
Another Great Beatles' Book by Turner 
2009-06-26 - Well-reached and informative, and yet beautifully written, Steve Turner explores the Fab Four's spiritual foundations. Particularly enlightening is the account of John Lennon who moves from the Anglican Church in his teens to a hostile rebellion in his 20s against Christianity to fascination with it in his 30s. A great read.
A Boring Mish-Mash 
2008-04-13 - I am a great Beatles fan but found this tome meandering and unclear as to theme and content. I just didn't get where the author was going. Disappointing after intial excitement.
A Quality Work
2008-02-11 - Ignore the 3-star-Jim Nabors-review. Turner's work is a well-informed, insightful, and painstaking analysis of the spiritual pilgrimage of the Beatles. Anyone who grew up in the tumultuous sixties, particularly if intrigued by the Beatles phenomenon, can gain a new perspective on that decade and its impact down to this day.
At the close of the book, Turner brings his own worldview to bear on the whole question of art and culture in a way that challenges the tendency of many Christians to dismiss the Beatles out of hand.
Finally, the excerpts from Turner's 1971 interview with John and Yoko are alone worth the price of the book.
I'm already looking for other books by this excellent writer.
Believe it or not...a Beatles book that isn't redundant
2007-11-02 - When I saw a book titled "The Gospel According to the Beatles," I groaned. My snap judgment, based on nothing but the title, was that it was the work of an apostate Christian who found that his own watered-down interpretations of Scripture were reflected in the music of the Fab Four. It turns out that the author, rock journalist Steve Turner (who also wrote "A Hard Day's Write," an excellent song-by-song history of the Liverpudlian quartet's canon), is a Christian. His goal is not to find Christian messages where there are none, but to examine the spiritual beliefs, most of which are in opposition to the Bible, that the Beatles expressed in song. And the Beatles, though kicking off their musical journey with innocuous but irresistible ditties like "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You," were unique among "pop" groups in that their music consistently expressed profound, if often misguided (to those who believe the Bible), philosophical and religious ideas.
As Turner quotes Paul McCartney as saying in 2004, "There'd never been anything like the Beatles, who were about music but also about something more far-reaching."
That "something more far-reaching" was awakened by the Beatles' experimentation with drugs. They started by popping the pills that provided the pep necessary for their pre-fame marathon stage performances in Hamburg, then progressed to marijuana, widely cited as influencing the mood of their 1965 album "Rubber Soul." But it was LSD that played the central role in transforming their music and led to the "spiritual" element that began to seep into their songs, beginning, most notably, with "Tomorrow Never Knows," the closing number on 1966's "Revolver" that its author, John Lennon, later referred to as having emerged from his "`Tibetan Book of the Dead' period." Far more than pills or marijuana, LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) was not simply a means of altering a mood, but a way to alter one's consciousness.
"God isn't in a pill," Lennon said, "but LSD explained the mystery of life. It was a religious experience."
Some of the Beatles' greatest works, such as the "Sgt. Pepper" album, which included the disturbing masterpiece "A Day in the Life," may not have been possible without the influence of LSD, but though Lennon was correct in describing the drug as a "religious experience," the spiritual being whose presence is revealed through LSD is not the God of the Bible but His chief foe, Lucifer, the fallen angel whose rebellion was triggered by his desire to "be like God." This same kind of thinking is reflected in George Harrison's statement that "Everybody is potentially divine. It's just a matter of self-realization before it will all happen."
There's no questioning the Beatles' genius as composers and artists, but their influence beyond music was often pernicious. Their experimentation with LSD and later exploration of Transcendental Meditation helped lead the world away from the truth of the Bible and the need for salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, to philosophies based in the occult.
Turner's book is unique among the many hundreds (thousands?) of volumes written about the Beatles in that he offers insight into the religious ideas that shaped their youths. Although George Harrison was the Beatle famous for his religious beliefs, it's not surprising that the most intriguing passages concern John Lennon, the founder of the group and one of the 20th century's most fascinating public figures. Few biographers of John Lennon note that he was raised, more or less, as a Christian. This upbringing explains his lifelong obsession with Jesus Christ. When Lennon wasn't mocking Jesus, as he did in the cartoons he drew in his youth (such as one depicting Jesus on the cross with a pair of bedroom slippers at the base), he identified with Him (as in the chorus of "The Ballad of John and Yoko"). Then there was his famous 1966 remark that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus ("Christianity will go..It will vanish and shrink").
It is therefore surprising to learn that, in 1972, Lennon wrote a desperate letter to evangelist Oral Roberts to inquire about Christianity ("Is it phoney? Can He love me?") in an attempt to escape the hell of drug abuse. According to several previous biographers who had access to Lennon's personal diaries, or were employed in the Dakota during his five year withdrawal from the public eye, Lennon professed to be "born again" in 1977 but faced intense opposition to his new found beliefs from Yoko Ono who saw her husband's embrace of Jesus as a threat to her control of his life. Before long, Lennon was once again living a life dictated by astrologers, mystics, and other practitioners of the occult. But Jesus, and the Bible, were never far from his thoughts, as many of the interviews he gave shortly before his 1980 murder indicate. As he told Barbara Graustark of Newsweek, "Some of [Christ's parables] are only making sense to me now, after a whole life of sitting in church or school." It's anybody's guess what Lennon actually believed before Mark David Chapman ended his life on December 8, 1980.
At this point, it's hard to believe that anyone could possibly offer fresh insights into the Beatles phenomenon or their brilliant body of work, but Turner succeeds in making "The Gospel According to the Beatles" a necessary addition to the bookshelf of anyone who admires or is simply fascinated by the Fab Four.
Brian W. Fairbanks
Theologians may be disappointed...
2007-08-26 - but Beatles fans will be delighted with this biography of the Beatles with particular reference to their relationship to things religious.
