The Beatles and The Gospel

I grew up listening to the Beatles in my teen years. I can still flash back to the first time that I heard She Loves You - simply sublime ... for a Junior Higher anyway. During my ten years I saw the Beatles' music go mystically dark and over time I lost interest in them and their music. So I was interested when I saw an article in the paper this morning on this book.


Steve Turner, author of The Gospel According to The Beatles , was recently interviewed by INFUZE. Here are a few excerpts from the interview:

I spent my teenage years listening to the Beatles. The very first article I ever wrote was on the Beatles for their fan magazine The Beatles Monthly. I've always found them exciting and interesting so it's a great pleasure to be able to investigate them in more depth.

As a Christian I've always been interested in the way they fused their changing beliefs with their music and how the music in turn affected a whole generation. So this is what the book investigates and hopefully people will learn about the Beatles, the Sixties and how they affected each other...

The book goes into their changing beliefs starting with their upbringing in different churches and ending with what they believed before they died (in the case of John and George) and what they seem to believe today (in the case of Paul and Ringo). I explain their gospel as one of expanded consciousness. They identified the problam in a song like "Nowhere Man" ("He's as blind as he can be...").

All the answers they came up with, whether it was drugs or eastern spirituial practices, had expanded consciousness as their goal. They believed that a child naturally has this consciousness and yet we lose it as we grow older. If we regain it, we see everything with a greater degree of clarity and are able to enjoy the present momenet rather than get hung up either on the past or the future...

It just gives me a deeper understanding of their view and how it did affect and continues to affect society. People who are now in important decision-making positions are people who grew up on The Beatles. Read more here.