#413: Struggling to Evangelize? Meet the Beatles!

 Cultural historians have said that the Beatles “changed everything”--and that includes the US Catholic Church. 

As Catholic leaders try to cope with slipping numbers (of sacraments, worshipers, and revenue), they struggle to address cultural factors, often beyond their control, that altered the environment for Catholic life over the last several decades.  The Beatles are a significant case in point.

I have long considered the JFK assassination to be the event that closed the complacent social stability of the immediate post-war period in America (“the fifties”) and opened up a new era of turbulent cultural change (“the sixties”).  So it’s natural for me to see the Beatles’ US debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, just nine weeks after JFK was shot, as America’s first taste of the decade ahead.

With Ed Sullivan

  Hence CBS titled last week’s 50^th anniversary celebration of that event “The Night That Changed America.”

The 50th anniversary "Beatles Reunion"

To see how that change touched Catholic life, one must first recall the impact of the Beatles on pop music, in order to gauge their long-term cultural impact.

When hip-hop, dance, and “bubble gum” pop began to take over the music market in the mid-1990s, it finally ended rock & roll’s reign as America’s dominant pop music—a reign that lasted more than 40 years.  No type of popular music had ever dominated record sales, ticket sales, and the airways for such a long period.  In the past, popular music generally had shifted from one generation to another.  But Rock’s long reign meant that children born in 1990 grew up hearing the same music--often the same songs--their grandparents heard in the 1960s.  And the Beatles made this happen.

When the Beatles arrived on the scene, rock & roll was reeling from the loss of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, and had lost most of its popularity and power after only 10 years.  Record sales were bottoming out, and the airwaves were dominated by singers like Lesley Gore, Bobby Vinton, and the Four Seasons.  One heard few guitars, fewer pianos, and virtually no rock bands. Rock was on the verge of falling into minor cultural status, the same way that Swing, Big Bands, New Orleans Jazz, and Rag music had each fallen from popularity after brief periods of dominance during the 20^th century.

"The Night That Changed America"

But the Beatles changed all that, reintroducing the classic sounds of rock: guitars, drums, strong backbeat, and voices in harmony. Their runaway popularity opened a floodgate for the British Invasion, bringing The Rolling Stones and dozens of other rock bands in their wake.  This in turn reinvigorated the US rock scene, which generated hit-making bands for another 30 years.

In short, the Beatles saved rock music and, in doing so, laid a major pop-art foundation for the transformations of the sixties.  Once Bob Dylan followed their lead and went electric, rock was destined to become the defining music not just for baby boomers but also for their children.  Those children are now the very adults and parents who make up the largest group of “de-churched” Catholics in America.  In that sense, evangelizing means reaching out to a generation raised in the rock culture made possible by the Beatles.

But the Beatles change more than music, of course. They changed hair styles, language, and above all an attitude toward conventional ways and wisdom.

If John Lennon shocked Americans by suggesting that the Beatles had become “more popular than Jesus,” the shock was all the more acute for those who knew that he spoke the truth.

After their famous 1965 Shea Stadium concert, the Beatles retired from public performance.  So more than half of their career was spent recording music they never played in public.  For five years, this meant no tours, concerts, radio, or TV--no live performances of any Beatles songs written after Shea Stadium.  Such a move was without precedent, and remains unique today.  The Beatles became the first and only real “recording artists” in pop music.  We inherit the “standards” songs they created by the dozens not (as with traditional standards) as sheet music, but as actual, definitive performances by the authors themselves.

They abandoned the practice of marketing albums with one or two hit singles and ten unknown songs.  Instead, they produced albums full of songs that were radio hits in their own right, without ever being singles.

They also abandoned the common practice of singing music written by professionals songwriters, releasing albums written entirely by themselves, a practice that became the norm for rock bands everywhere ever since.  Thus it was no longer enough to sing or play, one also had to become a songwriter.

With the release of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967, they broke new barriers. They invented the “concept album,” where the album’s songs, rather than a random collection, were related to a single theme.  They also printed all the lyrics on the album.  These innovations also took hold across the industry.

All this while their music evolved in all directions at once, incorporating classical forms, British music hall, country music and blues, and even Indian music and electronic avant-garde.  By the end of their brief careers, “rock music” denoted a musical range that had not existed even six years before.

Finally, the Beatles began Apple records, and became their own publishers.  To this day, their music is released on the Apple label.

In short, the Beatles broke virtually every existing rule of the music business, and in fact re-wrote those rules.  As Dave Groh said at the Ed Sullivan TV special last week, “The Beatles knew no boundaries.”

All this raises two questions.  First, how did they get away with it--how did they break all the rules and survive?  Second, what effect of that have on American culture?

The first one is easy.  The Beatles got away with it because their brilliant music made them so popular they could flaunt all the commercial conventions, do everything their own way--stop touring and promoting and appearing live--and still dominate record sales with every album.  And they sustained that brilliance-driven-popularity until they broke up.

What effect did this all have?  Well first of all it meant that the Beatles exhibited palpable irreverence for the established conventions of both their industry and the culture at large.  Like true sixties icons, they questioned authorities at every turn and often decided to simply go their own way.  And they inspired many others to follow suit.

But notice that, for the Beatles, “going their own way” did not mean fighting the system, or simply transferring from one record label or manager to another.  It meant taking their fate into their own hands without institutional support.  They no longer depended on impresarios to produce shows, agents to promote them, company executives to tell them what to do, marketers to tell them what would sell, or accountants to tell them how much to spend on the next album.

In other words, the Beatles declared their independence from virtually all of the institutions that had previously controlled nearly everyone in their field.  They pursued their careers and lived their lives as if they were perfectly content to continue on without needing those institutions at all.  By breaking from those institutions, they modeled a kind of existential freedom to others-- and, given their iconic status, “others” meant tens of millions of baby boomers and their children.

The Beatles were not, of course, the only cultural force moving to such “existential freedom” in the 1960s.  The folk movement, the civil rights movement, the student protests, the antiwar movement, and the feminist revival all fueled the growing feeling that depending as little as possible on institutions and institutional authority, traveling light and living “free,” was the best way to live.  Thus life became not about following rules, but about making choices.

The Beatles’ example inspired Steve Jobs, who considered them to be the very model businessmen of a new age. He named his company after theirs and dedicated himself to building a computer business that broke all the rules upon which IBM’s monopoly depended.  Apple computers won, and IBM’s dominance declined.

All of which brings us finally back to evangelization.  Catholic leaders seeking to reach out and welcome disaffected baby boomers and their children (Americans between 15 and 65) face an obvious cultural barrier.  Such leaders represent a massive institution with a highly visible authority structure.  They lead a Church that too often presented Catholicism as a set of rules to be followed under the threat of punishment.  Yet their target population has embraced a culture that prizes personal freedom, distrusts authority, dislikes institutions, and prefers to break rules whenever possible.

If it seems too much of a stretch to credit the Beatles for this gap between institutions and the 15-65 group, recall that the original “generation gap” of the sixties began with a clash between parents and their sons over the length of their sons’ hair.  More than any other image of the counter-culture’s rejection of conventional authority and institutions, long hair was the iconic emblem of a rebellious generation.  And where did those kids get their idea to adopt long hair as the sign of their personal declaration of independence?  Why, that idea came, of course, from the Beatles!

That generation approaches retirement today, but they and their children still prefer to live without depending on institutional rules and conformity to conventional ways. 

So our efforts at evangelization would do well to pause and “meet the Beatles”--that is, consider how we can approach people who are perfectly content to live without the institutional Church.  We’re asking them to join a faith community, and “community” is certainly a congenial notion for anyone raised in the 1960s.  But to the extent that “faith community” becomes code for institutional structures or rules, we risk alienating the very people we want to reach.

Our culture’s loss of respect for institutions, in other words, affects the church as much as (perhaps more than) any other institution in our culture.  We must acknowledge this fact, recognize that it results from factors beyond our control, and then think how to lighten our own institutional baggage as we reach out to others for whom such baggage will never be an attraction. 

Perhaps we can start by listing to the Beatles “Speaking words of wisdom: Let it be.”

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014