No One Was Saved: The Beatles and Organized Religion

Since the mid-1960s, much has been made in the popular press about the Beatles' ostensible godless nihilism. This notion clearly finds its origins in March 1966, when the London Evening Standard published journalist Maureen Cleave's wide-ranging interview with John Lennon. Having recently read Hugh J. Schonfield's bestseller The Passover Plot (1965), Lennon was anxious to share his views regarding the plight of contemporary religion. During their discussion, Lennon remarked that “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink… We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first—rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.”