We are more popular than Jesus, the relevance of our faith today.

This is Jim Denison's daily article for Monday, March 4th, 2019.

We're more popular than Jesus now.

These words of John Lennon published on this day in 1966 have become a famous, or infamous, part of cultural history.

Here's the larger context.

Lennon told an interviewer for the London Evening Standard that Christianity will go.

He added, It will vanish and shrink.

I needn't argue about that.

I'm right and I will be proved right.

We're more popular than Jesus now.

I don't know which will go first, rock and roller Christianity.

Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary.

It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.

His words sparked a furor in the United States.

Radio stations invited listeners to bring their Beatles records to pick up points where they

would be burned.

Lennon later apologized at a press conference in Chicago.

I'm not anti-God, anti-Christ, or anti-religion.

I was not saying we are greater or better. I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man

in the sky. However, Lennon began his most famous song, Imagine, with the lyrics. Imagine there's

no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us, only sky.

Later, he asked us to imagine that there's no religion, too. In a world like ours, it's easy to wonder

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