Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Evangelicalism Around
2. Around Bono
3. Neoliberalism Around
4. Around Africa
5. Love and Debt
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Chad E. Seales is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Secular Spectacle: Performing Religion in a Southern Town.
“A tough but needed critique of how U2 and Bono’s themes of human
unity, racial reconciliation, and love are deployed in the service
of larger market-driven projects.”—Paul Harvey, author of
Christianity and Race in the American South: A History
“From the parking lot of a Baptist church in the Florida Panhandle
to Dublin, New York, Johannesburg, and the G-8 Summit at
Gleneagles, Seales takes his readers on a tour of the evangelical
grammar of humanitarian neoliberalism with Bono as his guide.
Seales convincingly argues that when Bono speaks for Africa, he
speaks for religious, cultural, and economic systems far more
complex—and far less empowering—than his identity as a
rock-and-roll saint may imply.”—Jill DeTemple, author of Cement,
Earthworms, and Cheese Factories: Religion and Community
Development in Rural Ecuador
“When I said that I never wanted to read one more word about the
aid celebrity Bono again, I had not imagined the possibility of
Religion Around Bono! This book is a concise, eloquent tour de
force using Bono as a keyhole through which we can peer into the
intimate workings of the religion of racialized, neoliberal,
millennial capitalism. The intersectional critique of class, race,
and gender draws on anthropology, ethnomusicology, politics, and
religious studies to explain how religious sincerity and love
obfuscate relations of exploitation.”—Lisa Ann Richey, editor of
Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations: Politics,
Place and Power
“Chad Seales boldly claims that as Jesus is to Jewish law or Luther
to Roman Catholicism, so Bono is to evangelical Protestantism: the
prophet of a new religion, repurposed from the materials of the
old. The gospel of Bono is the neoliberal promise that free markets
bring salvation to the world’s poor. In his lyrics, his politics,
and above all his consumer brand, Bono preaches the good news of
millennial capitalism to evangelicalism’s rebellious kids: buy,
believe, save, and be saved. A richly satisfying deep dive into the
logics of consumer capitalism and evangelical self-fashioning,
Religion Around Bono urges us to listen, question, and learn
more.”—Tracy Fessenden, author of Religion Around Billie Holiday
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