“No one was saved”

In 1966 the Beatles were at the height of their fame, and John Lennon got in trouble, big trouble, for suggesting the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. In an excellent post by the insightful Anchoress, Elizabeth Scalia, titled: “No one was saved”: Paul McCartney out-harshed Lennon’s Critique with 4 words

The Anchoress points out the much more striking and prescient words by the cute Beatle, Paul McCartney, missed at the time but none the less timely for us:

"The Church is failing in its mission to save; it is becoming irrelevant to people’s lives because it is too self-concerned, too insular, too busy protecting its own interests — darning its socks — while the world spins and the pews empty, and humanity grows ever more lonely, more isolated, and social interaction becomes more fleeting, more guarded and inauthentic (wearing faces kept handy by the door…or the twitter Facebook feed) until it disappears completely, and no one is saved." McCartney went on to point out the hypocrisy of American racism, much more tangible and manifest in 1966, then added, "...You can’t kid me the last generation were any more moral than we are. They hid it better. If you wheedle it out of people they were just as bad as we are, only they grew out of it.”

“Perhaps,” he said, with the air of one hitting on the truth, “perhaps they grew too tired for it.”

As you may have gathered from my posts, I'm a get to the point, money-quote kind of guy, but if you want to read literature that teases the subtleties out of you, please enjoy the Anchoress' post in full, you may find especially intriguing Scalia's theory about why McCartney got away with harsher remarks than Lennon did, and how that reflected in the Beatles music and lyrics. As Scalia put it, "Young Paul McCartney was a sharper customer than we appreciate, a stiletto wrapped within a cotton candy, the razor in the bright and shiny apple."