religion is the artifice, you know, the building, after God has left it sometimes, like Elvis has left the building. You hold onto religion, you know… - Bono

I'm wary of faith outside of actions. I'm wary of religiosity that ignores the wider world. In 2001, only seven percent of evangelicals polled felt it incumbent upon themselves to respond to the AIDS emergency. This appalled me. I asked for meetings with as many church leaders as would have them with me. I used my background in the Scriptures to speak to them about the so-called leprosy of our age and how I felt Christ would respond to it. And they had better get to it quickly, or they would be very much on the other side of what God was doing in the world. Amazingly, they did respond. I couldn't believe it. It almost ruined it for me — 'cause I love giving out about the church and Christianity. But they actually came through: Jesse Helms, you know, publicly repents for the way he thinks about AIDS. I've started to see this community as a real resource in America. I have described them as "narrow-minded idealists." If you can widen the aperture of that idealism, these people want to change the world. They want their lives to have meaning.

Can you imagine your second album — the difficult second album — it's about God? Everyone is tearing their hair out and Chris Blackwell says, "It's okay. There's Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, it's a tradition. We can get through it.

What's interesting is, in the months leading up to this, I was probably at the lowest ebb in my life. I was feeling just teenage angst. I didn't know if I wanted to continue living — that kind of despair. I was praying to a God I didn't know was listening.