As one commenter wrote: Gotta love what words can do when writers are honest and true.

Somewhat, but not totally off-topic: Anyone who's remotely interested in analysis of the culture that sustains Christian rock that is Christian (to borrow from Switchfoot) not just by faith but by genre, should really read this article in GQ by John Sullivan. (I owe a hat tip to GetReligion's post for pointing me to it.) He attends the massive Creation Festival and turns in a thorough treatment full of interesting, often funny detail; for those of you who are only in it for this, there are two different sentences of U2 content.

But honestly, this is a marvelous piece. There are some wonderful, sharp sentences: I'd assumed that my days at Creation would be fairly lonely and end with my ritual murder.

However, the thing that makes the piece extraordinary, and deeply moving I suspect to anyone who doesn't just bring too much bias to the topic to muster any sympathy for evangelicals at all, is the way Sullivan writes about his own past. For he was a believer once, back in the 80s, and lost his faith. He writes powerfully of his own disillusionment, but even more so of his engagement, which began at a small and fervent Bible study group:
[I was] powerfully stirred on a level that didn't depend on my naivete. The sheer passionate engagement of it caught my imagination: Nobody had told me there were Christians like this. They went at the Bible with grad-seminar intensity, week after week. Mole was their leader (short for Moloch; he had started the whole thing, back in the '70s). He had a wiry, dark beard and a pair of nail-gun cobalt eyes. My Russian-novel fantasies of underground gatherings - shared subversive fervor - were flattered and, it seemed, embodied. Here was counterculture, without sad hippie trappings.

Sullivan has that haunted tone, that lingering wound of longing in nearly everyone of intellect and substance who has ever been in a group like this; I always associate it with Jacob limping because of his hip.
My problem is not that I dream I'm in hell or that Mole is at the window. It isn't that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn't even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It's that I love Jesus Christ. "The latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose." I can barely write that.... Why should He vex me? Why is His ghost not friendlier? Why can't I just be a good Enlightenment child and see in His life a sustaining example of what we can be, as a species? Because once you've known Him as God, it's hard to find comfort in the man. The sheer sensation of life that comes with a total, all-pervading notion of being - the pulse of consequence one projects onto even the humblest things - the pull of that won't slacken. And one has doubts about one's doubts.

For those of you who have good imaginations, I think there might be a little more U2 content in this piece that is apparent at first.