Lennon said it to journalist Maureen Cleave at his Weybridge home, and it ran in her profile “How Does a Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This” in the London Evening Standard on 4 March 1966. The full article — reprinted by permission of the Evening Standard — carries the sentence word for word, and Wikiquote files it in its sourced section, not among the disputed.
“We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity” John Lennon, interviewed by Maureen Cleave, "How Does a Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This," London Evening Standard, 4 March 1966. The printed article reads "rock 'n' roll"; "rock and roll" is a common rendering. Verified via Quotle.info. · Verbatim: “We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock 'n' roll or Christianity.”
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In context
Evoking the world of John Lennon — English singer-songwriter, co-founder of the Beatles. Theme: "We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The interview
Article
How Does a Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This
Published
London Evening Standard, 4 March 1966
Interviewer
Maureen Cleave (1934–2021)
Setting
Lennon’s home at Weybridge, Surrey
Experience has sown few seeds of doubt in him: not that his mind is closed, but it’s closed round whatever he believes at the time. “Christianity will go,” he said. “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 ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” He is reading extensively about religion.
Evening Standard, 4 March 1966
Taken from the complete article as reprinted by permission of the Evening Standard. Note that the printed text reads “rock ’n’ roll” and uses a dash where many reproductions use a comma — the substance is unchanged.
Started with the specialists. Quote Investigator has no entry on this line, but Wikiquote carries it in its sourced Quotes section ↗ — not under Disputed or Misattributed — citing Maureen Cleave’s interview in London’s Evening Standard of 4 March 1966.
Cross-checked the framing. Wikipedia’s account of the controversy ↗ confirms the 4 March 1966 publication, the secondary heading “On a hill in Surrey … A young man, famous, loaded, and waiting for something,” and that the widely used “bigger than Jesus” is not what Lennon said.
The words are Lennon’s, but the text that records them is a newspaper article first published on 4 March 1966 — long after the pre-1931 threshold for US public domain — so it remains in copyright. The scholarly volume that reproduces it does so “by permission of the Evening Standard,” which is itself evidence the rights are live. Short quotation for comment and criticism is a separate question from reproducing the article.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What goes wrong with this one
The attribution is right — this is one of the rare famous-name quotes that survives checking intact. What travels badly is the wording and the meaning.
A harmless house-style difference, worth knowing if you are quoting precisely: the Evening Standard text prints “rock ’n’ roll” ↗, while many reproductions, including Wikiquote, spell it out.
✓Lennon said it, in these words, to Maureen Cleave — and the sentence is printed verbatim in her Evening Standard article of 4 March 1966 ↗. It is the paraphrase — and the reading — that are wrong, not the attribution.
Context
Why it mattered
The remark caused almost nothing in Britain. It ran on a Friday in March 1966 in a chatty profile about a rich 25-year-old who couldn’t remember what day it was, and British readers — in a country where church attendance was already sliding — largely shrugged. The sentence only became a scandal when it crossed the Atlantic stripped of the paragraph around it.
In its September 1966 issue, which reached American media on 29 July, the teen magazine Datebook put the second half of the line on its cover: “I don’t know which will go first — rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.” Southern radio stations organised record burnings, the Ku Klux Klan picketed, and on 11 August 1966 Lennon sat in front of the cameras at Chicago’s Astor Tower Hotel and apologised. The Beatles played their last commercial concert in San Francisco on 29 August 1966.
“If I had said television is more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it.”
What Lennon said he meant
At the Chicago press conference he unpicked his own sentence: “I used the word ‘Beatles’ as a remote thing — not as what ‘I’ think as Beatles — as those other Beatles like other people see us. I just said ‘they’ are having more influence on kids and things than anything else, including Jesus. But I said it that way which is the wrong way.”
Cleave herself defended the reading: “John was certainly not comparing the Beatles with Christ. He was simply observing that so weak was the state of Christianity that the Beatles were, to many people, better known.” She added that he had intended to be ironic.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1940–1980 · English singer-songwriter, co-founder of the Beatles
Born in Liverpool on 9 October 1940, Lennon co-founded the Beatles and, with Paul McCartney, wrote one of the most-covered songbooks in popular music. He was 25 when Maureen Cleave spent a day with him for the Evening Standard — bored in a mock-Tudor house in the stockbroker belt, reading extensively about religion, and, as Cleave put it, with a mind “closed round whatever he believes at the time.” He was shot dead in New York on 8 December 1980.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Cleave, Maureen. “How Does a Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This.” London Evening Standard, March 4, 1966. Reprinted in Read the Beatles: Classic and New Writings on the Beatles, Their Legacy, and Why They Still Matter, ed. June Skinner Sawyers (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity’?” Last verified 7 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/were-more-popular-than-jesus-now-i-dont-know-which-will-go/