John Lennon’s “Imagine” was played at Jimmy Carter’s funeral this week. There are videos all over the Internet of Garth Brooks and Tricia Yearwood performing the song. We can assume the Carter family was aware in advance and fully approved.
Some conservatives and religious leaders, however, did not approve, and made their disapproval known.
“Why would any Christian have that sung at their funeral? Imagining there is no heaven and no Christianity at a Christian funeral is dark, indeed,” opined Mollie Z. Hemingway on social media.
Bishop Robert Barron, a conservative Catholic, wrote on X:
“I was watching highlights from President Carter’s funeral service at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. I found some of the speeches very moving. But I was appalled when two country singers launched into a rendition of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine.’…Vested ministers sat patiently while a hymn to atheistic humanism was sung. This was not only an insult to the memory of a devoutly believing Christian but also an indicator of the spinelessness of too much of established religion in our country.”
I was too young to remember the Beatles (1960 – 1970) as a going concern, but I remember the final years of John Lennon’s solo career. I recall his tragic death by assassination in 1980, and how the 40-year-old Lennon, forever frozen in time, became something of a cultural martyr afterward. (This is not something that Lennon, who had a remarkably practical mind underneath all the hippie flimflam, would have wanted.)
“Imagine,” is a 1971 Lennon ballad that posits a humanistic utopia, where there are “no countries”, “no possessions” “no greed or hunger”, and “nothing to kill or die for”. A hyper-idealistic wish list, in other words.
Even Lennon didn’t take the song’s concept completely seriously. Consider the “no possessions” part. At the time of his death, John Lennon had a net worth of $200 million. That’s $760 million in today’s money. John Lennon with no possessions? Give me a break.
But where Carter’s funeral performance is concerned, the lines that caused ire were:
“Imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try…Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.”
John Lennon was never an ideological atheist of the Sam Harris/Richard Dawkins variety. He never embraced the reductive materialism of that crowd. (This is not my extrapolation. Lennon said as much in interviews during his lifetime.)
Lennon did, however, actively question the monopoly of organized religion on faith and belief. While “Imagine” is not an ode to atheism, it is not a church hymn, either. (I could also note that since 1971, “Imagine” has become the most overplayed song on the planet, relative to its musical merits, but I’ll leave that one alone.)
In other words, what would be appropriate at a mostly secular outdoor public memorial (say, in a park), would not be appropriate at a religious funeral inside a church. So I take the points of Ms. Hemingway and Bishop Barron in the context they were intended.
But please, don’t blame John Lennon for all of this. The guy just wrote a song more than 50 years ago. Lennon always said that his songs came from his personal experience, and might not have too much meaning beyond that.
Lennon didn’t ask the world to make far more of “Imagine” than its author ever intended it to be…as happened yet again this week at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.
-ET