Lennon’s “Imagine” and Carter’s Ignorance

John Lennon's "Imagine" is an anthem for relativism, and its implications would certainly contradict some of the Bible School lessons the ex-president imparted regularly for most of his adult life.

PUBLISHED ON

January 14, 2025

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A pollster once made the statement that he had found in his work that voters were “very stupid.” A colleague tried to defuse the remark by saying the issue was that people answered opinion poll questions, “in the context of their ignorance.”

The phrase came to mind when I learned that President Carter had requested John Lennon’s “Imagine” for his funeral, which was sung by Country superstars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood. The song is like an anthem for relativism, and its implications would certainly contradict some of the Bible School lessons the ex-president imparted regularly for most of his adult life. The presentation of the song by two country music stars at the end of a show funeral was kind of a reductio ad absurdum demonstration of how pop culture reveals not just intellectual inconsistency but intellectual bankruptcy. Hypocrisy would have been more decorous. It wasn’t, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”; it was advertising ideological confusion with a stellar command performance.

To sing “Amazing Grace” and “Imagine” at the same church service is to fall into latitudinarian contradiction. If the lyrics of one song means anything, the other is out of place. I am trying to imagine the ex-president playing a recording of the song to his Bible students. “Imagine there’s no heaven,” he could write the lyrics on the chalk board, “it’s easy if you try.” Let’s picture that phrase written with crayons on manila paper. Would all parents stick that kid’s picture on the refrigerator door without blinking (or thinking)?

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George Orwell once said that politics is a non-Euclidian world where two objects can be in the same place simultaneously. This was because political opinions were not “tested against solid reality.” That is bad enough, but to take a similar approach to metaphysical questions where no statements are confronted with core beliefs is relativism in action. The order of worship (using the word loosely) consisted of eulogies/patriotic apotheosis, statements of belief, Scripture, and then, to cap it off, words affirming that patriotism and faith can (should) be jettisoned in order that there be world peace. And all to a catchy melody.

No doubt that when Carter planned his funeral he was going for a feeling as the coda. They couldn’t have the words of “A Candle in the Wind” rewritten for him; and “We are the World” would have been hard to stage. But a recruiting pitch for secular humanists? A utopian anthem of “beyond-belief-ness”? I’m not just saying that a former leader of the free world was not sensitive to the words (ideas) of the song. Many of our political leaders would not get “As” in Logic 101 and are not unusually gifted in picking up ideological nuance that is not directly pandering to specific constituents. But wouldn’t any Sunday School teacher pay attention to the words of a song that contradicted why we would have any Bible study, on whatever day of the week?

Public ceremony in America is never an exercise in dialectics (or at least rarely so). Superficiality is to be expected but not outright contradiction. Without countries or religion, per Mr. Lennon, there would be “nothing to kill or die for.” This is the antithesis of Horace’s famous dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—“it is sweet and right to die for one’s country,” but forgive me for thinking it a bit outré for the funeral where a naval anthem was sung for a former Commander in Chief. It was the master touch of farce that got me. I thought of that funeral in the movie The Big Chill where the organist in the little Baptist church cranks out a version of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as the closing hymn. 

President Carter’s funeral was not only evidence of our political culture being performed in the “context of ignorance” but also, supposedly, conducted “in the context of worship.” Let it go that Catholics and Orthodox believers might have an instinctive reaction to a funeral liturgy in which there is nary a prayer for the soul of the deceased. Incongruity is part of the high degree of intellectual and moral ambiguity tolerated in American public life. I still wonder at the message of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” sung at President Reagan’s memorial service at the Episcopalian “National” Cathedral. (Episcopalians still punch above their weight in national politics: the latest Pew survey indicated that 4 percent of Congress is of that denomination, although Episcopalians are now only 1 percent of the population.)

It wasn’t just the last song that was performance. The glimpses of the ex-presidents seated in close proximity and greeting each other with a bonhomie not in accord with their past remarks and campaign rhetoric was characterized as “weird and wonderful” by The Spectator magazine. It was theatrical, with the President-(re)Elect chatting with ex-President Obama and causing the latter’s hilarity. What or whom were they talking about? My principal would have had words with two students talking during a church service, but presidents are presidents. The whole thing was politics as spectacle and should be conserved in a time capsule for our age. Almost everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves (except for one herself and consort).

Perhaps it is expecting too much asking for theological coherence in a civic funeral in America. We cannot forget that Mr. Carter himself made a foray into social philosophy with his famous “cultural malaise” speech in 1979. America was experiencing a “crisis of confidence” in itself and—he needed not mention this—its president. Decline was everywhere evident, especially in his poll numbers. 

Carter was a speed reader and had devoured Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and other books. In a relatively long televised speech from the White House (33 minutes), he detailed the spiritual crisis of our society. It didn’t go well. Sen Ted Kennedy mocked the book in his primaries campaign against Carter (he probably didn’t like people bringing up the subject of narcissism because of obscure personal reasons). Mr. Lasch himself thought that Carter had read the book too fast. (Rereading it lately, I think Mr. Lasch wrote the book the same way.)

Maybe Carter’s including “Imagine” in his funeral was a kind of “gotcha” moment. “You thought I was through with pretentious nihilistic philosophy—not so fast, wait until you hear the last number.” Remember, this was the guy who, as a candidate, told a delegation of Catholic bishops that he was not going to contradict Roe v. Wade. (Obiter dictum: Can you imagine a delegation of Catholic bishops going publicly to a presidential candidate to discuss abortion today? Expecting him to reverse himself?) 

I know what you’re thinking, nihil nisi bonum about the dead. But this is not about a man but about good old confused America. Kyrie eleison.

Author

  • Antall

    Monsignor Antall is pastor of Holy Name Parish in the Diocese of Cleveland. He is the author of The X-Mass Files (Atmosphere Press, 2021), and The Wedding (Lambing Press, 2019).

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2 thoughts on “Lennon’s “Imagine” and Carter’s Ignorance”

  1. I heard that Rosalyn Carter also had “Imagine” played for her funeral. I was at first surprised because both Carters were outwardly solid Baptists but on the other hand their stated political and ideological positions were progressive Democrat (which is to say anti-Christian) so the song seemed to fit the deceased and the occasion.

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