Jimmy Carter carried off with John Lennon’s empty sky song

by Damien F. Mackey “Imagine is not just sentimental waffle. It is dangerous sentimental waffle. It asks nothing from us. The song allows us to feel morally superior while doing absolutely nothing. Nobody sensible believes any of it. We get to imagine a world of harmony with others where we don’t have to change”. Michael Jensen Some decades ago I perchanced to walk in to a concelebrated (five priests at the altar) Requiem Mass for a deceased nun at St. Patrick’s, Sydney. The Mass concluded with the popular John Lennon song, “Imagine”, which I had always considered to be an atheistic anthem, “no heaven”, “no hell”, “no religion”, hence, presumably, no God. Now I began to wonder if I had heard the lyrics correctly. Perhaps I was missing out on something. Well, if the reverend Michael Jensen is correct, in his article for The Daily Telegraph (January 14, 2025, Opinion 13), “Carter was a good man, but Imagine was an awful song”, my first instincts about John Lennon’s son were perfectly correct. Here is what Michael Jensen, the rector at St. Mark’s Anglican Church, Darling Point, has written about it: I admire former President Jimmy Carter as a man who exemplified what it is to be a follower of Jesus. He gave himself in humble service. He taught Sunday school until well into his 90’s. But I have to say I was completely flummoxed by the choice of John Lennon’s Imagine as one of the “hymns” for his funeral service in Washington’s National Cathedral. According to some reports, it was Carter’s own choice. It’s a weird choice for the overt believer Carter was. Imagine is a song of yearning for a world without religion and an afterlife. It is not quite an atheist fantasy, but it is close. It’s sadly become a staple of secular seasonal singalongs for when we’ve run out of songs about reindeer and obese guys dressed in red. But that’s not what gets up my nose about Imagine. Imagine is not just sentimental waffle. It is dangerous sentimental waffle. It asks nothing from us. The song allows us to feel morally superior while doing absolutely nothing. Nobody sensible believes any of it. We get to imagine a world of harmony with others where we don’t have to change. We get to imagine a world of no consequences. Certainly, you don’t see people singing the song and then giving up the idea of national borders or giving away all their possessions. John Lennon himself didn’t believe it. He was a man who mocked disabled people, mistreated his wives, neglected his son, and had an airconditioning system for his fur coats in his vast apartment in New York. Imagine no possessions? Yeah, right. Easy if you try. Living life in peace? He couldn’t even keep four guys from Liverpool together. [End of quote] The Beatles featured the infamous British arch-Satanist, Aleister Crowley (d. 1947), “the wickedest man in the world”, on the cover of their Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, and there are rumours that John Lennon himself had dedicated his soul to the devil in order to achieve serious fame and success. Crowleyism was a huge fad at the time, as David Bowie has pointed out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX0ZVQhEnEc Michael Jensen concludes his article: Taken literally, Imagine is the kind of insipid vision for world peace that leads to totalitarian mass murder At the time Lennon was writing this hymn to an empty sky, the authoritarian atheistic regimes of the left in the USSR, Eastern Europe, and China held millions of people under the jackboot in the name of ‘the brotherhood of man’ [a quote from Imagine]. It was obvious even in 1970 that Communism was the kind of guff only a Western intellectual would think was a good idea. That’s not to say that military dictatorships, rampant unchecked capitalism, colonialism and theocracies don’t also have blood on their hands. But the real flaw in Imagine I that it confuses a political problem with a spiritual one. It is ludicrous to suppose that if we just change political structures, we’ll live in peace and harmony. What we need to imagine is a world in which we ourselves are changed. We don’t do this by imagining God into non-existence, but by turning to him – as Jimmy Carter himself would no doubt have agreed.