Did you know that John Lennon’s song “Imagine” was sung at Jimmy Carter’s State Funeral at Carter’s request? “Imagine” is an atheist anthem. Carter identified as a “born again Christian.” Here’s what Carter said about the song:
Carter spoke more than once about his enthusiasm for the song. He delighted in the fact that “Imagine” had become a truly international anthem. “[I]n many countries around the world—my wife and I have visited about 125 countries—you hear John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ used almost equally with national anthems,” the former president said in a 2006 NPR interview. “So John Lennon has had a major impact on some of the countries that are developing in the world.”
When Carter was asked about his favorite song by the Associated Press, Carter said, “My favorite is ‘Imagine.’ When I go to a strange country, Cuba and other places, in some of those nations, ‘Imagine’ has become [an unofficial] national anthem. If you go to Havana, for instance, you’ll see a statue of John Lennon,” he said, referencing the memorial in Havana’s Parque John Lennon. “When we go to a folk performance or a symphony concert or to modern American music, they always play ‘Imagine,’ and it’s one of my favorites just personally. If you listen to the lyrics closely, you’ll see that it’s against religion, it’s against national boundaries, it’s against nationalism, it’s against jingoism, but the impact it has on people is profound.” (Source)
If this is true, no wonder the world is a mess. Take note of the lyrics:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only skyImagine all the people?
Living for today.Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too.
If there’s no religion, that would include the Christian religion, supposedly Jimmy Carter’s religion. People kill and die for lots of things, but if there is no God, then there’s nothing to say that anything is wrong. It’s survival of the fittest.
The materialist has a problem accounting for today’s moral necessities. What is their origin? How does the physicalist identify morality in the stuff of the cosmos or the physical parts and processes of humans? If morality is part of the physical evolutionary process, we should be able to locate morality in the physical makeup of evolved humans. Abraham Kuyper sarcastically offers the solution: “The materialist says that our thinking is the burning of phosphorus in the brain; and that lust, envy, and hatred are the result of a discharge of certain glands in the body. Virtue and vice are only the result of chemical processes. In order to make a man better, freer, and nobler, we should send him to the laboratory of a chemist, rather than to school or church. And if it were possible for the chemist to lift the man’s skull, and subject his cells and nerves to the necessary chemical process, then vice would be conquered, and virtue and higher wisdom would effectually sway him.”
That would be the “scientific” approach. But no matter how deep and wide scientists probe the human body down to its DNA and beyond (think of the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man), they will never find a moral code that is required to be followed.
Why It Might Be OK to Eat Your Neighbor
The most damning assessment of a matter-only cosmos devoid of a Creator is that we got to this place in our evolutionary history by acts of violence whereby the strong conquered the weak with no one to support or condemn them. Why It Might Be OK to Eat Your Neighbor repeatedly raises the issue of accounting for the conscience, good and evil, and loving our neighbor. It’s shocking to read what atheists say about a cosmos devoid of meaning and morality.
Buy NowIn a series of interviews published after his death, “[t]he man who famously called for imagining a world with ‘No religion’ also jettisoned his anti-theism,” Jordan Michael Smith of The American Conservative writes. “‘People got the image I was anti-Christ or antireligion,’ he said. ‘I’m not at all. I’m a most religious fellow. I’m religious in the sense of admitting there is more to it than meets the eye. I’m certainly not an atheist.’”
Not only did Lennon reject atheism, he also rejected extreme forms of evolution. He instinctively knew that there was something special about humans and different about the animal world even if he did not how the theory of evolution is argued:
“Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way,” he insisted. “That’s another piece of garbage. What the hell’s it based on? We couldn’t have come from anything — fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don’t believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren’t monkeys changing into men now? It’s absolute garbage. It’s absolutely irrational garbage, as mad as the ones who believe the world was made only four thousand years ago, the fundamentalists. That and the monkey thing are both as insane as the apes standing up suddenly.”[1]
What happened to Lennon? Why did his views change? He grew up. He matured. He was willing to look reality in the face without blinking and say, I was wrong.” The man who imagined a world with “no religion” and “no possessions” left an estate of more than $275 million, “not bad for one who referred to himself as an ‘instinctive socialist,’ for one who believed in the abolition of ‘all money, police, and government.’”[2] His early flirtation with the theory of socialism was naive.[3] He knew that sending money to poor nations was counterproductive.
When it was pointed out that a Beatles reunion could possibly raise $200 million for a poverty-stricken country in South America, Lennon had no time for it. “You know, America has poured billions into places like that. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. After they’ve eaten that meal, then what? It lasts for only a day. After the $200,000,000 is gone, then what? It goes round and round in circles.”
It looks like Lennon would have agreed with David Chilton’s book Productive Christians.
Productive Christians
Socialism has a perennial appeal, and Christians seem to be particularly susceptible to its allure. The modern evangelical resurgence of interest in social justice, critical race theory, gender equity, and woke idealism are clear evidence of this. But, for all its aspirations for justice, equality, and fairness, the rhetoric of socialism is typically marked only by high sounding moralisms stuffed with cliché, guilt, pity, bluster, and resentment. What is worse is that history demonstrates that this rhetoric has had disastrous results whenever it has been translated into economic or political policy. Socialism has proven itself to be the sort of ideology that could produce a shortage of salt water in the Pacific.
Buy NowIt’s time atheists and liberals follow Lennon’s lead and grow up. Atheism and socialism are literal dead ends. They are destroyers of people and societies. If there is no God, then Lennon’s death at the hands of Mark David Chapman was the result of the survival of the fittest, the fittest being Chapman.
We don’t have to imagine what our world would be like without religion. Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) gives us a window into such a world:
Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism…. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.[4]
The French “enlighteners” worshipped reason. “[T]he success of the physical and other sciences in England in the seventeenth century,” Robert Conquest observes, “gave the French intelligentsia the idea that everything could be determined by Reason—in whose name the Revolution was made—with the ‘Romantic’ input from Rousseau as part of the meld.”[5] What was the result? The guillotine and blood in the streets. All together now, “Imagine no religion. It’s easy if you try.”
The atheism that spawned Communism was very reasonable and led to the deaths of 100 million people in the 20th century.
[1] Evolutionists do not claim that humans evolved from monkeys, but that humans and simians evolved from a common ancestor. It’s possible that Lennon knew the difference but rhetorically used “monkey-to-man” evolution for rhetorical effect. His dig at six-day creationism shows that he was aware of the competing position.
[2] David A. Noebel, The Legacy of John Lennon: Charming or Harming a Generation? (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982), 11.
[3] Maybe he was persuaded by the lyrics from fellow-Beatle George Harrison’s “Taxman.” Its lyrics attack the high levels of progressive taxation taken by the British Labour government. At the income level of the Beatles, it was 95 percent. In the January 22, 1981 Playboy interview (Lennon was interviewed in September 1980 by David Sheff), Lennon admitted that he “threw in a few one-liners to help the song along.” In a later version of the song, Harrison added “If you’re overweight, I’ll tax your fat.”
[4] Vladimir Lenin, “Socialism and Religion” (1905). Link here.
[5] Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999), 4.