Bishop Robert Barron set off a tempest in a teapot with his rather innocuous observation about the propriety of singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” at Jimmy Carter’s state funeral at the National Cathedral. The bishop thought it paradoxical that in a Christian church, nominally committed to tradition by its ritual and smells-and-bells, a song urged us to imagine there’s “no religion…”
The usual suspects pounced via social media. The initial volley was the “social justice plus” crowd (coupled with Catholic Lite). “Jimmy Carter,” the basic argument went, “fought so hard for social justice and human rights and you strain at a song?”
I won’t belabor the fact that Jimmy Carter did nothing for the human rights of the unborn and that, in his combination of faith and politics, was most likely the Protestant JFK. He was the creation of Protestant ministers when they got candidate Kennedy’s acquiescence in 1960 to separate faith and politics. Those who had not yet adapted to the Zeitgeist then fled to the Moral Majority when their Baptist Frankenstein proved more aligned with liberal politics than traditional values.
There was also the “music requests” argument. Considering that there are no few theologians, liturgists, and organists ready to die on the hill of “No Wedding March” at marriages Masses or “no Captain and Tenille favorite pop song at grandpa’s funeral,” I was surprised at the degree of indulgence of “Imagine”. Some said that Carter himself may have picked it and that it featured in the repertoire at Rosalyn’s funeral. Again, music is an integral part of a religious service; it’s not a dedication on the “pilot of the spiritual airwaves” request show. The test is: does it fit the context?
“It was not a Catholic funeral!” was another retort. Yes, and I commented on that. But it was a Christian funeral and “imagine there’s no religion” sounds as equally, if not more implausible, coming from a low church Baptist as a high church Episcopalian.
Barron’s point was that there was a clear incongruity in singing “imagine there’s no heaven” in a church that slavishly imitated the best of Gothic architecture (as I’ve noted, everybody who wants to give an institution gravitas copies Catholic medieval, not Catholic Seventies). Like ketchup on pheasant under glass, having people dressed up in high church vestments processing around a choir hidden partially by a rood screen just doesn’t go with “imagine there’s no heaven.”
The architecture, of course, also stirred up some of the Catholic traditionalists, who swooned over rood screens and ritual, criticizing the Novus Ordo as impoverished by comparison. I’ll not get into liturgy wars other than to say, in the lyrics of Shania Twain: smells and bells absent a real theology of sacrificial suffrages for needy deceased “don’t impress me much.” Don’t get hung up in the trappings.
All those Christians ought to grasp the basic liturgical concept lex orandi, lex credendi, roughly translated, how we pray expresses what we believe. That includes that we sing in worship (since, as St. Augustine remarked, singing is praying twice). So, if we’re singing in a Christian church “imagine there’s no heaven … no religion, too,” one might suggest a case of spiritual schizophrenia.
Bishop Barron criticized a similar anomaly back in 2021, when Harvard hired an atheist “chaplain.” When challenged, Harvard started dissembling, saying his primary duties were to address nondenominational prayer at events (to whom?), and do admin work like file timesheets. Barron had the temerity to ask how is a chaplain–somebody who is normally understood to be a person who leads people to God (however conceived)–to fulfill that role if he does not believe in God? As I noted at the time, that was as paradoxical as a celebrated European writer saying he wanted to write an opera about Maximilian Kolbe but was unsure how to do it without “making it an advertisement for Christianity.” So, Kolbe starved to death because he was a “nice guy”?
Much of this is tied up with the question of what a funeral is and what it is for. If it is a prayer service to ask for the Lord’s mercy, the ritual prevails. If it is a “celebration of life”—especially when the faith in an afterlife in the congregation may be gauzy, nominal, or simply absent—then it lends itself to the decedent’s playlist hit parade.
Finally came the “T” word: where’s your “tolerance? Why are you so intolerant?” Because you cannot tell me what avowedly secular venue would open itself and lustily sing “Nearer My God to Thee”! It’s only ostensibly religious venues that imagine “no religion, too.” Or at least religious venues with good acoustics, available for rent and hollowed out by half a century of secularization.
Some might think Barron’s criticisms are echoes of the debate simmering in Catholic circles, at least in the United States, about the questionable content of songs that are in Catholic hymnals and regularly sung at Sunday Mass. That may be part of the picture, but Barron’s criticisms also plunge deeper, to the struggle with secularization in Western culture—a fight in which some European ecclesiastics (such as Belgium’s Jozef de Kessel) seem ready to tap out. It also asks whether the secularized West has the will to defend its religious heritage.
Finally, let’s try to imagine the world of “Imagine”. It’s not just about “imagine there’s no heaven” or “no religion.” Imagine a world without those things. The song trades in the old shibboleth that religion is a source of human division and alienation, whose elimination (or at least significant containment) would prosper human welfare.
Do you believe that? Did Jimmy Carter? No, rather than a solution to human problems, it’s been the temptation since Adam and Eve: the flight from a God who defines right and wrong to some gauzy god of “spirituality” has left man far more broken than benefitted. And “imagine there’s no heaven … no hell below us.” If that’s true, then life is hard and then you die, good and evil ending in the same meaningless fate.
Over at The Nation, John Nichols seeks to gaslight, saying that we need a “nuanced understanding” (like Jimmy’s) of what Lennon was singing, because we certainly cannot just believe what our ears are telling us.
However, it’s nowhere near that complex. “Ideas have consequences” wrote Richard Weaver. Even when those ideas are in the form of lyrics.
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Mark Steyn wrote a column about “Imagine” in which he described the song as John Lennon’s “anthem for cotton-candy nihilists.”
Sounds accurate. What an utterly dreary, depressing, icky song.
Bishop Robert Barron is quite mistaken in his assumption that ANY religion is represented by the National “Cathedral”. It is a pagan temple that simulates a Christian worship space. It is the final degradation of what began in the early 16th c., was given a generous impetus by late 18th c. France and has continued in it disintegration throughtout the 20th century to the present. The entire service was meaningless and that hortible song “Imagine” was most appropriate for the heathens gathered there. Let’s call a spade a spade and stop trying to put lipstick on a pig.