Jimmy Carter may have been a good man, but Imagine is a terrible song

The song, which was played at the former president’s funeral, allows us to feel morally superior while doing absolutely nothing. Nobody sensible believes any of 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 90s.

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.

Jimmy Carter, right, and Imagine singer John Lennon, left. Pictures: News Corp

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.

A sign adorns a building on the funeral procession route for former President Jimmy Carter on January 9, 2025 in Plains, Georgia. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

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.

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’. 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 is 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.

Dr Michael Jensen is the rector at St Mark’s Anglican Church, Darling Point and is the author of My God, My God: Is it Possible to Believe Anymore?