Gentle and yet increasingly stirring as the song progresses, "Imagine" is unabashedly utopian and deeply moral, calling on people to live, as one humanity, in peace.

It is also purposely and powerfully irreligious.

From its opening lyric, "Imagine there's no heaven," to the refrain, "And no religion too," Lennon sets out what is, to many, a clear atheistic message.

While most pop songs are secular by default — in that they are about the things of this world, making no mention of the divine or spiritual — "Imagine" is explicitly secularist. In Lennon's telling, religion is an impediment to human flourishing — something to be overcome, transcended.

As a scholar of secularism and a devout fan of the Beatles, I have always been fascinated by how "Imagine," perhaps the first and only atheist anthem to be so enormously successful, has come to be so widely embraced in America. After all, the U.S. is a country that has - at least until recently — had a much more religious population than other Western industrialized democracies.

Since being released as a single on Oct. 11 1971, "Imagine" has sold millions, going No. 1 in the U.S. and U.K. charts.

And its popularity has endured.

Rolling Stone magazine named "Imagine" as the third greatest song of all time in 2003, and it regularly tops national polls in Canada, Australia and the U.K.

Countless recording artists have covered it, and it remains one of the most performed songs throughout the world — the opening ceremony of this year's Olympics Games in Tokyo featured it being sung by a host of international artists, a testament to its global appeal.

But not everyone is enamoured of its message.

Robert Barron, the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, responded to the recent Tokyo rendition by lambasting "Imagine" as a "totalitarian anthem" and "an invitation to moral and political chaos."

His issue: the atheistic lyrics.

Numerous attempts have been made since "Imagine" was released to reconcile Lennon's anthem with religion.

Scholars, those of faith and fellow musicians have argued that the lyrics aren't really atheistic, just anti-organized religion.

Others have taken the sledgehammer approach and just changed the lyrics outright - CeeLo Green sang "And all religion's true" in a televised rendition on New Year's Eve 2011.

In interviews, Lennon was at times ambiguous about his beliefs on religion and spirituality, but such ambiguity is at odds with the clear message of "Imagine."

The song's irreligious ethos is frank.

The first verse speaks of there being "no heaven," "no hell" - "Above us, only sky."

In such clear, distilled words, Lennon captures the very marrow of the secular orientation.

To me, Lennon is saying that we live in a purely physical universe that operates along strictly natural laws - there is nothing supernatural out there, even beyond the stars.

He also expresses a distinct "here-and-nowness" at odds with many religions.

In asking listeners to "Imagine all the people, livin' for today," Lennon is, to quote the labour activist and atheist Joe Hill, suggesting there will be "no pie in the sky when you die," nor will a fiery eternal torture await you.

Lennon's lyrics also give way to an implied existentialism.

With no gods and no afterlife, only humankind - within ourselves and among each other - can decide how to live and choose what matters.

We can choose to live without violence, greed or hunger and - to quote "Imagine" - exist as a "brotherhood of man … sharing all the world."

It is here that Lennon's humanism — the belief that humans, without reliance upon anything supernatural, have the capacity to create a better, more humane world - comes to the fore.

Nihilism is not the path, nor is despondency, debauchery or destruction.

Rather, Lennon's "Imagine" entails a humanistic desire to see an end to suffering.

The spirit of empathy and compassion throughout the song is in line with what scholarship has found to be strong traits commonly observable among secular men and women.

Despite attempts to tie Lennon and "Imagine" to blood-lusting atheists like Stalin and Pol Pot, the overwhelming majority of godless people seek to live ethical lives.

For example, studies have shown that when it comes to things like wanting to help refugees, seeking to establish affordable health care, fighting climate change and being sensitive to racism and homophobia, the godless stand out as particularly moral.

Indeed, secular people in general exhibit an orientation that is markedly tolerant, democratic and universalistic — values Lennon holds up as ideals in "Imagine."

Other studies reveal that the democratic countries that are the least religious — the ones that have gone furthest down the road of "imagining no religion" — are the safest, humane, green and ethical.

"Imagine" was not the first time Lennon sang his secular humanism.

A year before, in 1970, he released "I Found Out," declaring his lack of belief in either Jesus or Krishna.

Also in 1970, he put out the haunting, scorching "God."

Beginning with a classic psychological explanation of theism — that humans construct the concept of God as a way to cope with and measure their pain — "God" goes on to list all the things that Lennon most decidedly does not believe in: the Bible, Jesus, Gita, Buddha, I-Ching, magic and so on.

In the end, all that he believes in is his own verifiable personal reality. Arriving at such a place was, for the bespectacled walrus from Liverpool, to be truly "reborn."

But neither "I Found Out" nor "God" achieved anywhere near the massive success that "Imagine" did.

No other atheist pop song has.

• Phil Zuckerman is a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

This is a sentiment that makes perfect sense to me.

Our current reality is one that is hard to anticipate in its particularity — pace epidemiologists that actually predict such realities for a living — and even confounds the creative minds of brilliant novelists like Stephen King.

As I have reflected on this line and feeling for the last few weeks, I have found myself considering the importance of imagination and the dangerous lack of it in our church and world today.

The world we now live in has become in many ways extremely literal; we have become focused on facts (and lies masquerading as facts), reducing the evaluation of knowledge to standardized tests and offering only binary answers to nuanced questions that surface in a complicated context that is oftentimes ignored or overlooked.

In turn, we have collectively lost the ability to see another world, another way, the real world, a better way. Cynicism has quelled forward momentum and incredulity about change has risen.

The human faculty of imagination is typically dismissed as childish or unserious, or a spectacular waste of time for those with the luxury of time to waste.

We may be told that imagination is for the daydreamers, the lazy, the immature, or the "creative types," which is another category dismissed as readily as "millennials" or other groups that "just don't get it" from the vantage point of social, political and ecclesial centres of power.

However, I am becoming increasingly convinced that imagination is our only hope.

It is the only way forward toward a better world that seems impossible to attain but is in fact only possible with God and only conceivable with our imagination.

It is not just a frivolous pastime. It is an absolutely serious and essential element for our collective well-being.

Livestreaming Masses, and many other experimental efforts have reflected the need to think imaginatively about a new way of living out our faith.

The pandemic has only put the crisis of imagination in the church into sharp relief due to the near-universal need to jettison many traditional pastoral practices, at least for a time.

Imagination is necessary for empathy, creativity, knowledge and problem-solving. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes:

'To imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are.

"One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one's own.

"Unlike perceiving and believing, imagining something does not require one to consider that something to be the case. Unlike desiring or anticipating, imagining something does not require one to wish or expect that something to be the case."

Unfortunately, in an age in which imagination is discouraged — or at least not welcomed and encouraged in our various spheres of living — confirmation bias and maintenance of the status quo reigns supreme, prompting us ever onward toward our entropic future.

To some extent, I believe this is what The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (with whom I often otherwise disagree) means when he describes our age as one of decadence.

The current crisis of imagination has limited our conceptual horizon, disabling us as a society from considering and then actualizing other ways of being in the world.

A crisis of imagination is not only striking the secular realm of culture and politics, it also impedes the Holy Spirit's working in the church.

Like those who wish to maintain the status quo from centres of political power in society, there are some who have a strong interest in advancing a theological agenda in the church that is unimaginative at best and reactionary at worst.

Those without a functioning imagination resist bold, creative and, yes, imaginative initiatives proposed to respond to growing economic inequality and global climate change, among other perilous realities. Imaginative efforts like the Green New Deal are frequently dismissed out of hand for precisely this reason.

Likewise, solutions to the novel problems that have arisen in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic appear elusive precisely because we have lost the ability as a society to think creatively at the risk of appearing out of sync or disconnected from reality.

Imagination is needed; engagement with that ability we have to consider that which was unknown and bring to birth that which has never been is the only answer.

Those who have some semblance of a working imagination, like those state and local leaders brave enough to risk displeasure from their constituents for the life-saving inconvenience of economic shutdowns and social distancing orders, have shown that something we've never done before is indeed possible and challenge us to imagine other ways of existing for the sake of the common good.

But a crisis of imagination is not only striking the secular realm of culture and politics, it also impedes the Holy Spirit's working in the church. For as much as human imagination is a cognitive function, it is also a spiritual one.

Over the last two months, we have seen the rocky responses of bishops and other church leaders to the unprecedented circumstances that affect the ordinary function of the ecclesia.

Livestreaming liturgies, offering online spiritual resources, connecting with parishioners remotely and many other experimental efforts have reflected the need to think imaginatively about a new way of living out our faith.

And yet, the pandemic did not create this problem.

It has only put the crisis of imagination in the church into sharp relief due to the near-universal need to jettison many traditional pastoral practices, at least for a time.

Like those who wish to maintain the status quo from centres of political power in society, there are some who have a strong interest in advancing a theological agenda in the church that is unimaginative at best and reactionary at worst. Continue reading

To "live for today" is precisely what we all do, all of us, believers and not. Christians do not neglect present exigencies just because they believe there is a afterlife. Rather, the call of eternal life makes this world more, not less important. To claim that Christians do not care about today, so wrapped up are they in what is to come, is to confuse Christianity with millenarian cultists, which is what we are not.

Heaven and hell, by the way, are not places - they are states. Heaven is the state of seeing the Beatific vision; hell is the state of being utterly cut off from God. The idea of these being places either above or below us is persistent, and has its roots in Classical literature, but is certainly not taught by the Church.
Again, the nation-state may well engage in war with other states, but it is important to realise that the nation exists to defend and protect its citizens. Anarchy, in the classical meaning of the word, is envisioned as some sort of utopia, but in practice, where the state withers away, anarchy of the most non-benign type succeeds. Look at Somalia today. Look at Lebanon in the time of its civil war. Look at England under King Stephen. The withering away of the state does not lead to peace - but the complete opposite.

As for religion withering away and leading to peace - have a look at some of the avowedly atheist states of the twentieth century. Continue reading

Image: ucanews.com