At his own funeral and the funeral of his wife, Rosalynn, Jimmy Carter had Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sing John Lennon’s atheistic ballad “Imagine.”

“Imagine” perfectly encapsulates a secular worldview: “Imagine there’s no Heaven / It’s easy if you try / No Hell below us / Above us, only sky.” Wow—no accountability. We can make up all the rules. We can live any way we want to, and we’ll never have to answer for it. As Church Lady ( Enid Strict, better known as The Church Lady, is a fictional character portrayed by Dana Carvey on American sketch comedy television show Saturday Night Live) might say, “How convenient!”

“Imagine” croons on: “Imagine all the people / Living for today … Imagine there are no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too.”

These lyrics are clearly at odds with Carter’s professed faith in Jesus.

In his January 10, 2025 edition of “Gary Varvel’s Views from the Right,” the syndicated political cartoonist comments: “The song, ‘Imagine’ is the opposite of what Carter said he believed. Look, I have some doctrinal issues with Carter’s position on abortion and marriage, but he claimed to be born again, which requires faith in Jesus Christ’s death, burial and resurrection. Based on that, I assume Carter also believed in life after death and a literal heaven. So why on earth would Garth sing the song, ‘Imagine?’” This seems like cognitive dissonance.

What Lennon and Yoko Ono’s song does is undermine the very solution to the problems that plague humanity. This has been demonstrated over and over by the atheistic utopian regimes (Mao in China, Stalin in the USSR, Pol Pot in Cambodia, etc.) that engineered the deaths of over 100 million people in the 20th century alone.

America’s founders and early leaders recognized the sinfulness of man and that God would hold us to account one day. That’s why the Constitution has proved so durable. Most of the original state constitutions, notes historian Bill Federer, author of The Original 13: A Documentary History of Religion in America’s First Thirteen States, required that those who held public office be believers in God, lest they advocate lawlessness. For instance, Federer cites the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, which required officeholders to acknowledge “one God, the Creator and Governor of the Universe, the Rewarder of the good and the Punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine Inspiration.” Ben Franklin signed this.

Federer told me, “Later, Pennsylvania’s 1790, 1838, 1874 and 1968 Constitutions contained the wording: “That no person, who acknowledges the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments, shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or place of trust or profit under this commonwealth.’” Knowing our accountability to God should change how we act.

Robert Winthrop, a Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in the mid-19th century, once put it this way: “Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them or by a power without them; either by the Word of God or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or by the bayonet.”

The problem with the song “Imagine” is that it is predicated on the goodness of man — a chimerical idea at best. One has to ask what did Jimmy Carter really believe?