‘Dark Indeed’: Horribly Anti-Christian Song Performed at Jimmy Carter’s Funeral

The funeral for one of the United States’ worst presidents was serenaded with John Lennon’s worst song.

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, was honored Thursday with a service at the Washington National Cathedral that would have been fitting for a former commander in chief who was also well known for espousing Christian beliefs and teaching Sunday School at his Baptist church in Plains, Georgia.

But the inclusion of the explicitly anti-Christian song “Imagine” cast a shadow on the proceedings that not even a performance by country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood could brighten.

From the very first line, the song’s dismal nihilism proclaims itself opposing the fundamental Christian belief of an afterlife.

“Imagine there’s no heaven,” Lennon wrote in the title track of his 1971 album. “It’s easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us only sky.

“Imagine all the people, living for today.”

Mollie Hemingway, the astute commentator and editor in chief of the conservative website The Federalist, nailed the disastrous choice in a post on the social media platform X.

“Why would ANY Christian have that sung at their funeral?” Hemingway wrote. “Imagining there is no heaven and no Christianity at a Christian funeral is dark, indeed.”

WHAT? Why would ANY Christian have that sung at their funeral? Imagining there is no heaven and no Christianity at a Christian funeral is dark, indeed. https://t.co/64IaRvlOmz pic.twitter.com/cr9kOP892p

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) January 9, 2025

“Dark, indeed” sums it up pretty well.

It doesn’t help that the rest of the song just gets worse. It’s a treacly paean to the ignorant illusions that form the basis of an outright leftist, globalist worldview.

It imagines a world without countries, without convictions (“nothing to kill or die for”) and without faith (“and no religion, too”).

It imagines a world without “possession,” which is to say a world without private property or capitalism, the greatest forces behind the innovations that have fostered human prosperity in the long history of mankind.

It imagines, in short, a world of godless, hedonistic chaos: A world without the law that nationhood provides, a world without the security of individuals owning their own means of survival and the ability to provide for their families.

It imagines a world without a Creator who will sit in judgment on the actions of every soul.

And somehow, through some bizarre mental delusion, it concludes that all that would lead to a “brotherhood of man.”

Any thinking adult knows differently. It would instead be a hellscape, a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where only brute force would matter — a dystopia that would make the pre-Christian world of pagan empires enslaving millions look like a paragon of ordered liberty.

It’s Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” set to music. (Lennon himself reportedly described it that way.)

But this was a song chosen for the funeral of a man who professed the Christian faith his entire life? And achieved the pinnacle of power in a country literally built on the idea of individual liberty?

As reaction on social media showed, Hemingway wasn’t the only critic. Here’s a sample:

Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood are performing “Imagine” at Jimmy Carter‘s funeral.

“Imagine there’s no heaven…”
“And no religion too …”

I gotta wonder-who planned this? There’s no worse song to sing at a funeral, except maybe “Highway to Hell.”

Sad. Pitiful, really.

— SpinRemover (@TNMSAdventures) January 9, 2025

John Lennon himself described his song “Imagine” as “virtually the communist manifesto”. Lennon added that it is accepted because “it is sugarcoated”. It is literally an ode to a system that has killed tens of millions. So sad they would sing this at Jimmy Carter‘s funeral. pic.twitter.com/S1brQ4Mhuk

— Jeremy Wayne Tate (@JeremyTate41) January 9, 2025

Watching Jimmy Carter’s funeral service.

Here, I thought “ahh, I wonder what pleasant song this is for a funeral”

The first line: “…Imagine there’s no Heaven”

…maybe it’s just me, but what a TERRIBLE song to play at a funeral, lol pic.twitter.com/g3NGGH7b91

— The Governor (@Gov_Megatron) January 9, 2025

This was clearly no accident. Brooks and Yearwood teamed up to deliver the same song at the funeral for Rosalynn Carter, Jimmy Carter’s wife,  in 2023, so it’s fairly obvious that Carter himself had something to say about it being played at his own services.

No American who lived through the Carter presidency — or has read any honest history of the late 1970s — can have any illusions about how awful it was.

Inflation wracked the country on the domestic front. Abroad, the Iranian hostage crisis pretty much defined the impotence of an administration that was fundamentally unable to lead the free world because of a president who was fundamentally unsuited for the job.

(As The Associated Press described it in a 2022 report: “The 444-day crisis transfixed America, as nightly images of blindfolded hostages played on television sets across the nation. Iran finally let all of the captives go the day Carter left office on Ronald Reagan’s inauguration day in 1981.”)

Until Barack Obama and Joe Biden took the oath of office, Carter would have been hands-down the worst chief executive in the country’s history. Democrats are only getting worse.

And no one who can read English can have any illusions about what the song “Imagine” really imagines — beneath its deceptively pleasant melody. (If anyone doubts it, the lyrics are here.)

Lennon had some great songs, particularly in his Beatles days. He had some lousy ones. (“Instant Karma!” comes to mind, for pure idiocy.) But “Imagine” is the worst by far.

So maybe it is fitting that the late Lennon’s ode to an atheistic world devoid of both faith and humanity is a fitting match for the failure that is synonymous with Carter’s name.

But for the funeral of a supposed Christian? It’s an atrocity.

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