Imagine: a return to religion

In his 1971 song Imagine, former Beatle John Lennon sang: “Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace…”

The song was taken up by youth culture, captivated by the singer’s soulful desire to “give peace a chance,” as an earlier song put it. Over time, Imagine was embraced as something of an anthem by idealistic utopians caught by Lennon’s idea of a world living “as one,” where people“shar[e] all the world” in “a brotherhood of man.”

Lennon’s song captured a particular cultural moment. At the same time, it gave popular expression to a set of ideals and criticisms that have proved enduring. Imagine was intended not as a simple paean to peace – a secularized, rock version of Oseh Shalom – but rather as an anti-capitalist manifesto of sorts.  “Imagine no possessions… No need for greed… Sharing all the world.”

While those lines resonate with the visions of Isaiah, arguing for a just world, the song articulated a romanticized Marxist vision that involved the dissolution of such things as religious and national identity in favour of a universalist ideal.

You could say that Imagine encapsulates a messianic vision, but one displaced from the religious to the secular political context. Religion was lumped together with other things that caused people to fight and die, rather than being seen as a source of spirituality and ethics.

This view of religion as, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, destructive, has long characterized both academic analyses and radical political stances. But two articles that I came upon recently by staunch cultural critics place religion back into the arena as a source of sustaining values. The angle that the articles took, and the turnabout that they represented for their authors, caught my attention. Each of the authors argued that western culture – North America, Europe – would be the better for coming under the influence of Islamic fundamentalism.

In a recent essay in Commonweal, the illustrious Terry Eagleton, a British Marxist literary theorist, described western liberal democracies as populated by consumerist automatons with no compelling beliefs. He contrasted their inner emptiness with the “critique of materialism, hedonism, and individualism made by many devout Muslims,” arguing that western countries would “be altered for the good” if they were to be influenced by Islam.

American feminist Naomi Wolf, in the pages of the Globe and Mail, argued that rather than viewing the veiling of women under Islam as the oppression of women and repression of their sexuality, we should understand it as a practice that supports the values of marriage and family. Best known for her book The Beauty Myth, which sees the idea of beauty as an instrument to control and limit women, Wolf views female modesty as a potential source of sensuality and liberation. Elsewhere, she extends this idea to Orthodox Judaism, as well. She contrasts Christian anti-sensuality with Islam and Judaism, where, she argues, “sexuality channelled into marriage and family life is seen as a source of great blessing, sanctioned by God.”

One could argue that both of these authors romanticize religious devotion, and neither of them possess a deep knowledge of the religious phenomenon they describe glowingly. For them, religious commitment is a peg on which they hang their ongoing criticisms of western civilization.

Still, these two articles are a sign of the changing cultural winds. Religion, once pushed to the periphery of civic discourse, is regaining the centre. What will that mean for the way we live our lives as Canadian Jews? I, for one, will welcome a more complex, less trivial public understanding about the place of religious values and ethics.

John Lennon saw only religion’s power to divide and destroy. As a professor of Jewish studies at a secular university, I am often struck by its potential to bring people together – not only co-religionists, in a feeling of solidarity and belonging, but people of different faith groups who respect religious commitment. Imagine.