Thursday, August 28, 2025

Lessons learned from studying four U.S. hymnals

In the first decade of this blog, one of my ongoing preoccupations (and occasional blog subject) was speculating about someday having a new Anglican hymnal. Now we have two: the 2017 Magnify the Lord (aka Book of Common Praise 2017) and the 2023 Sing Unto the Lord.

The way it played out is different that what I expected back 15 or 20 years ago. While the ACNA was officially not founded until 2009, here in San Diego individual parishes started leaving TEC in December 2005.

Beyond differences in what hymnals were produced, the elephant in the room is the decline in the importance of hymnals over the past 30 or 40 years ago. In this century, a large number of ACNA parishes have decided they don’t want or need hymnals due to their culture and worship practices. Many put everything on a screen, and a few put everything in a booklet. Of the former, some are constantly chasing the newest music — which is fundamentally incompatible with a fixed, agreed-upon corpus of music shared between churches and over multiple decades.

Hymnal Fragmentation

Compared to what I expected in 2005 or 2010, the most obvious difference is that there are now 4 hymnals used by non-TEC Anglicans, instead of one or maybe two. But after working to become a hymn scholar over these past years, I now know that that frequently a denomination or publisher will be disappointed when it tries to replace an old hymnal with a new one, either for something “new” or to make more money selling the “upgrade.”

An iconic example was the failed attempt by the LCMS (or more accurately, its money-making CPH publishing arm) to sell users of The Lutheran Hymnal (1941) on “upgrading” to Lutheran Worship (1982). Of course, TLH was arguably the best and most influential U.S. Lutheran hymnal of the 20th century, while LW was (at best) a so-so compromise from a failed effort to produce a joint hymnal (the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship) with its much more liberal LCMS brethren. CPH was more successful in wiping out TLH with its 2006 update (Lutheran Service Book), which is a decent hymnal but — more importantly — was backed both by a full CPH marketing push and a concerted denominational effort to eliminate older hymnals and unify under the new hymnal.*

The latter success cannot be a model for today’s ACNA hymnals. While The Hymnal (1940) and Hymnal 1982 were produced by official ECUSA committees (before “TEC” became the common acronym), MTL and SUL are hymnals for the ACNA but not by ecclesially-sponsored ACNA authorities. (MTL is an officially produced hymnal for the REC and its four US dioceses, but not mandated even for them). So in the next decade, there will be no stone tablets from Mt. Sinai (or Pittsburgh, Atlanta or Raleigh) saying “thou shalt buy this hymnal.”

(* Note: For Lutherans and Methodists among others, a “hymnal” includes both the music of an Anglican hymnal and all the liturgical elements that for Anglicans are found in a prayer book.)

Difficulty Evaluating Hymnals

I’ve spent more than six months examining the 800+ musical pieces in SUL, which required building databases that allow me to compare the two 21st century ACNA hymnals (SUL, MTL) with the two latest 20th century ECUSA ones (H82,H40) — ignoring The Hymnal (1916).

For the January 29 article on service music of SUL, I identified and cross-referenced 16 complete mass settings (nine traditional language, seven contemporary language) across these four hymnals; some of these are also found elsewhere. I also cataloged more than 200 specific pieces of communion music from full or partial mass settings (e.g., my favorite “Scottish” Gloria) found in at least one of these hymnals. I also cross-referenced nearly 400 pieces of Daily Office service music found in one or more hymnals.

Similar, for today’s (Aug 28) article on the SUL hymns, I made a database of 1216 unique hymn texts and 1630 hymn-text pairings found in one or more of these hymnals. While texts are standardized for service music (at least until recent divergence of contemporary translations), incrementally modified hymn texts made it more difficult (or even subjective) to decide if two hymns were the same text. Less obviously, some tunes have multiple names which makes it a challenge to match them unless you do so one hymn at a time.

Difficult Committee Decisions

I’ve never been on a hymnal committee (nor have I shipped a new jet engine, fighter plane or computer operating system). In earlier jobs, I did develop and maintain various forms of complex system software.

From studying these hymnals and talking to the two most recent editors (Chris Hoyt and Mark K. Williams), there are a lot of details to be tracked — of what you’re starting from, what you’d like to do, and what you end up adding, changing or deleting. Obviously it would help to have someone with OCB attached to the hymnal committee, as well as good tracking tools.

Unless you have a photographic memory, it’s nearly an impossible task, even with good tools. Talking to the editors 2,3,4 years after they made a decision, after spending a weekend on one small part of the hymnal (e.g. the change in Christmas hymns over a previous hymnal) I was probably that week more knowledgeable what the hymnal is (as opposed to why) than the person(s) who made it.

That doesn’t even get to the question of what decisions you want to make, and how you end up making them. It’s clear that the H40 and especially H82 decision making had both formalized processes and the logical consequence of such processes: bureaucracy and politics. I have not yet seen the H40 working papers, but it seems that the H82 process was the more political of the two— the hymnal feels like the result of conflicting visions rather than the relatively unified vision of H40 (or the stronger moral and technical authority of C.W. Douglas, who had no equal in the H82 process).

MTL had 1½ leaders — an editor (Hoyt) and a clear second-in-command, Andrew Dittman. Knowing the two, while they both have strong opinions and thus must have had conflicts, both have been friends and worked alongside each other for a long time. I thus see evidence of a blended effort to create a vision and implement that vision for the new hymnal.

From reading, emails and calls regarding SUL, its process was even more streamlined: Williams is the editor, and everyone else listed played an advisory role. Even more so than with the Douglas H40, SUL is the result of a unitary vision.

Inevitable Tradeoffs

What is in each hymnal? Below is a summary I published with my Part 1 review, including not just H40 but its two later updated editions (of which 1981 is now what’s found in most churches).

Table 1: Hymns and Service Music in U.S. Anglican hymnals, 1940-2023

Hymnal 1940Hymnal 1940 (1961)Hymnal 1940 (1981)Hymnal 1982Book of Common Praise 2017Sing Unto the Lord
Hymns[7]725725751720639741
Service music141160175288[8]161140
Total musical pieces8668859261008800881
Complete Mass settings4885510

From this, there is roughly a “normal” size for the hymnal, the number of hymns, room for service music etc. So at a first order of approximation, if you want to add 200 hymns you have to drop 200 hymns. My guess is that for each hymnal, perhaps 10% of the hymns are clear losers — either from before when it went to print, or realized soon thereafter. But if dropping 200 hymns is 25% of the preceding hymnal, even if finding that next 10-15% to eliminate avoids hymns that are widely used, it still will end up dropping hymns that are important to someone.

Conclusion: No One Answer for Everyone

Looking back to 15 years ago, my biggest surprise is that there is still no “ACNA” hymnal for the entire province, let alone all US Anglicans. No one hymnal is suitable for all parishes across all dioceses of the ACNA, let alone Continuing churches. (The decision for Continuing Anglicans is much simpler, but there is still the choice of 1940 vs. 2017).

The flip side of this is that each of the 21st century hymnals is less of a compromise than H82, and thus a better fit to a specific subset of US Anglicans. So what would I recommend?

First, for existing users of H40 or H82, there’s no requirement to change. In many aspects of life newer is not better, let alone an “upgrade”. People meet in 100 year old buildings and some drive 30 year old cars or stay married for 60 years. Change is not, by its nature, inherently good. 

Over my many parish visits and conversations, my sense is that either there’s a groundswell of interest in replacing the old hymnal or there isn’t. Clearly, having a new rector or music director throw out the old hymnals because he can is not a sufficient reason to do so — any more than firing the assistant rector or getting rid of the organ is. In extreme cases, this can prove a career-limiting move.

However, some parishes have already decided to look for a new hymnal — or some new or newish parishes may not have a hymnal and thus can make the decision from scratch. Which hymnal should they choose?
  1. The short answer: compare MTL and SUL to each other — and if you have a hymnal, to the one you have.
  2. The next longest answer: MTL is the successor to H40 and SUL to H82, so unless your parish character has changed, the starting assumption is that the average parish will be more happy to “upgrade” within its lane.
But beyond these simple rules, there are further considerations:
  • MTL is a less extensive revision and SUL a more extensive one (higher proportion of new material).
  • MTL consciously valued saving material from H40 and rarely borrowed from H82 (the Hurd mass setting being the major exception). SUL has no particular loyalty to any previous hymnal, so there is no guarantee that your favorite hymn or setting from any of the previous hymnals will be kept. (Put another way, the editor chose what he thought best from MTL, H82 and H40, while recovering a few even older hymns).
  • The ethos of MTL for things like inclusive language follows H40, i.e. almost none. SUL is certainly more aggressively updated than MTL and less updated than any 21st century TEC hymnal would be; on average, I'd say it’s between H82 and MTL: “Good Christian men” become “Good Christian friends” but with Chesterton we still sing "All Thy saints in warfare".
Finally, H82 came at a time when the 400 year old liturgy became Rite I and the prayer book was split into Rite I vs. Rite II. Thus, in the 1980s, both the prayer book and hymnal allowed for both, and together they were frequently used by parishes that had one service of each. Four decades later, the ACNA liturgy commission decided that contemporary language is the norm, that traditional language could be tolerated for a few cranky parishes, but that no prayer book would support both.

Each of the new hymnal mainly supports the 2019 or 2022 (“TLE”) ACNA liturgies. MTL is a Rite I (or TLE or 1928) hymnal with four traditional mass settings and (IMHO) the best of the H82 contemporary settings — David Hurd’s “New Plainsong.” If you’re an H82 parish and Hurd is not your preferred setting, you’ll be disappointed — as will those parishes that rotate between 2 or 3 settings across the liturgical year.

Instead of 4 vs. 1, SUL is slightly more balanced with 2 (TLE) settings vs. 6 for the modern (2019) texts. However, SUL omits one of the three core traditional settings. Perhaps it’s not one used in S.C., but (in my biased opinion) it’s the most musically important of the three, the Douglas “Missa Marialis” adapted from authentic medieval chants. (Of course, if all your mass settings are in the service booklet, you can ignore these two paragraphs).

But if you’re not a blended parish, nine times out of ten the default choice is the best choice. Going beyond that default choice would likely require understanding in more detail the differences in the core portfolios of 600-700 hymns that account for most of the pages of each book.

Below is what I’ve written on the subject of 21st century US Anglican hymnals; not a lot of other people are doing so. Beyond these articles, I am glad to provide resources (e.g. a database) to readers if someone is interested in more specifics on what’s different.

References

Thursday, May 29, 2025

Hymnody Ascendant

Today was a rare midweek feast day for me: two sung Eucharist services, plus an evensong in one day. But the reason I'm blogging is that three hymns overlapped on the two Ascension masses.

Overlapping Editor Choices

The morning HC and evensong were part of the REC’s Anglican Way Institute annual conference, hosted by Holy Communion, the REC’s Dallas cathedral. The evening HC was at Chapel of the Cross, a sister REC parish a half hour away.

The former uses Magnify the Lord (Book of Common Praise 2017) as the former home parish of the MTL editor, while the latter since uses The Hymnal (1940). I sang in the (ad hoc) AWI choir at the former and in the pews at the latter, but essentially three hymns were the same with the same words and harmony.

I’ve also just finished by master database of 1600+ hymns in MTL, H40, H82 and the new Sing Unto the Lord (as part of finishing part 2 of my SUL hymnal review), so I was able to cross-references these hymns into H82 and SUL.

Here are the three hymns I sang twice, all with four part harmony:
  1. All Hail the Pow’r of Jesus’ Name (Coronation in F): 6 verses (H40: 355 1st, H82: 450, MTL: 156, SUL: 175). Hymnary.org list 3,501 hymnals.
  2. Hail the Day that Sees Him Rise (Llanfair in F): 4 verses (H40: 104 1st, H82: 214, MTL: 160, SUL: 181). Text by Charles Wesley in 553 hymnals
  3. Crown Him With Many Crowns (Diademata in G): 5 verses (H40: 352, H82: 494, MTL: 149, SUL: 186).  807 hymnals
I don’t have a copy of H82 handy, but the H40 and MTL melody and bass part sung the same, and the SUL mens’ parts eyeball the same.

SUL has a descant by Richard Proulx, which (according to the Hymnal 1982 Companion) was previously found in H82. Neither H40 or MTL have any descants for any hymns.

Overlapping Musician Choices

Both services opened and ended with a crowd pleaser, but the AM had #1 for entrance, #2 for gradual and #3 for exit, while PM had #3 for entrance, #2 for sermon and #1 for entrance. Interestingly, MTL and SUL treated all three as Ascension hymns, while H40 and H82 only treated #2 as such.

The two hymnals I sang from have different hymn selection guides. I asked the PM music director about the overlap, and all he could offer is “great minds think alike.”

Both also used the Willan mass setting, but that is not surprising then since the 1940s that has been the standard “high” (or “ordinary”) season mass setting for US ECUSA (and later Anglican) parishes — at least until Rite II came along, when that role was taken by the Hurd or Powell setting. (Hurd seems normal to me but probably others would see it as serious and thus penitential rather than festive).

Sunday, April 27, 2025

No doubt: Everyone's favorite St. Thomas hymn

The first Sunday after Easter is often called “low Sunday,” or sometimes as “Doubting Thomas Sunday.” Since the first English prayer book in 1549, the gospel reading has been from John 20:19-23, where Jesus greets the 11 and establishes auricular confession. More recently, that’s been extended toby adding verses 24-31, with the entire story of “Doubting” Thomas, appointed for all three years of the RCL and ACNA lectionaries. That was what we heard this morning at our 1928 BCP parish.

As I wrote in 2012, there is one hymn suitable for this date: “O sons and daughters let us sing!” set to the tune O Filii et Filiae. Here are excerpts from the Hymnal 1940 Companion (p. 73-74):

[The Latin original] was written by Jean Tisserand, a Franciscan monk, who died at Paris in 1949. It is first found in a small booklet without title printed between 1518 and 1536, probably at Paris.…The translation by John Mason Neale has been frequently altered since it was first published in his Mediævel Hymns and Sequences, 1851. 

The tune, O filli et filiae, is probably the original contemporary melody since none other has been used with the text. The earliest known form is a four-part setting … [from] 1623.

This hymn is #99 in my favorite hymnal (H40), with nine verses. The author notes that H40 drops three of the verses from Neale’s original, but it appears that the 1986 New English Hymnal adds a 10th verse after a very different adaptation of the same nine Neale verses.

All verses can be sung on Easter, but verses 1,5,6,7,8 are normally sung on low Sunday. The same hymn is #142 in Book of Common Praise 2017 (aka Magnify the Lord), the first hymnal published for ACNA usage, mainly as an update for H40 for traditional-language parishes.

As I noted earlier, Hymnal 1982 split this hymn into two separate hymns with the same tune: #203 with five Easter verses and #206 with six Doubting Thomas verses.

This month, I have been researching the second of my two-part review of Sing Unto the Lorda 2023 hymnal published as a replacement for H82 for more contemporary language ACNA parishes. SUL replicates the H82 pattern (as it does in many other areas), with #170 with five Easter verses and #169 with six Doubting Thomas verses.

Since Covid, I've been monitoring the online bulletins for six Episcopal and ACNA parishes. Three sang the translated Tisserand text today: two H82 parishes sang #206, and one H40 parish sang #99, as we did at our Continuing parish.

Sadly, the Savannah, Georgia ACNA parish that is the home of Sing Unto the Lord did read John 20:19-31, but did not schedule hymn #169 from its hymnal. Instead, it had two regular Easter hymns (part of the overflow from Easter Sunday that often happens throughout early Eastertide).

Still, I think the message is clear: for those who focus on the Doubting Thomas story for low Sunday, there is one clear choice of a hymn — Neale’s opening verse, his five verses about John 20:19-31, plus (in some cases) three other verses from Neale’s longer original hymn — all set to the earliest known (if not only) tune used for this text.


Caravaggio, Incredulità di San Tommaso

Friday, April 18, 2025

The most famous C&E oratorio

Virtually all Anglicans know Handel’s most famous sacred work — which is probably the most famous long-form sacred work ever written in English. Most would know the three parts — first with OT prophesy of a Messiah and his birth in 1st century Judea, the second with Christ’s atoning sacrifice, and the third focusing on the second coming.

In a Friday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — in the weekly “Houses of Worship” feature — assistant WSJ editorial page writer (and Hillsdale alumna) Nicole Ault laments the scarcity of Eastertide performances of what instead has become a staple of the Christmas season. The work was originally performed April 13, 1742 during Eastertide, and its librettist thought it ideally suited for Holy Week.

She spotlights the enduring power of the text by English librettist Charles Jennens:
A devout Anglican, Jennens wrote “Messiah” in part to battle the deists of his age, who posited a distant God but not a Savior. As rationalists, they put no stock in things of faith like resurrection from the dead. “ ‘Messiah,’ with its insistence on God’s free . . . gift of his Son, on the historical fact of the Incarnation and the supernatural fact of Redemption, was an assertion of everything that the Deists sought to deny,” writes Richard Luckett in his 1992 book, Handel’s Messiah: A Celebration.

Ault closes her column with a tribute to the witness the final part that this libretto offers to the promise of the Resurrection:

But besides testifying to facts that require faith, “Messiah” also bears witness to a hope that results from that faith. The feeling is personal: “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” sings the soprano in one of the work’s sweetest solos, “yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

It is also unassailable. Easter seals the promise of eternal life, revealed at Christmas but unfulfilled except through death and resurrection. Thus, quoting the apostle Paul, “Messiah” can say what is ours to proclaim as well: “O death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?”



Monday, March 17, 2025

The Missing Verses to St. Patrick’s Breastplate

“I bind unto myself” — the English translation of the ancient text known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate — is the recommended by Anglican practice to be sung (at least) twice a year..

One obviously is today, on St. Patrick’s Day, in honor of the missionary bishop who brought Christianity to Ireland in the 5th century. The other is on Trinity Sunday, because — as Patrick intended — it taught the doctrine of the Trinity in an understandable form, 15 centuries before Donall and Conall did.

I previously blogged on this 7 (actually 6½) verse hymn that most readers know from Hymnal (1940) or Hymnal 1982. Even with the switch of tune on verse six, it is a long hymn to sing.  As I wrote in 2019:
In my interviews on church music practice last fall, it was a (slightly) controversial hymn: everyone loved the doctrine and the memories it evokes. However, the parishioners were split: most loved the complete hymn, but a minority complained that it was too long. (IIRC only one music director regularly abridged the hymn).
Still, I have sung it many times — even a capella for all seven verses in a church retreat. It is probably my daughter’s favorite hymn at this point.

However, in January I learned about the missing verses of the hymn, that both complete the hymn and make it longer. I heard about it from a priest who has been a mentor to me and my father, Fr. Lawrence Bausch, who was (fittingly) rector of Holy Trinity Episcopal (later Anglican) Church in San Diego. In 2010 I wrote about their last worship service at their original home.

At a January 11 service at their new home, we sang all nine verses of the hymn. Fr. Bausch said he learned about the missing verses decades earlier, and argued that since then, he has always scheduled all nine verses, because the extra verses make the crucial theological points that were set up by the rest of the hymn.

About those Missing Verses

The Hymntime website lists the history of the 1889 poem by (Mrs.) Cecil F. Alexander:
Alexander penned these words at the request of Hercules Henry Dickinson, Dean of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle:
“I wrote to her suggesting that she should fill a gap in our Irish Church Hymnal by giving us a metrical version of St. Patrick’s Lorica, and I sent her a carefully collated copy of the best prose translations of it. Within a week she sent me that exquisitely beautiful as well as faithful version which appears in the appendix to our Church Hymnal.”
Ralph Vaughan Williams arranged all nine verses to St. Patrick and Deidre for the 1906 The English Hymnal. Here are verse 5 (familiar to US Anglicans) and the missing verses 6 and 7:
I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, His might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need.
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide, His shield to ward;
The Word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard.

Against the demon snares of sin,
The vice that gives temptation force,
The natural lusts that war within,
The hostile men that mar my course;
Or few or many, far or nigh,
In every place and in all hours,
Against their fierce hostility
I bind to me these holy powers.

Against all Satan’s spells and wiles,
Against false words of heresy,
Against the knowledge that defiles,
Against the heart’s idolatry,
Against the wizard’s evil craft,
Against the death wound and the burning,
The choking wave, the poisoned shaft,
Protect me, Christ, till Thy returning.
Fr. Bausch said (paraphrasing) that while verses 1-5 talk about obedience to God and his power, without verse 6-7, it doesn’t say why. Clearly, many “modern” 20th century Christians don’t believe in demons, temptations, holy powers, Satan, wizards and the like. But this is their fault: the world remains enchanted by the eternal presence of the creator, whether we recognize it or not.

As a fully-modernized rationalist, I am struggling to overcome this delusion of disechantment. And nine verses is a lot of verses, even for the most diehard parish. Still, any church that uses St. Patrick’s Breastplate as a catechetical tool (rather than a cultural artefact) should pull out the extra verses once a year &emdash; preferably when thereis support from choir and organ.

Friday, January 10, 2025

An evangelical against Christianity

I was talking with a church friend Thursday. At some point, when we were talking about culture vs. church, I mentioned how (back in 2010) I blogged about the most famous anti-Christian pop song of the late mid-20th century. We discussed how — given its anti-Christian bigotry — we couldn’t Imagine any Christian who listened to (or read) the lyrics would ever request or otherwise endorse it

After we got off the phone, I read that this same song was performed at the funeral of our 39th president, a man who had campaigned and been elected as a Southern Evangelical.

The song, of course, is “Imagine,” from the 1971 John Lennon album of the same name. It peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. For those who didn’t read the earlier post, this is how John Lennon famously described his approach in a Rolling Stone interview at the time:

'Imagine' is a big hit almost everywhere -- anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do: Put your political message across with a little honey.

Or as freelancer Stereo Williams reflected in Billboard during the turbulent summer of 2020:

Why John Lennon’s Protest Perennial Became an Anthem For the Clueless

…It’s a song that was almost destined to turn into what it’s become today. In many ways, the track epitomizes the sanitizing of Lennon as a persona and public figure; controversial ideas couched in a likeable melody — and a more saccharine distillation of what was a very complex and contradictory oeuvre of topical music on a wide range of issues. 

This Week’s Funeral

Fast forward to this week. Like any (departed) president, James Earl Carter Jr. (1924-2024) had multiple funerals, include the most visible, his state funeral Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral, the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. The diocesan bishop and Carter’s “personal pastor” led the prayers.

The full program is online. The hymns were

  • Eternal Father, strong to save, aka the “Navy Hymn”
  • Amazing Grace
  • All hail the power of Jesus’ name
According to the program, the first two were performed by a choir, and the congregation was invited to sing the last hymn.

Just before the Lord’s Prayer was a song performed by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood. The couple met in 1987 when both were married, and then toured and recorded songs together in the 1990s. She divorced in 1991, he divorced in 2001; they officially started dating in 2002 and married in 2005.
The program lists five verses of the song by Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono. The first two verses were
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky 
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

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...
To my earlier criticism, with a courses from two seminaries and a master’s degree under my belt, I would add two thoughts about why this song would be anathema to any devout Christian.

First, the premise of the song is that human being are perfectible, and through hard work, we can make a perfect utopia in this life. There are all sorts of political science and sociological explanations why that will never happen (e.g., “power corrupts”), but as Christians we know than after the fall and in this world, there never has been and never will be more than one perfect human to ever walk the face of the earth.

Second, in Christian worship, this reveals a faulty eschatology, one that does not trust in God the Father (or Son or Holy Spirit), His divine revelation and promises as revealed to the human race. We know where and what perfection will look like — in the New Jerusalem revealed in Revelation — but don’t know when or exactly how it will come about. Instead, we are called to wait for God to deliver on His promises, in the time and manner of His plan.

Reaction

A few other people remarked on the incongruity of this choice, most notably those reported by the Christian Post. The best known of those mentioned is the famous Christian apologist, Catholic Bishop Robert Barron:
"Under the soaring vault of what I think is still a Christian church, they reverently intoned, 'Imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try' and 'imagine there’s no country; it isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.' Vested ministers sat patiently while a hymn to atheistic humanism was sung."

"This was not only an insult to the memory of a devoutly believing Christian but also an indicator of the spinelessness of too much of established religion in our country," Barron added.

I admire Bp. Barron greatly, but presidential funerals are elaborately choreographed over years if not decades. This was no accident. This controversial song was variously reported as being one of Carter’s favorites by the Daily Mail and Fox News.

Like anyone else, President Carter had the right to pick his music — but Christian churches and pastors should draw the line. Alas, this church isn’t going to do so for an anti-Christian song, and (the reality is) probably no church (other than perhaps the decedent’s own pastor) is going to say no to a former president.

So why would Jimmy Carter do this? He was a smart man, an Annapolis grad, a former nuclear engineer. He taught Sunday school and knew his Bible, even if his Baptist beliefs moved markedly leftward after he left office.

The Nation, a famous (and historic) leftist weekly, both celebrated the choice and found earlier quotes explaining Carter’s reasons:

Carter spoke more than once about his enthusiasm for the song. He delighted in the fact that “Imagine” had become a truly international anthem. “[I]n many countries around the world—my wife and I have visited about 125 countries—you hear John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ used almost equally with national anthems,” the former president said in a 2006 NPR interview. “So John Lennon has had a major impact on some of the countries that are developing in the world.”

Asked by the Associated Press about his favorite Beatles song when he was attending the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival for the debut of Jonathan Demme’s documentary, Jimmy Carter Man From Plains, at the time of the premiere of Across the Universe, a film framed by the music of Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, Carter once again mentioned Lennon’s majestic solo song.

“My favorite is ‘Imagine.’ When I go to a strange country, Cuba and other places, in some of those nations, ‘Imagine’ has become [an unofficial] national anthem. If you go to Havana, for instance, you’ll see a statue of John Lennon,” he said, referencing the memorial in Havana’s Parque John Lennon. “When we go to a folk performance or a symphony concert or to modern American music, they always play ‘Imagine,’ and it’s one of my favorites just personally. If you listen to the lyrics closely, you’ll see that it’s against religion, it’s against national boundaries, it’s against nationalism, it’s against jingoism, but the impact it has on people is profound.”

There seems to be a contradiction between this view and Carter’s stated religious beliefs.

None of us know the judgement of our own souls, let alone someone else’s. But I would hope that most devout Christian clergy would reject this song in a Christian context, if for no other reason than for its potential for misleading both Christians and non Christians about our ultimate purpose and God’s promises to the world.