Last year was a pretty good one for singer Cee Lo Green. His profane hit “F— You” (along with its much milder radio counterpart, “Forget You”) was one of the Top 10 singles of the year. And the song’s popularity paved the way for him to join NBC’s singing competition The Voice as a judge last fall.
Maybe all that success went to Cee Lo’s head, tempting him to believe he could tamper with the lyrics to John Lennon’s venerated ode to atheism and world peace, “Imagine,” and no one would notice.
They did.
On Dec. 31, Cee Lo performed “Imagine” during Dick Clark’s “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” broadcast. As Lennon sang it, you may recall, the song administers an indictment of religion as one of the main sources of suffering in the world. Among the many things the former Beatle imagines is, “Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too.”
Cee Lo apparently thought he’d give the song a more contemporary, inclusive update, changing those lyrics to, “Nothing to kill or die for/And all religions true.”
The Internet immediately pounced on his presumption, slamming Cee Lo on his Twitter account and lighting up myriad message boards across the blogosphere. “The whole point of that lyric is that religion causes harm,” @geekysteven tweeted in protest. “If ‘all religion’s true’ it would be a pretty bleak place.”
Forced into damage control mode, the singer tweeted in response, “Yo I meant no disrespect by changing the lyric guys! I was trying to say a world where u could believe what you wanted that’s all!”
In a Jan. 7 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cee Lo further clarified his position on the lyric change. “I will say that it’s all about love,” he said. “It was all done out of love and out of peace and unity and tolerance and acceptance and all those many wonderful things that seem cliché and a little bit cheesy. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. … I believe that we’re just advocates of individuality, you know what I’m saying. I’m pro choice. I’m pro expression. You know, that’s just me. And I meant no harm and no disrespect to anyone [of] any religious preference.”
Lots has already been written about Cee Lo’s choice, but let me add this: I think the most fascinating thing about this incident is not the sharp response he received, but the way both Lennon and now Cee Lo Green reflect and refract the ascendant cultural values of their respective times.
Lennon’s fame coincided almost perfectly with the crest of modernism. Modernism is a worldview that, among other things, hailed the triumph of human ingenuity and boldly predicted the receding influence of God as scientific progress increasingly banished “superstitious” and “irrational” spiritual beliefs to the dustbin of history.
Coinciding with and articulating that worldview, “Imagine” was released in 1971, just five years after Time magazine famously asked on its cover, “Is God Dead.”
Fast-forward 41 years, and it’s clear that Lennon still has a few fans who are willing to defend his dream of a religion-free world. In contrast, though, the concept of God has proven stubbornly resilient, much more so, perhaps, than it might have seemed in 1966.
As for modernism’s dream of unimpeded progress toward a humanistic Utopia, well, that dream has looked increasingly suspect in a world where suffering and seemingly intractable problems confront Earth’s 7 billion denizens.
And so modernism’s unshakeable confidence has yielded to postmodernism’s prevailing skepticism about virtually everything. It’s OK to have a conviction yourself, we’re often told by people like Cee Lo. But don’t suggest that anyone else should share your certainty. Claiming that any one idea or religion is true is almost guaranteed to get you labeled a “bigot” or “hateful” or “intolerant” these days, especially, it sometimes seems, for those of us in the Christian fold.
In contrast to such certainty, the chief virtue that postmodernism embraces is an amorphous “whatever” that’s careful not to exclude anyone for any reason. It’s a message cloaked in nice-sounding phrases such as “tolerance,” “acceptance,” “unity” and “individuality,” as Cee Lo’s quote above so aptly illustrates.
Cee Lo’s edit to “Imagine” is fascinating to me because it boils down this prevailing philosophy to its essence in just three words: “all religions true.” Whether he realizes it or not, Cee Lo’s a product of his age and the ideals that our squishy postmodern epoch cherishes most deeply.
Every age offers its own particular challenges to the truth that Christians affirm. In the last 40 years, both modernism and postmodernism have assailed the gospel from different directions, with different pop-cultural prophets (John Lennon, Cee Lo Green) lobbing their philosophical grenades at it.
Our job as Christians (or, one of them, at least) is to affirm and stand upon the truths we believe in, no matter how culturally out of vogue they might be. God is not dead. Nor are all religions true—no matter what John Lennon or Cee Lo say.
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