Vagle Brothers – "When We All Get to Heaven" (2008)

Soon the pearly gates will open

We shall tread the streets of gold

When the late Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, he was asked if he was a born-again Christian.  “Yes,” he answered.

When reporters asked him about his faith, he told them that he prayed “about 25 times a day, maybe more” and read the Bible every day.  After leaving Washington, the former president not only regularly attended a Baptist church in his hometown, but also taught Sunday school there.

Jimmy Carter teaching Sunday school in 2010 

President Biden touched on Carter’s devoutness when he eulogized him yesterday:

Jimmy held a deep Christian faith in God.  [H]is candidacy spoke and wrote about faith as a substance of things hoped for, and evidence of the things not seen.  Faith founded on commandments of scripture.  Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy mind and all thy soul.

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Given that, it seemed odd when Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” at Carter’s funeral.   After all, that song has been described as “purposely and powerfully irreligious.”  

Here’s how one writer described “Imagine”:

“Imagine” is unabashedly utopian and deeply moral, calling on people to live, as one humanity, in peace.  It is also purposely and powerfully irreligious.  From its opening lyric, “Imagine there’s no heaven,” to the refrain, “And no religion too,” Lennon sets out what is, to many, a clear atheistic message. . . . “Imagine” is explicitly secularist. In Lennon’s telling, religion is an impediment to human flourishing – something to be overcome, transcended.

Despite that, it’s been widely reported that “Imagine” was Carter’s favorite song – which is why it was performed at his funeral. 

“Imagine” famously begins with this line: “Imagine there’s no heaven.”  But this is what the late president’s grandson said when he spoke about his grandfather and his grandmother Rosalynn – who died last year – at the service: “Rest assured that in these last weeks, he told us that he was ready to see her again.”

Does that sound like someone who would prefer a world where there’s no heaven?

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It turns out that Carter never said that “Imagine” was his favorite song.  But he was quoted as saying in 2007 that it was his favorite Beatles song:

I hate to nitpick, but “Imagine” is not a Beatles song, of course – it was a John Lennon song that was written and recorded after the Beatles had broken up.

John Lennon and Muhammad Ali
at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration

Actually, it may not be accurate to characterize it as a John Lennon song either.  Lennon later acknowledged that the lyrics for “Imagine” were largely inspired by Yoko Ono’s poetry.  

In 1980, he told the BBC that the composition should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song:  

A lot of it – the lyric and the concept – came from Yoko, but in those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted her contribution, but it was right out of Grapefruit.  

(Grapefruit was the title of a poetry collection that Yoko published in 1964.)

In 2017, the songwriting credit for “Imagine” was officially changed to recognize both John Lennon and Yoko Ono. 

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I know many of you feel differently, but I am not a fan of “Imagine.” 

So today 2 or 3 lines is featuring “When We All Get to Heaven,” which was written in 1898 by Eliza Edmunds Hewitt, a Philadelphia schoolteacher.  According to the pianist at the church where Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school, that hymn – not “Imagine” – was Carter’s favorite song.

Click here to listen to a 2008 recording of “When We All Get to Heaven” by the four Vagle Brothers, who grew up in Karlstad, Minnesota – a town of 710 souls in extreme northwestern Minnesota that’s just a few miles south of the Canadian border.  (All four attended Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, which is affiliated with the Assembly of God denomination.)

Click here to buy the Vagle Brothers album In the Spirit of the Lord, which includes “When We All Get to Heaven.”  (That song is titled “When We All Get Together” on that album, but it’s the same hymn.)