Hopeful Anthem Showdown

Songs are a serious matter. This is especially so of those songs we call anthems, which stir our hearts toward some object of shared hope. It is by singing the song, by our joined voices and our reverent attention, that the hope expressed therein is really shared; at least that’s how we come to recognize that it’s shared (or if it is).

A moving depiction of this comes in a scene in the 1942 film Casablanca, taking place in a Moroccan nightclub during the Second World War. The city of Casablanca is neutral territory under the authority of Vichy France, and there are German soldiers mingling about alongside various European exiles, all waiting in limbo for some opportunity to get to the still-neutral United States. In the scene, the Germans begin loudly and obnoxiously singing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” an anthem of Franco-German enmity summoning young Germans to defend their fatherland. In response, the Czech resistance hero, Viktor Laszlo orders the dormant house band to play the French republican hymn “La Marseillaise.” With a nod of approval from Rick, the club’s owner, the band begins and the diffuse crowd in the bar is roused into song. After a moment of cacophony, their overwhelming emotion and enthusiasm drowns out and subdues the Germans. The emotions displayed in the scene were not merely theatrical. Many of the extras during production were themselves European refugees, and their joined voices singing “La Marseillaise” rekindled a lingering hope of freedom against the dispiriting backdrop of the war and the oppressive German Reich.

Living now, on the other side of that great calamity and in the world it left us, we are perhaps less sure of what we ought to hope for. We are uneasy about anthems. Those that roused people in past centuries are an anxious inheritance, bound up in much blood spilled for dreams we no longer share or even entirely understand. Our attachments to nations are tenuous, our commitments to loftier ideals even more conditional. We have a vivid sense of what sort of evil and violence can flow from the trappings of a devoted heart, and we have only the mistiest notion of the great goods which might demand one. We may, for understandable reasons, have become allergic to devotion altogether.

Photograph by Sinitta Leunen / Unsplash.

For people in such a state, a song like John Lennon’s “Imagine” fills the aspirational void, expressing the muted hopes of an otherwise hopeless and love-starved world. Written and released in 1971, the song has become ubiquitous over the last several years at our moments of global solemnity and reverence. It was the opening theme to the Winter Olympics in Tokyo, and it was performed at the recent funeral of former president Jimmy Carter in the Washington National Cathedral. Somewhat infamously, an ensemble of Hollywood celebrities sang it to console the public in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 (infamous for the much-noted irony of wealthy celebrities in relative health and safety inviting the poor and dying to imagine a world without heaven or possessions). It sometimes seems to be the only song capable of expressing hopes we still share, however unfulfilled those hopes might be.

“Imagine” has three verses, and in each Lennon invites us to consider a world free of those things which have ostensibly divided us. Firstly, we are invited to consider a world without any transcendent hope or ultimate justice, then a world without any marks of national distinction or particular bonds of love, and finally a world without possession. We can then imagine all the people living life peacefully in the present moment and sharing all the world as brothers and sisters. The chorus beckons us to join with those who dream of such a world, that we might someday live as one. What’s stopping us from living this way? Ultimately for Lennon, it’s just those things we love and want too much.

Twenty years after the release of “Imagine,” the poet and troubadour Leonard Cohen penned a different anthem fit for the same spiritually uneasy generation, with a spare and self-descriptive title. Like “Imagine,” Cohen’s “Anthem” has three verses and a chorus that rouses its listener to a hopeful response. And like “Imagine,” Cohen’s hymn depicts an anxious world full of violence and greed. Here the likeness ends, but it’s the differences that are profound and illuminating. Consider the beginning of each song. Lennon sings:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky

Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today

While Cohen begins:

The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be

Both songs exhort us to bring our attention to the present, but for very different reasons. Lennon’s objections are plain: our desire for salvation or fear of judgment keeps us from living in the moment, and we should just simply be and do in the here and now.

Cohen’s birds instead recall the “birds of the air” from Saint Matthew’s Gospel, who “neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Matt. 6:26). According to Cohen’s birds, the great obstacle to presence is our tight grip on an unchangeable past or an unknowable future, instead of trusting the God who surely loves us even more than the sparrows. Our hopes for the fulfillment of desire or our sense and fear of lasting justice, however, are very much a part of our life in this moment. They make each moment fully what it is, a locus for the drama of human freedom, given new to us again each morning.

Both songs go on next to talk of war and religion, with Lennon’s optimism only growing and Cohen’s giving way to sobriety. “Imagine” continues:

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
Livin’ life in peace

While Cohen more pessimistically laments:

Ah, the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free

We could live in peace, says Lennon, if we deemed nothing worth quarreling over, and loved nothing over and above our own lives. Of course, even in a world with nothing to die for, we will still all have to die, only here we can also have the assurance that we will all die for nothing. He who loves his life will lose it (John 12:25). Even in a world without killing for God or country, history and experience seem rife with plenty of more petty reasons for brutality. Lennon himself gives voice to such reasons in his less aspirational songs (for example, “Run for your life if you can little girl, catch you with another man, that’s the end”). Having nothing to kill for seems a scant assurance that we will not simply kill for nothing.

Cohen shares Lennon’s disdain for killing in the name of lofty things, especially divinity. But unlike Lennon, he likens such killing to a kind of corruption. Men capture, sell, and profane the holy dove amid their petty wars of conquest and vanity. The dove is an icon of the spirit of peace and truth, as presented in scripture from Noah’s dove that brought news of God’s mercy to the dove which descended at the baptism of Christ (Gen. 8:11, Matt. 3:16). In our sojourning lives, it’s by religion that we hope to be bound together – by that Spirit rather than by the sword, even if Cohen has the sober sense that our religion is usually for sale.

Whereas “Imagine” continues depicting an ideal world without greed or hunger, “Anthem” goes on recounting the real world of our brokenness and failure:

We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
And the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see

I can’t run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they’ve summoned up a thundercloud
They’re going to hear from me

The signs given to a faithless generation are the fruit of faithlessness. We have betrayed the hopeful promise of the birth of a child and the promise of fidelity in marriage. It’s worth noting here that there are no children or spouses at all in “Imagine.” Cohen’s biblical allusions, whether to the miraculous births of Isaac, Samuel, or Jesus or to the covenant God has made with his beloved Israel are far from exhausting the recognizable image. We do not live up to the ordinary and radical hope expressed in every birth, in the bringing of a new life into the world. Our lives cannot answer for it. Neither are we faithful to our vows, and our infidelity has widowed even our governments, unmooring them from true justice by which they might yet govern. Still, for Cohen, such a circumstance can no longer be an excuse for a life of personal lawlessness, all while “the killers in high places” pay their hypocritical tributes to the law. They have set something in motion that they will have to answer for.

The chorus of both songs exhort us not to despair. “Imagine” asks us to put aside these broken things and join with the dreamers, that the world might live as one. Someday, Lennon hopes, the world will not be as it always has been, and we will need no refuge.

In an important sense, Cohen’s “Anthem” asks the opposite, saying:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

The cynics might have a point, but it doesn’t matter. Ring the bells, he sings, that summon up whatever hopes remain. Bring the gifts you’ve been given as they are. It’s true that everything is broken, but that brokenness is at least our assurance that the light can always break in again. The light that shines in the darkness, that the darkness has not comprehended (John 1:5).

The final verse of “Anthem” invites us to share in the most profound hope of all:

You can add up the parts
But you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march
There is no drum
Every heart
To love will come
But like a refugee

What is at work is more than what we can grasp. The reasons for the ills of the world are many and inscrutable, and Cohen doesn’t presume to diagnose them. Still, he sings, we should trust that every heart in the storm will yet find shore, and love will be their refuge.