Manipulative desperation from Anglican
Christian (Anglican)
Curate, St Mary’s Sandbach
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Summary of Walt’s book, Prophetic Imagination
Podcast script
Welcome to episode 21 of the ST podcast. It’s Monday 20 April 2026. This episode is in response to what was broadcast by the Rev Jayne Manfredi on 11 June 2025.
First though, a content warning. In a few minutes, there is a poem that features adult themes and adult language. It’s brief, but it’s there. So if your kids are in earshot, you might want to come back to this one later.
Jayne doesn’t, apparently like John Lennon’s imagine. On the face of it, that’s hardly a surprise. She’s an ordained member of the Anglican church and the song’s lyrics encourage the listener to imagine a world without religion. Doh.
Kind of a dumb thing for a minister of the church to say. But nowhere near as idiotic as what she goes on to, which reveals a lack of honesty, a willingness to deceive, and an overwhelming lack of imagination. Which is very amusing given the allegations that she makes about Lennon’s song, and what she believes it to mean. Except, I don’t believe her. I think she’s lying. Which makes it all a whole lot less forgivable.
Worse, as we’ll come to, she hoists herself by her own petard. I have Horrible Histories to thank for an explanation of that phrase. A petard was a medieval explosive device designed to blow through the gates during a siege. If, though, that device exploded before the poor soul tasked with setting it had a chance to retreat, he would be blown into the air. He would have been hoisted by his own petard. More hoisting later.
Listen to this:
MANFREDI: I’ve never liked John Lennon’s Imagine. The opening lyrics always seemed so hopeless to me. “Above us, only sky.” It’s a line which reminds me of the Phillip Larkin poem, High Windows, where he looks through the glass at the sky which, “shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”
She doesn’t like it because she finds it hopeless?
She’s smart enough to realise that both John Lennon’s Imagine and Philip Larkin’s High Windows are bursting with hope. We’ll hear the words of both shortly. She’s not being honest in her criticism, unless I’ve gravely over-estimated her intelligence.
She’s obviously entitled feel however she likes about whatever she likes but claiming that the lines in Imagine and High Windows to her feel hopeless is a little like me claiming that the lines in Waking On Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves feel lacking in optimism. Or that to me the lines of Hazy Shade of Winter by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel feel like the comfort of a long, warm summer evening. Both are entirely legitimate, but those feelings would suggest I’d failed to understand the content, or that there was some much deeper experience, bias or trauma that had fixed for me a seemingly perverse association with the words.
That being the case, it would be a matter of courtesy to illuminate the audience, so they understand the deviation.
Assuming Jayne does understand the lyrics, for her to find them hopeless would benefit greatly from an explanation. In the absence of that explanation, the one we find for ourselves in her words is that she is indeed being perverse, and self-serving.
Whatever her objection it cannot rationally be to a lack of hope. Perhaps it’s the nature of that hope that she doesn’t like? Lennon and Larkin are writing about hope for a world where Manfredi has no priestly role, about hope for a world in which Manfredi’s church is consigned to a dustbin of false prophets and forgotten gods. So, if not a lack of hope, then seemingly her judgement on what she feels to be the wrong kind of hope? Classy move, Manfredi. But then I may be wrong. What do the song and the poem actually say?
John Lennon’s message is simple.
Larkin’s message is more nuanced, more open to interpretation. The song and the poem were published just a few years apart, the poem in 1967 and Imagine in 1971. A cultural revolution was underway in the UK. The role of the church in society was being questioned. Prevailing views on what was considered moral were being upended. Both Imagine and High Windows were of this era and both were deliberately provocative of the established order, deliberately provocative of the church. Deliberately provocative of bishops, deacons and priests, just like Jayne Manfredi.
So, it’s a little disappointing if all Jayne has done is reveal her predictable vulnerability to this provocation.
An Anglican minister saying she doesn’t like the lines of John Lennon and Philip Larkin is about as surprising as Liz Truss claiming she never really liked maths.
Manfredi goes on to say:
MANFREDI: Imagination is a great gift so if we’re going to imagine something, anything, then why not be extravagant?
Holy Mary mother of god, she doesn’t find the imagination in the poem or the song to be sufficiently extravagant. Either she’s not been paying attention or she’s full of crap FIX.
Many will be familiar with Lennon’s Imagine.
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
There’s a little more but that’s the bones of it. Lennon imagines paradise on Earth where we all live in peace. To achieve this goal, he suggests we shun material wealth, countries, religion and fear of gods.
On war and religion, Lennon’s song was responding to the issues of the day. Imagine was released in 1971, the papers were full of news of the Vietnam war and little of that news was good. Countries and the reasons they advance for war were fair game.
Religion had been under attack for years from without as well as within. It was seen by many as an interfering relic of the past, with no guiding value for the present. Worse, the church was associated with the establishment. With the worst elements of the apparatus of monarchy and government. It sought to impede the objectives of democratically elected leaders as attempts were made to update legislation to reflect new attitudes. The church was also deeply criticised by progressive politicians for failing to practice what it preached. For failing to act to help address inequality, poverty and racism. From within the church, the relevance of prevailing theology was debated. This period was the height of the church questioning itself. In 1966, the cover of one edition of Time magazine read “Is God Dead?”, reflecting a school of thought that the church needed to redefine itself and its reliance on a supernatural being if it were to continue to exist in any meaningful way. So along with war, religions was a distinctly justifiable target for Lennon. To take the lines out of context and out of their time, is deliberately to distort them.
Important also to note that Lennon was not making a simplistic claim that the world would be more peaceful without religion. He saw religion as something that contributed to division but not a cause of wars. Humans are adept at making war under any convenient banner to conceal the real reasons. Hell, we have a US president presenting himself as the messiah and fighting his Epstein smokescreen war right now in the middle east.
But for Manfredi to criticise Lennon for not having a sufficiently extravagant imagination is laughable.
Before examining the imagination at work in the song, we should listen to a little more of what Jayne had to say.
MANFREDI: Theologian Walter Brueggeman, who died last week, and was a huge influence on me at theological college, knew all about the value of imagination and its power to make the world a better place.
Jayne is citing Brueggeman’s book, The Prophetic Imagination. You can find a summary of it at secondthoughtfortheday.com. In short, The Prophetic Imagination is considered a seminal work of biblical theology that explores how the Hebrew prophets had the imagination to challenge dominant power structures, providing hope by energising alternative ways of thinking and living.
Remind you of anything Jayne?
MANFREDI: “Imagination is a danger,” he wrote, “every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist.” You can see why. If you have the means to imagine a more beautiful world, you might start to thirst for it, and if that happens, well. Suddenly, you have possibility.
Well, yes. Of course. While Brueggeman may have been a huge influence on Jayne at something called theological college, I’m not sure Jayne was paying a huge amount of attention to what Walter was saying. Given, though, that she plainly quotes from Bruggeman without awareness that it entirely collapses her criticism of John Lennon, I can only imagine she is so blinkered by her faith that she’s incapable of imagining that the Christian church is the totalitarian regime.
Despite it being screamingly obvious and plainly put by Brueggemann, Jayne saw no parallel with those prophets in John Lennon: challenging the dominant power structures of his day, and energising alternative ways of thinking and living.
Lennon was the embodiment of the imagination that Brueggeman claimed was needed for hope. According to Bruggeman’s description, John Lennon was somewhat obviously the artist and he was casting religion as part of the oppressive regime. Lennon was imagining a more beautiful world. More beautiful because it was without subservience to gods or to fears of not going to heaven.
Claiming the world would be a better place without religion in the UK today is no more controversial than claiming the world would be a better place without Nigel Farage. Five decades ago, though, the church had only just begun its long decline in attendance and in relevance.
Imagining then a world where the sky was just the sky was liberating. It was radical. No heaven. No threat of hell for not living the way the church wanted you to live. Just a vast expanse of freedom and opportunity unencumbered by superstition and a self-appointed morality police.
There is here no shortage of imagination. It’s just not imagination to Manfredi’s liking. She wants to turn the clock back six decades, to a time when regular church attendance was near universal. When pop stars didn’t exist and when almost no-one in public life dared question the church.
Jayne not liking Imagine says much more about her prejudices and imaginative shortcomings than it does about those of Mr Lennon. I think it also reveals her willingness to distort history and to distort meaning in the words of Lennon and Larkin to make a petty point of her own, entirely contrary to those of the writers. She also reveals her poor grasp of rhetoric and logic. By introducing Brueggeman’s book she illustrated the fragility of her argument. Brueggeman described the need for people like Lennon.
And if she didn’t like John Lennon’s Imagine, she was never going to enjoy Philip Larkin’s poem, High Windows.
Larkin published High Windows in 1967. It was voiced by someone in the latter half of their life commenting on the freedom and happiness of the new youth, lamenting the lack of this freedom in the youth of his own life. It contemplated the joy of permissive sex, of living a life with no god, with no fear of hell, and no need to conceal what you thought of the priest.
It’s far more provocative than Lennon’s Imagine. Here is it, High Windows, read by its author, Philip Larkin:
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Anglican church person against Larkin poem… and we’re right back to captain obvious. The essence of Larkin’s poem, though, arguably is tension and enquiry. The first four of the five stanzas are about unabated liberty and joy, albeit observed from a distance. The fifth and final part touches, ever-so lightly, on other consequences of that liberty. That last stanza is commonly described as evoking a funeral. One stripped of fantastical afterlife and ritual. The sky here is not liberty and opportunity as it was for Lennon, but the truth of death, the end of consciousness and the absence of an eternal soul. Perhaps the most fearful of concepts for cosy believers in the supernatural.
If all you hope for is the comfort of magical outcomes then I suppose Imagine and High Windows are hopeless, but through no lack of imagination.
The poem invites questions. When freed from religion the constraints drop away, but do important guard rails also drop away? It becomes necessary to find comfort in new and alien things. “… deep blue air that shows nothing and is endless.” We gain so much by abandoning centuries in the shadow of an authoritarian church but do we also lose morality? Does that matter? Without god, do we lose awe, lose purpose and lose meaning? There is suddenly a vast amount of life and thought that is no longer occupied by church. Can we meaningfully fill it and still live good lives?
These are excellent questions. Especially in England in 1967.
In an attempt to give her ridiculous claims more credence, Jayne also sought to ground them in an apparent need for people to escape the endlessly suffocating news of tragedy from around the world. But she went much further…
MANFREDI: When we exist in a harmful feedback loop of cynicism and despair, we lose the ability to imagine that things can be any different. This is what it’s like to live with no hope. I think we’re living in such times, right now, where many of us are numbed to the possibility of change. “It’s all so awful,” we say. When imagination dies, so does hope.
She is now up to her neck in groundless claims and ill-applied generalisation. She can think what she likes about what is in the minds of others but to suggest that they have no hope is insulting. To suggest imagination has died is insulting.
She might feel hopeless but that’s no reason for her to project her hopelessness on anyone else.
Now listen to this:
MANFREDI: John Lennon imagined there was no heaven, but imagine if there was? Imagine if the kingdom of heaven was here on earth, right now, just as Jesus said it was, providing a challenge and an alternative perspective to the dominant culture around us.
Hoisted by her own petard. John Lennon was imagining what he thought would be a paradise on Earth, one that challenged the prevailing culture. Do I need to reconsider that comment about Manfredi’s intelligence? Clearly it’s not a lack of hope to which she objects. Given that both Lennon and Manfredi are imagining the same thing, it’s also not a lack of imaginative extravagance to which she objects.
Manfredi is not just being dishonest, she’s being deliberately deceitful.
She repeats her focus on heaven. She is being disingenuous. Heaven’s a lovely thing, why wouldn’t we want it?
I think this is the biggest clue she drops about why she might think to claim hopelessness for Lennon’s words and why she failed to spot all the obvious flaws in her arguments. For millions, this religion in 1971 was not about the promise of eternal life doing god’s bidding in heaven, it was about the threat of eternal life in hell. Any mention of heaven would be received through the filter of that threat. A threat of which the church made great play in its evangelism and it morality. Threat and guilt to achieve moral objectives? No wonder the church was in trouble.
For the compliant, obedient congregant certain of their place among the angels, sure – a mention of heaven would no doubt invoke nothing but the comfort that they could look forward to an eternity of trumpeting angels. But Jayne then fails to imagine the harrowing existence of millions of lively curious minds, that had not yet dismissed the idea of gods but that were attempting to make sense of many contradictions and desperately worried that they’d never tick all the boxes required for heavenly admission. Indeed, no doubt being preached at about all these shortcomings. Living in constant fear of eternal torture. Heaven was nothing but a trigger for these fears. If you can walk a mile in the other person’s shoes, you can imagine the relief for millions of deep blue sky, that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
The failure of imagination, is all Jayne’s. It was mean spirited of her to deny the hope in those works of Lennon and Larkin.
This was not a reflection from a religious perspective on people and events in the news. It was self-serving and deliberate deceit apparently motivated by reactionary desperation. By a desire to retreat to an age when her church had relevance and authority and the power to silence detractors. It was also a cynical attempt to slight the works of artists and thinkers with whom she happens to disagree.
She would do well to listen to TftD from 11 April 2025 which was by Rabbi Ephrim Mirvis on why it is vital to defend the truth of history. Mirvis was celebrating the legal defeat of a Holocaust denier, David Irvine. But I’m sure he’d not distinguish too much, those who seek to deceive us about our own history, between the big lies of a holocaust denier and the smaller lies of cultist propaganda.
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