More popular than Jesus don't believe in Jesus", but also sang that he did not believe in the Bible, Buddha, the "Gita", and the Beatles. Critics of Lennon's lyrics have also focused on the line "Imagine there's no heaven" from his 1971 song "Imagine". Lennon was murdered on 8 December 1980 by Mark David Chapman, who had become a born-again Christian in 1970 and was incensed by Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" remark, calling it blasphemy. He later stated that he was further enraged by the songs "God" and "Imagine", even singing the latter with the altered lyric: "Imagine John Lennon dead". Notes Citations
More popular than Jesus In 1963, the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, John A.T. Robinson, published a controversial but popular book, "Honest to God", urging the nation to reject traditional church teachings on morality and the concept of God as an "old man in the sky", and instead embrace a universal ethic of love. Bryan R. Wilson's 1966 text "Religion in Secular Society" explained that increasing secularisation led to British churches being abandoned. However, in the US, churches remained popular. Both McCartney and Harrison had been baptised in the Roman Catholic Church, but neither of them followed Christianity. At the start of Beatlemania, the group