What Do Fundamentalists Know About Religion That Unitarians Have Forgotten (and Need to Relearn)?
Monday, July 26th, 2010Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.1MB)
Gary Bennett
Member, First Unitarian Church of Austin
Sermon, delivered Sunday, July 25, 2010
The title of this sermon is a bit deceptive. Today I wouldn’t use the term “fundamentalist” to mean evangelical, conservative or traditional, and these are the religious groups I really want to talk about. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Saudi Arabian government are fundamentalist, as are Pat Robertson, various recent presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention and a host of others who have done such outrageous things as praise terrorist attacks on Americans, plot political takeovers in church services, foment the murder of abortion providers, spit on mourners at funerals for fallen soldiers and advocate revolutionary violence against the United States. They are a recent phenomenon, a cancer on most major world religions, an attack on all modern thought and values; they are Fascists who masquerade using traditional religious language. In contrast, the denomination I was raised in, Southern Baptists before 1979, was by basic principle apolitical; members tended to be politically conservative, but people like Jimmy Carter, Bill Moyers and my parents had no trouble fitting in.
Why should we be interested? These are, after all, the traditions that many of us feel we outgrew; if anything, we think we have a bit to teach them. Perhaps we do, but demographics have not been kind to us in recent decades. We are grouped with liberal or “main line” Protestant groups, which also include the Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches. We all share one problem today: we can’t convince our own children that what we do is worth preserving. UUs have mostly made up for these losses with adult conversion, which has so far kept us out of the other denominations’ apparent race to extinction; but we are still in trouble. Politicians have taken notice, of course; and where in 1960 it was main line Protestant voices that they used for moral cover, today it is usually conservative Catholics, evangelical Protestants or Mormons, even outright Fundamentalists, that dominate the public forum. It is not that these groups are especially successful at proselytizing our children, who mostly become unchurched and thus invisible as far as the political culture goes; but the conservatives at least are keeping most of their own children. For some groups, like the high birth rate Mormons, that alone would be enough for rapid growth. If these changes in American culture and politics bother us, and I think they should, we have lots of serious ‘splainin’ to do. We think that we have a better approach to religious experience, but it is they who do the better job of convincing the children that what they have is important.
From the beginning, human beings have been bonded into groups by all believing in the same “six impossible things before breakfast.” Once these groups started stepping on one another’s toes by living together in cities or traveling to far places, religion began to be something distinct from the overall culture; religion was where you met with your support group. You would still prefer to shut up those fools who disagreed if you had the power to do so, but the religious group helped you to endure if you could not. Christianity by the 4th century had its own share of crazy ideas and also the power of the Roman state to shut up everybody who disagreed. Despite the fall of the Western Empire, this state of things persisted in Europe until a century of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants ended in the 17th century in a peace of exhaustion; neither group had been quite able to exterminate the other. By the late 18th century in places like the English colonies in America, toleration came to be seen as a virtue in itself; the idea was that different religious groups could scream all that they liked, but had to leave the swords, battle-axes and torture chambers at home.
Today UUs profess not to feel threatened by all these competing ideas, believing that our ideas are strong enough to survive out in the marketplace. Our advertising campaigns try to persuade the unchurched that they are very much like us; we are at one with the larger intellectual world, with science, human reason and American moral values. But traditional religious groups feel more alienated from the overall world of ideas. Their beliefs are quite distinct from those of the larger world and from those of each other. Small doctrinal differences are assumed to be important. For us Baptists, we asserted our lack of a creed, but at the same time accused other Christians of getting the rite of baptism all wrong. We, like most traditional Christians, believed that salvation was by the grace of God, rather than by good deeds of human beings; but I and my Church of Christ cousins, little lawyers all of us, went round and round on whether Grace was enough or whether participation in the rite of Baptism by the One True Church — that was them — was also necessary. What, said I, if you are saved by grace on Monday, but die before you are safely baptized in church the following Sunday? I will spare you various other Great Ideas Seminars we conducted. The point is, if the UU view of matters is pretty much the same as that of most of the secular world, why bother with church at all? Why not sleep in Sunday mornings, read a good book, go to a public lecture? If you are blessed to move in an academic environment or live in a cosmopolitan city of great cultural offerings, why do you need a UU church at all? But if you are an Evangelical, you will not get much reinforcement of your “six impossible beliefs” except in your own church group. You will need to spend a lot of time there, perhaps attending every time the church doors are open; and at other times, you might want to limit your socializing to other church members.
Then there is moral behavior. For UUs, ethics is about helping others: helping the poor, the sick, the elderly, children and other victims of social injustice; when we collect “pennies for peace” and try to build schools for girls in remote Asian villages, we are acting in the great ethical tradition. We have support in the teachings of Jesus, of the Hebrew prophets, of Mohammed, of Confucius and of many other seminal religious teachers. But for evangelical religions, most of these things are not so much morals but political issues on which good Christians can differ. As a young Baptist, most of my time in church and Sunday School seemed to be spent in being warned against various “gateway” evils: gambling was wrong because it led to playing cards, promiscuous sex was wrong because it led to dancing and smoking marijuana was wrong because it led to tobacco. There were never any lessons on the evils of racial discrimination, poverty in the midst of wealth, unjust wars, the rape of the world’s resources or other environmental disasters. Religious morality was about individual perfection, about keeping the temple of your body pure for God. UU moral positions tend to integrate us into the larger society in which we operate; evangelical Protestant positions tend to separate us into little self-absorbed clusters. And these all become more reasons to structure your life around other church members, people you can socialize with and not imperil your immortal soul.
Traditional religions require constant work on the part of their members. Orthodox Judaism has seemingly an endless list of requirements of diet, clothing and other rituals. Jewish friends have tried to explain to me how the laws of kosher are perfectly sensible; it seems the bans on eating pork, shellfish and mixing meat with dairy products were all put together by ancient nutritionists, protecting people from trichinosis, oysters out of season — do Hebrew months provide any rules comparable to r’s being safe? — and we all know the grim truth about eating fast food bacon cheeseburgers. Stuff and nonsense: the lawgivers wanted people to have to think about their religion every single day, in even the most trivial actions, just as my Baptist morality was designed to remind me of who I was, not to accomplish good. For Jews the result was a tough faith that people preserved in even the most extreme circumstances, for thousands of years of living in isolated ghettos surrounded by hostile societies. Few things have threatened Jewish identity more than living in religiously tolerant America over the last generation or so, where their declining numbers are similar to those of liberal Protestants. A rabbi once told me he considered UUs the greatest threat to Jewish survival, as we gave shelter to couples in mixed Jewish/Christian marriages! In an old fable, the sun and the north wind bet on which is the more powerful. The north wind tries to blow a traveller’s cloak off, but he only wraps it ever more tightly about himself; then the sun comes out, warms the land, and the traveller removes the cloak voluntarily.
Other religions have also found ways of making life tough for members. Devout Moslems have to stop whatever they are doing five times a day to humble themselves before God; the fasting month of Ramadan and the required ultimate pilgrimage to Mecca are also hard. Mormons require two full years’ missionary work from every young member as a rite of passage into adulthood. I have seen firsthand how much more serious and religiously committed a person can become after that experience. And then there are the Amish, who make their religious beliefs central to everything that they do in daily life.
And let us not forget the early radical Protestants. Medieval Hell might have been a terrible fate waiting after death, filled with every juicy torture and humiliation a fevered imagination could come up with; but at least Catholics could feel safe as long as they remained obedient to and in good standing with the Church. These Protestants took upon themselves the burden of finding the way to avoid Hell, without ever being sure they were right. They became puritanical, self-denying, hard-working people who, by all work and no play and by avoiding idle hands, the Devil’s own workshop, might hope to escape damnation. There was of course no room for compassion in this — if other people were mostly bound for eternal torture after death, any extra suffering they encountered in this life was trivial anyway — so it tended to generate a lot of excess wealth that came to be called capital by economists and ultimately to our rich modern society, all as a trivial side effect. Children brought up in such hard faiths knew the seriousness and importance of what was going on, and usually continued to practice them in adulthood.
I haven’t talked as if the theological content mattered much in the success or failure of these religions. Not entirely true: some things obviously do matter a great deal. The doctrine of Hell tends to grab one’s attention; for an imaginative child who has been exposed to it, anxieties can last a life time, even if he has rejected the idea of it in his head. Heaven is more like an afterthought for most believers, whether it is supposed to be souls singing hymns for eternity — a prospect mercilessly satirized by Mark Twain — or if is supposed to be filled with the reward of 40 virgins — which can double as the place bad virgins go to be punished, some suggest. Anyway, whatever goodies await, it is all kind of a bonus to go along with the biggie of avoiding Hell.
Above all, successful religions demand the belief that there is something that is greater than us, something before which we must humble ourselves. Arrogance is the opposite of real religious sentiment, something to remember the next time you encounter a swaggering televangelist with an obvious financial or political agenda. That we humble ourselves is more important than what we humble ourselves to. Our own tradition is mixed. Universalists supposedly thought God too good to condemn humanity to Hell, and Unitarians, that humans were too good to be condemned. If I have to choose, given what I have seen of human behavior, I really, really hope the Universalists were right.
I started by asking what traditional religious groups know, and what we can learn from them. Some lessons we will reject out of hand. I cannot imagine UUs declaring war on science and reason. Nor do we want to limit our concept of morality to keeping our bodies healthy while ignoring the world’s problems, and some of us even believe that “purity’s a noble yen, and very restful every now and then.” But I think we do need to make the practice of Unitarian Universalism more difficult, if we want to survive. We need an integrity about our lives, a sense that we are the same people, with the same values, on weekdays as Sundays. We need to be in covenant with one another, so that our disagreements may be resolved without injury to any, and so that members always feel that being here or being with other UUs in any situation is a safe place. We MUST give more; it’s hard to believe your faith is important to you when your giving is so embarrassingly poor compared with conservative churches, so low that they have severely crippled the mission of your church. I know how hard my Baptist parents struggled to tithe — that means 10% of gross income, if any of you are in doubt — in what were often very grim circumstances. Our own household falls far short of that standard. But Jesus’ words are still relevant: where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Contribute to the church’s mission AND to charities AND to just political causes that the church itself cannot involve itself in; contribute money AND time. If Moslems can stop to pray five times a day and Orthodox Jews can expend the effort to keep kosher at every meal, can we UUs not require ourselves to do at least one thing every day that reminds us who we are?
And we must also make religion harder for our children. How we strive to keep them entertained; it would be unthinkable to require them to sit through a boring old church service, or so we believe. Nonsense. Most children will live up or down to consistent adult expectations. Consider family discussions of moral issues; the “pennies for peace” project would seem a perfect opportunity to talk about what the problems are, and what Greg Mortenson is arguing in Three Cups of Tea are solutions. The long term feedback will come in part by what happens in rural Asia, but also by what part of you your children decide in adulthood is worth carrying forward. And that, above all, is what UUs must learn once again about religion, or die.