House Rules for our UU Game
Sunday, February 28th, 2010Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.9MB)
Corinna and Dale Whiteaker-Lewis
February 28, 2010
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Archive for the ‘Guest Speakers’ Category
The Covenants We Keep
Sunday, January 24th, 2010Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.6MB)
Rev. Stefan M Jonasson
UUA Director for larger congregations
January 24, 2010
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The Handwriting on the Wall
Sunday, January 17th, 2010Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.0MB)
First UU Transition Team
Margaret Roberts, Sylvia Pope, Wendy Kuo, Sharon Moore, Nancy Bene, Jim Burson, Michael Kersey
January 17, 2010
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Bryan and the Social Darwinists
Sunday, December 27th, 2009Podcast: Play in new window | Download (8.3MB)
| William Jennings Bryant and the Social Darwinists
Gary Bennett Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button. Reading BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN – Vachel Lindsay In a nation of one hundred fine, mob-hearted, lynching, relenting, repenting, millions, There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous things to shout about, And knock your old blue devils out. I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle. It was eighteen ninety-six, and I was just sixteen Oh, the longhorns from Texas, These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed: And all these in their helpless days And these children and their sons Headlong, dazed and blinking in the weird green light, II When Bryan came to Springfield, and Altgeld gave him greeting, The State House loomed afar, We roamed, we boys from High School, The long parade rolled on. I stood by my best girl. She wore in her hair a brave prairie rose. The earth rocked like the ocean, the sidewalk was a deck. III Then we stood where we could see And everybody heard him- IV July, August, suspense. Then Hanna to the rescue, V Election night at midnight: VI Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley, The desperately wicked, and their victims on the rack, Where is McKinley, Mark Hanna’s McKinley, Where is Cleveland whom the Democratic platform Where is Hanna, bulldog Hanna. Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy, Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth, Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan, The scene is frozen in our consciousness, one of the defining moments of Modern America: Clarence Darrow heroically defending Science and Intellectual Freedom by placing the champion of the forces of darkness and ignorance on the stand, forcing William Jennings Bryan to show to all the world that he believes absurdities, defends the indefensible, and uses his power to force others to do the same. You’ve seen the play: this yokel believes Adam and Eve were the first human pair, doesn’t know or care where Cain got a wife; believes some sort of whale or fish swallowed Jonah; in short the whole enchilada, whatever the Bible says, however absurd, however much in contradiction of science or even of itself; coming soon to your local school district to punish teachers for teaching biology, geology, physics or history. The Dragon, having been metaphorically slain by St. Clarence, obliges by dying on the Spot, presumably from shame at having been publicly exposed as a charlatan. I’m afraid I’m going to make several demands on you today, and the first is to suggest that things are not always what they seem, that we have in fact merely caught a man of great and noble character at a bad moment. One of the rarities of Bryan’s career was that, before the Scopes Trial, he had in thirty years lost many political races and crusades, but had steadily gained in esteem through them all. More than almost any other American politician, Bryan had the knack of losing the battles, but winning the war. His causes were adopted, one by one, by people who had originally seen him as a dangerous radical. But in Dayton, Tennessee, he as prosecutor technically won the case, while in the great court of public opinion, in the major newspapers of his day and in the play Inherit the Wind a generation later, he lost the reputation he had gained over a lifetime. A biographer suggests mitigating factors in Bryan’s behavior after 1920. The diabetes that claimed his life shortly after the Monkey Trial may have been diminishing his mental faculties and clouding his judgment. And we know that he disapproved of laws of the Tennessee model which included punishment for disobedience; he believed strongly in the power of moral persuasion and disapproved of the use of force in most cases. Bryan was not after publicity; rather, as the most revered Christian statesman in America, he was steadily pushed by others, first into a position of national leadership in the fundamentalist movement, and then into helping prosecute a violator of a law to which he had objected. In the end Bryan saw his faith on trial, and he could not back down. But this is not all there was to William Jennings Bryan. He was one of the greatest men of his time, and it is doubtful that any other American has ever made such a great positive impact upon our public life and then been so thoroughly forgotten. For the rest of the story, we go back to the year 1896, a turning point in American political history. After the Civil War, American cities and industries and railroads had blossomed, but the wealth created was concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Prices were jacked up by high protective tariffs and the spread of monopolies; labor conditions were abominable, with extremely long work weeks, widespread child labor, unsanitary and dehumanizing sweatshops; company towns that sucked workers’ wages away faster than they could earn them; wages depressed by seemingly endless stream of immigrants fleeing even worse conditions abroad. Attempts by workers to better themselves were bludgeoned to death by management-hired private thugs as well as regiments of public thugs called up by governors beholden to the rich. One of the grandest of these grand larcenies was the adoption of the Gold Standard in 1873. By removing silver as currency while withdrawing paper money from circulation, the plutocrats who ran the government systematically shrank money supply over the course of two decades, even as the population and real wealth of the country exploded. The result was one of the greatest deflations in world history. Debts incurred in the 1860s and ’70s became far larger and harder to repay as time went on. The massive deflation in the US housing market over the last two years, where houses are in many cases worth far less than what is still owed on their mortgages, may give us a sense of what it was like to live in that time, especially for Western farmers. Since prices of monopoly-controlled goods did not share in the price reductions, farm prices fell all the faster. Both major political parties were owned body and soul by the rich. We think of Democrats as the Party of the Left, more or less, but for half a century before 1896 that had not been the case. The Democrat Grover Cleveland cleaned up some governmental corruption by creating the Civil Service, but had nothing to say about the growing economic inequities, and fittingly lost control of his own party after doing nothing about the suffering engendered by the Depression of 1893. With the deepening poverty and despair, radical movements began to flourish, particularly in the West and South. The Populist Party grew in the 1880s, but like all American third parties, it was ultimately doomed to irrelevance and extinction. By the way, regardless of what the media might proclaim, there are not now nor were there ever “conservative populists” any more than there are “conservative progressives” or “conservative liberals.” The Populists were angry, but they were also as intelligent, well-read and principled as were the radicals who had made the American Revolution; they even managed to bring Southern blacks and whites together in a party of common interest, something demagogues have not tried to do in any era. In the Democratic Convention of ‘96, radicals of this stripe were in control; they nailed together a platform calling for a progressive income tax, control of monopolies, and a return to silver coinage as a way of halting deflation. Then they waited for a candidate. Bryan, the final speaker on platform issues, became man of the hour by delivering a speech for the ages. Once this was a treasured statement of progressive American principles in much the same way as the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address; perhaps it should be again. These are his concluding remarks: I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty – the cause of humanity …. Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between “the idle holders of idle capital” and “the struggling masses, who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country”; and my friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side are we, “the idle holders of idle capital”or upon the side of “the struggling masses”? This is the question which the party must answer first, and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic party, as shown by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses, who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic party. There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class that rests upon them. You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country …. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor the crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. The campaign was far and away the most scandalous in American history. Republicans owned most of the newspapers then as now, and they painted Bryan in the most pejorative terms imaginable. A Jacobin, an Anarchist, a Socialist (there were no Communists yet, or he would have been one of those too), a demagogue. Mark Hanna extorted from frightened businessmen a war chest which in real terms was in the range of $200-$500 million, in a nation far smaller and poorer than our own; Standard Oil’s contribution alone almost matched the entire Democratic campaign fund. Teddy Roosevelt made plans for a last military stand if the “Reds” won, and John Hay made plans to rendezvous with other emigrŽs in Paris. A number of bosses told their employees not to bother to show up the next day, should Bryan win. That all this should be the reaction to a candidate who brought back the words and ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, illustrates better than anything else the death grip which wealth had gained on America in 1896. In the end the popular vote was close, the electoral vote less so, but Bryan lost. A pattern had been formed for Bryan’s career. In 1900, new and massive gold strikes in the Klondike and South Africa temporarily eased the vice grip of deflation. But in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, we had become an imperial power in a world mad with colonialism; Bryan dared to campaign against imperialism, saying it was unworthy of America’s ideals and suggesting that we should begin preparing our new colonies for self-government. He lost again, but in 1901 accidental president Teddy Roosevelt became the first of Bryan’s former political enemies to begin adopting his policies, now rechristened the “Square Deal.” A third principled defeat followed in 1908, but after Woodrow Wilson won in 1912 in a close three-way election, Bryan was appointed Secretary of State. Wilson was another former enemy, but he now called for a New Freedom, also straight from Bryan’s platforms. Aside from his foreign policy responsibilities, Bryan was instrumental in shaping several of the key domestic reforms, most importantly the creation of a new way of banking called the Federal Reserve System. On most foreign policy issues, the President and Secretary of State thought alike. Their guiding principles were distaste for imperialism, respect for the autonomy of other countries, a desire to spread American values of democracy and human rights, and the attempt to create an international structure of law to curb war and other primitive national atavisms. As is the case today, some of these principles came into conflict with one another; as a result, the level of intervention in the Caribbean and Central America was almost as great as in the “We stole it fair and square” days of Teddy Roosevelt. Still they laid a foundation for a future Good Neighbor Policy to the south and for supra-national organizations to mediate disputes elsewhere. Only in one area did Bryan and Wilson disagree, and that finally led to the Secretary’s resignation: he was a pacifist who rightly believed that Wilson’s policies toward Germany would lead us into war. Who was right? Without American intervention, Germany would have won, and the result would have been an unpleasantly authoritarian Europe. But given the way events actually played out, the imposition of a draconian peace treaty on Germany, which enraged its people while keeping their economy weak and its democratic government unpopular and the withdrawal from European affairs of the only state capable of controlling it or resolving its grievances peacefully, all of which pretty much guaranteed some variant of Hitler and World War II, it would probably have been better for America to stay out of World War I. Finally, at the end of the war, Bryan’s last failed political crusade was attempting to persuade Americans to join the League of Nations. While he despaired of his failures, meanwhile, items from Bryan’s agenda continued to be adopted: direct election of senators; progressive income tax; women’s suffrage; prohibition; moving colonies to self-government. And a number of states were adopting Populist reforms such as initiative, referendum and recall. Franklin Roosevelt, coming to power after the Nebraskan’s death, abolished the gold standard, established a principled foreign policy in Latin America, and helped create the United Nations as what Bryan hoped the League of Nations would be. In short, much of the decent middle-class, internationally respected America he campaigned for had come into being by the time some of us were coming of age in the mid-twentieth century. But we are back to that strange period of his life, starting in 1921, when Bryan abandoned the world of politics and began to champion the teaching of bad science in the schools. It mystified his contemporaries among liberal reformers and has continued to baffle those who know enough about him not to be satisfied with Elmer Gantry / Pat Robertson-type caricatures. We mentioned his illness and pressure from followers as possible reasons. But we also know that he had come to believe that the evils he had been fighting his whole political life had been caused or exacerbated by the influence of one man. For the malefactors of great wealth, the monopoly-seeking capitalists, the gold standard purists, the imperial expansionists continued to expound a world view in which what they were doing was natural and right and inevitable, as they invoked the name of Charles Darwin. Darwin was a scientist and his theory of evolution through natural selection, first explained in Origin of Species 150 years ago last month, is one of the great documents in the history of science; but his achievement did not exist in a vacuum. The 19th century, particularly in England, America and a few other countries, was a time of rapid change without parallel in world history. The development of industrial capitalism, huge corporations and what seemed a widening distance between wealth and poverty, resonated with the notion that progress in the world came through savage competition; the very phrase “survival of the fittest,” though appropriated by Darwin, was actually coined by the English political philosopher Herbert Spencer and meant to apply to human culture. His basic premise was that government should stay out of the way and let human beings compete for survival as the only path to evolutionary improvement of the species; if the strong survived and the weak failed, then that was what nature intended. It was a very popular idea among the new industrial barons, and both Darwin’s and Spencer’s ideas were pushed and funded by them. Spencer’s ideas did not survive him long in England or Europe, but lived on in the United States and were later pushed by intellectuals like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. In Europe, Darwin’s name was invoked to push other ideas, such as that of German Premier Otto von Bismarck, that affairs among nations are ultimately settled by “blood and iron;” Marxists saw competition as between economic classes. And everywhere Darwin was used to push racism. The economic and military supremacy of the West was seen as proof that its peoples were more highly evolved and were natural masters of the world; all other races were natural selection’s losers, destined to be slaves. We can group these assorted ideologies under the banner of “Social Darwinism.” Though some were ideological support for actions that would have taken place in any case, others were the direct result of popular beliefs about evolutionary biology. There was the pseudo-science of eugenics: legislators, judges and juries were persuaded to disregard their natural sentiments and authorize sterilization of the unfit. Many of the frightened Republicans who were terrified of Bryan considered his followers to be subhuman; the Darwinist H. L. Mencken was only a particularly skillful writer among the many who habitually used images of apes and subhumans to describe Bryan’s followers and most other liberal politicians and political groups. Thus it was that Bryan, who as a young man had been open-minded about the origins of humanity, came to be convinced that Darwin’s theory was responsible for much that was wrong with the modern world. “The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate,” Bryan said, “Evolution is the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.” He believed that the Bible countered this merciless law with “the law of love.” It was not any principle of Biblical inerrancy that motivated him, but a desire to cut off a poisonous political philosophy at its root, to promote a national myth that would motivate the young to high ideals. He prepared himself as a prosecutor not to defend the stories of Genesis, but to present to the court and world the image of Jesus as “Prince of Peace.” He completely misunderstood his political adversaries, of course. In a Monkey’s Paw sense, his wish for the defeat of Darwin in the political arena came true, in that challengers to the teaching of evolution are strong in much of the United States. But I’m not sure he would appreciate the victory. We might say Social Darwinism has simply evolved, adopted protective camouflage, or mutated. Much of modern fundamentalism shares the same policies at home and abroad as did the Social Darwinists, but uses the language of evangelical Christianity, though there are usually very few teachings of Jesus himself in their dogma. Those Christian groups which preached social justice and were open to the findings of modern science, on the other hand, have declined in numbers and influence. Secular culture in the West has also changed. The horror of Social Darwinist moralities finally climaxed in the 1930s and ’40s when perhaps 100 million human beings were murdered in Nazi and Communist atrocities and in the battles of World War II. There has been a massive reaction in the West since then; for much of the second half of the last century, it was impolite in intellectual circles to imply that any human characteristics beyond eye, hair and skin color might be due to genetics. In general, secular culture in both Europe and America has promoted policies far more progressive than have today’s fundamentalist Christians. At the same time, the popular understanding of evolutionary biology is better grounded. Natural selection never involved “survival of the fittest” within hunter/gatherer tribes, but pushed trust and cooperation to form cohesive groups that could protect and educate children. Since individuals never had to survive on their own, they were able to carry a much wider variety of genetic traits, and this in turn has given the human species much more flexibility in adapting to different environments; genetic variation has been one of the greatest strengths of humanity, not as eugenicists asserted a weakness. And until recent times, there was very little or no competition for survival between tribes, which were scattered too thinly to interact at all; nationalism and racism could never have been factors in human selection. Thus the major tenets of Social Darwinism have no basis in actual human evolution; it was an ideology that emerged from a particular culture and economic system, not from any insight into the reality of human nature. Bryan too was a product of his time, but one worthy of our highest respect. I would like to end with these words of historian Henry Steele Commager: . . defeated candidates are usually forgotten and lost causes relegated to historical oblivion, but Bryan was not forgotten and the causes which seemed lost triumphed in the end. He refused to acknowledge defeat, not out of vanity or ambition, but because he was sure the causes which he championed were right, and sure that right would triumph in the end. And, right or not, most of them did. Few statesmen have ever been more fully vindicated by history. ltem by item the program which Bryan had consistently espoused, from the early nineties on into the new century, was written onto the statute books – written into law by those who had denounced and ridiculed it. Call the list of the reforms: government control of currency and banking, government regulation of railroads, telegraph and telephone, trust regulation, the eight-hour day, labor reforms, the_ prohibition of injunctions in labor disputes, the income tax, tariff reform, anti-imperialism, the initiative, the referendum, woman suffrage, temperance, international arbitration. These were not all original with Bryan, but it was Bryan who championed them in season and out, who kept them steadily in the political forefront, who held his party firmly ‘to their advocacy …. For Bryan was the last great spokesman of the America of the nineteenth century – of the America of the Middle West and the South, the America of the farm and the country town, the America that read the Bible and went to Chautauqua, distrusted the big city and Wall Street, believed in God and the Declaration of Independence. He was himself one of these people. He thought their thoughts, and he spoke the words that they were too inarticulate to speak. Above all, he fought their battles. He never failed to raise his voice against injustice, he never failed to believe that in the end justice would be done. Others of his generation served special interests or special groups – the bankers, the railroads, the manufacturers, the officeholders; he looked upon the whole population as his constituency. Others were concerned with the getting of office or of gain; he was zealous to advance human welfare. And when the [rest] . . . are relegated to deserved oblivion, the memory of Bryan will be cherished by the people in whom he had unfaltering faith. |
A Festival of Thanksgiving
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.5MB)
Rev. Janet Newman
Vicky, Brian & Geneva Bailey-Miller
Louise Reeser, Rose Ann Reeser & John Payne
Wayne Bockman & Chris Jimmerson
Chris, Toby & Maya Heidal
November 22, 2009
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A Missional Church
Sunday, November 15th, 2009Podcast: Play in new window | Download (8.6MB)
Rev. Dr. David Jones
November 15, 2009
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Transition, Transformation and the heart of Thacker Mountain Radio
Sunday, September 27th, 2009Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.5MB)
Eunice Benton
District Executive of the Mid-South District
September 27, 2009
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Ministry: An Endeavor for Life-Long Learners
Sunday, September 6th, 2009Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.9MB)
Rev. Dr. Janet Newman
and Ron Phares
September 6, 2009
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American Roots of Unitarian Universalism
Sunday, August 30th, 2009Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.1MB)
Luther Elmore
August 30, 2009
PRAYER:
Please join me in an attitude of prayer.
On this day at this hour…we pray to remember. We pause to remember those who have led the way for us. We seek to recall their lives…their words…their deeds. We seek to honor their leadership and inspiration.
This day we also pray to remember those in our own lives who have led us to this place… Those teachers…parents…ministers…writers… loved ones… who have safely guided us to be here…now.
We are thankful for their lives and for the path that has led us here.
Today, Let us remember all who have gone before……
Let us remember our past as we look to our future.
Let us remember……
This is our prayer.
Amen.
READINGS:
# 704 by John Murray
# 592 “The Free Mind” by William Ellery Channing
SERMON: American Roots of Unitarian Universalism: William Ellery Channing and John Murray
It is a joy to be here today at the First Unitarian Univeralist Church of Austin.
We are the church of the long and to some confusing name,
We are Unitarian Universalists and one name is not adequate to describe us. The reason for that is, of course, that we spring from 2 religious traditions – Unitarians and Universalists – each having distinctive beliefs, histories, and organizations. The roots for each of these groups began long ago with discussions about the divinity of Jesus, the nature of God, and the afterlife. In America two of our greatest early forefathers along this pathway were John Murray and William Ellery Channing. John Murray brought his universalist theology to the American colonies in the years immediately prior to the American Revolution. Almost 50 years later William Ellery Channing challenged orthodox beliefs regarding the concept of God as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and thereby defined Unitarians.
The direct pathway to modern UUs began with the Protestant Reformation of 1517. Martin Luther, a Catholic monk in Wittenburg, Germany, objected to what he saw as the corrupt practices of the Catholic Church. On October 31, 1517, he posted a list of 95 articles for discussion on his cathedral door. These 95 Theses set off a revolution in theology and church history as great as the revolution set off by Christopher Columbus who had discovered the “New World” only 25 years earlier.
Luther’s search for true Christian belief and practice in the scriptures led others to do the same. Nineteen years later John Calvin, a French lawyer and theologian, published his seminal work The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Differing from Luther, Calvin emphasized original sin, the depravity of mankind, and predestination by God.
Followers of John Calvin’s brand of Christianity would establish the most successful of the early English colonies in America – Massachusetts Bay. They were “Puritans” who wanted to purify the church and rid it of all improper doctrine and practices. They came for their own religious freedom, but they did not allow it in others. Dissenters from established beliefs were banished – some were executed.
These Calvinist doctrines of original sin and predestination remained mainstream theological thought in much of colonial America. Both of these ideas would be shaken in 1770 with the arrival in the colonies of John Murray. John Murray had experienced a tortuous early life. Born in England in 1741 into a devout Calvinist family, as a young man he lived what he called a “life of dissipation.” However, he then fell under the spell of the great evangelical preacher George Whitefield and Murray became a lay Methodist minister.
During the 1760s a serious challenge to mainstream Methodists was a former Methodist minister, James Relly, who had come to adopt a view of universal salvation for all mankind. Relly supported his beliefs with selected passages from the Bible.
For instance, 1 Corinthians 15:22 “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” Colossians 1:19-20 “For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of the cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself.” And 1 Timothy 2:3-4 “For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who will have all men to be saved.” For Relly the idea of ultimate redemption of all mankind by a loving God was clear. How could a loving Father purposefully condemn the major portion of his creation to eternal damnation in hell?
In the early 1760s Relly had a universalist congregation in London. He was attacked by orthodox ministers as “a man black with crimes; an atrocious offender, both in principle and practice.” John Murray zealously opposed the universalist theology of Relly and once referred to him as a “detestable babbler.”
In order to save a young female follower of Relly from what he saw as the “pernicious errors” of universalism, Murray tried to convince her of the error of her ways. He did not succeed. As a matter of fact, her defense of universalism raised questions in his mind. He later described his feelings at the time as “I myself carefully avoided every universalist and most cordially did I hate them.” Nevertheless, he could not dispel his doubts. Slowly he became that which he had detested – a Universalist. As a result, he was excommunicated from his church. In the meantime he had married, but after about a year his wife gave birth to a son and shortly thereafter both died. Unable to pay his debts, he even spent some time in debtor’s prison. In 1770 at the age of 28 he vowed to never preach again and decided to come to the American colonies for a new start.
Even his voyage to the colonies went amiss. Bound for New York the ship ran aground off the coast of New Jersey. There they waited for high tide to raise the vessel so they could continue the trip. Murray was sent ashore to purchase supplies in the community which was appropriately named Good Luck, New Jersey. He met a local resident, a deeply religious man who had built a chapel of his own and Murray was invited to preach there. On September 30, 1770, John Murray broke his vow to never preach again and delivered his first sermon in America on the theme of Universal salvation. Historian David Bumbaugh – who graced this pulpit last year – referred to this date as “a date which subsequent generations would fix as the beginning of universalism in America.” Shortly after the service ended, Murray was notified that the tide had come in, the ship had been freed and they were preparing to sail to New York. Some have facetiously suggested that this was “perhaps the only miracle in Universalist history.” (Howe)
John Murray then spread his universalist message. For 4 years he was an itinerant preacher, traveling throughout the American colonies, finally settling in Gloucester, Mass. There in 1779, a group of 61 believers in universalism were suspended from the local parish church for failure to attend services. They established a new congregation, the Independent Church of Christ in Gloucester, and called John Murray as their minister. This is recognized as the first universalist church in America. (Howe)
Murray was regularly attacked for his unorthodox beliefs. He was vilified as a “false teacher” who held “corrupt tenets.” Once while preaching in Boston, a rock was thrown through a window, barely missing his head. He responded by picking up the rock and stating, “This is solid and weighty, but it is neither rational nor convincing.” Another time followers of conservative orthodox minister Rev. Bacon pelted him with eggs. He responded to that assault by proclaiming “These are moving arguments, but I must own at the same time, I have never been so fully treated to Bacon and eggs before in all my life.”
In 1793 Murray became minister of the Universalist Society of Boston where he remained for 15 years. His message of universal salvation had great appeal, as you might imagine, among ordinary people, but not among the highly educated or most wealthy. Like Murray, most early Universalist ministers tended to be emotional, poorly educated, and evangelistic. As a Universalist, Murray remained a Bible-believing Christian who accepted wholeheartedly the doctrine of the Trinity.
By 1790 there were at least 17 Universalist ministers preaching their joyous message in America. That year they held a convention in Philadelphia and adopted a statement of beliefs. These “Articles of Faith” included specific clauses affirming belief in one God, Jesus as the mediator between God and man. Their statement on Universalism proclaimed that they believed that God would “finally restore the whole human race to happiness.” Although there would be differences of opinion as to how God would “restore the whole human race to happiness,” this would remain a core belief for all universalists. For his significant role John Murray is sometimes called “The Father of American Universalism.”
Unlike the Universalists who grew among the common people, the Unitarians grew among the highly educated and well-to-do. Rejecting the dour theology of Calvinism, they would use their minds more than their hearts to reject the concept of the Trinity and hold that “God is One.” In the years immediately before and after the American Revolution some liberal New England ministers led their churches to Unitarian positions. These were independent congregations, accepting and following the leadership of their individual ministers.
Conservative, orthodox ministers denounced this drift away from established acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity. Unitarians, on the other hand, felt they had sound Biblical basis for their position. After all, nowhere in the Bible is there an explicit reference or definition of the Trinity. Therefore, Unitarians rejected this description of God as an illogical, unscriptural invention by men. They selected specific Bible references that supported their position and indicated a distinction between God the Father and Jesus. For instance, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus says “Our Father which are in heaven hallowed by thy name” and “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.” (Matthew 6:9) He later is quoted in John 16:32 as stating “I am not alone, but the Father is with me.” At the time of the crucifixion Jesus said “Father if thou be willing remove this cup from me, nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” (Luke 22:42 and “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:24), finally, “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.” (Luke 24:46) Using such citations, the Unitarians proclaimed that there were numerous Biblical references which made it clear that God the Father and Jesus were not one in the same. Of course, this use of the Bible was not unique to them and they were neither the first nor the last to employ such tactics to support their position.
This controversy between the liberals and conservatives regarding the Trinity would erupt in 1803 over the choosing of a professor of divinity at Harvard. The Harvard Professor, Dr. David Tappan, passed away. The conservatives backed a thoroughly orthodox minister, Rev. Jesse Appleton, the liberals a suspected Unitarian, Henry Ware. After the governing board and Overseers approved the nomination of suspected Unitarian Ware in a very divided vote of 33 to 23, the conservatives raged, attacking Ware as holding secret Unitarian beliefs and claiming that he did not hold “orthodox principles” as the benefactor of the chair had stipulated. In protest, the conservatives resigned and were replaced with liberals, leaving Harvard clearly in control by liberal theological supporters. Only 5 years later the conservatives would establish their own orthodox seminary at Andover to compete with Harvard for the hearts and minds of new students and ministers. For years churches had a clear choice as they called new ministers. They could choose an orthodox, conservative religious leader from Andover or a questionable liberal and Unitarian from Harvard. This controversy at Harvard shattered the union between Trinitarians and Unitarians in New England churches.
One of the conservative overseers who had resigned, Rev. Jedediah Morse, took the controversy to a new level. Rev. Morse established a conservative religious magazine. In an attempt to highlight the orthodox position and challenge the liberals over their position on the Trinity, Morse published a pamphlet entitled “American Unitarianism.” This pamphlet was a reprint of one chapter from the recently London-published Memoirs of Theophilus Lindsey, an English Unitarian. Lindsay had shown a degree of common belief between English and American Unitarians. Having printed this chapter as a pamphlet, Morse then reviewed his pamphlet in his magazine, trying to show that liberal ministers were indeed Unitarians, that they were trying to hide their true beliefs, and that they should be expelled from their pulpits.
Chosen to reply to Morse was the 35 year old minister of Federal Street Church in Boston, William Ellery Channing. Channing denied that the ministers were Unitarian, but also proclaimed that belief or rejection of the Trinity was irrelevant. Such beliefs, according to Channing, did nothing one way or the other to help ministers inspire people to live Christian lives. Channing appealed for tolerance and acceptance of differing viewpoints. Channing now became the primary spokesperson for the liberals and he was well prepared for the task.
Channing had been born into a prominent and prosperous Rhode Island family. His mother’s father, William Ellery, had signed the Declaration of Independence. His father was Attorney General for the state of Rhode Island. At 18 he graduated from Harvard at the head of his class and later studied for the ministry there. Licensed to preach at the age of 23, Channing was called to be minister at Boston’s Federal Street Church, a position he would hold until his death 40 years later.
Thrown into the controversy surrounding the appointment of Henry Ware at Harvard, Channing was soon the intellectual leader and spokesperson for the liberals. The controversy between the liberals and conservatives, the Trinitarians and the alleged Unitarians, became even more divisive. Conservative ministers in the Boston area began to refuse to allow the liberals to speak in their pulpits. Since colonial times, Boston area ministers had regularly swapped pulpits once a month in a “pulpit exchange.” For conservatives this now meant the introduction of unorthodox, liberal viewpoints, so they stopped the practice.
With this controversy as a background, in 1819 William Ellery Channing would deliver the most famous sermon in UU history, “Unitarian Christianity.” Jared Sparks had just been called as minister to Baltimore’s First Independent Church. Channing was invited to deliver the ordination sermon. This sermon of 1819 defined Unitarians.
As his text for the sermon Channing chose 1 Thessalonians 5:21 “Prove all things hold fast that which is good.” He began by explaining that he was going to depart from the normal sermon and not talk about the nature and duties of a newly ordained minister. Depart he did!! He mounted a defense of Unitarian beliefs. He defended the Bible as God’s revelation to man, but said that “The Bible is a book written for men in the language of men, and…its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books. We therefore distrust every interpretation which, after deliberate attention seems repugnant to any established truth…God has given has given us a rational nature and will call us to account for it.” He protested against what he called the “irrational and unscriptural doctrine of the Trinity,” declaring “We believe in the doctrine of God’s unity, or that there is one God, and one only. We object to the doctrine of the Trinity.” Jesus’ mission, according to Channing, was to bring about “a moral, or spiritual deliverance of mankind.” He then proclaimed that the true mark of a Christian was a moral life. As he said, “We think that religious warmth is only to be valued when it springs naturally from an improved character…When it is the warmth of a mind which understands God by being like him. We regard the spirit of love, charity, meekness, forgiveness, liberality, and beneficence, as the badge and distinction of Christians, as the highest image we can bear of God, as the best proof of piety.” He closed by admonishing Jared Sparks, “May your life preach more loudly than your lips” and repeated, “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” Channing had boldly denounced the Trinity, called for the use of reason in religion, and proclaimed that a moral life was the true mark of religious people.
Before delivering this sermon on “Unitarian Christianity” Channing had prepared 2,000 copies for print. Within 4 months it went through 8 editions. It was the most widely circulated publication in America since Thomas Paine’s Common Sense which in 1776 had urged independence from England. Now the Unitarians were out in the open; there was no hiding their beliefs. Six years later in 1825 they would establish the American Unitarian Association.
For various reasons Unitarians and Universalists did not come together easily. Those early American Univeralists were generally poorly educated evangelicals who continued to appeal to and represent the common people. One historian has described them as “coming from the wrong side of the tracks.” On the other hand, early American Unitarians were generally highly educated, influential philosophers and writers who represented the well connected and wealthy. One historian has said that the Unitarians believed in “the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of Boston.” A later day Unitarian Universalist would explain the difference between the two groups as the Universalists believing that God was too good to condemn them to hell, while the Unitarians believed that they were too good to be condemned to hell.
Over the years both groups would dwindle in numbers and influence, would drift to more liberal humanist positions, and in 1961 would join together to form the American Unitarian Universalist Association.
So, what do we take from these roots? Few of us these days are much concerned about eternal salvation or the Trinity. We no longer argue about universal salvation; we no longer shout that “God is one.” We no longer debate eternal bliss in a Kingdom paved with streets of gold versus eternal damnation in hell fire and brimstone; we no longer debate the oneness of God versus the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. However, I believe there are lessons to be learned. I would suggest that from those old Universalists we take a broad worldview and concern for others. We are all one humankind. We are all one people, inhabiting one planet. We are all in this together. The Universalists point us to a greater love for everyone and an expansive, yes Universal, regard for all. The Unitarians, on the other hand, show us a tolerance for others, an openness for inquiry, and an encouragement to use our reason. We should not sit upon the beliefs and traditions of the past. We should not rest upon the laurels of long ago. We should as William Ellery Channing encouraged his generation seek to free our mind and use our reason. We should as he said, “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.”
Today that is what we are – Unitarian Universalists. We carry it in our name and we carry it in our beliefs. You need search no further than our Seven Principles to see the presence of Unitarian and Universalist doctrine. The Seven Principles state that we affirm and promote “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”
“The inherent worth and dignity of every person.” That is universal.
The Seven Principles go on to state that we affirm and promote a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
A “search for truth and meaning”. That strikes at the core of Channing’s Unitarian Christianity to “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.”
In my own personal journey, I did not regularly participate in church services and activities for over 30 years…until I started attending here about 5 years ago.
However, I had continued to read a great deal. One of the many books I read during those years – and I cannot recall exactly why I chose it – was “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” by Robert Fulghum. I found the book filled with folksy, down-to-earth advice, humor, and religious insight. As far as I recall, it did not make a lasting impression on me that on the jacket of the book Mr. Fulghum was described as a “Unitarian Minister.” I should have known. In the first chapter of the book he listed the important life lessons he had learned in kindergarten. These included such gems of wisdom as: “Clean up your own mess,” “Play Fair,” “Don’t hit people,” “Take a nap every afternoon.” And, of course, “Flush.”
He also included this bit of advice: “When you go out into the world, Watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.” I think that is good advice for five year olds… and for adults, as well.
I think we should continue to hold hands, look out for one another, and stick together.
We are not UUs by chance or accident, many have led the way for us as a religious association and as individuals.
Let us remember John Murray and William Ellery Channing. Let us remember who they were and the rich heritage they have passed down to us. Let us remember who we are…and let us work to make our future as meaningful and relevant as our past.
Amen.
Honest Religion-part 2
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.3MB)
Tom Spencer
August 23, 2009
Thank you for having me back. Today, I am going to present the second part of a sermon on the topic of Honest Religion. More specifically, what does it mean to live honestly as progressive, reasonable, and religious people in the 21st century?
For those of you who were not here – my last sermon started out with a long vamp on why religion makes so many of us nervous and then detoured into speculation about why it really still matters.
I won’t recount the reasons why it makes us nervous – I think it is safe to say that there is plenty of evidence that religion is indeed a very slippery slope… a quick glance through any newspaper usually provides reasonable proof of the abyss that religion can lead to – right?
But, I do want to briefly revisit why I think religion still matters and, more importantly, why I believe an honest religion may actually be our salvation. Now, I know that the word salvation probably makes you nervous too… but let’s all take a few deep breaths and consider the world around us, and what we might need to be saved from…
Let me begin with a brief confession… I am a worrier. I think we live in extraordinarily vulnerable times… I remember watching President Obama step from his limousine on his inauguration day and frankly, I could not catch my breath. At that moment in our history – with an economy in free fall – two wars under way – and a nation deeply divided – I felt as if the world was standing on one foot on top of a steep precipice… all that it would take was one slight shove and the whole edifice of our modern democratic lives could come tumbling down.
Turns out – I am not the only worrier out there… I’m not the only one who frets about what would happen if the “center cannot hold.”
Here are a few verses from a poem that I am sure most of you know… The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats was written in the gloomy aftermath of the First World War:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats goes on to describe an ominous apocalyptic spirit waking and walking in the world and concludes:
The darkness drops again; but now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Kind of sounds like a health care town meeting, doesn’t it?
All joking aside…
We live in very fragile times – that bond between falcon and falconer has seemed over-taut for a century… things snap, the center cannot hold… wars, economic calamities, climate change, fundamentalism, terrorism, and assassination all threaten our little island of progress and liberalism and relative civility.
Salvation? Yes, I think we need salvation…
Let’s dig a little deeper into Yeat’s poem. In his book, Reverence, Austin professor Paul Woodruff, uses this poem to illustrate the consequences of a lack of reverence in the world – “mere anarchy,” a cacophony of irreverent voices has disrupted the link between falcon and falconer and the center cannot hold.
We’re not talking about talk show and political cartoon irreverence – which, in Woodruff’s view, can often express a very real of reverence for life, reason and truth. No, we are talking about a nihilistic lack of concern for anything – much less life, reason and truth.
The result of this kind of irreverence in our world is indeed a rising tide where “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Not innocence itself, though that is sure to follow – but the ceremony of innocence – the reverent ritual of innocence. To my ears, that is beginning to sound like the practice of honest religion.
I do not believe that Yeats is talking about the collapse of religious authority in the way that most people think of it… the kind of authority that issues from literal interpretations of sacred books and religious institutions… No, he is talking about something much deeper and more profound.
The ceremony of innocence is the practice of basic goodness which is informed by and infused with reverence. This reverence may be inspired by ancient texts and religious institutions but it goes well beyond strictures and creeds.
If you were here for my last sermon you will recall that I mentioned that there are two competing theories about the origin of the word religion – one being te Latin “religio” or reverence – the other is “religare” which means to bind together.
Both are essential to the honest religion that I hope for – and that is so beautifully expressed in Yeat’s poem – a reverence that binds and holds us together.
Let’s listen to Yeats again – “the best lack all conviction.”
Where is our conviction? What should we hold in reverence?
In our search is for honest religion – don’t we mean a religion of conviction that we feel in our bones, that makes sense to our heads, and speaks to our hearts?
I certainly think so.
But, even more importantly, and the focus of my sermon today – is that an honest religion needs to move beyond the house of our individual bones, heads and hearts. It needs to live in the world that we share if it is to be our salvation from Yeat’s “blood dimmed tide.”
When I was here last I said that an honest religion must make demands of us – And I believe we must answer those demands with conviction. The ceremonies of innocence those circles of goodness around us, must be widened and become an example to the world.
In my view, there is no certainty in this honest faith except that belief that goodness enacted is God enacted – it means salvation in the here and now – not in some world to come. Though we must act as if that world depends on our every act and breathe, for surely the world of our children and our grandchildren depends on what we do today.
So, here we go – this is the heart of the matter – what does Honest Religion look like when it is enacted? If the ceremonies of innocence are a command performance – how do we perform them?
Here are my ideas- inspired largely by experiences I have had and the deep hunger within me to see the center hold…
First reverence is its essential glue – no ceremony, no belief, no creed, or any other of the human products of honest religion should be our first concern – but cultivating an attitude of reverence should be – only reverence will hold our raging egos and dogmas in check.
Professor Woodruff says it better than I can, “No one owns reverence. It is not cruel or repressive in itself. It does not put down mockery or protect pompous fools. And most important, it cherishes freedom of inquiry. Reverence sets a higher value on truth than on any human product that is supposed to have captured the truth.”
And so reverence also provides that sense of humility that is essential to an honest religion – as I said last time – no certainty that we concoct will ever provide all of the answers – no matter the beauty of our equations or the power of our telescopes, mystery will always – always be with us and so we must be humble – we should never stop inquiring but we should also admit to the limits of our inquiries.
So reverence keeps us humble. But it is also the key to all of the other virtues towards which any honest religion should try to steer us.
Listen to these words from the Analects of Confucious… “Without reverence, courtesy is tiresome; without reverence, prudence is timid; without reverence, bravery is quarrelsome; without reverence, frankness is hurtful.”
Courtesy, prudence, bravery, frankness… to that list let us add compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, humility and dozens more. These virtues are the measure of an honest religion and of human goodness. But only true reverence can counterbalance these human potentials and save us from turning into annoying virtue potentates.
So, honest religion is reverent and humble – it loves inquiry and yet values the limits of what can be known – it sounds like a religion that really values questions and questioning – and yet it demands we move beyond questioning to action – that we embody goodness that we practice the virtues that make goodness and, I would add, God possible.
Because it must be brought off of our book shelves and into the world – an honest religion must also be a communal activity – it is in community that our goodness must be honed, taught, shared, and lived. There is a very real experience of salvation in connection and the bonds of community. That sense of Religare…
Yes, we grow from listening to and learning from one another as well as holding each other accountable, helping each other towards being better people. But perhaps more importantly, and more practically, we need community for survival.
Here is my worrying side again – these are threatening times – terrible things can happen – we need to be bound together in a practical way to support one another through tough times. Think of how quickly things would become uncivilized if, for example, the power went out… after 48 hours without air conditioning I don’t think Texas would be a very civil place.
I often think about the early days of the great religious traditions – the beginnings of both Christianity and Islam. The persecuted Christians of the Roman Empire won many of their converts because of the extraordinary way that they took care of one another in the face of terrible persecution. People learned to admire their charity and their compassion long before they bought into their theology. In the early days of Islam – during Mohammed’s exile in Medina, it was the power of the Islamic community which first attracted the admiration of others, not necessarily the utterances of the prophet.
Today, sadly, there are many Christians, Muslims and others who seem to actively advancing a truly irreverent “end times” theology.
Sad to say it, but I think an honest religion should take them at their word. We should be countering them with our convictions – we need a beginning times mentality that looks at every action as an opportunity to widen the circle of virtue and reverence – Yeat’s ceremonies of innocence.
I think that if we took it seriously – an honest religion born today amid a small group of exiles – could inspire thousands if not millions more to work feverishly for a world that is busy being born – not busy dying.
This can happen by bringing reverence and ritual to the small everyday occurrences of our lives – ritual doesn’t imply spectacle – the earliest ceremony of the new born Christian church was the simple practice of sharing a meal.
You’ve heard me say that an honest religion should make demands of us – well, what if it demanded that we share our meals – not retreat to our separate entertainments. What if is asked that we say grace – or simply give thanks before our meals. Could we bring ourselves to do just that?
I made a new friend recently – a really extraordinary young man. Our conversation was intense and went deep faster than most conversations do – as dinner time approached we went out to a stylish local restaurant, and just as I was about to dig into my genuine interior Mexican tacos, he stopped me and asked if we shouldn’t give thanks.
Shouldn’t we give thanks? In that moment he was doing everything I would hope for from another practitioner of honest religion. He was bringing reverence to our table, he was reminding me that we can be better people through the humblest of acts. Wow… it was so refreshing. A breathe of honest religion between sips of Mexican martini! Talk about your ceremonies of innocence!
Finally, I want to pick up a theme I mentioned in my last sermon. In the year 2009, an honest religion must make sense – common sense. I admit that this boundless universe and the universes beyond are beyond my comprehension – that it is filled with mystery – and unanswered questions. Bu my inability to answer all of the questions shouldn’t empower me to leap to super natural and superstitious conclusions.
When our little corner of our universe is imperiled by our own actions – we do not need to beseech or invoke the supernatural – we need to roll up our sleeves and start doing good.
The only miracle we need to believe in is the one that proclaims that we make God happens when we are kind, when we are patient, when we tell the truth – because anything that lifts up life and virtue and quiets the din of anarchy and nihilism allows the falconers voice to be heard and the ceremonies of innocence to continue.
This is not the God of our fathers. We offer this up as an alternative for a God hungry world whose salvation can only be delivered though one simple act of human goodness at a time.
So, when we stop to give thanks – think of all of those who have preceded us stretching back over the millennia. Be thankful for those who brought reverence and goodness to their work, to their tables, their communities, families, and friends.
Be grateful to those who somehow managed to steer us to this moment in time when we have gathered here to ask questions, to search for honesty, to widen the circles of love and beauty.
When William Butler Yeats wrote the Second Coming, he too sensed a kind of end times. But here we are, ninety years later, having survived so much horror since that time, and we are still heeding the falconers call, still longing for the ceremonies of innocence.
Let us move forward confident in a new beginning – a beginning times illuminated by reverence, humility, community, ritual, and common sense.
May our grandchildren read our words and remember our actions and be thankful that through our conviction we did not surrender to the blood dimmed tide.