Below is a sermon I delivered a few weeks ago. Some folks have asked to read it, so I have directed them here. Please know that I don’t write sermons to be read, so if parts are rough that’s why. I’ve never had more trouble writing a sermon than I did writing this one.
You ever heard the saying that Unitarian Universalist ministry is like herding cats? Now, it’s never that way here, of course, but there is something in this saying that is seated deep in our religious DNA.
To hear some folks tell it, the story of liberal religion is the story of a rough-and-tumble fellow who decided to leave his small Little-House-On-The Prairie theology with its white church building and sparsely stocked general store and go it on his own. So, face covered with beard stubble and carrying his philosophical six-shooter to ward off bad theology, the liberal religionist mounted his trusty steed and headed west into his own head to interpret religion for himself. There he found adventure and mystery and truth that he could never have found back home. And once this lone ranger figured out what he really believed, he then found a gang of fellow ramblers called the Unitarian Universalists. They were a self-reliant lot. Couldn’t even sit down to chow together without scrappin’. And the only thing that kept those liberals together was their belief that everybody ought to be free to think for herself.
That fictional old Western is produced by the enlightenment. The enlightenment, this 18th century movement which told us that the human intellect can solve any problem. Science was strengthened, literature became more focused on the inner workings of the individual, and religion wasn’t exempt, either. Liberal religion especially. Even today, liberal faith emphasizes personal freedom and the right of an individual to decide what’s best for herself as pertains to religious beliefs. Because I am a thinking person, religious liberals have said, I can validate myself, thank you very much. I don’t need the approval of a religious community. All the religious truth I need is inside me. This is our enlightenment heritage talking.
And because we’re people of liberal faith and because we can affirm ourselves thank you very much, that has often meant, as UU author and scholar Paul Rasor puts it, “(my sense of purpose as a liberal) must come from within myself and not from my community. … the individual becomes a mature self, an autonomous ego, by throwing off the constraints of the social group and breaking free. (And, Rasor writes,) This view still expresses the dominant self-understanding among religious liberals.” He’s saying that we are often cats who might rather die than be found in a herd!
Rasor supports his claim with the results from a 1998 survey of more than 10,000 Unitarian Universalists. When they were asked, “What role has your congregation played most importantly in your life?” the largest response was “It supports my views and upholds my values.” When asked “What do you expect to happen for you when you attend a Unitarian Universalist worship service?” the largest response was “to remember with gratitude and celebrate what is most important in my life.” And it’s not only UUs who think this way. A 1978 Gallup poll reported in sociologist Robert Bellah’s book Habits of the Heart “found that 80 percent of Americans agreed that ‘an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any churches or synagogues.’” Bellah concluded that “most Americans see religion as something individual, prior to any organizational involvement.”
But is that true? Do we really wander off into the wilderness to find the group that fits us best? Certainly that is the enlightenment picture. And there’s some truth to it. Most of us are here today because we chose to be. Some were born into this faith, but many more were not. This is a chosen faith.
And of course that’s not all bad. What a wonderful thing to be a part of a religion which encourages us to evaluate belief, to pursue truth no matter what the crowd says. But maybe we’re not quite the rugged individualists we’ve been told we are. Hear the response of Paul Rasor:
“Our liberal-modern understanding of ourselves as autonomous individuals is an illusion. The truth is that we don’t first exist as individuals who then form social groups. The group always comes first. As individuals, our identities are always formed in relation to a particular social context. We are social beings through and through.”
The language sometimes gets a little complicated, but the contrast between the story we have told ourselves and what seems to really be happening is clear. We people of liberal faith have told ourselves that we ourselves decide what we believe and then form groups of like-minded people. But what really seems to happen is that we are born into certain social groups that influence us even as we make our decisions.
So, for example, I was born into a very conservative brand of Christian faith. The story I told myself is that one day I stood up and said ‘no more!’ Then, I went off and found the Unitarian Universalists, a group of like-minded people, and I am now beginning to live happily every after.
What really happened is that I was born into a very conservative brand of Christian faith which existed before I was born and exists to this day. Then I became the first person in my family to go to college. A college which existed before I was born and exists to this day. College was a social group which influenced me and caused me to react to my childhood faith. Seminary was another social group. I was being influenced by my faith group and by my college and by my seminary education, and my reaction to those influences led me here. Here, where I have joined the Unitarian Universalist community, which existed before I was born and will exist long after I die. Now, I’ll influence you as a group and you will influence me. But would I be here if it hadn’t been for the religion of my youth? If I had been raised a liberal Methodist, would I today be a Unitarian Universalist? Maybe not!
It seems none of us is here as a completely free, self-deciding individual. We are influenced by and we wield our own influence over the social groups in which we find ourselves. Put another way, we are embedded in certain cultures which hold sway over who and where we wind up.
You may say, ‘what difference could this possibly make?’ I’m glad you asked, because I think it makes a big difference.
When we acknowledge that we are in many ways products of our cultures, when we can acknowledge that we have not been without influence in becoming the people we are, we see that people who are different than we are, who think and behave in ways we may not understand, are products of their cultures as well. They are not things or ideas to be figured out and argued against. They are fellow human beings, influenced by many things we can’t see, just as we’re influenced by many things they can’t see.
And then, when we have seen that we’re all embedded in one culture or another, as Paul Rasor writes, “(our own eyes are opened) to the ways in which we are implicated in these structures, the ways in which our middle-class privilege depends on them.”
If we don’t see that none of us is completely self-made, then our individualism becomes a crippling weakness. It leads us to do things in our heads rather than in our hearts. It can cause us to look for solutions to problems by offering up all our individual ideas and solutions and arguing them rather than trying to find common threads. Being able to argue well and ‘win the day’ becomes a higher value than peace and justice making.
And that may cause us to miss our own part in some of our biggest problems. Too often, liberals have stood over problems like racism and classism like scientists, taking them apart and laying them all out in neat pieces on the altar, as if we can then put them back together again in the right order if we just go home and think about it enough. If we just think about it and argue it long enough. And whom have we attracted with this approach? Mainly white upper middle class Americans. Frankly, people whose position in society depends on the status quo and who aren’t the best at changing it. Why have we struggled so with diversity, why do we continue to attract mainly white upper middle class people? I wonder if it is because our intellectual, individualistic, fix it by analyzing every piece approach doesn’t always take into account what it feels like to be the oppressed other. We understand it in our minds, our enlightenment heritage of deep thought and skilled argument has made sure of that, but we don’t feel it because an academic approach doesn’t tell the story. It invites us to go off by ourselves and analyze, even to go out together and act, rather than to feel anything.
The African American UU scholar Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed has argued that while the black church has always prized political freedom and equality, freedom from slavery and oppression, middle class religion (liberal religion especially) has valued intellectual freedom. He quotes another scholar as saying, “(Liberal religion’s) martyrs die for liberty, not for fraternity and equality; its saints are patrons of individual enterprise in religion, politics, and economics, not the great benefactors of mankind or the heralds of brotherhood.”
We need spirituality as a balance to our intellectual individualism. We need a conscious concentration on our shared humanity. Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Only through inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”
The enlightenment focus on individualism in many ways gave birth to liberal religion. It encourages us to investigate our institutions and to check out any claim of truth. The problem is that it sets the individual up as one who can understand and control the world rather than one who is embedded deeply in the world.
But let us never forget that at our cores, we are social beings. And Unitarian Universalism, and UUCC, is not a collection of individuals whose only bond is our belief in freedom to do and think whatever we want. While we cherish and fight to preserve our liberties, we are also sisters and brothers in community. We share not just a mental bond, but a bond of spirit and heart. And may our heritage of individual rights never drown out the human call for the love and health, healing and true empathy that such community can bring. May we be free individuals who are further freed by knowing that we aren’t quite self-made, and that we aren’t so different from our neighbors. Amen
