Rev. Lisa Friedman
October 28, 2008
Readings
from the writings of Thomas Jefferson
“God… has formed us moral agents… that we may promote the happiness of those with whom He has placed us in society, by acting honestly towards all, benevolently to those who fall within our way, respecting sacredly their rights, bodily and mental, and cherishing especially their freedom of conscience, as we value our own.” (to Miles King, 1814)
“When we come to the moral principles on which the government is to be administered, we come to what is proper for all conditions of society… Liberty, truth, probity, honor, are declared to be the four cardinal principles of society. I believe… that morality, compassion, generosity, are innate elements of the human constitution; that there exists a right independent of force” (to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816)
from “The Politics of Culture in American Perspective” in The Prophethood of All Believers: the writings of James Luther Adams, G.K. Beach, ed.
The demand for freedom of religious association carried with it the claim to form a church in which every member had the right and responsibility to participate in the shaping of policy – a radical self-determination. This democratic conception soon began to appear in the economic and political realms. James I had predicted: Today they are attacking the bishops, tomorrow they will be attacking me. His prediction was correct. By analogy the free church become the model for a democratic state and eventually the sanction for the extension of the suffrage. Just as minority views were to be protected in the free church, so they were to be protected and even listened to in the state. Before the seventeenth century the radical dissenters were hanged or beheaded; after the seventeenth century the political dissenters became a “loyal opposition” and occupied the oppositional benches in Parliament with the opportunity to become the party in power. The dissenters of this loyal opposition were not only tolerated, they were also supported financially by the government – as we say in English, they were placed on expense account. Moreover, the demand for freedom of religious association was soon followed by the demand for freedom of other associations. Voluntary associations became agencies of criticism and innovation. Here we see the advent of the modern pluralist society, the dispersion of power and responsibility. Coercion of opinion was in principle outlawed. Eventually came the demand for a written constitution to define and protect rights of freedom and dissent within and embracing, though open, framework. Shakespeare might have called it “union in partition”; Daniel Webster called it “liberty and union.” …
We now live in a mass, technological society made up of great concentrations of power which attempt to control the means of communication and livelihood, a society that in some ways resembles the type of society against which the Radical Reformation initially protested. Freedom of association, or rather the greedy abuse of it, has issued in crude nationalism, imperialism, exploitative colonialism, and multinational corporations that are largely unaccountable, indeed are stronger than many of the “sovereign states.”…
The politics of culture can be effective only if it supports institutional agencies that aim to correct the forms of tribalism, of elitism, of discrimination in terms of sex, race and class. It therefore calls for participation in the shaping of social policy, it call for the engages and also for the enrages. Else we shall be fed with wormwood and be given the water of gall to drink.
Sermon “The Moral Nation”
The tradition of the election sermon has deep American and Unitarian roots, dating back to the earliest years of the Massachusetts colony, well before the American Revolution. The Puritans expected that their government should be influenced by the religious and moral vision of the people, just as they expected their churches to be funded by its treasury. Even after the United States Constitution established the separation of church and state in our federal government, for a time individual states could handle this relationship as they chose. And so it was that Massachusetts, the birthplace of American Unitarianism, continued to support its congregations with taxpayer money into the 1830’s.
It is because of this unique history that the Rev. David Bumbaugh argues that the “Unitarians in Massachusetts, and to some degree throughout New England, took a great deal of interest in the political life of the community. One expression of this interest was…”The Election Sunday Sermon.” On the Sunday before Election Day, the Unitarian clergy would mount their pulpits and deliver themselves of a sermon in which they sought to define the moral, ethical, religious dimensions of the issues to be decided by the electorate. Nor did they pretend to be non-partisan. In the struggle for a moral and just society, the church was called upon to be fiercely partisan, and so our religious forbearers did not hesitate to instruct the faithful concerning how they should cast their ballots.” This was a different kind of election sermon that the ones preached before Congress and other governmental bodies instructing them on how God might judge the outcome of their work. This was the kind of election sermon which recognized, as James Luther Adams observed, the people’s belief that if they could build the free and good church, by logical extension, they could build the free and good society. This was an election sermon for the people, for those who would cast their votes as ordinary, hard-working citizens, for those who would use their voice to call their leaders accountable to the needs and moral visions of the local communities which make up this free and democratic nation.
I find the election sermon to be a noble tradition. One the one hand, one can argue that if a pulpit and congregation are engaged with our times and the world around us, every sermon is an election sermon to the degree it connects us to the moral and ethical challenges of our day. On the other hand, there is a something profoundly alive in the air around us in these days before Election Day, especially in this presidential year. I want to take my children to the polls on November 4. I want them to witness the lines, to see the booths, to experience the act of voting in a nation which defends that right for each and every one of its citizens, to see our Unitarian Universalist 5th principle in real time. As weary as I might feel of all the election ads and commentary by this time of year, I am never tired of the privilege and exhilaration I feel when I head off to exercise this basic liberty. It is more than a civic and moral act alone: to vote out of the core of what I believe is just and true for our society is a spiritual experience.
With that said, in this year, when so many people are ready for this long, ugly, and contested election season to be over, it seems appropriate that my preaching schedule allows me to offer my election sermon one week early! Just to be clear, I do not intend to endorse a candidate or particular party. I have no plans to offer you a thorough review of the pro’s and con’s of the IRS tax laws regarding the relationship between politics and religion. But I do want to offer you my religious sense of where we stand as a nation. For while I don’t want to return to the church/state relationship of our Puritan ancestors, it seems to me that there is a role for democratic religion in a democratic society to lift up our need for a collective moral vision. It was James Madison, who once observed that “if [human beings] were angels, no government would be necessary.” But the flip side of this insight is equally true – if power inherently corrupts and compromises, then no government, however noble in theory, will ever live up to its promise, unless the people demand that it do so. As I listen to the election rhetoric and read the magazines and newspapers, it seems to me that something critically important is missing in our civic conversation. The democracy we see around us does not reflect the best hopes of the authors of our revered Constitution, whose vision of democracy depended upon the explosive, delicate connection between politics and religion, between our civic and moral souls.
It was actually the current financial crisis which brought this into clear view for me. As the stock market began its roller coaster ride and panic set in, I watched candidates tailor their speeches to people’s individual fears and worries. The literature crowding my mailbox suddenly targeted me even more as the individual voter. What was this particular candidate promising to do for my tax-load? My health-care? My retirement future? My childrens’ education? My gas prices? The candidates’ assumptions were clear. They expect me to vote for my own self-interest, before any other national or global concern. Yes, it is true that there is a lot at stake for the households of America in the uncertainty of today’s world, but as I stood on my front stoop one morning and watched my neighbors walking by, it occurred to me, when did it become all about the individual? Who has asked me, if this is what I think our democracy is about? Who has asked me what I might be willing to change about my own healthcare coverage, so that the child down the street might have the coverage she needs or the senior citizen across the way might afford his medication? Who has asked me what I might be willing to pay for gas in order to help us change our habits to recognize the valuable and limited natural resource that it is? Who, of our politicians, is prepared to answer what we owe to our larger community, beyond just the liberty of a free people, but the liberty of a free people who come together to demand liberty and justice for all?
The founding fathers and mothers understood that a moral vision was needed, in order for our democracy to succeed. John Adams boldly stated that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In saying this, he was not calling for a particular religious perspective, or a specific brand of scriptural interpretation. What he was acknowledging was that the health of a democracy is depending upon the health of its moral values – generosity, compassion, hard work, and responsibility, to name a few that echo Thomas Jefferson’s list. The authors of our democracy, many of them with Unitarian sympathies, were not interested in establishing a national creed, but they did assume that the citizens of their democracy would engage in some kind of spiritual discipline which would guide them and their government beyond war, corruption, and self interest. Somewhere in the last few decades, our nation has lost a sense of who we strive to be as a collective whole. It’s not that we have ever always agreed (the founding fathers themselves were often at passionate loggerheads), but we have at times understood better what values bring us together over our differences. I think the electioneering calls for unity and change on all sides today reflect an emerging sense of this loss, but I’m not sure if we yet grasp just how deep our confusion is.
I witnessed this confusion the other night at the neighborhood gym, when the nearest TV to me was set to the Extreme Makeover home show. In case, like me, you aren’t familiar with this reality show, the premise is that a group of designers chooses a worthy family for whom they will build a new house. In this particular show, the Extreme Makeover team had discovered an African American family who were running a day-care for single mothers who had no other place to turn to. The family provided clothes, food, and other support to the extent that as business owners their own standard of living was below the poverty-line. But they did it because they believe in service to others and love the families whom they serve. As the show began, the King family had just learned that their home was infested with mold, which they could not afford to eradicate. If they lost their daycare license, many of the families who depended upon them would lose their jobs and lose what fragile stability they had.
The Extreme Makeover team arrived, hugged the family, sent them to Puerto Rico for a week’s vacation and then pulled in a team of volunteers to raze the house down. Within one week, they had built and furnished a 5,000 square foot home, with a state-of-the-art attached day-care center, filled a storeroom with clothing donations to be given to children in need, and secured a year’s worth of food from a local food chain, not just for the King family, but for every family who attended their day-care. The camera-work included many close-ups of the King family in tears of joy, of volunteers working with satisfied exhaustion on their faces, and pumped up designers exhilarated about rewarding this family for their vision and sacrifice. All good, right? Right. But as the TV turned to an Al Franken for Senate commercial, I was both touched and horrified. What does it say about the state of our society today that our entertainers are running for political office, while our social safety net, to the minimal extent that it exists, is in the hands of an entertainment industry who does its do-good work with the goal of immense profit? I’m glad for the King family and the families they serve. But every community in this country should be able to come together to ensure that there is a 24 hour safe place open for its children and struggling working families, if we chose to. We shouldn’t have to wait for the TV cameras and feel-good drama to create the glue which makes our communities stronger.
The visionary behind the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, argued that “every generation needs a new revolution.” In this post 9/11 world, with the credit bubble reaching an end and the global climate changing the landscape of the earth beneath our feet, it is clear that the revolution that is needed is not one of further parochialism or self-interest. We need a revolution that challenges us to put the possibility of the welfare of the human community back in everything that we do. The change that is required of us is more than mere changes in leadership or administration - it is a social, moral and spiritual sea-change. It is not that we don’t care as individual citizens of society. It is not that we are blind to the needs that surround us in our neighborhoods. It is not that we have turned our backs on personal calls to service. And yet, collectively we have witnessed the insidious shift in our national consciousness which has allowed our leaders to slowly convince us that we can raise 700 billion dollars to bail out Wall Street, but don’t have the where-with-all to solve the Social Security or Medicare crises; that we can share the same fears for our children and our future, but that no common ground or answers can be found between the culture wars of the blue and red states; that we can go to war an ocean away to bring democracy to a desert land, but that we cannot find a way to defend our own soil without compromising our basic liberties. Again, I say, who asked us to agree to these assumptions? Is it really true that we have no shared vision of what the United States of America should be? The moral revolution begins when we start to prove the nay-sayers wrong.
Last weekend, I had the privilege of moderating the interfaith panel for our Humanity Series weekend on forgiveness. On this very platform, we had a circle of people who spoke of their own tradition’s insight into this profound human need. Now, there are many people in today’s society who would try to tell you that in this diverse and global world that there is little that a Muslim, a Roman Catholic, an Atheist, a Jew, a Buddhist, and an unchurched Mystic would have to cordially say to each other on this or any topic. But what unfolded before our eyes last Saturday was a conversation in which people with very different theologies and spiritual lives found common insight and questions into a universal human struggle. It was a conversation in which they learned from each other, surprised each other with the connections that they found, called one another cousins, and in which we who were present learned from their learning. As we listened and talked, I thought, how rare this is! Where are the models out there for radical conversations such as this, in a world, where leaders like Colin Powell have to reawaken us to our democratic values by demanding that someone explain to us just what’s wrong with being Muslim in America? In a nation founded on the belief that religious freedom and moral consensus are both possible, the revolution will begin when we reclaim with joy the truth of our rich community and common ground.
We cannot wait for our government to do it for us. It is we, the people, who must remind them of the vision with which they are entrusted. James Madison once theorized, “What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” If we believe, as the founders of our country did, that human nature is inherently moral and spiritual, then our government cannot be allowed to be indifferent or amoral to the challenges of our times. At the same time, as James Luther Adams reminds us, to preserve the values of our democracy, we are called to participate “in the shaping of social policy”, to be both engaged and enraged when needed. With the challenging days which appear to be on our horizon, this will be hard to do. We will be fighting against our anxieties, our fears, and our despair. And yet, as anyone from the generation which lived through the Great Depression or the World Wars will tell you, it is exactly at these moments in history that our communities and their values matter the most.
So as you prepare to vote on this upcoming Election Day, I invite you to spend some time on your front stoop or walking through your neighborhood. You might even encourage conversation over leaf-raking among neighbors with opposing lawn signs. As you do so, I invite you to join me in the revolution at hand, to frame the issues and challenges before us not as a question of what they might mean to us as individuals, but what do they mean to us, as a community which cares? And as you begin to have the conversations about what “we”, not “I”, should do, reflect upon two basic issues of our moral vision. Ask yourself and your neighbors first, what are the demands of our compassion? Second, what are the limits of our tolerance?
The demands of our compassion reveal to us the places where we need to be collectively engaged. This is not the conversation where we debate the merits of big or small government, rather it is the conversation where we sit at the same table as ask ourselves what basic expectations we have for the quality of life of our children and our elders, of our workers and our farmers, of our small towns and big cities, of our wilderness and our seas. This is not the conversation where we debate the truth about global warming, but where we ask ourselves about what it means to live respectfully on the land and how much we truly need. This is not the conversation where we debate the pro’s and con’s of immigration laws and border fences, but where we ask ourselves to consider what basic hospitality we owe to the stranger in our midst, even as our ancestors were once strangers to this land. Our compassion comes out of our vision of right relationship, and it is to this vision and to this relationship that we are called to return.
The limits of our tolerance reveal to us the places where we need to be collectively enraged enough to not accept behaviors and policies which betray what we stand for. I will not belabor this point, because it is another sermon in itself, but let me simply say that I find it hopeful in the past week to see the community rise up and acknowledge that there are limits to what is acceptable in how we treat one another and live out our democratic values. In our democracy, we will not allow narrow definitions of patriotism or “anti-Americanism” to silence our values and opinions. We will not sanction hateful, anonymous graffiti on the garages of our congress-people or have it be seen as acceptable political engagement. And what else might we agree upon, if we were to share our outrage constructively with one another? Would Guatanamo Bay have happened? Would Dafur still be in danger of genocide? Would the credit giants have made it to this day? The limits of our tolerance also call us back to right relationship, for at the depths of the human heart, we know the difference between love and hate, kindness and cruelty, generosity and greed among us.
How should you vote this Election Day? My friends, beyond the merits of each individual candidate, as citizens of this free democracy, you should vote from the moral and spiritual center within you. You should vote not out of your fears, but from your dearest-held beliefs. You should vote, not out of cynical self-interest, but from a sense of civic and communal pride. You should vote, not out of your despair for our earthly fate, but from your hope for our world. This is not idealism - it is realism. For only by putting our democracy into action, only by voting and engaging each other as though the moral society were possible, will ever come to pass. John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, who was witness to the long battles of his father’s generation and to the problems of slavery in the new country, nevertheless came to the same conclusion. Daringly, he called upon his fellow citizens to “always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” So may it be.
