Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Why democracy matters

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading was from Cornel West’s book Democracy Matters:

    “In America, we have tended to underplay the crucial role of the foundational motivation of democracy. From the time of that first experiment in democracy in Athen in the fifth century BC to the birth of the American democratic experiment in the eighteenth century, the consolidation of elite power was the primary object of democratic revolt. This will to transform corrupted forms of elite rule into more democratic ways of life is an extraordinary force, though each new democratic result of the exercise of this will [always] falls short of democratic ideals. This is why all democracies are complete and unfinished, and this is why American democracy is a work in progress.”

    The second reading was from the long poem “Freedom’s Plow” by Langston Hughes:

    …America is a dream.
    The poet says it was promises.
    The people say it is promises — that will come true.
    The people do not always say things out loud,
    Nor write them down on paper.
    The people often hold
    Great thoughts in their deepest thoughts
    And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
    Haltingly and stumbling say them,
    And faultily put them into practice.
    The people do not always understand each other.
    But there is, somewhere there,
    Always the trying to understand,
    And the trying to say,
    “You are human. Together we are building our land.”

    America!
    Land created in common,
    Dream nourished in common,
    Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
    If the house is not finished,
    Don’t be discouraged, builder!
    If the fight is not yet won,
    Don’t be weary, soldier!…

    (Excerpt of this poem included under copyright fair use: fewer than 500 words, less than half the poem.)

    Sermon

    This morning, I’m going try to give a couple of small reasons why democracy matters. The title I gave this sermon — “Why Democracy Matters” — uses a phrase I stole from Democracy Matters, which was the title of a book by philosopher Cornel West. When I first read that book a couple of decades ago, two things stood out for me. First, West made it clear that part of his commitment to democracy stemmed from his liberal Christian faith. Second, West thought that Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the people who was (to use West’s own words) “the life force behind the deeper individual and civic American commitment to democracy.”(1)

    Unfortunately, West isn’t an especially good writer, and he uses the book to settle personal grudges; so I don’t recommend it. But I appreciate the title of the book — “Democracy Matters.” Democracy does matter. And I appreciate the thought that those of us who are religious, yet neither fundamentalists nor evangelicals, have something important to contribute to American democracy.

    West tells us that a key contributor fo the American democratic tradition is Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson served as a Unitarian minister for eight years before he embarked on his more famous career as an essayist and a public lecturer. As a minister and as a writer, his ideas and his ideals were shaped by the deep Unitarian conviction in the power of the individual, and by the related Unitarian conviction that each and every person can have a direct connection with the divine. His Unitarian convictions led him to reject hierarchies, to reject blindly following authority; as Cornel West phrased it, Emerson “refused to accept the conventional wisdom of leaders.” After saying this, West quotes from Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance”:

    “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

    After quoting Emerson, West comments that “Emerson offered the empowering insight that to be a democratic individual is to be flexible and fluid, revisionary and reformational in your dealing with your fellow citizens and the world, not adhering to comfortable dogmas or rigid party lines.”(2)

    Emerson was a Unitarian, and West was a liberal Black Baptist. We tend to think those two religious traditions are very different, but in one crucial way, they’re very similar. Both those religious traditions agree that it’s up to the individual to know the truth; and both those religious traditions agree that individuals can have a direct experience of divinity, goodness, and truth.

    These two religious traditions share these important beliefs because they both come from the same ancient religious tradition. They both owe a great deal to the religious tradition extending back thousands of years to the earliest books of the Hebrew Bible, a tradition that believes in equality and justice for all persons. Martin Luther King was another liberal Black Baptist, who famously quoted the prophet Amos, “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (3). Nor is it just Unitarians and Black Baptists who emphasize the religious tradition of justice for all persons — liberal and moderate Jews, liberal and moderate Christians of all denominations, and liberal Muslims also affirm that there must be justice for all persons.

    One of the founding documents of American democracy, the Declaration of Independence, draws on this same tradition when it says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, who was a liberal Christian. In drafting the Declaration, Jefferson worked closely with John Adams, another liberal Christian (in fact, he was Unitarian). The Declaration of Independence was able to declare that all people are created equal, because it can draw from that long tradition of justice stretching back to the prophet Amos and beyond. We all know the limitations of the Declaration of Independence: it left out women, it ignored enslaved African Americans. But we are able to criticize the Declaration of Independence in this way precisely because we draw on the long tradition of justice originating in the Hebrew prophets.

    As a former Unitarian minister, Emerson knew this ancient tradition well. He knew it was not a dead, static tradition. The search for goodness and justice is not something that happens once, and then you’re done with it. Emerson said that when you think you’ve found goodness, you “must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if [what you’ve found actually] be goodness” or not. While Emerson never quite accepted that women were created equal to men, and although he never quite accepted that Black people were the equals of White people, even though he favored the abolition of slavery; nevertheless, he went further than many people of his day and age in saying that at least some justice might be extended to enslaved African Americans. Emerson’s disciple, Henry Thoreau, went further than Emerson did, and Martin Luther King took things further than either Emerson or Thoreau, advocating for complete equality of all Americans regardless of race.

    This is the way democracy works. It is not static. It is an evolving tradition. American democracy continues to evolve, continues to extend the basic principles of equality further than Jefferson or Adams were willing to take it. We have now extended equality to women, and to people who are not White. And it’s significant that many of the people who worked to extend equality have been able to draw on the ancient tradition of justice that extends back to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

    In the United States today, however, I am aware of at least two religious traditions that do not support equality, and that therefore act to undermine democracy.

    One religious tradition that seeks to restrict equality is conservative Christian nationalism. The Christian nationalists do not believe that women are equal; they believe that women should be subordinate to men; and while they may say that women should retain the right to vote, they also say that a wife should submit to her husband, perhaps to the point where she should vote the way he tells her to vote. Increasingly, the Christian nationalists also seem to be drifting into the belief that only White Christian nationalists deserve full equality, while non-White people are not as equal. Christian nationalism is a non-democratic religious tradition. While Emerson believed that people in a democracy must be flexible enough to seek out truth and goodness on their own, by contrast Christian nationalists want people to stick to comfortable dogmas and “rigid party lines.” Democracy requires that we think for our selves; Christian nationalists don’t want us to think for ourselves; they want to tell us what to think and what to do.

    The second religious tradition that seeks to restrict equality and to limit democracy is the religion of amoral capitalism. Capitalism has not always been a-moral. There was a time when the goal for businesspeople was to make a profit while providing things their community needed. My first full-time job was in a lumberyard, which made a tidy profit for the family that owned it, while at the same time supplying needed building materials, and providing much needed jobs to the community. The goal for business used to be stated like this: Do well by doing good. But a new religious belief emerged that has taken over the biggest businesses, a religious belief that the only goal is to maximize shareholder value. I consider this a religious belief because its believers cling to it with religious fervor. This religious belief even has a name: it’s called the Friedman Doctrine. The Friedman Doctrine shares Christian nationalism’s commitment to dogma and obedience to authority. Like Christian nationalism, the religion of the Friedman Doctrine is essentially hierarchical and non-democratic: there are no stakeholders except for CEOs and shareholders. The Friedman Doctrine stands in opposition to the long Biblical tradition of extending justice to all persons. Back in 2016, The Economist, a politically centrist periodical, pointed out that the moral result of the doctrine of maximizing shareholder value is “a license for bad conduct.”(4) Democracies must be rooted in a firm sense of justice; they depend for their existence on widely-shared morality that proclaims equality for all persons. Thus the Friedman Doctrine, with its license for bad conduct, is anti-democratic.

    How can we respond to these two anti-democratic religions? Recall that passage from Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” To paraphrase this in a more contemporary idiom: If you would be fully human, you must think for yourself. If you would be truly good, it is not enough to let someone else tell you how to be good; you must find goodness out for yourself. You must value your own personal integrity above all else.

    And here’s how this applies to democracy. In other forms of government, such as monarchies and autocracies, you simply accept that whatever the ruler of your country tells you is the right thing to do. Similarly, in a big impersonal business, the largest shareholders and the CEO determine what is right, and everyone else — both inside the business, and outside the business — simply has to accept what they are told to do.

    Why does democracy matter? Democracy matters because it does not dictate to us. In a democracy, we must think for ourselves. In a democracy, if we would strive for true goodness, it is not enough to let someone else tell us how to be good, we must find out goodness for ourselves. Above all, we must value our own personal integrity. In a democracy, we have to ask ourselves, “Have I been the best person I can possibly be?”

    Democracy matters because it continues the long tradition of justice going back to the Biblical prophet Amos, and beyond. We may not hold exactly the same notion of God that Amos does; we may be Buddhist or pagan or atheist or something else; but like Amos, we want justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Thomas Jefferson surely had the Biblical prophets in mind when he wrote the Declaration of Independence; and for all his many faults — that he was sexist, that he was a slaveholder — Jefferson did the best he could to uphold that long tradition of justice; and he made so that we could extend justice beyond what he could have imagined.

    Democracy matters because all people are created equal, with certain inalienable rights; and may justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

    Notes

    (1) Cornel West, Democracy Matters (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), p. 68.
    (2) Ibid., p. 70.
    (3) Amos 5:24, KJV
    (4) “Analyse this,” The Economist, March 31, 2016.

  • Faith, Hope, and Kindness

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Sermon

    This morning I’d like to address two questions asked by people in this congregation during las year’s question box sermon: “Is it enough to have hope and be kind?” and “Your thoughts on faith: What is it? Is it religious?”

    I got to thinking about the question of faith yesterday when I was at the memorial service for Ana Walshe, held at the Greek Orthodox church in Cohasset. Ana Walshe disappeared three years ago, and the trial of her husband recently ended in his conviction for murder. During the memorial prayer service yesterday, the presiding clergy spoke of their faith in eternal life. This is the classic understanding of faith — “faith” means faith in God, faith in eternal life through Jesus, faith in the tenets of the Christian religion. In this sense of the word, then, “faith” is very definitely religious; more precisely, “faith” is very definitely Christian. And because Christian assumptions so permeate our culture, it’s hard to get away from that definition of faith.

    But we Unitarian Universalists do not have a creed, so we do not require you to have faith in God, faith in eternal life, or faith in Christianity. You are welcome to have such faith, but it is not required. In our congregation we have people who consider themselves Christian, atheist, Jewish, Buddhist, and more (including some of us who might not be able to put a name to what we are beyond “Unitarian Universalist”). I feel that because we sit side by side with people of differing worldviews, we Unitarian Universalists are better able to understand “faith” in more of a metaphorical sense: a feeling that eventually things are going to get better. Most of us have this feeling, even if we don’t identify as Christian, even if don’t hold the usual Christian views of eternal life — we still have the sense that somehow, some day, things are going to get better.

    Our feeling of faith in the future was perhaps best captured by the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who lived from 1810 to 1860. Parker was a Transcendentalist, which meant that older Unitarian ministers of his time accused him of not being a real Christian. Yet Parker had a deep sense of faith, which he expressed in an anti-slavery sermon from the 1850s titled “Of Justice and Conscience,” in which he said:

    “Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged [for] long. [Thomas] Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.”

    Theodore Parker was an abolitionist. When he gave this sermon it was not at all clear that slavery would ever be abolished in the United States. Parker admitted that he could not prove that we were bending towards justice, but he said he could “divine it by conscience.” This is a perfect example of having faith. A century later, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King restated this same sentiment more concisely in the famous phrase, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Dr. King did not say he had some sort of scientific knowledge that the world was moving towards justice; but he knew it nonetheless. He was sure that some day, African Americans like himself would achieve equality. While we still have a ways to go before there is full equality for all races — my Black friends tell me that sometimes it feels like two steps forward and one step backwards — nevertheless, Dr. King was right, and we have made significant progress.

    Dr. King’s faith that the arc of the moral universe slowly bends towards justice was not the same as his Christian faith in God and eternal life through Jesus. Yet the two kinds of faith are linked. Even those who did not share Dr. King’s Christian faith in God could understand his moral faith that the universe would tend towards justice. Dr King’s faith was Christian — and it transcended Christianity — both at the same time.

    Faith, it seems to me, is rooted in hope. Again, I was thinking about this during the memorial service for Ana Walshe yesterday; and thinking of her death got me thinking about the problem of domestic violence. Having spent twenty-five years working with children, I inevitably came to know families that had been marked by domestic violence; and I wanted to know if there was hope for ending domestic violence. I have to conclude that there is hope. Thirty-odd years ago, when I started working with kids, we weren’t aware of domestic violence in the way we are today. For example, now, we have mandated reporter laws, so certain professions (like clergy) are mandated by law to report child abuse. We also have many more resources for adults who are being abused. Yes, we still have a long way to go, but I have faith that the arc of the moral universe is bending towards justice, bending towards a reduction in domestic violence; that is to say, I have hope. We haven’t made as much progress as I would like; but we have made progress, and that gives me hope.

    The faceless algorithms that govern social media, and podcasts, and television, have been designed to make us feel angry and upset, because these companies know angry people spend more time consuming their products. Since we all spend so much time consuming these media, it’s easy for us to think the world is in horrible shape. If we lose faith in the future, the algorithms can drive us to spend ever more time being angry and consuming media products. This is where our metaphorical understanding of faith can help us. You don’t need to be sure the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice; you merely have to have faith that is true. When you have faith that we are moving towards justice, you will spend less time consuming algorithmically-driven media that make you doubt your faith; when you spend less time consuming those media products, you have more time to engage face-to-face with real people — that is, more time to make the world kinder and better.

    Faith and hope are what our dreams are made of. To do away with faith and hope is to deny our dreams for a better world; and as Langston Hughes pointed out, a dream that is deferred too long will fester like a sore, or maybe it will explode in anger. The moral arc of the universe does not bend towards justice all on its own; we must help the universe move in the right direction.

    And this brings us to kindness. If you have no hope, what reason is there to be kind to someone else? If you have no faith, what is the purpose of kindness? Faith and hope can clear a sort of metaphorical breathing space around us in which we can be kind to one another. Rather than sinking into hopelessness, you can have faith that what you do makes a difference; and when you have faith that you can make a difference, you will find yourself called to be kind. This is why Martin Luther King told the story of the Good Samaritan, why he pointed out the obvious question behind that story: Who is our neighbor? This story recalled the Hebrew Bible, the book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18: “You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Rather than seeking angry vengeance, we should love our neighbors.

    To me, this is what is meant by kindness: loving your neighbor as yourself. I find this a difficult commandment to follow; it is much easier to seek vengeance (and indeed the algorithms that aim to govern our lives keep pushing us towards vengeance). Yet I know it is better to turn away from vengeance, and towards kindness. I admit there are many times when I desire vengeance; I had some of that feeling yesterday when I thought of what happened to Ana Walshe. But I would rather have faith that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. That is, I would rather have hope for the future. I would rather go forth into the world with kindness — not just because it’s better for the world, but also because it keeps me sane.

    To return to the questions which prompted this sermon: Is it enough to have hope and be kind? It is not enough, unless you also have faith that your hope and your kindness are helping the universe bend towards justice and bend towards love. As for the other question: What is faith, is it religious? It is religious, if by “religious” we mean something that aims to make our lives better, something that aims to make us become our best selves, something that aims to help us all love our neighbors as we love ourselves. As a Universalist, I might add: against all odds, I have faith that love is the most powerful force in the universe; that faith gives me hope for humanity, and that hope guides me to extend kindness to all my neighbors, whoever they might be.

  • A Secular Saint

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading was from a 2018 BBC interview with Claudette Colvin, who died last week. On March 2, 1955, when she was fifteen years old, Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus. According to the BBC, “Colvin was the first person to be arrested for challenging Montgomery’s bus segregation policies….” It would be another nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus. In the 2018 interview, Colvin said:

    “We walked downtown and my friends and I saw the bus and decided to get on. It was right across the road from Dr Martin Luther King’s church. The white people were always seated at the front of the bus and the black people were seated at the back of the bus. The bus driver had the authority to assign the seats, so when more white passengers got on the bus, he asked for the seats. He wanted me to give up my seat for a white person and I would have done it for an elderly person but this was a young white woman. Three of the students had got up reluctantly and I remained sitting next to the window. Whenever people ask me: ‘Why didn’t you get up when the bus driver asked you?’ I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail. I wasn’t frightened but disappointed and angry because I knew I was sitting in the right seat.”

    The second reading was the poem “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou. The pome is not included here due to copyright.

    Sermon

    Tomorrow is the national holiday celebrating the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Today, fifty-eight years after he was murdered, Dr. King has become something of a larger-than-life figure in American culture. All these years later, we’ve finally reached something of a national consensus that King is an important figure in our national history. I’d even say he’s become something of a secular saint, though then we’d have to figure out what we mean by the phrase “secular saint.”

    There are religious groups — Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans and some Lutherans — who have fairly well-defined definitions of sainthood. The Benedictine Monks of St. Augustine’s Abbey in Ramsgate, England, offer a definition of sainthood in their 1921 book “The Book of Saints: A Dictionary of Servants of God Canonized by the Catholic Church” back in 1921 (London: A.C. Black). The monks begin by pointing out that their religion has a strict and rigorous process for determining who is a saint. This process begins after the proposed saint has died with a careful investigation into that person’s life. The monks summarize this long process thus:

    “It consists in the first place of a thorough investigation into all the particulars that can be ascertained of the life and death of the alleged Saint, all facts connected with whose career, both public and private, together with all his utterances and writings, are tested in every way. He must be shown to have been God-fearing, pious, just in his dealings, patient, self-denying, charitable, and so on, far above the average of ordinary good men….particular stress is put upon the popular verdict concerning the alleged Saint, that is, upon the repute in which he was held by those who may have had dealings with him or had opportunities of forming an opinion about him.”

    While this process is for Catholic saints, you can see that something similar applies to the process of determining who gets to be a secular saint. In Dr. King’s case, it wasn’t until the year 2000, 42 years after his death, that all 50 states recognized the federal holiday honoring him.

    The monks also point out that there is an exception to this lengthy process of determining sainthood, which would not apply to Dr. King:

    “The above official enquiry into the conduct in life and virtues of the deceased Christian for whom the supreme honor of [sainthood] is claimed is deemed unnecessary only in the case of a Martyr, that is, of one of the Faithful who has deliberately laid down his life rather than deny Christ. In his case, it has to be fully proved that he was put to death on account of his religion, and not because he was guilty of some political or other crime….”

    In American popular culture, martyrdom — the fact that someone gave their life for some great cause — may sometimes, but not always, be a part of secular sainthood. I’ll return to the question of martyrdom later on.

    Now, I have greatly shortened what the monks say about the criteria for sainthood, and they themselves say they are merely summarizing the complicated laws of sainthood in the Roman Catholic church. So we can see that some Christians have a lengthy process and strict criteria for determining who is a saint. For other Christians, however, sainthood doesn’t involve some complicated legal procedure; a saint is simply someone who leads a good Christian life. In these less strict Christian traditions, a saint is recognized as a saint when enough people agree that that person is a saint — this is sainthood by popular acclaim, rather than sainthood by formal church laws.

    Nor is it just Christians who recognize moral exemplars. Many other religious traditions venerate figures who are roughly equivalent to Christian saints. In Buddhism, a bodhisatva, someone who is striving towards Buddhahood, may be understood to be something like a saint. In Sikhism, the ten gurus who served from the founding of the religion until 1708 are considered to be roughly equivalent to saints. The Daoist immortals, people whose mastery of that religion have allowed them to overcome death, are somewhat saintlike.

    What about us Unitarian Universalists? We tend to be a skeptical group of people. We’re likely to be skeptical of the miracles attributed to the Christian saints. We’re likely to be skeptical that Daoist immortals really live forever. We may have doubts about the endless cycle of rebirth from which Buddhist bodhisattvas release themselves. We also get skeptical about sainthood because we see how the different religious traditions define sainthood differently: the Christian saints have a special connection to God; the Buddhist bodhisattvas achieve nirvana; the Daoist immortal works with alchemy; and so on.

    Indeed, our skepticism tends to push us towards doing away with saints altogether. However, I’d like to suggest that we probably don’t want to completely do away with saints. On the one hand, doing away with saints might cause us to view all moral exemplars with skepticism, which in turn can make it difficult to learn from anyone’s moral example. On the other hand, doing away with our skepticism might cause us to stop thinking critically about our moral exemplars. It’s good to have people we can look up to, and good to have people who serve as moral exemplars. It’s also good to remain aware that all persons, even saint-like people, have limitations. We Unitarian Universalists can steer a middle path between completely giving in to skepticism and doing away with saints on the one hand — and on the other hand, completely ignoring our skepticism about saints so that we can no longer think critically about them.

    This is how I got wondering whether Dr. King might be considered a saint: I wanted to keep him as a moral exemplar, but there were some things I wanted to think critically about. First, I wasn’t sure if he should be a religious saint. If he were a religious saint, he’d of course be a Christian saint. But then people who aren’t Christian might not find him especially inspiring, which would limit his reach as a moral exemplar. But even for Christians, since Dr. King was a Baptist I suppose he’d be a Baptist saint; except the Baptists don’t really spend much time venerating saints. So since Dr. King had become a saintlike moral exemplar, valued by Christians and non-Christians alike, that implies he had become a secular saint. As a secular saint, he wouldn’t be restricted to one Christian denomination; he could be claimed more widely by Christians, by people of other religions, and by people of no religion at all.

    This raises two questions for me. First, why have saints at all, even secular ones? Second, who gets to determine who becomes a secular saint?

    I’ve come to believe that it’s good to have secular saints. I spent twenty-five years working as a religious educator, and a big part of Unitarian Universalist religious education is moral education. We want to help each other to lead a good life. And when we do moral education, it works best to show what a moral life looks like, rather than decreeing that there are certain rules that you must live by. Thus, the best moral educators find people who can serve as moral examples, about whom they can say: This person did many good things in their life, and you might consider following their example.

    I think back to my own Unitarian Universalist upbringing, and remember how I was offered several examples of Unitarian Universalists who lived good lives, and whose example I might wish to follow. One of those Unitarian Universalist saint-like people was Louisa May Alcott, who not only wrote books about the importance of family, she also helped support her own family both financially and emotionally. Another of those Unitarian Universalist saint-like people was Henry Thoreau, who lived a life of simplicity, who was an anti-slavery activist, and who also helped to support his family financially.

    As I got older, I learned about other Unitarian Universalist saint-like people; people like James Reeb, a White minister who answered Martin Luther King’s plea for clergy to come to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and march for voting rights. Reeb was murdered by White segregationists, and so became a kind of martyr. But he wasn’t a martyr in the formal Roman Catholic definition of the term: he did not die because of refusing to deny Christ, he died for a political cause. If we think of him as a secular saint, then we can say that he was a secular martyr, because he died for a higher purpose. Not that we think everyone should become a martyr to a higher purpose; we can retain enough of our skepticism to question when martyrdom is justified. Reeb didn’t seek out martyrdom; instead, he was simply following his highest principles.

    The question of martyrdom brings us back to the question of who gets to determine who becomes a secular saint. Just because someone gets killed, they do not automatically become a secular saint. Malcolm X was assassinated at about the same time as Martin Luther King, but Malcolm X has not become a secular saint in the same way that Dr. King has. I have great admiration for Malcom X, particularly the last year of his life, after he went to Mecca and came to a deep understanding of how all humanity was closely interconnected. But I admire Dr. King more, because of his principled stand for nonviolence. I understand why Malcolm X felt it necessary to advise all Black families to own guns in case they had to defend themselves against White supremacists. But I admire Dr. King for being able to take a broader view when he said, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.” Dr. King’s principle of nonviolence helps explain why he has become more widely recognized as a secular saint.

    Let us consider another pair, one of whom became a secular saint, and the other of whom did not. Rosa Parks has achieved secular sainthood through her act of refusing to give up her seat to a White person on a segregated city bus. Yet as we heard in the first reading this morning, Rosa Parks was not the first Black person to refuse to give up her seat on a city bus; Rosa parks was not even the first Black woman to go to jail for refusing to give up her seat. Claudette Colvin, who just died this past week, was one of several Black people who refused to give up their bus seats before Rosa Parks did. Claudette Colvin was fifteen years old when she was arrested, and it is astonishing to think that a high schooler had the courage to risk arrest as a protest against segregation laws. So why did Rosa Parks become a secular saint, but not Claudette Colvin? One answer to that question is that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat as a part of a larger strategy to mount a legal challenge to the segregation laws. Although Claudette Colvin later became one of the plaintiffs in the legal challenge to segregated buses, her refusal was an individual decision made on the spur of the moment. Furthermore, when she was arrested, Colvin was pregnant, which by the standards of the time made her ineffective as a moral exemplar; she also had darker skin than Parks did, which in that place and time would have worked against her. Indeed, her mother reportedly advised her to stay out of the spotlight. None of this diminishes what Claudette Colvin did; but it does help us better understand what makes a secular saint. Both women helped create lasting change by participating in the law suit challenging segregated buses; both women were members of the NAACP, both were already participating in the struggle for civil rights; but because Rosa Parks would be more acceptable to more people, she was the one who became a secular saint.

    Can you see how I’m trying to think critically about secular sainthood? A healthy amount of skepticism allows us to sort through the strengths and weaknesses of our secular saints. By sorting through their strengths and weaknesses, we can make careful judgements about what they did best, and what they might have done better. We can judge that both Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks did something amazing, while at the same time understanding why Rosa Parks got all the publicity. We can judge that both Malcolm X and Dr. King had admirable qualities, while at the same time acknowledging that Dr. King’s philosophy, with his broad vision for united humanity, would be valued by a wider segment of the population.

    We can also use our healthy skepticism to make judgements about individual secular saints. As skeptics, we are pretty sure that no individual human being is infallible — not even secular saints. And so we can acknowledge that it is important to use our judgement as we strive to follow the examples of secular saints. Dr. King allegedly had extra-martial affairs. As healthy skeptics, we can recognize his very real faults and imperfections, while also valuing the good things he did. We do not require uncritical acceptance of our saints; we accept them for who they really were, as complex and fallible human beings, recognizing their faults while valuing their moral accomplishments.

    And now we can consider why we might want to have secular saints at all. I’ve already said that I found secular saints were useful when doing moral education with children. But I think we adults also benefit from having secular saints. I’ll give myself as an example. I’ve already told you about one of the secular saints I was introduced to as a child, Henry Thoreau. As children, mostly what we knew about Thoreau was that he lived in a cabin out at Walden Pond, which seemed like fun; but we also got some small inkling of Thoreau’s principles of simplicity. Then in the summer after my senior year in high school, I actually sat down and read Walden. I found it slow going, but I learned something new: Thoreau was a mystic who found God everywhere, and his notions of simplicity were part and parcel of that vision of God. It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I finally realized that Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond was a station on the Underground Railroad; and it wasn’t until I was middle-aged that I learned how Thoreau was dedicated to his family. As my own moral capacity grew, I was better able to understand Thoreau as a complex moral exemplar.

    A good moral exemplar, someone truly worth emulating, is not going to be a simplistic goody two-shoes one-dimensional figure. Those simplistic figures don’t have to confront difficult moral choices, so there is little to learn from them. When Dr. King is portrayed merely as someone who advocated for Civil Rights for Black people, he is little better than a goody two-shoes. Then when you recall that gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 during a march for jobs, a march that included both Black and White organizers because the issue of jobs is an issue for all races — then Dr. King gains more complexity; then he becomes more worthy of our emulation. Finally, when you realize all his actions were rooted in his deep spiritual practices, he gains further complexity — and he challenges us to deepen our own spiritual practices, so that our own actions are rooted in our own spiritual practices.

    And so you see, finding out about secular saints is not just an intellectual exercise. We can (and should) maintain a healthy skepticism about secular saints. But we also long for people to serve as examples of how our own lives can be more spiritually grounded. Contemplating the lives of secular saints can help go deeper into our own spiritual centers.

    This, in fact, is how we learn to be human: we are taught to be human by the examples of other humans. And part of our moral growth is learning that every human being has flaws, even our moral examples; then if we’re honest with ourselves we admit that we too have flaws, and we can learn how a seep spiritual grounding can help us overcome our own flaws. And so it is that we learn how we can our best possible selves by considering the examples of the best possible humans we know. And this learning continues our whole live, helping our spirits grow ever stronger, and helping our selves to grow into ever greater goodness.