Religion in society – Dan Harper

Religion and Public Education

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

Readings

The first reading was the poem “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes.

The second reading was from the essay “The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy” by John Dewey:

“It is no accident that all democracies have put a high estimate upon education; that schooling has been their first care and enduring charge. Only through education can equality of opportunity be anything more than a phrase. Accidental inequalities of birth, wealth, and learning are always tending to restrict the opportunities of some as compared with those of others. Only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” [John Dewey, Manual Training and Vocational Education (1916)]

Sermon: “Religion and Public Education”

Unitarian Universalism has a long history of being concerned with public education. This begins at least as far back as the work of Horace Mann, a Unitarian who served as Secretary of Education in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century, and did more than anyone to establish the idea of universal, free, non-sectarian public schools as the norm in the United States. Our own congregation was also deeply involved in public education in the mid-nineteenth century; we allowed our then-minister, Joseph Osgood, to serve as the superintendent of the town’s schools while he was serving as minister. Osgood worked tirelessly at the local level for the same goal of universal, free, non-sectarian schools.

The involvement of Unitarians, and to a lesser extent Universalists, in public education continued through the late twentieth century. Many Unitarians became teachers; many Unitarians served on their local school boards; and Unitarians also advocated tirelessly for universal, free, non-sectarian public education at the national and state levels. Our reasons for doing so are fairly straightforward. We Unitarian Universalists believe that public schools are essential for a strong democracy; and we believe in democracy as the governmental system best designed to help us establish a society oriented towards truth and goodness. We are well aware that both democracy and public education are imperfect vehicles for helping to establish a society devoted to truth and goodness. Both democracy and public education can be diverted away from truth and goodness, towards lesser goals like personal gain and power politics. But, to paraphrase the old saying, so far they’re better than any other system anyone has come up with. And public education is essential to democracy because an informed electorate is essential to democracy.

Besides, we Unitarian Universalists are idealists, in the sense that we believe in the perfectibility of humanity. As the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker said, and as Martin Luther King, Jr., later paraphrased, the moral arc of the universe may be long, but it bends towards justice. Thus the reasons why we Unitarian Universalists support public education are fairly straightforward. I’d like to review with you some of our past support for public education, and then I’d like to talk about why we should recommit ourselves to public education.

And by looking back at education in Cohasset, we can see how far we’ve come. Prior to about 1830, those who wanted their children to have more than basic literacy had to pay for their children’s schooling. Younger children paid to attend “dame schools,” often taught by a widow who needed income. For young teens who wanted the equivalent of a high school education, Jacob Flint, minister at First Parish until 1835 and one of the few people in town with a college education, would prepare students for college for a fee. There was also the Academy, a private school organized in 1796 by well-to-do parents who wanted to prepare their children for college. Cohasset finally established a public high school in 1826. At first, the town’s high school was so poorly funded that it shared a teacher with the Academy, and only operated when the Academy was not in session.

Cohasset finally established a school board in 1830, and that committee slowly improved the town’s public education offerings. By 1840, the “dame schools” had mostly given way to publicly funded primary education. It took longer to establish a year-round high school; it wasn’t until 1847 that the town finally provided funding to keep high school open for all year.

When our congregation hired Joseph Osgood as our minister in 1842, we specifically chose him because he had a background in education. According to town historian Victor Bigelow, Joseph Osgood brought about “uniform teaching and systematic promotion in our schools.” Osgood established graded classrooms and regular oversight of teachers. To support his efforts, Osgood could point to the work of Horace Mann. To train teachers, Mann had founded three so-called “normal schools” across the state; one of these normal schools was in Bridgewater (now Bridgewater State University). Mann also published “The Common School Journal,” a periodical filled with practical advice and best practices. No doubt Joseph Osgood read “The Common School Journal,” and (when he could) hired his teacher from the Bridgewater normal school.

Of special interest to us today, given what’s going on in public education elsewhere in the United States, is that both Osgood and Mann believed that publicly funded education should be non-sectarian. This did not mean that Horace Mannn believed that religion should be excluded from the public schools; it only meant that no one denomination or sect should have control over what was taught. In 1848, Mann wrote: “our system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals based on religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible; and, in receiving the Bible, it allows it to do what it is allowed to do in no other system — to speak for itself. But here it stops, not because it claims to have compassed all truth; but because it disclaims to act as an umpire between hostile religious opinions.”(1)

I think Mann was wrong in saying that public schools should be founded on Christian morals. In his own day, there were Jews and freethinkers in Massachusetts who did not wish to have their children inculcated with Christian morals. Even among the Christians of Massachusetts, it proved impossible to find common ground. Roman Catholics felt that Massachusetts public schools taught Protestant Christianity, with the result that they established Catholic parochial schools to provide appropriate schooling for their children; indeed, Catholics sometimes referred to public schools as “Protestant parochial schools.”

Yet although I don’t agree with everything that was done by the mid-nineteenth century educational reformers, people like Horace Mann and Joseph Osgood, I give them credit for greatly extending the reach of free public schools. Here in Cohasset, Joseph Osgood provided leadership to extend the school year, and to open the schools to as many children as possible. Over time, other educational reformers worked to further extend the reach of the public schools, and to further reform the content of public schooling.

One of those reformers was one of my personal heroes, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. A Unitarian and a teacher, Peabody became interested in the education of young children. She traveled to Europe to learn about a new educational approach called kindergarten. Peabody and other educators helped to establish kindergarten as an accepted part of the public school system, extending free schooling down to five-year-olds.

One of the people Elizabeth Palmer Peabody trained was Lucy Wheelock, who went on to found Wheelock College. My mother got her teacher training at Wheelock College while Lucy Wheelock was still active, and thus had a direct connection to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. My mother was both a career schoolteacher and a lifelong Unitarian, and I’d like to use my mother’s example to talk about the connection between mid-twentieth century Unitarians and public education.

Unitarianism in the mid-twentieth century was deeply influenced by the Progressive movement. Please note that what was meant by “Progressive” back then is not what is meant by the adjective “progressive” today. The Progressives of that time (spelled with a capital “P”) wanted to reform human society: they believed in the essential goodness of human beings; they believed in the capacity of human beings to progressively establish a more just and humane society; they believed in the power of reason; they believed in democracy. They differed from today’s progressives (spelled with no capital “P”) in that the older Progressives founded their Progressivism in their liberal religious outlook; by contrast many of today’s progressives either have no religious outlook, or they try to divorce their religious outlook from their politics. I’d even say that the earlier Progressivism was not so much a political movement as it was a religious movement.

The wars and economic disasters of the mid-twentieth century caused many people to abandon Progressivism, to abandon their hope for progressively establishing a more humane and just human society. These other people turned to a grim view of humanity, and a grim view of human society; we can see some of this grimmer outlook in today’s political progressives.

But we Unitarians and the Universalists, and some other liberal religious groups, held on to our belief that human beings are basically good. We held on to our belief that human society can be improved through human effort. My mother was one of that generation of mid-twentieth century Unitarians who believed we could make the world better. Like so many Unitarians of her generation, she and her twin sister both trained to become teachers. This was a classic strategy of Progressivism: to reform the world through education. With their sunny view of human nature, my mother and her twin were drawn to John Dewey’s educational philosophy. Dewey said that it was through public education that we could establish a truly democratic society. Dewey taught that “only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy.”

My mother’s idealism was quickly tested. She got her first job right after the Second World War ended, teaching kindergarten in the public schools in Fort Ticonderoga, New York. In 1946, Fort Ticonderoga was a backwater. At the end of her first year of teaching, the school principal told her that if she wanted to continue teaching in Fort Ticonderoga, she would have to begin to use corporal punishment. This went against my mother’s belief in progressive education. She found another job.

She wound up teaching in the Wilmington, Delaware, public schools when those schools were being desegregated. Once while she was walking down the street with her class, some men drove by and shouted racial slurs because she, a White woman, was holding the hand of a Black kindergartener.(2) The Progressive Unitarian teachers of the mid-twentieth century believed, with John Dewey, that “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” In the 1950s and 1960s, the crisis in democracy centered on racial segregation; and educators and education were the midwives to a very messy birth of equal access to the public schools, all in service of strengthening democracy.

Today, seventy-five years later, we face a different educational crisis, and we Unitarian Universalists are still trying to figure out how to respond. The current presidential administration is in the news this week with their efforts to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education. While this act grabbed the headlines, it’s actually just one event in a longer history of efforts to privatize education. These efforts can be traced in part back to the work of the influential economist Milton Friedman. In 1955, about the time when thugs were shouting racial epithets at my mother, Milton Friedman wrote an essay titled “The Role of Government in Education,” in which he advocated for what he called school choice, based on a voucher system. School choice has been widely adopted both by both political and religious conservatives, and by political and religious liberals. Friedman’s ideas for school choice are rooted in his notion that economic freedom is the crucial freedom that a democracy needs to flourish.

We are in the process of discovering some of the downsides to school choice as promoted by Milton Friedman. School choice policies have encouraged for-profit companies to get involved in education. In theory, this is not a bad thing, but it has led to a definite tendency to establish financial profit as the most important goal of a school, rather than education. School choice also means that one city can see separate schools reflecting the values of a small group of families rather than the wider community. In theory, this is not a bad thing, and indeed Unitarian Universalists have used school choice to establish charter schools that reflect their ideals and values. But this goes against the notion that public schools are where we can learn to live with people who are different from us, an essential skill in a democracy.

At the same time, school choice could be a useful tool for promoting educational reform, because it allows for the testing of innovative ideas. If school vouchers existed in the day of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, perhaps she might have established a charter school to demonstrate that kindergartens really do benefit young children. Similarly, we can imagine John Dewey establishing a charter school, to show that the educational methods he first tried out in the University of Chicago laboratory school could also work in a public school.

And we do face some serious educational problems today. For example, the quality of the schooling a child gets depends a great deal on what city or town they live in. In 2023, the high school graduation rate in Cohasset, where I now live, was 98.3%; in that same year, the high school graduation rate in New Bedford, where I used to live, was 78.6%.(3) Nor can this disparity be explained solely by the per-pupil expenditures; for while Cohasset does spend more, at $23,212.40 per pupil in 2023, New Bedford is not that far behind, at $20,943.37 per pupil in 2023. The reasons behind these educational disparities in Massachusetts are hotly debated, and I’m certainly not qualified to end that debate. My point is simply this: educational reform is still necessary to ensure that all children have equal access to education, and to ensure an informed electorate which is necessary for democracy.

Unitarian Universalists used to see education as a key area where we could make a difference in helping to improve human society. After all, we are one of the top two or three most-educated of all religious groups; thus not only do we place a high value on education ourselves, but our educational attainments mean we should be able to help strengthen the educational system of this country. And as a religious group, we remain committed to education, both as a way to strengthen democracy, and as a way to allow human potential to flourish.

Yet it feels to me as though Unitarian Universalism, as a wider movement, has drifted away from seeing education as a key area where we can make a difference. In the past couple of decades, I’ve heard lots of Unitarian Universalists talk about their commitment to social justice, but I’ve rarely heard a Unitarian Universalist say that their commitment to social justice led them to get elected to their local School Committee, or try to influence state or local policy on education. Similarly, in the past couple of decades, I’ve often heard older Unitarian Universalists encouraging young people to go to college to “get a good job”; much less often have I heard older Unitarian Universalists encouraging young people to go to college so they can become teachers. And in our denominational publications, I read quite a bit about how we should be active in promoting justice, but I don’t read much about the importance of teachers and teaching and education.

Our own congregation is better at seeing education as a central way for us to make a difference. We have quite a few teachers and educators in our congregation, and we honor them and their profession. I’ve listened to older Unitarian Universalists in our congregation encourage young people to follow careers in teaching. A primary part of our mission as a congregation is operating Carriage House Nursery School, a progressive educational institution providing innovation in the area of outdoors education for young children. I should also mention that our congregation provides state-of-the-art comprehensive sexuality education for early adolescents and a week-long ecology day camp; these are both small programs, but they fill an educational need here in Cohasset.

In these and other ways, we’re continuing Joseph Osgood’s legacy. We still consider teaching and education to be a central part of our purpose; we still consider teaching and education to be a central part of how we contribute to the betterment of human society. It might be worth our while to be a little more forthcoming about taking credit for all the ways our congregation supports public education, supports early education, supports teachers, supports other kinds of education — and for us to be a little more forthcoming in taking credit for the way we are thus supporting and strengthening democracy.

Notes

(1) Horace Mann, Life and Works of Horace Mann, vol. III, ed. Mary Mann, “Annual Report on Education for 1848,” pp. 729-730.
(2) I don’t know when exactly this took place. My mother left Wilmington, Del., c. 1956; I can’t find out when primary schools were desegregated. One source I consulted said that desegregation didn’t occur until after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling; see: Matthew Albright, “Wilmington has long, messy education history”, The [Wilmington, Del.] News Journal, 10 June 2016 accessed 22 March 2025 https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/education/2016/06/10/wilmington-education-history/85602856/
(3) The Massachusetts Department of Education has a website where you can compare educational outcomes between school districts: go to the “DESE Directory of Datasets and Reports” webpage, click on “School and district performance summaries.” https://www.mass.gov/info-details/dese-directory-of-datasets-and-reports#school-and-district-performance-and-indicators-

World Peace

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

Readings

The first reading was a short excerpt from the poem “Jerusalem” by Naomi Shihab Nye:

I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.

The second reading was from a poem titled “Poem” by Muriel Rukeyser:

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons….
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,…
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace….

The third reading was from the poem “Making Peace” by Denise Levertov:

…peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.

Sermon: “World Peace”

When I was in my teens and early twenties, a fellow by the name of Dana Greeley was the minister of my Unitarian Universalist church, and he used to preach regularly about world peace. He had been a pacifist since before the Second World War, not only because violence was wrong but also because war could not solve the problems it was supposed to solve. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, he became opposed to war for yet another reason: once atomic weapons became available, then war had the potential wipe out the entire human race. So as I recall it, Greeley had three good reasons to reject war: on moral grounds, because violence was wrong; and on pragmatic grounds, both because it could not obtain its stated objectives, and because it threatened all human existence.

I was convinced by these arguments, and became a pacifist myself. I was convinced to the point that I even registered with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, a Quaker group, just in case the draft was reinstated. But I must admit I was not entirely convinced by Greeley’s vision for what a peaceful world might look like. Greeley was an internationalist and a strong supporter of the United Nations. The United Nations offered a concrete vision of international cooperation that was especially compelling to those who lived through the Second World War. However, I think that while people in my age cohort found the humanitarian mission of the United Nations compelling, what we saw of the Vietnam War decreased our confidence in the ability of the United Nations to end war.

Put it this way: Yes, of course there should be an international community, and of course that community should promote international cooperation in areas like public health and economic development. But what does a peaceful world look like? It’s not enough to say: a peaceful world is a world without war. That’s a vision that’s essentially negative. But what are the positive aspects of a peaceful world? There must be more to a peaceful world than merely the absence of war.

This reminds me of an old Chinese story that presents a vision of a peaceful world. The story of “Peach Blossom Spring,” first told by Tao Yuan-ming, tries to answer the question: How are we to build the kind of peaceful community we long for? I’m going to retell this story for you using the 1894 translation by Herbert Giles.

In the year 390 or thereabouts, when the north of China had been conquered by the Mongol invaders from central Asia, and refugees from the invasion filled the south, there lived a fisherman in the village of Wu-ling. This was during the Qin dynasty. The Qin emperors were powerful, and while some people said they did what had to be done in troubled times, there were others who said that government officials were vain and greedy, and did not have the interests of the ordinary people at heart. (How often do we hear the same complaint, even in our own day!)

To get back to the fisherman of Wu-ling:

One day, while out on the river, this fisherman decided to follow the river upstream. At one point, he came to a place where the river branched, taking the right or left branch without paying attention to where he was going. Suddenly he rounded a bend in the river and came upon a grove of peach-trees in full bloom. The blossoming trees grew close along the banks of the river for as far as he could see. The fisherman was filled with joy and astonishment at the beauty of the scene and the delightful perfume of the flowers. He continued upstream, to see how far along the river these trees grew.

When at last he came to the end of the peach trees, the river was scarcely bigger than a stream, and then it suddenly ended at a line of steep hills. There where the river began, the fisherman saw a cave in the side of the hill, and a faint light came from within it. He tied up his boat to a tree, and crept in through the narrow entrance.

He emerged into a world of level country, with fine houses, rich fields, beautiful pools, and luxuriant mulberry and bamboo. He saw roads running north and south, carrying many people on foot and in carts. He could hear the sounds of crowing cocks and barking dogs around him. He noticed that the dress of the people who passed along or were at work in the fields was of a strange cut. He also saw that everyone, young and old, appeared to be happy and content.

One of the people caught sight of the fisherman, and expressed great astonishment. When this person learned whence the fisherman had come, he took him home, cooking a chicken for him and offering him some wine to drink. Before long, all the people of the place came to see the fisherman, this visitor from afar.

The people of the village told the fisherman that several centuries ago, during troubled times, their ancestors had sought refuge here. Over time, the way back to the wider world had been cut off, and they had lost touch with the rest of the human race.

They asked the fisherman about the current politics in the outside world. They were amazed to learn of new dynasty that ruled the land. And when the fishermen told them of the Mongol invasions, they grieved over the vicissitudes of human affairs.

Then each family of the village invited the fisherman to their home in turn, each family offering him hospitality. He saw that this was truly a land of peacefulness and contentment. But at last, the fisherman longed to return to his own family, and he prepared to take his leave. As he said his farewells and began to make his way back to his boat, the people said to him, “It will not be worth while to talk about what you have seen to the outside world.”

But of course the fisherman hoped to return to that lovely peaceful land. He made mental notes of his route as he proceeded on his homeward voyage. When at last he reached home, he at once went and reported what he had seen to the ruling magistrate of the district. The magistrate, greatly interested, sent off men to help him find the way back to this unknown region of peace and plenty. But, try as he might, the fisherman was never able to find it again. Later, a famous adventurer attempted to find the land of Peach Blossom Spring, but he also failed, and died soon afterwards of humiliation. From that time on, no further attempts were made.

The story of “Peach Blossom Spring” is a Utopian story. And in fact, the Chinese name of the story, Táohuā Yuán Jì, has come to mean much the same thing as our English word Utopia: a place of perfection that doesn’t really exist.

We can find versions of the Paech Blossom Spring story in our own time. When you hear people who want to go back to a simpler time, they’re looking for a land that’s stuck in the past, just like the land the land the fisherman found. Or when you hear people who don’t like the current political administration say that they’re going to emigrate to another country, they’re actually looking for a land like the fisherman found, removed from the real world.

Utopian fantasies have become our primary means of expressing our vision for a peaceful world. I consider this to be unfortunate, because we know that Utopian visions are impractical and can’t come true. Utopias can only exist if they are completely cut off from the rest of the world, but this is impossible in an interdependent world. A Utopian vision for the world is a dead end.

Yet we are still liable to fall under the spell of utopian visions. Many people in our own time fall under the spell of religious Utopian visions. So, for example, the Christian vision of heaven can function as a kind of Utopia: you can only reach heaven after you die, and you can only reach heaven if you’re extraordinarily good or lucky; this kind of vision of heaven neither pragmatic nor fair the vast majority of humanity. Our Universalist forebears rejected this conception of a Utopian heaven, saying that everyone gets to go to heaven, and also saying that the only hell was the one we humans created here on earth. Thus our Universalist forebears conclude that it’s up to us to fix the problems in this world, to create a Utopia in the here and now. I agree with our Universalist forebears, but this still leaves open the question of what is a positive vision for the world we’re trying to create.

I don’t think that any one person can provide us with a perfect vision for a peaceful world. That vision can only emerge through communal endeavor. And I suspect when a compelling vision for a peaceful world emerges, it will be far less grand that either the United Nations or Peach Blossom Spring. I think it far more likely that we will find a truly compelling vision for a peaceful world in the mundane details of life. So if we’re going to look for compelling visions for a peaceful world, we might do well to begin with images like the one offered by Joy Harjo in her poem titled “Perhaps the World Ends Here”:

[This copyrighted poem is online here.]

Of course if we’re not careful, even this prosaic vision can seem a bit Utopian. Anyone who knows anything about domestic violence, for example, knows that a kitchen table can be a place of fear and even violence. But the poet acknowledges this when she says that the kitchen table “is a place to hide in the shadow of terror.” There will be violence even in a peaceful world; but perhaps the difference is that the existence of violence will be recognized, and instead of being glorified it will be addressed openly.

I see one big barrier to a widespread adoption of this particular vision for a peaceful world. Joy Harjo’s vision of the peaceful kitchen table owes a great deal to her roots as an enrolled citizen of Muscogee Nation. That is to say, hers is not a vision of the individualistic suburban American nuclear family, but rather a vision of peace rooted in the human connection of extended family and supportive wider community. This is not a vision of life as portrayed on a picture postcard, but rather life as it really is, messy and complicated, but also filled with love and connection.

This makes the image of the kitchen table compelling to me. The kitchen table in the poem is messy: babies teethe at the corners, so at the very least it’s a table covered with baby drool. The kitchen table in the poem is also the place where people put themselves back together after having fallen down. That is to say, the kitchen table in the poem is not some kind of Utopia. But at the same time, it is a place where you can find support when life gets difficult; it can be a place of joy and of triumph; it can be a place to give thanks. It is a human-scaled vision, and a vision grounded in human connection.

I think if we’re going to envision a peaceful world — not as the absence of war, but as something positive — we need to include in our vision the importance of human connection. Not some abstract connection, but the connection that can happen around a kitchen table. If we’re going to envision a peaceful world, we need to include all the messy complexities of human life. It’s not enough to have some big abstract vision, we need a vision that includes teething babies, and drinking coffee, and raising children, and preparing and eating meals together.

Actually, this sounds a bit like what we’re trying to do here in our congregational community. God knows, we are not perfect. But we try to be a community rooted in human connection. I might wish we had some teething babies, but we are a place where people can put themselves back together after having fallen down. We do give children instructions on what it means to be human. We do sing with both joy and sorrow, we do pray with both suffering and remorse. And we do give thanks. Probably the most important thing we do is to give thanks that we are here, and that we have the strength and the ability to make this world just a little bit better.

Our Civil Religion

Readings

The first reading is from sociologist Robert Bellah’s article titled “Civil Religion in America,” first published in the journal Daedalus in 1967:

“The words and acts of the founding fathers, especially the first few presidents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion [of the United States] as it has been maintained ever since. Though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity. For one thing, neither Washington nor Adams nor Jefferson mentions Christ in his inaugural address; nor do any of the subsequent presidents, although not one of them fails to mention God. The God of civil religion is not only rather ‘unitarian,’ he is also on the austere side, much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love. Even though he is somewhat deist in cast, he is by no means simply a watchmaker God. He is actively interested and involved in history, with a special concern from America. Here the analogy has much less to do with natural law than with ancient Israel; the equation of America with Israel in the idea of the ‘American Israel’ is not infrequent. What was implicit in the words of Washington [in his inaugural address] becomes explicit in Jefferson’s second inaugural when he said: ‘I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.’ Europe is Egypt; America, the promised land. God has led his people to establish a new sort of social order that shall be a light unto all nations.”

The second reading is from an interview with the philosopher Jonardon Ganeri, in the recent book Talking God: Philosophers on Belief:

“Taking Christianity as the exemplar of religion skews philosophical discussion towards attempts to solve, resolve, or dissolve difficult philosophical puzzles inherent in monotheism: problems about God’s powers, goodness, and knowledge; attempts to provide rational arguments for God’s existence; the problem of evil; and so on. Hindu philosophers have traditionally been far more interested in a quite different array of problems, especially questions about the nature of religious knowledge and religious language, initially arising from their concerns with the Veda as a sacred eternal text and as a source of ritual and moral law…. Some of the more important Hindu philosophers are atheists, arguing that no sacred religious text such as the Veda could be the word of God, since authorship, even divine authorship, implies the possibility of error. Whether believed in or not, a personal god does not figure prominently as the source of the divine, and instead nontheistic concepts of the divine prevail.”

Sermon: Our Civil Religion

The subject for this morning is civil religion in the United States. Our U.S. civil religion has been explored by scholars going back to 1967 when sociologist Robert N. Bellah published an article on the topic. While talking about our American civil religion is nothing new, at the same time in the current political situation it’s also very much of the moment.

I do have to admit, however, that not everyone agrees that the United States has a civil religion. Conservative Protestant Christians, for example, are often uncomfortable with the notion that our country has a civil religion, for at least two reasons. First, the U.S. civil religion does not fit into their definition of religion, because our civil religion does not center on belief. On the contrary, U.S. civil religion centers of performance of rituals rather than belief. Second, conservative Protestant Christians are quite certain that a person can only have one religious commitment. For this reason, they deny that a civil religion exists; and then they conflate their performance of the religious rituals of U.S. civil religion with their conservative Protestant Christianity. As a result, conservative American Protestantism sometimes becomes a mash-up of Protestant Christianity and U.S. civil religion; using the technical term, it is a “syncretic religion.”

By the way, it can be controversial to point out the fact that U.S. civil religion is different from Christianity. Robert Bellah points out that “from the earliest years of the nineteenth century, conservative religious and political group have argued that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion.” (1) Yet even though conservative Christians find this controversial, it’s important for us to see clearly that an American civil religion actually does exist — and further, it’s also critically important to see clearly that the American civil religion is not Christianity

So that we can see more clearly, let’s admit that (all too often) we Unitarian Universalists default to the conservative Protestant Christian definition of religion. All too often, we just assume that a person can only have one religion at a time; that religion centers on belief in a transcendent deity; that the purpose of religion is salvation; that religion is entirely a personal matter; that every religion must have a single sacred text like the Bible. Of course, by this standard, Unitarian Universalism would not be a religion, because we don’t require belief in a deity, we don’t mind if you follow more than one religious path, we don’t have a founding figure, and we’re pretty loose about what constitutes a sacred text. We should know better: the conservative American Christian definition of religion does not work. To be blunt, it is just plain wrong.

So let’s put that definition of religion aside. And to better understand our current U.S. civil religion, let’s take a look at ancient Rome. The religions of ancient Rome can teach us a lot about the religions in our society today.

Ancient Rome was a multicultural society, somewhat similar to the way the United States is a multicultural society. Many different religious sects flourished throughout the Roman Empire, sects like the Eleusinian mystery religion in Greece, the religion centered around Isis in Egypt, Judaism in Judea, and so on. A person could join any of these religions, but that person would also be expected to participate in the rituals of the Roman state cult. The Roman state cult provided a measure of social cohesion across the vast empire, with an elaborate calendar of ritual events. Everyone in society had a part to play in the various ceremonies and festivals and sacrifices. Ancient Rome even had sports events as part of the Roman state cult — the Taurean Games, which helped propitiate the deities of the underworld.

In ancient Rome, Judaism was notable because it was perhaps the only group whose adherents were not required to participate in the ritual sacrifices of the state cult. Admittedly, a few emperors sometimes forgot that the Jews were exempt; so for example, the mad emperor Caligula, who had gotten the Senate to deify him, threatened to place a statue of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem. When the Christians came along, as an offshoot of Judaism they tried to piggy-back on this exemption from the state cult, but got thrown to the lions instead. Thus, with the occasional exception of the Jews, it didn’t matter what other religion you practiced, you had to participate in the state cult of the Roman Empire, or face the consequences.

I think you can begin to see the parallels between the ancient Roman state cult, and today’s U.S. civil religion; although there were also significant differences. Like the ancient Romans, our civil religion has a calendar of events. The high holiday of this calendar is Independence Day, the fourth of July, which is widely celebrated with fireworks, barbeques, and other standardized rituals. Unlike the ancient Romans, you don’t have to go to a barbeque or watch the fireworks, but at some point in our lives most Americans do participate in these rituals. The rest of the yearly calendar is filled with lesser holidays and their associated rituals: Memorial Day parades, commemorations of 9/11, Martin Luther King Day celebrations, and so on.

Just as the ancient Romans integrated sports into their state cult, so too are sports an integral part of our U.S. civil religion. Every sports event in the U.S. includes an important ritual from our state cult, the playing of the Star Spangled Banner during which everyone is supposed to stand. When we understand this is a religious ritual, we can understand why there was such a strong reaction when Colin Kaepernick (KAP er nik) took a knee during the Star Spangled Banner. By refusing to participate in a ritual of the state cult, Kaepernick was was actually emulating what the ancient Christians did; and while the lions he got thrown to were metaphorical, he was still thrown to the lions. Interestingly, many conservative Christians didn’t understand how his action was somewhat analogous to the ancient Christian martyrs.

Another feature of our U.S. civil religion is that we deify our presidents. When I say “deify,” there’s a tendency to confuse that with the Christian idea of the relationship between Jesus and God-the-Father. But deification in ancient Rome was something quite different. When Caesar Augustus died, the Roman Senate voted to deify him — that is, human beings could turn another human being into a god through a legislative act. Once Augustus was voted a deity, then he became part of the Roman pantheon, the government built temples to him and staffed those temples, and his name was invoked on a regular basis in political rhetoric. In U.S. civil religion, we have a similar process with some of our past presidents. Consider Abraham Lincoln for example. His birthday was made a holiday through a legislative act; his portrait was placed on coinage; the government built a temple to him which we call the Lincoln Memorial; and Lincoln’s temple is staffed, not with priests, but with uniformed National Park Service members. Once you understand that Lincoln is analogous to those deified emperors of ancient Rome, you can better understand the bitter reaction to two initiatives of the current presidential administration: the proposal to do away with the penny means doing away with the deified Lincoln’s portrait on our coinage; and cutting National Park Service staff means cutting the uniformed priesthood that cares for the Memorial.

This also helps us understand why the Trump administration was so upset about the flags flying at half staff for Jimmy Carter during the Trump inauguration. In the last hundred years, every president has received some level of deification upon his death; at a minimum, that deification involves U.S. flags being flown at half staff for a month. But Donald Trump and his followers have begun to sound a little too much like the ancient Roman emperor Caligula and his followers; Caligula and his followers decided to deify him before his death, not after. Increasingly over the past two decades, our presidents and their followers have been trying to deify them before they’re dead. As an independent, belonging neither to the Democratic nor the Republican party, I find this concerning. Barack Obama and Donald Trump are well on their respective paths to deification, and I don’t think either one of them deserves it. While they are each human beings with strengths and weaknesses, in my view neither one is worthy of deification — and I make that last statement with a certain amount of trepidation, knowing that statement will anger their respective followers. It’s almost as if our American civil religion has been torn apart into competing subsects.

In 1976, a decade after he proposed the idea of a U.S. civil religion, Robert Bellah wrote that our civil religion was at that time in disarray. He wrote: “The legitimacy and authority of all our institutions, political, economic, educational, even familial, as well as religious, has never been shakier.” (2) Civil religion was one of those institutions whose legitimacy and authority was called into question. And when the country as a whole drew back from American civil religion, the conservative Christian view — that Christianity is the state religion — won by default.

Yet, as Bellah pointed out in 2002, a broader civil religion can serves an important unifying function: “Without some degree of ethical and religious consensus [Bellah said], the burden of social coherence must rest entirely on economic, political, and military structures — just the structures that our highly individualist society most abhors. Religious individualism, then, leads to a purely secular society which can be held together only by external coercion. [This is] a contradiction indeed.” (3)

Bellah wrote that in 2002, and it seems to me that we are still facing that same contradiction nearly a quarter of a century later. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have been able to propose any unifying ethical and religious consensus; nor has our one lone socialist, Bernie Sanders. Increasingly, our social coherence rests on external coercion through economic, political, and military structures.

It is tempting to point fingers of blame, and say that the other political party is at fault for destroying social cohesion. The Republicans point the finger of blame at the Democrats, accusing them of destroying social cohesion by attacking marriage and the family, killing unborn babies, and the like — and if you think my rhetoric sounds outrageous, I’m actually toning it down from what I’ve heard in public discourse. For their part, the Democrats point the finger of blame at the Republicans, accusing them of destroying social cohesion by wanting to reinstate slavery and subjugate women and go back to the Stone Age — again, for the sake of this sermon, I’m toing down the rhetoric as we actually hear it in the public square.

So what happens when American civil religion breaks down? When we can no longer promote social cohesion through the relatively benign means of American civil religion, then people start trying to promote social cohesion through external coercion. Yet for us Americans, external coercion is a form of social cohesion we find abhorrent. When the Republicans talk about “owning the libs,” that’s a mild form of external coercion. When the Democrats talk about how only stupid people could vote for Trump, that’s a mild form of external coercion. Both these forms of social coercion strike at the roots of our cherished ideal of valuing the individual.

We Unitarian Universalists, as a matter of religious principle, place a high value on the individual. We are still followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spent eight years as a Unitarian minister before transitioning to a full-time career as a writer. In his essay on Self-Reliance, Emerson taught us to value the powers of the individual, and to appreciate both personal responsibility and the right to not conform to societal expectations. Emerson’s protege Henry David Thoreau, a Unitarian for the first two decades of his life, promoted individualism in his famous essay on civil disobedience, in which he taught that individuals must heed the promptings of higher principles. The teachings of both Emerson and Thoreau lie at the core of who we are as Unitarian Universalists: we place the highest value on the worthiness and dignity of individual persons, and we do not like external coercion in any form.

Because we don’t like coercion — and because we value the individual — I would suggest that we may want to revisit our attitude towards the U.S. civil religion. Over the past few decades, we Unitarian Universalists have been inclined to remove examples of American civil religion from Unitarian Universalism. For example, the last two hymnals published by the Unitarian Universalists Association removed all the patriotic hymns that we used to sing — including the removal of “My Country Tis of Thee,” in the absence of which some of Martin Luther King’s sermons lose their meaning. There have been very good reasons for every action where we’ve removed ourselves from American civil religion. But the effect of all those actions has been that we’ve participated in the erosion of “ethical and religious consensus” in the United States. As a result, we’ve helped to create a climate where some form of external coercion is increasingly required to maintain social cohesion.

Now because we Unitarian Universalists value individualism so highly, I’m not going to try to tell you what to do. But I’d like to suggest that it would be beneficial for us Unitarian Universalists to re-engage with American civil religion. And in fact, our congregation has been re-engaging with American civil religion over the past few years. We’ve been flying both the United States flag and the Progress Pride flag outside the Meetinghouse (at least, we were flying those two flags alternately until one of this winter’s wind storms broke the flagstaff). Here inside the Meetinghouse, a committee consisting of Bill Baird and Rory Toyoshima recommended moving the U.S. flag down from the gallery to the main floor of the Meetinghouse, and now we display the U.S. flag along with the progress pride flag, the African American national flag, the state flag, and the United Nations flag. Holly Harris and I have started an annual tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence here in the Meetinghouse on the Sunday before Independence Day. In each of these small acts, we as a congregation have re-engaged with the U.S. civil religion, while putting out own interpretation on it.

I hope that none of these small actions is perceived as being in any way coercive of your rights as an individual. This is part of our interpretation of the U.S. civil religion. No one is going to tell you what to believe. No one is telling you that you have to participate in any ritual that you don’t want to participate in. And if you are sincerely opposed to any of the actions of the U.S. government, we will uphold your right — no, your responsibility — to engage in civil disobedience if your conscience calls upon you to do so.

But our small actions — things like flying a U.S. flag in front of the Meetinghouse — can signal that we as a religious community are equal participants in American civil religion. And if we can manage our own strong feelings that have been bubbling up because of the current political situation, we are actually well placed to provide powerful spiritual leadership to help this country find common ground. We can present an expansive vision of those famous words from the Declaration of Independence: “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.” And we can do this without requiring belief in unbelievable things, without having to deify presidents; and also without having to demonize presidents, for as Unitarian Universalists we know that presidents are neither gods nor demons, but merely fallible human beings.

Will we convince everyone of our expansive vision of the Declaration of Independence? No, not everyone. But I believe the vast majority of Americans actually do share this vision. And this is a shared vision that could promote social cohesion without external coercion, allowing us to work together as a nation once again.

Notes

(1) Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus, Winter, 1967, vol. 96 no. 1, Religion in America (Winter, 1967), footnote 1.
(2) Robert N. Bellah, “The Revolution and Civil Religion,” in Religion and the American Revolution, ed. Jerald C. Brauer (Fortress Press, 1976).
(3) Robert N. Bellah, “New-time Religion,” The Christian Century, May 22-26, 2002, pp. 20-26.