humanism – Page 2 – Dan Harper

Humanism in Our Time

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Readings

First reading — “Gods” by Langston Hughes

“The ivory gods,
And the ebony gods,
And the gods of diamond and jade,
Sit silently on their temple shelves
While the people
Are afraid.
Yet the ivory gods,
And the ebony gods,
And the gods of diamond-jade,
Are only silly puppet gods
That the people themselves
Have made.”

…

Second reading — Margaret Atwood, “In the Secular Night” from her book Morning in the Burned House (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p. 6.

Sermon

This morning, I’d like to speak with you about humanism. Humanism is a religious system that does not require a belief in God. In my opinion, humanism has been the most influential thought system in Unitarian Universalism over the past century. This is not to say that all of us Unitarian Universalists are humanists — although about 45 per cent of us are — but the simple fact that many Unitarian Universalists don’t feel the need to believe in God, nor to accept any divine or supernatural agency whatsoever, has, I believe, helped keep us from drifting into rigidity of thought, and has contributed in other ways to the overall health of Unitarian Universalism.

I suppose I had better define humanism before we go any farther. Although humanism does not ask any belief in God, it is not the same as atheism. Atheism tends to be defined by what it rejects — it rejects a supernatural God — whereas humanism tends to be defined by what it affirms — the boundless potential of human life. Nor is humanism the same as the rejection of religion; the people who reject religion generally don’t come to church, whereas there are plenty of humanists in our churches.

I’d say the defining characteristic of humanism is this: humanism places human beings at the center of religion. Humanists don’t place God at the center of religion — indeed, most of the humanists I know don’t pay much attention to God, and many humanists would simply reject the whole notion of God. What humanists want to do is to make sure that religion is centered around human beings. In so doing, the humanists have helped us in our work for justice and liberation; they have changed the way we provide comfort to one another; and they have helped us better understand what it means to be a part of a religious community. Let’s take a look at each of these three humanist contributions.

I/ And let’s start with justice and liberation. Originally, Western religion taught us that the reason we should be nice to one another is because the Bible says so, and the Bible says so because God says so, and if we follow God’s plan everything will be fine. But during the twentieth century, some people began to question whether God had a good plan for humanity.

When I was young, my parents were friends with a couple who had escaped Germany during the 1930s; they had been born Jewish, and as the Nazis came to power they knew they couldn’t survive in Germany. By the time I knew them, they refused to have anything to do with religion. I remember one of them asking how anyone could believe in God, since to believe in God meant believing in a God who would allow millions of Jews to be slaughtered in concentration camps. How could the horrors of the Holocaust be a part of God’s plan?

And then there’s the racism endemic in the United States. When you look at the horrors of racism — shortened life spans, violence against people of color, an inordinate quantity of environmental problems located within communities of color, and so on — how could all this be part of the plan of a supposedly good God?

Back in 1971, Dr. William R. Jones wrote a book titled, “Is God a White Racist?” Dr. Jones, an African American humanist theologian who also happens to be a Unitarian Universalist minister, had a subtle answer to the question posed in this title. He said that if we believe in a God-centered religion, then God must be a white racist because God allows the evil of racism to continue unchecked. But, says Jones, there’s another possibility, which is to have a human-centered religion where we take responsibility for fighting the evils of the world. The real divide is not between those who believe in God and those who don’t believe in God — Dr. Jones says that the real divide is between the people who have a God-centered religion, and the rest of us who know that we have to go out there and do the hard work of making the world a better place. So it is that Dr. Jones outlined one of the most important aspects of humanism: that human beings must take responsibility for their own destinies.

You probably know the old joke about the fellow who is trapped in a flood. As the flood waters cover the street in front of his house, he lifts his eyes up to heaven and prays to God to get him out of the flood. Just then, a police officer drives by and asks him if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, he tells her, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, the flood waters keep rising until he has to move up into the second story of his house to stay dry, and just then some guy comes by in a boat and asks the man if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, says the man, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, the flood waters keep rising, and finally the man is up on the roof of his house. Just then, a woman in a balloon comes floating by and asks the man if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, says the man, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, finally the flood waters rise up so high that the man is perched on top of the chimney of his house. He looks up into the sky and says, God, what’s the matter? I prayed to you to save me. And this big booming voice comes out of the sky saying, Look, pal, I sent you a car, then I sent you a boat, and finally I sent you a balloon, what more do you want?

This old joke gives us a basic humanist truth: that whether or not we believe in God, we human beings have to take charge of our own destinies. Humanists teach us that if you believe in God, you don’t wait around for some miraculous divine act to make the world a better place — you take the initiative yourself, and when your street is flooded and that police officer drives by, you get in her car and drive safely to higher ground.

Notice that someone who believes in a human-centered God acts almost exactly the same way that a humanist would act. The only difference is that the humanist wouldn’t bother to pray to God in the first place. But the end result is that same: whether we’re trying to escape from a flood — or trying to end racism, for that matter — it’s up to us to take action to make the world a better place.

II/ Because humanism challenges the orthodox notions about God, humanism can also be a comfort to those of us who do not experience religion the way the orthodox tell us we’re supposed to experience religion. Let me give you an example from my life, not because I think I’m particularly interesting, but because I think it’s a representative example.

For the last eight years of her life, my mother had supra-nuclear palsy, a particularly aggressive form of Parkinson’s disease that typically kills you in less than a decade. This disease led to all kinds of other problems, and at one point about three years before she died there was a time when she was in the hospital, and I was scared. I remember going to visit her in the hospital, and then going out to take a long walk along this road near the hospital. While I was walking, I decided to try prayer:– why not? I was a Unitarian Universalist, and prayer has long been one of our central spiritual practices, and I felt I needed some kind of spiritual practice to get me through that time.

So I started praying. Mind you, I wasn’t praying to ask God to somehow miraculously heal my mother, because I knew that ultimately wasn’t possible; rather, I was praying as a way to try to connect with something larger than myself, in order that I might find some peace, some relief from being scared and sad. I gave it my best shot, but praying did absolutely nothing for me. So I stopped praying. Eventually, I took my cue from those great Unitarians Emerson and Thoreau, and found a healing spiritual practice in spending time outdoors in Nature. After my mother finally died, I spent a lot of time walking and canoeing and fishing — and it was that non-traditional spiritual practice, the spiritual practice of spending time outdoors in Nature, rather than praying to God, that comforted me and helped me through my grief.

One of the greatest gifts humanism has given to us has been to show us that spiritual comfort does not require belief in the traditional Christian God, nor does spiritual comfort require participating in the traditional Christian spiritual practices such as prayer. The humanists have shown us that spiritual comfort is, above all, a human phenomenon; and because individual human beings differ from one another, because different human cultures differ greatly from one another, it is therefore obvious that each individual human being may have different spiritual needs, and may find spiritual comfort in different ways. I know many people who find great comfort in praying; I know many of you find great comfort in praying; but some of us happen to be made up differently, and we find our spiritual comfort in non-traditional ways. By emphasizing the human dimension of spiritual practices, humanists have relieved all us of feeling inadequate if it should happen that we don’t find comfort in traditional spiritual practices.

III/ Next I’d like to consider how it is that humanism has strengthened our local Unitarian Universalist churches, strengthened our local religious communities. Most Christian churches are united around beliefs: if you believe certain things about God, then you belong in a certain kind of church. But thanks to the humanists we Unitarian Universalists know we don’t have to believe in God at all, and this strengthens our conviction that we can find unity without adhering to any specific set of beliefs about God.

Because we are not united by a specific set of beliefs about God, we rely on something else to hold us together in religious community: we are held together by the idea of covenant, that is, by a set of promises that we make to one another about how we are going to treat each other. Another way to say this is to say that we can be held accountable to one another for our behavior. You can’t be a Unitarian Universalist just because you have some specific set of beliefs — you become a Unitarian Universalist when you make a commitment to a religious community that you will live your religion by treating other people with the same dignity and respect that you yourself deserve.

I believe humanists have helped us to realize that we can not only hold each other accountable for our behavior — but logically speaking, those of us who believe in God can also hold God accountable for God’s behavior. It’s like the old joke:

A woman goes down to the beach with her grandson. The little boy is playing in the waves when suddenly a huge wave comes out of nowhere and swallows up the little boy and drags him out into deep water. The woman stand for a moment in shock, watching where her little grandson was playing. She can’t swim, he’s completely disappeared anyway, what else can she do but pray to God. So this is what she does, she prays to God to return her grandson. Nothing happens, but the woman is absolutely insistent, she refuses to give up. Nothing happens, but she just prays louder. Finally, this voice comes down from heaven, saying, “All right, enough already, here’s your grandson back.” Out of nowhere, a wave comes, crashes on the beach, and there’s her grandson, completely unhurt, although he looks pretty wet, dirty, and disheveled. The woman look up to where the voice came from and says, “He had a hat.”

OK, so this is just a joke, but it seems to me that there’s some deep truth in this joke. If there is a God, it is completely unjust for that God to take the life of an innocent young boy playing on the beach. And if all that is true, then when the grandmother prays to God to correct this injustice, the boy should be fully restored to her; even if his hat is missing, it is not good enough. The woman in this joke holds God accountable to the highest ideals of religion; just as Prometheus holds the gods accountable.

Do you remember the ancient Greek story of Prometheus? — it is a favorite story of many humanists. Prometheus was the fellow who stole fire from the Greek gods and brought it down to humankind, so that human beings could live better lives. For his disobedience, of course, the gods punished Prometheus; but humankind got to keep the knowledge of making fire. Once Prometheus had given fire to humankind, the gods realized that they could not take fire away from humankind, they couldn’t take away fire which relieved so much human suffering; for if they took away fire, then the gods would be shown to be cruel and heartless. In this way, Prometheus held the gods accountable to their highest ideals.

It is in this way that humanists uphold rebellion as a key religious value. Humanist rebellion is not a blind, destructive, striking-out at authority; humanist rebellion is carefully calculated to build community by holding ourselves and others to the highest ideals of humanity.

Rebellion for the sake of rebellion is a waste of time. But rebellion for the sake of upholding the highest ideals of humanity:– this was the life work of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is the kind of rebellion that we need in our religious communities:– a rebellion that never settles for good enough, a rebellion that is willing to take on sacred cows, a rebellion that holds us accountable to the highest ethical standards. Humanism reminds us: religious belief is useless if you don’t live out your religious beliefs in the real world; and humanists suggest to us that belief should be a lower priority than making the world a better place.

Before I end I do want to acknowledge that humanism is capable of its own excesses. In some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations I have seen a phenomenon I call “humanist fundamentalism,” where no one is allowed to believe in God, or even use the word “God” in a worship service. Some of these humanist fundamentalists, just like Christian fundamentalists, can be annoying and oppressive.

However, unlike other kinds of fundamentalism, and unlike plain old atheism, humanism contains its own corrective to “humanist fundamentalism.” In its highest and best form, humanism cares little about what others believe, while it cares deeply about making this present world a better place to live. The best humanists don’t care so much you may or may not believe, but they do care about bringing out the best of humanity in each one of us.

Humanists remind us to place human beings at the center of religion, humanists remind us to uphold the highest ideals of humankind. By downplaying the importance of belief in God (or disbelief in God), humanists help all religious people to stay focused on what is most important about religion: that religion should be focused on human beings. When we remember to keep religion focused on human beings, thus helps us to create healthy religious communities in which we are accountable to one another; it helps us in our work for justice and liberation; it helps us to provide spiritual comfort to one another, and spiritual comfort to ourselves. So it is that religion be a gift and a pleasure to us, to help us to spread the light of love throughout the world.

Which Black Church?

Story — “The Lowells and Oatmeal” — as told by Helen Cohen

This is a little story about change and learning new ways of doing things.

It was 7:30 in the morning, by the grandfather clock at the Lowell household. Judge John Lowell had come to the table for breakfast.

Judge Lowell sat with a newspaper up in front of his face, as he had done at breakfast every morning for the past thirty years. All of a sudden, from the pantry, the maid came rushing inn to whisper something in Mrs. Lowell’s ear. It was clearly bad news!

The maid had burned the oatmeal! And there was no more oatmeal in the house! Mrs. Lowell thought for a moment. She said to herself, Well, I must tell him right away.

So she turned to Judge Lowell and said, “John, my dear. There isn’t going to be any oatmeal this morning.”

Now this was no minor domestic tragedy. Because, to Mrs. Lowell’s knowledge, Judge Lowell had eaten oatmeal for breakfast every morning of his life.

The silence was deafening.

Slowly the judge lowered his newspaper.

He looked at his wife, and he replied, “Frankly, my dear, I never did care for it.”

If you are someone who hates oatmeal, your first thought about this story was how awful it must have been to eat oatmeal every day of your life if you didn’t like it. And if you’re like me, you thought to yourself, Oh, why didn’t Mrs. Lowell ask him what he liked? And then maybe you thought to yourself, Yes, but why didn’t Judge Lowell just tell her that he didn’t like it?

I don’t know why! But this story does raise questions about how we live our lives, and why we don’t change things we don’t like.

[Adapted from a story told by Helen Cohen, who adapted her story from an anecdote by John Ciardi.]

Readings

The first reading this morning comes from a chapter titled “What If God Were One of Us?: Humanism and African Americans for Humanism” in the book “Varieties of African American Experience,” by the humanist theologian Anthony Pinn. Pinn writes:

“I am not convinced that religion is dying wholesale, because religion provides a language or grammar for making sense of the world in life affirming ways. Rather than dying, religion emerges in new forms of expression. Some who acknowledge this still avoid humanism because they believe that it robs adherents of valuable hopes and comforts. [The humanist Unitarian minister] John Dietrich states, however, ‘Humanism robs man of nothing that actually exists. It takes from him only his comforting illusions and substitutes from them consolations that are real and hopes that are realizable.’ Humanism challenges activities and thought that do not appear liberating in nature. Organized traditional religions, therefore, have come under increasing attach because of their perceived failure to combat continued socioeconomic and political turmoil. Although the churches’ role in promoting such transformative events as the Civil Rights movement must be acknowledged, humanists will point to more examples of the churches’ failure to engage relevant questions and issues.

“Theistic forms of religious expression resolve the problem of moral evil in the world through some interaction between god(s) and humanity. This resolution, however, stimulates additional questions for the humanist. In the words of Raymond Knox: ‘Here they lynching Negroes — if God’s all that good, how come he don’t stop the police from killing Negroes, lynching Negroes, if God is all that just?’ Or, as James Baldwin articulates the question: ‘And if one despairs — as who has not? — of human love, God’s love alone is left. But God — and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that tremendous floor, unwillingly — God is white. And if His love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far?…’

“Humanism resolves the problem of accountability through an appeal to human accountability. Humans have created the conditions presently encountered and humans are responsible for changing these conditions.

“For African Americans humanist history demonstrates that this goal is noble but its achievement is far from guaranteed. African American humanists’ sense of optimism based open human potential for transformation is more guarded that that present in white humanist thought because of black people’s disproportionate suffering. Nonetheless, African American humanists hold that humanity has no choice but to continue seeking progress. The alternative is stagnation….”

[pp. 184-5]

The second reading is from the book “Black Pioneers in a White Denomination” by Mark Morrison-Reed. Morrison-Reed calls himself “black-born, Unitarian bred,” and in this passage he talks about the church he was raised in:

“The efforts of the First Unitarian Church of Chicago to become integrated are especially interesting…. The Reverend Leslie Pennington [of First Unitarian] had long been involved in race relations and had frequently exchanged pulpits with black ministers in Chicago…. For Pennington, it was understood that blacks were welcome, but other wanted a distinct proclamation. The Evening [Women’s] Alliance, which included Muriel Hayward, Gladys Hilton, Margret Adams, and Dorothy Schaad, pushed for a church resolution that would clearly state that the First Unitarian Church welcomed people of all races. The knew that ‘ “whites only” was never carved over the door of any Protestant church in America; it was understood.’ To dispel this assumption, they needed to make a public statement to the contrary, but this was not an easy matter, since there were people in the congregation who opposed integration altogether. James Luther Adams remembers a meeting of the board of trustees that went late into the night as they argued over whether or not to become an integrated church. Finally, in the early hours of the morning, one trustee, still recalcitrant on the issue of integration, was challenged with this questions: ‘What is the purpose of the church?’ He blurted out, ‘To change people like me!’ He and another trustee later left the church. In January, 1948, a resolution was passed at the annual meetings, and in that year the church received its first black member. Since then it had turned into one of the most thoroughly integrated church within the liberal faith….” [pp. 130-1]

Sermon

This is the third in a series of three sermons for Black History Month. Black History Month is, in part, a time to celebrate African American culture. This morning, I’d like to celebrate one aspects of Black religious culture that is mostly ignored, and that is the fact that Black religious culture in the United States is not limited to the traditional Black Christian churches.

In the second reading this morning, we heard a little bit about First Unitarian in Chicago, one of the few fully integrated, truly multi-racial Unitarian Universalist congregations. At present, perhaps thirty percent of the membership is African American, and another ten or twenty percent is Hispanic or other non-white persons. First Unitarian is located right near the University of Chicago, in a racially mixed part of Chicago. The congregation meets in a large stone building they built in 1929, which is meant to imitate an English medieval church. Since it was built as a Unitarian church, there is an empty niche above the chancel to remind worshippers that each individual brings his or her own individual conception of the spirit to a worship service — an empty niche, instead of a cross or some other limiting symbol.

I went to First Unitarian for some months when I studying for the ministry at Meadville/Lombard Theological School — attended worship there, rented a room from the president of their board of trustees, and taught Sunday school now and then. I have to admit that the worship services tended to be a little too formal for my tastes; it was what I call a “high-church humanist” kind of worship service. I also have to admit that I found their big, echo-y stone building to be a little cold. And I also have to admit that since I was attending school on a very part-time basis, I only went to worship there a total of perhaps twenty times over four years. Yet I felt more comfortable in that congregation than in any other congregation of which I have been a part. Why? Because I liked being in a truly multi-racial, multi-generational congregation; and sociologists tell me that I am typical for college-educated people my age (I’m 46) and younger — we have gotten used to multi-racial settings. This in fact was one of my great attractions to our own congregation, First Unitarian in New Bedford: this congregation is already somewhat multi-racial, and given the demographics of the city has the potential to become far more so.

There are in fact many Unitarian Universalists my age and younger who really want to see truly multiracial congregations. Yet there are only about a dozen truly multi-racial Unitarian Universalist congregations in North America. I think there are two main reasons that we have remained so white. First, I think we have remained predominantly white out of habit — not out of malice, just because old habits die hard. Second, I think lots of white Unitarian Universalists have this idea that African Americans and other non-white persons just aren’t interested in liberal religion.

The first reason is easily disposed of: we can change habits, even old habits, if we are willing to try. We could do some anti-racism training, just to make sure we weren’t being held back by some residual racism; and take a few other pretty obvious steps towards becoming fully multi-racial. Indeed I’m talking with the Board of Trustees about having an anti-racism training here in our congregation this spring, so this is a real possibility. But what about that second reason? What if we decide to become truly multi-racial? Are there African Americans and Hispanics and Cape Verdeans and Azoreans and other non-Anglo persons who would want to come join us here? We are told that African Americans are all Protestant Christians, while Hispanics and Cape Verdeans and Portuguese and Azoreans are all Catholic. If that’s true, aren’t we doomed to remaining an all-white congregation?

Fortunately, that isn’t true. A few years ago, I got to do a day-long seminar with a theologian by the name of Anthony Pinn. Anthony Pinn happens to be an African American, and he happens to be a humanist, that is, he doesn’t believe in God. As an African American humanist, he got a little tired of other black scholars assuming that all African Americans are Christians. Pinn contends “that African American religious experience extends beyond… black Christianity,” and so he wrote a book titled “Varieties of African American Religious Experience” detailing his research into four non-Christian religious traditions within the African American community: Vodou, Santeria, Islam, and religious humanism.

It is that last religious tradition that concerns us most. Anthony Pinn documents that there are now, and have been for years, lots of African American humanists — atheists, agnostics, unbelievers, and others for whom traditional Christian answers appear insufficient. In our first reading this morning, taken from Pinn’s book, he quotes two such African American humanists. He quotes Raymond Knox, who said, “Here they lynching Negroes — if God’s all that good, how come he don’t stop the police from killing Negroes, lynching Negroes, if God is all that just?” And then Anthony Pinn quotes James Baldwin, who said: “But God… God is white. And if His love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far?” What Raymond Knox and James Baldwin have to say sound to me very much like what most Unitarian Universalists have to say, which is that if God is supposed to be so good and all-powerful to boot, how come we have to suffer so much? Those of us Unitarian Universalists who do believe in God or some higher power go on to say that ultimately it’s we human beings who are responsible for our own destiny, while those of us who are humanists — and about forty or fifty percent of all Unitarian Universalists are humanists — set aside the idea of a higher power.

What Anthony Pinn shows us is that there are plenty of African Americans who think very much like Unitarian Universalists. Pinn points out this very fact in his book, and he documents the fact that a fair number of African American humanists have managed to find an institutional home within Unitarian Universalism since at least the 1930’s. The only problem is that there are only about a dozen Unitarian Universalist congregations, all of them located in cities, that are truly multi-racial — this in spite of the fact that the current president of the Unitarian Universalist Association is African American. The end result is that there aren’t that many African American Unitarian Universalists. But Pinn makes it clear that there is no theological barrier to keep us from becoming truly multi-racial; I would say the only barrier is that we have simply gotten into the habit of being a predominantly white, Anglo religion.

But there is also evidence that we could get over the habit of being white and Anglo. To show you what I mean, let me tell you a little story.

Duncan Howlett was minister of this congregation in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, probably the greatest minister this congregation has had in this century. Howlett went from here to First Church in Boston, and then in the 1960’s he went to All Souls Church in Washington, D.C. At that time, All Souls was a very, very prestigious congregation. The minister who preceded Howlett was A. Powell Davies, who was renowned as a great preacher — he was so good, the Washington newspapers would hold their Monday editions until they could get a copy of his sermon — Davies was so good, he counted several congressmen and senators as members of his congregation. So Howlett wound up in the most prestigious Unitarian Universalist pulpit in the United States, a place most ministers would stay until they died or were incapacitated.

But instead of staying in the pulpit of All Souls forever, Howlett did something far more honorable and far more daring. In 1968, he looked around and realized that his congregation was mostly white, yet the city of Washington was mostly black. So he retired, saying that he felt the congregation needed to call an African American minister and the only way that would happen would be if he quit. He left, and they did call an African American minister. Today, All Souls in Washington remains a truly multi-racial congregation with one white minister, and one black minister.

A similar thing happened recently at Davies Memorial Church in Camp Springs, Maryland. The congregation is ten miles outside Washington, in an area where the population is more than 60% black — yet five years ago, the congregation remained almost entirely white, with a white minister. Five years ago, a young African American minister named John Crestwell began coming to Davies Memorial, and he and the white minister and the lay leaders of the congregation came up with an idea of bringing Crestwell on as an associate minister. Their shared plan and vision was that they would all work together to grow the congregation while increasing racial diversity, and at the end of a three-year period the other minister would resign, leaving Crestwell as the sole minister. Their plan worked — they grew by 50%, more than a third of the members are now black, and their old minister resigned, leaving John Crestwell as the sole minister. And Davies Memorial Church will be honored this June at the annual gathering of the Unitarian Universalist Association as a “Breakthrough Congregation.”

The story we Unitarian Universalists have told about ourselves is that we are a white religion, and that people of color don’t want to belong to our religion. It should be obvious by now that we have been telling ourselves a false story. First of all, we are not a completely white religion, and we do have multi-racial congregations, and there are plenty of non-white, non-Anglo Unitarian Universalists.

Second, given the experience of Davies Memorial Church, and given what Anthony Pinn tells us, it looks to me as if there are quite a few African Americans out there, and probably lots of other non-white non-Anglos, who would love to become a part of our religious tradition. According to the 2000 U.S. census, there are more than 4,000 African Americans in New Bedford — if 40 of those African Americans, less than one percent of the total, started coming to First Unitarian, we would be as integrated as Davies Memorial Church. There are nearly ten thousand Hispanics in New Bedford — if less than half of one percent of them found us, we’d be far more integrated than Davies Memorial Church. And I’d like to think that we’re already headed in that direction. On one recent Sunday morning, I looked around and happened to notice that ten percent of the people in this room were non-white, an additional ten percent were bilingual in Portuguese and English, and an additional five percent identified as non-white. On that particular Sunday, a total of twenty-five percent of the congregation was non-white and non-Anglo. I say we should begin to really embrace that as a central part of our identity — as a central to our core of openness.

The story we could tell about ourselves is that we are a religion that is open to whomever needs it, black, white, Hispanic, Cape Verdean, Azorean, Portuguese, gay, straight, young, old. The story we could tell about ourselves is that an openness lies at our core — that at our core, we are open to more than one theological position, that we are open to different races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and ages we could say that, at our core, we are open to openness. Maybe we’d have to be open to giving up some of our traditional ways of running our congregations, by so what.

Rev. John Crestwell says, “The institutional church is still very tribal. Less than 10 percent of all churches in the United States are racially diverse. Unitarian Universalists break down tribalism — with our come-as-you are beliefs.” So says John Crestwell.

Come as you are. Come as you are, no matter what your skin color. Come as you are, with whatever liberal theology you bring. Come as you are, to a congregation of openness.

“Is God a White Racist?”

Readings

The first reading this morning comes from Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, written by Frances Anne Kemble in 1838-1839. Ms. Kemble was born in England, became a famous actress, and left the stage to marry Pierce Butler of Philadelphia, a respectable Unitarian man of wealth — who was also the owner of seven hundred slaves on a vast plantation in Georgia. Mr. Butler took Ms. Kemble to live on that plantation during the winter of 1838-1839. Her journal from that time paints a harshly realistic portrait of the institution of slavery, and in this excerpt she tells of the role of churches in maintaining slavery:

“Some of the planters are entirely inimical to any [prayer meetings], and neither allow their Negroes to attend worship of to congregate together for religious purposes, and truly I think they are wise in their own generation. On other plantations, again, the same rigid discipline is not observed; and some planters and overseers go even father than toleration, and encourage these devotional exercises and professions of religion, having actually discovered that a man may become more faithful and trustworthy, even as a slave, who acknowledges the higher influences of Christianity, no matter in how small a degree. Slaveholding clergymen, and certain piously inclined planters, undertake, accordingly, to enlighten these poor creatures upon these matters, with a safe understanding, however, of what truth is to be given them, and what is not; how much they may learn to become better slaves, and how much they may not learn, lest they cease to be slaves at all. The process is a very ticklish one, and but for the Northern public opinion, which is now pressing the slaveholders close, I dare say would not be attempted at all. As it is, they are putting their own throats and their own souls in jeopardy by this very endeavor to serve God and Mammon. The light that they are letting in between their fingers will presently strike them blind, and the mighty flood of truth which they are straining through a sieve to the thirsty lips of their slaves, sweep them away like straws from their cautious moorings, and overwhelm them in its great deeps, to the waters of which man my in nowise say, thus far shall ye come and no farther.

“The community I now speak of, the white population of Darien [Georgia], should be a religious one, to judge by the number of churches it maintains. However, we know the old proverb, and, at that rate, it may not be so godly after all. Mr. [Butler, her husband] and his brother have been called upon at various times to subscribe to them all; and I saw this morning a most fervent appeal, extremely ill-spelled, from a gentleman living in the neighborhood of the town, and whose slaves are notoriously ill-treated, reminding Mr. [Butler] of the precious souls of his human cattle, and requesting a farther donation for the Baptist Church, of which most of the people here are members. Now this man is known to be a hard master; his Negro houses are sheds not fit to stable beasts in; his slaves are ragged, half-naked, and miserable; yet he is urgent for their religious comforts, and writes to Mr. [Butler] about “their souls — their precious souls.” He was over here a few days ago, and pressed me very much to attend his church. I told him I would not go to a church where the people who worked for us were parted off from us as if they had the pest, and we should catch it of them. I asked him, for I was curious to know, how they managed to administer the sacrament to a mixed congregation? He replied, oh, very easily; that the white portion of the assembly received it first, and the blacks afterward. A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you. Oh what a shocking mockery!”

So ends the first reading. Ten years after Ms. Kemble wrote this journal, her husband Pierce Butler divorced her, in large part due to her opposition to slavery, and he managed to retain custody of their children. Ms. Kemble returned to England, and finally published her journal in 1863, to show the justice of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The second reading comes from the 1971 book Is God a White Racist? by William R. Jones. Jones is a theologian, and African American, a humanist, and a Unitarian Universalist minister. His theological concepts have been a major influence on me personally; unfortunately his uncompromising language has scared away the wide audience he deserves.

“It has often been said that asking the right question is as important as supplying the correct answer. Whether correct of incorrect, this generalization describes the purpose in this book. To paraphrase Kant’s admonition, my objective is to force the black theologians and their readers to pause a moment and, neglecting all that they have said and done, to reconsider their conclusions in the light of another question: Is God a white racist? My concern throughout is to illuminate the issues this pregnant question introduces into the arena of black theology and religion. The black theologian, I contend, cannot avoid this issue of divine racism….

“No doubt the combination of terms ‘divine’ and ‘racism’ is novel — some will say blasphemous. But the ideas and categories the concept expresses are time-honored and familiar themes in philosophy and theology. To raise the question of divine racism is actually to revive a perennial issue in black religion: what is the meaning, the cause, and the ‘why’ of black suffering?…

“In a more general vein the issue of divine racism is simply another way of addressing the traditional problem of evil and human suffering. ‘The Problem of Suffering Revisited’ is an apt description of a central emphasis of this book….

“An obvious place to look for parallels to the black experience in religion is the theological treatment of Jewish oppression, the suffering of another ethnic minority. One work stands out here, Rabbi Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz. His analysis of Jewish suffering forced me to pose a troublesome question that he does not explicitly consider: Is God an anti-Semite? The implications of his study for my own explorations in black theology were direct and immediate. In the light of black suffering, a suffering that may exceed that of the Jews, the unsettling question becomes: Is This is the second in a series of three sermons for Black History Month. Black History Month is, in part, a time to celebrate our heroes and heroines who are black; and this morning I’d like to speak with you about one of my black heroes, William R. Jones.

Chances are that you’ve never heard of William R. Jones before this morning. He’s a theologian, and these days when most people hear the word “theology” they either fall asleep from boredom, or run screaming from the room. Worse yet, he’s a humanist theologian, which is to say that in his view religion can do just fine without a concept of God; and I’m afraid most of United States culture today tends to revile rather than revere humanists. On top of that, he happens to be a Unitarian Universalist, and being a theologian in our tiny heretical denomination is not exactly a path to fame and fortune. For all these reasons, chances are good that you’ve never heard of William R. Jones before this morning.

I also have to acknowledge that there are those of you in this room this morning who couldn’t give two hoots about theology. You’re probably not going to like William R. Jones, or this sermon. As always, if this sermon bores you, you have permission to fall asleep, write in your journal, read, or let your mind drift; as long you don’t bother anyone else. Because there are some of us who care deeply and passionately about theology, some of us who think theology has the capacity to change the world for the better. I know theology is out of fashion, but sometimes I have to preach sermons for those of us who are theology-lovers.

William R. Jones is one of my heroes because he makes theology, and therefore organized religion, relevant to the real world. Jones concerns himself with human suffering and the problem of evil, and he is interested in figuring out how organized religion can actually make a positive difference in the world. He is particularly interested in the evil of racism, and he points out that organized religion could do a lot better in terms of combating the evil of racism.

In the first reading this morning, we heard a little bit about how organized religion in the 19th C. managed to perpetuate the evil of slavery. Fanny Kemble writes:

“I saw this morning a most fervent appeal, extremely ill-spelled, from a gentleman living in the neighborhood of the town, and whose slaves are notoriously ill-treated, reminding Mr. [Butler] of the precious souls of his human cattle, and requesting a farther donation for the Church, of which most of the people here are members. Now this man is known to be a hard master; his Negro houses are sheds not fit to stable beasts in; his slaves are ragged, half-naked, and miserable; yet he is urgent for their religious comforts, and writes to Mr. [Butler] about ‘their souls — their precious souls’.”

All too often, that kind of thing has been typical of the way organized religion in the United States has dealt with slavery; and later with racism. Organized religion in the United States has had a persistent tendency to ignore real evil and real human suffering in this world, and to concentrate instead on getting people into heaven after they’re dead. Fanny Kemble said there was a difference between the truth of religion, and the way religion was actually carried out; she said, “The light that they are letting in between their fingers…” — that is, the little bit of true religion that the white slave owners allowed their slaves to have — that little bit of light “will presently strike them blind, and the mighty flood of truth which they are straining through a sieve to the thirsty lips of their slaves, sweep them away like straws from their cautious moorings, and overwhelm them in its great deeps, to the waters of which man may in nowise say, thus far shall ye come and no farther.” In other words, Fanny Kemble felt that the truth of religion, the permanent core of religion, would one day win out and the flood of truth would wipe away human suffering and evil.

Unfortunately, Fanny Kemble apparently was wrong. In the 19th C., plenty of churches in both the North and the South condoned slavery. In the 20th C., plenty of churches in both the North and the South practiced outright racism. Why, there was even a handful of Unitarian Universalist congregation which did not allow African Americans to become members of their congregations right up into the 1960’s. Even today, Sunday morning at 11:00 is probably the most racially segregated hour of the week. Yes, it is true that some churches in the 19th C. fought against slavery, and some churches in the 20th C. have fought against racism. But they have been in the minority, and the majority of churches have remained silent or passive. So far, no flood of truth has yet come out of organized religion to wipe out all human suffering and evil.

I’ll grant that true religion should not permit the evils of racism. The problem is, “true religion” (whatever that might be) only exists in the form of embodied human communities. Thus when William R. Jones asks his uncomfortable question, “Is God a white racist?”, the real answer appears to be — as far as most white congregations are concerned, anyway — yes.

Even if you don’t believe in God, as is true of many Unitarian Universalists, the fact remains that much of organized religion in the United States has not been particularly good at addressing the evil of racism. So even if you don’t believe in God, you might ask: is organized religion racist? You might begin to ask: is my own congregation racist? You might even ask: Should we just do away with organized religion altogether?

These are some of the uncomfortable questions that William R. Jones raises. These questions are particularly uncomfortable because most of us have asked these questions of ourselves. But William R. Jones was brave enough to raise these questions in public, bringing all the weight of his intelligence and learning to bear on these questions. Jones even goes further, and he asks whether the historically black churches have actually practiced the liberation that they preached; and in light of this he states, “The initial task of the black theologian is to liberate the black mind from the destructive ideas and submissive attitudes that checkmate any movement towards authentic emancipation.” [p.67] And Jones goes even further than that: he asks us to consider when and if rebellion might be an appropriate and necessary response; and in light of this, he even asks whether those who are oppressed might have to “seek a realignment of power”; in short, whether those who are oppressed must engage in rebellion. [p. 43]

I said that Jones was brave to ask these questions in public. Years later, in 1997, Jones wrote that his book “triggered a xenophobic response. Most black theologians decided that Is God a White Racist was not a faithful trustee of liberation theology’s philosophy and practice, nor of the black religious tradition. In fact, they found it to be a fraudulent traitor to these traditions. As a result of this criticism, Is God a White Racist was essentially removed from the theological market and consigned to the pariah status of Ralph Ellison’s ‘invisible man.'” [p. xi] Jones paid a price for asking these difficult questions — he was made something of a pariah by black theologians. Of course white theologians simply ignored Jones, and ignored his questions.

Yet we can’t ignore those questions, can we? We know that Jones asked — continues to ask — the correct questions. In the face of continuing racism here in the United States — the de facto segregation of many public schools, the de facto segregation of most suburban communities, the reality that in many communities you can get pulled over by the local police for the crime of DWB, driving while black — in the face of continuing racism, those of us who belong to some sort of organized religion have to face up to the question of whether or not our religion, our congregations, allow God to be a divine racist.

So now I’m going to tell you how William R. Jones saved organized religion for me. Well, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but only a little. But William R. Jones helped me to see that organized religion could make a difference, at a time when I had become quite discouraged with Unitarian Universalism.

A few years ago I was working as a Director of Religious Education three-quarter time while attending theological school half-time. Religious education was fun, because you got to work with these cool Unitarian Universalist kids who were so open and receptive. Because I’m a Universalist, I have a strong religious belief that every person is worthy of dignity and respect, so I would teach this to kids. Based on my Universalist principles, I would teach radical feminism to girls and boys in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday school, and they really got it, and suddenly you’re surrounded by these young people who really believe in their heart of hearts that girls are just as good as boys. Based on my Universalist principles, I would teach Unitarian Universalist kids that homophobia is bad, and we would give them a safe place to discover their own sexual identities as they matured. Teaching anti-racism was a little more difficult because the congregation I was serving at that time was mostly white, but by the time they were teenagers those kids were anti-racists; and based on Universalist principles, they started noticing that their church was predominantly white, and they didn’t particularly like it.

That’s what we do with our Unitarian Universalist kids. We teach them Universalism, that all persons are equally worthy of dignity and respect. As they grow up and look at us, they start to look at the way we adults run our congregations. When the kids do that, all too often they find that our Unitarian Universalist congregations don’t live up to the Universalist ideals that we adults taught them in Sunday school.

As a religious educator, this began to really bother me. What could I tell kids when they realized that our congregations aren’t living up to the ideals we teach? I wasn’t going to lie to them and tell them that everything was really just fine in our congregations. Obviously I wasn’t going to try to tell them about original sin, or God’s will, because I don’t believe in those things. And I didn’t want to tell them to leave organized religion altogether. So I was stuck. That’s when William R. Jones became my hero.

In a 1974 essay, William R. Jones said two things that saved organized religion for me, and gave me something to tell to Unitarian Universalist kids. First, he said that his religion “permits but does not dictate a human response of rebellion as soteriologically authentic.” Let me translate this sentence from theological jargon into plain English. “Soteriologically” simply means having to do with salvation — what it is that will save your soul. Jones is saying that rebelling against injustice can save your soul. Not that religion requires you to rebel, but if you decide that rebellion is necessary, it can save you. Even if it means rebelling against God, or against the way things are.

Second, Jones talked about the “functional ultimacy of humankind.” If we translate that sentence into ordinary English, it basically means we have to act as if we are the ultimate authority in the universe. Even if you believe in a God that rules the universe, you have to act as if you are the ultimate authority, not God. And if you don’t believe in God, you can’t blame things on chance, or on evolution, or on fate — you still have to act as if you are the ultimate authority.

Which means that rather than worrying too much about whether or not God is a white racist, we should accept the fact that we have to act as if we are the ultimate authority, and as if we have the ultimate responsibility. In other words, if we find racism in organized religion, the racism is there because we human beings have put it there. We heard that in the first reading this morning, when Fanny Kemble told us how white people twist and pervert religion in order to perpetrate the incredible injustice of slavery. William R. Jones tells us that if we find something evil in organized religion, it’s only there because we put it there.

But of course if we put it there, we can get rid of it. This is where rebellion comes in handy. You can save your soul by rebelling against injustice. It might cost you your life, as was true with Martin Luther King, Jr. But the very act of a human being rebelling against human injustice is an act of salvation.

That’s how William R. Jones saved organized religion for me, by pointing out how rebellion could be a saving force in my life, and by pointing how I have to act as if I am ultimately responsible for what’s going on in my organized religion. So when I look around at this congregation and notice that it’s ninety percent white, I don’t blame it on God and I don’t throw up my hands in despair — I just say that this must be a problem that was created by human beings so it is a problem that can be solved by human beings. I might also get a little rebellious and engage in subversive acts. Like I might engage in the subversive act of telling you that instead of sending your minister out into the wider community to do good works, I might focus my attention on this congregation so that together we might engage in the much more subversive act of creating an intentionally multiracial, multigenerational community here within these walls — and we might also grow this congregation so that instead of fifty of us, there would be three hundred and fifty of us, and our power would multiply exponentially to the point where there would be so many of us we could really effect change in the surrounding community.

In any case, I began by telling you that William R. Jones is a hero of mine, and now you know why — because he saved organized religion for me. Here is what this hero of mine taught me:

Is God a white racist? — only if we allow God to be a white racist. Is organized religion hypocritical? — only if we allow it to be hypocritical. Do we have to remain a congregation that’s ninety percent white? — only if we allow ourselves to remain that way. Do our congregations contradict the ideals that we teach our children? — only if we allow them to do so.

We hold it in ourselves to rebel against injustice and oppression — and such rebellion can be the act that saves our souls.