Unitarian Universalism is a democratic faith, meaning that we are an open faith for all, operating out of democratic principles, and on the week-end of the anniversary of the birth of our country's democracy, to speak of our own UU democratic faith is timely.
We are religiously liberal people (not necessarily politically) who have two centuries of experience in this democratic faith. So, this morning I will look at three aspects of our democratic faith, aspects that we have experienced and explored and argued over.
Is it the Free Church, radically congregational approach, based on individual congregations or is it a more presbyterian approach with more centralized leadership?
Of course, I was steeped in all these questions and more during leadership training, Ministers' Days and the General Assembly at the end of June. I dearly love us all but more than a week of anywhere from 100 to 4000 Unitarian Universalists is just about enough. In our hotel room alone there were five! Four of us ministers, and the fifth a PK (Preacher's Kid).
First, the ministry as cleric or academic. Today I wear a stole. The ministers in this congregation do not usually wear clerical garb for Sunday preaching. Some Unitarian Universalist ministers do. And many of those do not wear stoles and ecclesiastical garb; they wear academic gowns, representing the Protestant aspect of our tradition that affirms the intellect in religion. It is an affirmation that extends to both those among us who are ordained and those who are not, an understanding that goes back to Martin Luther's Priesthood of all believers. The minister does not own the pulpit, only what he or she says in it. The free pulpit. The minister does not own all truth; we all are called to examine, to reflect and to extend ourselves to greater understanding. The free pew. It is part of why we are a noncreedal tradition. We all learn and continue learning.
At the same time, the priestly aspects of ministry are essential to the extent that they remind us that when we gather we are not merely an intellectual, discussion group. We are a worshipping community gathered in memory and hope, to charge our lives more truly and authentically to what each separately and all of us together examine, reflect on and conclude. So today, a stole for that reminder.
Second, our denominational understanding. We do not live in the time of the Standing Order with our communities divided into both precincts and parishes. Religion is officially separated from politics as a Voluntary Association. Each religious tradition understands the meaning of that voluntary nature in its own way, largely through the lens of each tradition's polity. Polity, meaning how the tradition governs itself: presbyterian (centralized leadership) or congregational (meaning power resides in the congregation itself). Our own tradition describes itself as congregational in polity, so that the center of our tradition lies in the individual congregation. Whatever comes out of UUA headquarters in Boston or General Assembly, held just this last week in Nashville, is understood by the congregation through its own lens. Followed or not followed, accepted or protested.
Such congregational polity means that each of us has a tremendous amount of power and responsibility in the strength, the moral character, the growth and possibility available to Unitarian Universalism. And I will go back to this when I speak of our role, through this lens, in public discourse.
In the nineteenth century such congregational polity, still in the forming, meant that Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows could exert enough power in his efforts to organize the Unitarians into denominational form, that the transcendentalist and free church movements found or felt themselves so much on the outside of Unitarianism -which they thought needed no organization at all - that many left. Over time other groups have struggled among us also. In the late twentieth century it has been the Christians among us and there is a growing mood of uncertainty among some Humanists among us. I don't expect our polity and our shifting religious understandings will so marginalize theological positions that whole groups will leave but we must be vigilant in the affirmation of our diversity.
There are Christians AND Humanists among us. There are politically liberal AND conservative folks among us. As determined as we are to express ourselves as diverse, there will be some among us who feel marginalized and excluded. And although we invite many to travel the path, the comfort of the center of the path creates tensions. As our 20th century theologian James Luther Adams called us to "the community-forming power" of our congregations, we must draw toward the center while affirming and holding all the multiple edges.
The tension we most strongly feel at this time in our history is that between the Free Church Movement which asserts the singular power of the individual congregation and the energies, efforts and programs developed through the UUA offices in Boston, particularly the UUA Board of Trustees and the Department of Ministry, and the work of the General Assembly.
This tension is one that is in part a tension between our Unitarian and our Universalist heritage. Universalist polity at the same time that Henry Whitney Bellows was organizing the Unitarians, then separate denominations, was distinctly different. It was both congregational and presbyterian. "Churches chose their own ministers and controlled their internal affairs, finances, and property; in their ongoing life they were largely autonomous" much as were Unitarian congregations. But the ministry was managed by the state conventions and by the Universalist Church of America itself." (Interdependence)
UU minister Gordon "Bucky" McKeeman humorously described the two strands of our tradition this way: "Someone once said in commenting on the difference between Unitarian and Universalist polities that the Universalists were organized like Presbyterians and acted like Congregationalists; Unitarians were organized like Congregationalists and acted like Presbyterians." We act convinced and live complicatedly with one another.
Number three: Public Conversation and public theology means both the religious in the words of the political man Abraham Lincoln, as well as to the political in the theologians among us. It is the Public Conversation, the Public Discourse which makes us as a whole country who we are. It is an American institution that religion and politics do not mix, that church and state are separate. There is good reason for such separation.
Groups of people came to this continent in search of worship without interference from denomination-specific governments. These same people, of course, did not extend such freedom to other religious groups -- that wasn't the point. And until the last thirty years we were a Christian, specifically Protestant, nation. The early European settlers to this continent did not recognize separation of church and state. They taxed the people in order to support the minister -- as the civilizing force among them.
Unitarian historian Conrad Wright reports it this way: "The intent was to make certain that no one would evade the common responsibility to provide for a common benefit, just as today everyone is liable to taxation for the support of schools or other activities from which society at large derives benefit....[S]ince the preaching of the Word conduces to civic order, it is a matter of common concern to all the inhabitants of the town. The minister was settled by the town in recognition of the fact that he performed a civic as well as an ecclesiastical function." This force was strongest in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire and the intertwined civic precinct and church parish was called the Standing Order. When Anglicans, Baptists and Quakers grew in strength by the 1720s they were tax exempted as long as they provided the appropriate services. The system didn't change. Consciousness remained that society needed someone in place to act as a moral force, to remind citizens of both their religious and civic duties and the influence of the one on the other. Our forbears first of all saw no conflict -- no reason to separate church and state -- because communities were homogenous.
The system continued even when communities weren't homogenous because they knew only this one way -- taxation toward the hiring of a minister. Such taxation did not end in until the early 1830s and it was the Unitarians of Massachusetts who were the last hold outs. It was effectively at this point, when diversity overwhelmed the ability of the old system, that religion moved into the category of voluntary association and church and state began to divide into separate institutions.
But church and state are still not thoroughly divided. Chaplains have long been a part of our legislative bodies who pray to open the sessions each day. And it is complex. This past winter a fundamentalist minister prayed at the opening of a session of the legislature in Kansas and reflected on the evils of society from his point of view, a point of view that was narrowly understood and doctrinaire in perspective. Still, I had the opportunity to open the legislative session of the Michigan House with prayer only three years ago. I prayed using imagery from Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam to disclose the power of the human voice and the particular power of the voices of our legislatures, praying that our legislators recognize the voices of their constituents who speak with them as they decide for the whole.
That our legislative bodies' work is difficult and tremendously influential upon the people they represent strongly suggests their need for religious presence and recalls the reasons for the old Standing Order. However, such presence represents more than that. When asked whether he prayed for the Senators, early 1900s Unitarian congressional chaplain Edward Everett Hale responded, "No. I look at the senators and pray for the country."
Martin Marty speaks of this responsibility in this morning's words and he directed them to us specifically as Unitarian Universalists when he spoke a few years ago at an anniversary celebration of Meadville/Lombard Theological School in Chicago. He told us that our call is to be in public conversation, to take our liberal religious voice, our energy and ability to process and continue growing, our religious sensibilities, our diversity and our intellectual bent into the public for the good of the public.
We have many among us who engage in such conversation. Your parish minister, Dick Gilbert is strong among them, including his active participation in NY State's Interfaith Impact in Albany. There are and have been others among us, including: John Haynes Holmes, Community Church NY WWI pacifist, James Luther Adams who warned us in the 1930s of the threat from Nazi Germany, Steve Fritchman LA: House un-American Activities Committee, supporting those blacklisted by McCarthy; our UU UN Office in New York City, our UUA Presidents, our Resolutions from General Assembly: this year including a focus on alternatives to current drug laws.
All of these were and are called and so are each of us, to be in the public conversation, as religious people, as public theologians. We, the people of the democratic faith, are called to take who we are into the larger culture and engage us all in reflection and exploration. Listening, speaking, thinking, engaging, standing for ourselves, acting out of community. Religious people who stand in a democratic faith and who understand that such a voice extends to the whole of our source.
Happy Fourth of July. -- AMEN
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