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Principle #5
The Right of Conscience and the Use of the Democratic Process Within Our Congregations and In Society at Large
"Living a Spiritual Democracy:
the Challenge of our Fifth Principle"
The very first paper I ever wrote that dealt with theological issues was for a course offered by the Boston College Institute of Pastoral Studies which was studying what kinds of changes should be occurring within religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, as we enter the twenty-first century. As the only Unitarian Universalist is a class among 80 nuns and priests, I was allowed to write about my own religion. My professor seemed to appreciate Unitarian Universalism as I described it, but expressed concern, or perhaps even mild skepticism when I described Unitarian Universalism as being a uniquely democratic religious institution. We are, you know. What makes us unique, I explained, isn't that we are politically democratic - many denominations have democratic polity - we're also trying to become spiritually democratic. We aren't told what to believe by our faith, rather, our religious structure is committed to helping individuals determine what it is we each believe as a result of our life's learning and experience. We intentionally house many belief systems under one steeple both literally and figuratively.
The professor put one question in the margin: "Do you experience any problems here?" she wanted to know. The question was rhetorical, but when I saw the comment I wanted to be able to tell this wonderful nun, "Of course we experience problems here! This is exactly where we experience our greatest difficulties, but that doesn't mean we're on the wrong track. This isn't only our growing edge -- it's humanity's growing edge. Learning to live together peacefully and cooperatively in spite of our different beliefs is the whole ball game - it's hard work, it seems impossible at times, but it's the challenge we have to face if the world's expanding population is to live peacefully in a world that seems forever shrinking. The time to start is now and the right place to start is in our churches!"
In conversation with others I am reminded that Unitarian Universalism isn't comfortable for some because of its spiritual ambiguity, it's lack of clarity and certainty; and the questions about authority and procedure with which we so often wrestle. (Are you familiar with these qualities - do you know what I'm talking about?) Some people simply want, perhaps need, more structure than Unitarian Universalism can provide. But it's my hope and belief that if we can understand these characteristics of our faith in a new way, as the growing pains of a spiritual democracy struggling to be born, as part of the continuing emergence of the democratic principle, then we can accept that discomfort as our religious growing edge, and honor it as such. Therefore, it's my goal in this sermon to place Unitarian Universalism into the context of the history of the democratic principle.
The discussion begins in the sphere of religion back when the European governments were all monarchies. Until the sixteenth century western Europe was Roman Catholic and the authority of the pope reigned unchallenged over people's spiritual lives. This changed when Martin Luther initiated a successful rebellion against Catholic authority in 1517. He asserted that human beings were not justified by submission to the Church but, rather, by faith in God. When ordered by the Church to retract his teachings, Luther said , "I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise."
Luther changed the rules by not believing in the authority of the pope. He believed instead in the primacy of the Bible and became the first to translate the Bible into German so laymen could have access to it. Although it's hard to believe in retrospect, Martin Luther didn't intend a revolution and he actually had no quarrel with most of Catholic Church doctrine - his desire was simply to reject the authority of the pope. What emerged were new religious institutions, headed by Luther and later John Calvin, that were initially quite similar to the Catholic Church, save for the fact that they located ultimate authority in the Bible, not the pope. But as we shall soon see, his appeal to conscience had let Pandora out of the box never to return. it seemed once the authority of conscience was invoked in western Europe it dwelled there almost like a living presence planting questions in the minds of people asking, "What do you think? What do you believe about this? Many Protestants in Germany, Switzerland and France began insisting that the people -- not just kings and Bishops - should share in religious and political policy-making. This trend would give eventually birth the world's first modern political democracy in 1776. Using the Bible as their rule of faith, many religious began to speak out against doctrines that they felt were not supported by Biblical evidence. I will spare you a history of the Reformation here. What I want to do is outline the events that lead slowly but surely to the notion of a spiritual democracy.
. Michael Servetus was one of the first who looked very closely at biblical evidence and then spoke out. He felt that the church's construction of the Trinity was in error. But because he wasn't authorized by the structure of society to have his own thoughts he was burned at the stake in 1553 for asserting this. The structure of their social world simply didn't allow him to have a view of his own.
The Anabaptists, Francis David and Faustus Socinus also founded early movements based on new Biblical interpretations, and all spoke in an atmosphere of great risk.
The case of Unitarian Francis David, in Transylvania (now part of Romania) is particularly interesting because he won the support of the country's monarch, for his Unitarian views. The king, John Sigismund, then passed an "Act of religious Tolerance and Freedom of Conscience" which decreed that no one should be reviled for his religion. The idea of choice in religion was a completely new idea. The choice was limited - Unitarian or Trinitarian - but people were being asked what they believed.
A century later the English philosopher John Locke wrote his famous, "Letter Concerning Toleration," calling for religious freedom. These are his words:
"The care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate, any more than to other men....it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one man...nor can any such power be vested in the magistrate by the consent of the people; because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation, as blindly to leave it to the choice of any other...I cannot be saved by a religion that I distrust, and by a worship I abhor...no religion, which I believe not to be true, can be either true, or profitable unto me."
Locke intended to protect religious minorities. Although Locke spoke strongly and eloquently for the right of conscience in religion, I suspect he had no idea where that argument would lead in a very few short years. He might not have been concerned at the declarations of early Unitarians Joseph Priestly, Jonathan Mayhew, Charles Chauncy or William Ellery Channing who used conscience as their guide to argue their beliefs in the unity of God; and probably Locke would have been willing to defend Universalists John Murray and Hosea Ballou who, using conscience as their guide, argued for God's benevolence. But John Locke was a Biblically based Christian. I imagine he would have rolled over in his grave when Ralph Waldo Emerson and other transcendentalists changed the rules altogether when they rejected the Bible itself in good conscience, declaring, in the words of Emerson, "Truth...cannot be received at second hand." And what would Locke have made of the religion of religious humanists which can be lived without aspiring to a God at all? One wonders whether Martin Luther or John Locke or Francis David would have made an appeal to conscience at all if they'd have known that taking this path would lead their ancestors so far from their own familiar religious home.
Every faith appeals to conscience - that still, small voice that dwells within the soul. How can we turn back from that? Yet what are we to do with all of these differing beliefs -- Catholicism, Protestantism, Unitarianism, Buddhism, and Paganism and everything in between? Do we send each to a different house to speak only with their own? How do we understand each other from such a distance? Because Unitarian Universalism believes that the right of conscience in religion leads directly to religious self-government, we are struggling to become a spiritual democracy. What, exactly does this mean? It means we are each free to define our own God, or that which is our highest value, on our own terms. It means that at church and in life we try to agree on certain fundamentals which allow us to live together as a community with our religious differences.
- in spiritual freedom, in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, in the democratic process itself
Religious freedom frees us from needing to pretend to believe in something that we don't, and to explore our questions as they arise. It frees us to let go of practices that are no longer meaningful and to speak our deepest truth if it is different from what we were taught to and name the experience which shaped it. In all these respects Unitarian Universalism is a very freeing faith. But now comes the hard part -- for in truth, all that being said, we are not free at all. We aren't free because there is no action without consequence. Even inaction - - not choosing -- has very real consequences. Even in a Unitarian Universalist spiritual democracy there is no true freedom.
I always found the Bible a very confusing book. One part that always amazed me was when Moses met God on Mt Sinai. This is what God said:
"I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;. you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth, or that is in the water under the earth. 5. You shall not bow down to them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of the parents, to the third and forth generation."
That's from Exodus. I never understood that. Think about it. He frees the people from servitude -- not for their own sakes-- why? so that they could be in bondage to him! He warns if you bow down to the wrong god you will suffer for generations. I used to think, "They want me to believe this is a good God? He's a jerk!" Now, I understand this ancient story differently. God isn't a person- that's the way the story was told -- we're using a metaphor here. Let's name the God - Goodness or Mercy or Charity. Obey that God and thrive. Obey a false God - money, fame, power, and suffer.
Now I know we all serve a god -- there is no choice there -- we all serve - to live is to serve. For many of us our childhood faith felt like captivity, and so we came here to be freed from that and to name our own God. Naming, however, isn't enough. If we do not consciously serve the God we have named then we are serving some other God, and our live will be shaped by that God. That God Jesus, love, light, beauty, fun, money, YHWH, fame, truth, Allah, compassion, or sex. The choice is ours. The question is whether we are willing to look at our god face to face. The passage warns that there are many false idols.
Where Unitarian Universalism differs I believe, from the passage in Exodus is that we believe that God, one's highest value, can have many names. We do not have to name god in the same way. Have I named your true god? Have you? Do you like your God well enough to admit the relationship to yourself? I now know the meaning of the passage "I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of the parents, to the third and forth generation." That's not a vengeful warning. It's simply the truth. Our children suffer if we choose the wrong god.
. We Unitarian Universalists are consciously free to name our own God. Name your God well, and serve gladly.