A sermon by the Rev. John T.
Morehouse
In his correspondence, Thomas Jefferson, wrote to
Joseph Priestley, a Unitarian and scientist that “it is my sincere belief, that
someday all ‘men’ will be Unitarian” going on to profess it as the most natural
and reasonable religious stance one could have. Jefferson, despite our claims to him otherwise, was not a
Unitarian. He was rather, a deist that
brand of faith held in such high common esteem by almost all of our founders
and characteristic of the high enlightenment from which our nation was
born. Deists believed not in the
personal God of the Bible but in the impersonal deity of ‘natural law’. A God who had set in motion the wheels of
the universe but left it up to human endeavor to complete. Far from the endorsement we might want to
claim of Jefferson, his statement was more a reflection of what he and all the
founding fathers believed to be the natural conclusion of the grand experiment
of the American Republic: That of a people endowed with certain inalienable
rights, as all people everywhere should be everywhere. The Unitarian faith in a God for all people,
subject to the dictate of reason seemed a natural conclusion for Jefferson and
many others.
Thomas Jefferson is a good place to begin
my thoughts on Civil Religion because, like our religion, Jefferson is a study
in paradox. The author of our
Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson spoke boldly
of the need for free discourse in the service of liberty. The freedom of speech, assembly and religion
is at the heart of our nation. But
Jefferson had a shadow side as well. He
was a racist despite his hopes for “eventual” emancipation, a keeper of slaves,
even those of his own born to his slave Sally Hemmings. Apparently his claim that all men are
created equal had a footnote.
So it is also with our freedoms. We are both free and enslaved. Free to speak out for what we believe, but
limited in what we say. This week is
the anniversary of the so-called Patriot Act of 2001, a knee jerk reaction to
limit the civil liberties of many in hopes of catching terrorists. It exists as a shadow to our national
identity. Likewise, we are free to
practice religion – a freedom earned through such brave men as Roger Williams,
who, in the early days of our colonial expansion, broke away from the
theocratic Puritanism of New England and founded the colony of Rhode Island,
the first free religious community in America.
But our freedom to practice religion is limited in fact by the
overwhelming Judeo-Christian Character of our country. We here, who celebrate the freedom of
belief, have to be circumspect about our promotion of freedom. The fact that we welcome theists as much as
pagans is not well known nor perhaps should it be – yet.
We
have had a fundamentalist stand in our doorway here handing out literature
denouncing our way of religion (I asked him to leave). I have been challenged time and time again
to defend our free faith in light of the predominant Christianity of this
area. Rarely do I bother.
I don’t defend our faith because it is
defended by our principles as a nation.
I remind our detractors that we are all bound by our “civil religion” by
which I mean not only the principles (deist that they are) which we live by but
also by the fact that we are all religious.
America, observed the Frenchman, Alex deTouqville, is the most religious
nation in the world. The forgotten
premise to that is that we are religious in different ways and that is the very
foundation of our democracy.
As a religious nation we are bound
together by what Forrest Church and others have called the American Creed. While each of us has our own “religion” it
is not the same religion. “America is
faithful just not of the same faith” wrote Forrest Church. Our creed, based as it is in the rights of
all to basic necessities (what Jefferson called ‘the pursuit of happiness’) and
the freedom to believe and act on that belief is the true heart of this great
country, not Christian values. The
mistake that the religious right makes here is assuming that our core American
values are necessarily Christian. Our
values are informed by Judeo-Christianity, we are a majority Christian nation,
but that does not make the American Creed or our Civil Religion Christian. Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison,
Hamilton, all agreed on this point.
America is bound by a natural law, even a higher law but not a Christian
law. The same higher law that informed Martin Luther King, Jr. to civilly
disobey the laws of the land.
Just what is that law? In short it is the belief that in order to
be faithful to our belief in the goodness of all, the extension of compassion
and the pursuit of happiness that is our Republic we must have the freedom to
follow the faith we hold most dear.
Echoing Roger Williams a century before, Jefferson proclaimed the
paradox that in order to live up to the principles of good that the creator has
endowed us with we must have the freedom to choose the good. In other words, any faith, whether it is in
the principles of our nation or a faith in Jesus must be freely chosen to be
real. A coerced faith is no faith at
all.
This then is the heart of our civil
religion. We are bound together, each
with our own beliefs under One God, E
Pluribus Unum, not because there is one true faith but because there is a
freedom to have a faith.
This is why such legislation as the Patriot
Act flies in the face of our civil foundations. By limiting our expression of belief in the fear of finding “terrorists”
we are undermining the very faith in freedom that makes us great. In many ways, this is a sort of “official
terrorism”. We have become afraid
ourselves to speak out against the government and in so doing we are being
terrorized by our government.
And lest you think this is just a national
problem, look closer to home. For many
years, the Frederick County Human Relations Commission has been trying to get
civil rights protection for gays in Frederick County. Twice our proposal was defeated by the County Commissioners. We took our efforts to the state level and
we did achieve, along with many others, protected rights for Gays at the state
level. My parting hope was that we
would still see local legislation. And
so once again the Human Rights Commission proposed language. It died at the Commissioner’s table for lack
of a second. Talk about fear! I am sure that the Commissioners, mostly
conservative, are simply afraid to even talk about this issue for fear of the
conservative backlash. Why is this
important? Because everyone of us knows
someone here who is gay or may be gay.
Everyone of us, save for our privileged status, could be subject to the
loss of these rights. But by the grace
of God go I. There is precious little
that separates even our privilege from the rights we are endowed to own.
Walt Whitman, the great American poet and
Unitarian once wrote “religion in America, knows not the bibles of the old way
but in new ways, the soul freed.” Why
is our civil religion so vital to life?
Because, my dear people, without the very faith in freedom, there would
be no freedom of faith. Without the
freedom of expression, there would be no freedom of service. What makes our nation, just like this
church, so spiritually possible is that we couple our freedom of expression
with a call to serve. Look at any
totalitarian regime of history and what do you notice? They don’ last. Why? Because without the
rights of freedom there is no responsibility to serve. And you can only pay or coerce people to
serve a dictator for only so long. True
service, the very civility that makes our country, indeed this church run from
day to day, is the result of the freedom accorded those of us who do serve. Without it America would fall. No one to serve the food to the hungry, to
drive the sick to doctors, to clean up the cities. Our freedom of expression naturally entails a freedom to serve
and volunteers make this and any democracy possible. This is what Whitman meant, by not the old ways of bibles, important
as they are to some of us, but the power of the freed soul. In the freed soul rests the possibility of
change.
Jefferson believed that democracy could
instill greatness, not because it was rooted in religion but because its
freedom allowed us to choose the possibility of religion as one among many
guiding forces in our lives. Freedom
gives us the potential to choose greatness.
And even when we fail – and we have failed often, witness our
destruction of Native Americans, slavery and the subjugation of minorities – we
are at least called to higher principles by the very fact that we can choose.
This is the heart of how we do religion here
as well. People ask me what we believe
and, when I tell them that we believe in the freedom to believe, they shake
their heads and say, “why, that is no belief at all”. But I say “look again”.
The
very process of democracy keeps us true to a moral pathway. In choosing to do good over evil, we help to
define what is possible. Is this not
Holy? Is not the power to choose at the
heart of every religion? Choose we
must, for without that we already slaves to another truth. As long as there is a spark of life within
us, implied Jefferson, there will be a God calling us to choose and in the
choosing we grow. Amen.
Sources
used and recommended:
“The
American Creed” by Dr. Forrest Church, 2003
“The
American Soul” by Jacob Needleman, 2001
The
United States Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.