Who Deserves Our Love?

Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. Once again this week, more than the usual number of typos and errors, but I didn’t have time to correct them — sorry!

Readings

The first reading was June Jordan’s poem “Alla Tha’s All Right, but”

The second reading was June Jordan’s poem “A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

The final reading was from Jordan’s introduction to her book of poems titled “Passion.”

In the poetry of the New World, you meet with a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life, an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge and unity… and a deliberate balancing … of sensory report with moral exhortation.

Sermon: “Who Deserves Our Love?”

The English language has some distinct limitations. For example, we only have one word for “love.” Contrast this with ancient Greek, which has half a dozen words that can be translated by the one English word “love.” This creates some problems for us English speakers, because we’re the inheritors of the Western intellectual tradition which extends back to ancient Greece. When you’re speaking English and you hear the word “love,” you have to automatically do some internal translation.

When this person says “love,” do they mean erotic or romantic love? Do they mean the love that can exist between good friends? What about the love that exists between parents and children, which is different than the love that exists between good friends, because where friends are more or less equal, there’s an imbalance of power between parent and child — at least there is when the child is young. Then there’s love of oneself, which is a virtue when it’s tied to ordinary self respect, but is a vice when it becomes self-obsession.

Finally, there’s a kind of selfless love, the kind of love where you continue to love even when you get nothing out of it. The early Christians picked up on this last kind of love — the ancient Greek name for it is “agape” — and integrated it into their conception of God, and their formulation of the Golden Rule. The story of the Good Samaritan is a story of agape-type love.

As English speakers, we have all these different kinds of love sort of mushed together into the one word. This can cause a certain amount of confusion. But I think it’s also useful for people like Unitarian Universalists, who spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how we can be the best people possible. We also spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to get through the day to day challenges that life throws at us, things like the death of people we love, or betrayals by people we thought we loved, and so on. Life rarely breaks down into neat, tidy categories. So I find it helpful to know that love doesn’t necessarily break down into neat tidy categories either.

And this brings me to the book of poetry that June Jordan published way back in 1980. The title of the book is “Passion.” The poems in the book cover a wide range. There are poems about passionate erotic and romantic love, as we heard in the first reading — and here I should point out that June Jordan was part of the LGBTQ+ community, so when she’s talking about passionate erotic and romantic love, she’s not restricting that love to opposite sex attraction. June Jordan also has a couple of poems in that book that are about rape. These particular poems are pretty graphic, and I find them very difficult to read — I’m giving you fair warning, in case you decide to pick up this book and read through it. But these poems are included for a reason. Jordan wants us to understand how for her as a woman, passionate erotic love can also become something twisted.

There are also poems about relationships between equals, the love of friendship between equals. That’s what we heard in the second reading, the poem titled “A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades.” I’ll read you the last few lines of the poem again:

Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant
or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight
or are you gay?
And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind

I love this poem because I’ve had this sort of thing happen to me in my own friendships. And I’ve done this to others. We humans tend to put each other into boxes. We put people into boxes based on skin color, age, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, political party…. Let me pause here and focus on political party, because that’s where people are putting other people into boxes a lot right now. And it’s pretty ugly. I hear Republicans talking about “Sleepy Joe” Biden, and I hear Democrats talking about “Dementia Donald” Trump. There’s no love lost here — there’s no love present here, none at all, just rank stereotyping and sometimes naked hatred.

This is what we humans do. We strive for love. We want to create a world where all people are loved equally. But when reality confronts us with other people who are doing things which we find distasteful or reprehensible or misguided, we can switch from universal love to individual hatred pretty quickly.

I feel like this has become a spiritual crisis in our country. There is a lot of demonization going on all around us. Going back to June Jordan’s poem, we all find ourselves saying unpleasant things about other people — that other people are too racist or too anti-racist, that other people are too much of a nationalist, that other people are too stupid, or too angry, or too idealistic. This kind of thing tips over into demonization very quickly. We demonize people, imagining them as demons rather than humans, when we feel those other people are too angry, or too old, or too different. To which June Jordan replies — “Hey! it’s not about my mind.” She’s right. Demonization is always about the mind of the person who does the demonizing. I’ve done my share of demonizing recently, mostly aimed at politicians and public figures with whom I don’t agree, and that demonizing that I do is more about me than about the person at whom I direct it. When I demonize someone, it damages me, and it damages our public discourse.

We need to find a way out of this — a way out of these demonizing behaviors that dominate our public discourse right now. To do so, I’m going to go back to one of our great spiritual resources, our Universalist tradition.

The early Universalists were Christians, of course, and not all of us now are Christians. But those early Universalists got at some universal truths through their liberal Christian tradition. One of those truths is encapsulated in the phrase, “God is love.” If you’re a Christian, this phrase might focus you on the Christian God. From that perspective, this phrase defines God as being all about love. If you’re not a Christian, though, this phrase can still make sense. Here in the West, the term “God” serves as a philosophical placeholder for the object of our ultimate concern. So this phrase need not be taken literally. It can be understood quite simply as saying that love is our ultimate concern.

The old Universalists wanted everyone to see the truth of that phrase, “God is love.” They understood that if God is love, there can be no such thing as eternal damnation, because love must eventually overpower hatred and evil. Instead, hell is something that happens here on earth, during our lifetimes, when we forget that love is supposed to be our ultimate concern. In particular, hell can arise here on earth when one group of people demonizes another group of people. Of course it feels hellish to be on the receiving end of the hatred that comes with racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ageism, and so on. But hell also arises in the hearts of those who demonize others. When we demonize others we throw ourselves into hell, into a place where hatred is more important than human connection.

So the old Universalists wanted us to get ourselves out of any hell that is here and now. They wanted everyone to truly feel in their bones that love is the most powerful force in the universe. They wanted to build their religious communities centered on love. The early Universalist Hosea Ballou put it like this: “If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, and if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good.”

Over the next century or so, the Universalists pulled back from that early trust in the power of love. The power of evil seemed so strong that they returned to the old idea that there must be some kind of punishment after death. They decided that God would in fact condemn some people to hell, it just wouldn’t be forever. In other words, they decided that God might be love, but that God’s love had limits to it.

But in my view, they weren’t really thinking about God, they were thinking about themselves. They weren’t asking: Who deserves God’s love? Or to put it in non-theistic terms: Who deserves to be included in our ultimate concern? Instead, they were asking: Who deserves my love? IThey were saying: ’m not so concerned with ultimate concerns, I’m narrowly concerned with whom do I love? And whom do I not love? Even: whom do I hate?

Now remember the different meanings that the word “love” has in the English language. Of course we limit our romantic love to our romantic partners. Of course we limit parent-child love to our own families. Of course we limit the kind of love that exists in friendships to our friends. But there is also that larger love, that unconditional love, which extends to all of humanity.

It takes a truly great person to be able to extend universal unconditional love to all persons. Martin Luther King, Jr., was able to extend a universal unconditional love even to the White racists who beat him and jailed him and reviled him, the people who hated him and did everything they could to keep him in the little box they constructed for him. When I say he extended a universal love to the White racists, I don’t mean that he wanted to become best friends with them. I don’t mean that he liked them. I don’t even mean that he loved them personally. What he did was to see that even those White racists had an inherent worthiness, they had an inherent human dignity. From within his progressive Christian world view, he saw that God loved those White racists, and he respected that universal love.

By doing this, Martin Luther King, Jr., set an example for the rest of the world. In fact, he changed the world. His understanding of universal love changed the world. It might not have seemed like it at the time, but his unconditional love for all humanity, expressed through nonviolent action, changed even those White racists permanently.

Universal love is a real spiritual challenges right now. I don’t know about you, but I’m not as good a person as Martin Luther King, Jr. I find it quite difficult to turn the other cheek. Yet when I think about it, it’s pretty clear that responding to hatred and demonization with more hatred and demonization is probably just going to make things worse. I’m not as good as Martin Luther King, Jr., so I’m not sure that I can rise to the level of feeling that universal love.

What I can do — what all of us can do — is to do a little less demonizing. Asking ourselves to stop demonizing certain very public figures, such as the leading politicians of the other political party, is probably too much to ask. If you’re a member of one political party, you don’t have to love politicians in the other political party. Start small. Start with people you know here on the South Shore who are of a different political persuasion than you. When we see people who are different from us face to face, we can disagree with them, but we can also try to remember that they, too, are deserving of universal love.

This is going to be difficult in this election year — and this is an election cycle that promises to be especially rancorous. But here’s what I’ve found. Every time I manage to stop myself from demonizing some political figure, I feel a tiny sense of relief. I feel better about myself, too; I like myself better. I find that I’m also just a little bit nicer to my spouse. It’s not a huge effect, but I can notice the difference. I’m a little bit happier, I’m a little more at peace with myself and with the world.

Perhaps this is part of what Martin Luther King, Jr., was trying to tell us with his theory of nonviolent action. Real change begins within our hearts and minds, and then spreads outwards to affect others.

Is Religion in Decline?

Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. There are more than the usual number of typos and errors in the text, for which I apologize.

Readings

The first reading was an excerpt from “The Jain Bird Hospital in Delhi” by William Meredith.

The second reading is from Annie Dillard’s book Teaching a Stone To Talk:

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”

Sermon — “Is Religion in Decline?”

I love the second reading, the one by Annie Dillard. Although she addresses her comments to Christians, I feel they apply to anyone who goes to regular religious services. Here we all are, contemplating the huge and awful mysteries of life; we should all be wearing crash helmets. And I love the first reading, too. We may not be followers of Jainism, and we may not run a bird hospital in Delhi. But we are like them every time we attempt to live out our values among the seemingly inconsequential events of life.

Keep those thoughts in mind. But now I’m going to turn to the subject of Daoist priests. To help answer the question of whether religion is in decline, I’m going to tell you about a modern-day Daoist priest named Li Bin. Journalist Ian Johnson met Mr. Li in 2009 in New York City, and then renewed their acquaintance in 2015 when Johnson went to China for an extended stay. Johnson tells Li Bin’s story in “The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao.”

Li Bin is a ninth generation “yinyang” man, or daoshin, a Daoist priest. He grew up in the countryside. There he learned how to be a yinyang man from his father, Li Manshan, who had learned it from his father, Li Qing, and so on back through ninth generations. Li Qing had kept the daoshin tradition alive through Mao ze Dong’s Cultural Revolution, hiding their ritual texts and ritual objects from the Red Guards. Then in the 1990s, the Chinese government began to see Chinese religion as a cultural asset. And so the Li family can now work openly as yinyang men.

Li Bin did not set out to be a yinyang man. But after he failed the test to get into high school, Li Bin joined his father and his grandfather in the family business. The main money-making business for yinyang men (and they are all men) is conducting traditional funeral services. When someone dies, the family will call in the yinyang men to organize and conduct a funeral which usually lasts for two days.

So here’s what happens when Li Bin and his father are called to conduct a funeral. First, they negotiate a fee with the family. A portion of the fee goes towards subcontractors, such as the musicians who play during the two-day service; families with more money can afford more musicians for their funerals. Li Bin and his father are both excellent musicians, but when they can they add up to four other musicians to their ensemble.

The yinyang men and the other musicians arrive at eight in the morning on the first day. One of the yinyang men writes a formal announcement of the death. This announcement is worded as if it is told by the eldest son of the deceased. The announcement is written in classical Chinese, so the yinyang men must both know classical Chinese characters (which is difficult in of itself) and must be excellent calligraphers (which is perhaps more difficult).

After the announcement has been written, they all put on the robes of Daoist priests, along with hats with the sun on the front and the moon on the back. Together they process to the family’s house, where they proceed to play music and sing Daoist scriptures. In the breaks between playing music, the yinyang men write magical symbols on pieces of paper. These strips of red paper will be used to seal the coffin. The first day is punctuated with other small ceremonies, such as burning strips of paper that represent the material goods of the deceased person, who will need those things when they arrive in the world of the dead.

The yinyang men calculate the most auspicious place for the grave. They prepare the coffin using the strips of paper they made earlier. The family bow to the coffin, while a picture of the deceased person looks down at them. After the coffin is lowered into the ground, the children of the deceased person sweep the grave.

There’s much more to it than this; I’m leaving out many details. But you get the idea. The Daoist priest must be a good musician, and a good calligrapher — so he must be something of an artist. The Daoist priest must also be skilled in geomancy and fortune-telling and other mystical arts — so he is also like what we in the West think of as a priest, a person in tune with the mystical parts of the universe. And the Daoist priest must know the traditional death rituals of his culture — so he is also what folklorists call a “tradition bearer.”

In the past, generations of yinyang men lived and worked in the same village for generations, where they knew pretty much everyone. But Li Bin realized the villages were quickly disappearing. Everyone who could was moving to the cities for economic opportunity, and for that matter the cities were expanding and taking over the villages. As a result, Li Bin decided to move to the city. He still works with his father back in his home village, but much of his business now comes from city people.

The city people are detached from tradition. They don’t know proper funeral traditions. Educated people are the worst. Not only does Li Bin have to tell them the correct things to do, they don’t want to pay for the full ritual. Because the city people don’t want to pay, Li Bin has to bring in cheaper musicians (who are not very good, but who cost less). As a result, the younger people at funerals may ignore the traditional music, and instead listen to pop music or do karaoke.

Despite the cultural changes that come with urbanization, Li Bin can still make a good living as an urban yinyang man. But when he considers his teenaged son, he does not want his son to become a yinyang man.

The cultural changes Li Bin is confronting in China remind me of some of the cultural changes I’m seeing as a Unitarian Universalist minister in the United States. Let me explain.

Over my twenty years as a minister, I have noticed that fewer and fewer people turn to clergy based in congregations for their memorial services. A whole cottage industry of memorial service officiants has grown up, ranging from trained clergy who specialize solely in rites of passage, to people who have no formal training but who feel deeply called to this kind of work. (The same is true, by the way, of marriages — increasingly, couples are asking professional officiants or even friends to officiate at their weddings.)

Even those people who do ask me to officiate at a memorial service are doing more and more of the service themselves. Twenty years ago, a family would come to me for a memorial service, and I’d tell them what to do. Now I’m more likely to act as a sort of consultant to support families in creating their own service. I consider this to be a good thing. A memorial service should be something that comforts the family of the person who has died. It should not be a rigid religious rite. I like that families want to be the ones deciding what to do and how to do it. I like my new role of telling families what works best from a pragmatic standpoint, helping them achieve whatever vision they have for their memorial service. The only downside I see is that sometimes families take on a lot of work, and it causes them a bit too much stress. On the other hand, families mostly like being able to come up with creative and moving ways to personalize their memorial services.

It would be nice to give you some examples, to tell you about some of the beautiful memorial services I’ve helped families arrange. But those are not my stories, and to preserve confidentiality I’m not going to talk about them. However, I can tell you what Carol and I did for her father Ed’s memorial service last March. When Ed died, he was living in a retirement community, and we knew that many of his friends were tired out from attending memorial services. So we announced that we were going to have a celebration of Ed’s life. We invited people to come to one of the community rooms, help drink up Ed’s wine cellar, have snacks, and share any memories of Ed that they liked. We didn’t want the celebration of Ed’s life to go on forever, and we scheduled it an hour and a half before the dinner hour so it would end naturally after about an hour. And we made sure people understood that we wanted to keep it positive — yes, there were tears, but everyone was grateful to keep the focus on Ed’s life.

This was a non-traditional memorial service — if for no other reason than you usually don’t drink wine and eat snacks during a memorial service. Twenty years ago, I don’t think we could have gotten away with something like that. But urbanization has changed everything. Very few people live their whole lives in the same town; most people have moved from where they were born, and we are no longer restricted to unquestioned rituals into which we were born.

Drawing again from my own family’s experiences — because it would be inappropriate for me to share some other family’s experience — I’ll give you an example of how we are no longer restricted to the old ways of doing things. When my mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness, she made clear what she wanted when she died. Her ethnic and religious tradition called for a church service led by the minister, and burial in the family plot in a coffin without embalming. Since my mother’s family came from Nantucket, this entailed some logistical difficulties — after she died, her body had to be flown to Nantucket within a couple of days. On the island we had a Unitarian graveside service conducted by the Unitarian minister on Nantucket, who read a standard graveside service — we had no input into what he said or did. Then we returned to the mainland, where the minister led her memorial service in her Unitarian church a week after she had died.

Contrast that with what happened when my mother’s twin sister died some two decades later. My mother’s twin was cremated. The memorial service was held when it was convenient for her children and others to fly to her retirement home — and the service was not held in a Unitarian church but at the retirement home. Those who could not attend the service in person, including one of her daughters, participated via videoconference. In the memorial service itself, the Unitarian minister played a much smaller role. The old rituals no longer bound us.

These examples from my family are just a couple of specific examples of the increasing diversity of today’s memorial services. American death rituals have changed considerably just in the past twenty years. And they’re continuing to change. Even if you’ve lived your entire life here in Cohasset, even then you’re no longer bound to the rituals of the town and ethnic tradition in which you grew up. And fewer and fewer people feel restricted to the rituals of any formal religious affiliation. This does not mean that religion is in decline — this simply means that our rituals are changing.

Yet even as our religious lives change, we can still choose to find support in a congregation, in this congregation. As a part of this congregation, you can ask fellow congregants for help and support, you can draw on the minister’s experience and training, you still have a community behind you. But these are our choices; religion is not dictated to us from on high.

So it is that we can choose to have our religious life be deeply embedded in a chosen community, supported by people we know and like. And when we come to major life-changing events, the presence of this chosen community can make death and new life feel less like a mystery and more like something that’s a natural part of life and of living. Rather than being unknowable and remote, religion is now what we do together, as we live life from day to day, as we confront mystery and difficulty and sadness and joy and death and beauty.

Is It Religion? — Pt. 5, Unitarian Universalism

Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

Opening words

They drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took them in.

by Universalist poet Edwin Markham

Unison chalice lighting words

I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

by Unitarian poet Edward Everett Hale

Moment for All Ages: What do you say when someone asks what UUs believe?

A tough question for Unitarian Universalist kids (and for Unitarian Universalist adults, for that matter) goes something like this: “So you’re a Unitarian Universalist. What do you Unitarian Universalists believe, anyway?”

The thing is, we Unitarian Universalists can’t really answer this question. If you’re a member of a Christian church, usually you’re supposed to believe in God. But for us Unitarian Universalists, it’s different — some of us believe in God, some of us don’t believe in God, some of us worship the Goddess, and some of us don’t think much about gods or goddesses at all. Then if you’re a member of a Christian church, you’re usually supposed to spend time believe the Christian version of the Bible is a holy book. But for us Unitarian Universalists, it’s different — some of us do read the Christian version of the Bible, some of us prefer the Jewish version of the Bible, some of us read other sacred books like the Buddhist sutras, and some of us don’t believe in reading any sacred books.

When someone asks us Unitarian Universalists what we believe, we can’t give them a simple answer. I recently had this happen to me. A Christian minister said to me, “So you’re a Unitarian Universalist. What do you Unitarian Universalists believe, anyway?” But when I started to say to give them a detailed answer, similar to what I said just now, I could see their eyes glaze over. They basically stopped listening.

Honestly, when people ask us what we believe, they don’t want the real answer. They just want a sound bite. Over the years, I’ve come up with some sound bites you can use, and I thought I’d share some of these with you.

When I get the question: “Do you Unitarian Universalists believe in Jesus?”… my sound bite answer is: “Yes, we believe Jesus was a radical rabble-rousing rabbi from Nazareth.”

When I get the question: “What do you Unitarian Universalists believe?”… my sound bite answer is: “We believe that what you do is more important than what you believe.”

When I get the question: “Do you Unitarian Universalists believe in God?”… my sound bite answer is: “We believe everyone has to figure out the truth for themselves.”

And we really do believe that. This is what makes our congregation so interesting. We learn from other people. Together, we search for truth and goodness.

Readings

The first reading was a May 17, 2004, news story from the Fort-Worth Star Telegram. This story is no longer online, but read an extensive excerpt here. Seven days later, the state reversed its ruling, restoring tax exempt status to Red River Unitarian Universalist Church.

The second very short reading is by Duncan Howlett, from a pamphlet titled “What Do Unitarian Universalists Believe?”

“We reject all doctrines and creeds and theologies if they pretend to any finality. We think the fabrication of such systems valuable, but we do not believe one or another of them.”

Sermon: “Is It Religion, pt. 5 — Unitarian Universalism”

For the past few months, I’ve been doing a series of sermons titled “Is It Religion?” In the first sermon I asked whether sports is a religion; in the second sermon, whether Christian nationalism is a religion; in the third, whether communism and capitalism are religions; in the fourth, whether Christmas was a religion, or at least religious. In each sermon, the answer boiled down to — yes and no. If you’ve heard one or more of these sermons, you’ll recall that part of the problem is that there is no generally accepted definition for religion. Today I’m going to have a look at Unitarian Universalism, and I’ll ask whether it’s a religion or not. And once again, the answer’s going to be — yes and no.

In the first reading this morning, we heard how the Texas comptroller’s office denied tax exempt status to a Unitarian Universalist congregation, on the theory that it wasn’t a religion. The reality was a bit more complicated than what we heard in that news story. An entry on Harvard University’s Pluralism Project website gives a fuller story:

“On May 30, 2004 the First Amendment Center reported, ‘It’s been a strange and scary week for religious liberty in the great state of Texas. In September 2003, the office of Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn denied tax exemption to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Denison, Texas. This fact was not revealed until last week, when the Fort Worth Star-Telegram learned of the decision. After few days of bad press in the newspaper, Strayhorn’s office announced May 24 that she had reversed the decision and granted the church tax-exempt status. Nobody has paid much attention over the years as the comptroller turned down Wiccans, New Age groups and Freethinkers – not exactly popular groups down in Texas. But picking on Unitarian Universalists finally sparked some outrage.’”

Even though this happened twenty years ago, this remains a fascinating story because it reveals some important truths about the way our society defines religion.

First of all, one of the key ways our society defines religion is through tax exempt status. The ability to bestow or withhold tax exempt status gives government officials the power to define what is religion and what is not religion. This is an incredibly difficult task for those government officials, because there is no consensus on how to define what a religion is. When the Texas state comptroller’s office tried to establish clear and consistent criteria for defining what constituted a religion, they turned to a definition of religion that is widely held in our country — a religion must include “a belief in God, or gods, or a higher power.”

That definition worked well for several months, allowing the comptroller’s office to deny religious status to Neo-Pagan groups and Freethinker groups. However, we Unitarian Universalists were willing and able to fight back, and we regained our tax exempt status. Which put the Texas state comptroller’s office back in the position of deciding what a religion is, in the absence of any objective criteria. So it is that our society defines religion in part by asking government officials with no expertise or training in religious studies to decide who gets tax exempt status and who doesn’t. And religion can also be redefined by anyone is capable of pushing back on government rulings.

A second important truth about the way our society defines religion: our society defaults to defining religion as “a belief in God, or gods, or a higher power.” That’s the definition the Texas state comptroller’s office defaulted to when they were trying to establish objective criteria to define religion. Here in the United States, we generally accept this as normal: if you’re religious, you believe in God; if you believe in God, you’re religious.

As we Unitarian Universalists know, there are several problems with defining religion in this way. Perhaps most obviously, there are people who consider themselves religious who don’t believe in God. More importantly, naming “God” in this definition shows that we consider Christianity to be the paradigm for all religion. That definition does not say, “a belief in Allah, or gods, or a higher power.” That definition does not say, “a belief in the Goddess, or gods, or a higher power.” “God” comes first, and by that most Americans mean the God of Christianity. To which most Americans would probably add the following qualifying statement: “The Jews worship the same god as the Christians, so it’s also the god of Judaism.” Which simply isn’t true, because most Christians venerate a triune god consisting of three divine persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Jewish God most definitely does not include Jesus.

Thus, when Americans assume that religion is the same thing as belief in God, we’re basically assuming that Christianity is our default religion. If it looks like Christianity, then it’s a religion. If it doesn’t look like Christianity, then it’s not a religion.

From what I’ve seen, we Unitarian Universalists have mixed feeling about the Christian churches being the paradigm against which our religion is compared. On the one hand, we want to consider ourselves a religion. Obviously, we’d like to keep our tax exempt status. And many of us think of Unitarian Universalism as a religion — it’s something that offers us spiritual nourishment, and it enriches our lives in ways that religion is supposed to do.

On the other hand, though, here in the U.S. many people now identify religion with a certain form of White evangelical Christianity. By this definition, to be religious means to oppose LGBTQ rights, to forbid women as clergy, to ban books, and so on. If that’s what it means to be religious, then we Unitarian Universalists do not want to be religious — we support LGBTQ rights, we welcome all genders as clergy, we are horrified by book bans, and so on.

Because of the different ways in which Americans define religion, we Unitarian Universalists sometimes think of ourselves as religious, while at other times we feel that we’re not religious at all. It depends on how you define religion, and what the consequences are for either being a religion, or not being a religion.

As you think about that, let’s quickly go back in time to India some two hundred years ago. As the British Empire started to take over more and more of the Indian subcontinent, the British decided that India had a dominant religion which they called Hinduism. Actually, there was no such thing as Hinduism before the British came along. There were several different traditions, including the people devoted to Vishnu, the people devoted to Shiva, the goddess-centric tradition devoted to Shakti, the Smarta tradition, and so on. But the British — perhaps out of bureaucratic convenience — lumped all these traditions together under the name Hinduism, basically meaning someone from the Indian subcontinent who was not a Jain, Sikh, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, or other religion.

Thus, “Hinduism” was originally a name imposed on India by outsiders. However, the people who got lumped together as “Hindus” quickly discovered that there were advantages to being classified as a religion, because the British Raj afforded certain legal rights to religions. It turned out to be very convenient to be categorized as “Hindu.” The people called “Hindus” by the British colonial government came to accept, and eventually to embrace the name.

Obviously, our situation as Unitarian Universalists is very different from the Hindus under the British Raj. We Unitarian Universalists helped create the government of the United States; it’s not something that got imposed on us from the outside. But there is a rough analogy with our religious situation. Our society continues to be dominated by Christian assumptions and Christian definitions of religion. That definition of religion is imposed on us by others. Because we don’t fit neatly into the Christian definition of religion, we get misunderstood either as “a religion that doesn’t believe anything,” or, worse yet, “a religion where you can believe everything.” Yet even though we are misunderstood by the wider society, being classed as a religion provides certain benefits to us.

Yet our biggest problem right now is the belief of an increasing number of young people that all religions are homophobic, transphobic, sexist, and anti-science. Even though we Unitarian Universalists are none of these things, there are many young people who don’t understand that.

I’ve seen this play out in an unfortunate way when some Unitarian Universalist young people reach their middle teens. They get so disgusted by the excesses of White conservative Christians, they decide they don’t want to be part of any religion, not even Unitarian Universalism.

I’ve also seen this play out in a less unfortunate way as some teenagers stick with Unitarian Universalism, but hide that fact from their peers. These teens understand that Unitarian Universalism is a force for good in our society, but they get so tired of explaining to their peers how Unitarian Universalism is not like conservative Christianity, that they finally give up and hide their religious affiliation.

On a more positive note, I’ve seen quite a few Unitarian Universalist teens who are happy to be public about their Unitarian Universalism. I’ve known a couple of Unitarian Universalist teens who, when they turned 18, got a flaming chalice tattoo. That’s about as public as you can get with your Unitarian Universalism.

Finally, on a very positive note, I’ve known a few teens who used their Unitarian Universalism as a force for change in the world. One case in particular stands out for me. An LGBTQ teen was an active member of, and leader in, their high school Gay Straight Alliance. During their freshman and sophomore years, they never talked about being a Unitarian Universalist at Gay Straight Alliance meetings. Then in their junior year, they made a conscious decision to go public with their religious affiliation. Some of their peers were aghast — how could an LGBTQ person be “religious”? To which this teen responded (in no uncertain terms) that Unitarian Universalism was a religion that very actively supported LGBTQ rights, and that kind of a religion was something they actively wanted to be a part of.

Now we can return to the original question. Is Unitarian Universalism religion? No, because the paradigm for religion in our society is conservative Christianity, and Unitarian Universalism is most definitely not conservative Christianity.

Is Unitarian Universalism religion? Yes, because we do the things that religions are supposed to do. We have high moral and ethical values that we live out in the real world, such valuing all persons equally regardless of their sexual orientation, gender, or race.

Is Unitarian Universalism religion? Both yes and no at the same time, because we want to challenge the definition of religion that says all religion has to be like conservative Christianity.

This brings to an end this series of sermons answering the question, “Is it religion?” Even if this sermon series is now a blur in your memory, I hope you will remember that there is no one generally accepted definition for religion. And if you get nothing else from this last sermon in the series, I hope you’ll remember that if someone asks you, “Are you religious?” you can reply, “It all depends on how you define religion.”