Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Religion in society

  • Three Cohasset Patriots

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading is from “A Narrative History of Cohasset,” written in 1898 by Victor Bigelow:

    The battle of Concord and Lexington on April 19, 1775, exploded the pent-up fury of a myriad of yeomen throughout the colonies.

    When the news reached Cohasset nearly every man in the town able to bear arms was ready to spring into battle. Thomas Lothrop, who had already served in the province wars with a lieutenant’s rank, hastened to the scene of bloodshed, where he was soon commissioned a major.

    Of others who seized this first opportunity for martial promotion was probably James Hall, who afterwards became an aide to General Washington.

    There were doubtless other young men who did not wait for the formation of a company to march, but started at once for the seat of war, because they had no family responsibilities to keep them at home.

    The whole town was trembling with excitement, and a town meeting was immediately called to convene on the twenty-eighth day of the month. They voted to lay in a stock of corn — five hundred bushels — because food might soon be sadly needed if the war should rage. They also voted to buy one hundredweight of gunpowder, and five hundred flints for the old flintlock guns which had been used by the militia of the town since the beginning.

    The men who swarmed about the church that day on the Common may be imagined from the muster roll of [fifty-six] men who enlisted within a few days.

    The second reading is from the poem “Concord Hymn,” written by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837 to commemorate the Battle of Concord.

    By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
    Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
    Here once the embattled farmers stood
    And fired the shot heard round the world.

    The foe long since in silence slept;
    Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
    And Time the ruined bridge has swept
    Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

    On this green bank, by this soft stream,
    We set today a votive stone;
    That memory may their deed redeem,
    When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

    Spirit, that made those heroes dare
    To die, and leave their children free,
    Bid Time and Nature gently spare
    The shaft we raise to them and thee.

    Sermon

    It’s Patriot’s Day, that obscure Massachusetts holiday when the Red Sox play a home game, the Boston Marathon is run, and sometimes we get an extra day to file our taxes. But of course the real purpose of Patriot’s Day is to allow us to commemorate the start of the American Revolution, right here in our state on April 19, 1775. In honor of Patriot’s Day, I’d like to tell you stories of three Revolutionary War heroes and heroines, all of whom were part of our congregation. These are stories of how ordinary people lived through unbelievably hard times: hostile war ships right off the coast of Cohasset; men going away to war and never being heard of again; food shortages and not enough people to work the fields. And one of the questions that I’ll ask, but won’t be able to fully answer, is how the people in those days found the resilience and courage to survive hard times.

    Persis Tower Lincoln Hall

    I’ll begin with Persis Tower, the daughter of Daniel Tower and Bethia Nichols. Her family was firmly aligned with the Patriot cause. When Persis was 14 years old, her older brother Abraham took part in the Boston Tea Party. She was 15 years old at the time of the Battle of Concord and Lexington, and seven months later, at age 16, she married 20-year-old Allen Lincoln, a seaman, who was soon to go off to battle.(1)

    Allen served at least three times with the Continental forces. He did at least one stint with the local militia, defending our coast. He served in the Continental Army for three months in 1777, serving in the New York and New Jersey area.(2) And he served as a sailor, perhaps aboard a privateer; indeed, he may have been at sea much of the time during the early years of the Revolution. Many men in Cohasset went away for military service during the war, leaving Cohasset women to take on their work. Persis’s mother Bethia had the nickname “Resolution” Tower, because she was “said to have carted water in barrels from Lily Pond to water the corn [on the farm on King Street.] during a drought while the men were away in the Revolutionary War.” For her part, Persis bravely sailed a small boat through the British blockade across Massachusetts Bay to get much-needed supplies. Because of this, we remember her as a heroine of the American Revolution.(3)

    In March, 1778, while Persis was pregnant their first child, Allen was one of several seamen imprisoned by the British in Rhode Island. Allen never came home again, and there appears no record of when or where he died. When Sally, Persis and Allen’s daughter, was christened in our meetinghouse on October 18, 1778, Persis wouldn’t have known where Allen was, or whether he was alive or dead. It wasn’t until 1782 that Persis could finally settle her husband’s estate.(4)

    Allen Lincoln’s story is a reminder what prisoners of war faced during the Revolution. The total death toll among prisoners of war held by the British may have been as high as 19,000 men.(5) Persis probably never knew the exact fate of her husband, and I find it difficult to imagine the uncertainty she had to live with — raising an infant child while not knowing where her husband was.

    In 1786, Persis married James Hall, who had been a captain in the Continental Army, even serving as an aide to General Washington. Persis and James lived in the house that his father had built on Cohasset Common using timbers of the old meetinghouse, which was taken down when our present meetinghouse was erected in 1747. Three of their children died in infancy, but they received a bigger shock when their oldest child, Henry, died at age sixteen; he had gone to sea and died of yellow fever in the West Indies. Persis and James hadn’t bothered christening four of Henry’s younger siblings, but within weeks of hearing of his death, they had those four siblings christened all on the same day.(6) After all Persis had been through — Allen’s disappearance, the loss of children in infancy, Henry’s death far from home — perhaps the religious ritual of christening served as a reminder that there was hope for the future.

    Briton Nichols

    The next Revolutionary War story I’d like to tell you is the story of Briton Nichols. I told his story in a previous sermon, but I got some facts wrong, and found out some new facts, so I thought I’d tell it again.(7)

    Briton Nichols first appears in the historical record when he was 17 years old, and listed as a slave in the 1757 will of Nathaniel Nichols, Sr. The next time he appears in the historical record is on March 16, 1776, when he was thirty-seven. This was the day before the British evacuated Boston; Cohasset and other coastal towns were securing their coastal defenses against the possibility of a British naval attack. Briton served for a few days with the Hingham town militia, one of many men from Cohasset, Hingham, and Hull who helped defend the coast.

    A year later, in 1777, Briton enlisted in the Continental Army. We can only speculate why he decided to enlist at age 37. Although enslaved men would join the military to earn their freedom, Nichols was probably free by this time. The economy was in a shambles due to the war, he probably had a wife, and he might have enlisted because he needed money. He also may have believed in the Patriot ideals of freedom and liberty. Whatever his reasons, he and a contingent of soldiers from Cohasset marched together to join the fighting in Saratoga, New York.

    Ambrose Bates, one of Briton’s messmates, kept a diary during their military service. The Cohasset men reached Saratoga in early September and joined the fight against General Burgoyne. The Bates diary shows that much of their military service was filled with boredom. Several days were filled with monotonous marching back and forth from one place to another. Many days, Bates simply records, “Nothing new today.” Days of boredom were interspersed with days with more than enough excitement. On October 7 Bates recorded: “today we had a fight we were alarmed about noon and the fight begun, the sun two hours high at night and we drove them and took field pieces and took sum prisoners.” The British finally surrendered on October 16. All the Cohasset men then marched down to Tarrytown, where they saw little action. Their three month term of service ended on November 30. They marched home at a quick pace, averaging 27 miles a day, arriving in Cohasset on December 7.

    Next, in 1779 Briton Nichols enlisted for a month’s service in Rhode Island, and a month’s service in the Hudson River Valley. Then in 1780, now age forty, he enlisted for six months as part of a levy raised by the town of Cohasset. When the Cohasset men arrived in Springfield, New Jersey, the last major battle in New Jersey had already been fought, but they didn’t know that, and British troops were still active in the area. In October, he was stationed at a military base in New Jersey, part of a large force encamped on two heights above the Totowa River. Even though some of the soldiers’ clothes were in rags, and they sometimes didn’t get enough to eat, they were nevertheless an able fighting force. The British attempted only one attack on Camp Totowa, following a band of Americans who had been out on a foray; they were quickly driven back. We can imagine that perhaps Briton Nichols was sent out on one of the forays against the British, but there’s no way of knowing what service he actually saw.

    That was his last stint in the army. In traveling to and from military service, he walked the astounding distance of some 1500 miles, sometimes managing a punishing pace of 27 miles a day. After the war, Briton moved from Cohasset to Hingham, where he lived with his wife Phebe. Although Briton and Phebe never made much money, at least they kept their freedom and independence.

    I’m not sure that we today can fully understand what Briton Nichols lived through. He began life enslaved, then became free before he became a soldier. He served as a Revolutionary War soldier where he probably saw serious fighting. After the war, he lived to see slavery abolished in Massachusetts. While he never owned real estate, as other free Blacks in Cohasset and Hingham did, he at least managed to maintain his financial freedom.(8) I imagine he must have had a strong spiritual core to get through all that. Perhaps, as was true of many African Americans, he drew on both Christianity, traditional African spirituality, and the humanism that was later expressed in the blue. Whatever the source of his spiritual strength, I admire his resilience and courage.

    Noah Nichols

    The third and final person I’d like to tell you about is Noah Nichols Jr. Before I do, let me digress briefly to tell you how the lives of all three of the people whose stories I’m telling today are intertwined. Noah Jr.’s paternal grandfather, Nathaniel Nichols, was the enslaver of Briton Nichols, and Briton may have been living with one of Noah’s cousins as late as 1776.(9) Noah Nichols Jr. and Persis Tower Lincoln Hall were second cousins, sharing their great-grandfather Israel Winslow Nichols. And Persis’ first husband, Allen, was third cousin once removed to Noah’s wife Abigail. Now let’s get back to Noah.

    Noah Nichols was born on January 8, 1754, the third of thirteen children. His father, Noah Sr., had served in the French and Indian War.(10) And Noah Sr. was one of the wealthier landowners in Cohasset; in 1771, just before he died, he ranked 31 out of 123 property owners in Cohasset.(11)

    Noah Sr. died in 1771, when Noah Jr. was seventeen; leaving his wife Abigail pregnant and responsible for nine other children. By March of 1775, Noah was having sex with his girlfriend Abigail Lincoln. Their first child was born on December 15 of that year, though they remained unmarried. This may seem surprising to us today, but there was a rise in premarital sex in Massachusetts in the second half of the eighteenth century, and some 30 to 40% of all first births were conceived before marriage.(12)

    Noah and Abigail finally got married on February 28, 1776. By July, Noah was working as a wheelwright for the Continental Army at Ticonderoga.(13) As with Briton Nichols, we can’t know whether he was motivated by money or by ideals. He must have displayed leadership ability, though, for on November 9, 1776, he was commissioned as a captain in Col. Ebenezer Stevens’s artillery battalion.(14) The army had decided to create companies of skilled workmen whose trades they needed. These were called “artificer companies,” and a master artisan was placed in charge of the company, often with the rank of officer.(15)

    Now that he was in charge of an artificer company, Noah had to find skilled workers to fill the company. By January, 1777, he was back in Cohasset, and on February 2, four Cohasset men enlisted in Noah’s artificer company: his brother Bela, Jonathan Bates, Melzar Joy, and James Stoddard (James had been one of the Cohasset men who participated in the Boston Tea Party).(16)

    While in Cohasset, Noah also attended to some spiritual business. His daughter Susannah was now two years old, and hadn’t been christened yet. On February 15, Noah and Abigail presented their child to be christened here in this meetinghouse by Rev. John Brown, our Patriot minister. Noah and Abigail went further than that — they also “owned the covenant,” that is, became formal members of the church. The process of owning the covenant went like this: after a private meeting with the minister, a formal meeting of the church was convened during which the applicants for membership publicly confessed their sins. Noah and Abigail did this on February 15.(17) Owning the covenant was a serious and major commitment; many people waited until they were a good bit older to own the covenant, if they bothered doing it at all. We can thus sense a change in Noah from the young man who, before the war, didn’t bother marrying his girlfriend until after their first child was born. Perhaps some of the things Noah had seen during his military service had given him a sense of his mortality, a desire to deepen his spirituality.

    Noah was back with the army in March, 1777, marching with his company for Ticonderoga. They were stationed there when General Burgoyne’s forces attacked. In July, they retreated to Albany with the rest of the artillery brigade.(18) During the retreat, a private serving under Noah was taken prisoner by the British.(19) By mid-July, Noah was back in Cohasset for leave.(20) Then in September and October, his company was in the battles that eventually led to the defeat of the British, and was present at the surrender of General Burgoyne.(21)

    After leaving Albany, Noah was based in New Jersey and Pennsylvania for the remainder of his military service. It was probably during this time that he had a memorable encounter with General Washington. While on a forced march, General Washington ordered him to repair the wheel of a gun carriage. Captain Nichols requested permission to stop the carriage while he was doing the repairs, but the general abruptly refused. Noah had to do the repairs while the gun carriage was underway. Telling this story in later years, Noah added, “It was the hardest thing I ever did, but I did it.”(22)

    By 1779, when Noah had put in three years of military service, the pay of the artificers had depreciated badly, and because the artificer companies didn’t belong to a state unit, their officers didn’t receive the allowance given to regular officers.(23) And although Noah had received an officer’s commission, the other officers serving under him — including his brother Bela — never received their commissions, though they had been promised.(24) In early 1780, the artificer corps were reorganized under cost-saving measures.(25)

    I suspect this was the last straw for Noah. On March 26, 1780, Noah’s second child, Elizabeth, was christened, and presumably he was present for the ceremony.(26) Noah resigned his officer’s commission on April 3.(27) By 1781, all officers of the artificer corps were dismissed as a cost-saving measure.

    After returning to Cohasset, Noah resumed working as a cartwright and a housewright; when there wasn’t enough work in his chosen trade, he would take on other kinds of work like plowing.(28) In 1787, he finally received compensation from Massachusetts for the depreciation of wages he suffered from 1777 to 1780.(29) Noah and Abigail had five children in 1787, so no doubt the extra money was welcome.

    Noah was one of two highest ranking Revolutionary War veterans in Cohasset; the other being Captain James Hall. Late in life, Noah took pride in his military service, and he “was accustomed in his old age to shoulder his fire-lock, ‘And show how the fields were won.’”(30) Noah died in 1833, aged 79, still an active member of this parish.(31)

    Now that I’ve told you about these three people — Persis, Briton, and Noah — here’s what I take away from their stories. First of all, all three of them lived through very challenging times. Living in Cohasset during the Revolution meant the threat of British invasion. The war also caused economic hard times, with depreciation of currency and shortages of food and goods. With all the men away fighting, that meant more work for those who stayed home. Soldiers and sailors might wind up as prisoners of war or missing in action, leaving their families in dreadful uncertainty. Even the soldiers and sailors who returned might have seen horrors that would affect them for the rest of their lives. — And all this was on top of the normal difficulties of those times: the many children who died in infancy; the challenge of wresting a living from the rocky soil of New England, or from the often dangerous Atlantic Ocean.

    Looking back, we think of the Revolutionary generation as somehow more heroic than we are. But they weren’t. They were ordinary people just like us. Somehow, they managed to summon up the courage to get through the hard times. Some of them, like Noah Nichols, found extra strength through participating in this religious community. For others, like Briton Nichols, we’ll never know know for sure where they found the strength to get through those hard times.

    We face hard times today — if we’re honest, times today aren’t nearly as hard as they were then — but still, we face hard times. Looking back at that Revolutionary generation causes me to wonder about where I’m going to get the strength to get me through the hard times of today. The Revolutionary generation found strength in their spiritual practices, and they found strength in the connections of family and community. Perhaps those are the places we should be looking for our own strength.

    Notes

    (1) Records of First Parish in Cohasset; Mass. Vital Records.
    (2) Details of Allen’s military service may be found in Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War (Boston: Wright & Potter, State Printers, 1902), p. 798; “United States, Rosters of Revolutionary War Soldiers and Sailors, 1775-1966,” www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q5W9-9RDY , Entry for Allen Lincoln. Record of his imprisonment may be found in Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War (Boston: Wright & Potter, State Printers, 1902), p. 79; “United States, Rosters of Revolutionary War Soldiers and Sailors, 1775-1966,” www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QG2M-NFW5 , Entry for Allyn Lyncoln [note the two different spellings of his name]: “Lyncoln, Allyn. List of prisoners delivered to Col. Gabriel Johonnot by Mr. Charles Waller, Commissary of Prisoners at Rhode Island, March 17, 1778; reported a Seaman.”
    (3) Victor Bigelow, Narrative History of Cohasset (1898), p. 306; p. 290.
    (4) Waldo Lincoln, History of the Lincoln Family (Worcester, Mass.: Commonwealth Press, 1923), pp. 185-186.: “August 9, 1782, Persis Lincoln of Cohasset, widow, was admitted administratrix on the estate of Allin Lincoln, late of Cohasset, deceased intestate. The inventory of his estate, dated Aug. 14, 1782, shows that he left: real estate, house and half an acre of land, £80; personal estate £26:10. (Suffolk County Probate Records, vol. lxxxi, pp. 379, 630.)”
    (5) See e.g. Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary War (Basic Books, 2008), p. 317 n. 12.
    (6) First Parish records.
    (7) The story of Briton Nichols is a condensed version of a talk I gave for the Cohasset Historical Society on 28 Feb. 2026, revised 30 March based on comments by Paula Bagger and George Quintal, and further research. That talk has been deposited in the First Parish archives, and full footnotes may be found there.
    (8) His wife Phebe was not so fortunate. After Briton’s death, she sank into poverty, and died in the Hingham poorhouse.
    (9) Paula Bagger’s research (personal communication) indicates the following: In 1773, Nathaniel Sr.’s estate is finally settled on Nathaniel Jr.’s children; the land is divided up, but there is no mention of Britain Nichols. In Cohasset’s 1776 census, the household of Nathaniel Nichols 3rd (1749-1833) had one Black resident; this may or may not have been Briton, and it is not clear whether that person was enslaved or free.
    (10) Victor Bigelow, p. 279; History of the Town of Hingham, Massachusetts, vol. III [Cambridge: University Press, John Wilson and son, 1893], p.87-88.
    (11) Victor Bigelow, pp. 277-276.
    (12) Robert Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill, 1976), p. 217, concluded that 41% of all first births in Concord, Mass., between 1760 and 1774 were prenuptial conceptions. Karen A. Weyler, “The Fruit of Unlawful Embraces,” Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 292, says that the “changing relationship between parents and children may have also contributed to the striking rise in the incidence of premarital sex during the last decades of the eighteenth century…. from 1761 to 1800, 33 percent of all first births to married women occurred before the ninth month of marriage.”
    (13) Letter dated July 11, 1776, reprinted in: Peter Force, American Archives, Fifth Series: A Documentary History of the United States of America [July 4, 1776 to Sept. 3, 1783], volume I (Washington, D.C.: M. St. Clair and Peter Force, 1848), p. 653.
    (14) Robert K. Wright, The Continental Army (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army), p. 329; also see: W. T. R. Saffell, Records of the Revolutionary War 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Charles C. Saffell, 1894), p. 160.
    (15) Erna Risch, Supplying Washington’s Army (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, US Army, 1981), p. 152.
    (16) Saffell, Records of the Revolutionary War, p. 160.
    (17) In the First Parish records, these events appear as follows: In records of church meetings, “1777. Feby 15. Noah Nichols, and wife Abigail”; this would have been the church meeting where they confessed their sins. In records of those who owned the covenant, “1777. Feby 15. Noah Nickols and his Abigail his wife.” Finally, Susannah’s baptism is listed on that date. Note that in the terminology of the day, “church” meant the religious organization; this was different from the business side of the congregation, which was managed by the proprietors.
    (18) Some of these details from the account of the military service of Edward Burril of Lynn, Mass., who served under Capt. Noah Nichols. See: Howard Kendall Sanderson, Lynn in the Revolution, Part II (Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1909), pp. 236-237.
    (19) Saffell, Records of the Revolutionary War, p. 160.
    (20) Deduced from the birth date of his daughter Elizabeth.
    (21) Sanderson, p. 237.
    (22) From the address given by Hon. Thomas Russell at the Centennial Anniversary of the town of Cohasset, May 7, 1870, reprinted in: Duane Hamilton Hurd, ed., History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts (Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis & Cop., 1884), Chapter XIX: Cohasset, pp. 219-220.
    (23) Erna Risch, Supplying Washington’s Army (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, US Army, 1981), p. 155.
    (24) Journals of the Continental Congress 1774-1789, vol. XV. 1779 (September 2-December 31) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), p. 1388-1389.
    (25) Erna Risch, Supplying Washington’s Army (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, US Army, 1981), pp. 156-157.
    (26) First Parish records.
    (27) Francis B. “Alphabetical List of Officers of the Continental Army,” Historical Register of the Officers of the Continental Army during the War of the Revolution, April 1775 to December 1783 (Washington, DC, Rare Book Shop Publishing Co., Inc., 1914), p. 414.
    (28) The account book of Ambrose Nichols, covering dates from c. 1809 to c. 1830 provides these details; presumably the two brothers, pursuing the same trade, had similar experiences. See the finding aid: University of Massachusetts Amherst, Ambrose Nichols Account Book, 1809-1830, 1 volume (0.25 linear ft.) Call no.: MS 210, findingaids.library.umass.edu/ead/mums210.pdf
    (29) “Noah Nichols appears as a Captain on an account rendered against the United States by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for amounts paid officers and men of Capt. Jeduthan Baldwin’s regt. on account of depreciation of their wages for the first three years’ service in the Continental Army from 1777 to 1780. Account exhibited by Committee on Claims in behalf of Mass. against U.S., Sept 21, 1787.” — Entry for Noah Nichols, 21 September 1787, “Massachusetts, Revolutionary War, Index Cards to Muster Rolls, 1775-1783,” https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QGKC-WVCV
    (30) Thomas Russell, in Duane Hamilton Hurd (1884), p. 220.
    (31) First Parish records. Rev. Jacob Flint usually only recorded the name of the person who died, but in this case he noted: “June 23. Noah Nichols in his 79th year.”

  • Why democracy matters

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading was from Cornel West’s book Democracy Matters:

    “In America, we have tended to underplay the crucial role of the foundational motivation of democracy. From the time of that first experiment in democracy in Athen in the fifth century BC to the birth of the American democratic experiment in the eighteenth century, the consolidation of elite power was the primary object of democratic revolt. This will to transform corrupted forms of elite rule into more democratic ways of life is an extraordinary force, though each new democratic result of the exercise of this will [always] falls short of democratic ideals. This is why all democracies are complete and unfinished, and this is why American democracy is a work in progress.”

    The second reading was from the long poem “Freedom’s Plow” by Langston Hughes:

    …America is a dream.
    The poet says it was promises.
    The people say it is promises — that will come true.
    The people do not always say things out loud,
    Nor write them down on paper.
    The people often hold
    Great thoughts in their deepest thoughts
    And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
    Haltingly and stumbling say them,
    And faultily put them into practice.
    The people do not always understand each other.
    But there is, somewhere there,
    Always the trying to understand,
    And the trying to say,
    “You are human. Together we are building our land.”

    America!
    Land created in common,
    Dream nourished in common,
    Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
    If the house is not finished,
    Don’t be discouraged, builder!
    If the fight is not yet won,
    Don’t be weary, soldier!…

    (Excerpt of this poem included under copyright fair use: fewer than 500 words, less than half the poem.)

    Sermon

    This morning, I’m going try to give a couple of small reasons why democracy matters. The title I gave this sermon — “Why Democracy Matters” — uses a phrase I stole from Democracy Matters, which was the title of a book by philosopher Cornel West. When I first read that book a couple of decades ago, two things stood out for me. First, West made it clear that part of his commitment to democracy stemmed from his liberal Christian faith. Second, West thought that Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the people who was (to use West’s own words) “the life force behind the deeper individual and civic American commitment to democracy.”(1)

    Unfortunately, West isn’t an especially good writer, and he uses the book to settle personal grudges; so I don’t recommend it. But I appreciate the title of the book — “Democracy Matters.” Democracy does matter. And I appreciate the thought that those of us who are religious, yet neither fundamentalists nor evangelicals, have something important to contribute to American democracy.

    West tells us that a key contributor fo the American democratic tradition is Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson served as a Unitarian minister for eight years before he embarked on his more famous career as an essayist and a public lecturer. As a minister and as a writer, his ideas and his ideals were shaped by the deep Unitarian conviction in the power of the individual, and by the related Unitarian conviction that each and every person can have a direct connection with the divine. His Unitarian convictions led him to reject hierarchies, to reject blindly following authority; as Cornel West phrased it, Emerson “refused to accept the conventional wisdom of leaders.” After saying this, West quotes from Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance”:

    “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

    After quoting Emerson, West comments that “Emerson offered the empowering insight that to be a democratic individual is to be flexible and fluid, revisionary and reformational in your dealing with your fellow citizens and the world, not adhering to comfortable dogmas or rigid party lines.”(2)

    Emerson was a Unitarian, and West was a liberal Black Baptist. We tend to think those two religious traditions are very different, but in one crucial way, they’re very similar. Both those religious traditions agree that it’s up to the individual to know the truth; and both those religious traditions agree that individuals can have a direct experience of divinity, goodness, and truth.

    These two religious traditions share these important beliefs because they both come from the same ancient religious tradition. They both owe a great deal to the religious tradition extending back thousands of years to the earliest books of the Hebrew Bible, a tradition that believes in equality and justice for all persons. Martin Luther King was another liberal Black Baptist, who famously quoted the prophet Amos, “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (3). Nor is it just Unitarians and Black Baptists who emphasize the religious tradition of justice for all persons — liberal and moderate Jews, liberal and moderate Christians of all denominations, and liberal Muslims also affirm that there must be justice for all persons.

    One of the founding documents of American democracy, the Declaration of Independence, draws on this same tradition when it says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, who was a liberal Christian. In drafting the Declaration, Jefferson worked closely with John Adams, another liberal Christian (in fact, he was Unitarian). The Declaration of Independence was able to declare that all people are created equal, because it can draw from that long tradition of justice stretching back to the prophet Amos and beyond. We all know the limitations of the Declaration of Independence: it left out women, it ignored enslaved African Americans. But we are able to criticize the Declaration of Independence in this way precisely because we draw on the long tradition of justice originating in the Hebrew prophets.

    As a former Unitarian minister, Emerson knew this ancient tradition well. He knew it was not a dead, static tradition. The search for goodness and justice is not something that happens once, and then you’re done with it. Emerson said that when you think you’ve found goodness, you “must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if [what you’ve found actually] be goodness” or not. While Emerson never quite accepted that women were created equal to men, and although he never quite accepted that Black people were the equals of White people, even though he favored the abolition of slavery; nevertheless, he went further than many people of his day and age in saying that at least some justice might be extended to enslaved African Americans. Emerson’s disciple, Henry Thoreau, went further than Emerson did, and Martin Luther King took things further than either Emerson or Thoreau, advocating for complete equality of all Americans regardless of race.

    This is the way democracy works. It is not static. It is an evolving tradition. American democracy continues to evolve, continues to extend the basic principles of equality further than Jefferson or Adams were willing to take it. We have now extended equality to women, and to people who are not White. And it’s significant that many of the people who worked to extend equality have been able to draw on the ancient tradition of justice that extends back to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

    In the United States today, however, I am aware of at least two religious traditions that do not support equality, and that therefore act to undermine democracy.

    One religious tradition that seeks to restrict equality is conservative Christian nationalism. The Christian nationalists do not believe that women are equal; they believe that women should be subordinate to men; and while they may say that women should retain the right to vote, they also say that a wife should submit to her husband, perhaps to the point where she should vote the way he tells her to vote. Increasingly, the Christian nationalists also seem to be drifting into the belief that only White Christian nationalists deserve full equality, while non-White people are not as equal. Christian nationalism is a non-democratic religious tradition. While Emerson believed that people in a democracy must be flexible enough to seek out truth and goodness on their own, by contrast Christian nationalists want people to stick to comfortable dogmas and “rigid party lines.” Democracy requires that we think for our selves; Christian nationalists don’t want us to think for ourselves; they want to tell us what to think and what to do.

    The second religious tradition that seeks to restrict equality and to limit democracy is the religion of amoral capitalism. Capitalism has not always been a-moral. There was a time when the goal for businesspeople was to make a profit while providing things their community needed. My first full-time job was in a lumberyard, which made a tidy profit for the family that owned it, while at the same time supplying needed building materials, and providing much needed jobs to the community. The goal for business used to be stated like this: Do well by doing good. But a new religious belief emerged that has taken over the biggest businesses, a religious belief that the only goal is to maximize shareholder value. I consider this a religious belief because its believers cling to it with religious fervor. This religious belief even has a name: it’s called the Friedman Doctrine. The Friedman Doctrine shares Christian nationalism’s commitment to dogma and obedience to authority. Like Christian nationalism, the religion of the Friedman Doctrine is essentially hierarchical and non-democratic: there are no stakeholders except for CEOs and shareholders. The Friedman Doctrine stands in opposition to the long Biblical tradition of extending justice to all persons. Back in 2016, The Economist, a politically centrist periodical, pointed out that the moral result of the doctrine of maximizing shareholder value is “a license for bad conduct.”(4) Democracies must be rooted in a firm sense of justice; they depend for their existence on widely-shared morality that proclaims equality for all persons. Thus the Friedman Doctrine, with its license for bad conduct, is anti-democratic.

    How can we respond to these two anti-democratic religions? Recall that passage from Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” To paraphrase this in a more contemporary idiom: If you would be fully human, you must think for yourself. If you would be truly good, it is not enough to let someone else tell you how to be good; you must find goodness out for yourself. You must value your own personal integrity above all else.

    And here’s how this applies to democracy. In other forms of government, such as monarchies and autocracies, you simply accept that whatever the ruler of your country tells you is the right thing to do. Similarly, in a big impersonal business, the largest shareholders and the CEO determine what is right, and everyone else — both inside the business, and outside the business — simply has to accept what they are told to do.

    Why does democracy matter? Democracy matters because it does not dictate to us. In a democracy, we must think for ourselves. In a democracy, if we would strive for true goodness, it is not enough to let someone else tell us how to be good, we must find out goodness for ourselves. Above all, we must value our own personal integrity. In a democracy, we have to ask ourselves, “Have I been the best person I can possibly be?”

    Democracy matters because it continues the long tradition of justice going back to the Biblical prophet Amos, and beyond. We may not hold exactly the same notion of God that Amos does; we may be Buddhist or pagan or atheist or something else; but like Amos, we want justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Thomas Jefferson surely had the Biblical prophets in mind when he wrote the Declaration of Independence; and for all his many faults — that he was sexist, that he was a slaveholder — Jefferson did the best he could to uphold that long tradition of justice; and he made so that we could extend justice beyond what he could have imagined.

    Democracy matters because all people are created equal, with certain inalienable rights; and may justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

    Notes

    (1) Cornel West, Democracy Matters (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), p. 68.
    (2) Ibid., p. 70.
    (3) Amos 5:24, KJV
    (4) “Analyse this,” The Economist, March 31, 2016.

  • A Secular Saint

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading was from a 2018 BBC interview with Claudette Colvin, who died last week. On March 2, 1955, when she was fifteen years old, Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus. According to the BBC, “Colvin was the first person to be arrested for challenging Montgomery’s bus segregation policies….” It would be another nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus. In the 2018 interview, Colvin said:

    “We walked downtown and my friends and I saw the bus and decided to get on. It was right across the road from Dr Martin Luther King’s church. The white people were always seated at the front of the bus and the black people were seated at the back of the bus. The bus driver had the authority to assign the seats, so when more white passengers got on the bus, he asked for the seats. He wanted me to give up my seat for a white person and I would have done it for an elderly person but this was a young white woman. Three of the students had got up reluctantly and I remained sitting next to the window. Whenever people ask me: ‘Why didn’t you get up when the bus driver asked you?’ I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail. I wasn’t frightened but disappointed and angry because I knew I was sitting in the right seat.”

    The second reading was the poem “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou. The pome is not included here due to copyright.

    Sermon

    Tomorrow is the national holiday celebrating the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Today, fifty-eight years after he was murdered, Dr. King has become something of a larger-than-life figure in American culture. All these years later, we’ve finally reached something of a national consensus that King is an important figure in our national history. I’d even say he’s become something of a secular saint, though then we’d have to figure out what we mean by the phrase “secular saint.”

    There are religious groups — Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans and some Lutherans — who have fairly well-defined definitions of sainthood. The Benedictine Monks of St. Augustine’s Abbey in Ramsgate, England, offer a definition of sainthood in their 1921 book “The Book of Saints: A Dictionary of Servants of God Canonized by the Catholic Church” back in 1921 (London: A.C. Black). The monks begin by pointing out that their religion has a strict and rigorous process for determining who is a saint. This process begins after the proposed saint has died with a careful investigation into that person’s life. The monks summarize this long process thus:

    “It consists in the first place of a thorough investigation into all the particulars that can be ascertained of the life and death of the alleged Saint, all facts connected with whose career, both public and private, together with all his utterances and writings, are tested in every way. He must be shown to have been God-fearing, pious, just in his dealings, patient, self-denying, charitable, and so on, far above the average of ordinary good men….particular stress is put upon the popular verdict concerning the alleged Saint, that is, upon the repute in which he was held by those who may have had dealings with him or had opportunities of forming an opinion about him.”

    While this process is for Catholic saints, you can see that something similar applies to the process of determining who gets to be a secular saint. In Dr. King’s case, it wasn’t until the year 2000, 42 years after his death, that all 50 states recognized the federal holiday honoring him.

    The monks also point out that there is an exception to this lengthy process of determining sainthood, which would not apply to Dr. King:

    “The above official enquiry into the conduct in life and virtues of the deceased Christian for whom the supreme honor of [sainthood] is claimed is deemed unnecessary only in the case of a Martyr, that is, of one of the Faithful who has deliberately laid down his life rather than deny Christ. In his case, it has to be fully proved that he was put to death on account of his religion, and not because he was guilty of some political or other crime….”

    In American popular culture, martyrdom — the fact that someone gave their life for some great cause — may sometimes, but not always, be a part of secular sainthood. I’ll return to the question of martyrdom later on.

    Now, I have greatly shortened what the monks say about the criteria for sainthood, and they themselves say they are merely summarizing the complicated laws of sainthood in the Roman Catholic church. So we can see that some Christians have a lengthy process and strict criteria for determining who is a saint. For other Christians, however, sainthood doesn’t involve some complicated legal procedure; a saint is simply someone who leads a good Christian life. In these less strict Christian traditions, a saint is recognized as a saint when enough people agree that that person is a saint — this is sainthood by popular acclaim, rather than sainthood by formal church laws.

    Nor is it just Christians who recognize moral exemplars. Many other religious traditions venerate figures who are roughly equivalent to Christian saints. In Buddhism, a bodhisatva, someone who is striving towards Buddhahood, may be understood to be something like a saint. In Sikhism, the ten gurus who served from the founding of the religion until 1708 are considered to be roughly equivalent to saints. The Daoist immortals, people whose mastery of that religion have allowed them to overcome death, are somewhat saintlike.

    What about us Unitarian Universalists? We tend to be a skeptical group of people. We’re likely to be skeptical of the miracles attributed to the Christian saints. We’re likely to be skeptical that Daoist immortals really live forever. We may have doubts about the endless cycle of rebirth from which Buddhist bodhisattvas release themselves. We also get skeptical about sainthood because we see how the different religious traditions define sainthood differently: the Christian saints have a special connection to God; the Buddhist bodhisattvas achieve nirvana; the Daoist immortal works with alchemy; and so on.

    Indeed, our skepticism tends to push us towards doing away with saints altogether. However, I’d like to suggest that we probably don’t want to completely do away with saints. On the one hand, doing away with saints might cause us to view all moral exemplars with skepticism, which in turn can make it difficult to learn from anyone’s moral example. On the other hand, doing away with our skepticism might cause us to stop thinking critically about our moral exemplars. It’s good to have people we can look up to, and good to have people who serve as moral exemplars. It’s also good to remain aware that all persons, even saint-like people, have limitations. We Unitarian Universalists can steer a middle path between completely giving in to skepticism and doing away with saints on the one hand — and on the other hand, completely ignoring our skepticism about saints so that we can no longer think critically about them.

    This is how I got wondering whether Dr. King might be considered a saint: I wanted to keep him as a moral exemplar, but there were some things I wanted to think critically about. First, I wasn’t sure if he should be a religious saint. If he were a religious saint, he’d of course be a Christian saint. But then people who aren’t Christian might not find him especially inspiring, which would limit his reach as a moral exemplar. But even for Christians, since Dr. King was a Baptist I suppose he’d be a Baptist saint; except the Baptists don’t really spend much time venerating saints. So since Dr. King had become a saintlike moral exemplar, valued by Christians and non-Christians alike, that implies he had become a secular saint. As a secular saint, he wouldn’t be restricted to one Christian denomination; he could be claimed more widely by Christians, by people of other religions, and by people of no religion at all.

    This raises two questions for me. First, why have saints at all, even secular ones? Second, who gets to determine who becomes a secular saint?

    I’ve come to believe that it’s good to have secular saints. I spent twenty-five years working as a religious educator, and a big part of Unitarian Universalist religious education is moral education. We want to help each other to lead a good life. And when we do moral education, it works best to show what a moral life looks like, rather than decreeing that there are certain rules that you must live by. Thus, the best moral educators find people who can serve as moral examples, about whom they can say: This person did many good things in their life, and you might consider following their example.

    I think back to my own Unitarian Universalist upbringing, and remember how I was offered several examples of Unitarian Universalists who lived good lives, and whose example I might wish to follow. One of those Unitarian Universalist saint-like people was Louisa May Alcott, who not only wrote books about the importance of family, she also helped support her own family both financially and emotionally. Another of those Unitarian Universalist saint-like people was Henry Thoreau, who lived a life of simplicity, who was an anti-slavery activist, and who also helped to support his family financially.

    As I got older, I learned about other Unitarian Universalist saint-like people; people like James Reeb, a White minister who answered Martin Luther King’s plea for clergy to come to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and march for voting rights. Reeb was murdered by White segregationists, and so became a kind of martyr. But he wasn’t a martyr in the formal Roman Catholic definition of the term: he did not die because of refusing to deny Christ, he died for a political cause. If we think of him as a secular saint, then we can say that he was a secular martyr, because he died for a higher purpose. Not that we think everyone should become a martyr to a higher purpose; we can retain enough of our skepticism to question when martyrdom is justified. Reeb didn’t seek out martyrdom; instead, he was simply following his highest principles.

    The question of martyrdom brings us back to the question of who gets to determine who becomes a secular saint. Just because someone gets killed, they do not automatically become a secular saint. Malcolm X was assassinated at about the same time as Martin Luther King, but Malcolm X has not become a secular saint in the same way that Dr. King has. I have great admiration for Malcom X, particularly the last year of his life, after he went to Mecca and came to a deep understanding of how all humanity was closely interconnected. But I admire Dr. King more, because of his principled stand for nonviolence. I understand why Malcolm X felt it necessary to advise all Black families to own guns in case they had to defend themselves against White supremacists. But I admire Dr. King for being able to take a broader view when he said, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.” Dr. King’s principle of nonviolence helps explain why he has become more widely recognized as a secular saint.

    Let us consider another pair, one of whom became a secular saint, and the other of whom did not. Rosa Parks has achieved secular sainthood through her act of refusing to give up her seat to a White person on a segregated city bus. Yet as we heard in the first reading this morning, Rosa Parks was not the first Black person to refuse to give up her seat on a city bus; Rosa parks was not even the first Black woman to go to jail for refusing to give up her seat. Claudette Colvin, who just died this past week, was one of several Black people who refused to give up their bus seats before Rosa Parks did. Claudette Colvin was fifteen years old when she was arrested, and it is astonishing to think that a high schooler had the courage to risk arrest as a protest against segregation laws. So why did Rosa Parks become a secular saint, but not Claudette Colvin? One answer to that question is that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat as a part of a larger strategy to mount a legal challenge to the segregation laws. Although Claudette Colvin later became one of the plaintiffs in the legal challenge to segregated buses, her refusal was an individual decision made on the spur of the moment. Furthermore, when she was arrested, Colvin was pregnant, which by the standards of the time made her ineffective as a moral exemplar; she also had darker skin than Parks did, which in that place and time would have worked against her. Indeed, her mother reportedly advised her to stay out of the spotlight. None of this diminishes what Claudette Colvin did; but it does help us better understand what makes a secular saint. Both women helped create lasting change by participating in the law suit challenging segregated buses; both women were members of the NAACP, both were already participating in the struggle for civil rights; but because Rosa Parks would be more acceptable to more people, she was the one who became a secular saint.

    Can you see how I’m trying to think critically about secular sainthood? A healthy amount of skepticism allows us to sort through the strengths and weaknesses of our secular saints. By sorting through their strengths and weaknesses, we can make careful judgements about what they did best, and what they might have done better. We can judge that both Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks did something amazing, while at the same time understanding why Rosa Parks got all the publicity. We can judge that both Malcolm X and Dr. King had admirable qualities, while at the same time acknowledging that Dr. King’s philosophy, with his broad vision for united humanity, would be valued by a wider segment of the population.

    We can also use our healthy skepticism to make judgements about individual secular saints. As skeptics, we are pretty sure that no individual human being is infallible — not even secular saints. And so we can acknowledge that it is important to use our judgement as we strive to follow the examples of secular saints. Dr. King allegedly had extra-martial affairs. As healthy skeptics, we can recognize his very real faults and imperfections, while also valuing the good things he did. We do not require uncritical acceptance of our saints; we accept them for who they really were, as complex and fallible human beings, recognizing their faults while valuing their moral accomplishments.

    And now we can consider why we might want to have secular saints at all. I’ve already said that I found secular saints were useful when doing moral education with children. But I think we adults also benefit from having secular saints. I’ll give myself as an example. I’ve already told you about one of the secular saints I was introduced to as a child, Henry Thoreau. As children, mostly what we knew about Thoreau was that he lived in a cabin out at Walden Pond, which seemed like fun; but we also got some small inkling of Thoreau’s principles of simplicity. Then in the summer after my senior year in high school, I actually sat down and read Walden. I found it slow going, but I learned something new: Thoreau was a mystic who found God everywhere, and his notions of simplicity were part and parcel of that vision of God. It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I finally realized that Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond was a station on the Underground Railroad; and it wasn’t until I was middle-aged that I learned how Thoreau was dedicated to his family. As my own moral capacity grew, I was better able to understand Thoreau as a complex moral exemplar.

    A good moral exemplar, someone truly worth emulating, is not going to be a simplistic goody two-shoes one-dimensional figure. Those simplistic figures don’t have to confront difficult moral choices, so there is little to learn from them. When Dr. King is portrayed merely as someone who advocated for Civil Rights for Black people, he is little better than a goody two-shoes. Then when you recall that gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 during a march for jobs, a march that included both Black and White organizers because the issue of jobs is an issue for all races — then Dr. King gains more complexity; then he becomes more worthy of our emulation. Finally, when you realize all his actions were rooted in his deep spiritual practices, he gains further complexity — and he challenges us to deepen our own spiritual practices, so that our own actions are rooted in our own spiritual practices.

    And so you see, finding out about secular saints is not just an intellectual exercise. We can (and should) maintain a healthy skepticism about secular saints. But we also long for people to serve as examples of how our own lives can be more spiritually grounded. Contemplating the lives of secular saints can help go deeper into our own spiritual centers.

    This, in fact, is how we learn to be human: we are taught to be human by the examples of other humans. And part of our moral growth is learning that every human being has flaws, even our moral examples; then if we’re honest with ourselves we admit that we too have flaws, and we can learn how a seep spiritual grounding can help us overcome our own flaws. And so it is that we learn how we can our best possible selves by considering the examples of the best possible humans we know. And this learning continues our whole live, helping our spirits grow ever stronger, and helping our selves to grow into ever greater goodness.