Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Religion in society

  • Is It Religion? (part 1) — Sports

    Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Opening words

    The opening words were the poem “We’re Human Beings” by Jill McDonough.

    Readings

    The first reading this morning is from “The Cult of the Red Sox” by Mark Silk, (“Spiritual Politics,” Religion News Service, October 31, 2013):

    “Anyone who lives in New England knows that sports is religion. There are different denominations, albeit these are not (ecumenical souls that we are) mutually exclusive. You can be a devotee of the Patriots, Bruins, Celtics, and Huskies all at once.

    “Of course, the most exalted regional cult is the Red Sox, who have been playing in their Fenway Park shrine since 1912. This year’s bearded incarnation was a dead ringer for the barnstorming teams fielded in the early 20th century by the Israelite House of David, a Michigan commune dedicated to gathering in the 12 Tribes of Israel to await the imminent Millennium.

    “In the latter 20th century, the Red Sox sought the in-gathering of the six tribes of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut in anticipation of the Millennium that arrived in 2004, when they captured a world championship for the first time since Babe Ruth propelled them to one in 1918. Last night, Red Sox Nation celebrated its third championship in 10 years. Hosannah!

    “Once upon a time, baseball’s gods were indentured to their teams by the reserve clause. Like Athena in Athens or Apollo in Delphi, they were permanent fixtures of a city unless the owner decided to trade them away (as Harry Frazee traded Ruth to the Yankees in 1919). Now, thanks to free agency, the gods can shop around for their gigs. Moving from city to city, they are, perforce, less attached to any of them.

    “In Boston, this year, it was more like the old days. When the city was rocked by the Marathon bombing a few games into the season, the players, most of them newcomers, found themselves essential to civic recovery….”

    The second reading was the poem “Baseball and Classicism,” by Tom Clark.

    Sermon : “Is It Religion, Pt. 1: Sports”

    Is sports a religion? The answer is — yes. The answer is also — no.

    I guess I’ll have to explain what I mean. And to simplify things, I’ll begin by focusing on just one sport. The world of sports is large and complex, and it is composed of many denominations, sects, and cults. I suppose I should focus on the sport that is most widespread in the world, which is association football, known as soccer here in the United States. But we live close to Boston, where baseball reigned supreme for many years. With the coming of the prophet Tom Brady to the Patriots, some of baseball’s fair-weather fans became football fans, but now that the prophet Brady has gone back to San Mateo or wherever he came from, the faithful are slowly drifting back to the fold. So baseball it is.

    It doesn’t matter that the Sox have finished three of the last four seasons in the cellar. This is not a Church of Baseball where salvation is measured by wins and losses. This is the peculiar cult known as Red Sox Nation. Regardless of whether the Sox are winning or losing, the faithful of Red Sox Nation make their annual pilgrimages to Fenway Park from all over New England east of the Connecticut River. The pilgrimage to Fenway is the religious dream of every member of Red Sox Nation:– to sit beside that holy ground, to watch the ritual battle of pitcher against batter, to drink the sacred warm beer (for which you paid eleven dollars), to join in the sacred ritual chants of “No batter, no batter,” “Let’s go Red Sox,” and “Hey ump, you couldn’t call a cab.” And for the pilgrims of Red Sox Nation, the ultimate religious experience is to be in Fenway for a game between the Sox and the hated Yankees. Because for the faithful of Red Sox Nation, baseball is more than a game, it is in its highest form a re-enactment of the universal Battle between Good and Evil.

    Have I convinced you yet that Red Sox Nation is a religion, or at least a religious cult?

    Even I have been converted to the cult of Red Sox Nation. Even I, who have approximately zero interest in sports. I’m one of those people whose only interest lies in outdoor sports — hiking, fishing, camping, canoeing — and outdoor sports don’t count as real sports. Yet fifteen years ago, before I moved out to California, I was a member of Red Sox Nation. I made my pilgrimages to Fenway. I read the box scores, back when newspapers carried box scores. I listened to Joe Castiglione give the sacred broadcasts. If the Red Sox can get someone like me to follow sports — then it must be more than sports, it must be religion.

    Yet of course baseball can’t be religion. Sports can’t be religion. We all know what religion is. Social scientists here in the United States even have specific measurements to determine someone’s religiosity — things like belief in a higher power, engagement in prayer or an equivalent spiritual practice, attendance at religious services, affiliation to a religious institution, and so on. We are likely to use much the same measures as social scientists. If someone goes to church or temple, if they believe in God, if they pray regularly, if they identify with some widely accepted religion — then we call them religious. We who are not social scientists might add a couple of additional criteria for what defines a religious person — you’re supposed to read a sacred text or texts, and you’re only supposed to have one religious affiliation at a time.

    By these measure, baseball is not a religion. But by these same measures, Unitarian Universalism is not a religion either. Many Unitarian Universalists do not believe in God. Many of us do not pray, nor even engage in any other widely accepted spiritual practice such as meditation. Many of us have multiple religious affiliations. A good number of us do not care much about sacred texts. Quite a few perfectly good Unitarian Universalists do not attend weekly services.

    The problem with the usual American definition of religion is that it is based on Western Protestant Christianity. In order to be a Protestant Christian, you do have to believe in God. You do have to pray. You do have to read your Bible. You do have to attend religious services regularly. And you can only belong to one religion at a time.

    We then apply these standards, which are based on Western Protestant Christianity, to all other religious traditions. It’s pretty straightforward to apply these criteria to Judaism and Islam. But we have to be more creative when applying these criteria to Buddhism: we have to include Buddhist meditation as a form of prayer, the sutras are like the Bible, and we get around the requirement of belief in God by saying that Buddhists believe in Buddha who is sort of like Jesus Christ.

    We manage to make our clumsy definition of religion work — sort of — by forcing non-Christian traditions into Christian categories. This can become awkward. Take, for example, Confucianism. (Which, by the way, is called Confucianism by people in the West because we like to think of Confucius as a sort of sacred founder figure like Jesus Christ, even though he’s not that at all.) When Christian missionaries went to China in the early Modern era, they said to Confucian scholars, “Confucianism is a religion, right?” To which the scholars said, “Hm. Maybe. Well… not really.” Or take Shintoism. When Westerners finally forced their way into Japan in the late nineteenth century, they told the Japanese that Shintoism was a religion. This led to a certain amount of confusion because there was no word for “religion” in Japanese at that time. It turns out that our Western category of religion is not a universal category at all.

    We can try to make religion into a more universal category by defining it something like this: Religion is that which brings meaning to our lives. To paraphrase the mid-twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich, religion is the ground of being. This definition fits better with Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism, and Unitarian Universalism. This definition also fits sports. Sports brings meaning to the lives of many people. It can serve as the ground of our being.

    If sports really is a religion, that could lead to some interesting conclusions.

    First of all, like organized religion, sports does more than just bring meaning to people’s lives. Like organized religion, sports can also help build character and develop leadership abilities. This mostly applies to actually playing sports, as opposed to just watching sports. When you play sports, you learn self-discipline — just as when you learn spiritual practices like meditation or prayer, you learn self-discipline. Playing sports teaches you how to work with others on a team — just like serving on a committee in our congregation teaches you how to work with others on a team. And playing sports teaches you both leadership skills and followership skills, because you have to learn when to lead and when to follow the leadership of others — not unlike organized religion where we are constantly learning and relearning how and when to lead and how and when to follow.

    But there is a fairly large difference between sports and religious traditions like Mainline Protestantism, Reform and Conservative Judaism, Unitarian Universalism, and other more progressive religious groups. These more progressive religious groups maintain the equality of men and women, recognize LGBTQIA+ rights, and rely on democratic process in running their congregations. By contrast, most sports teams are run as hierarchies, not as democracies. Most sports teams require a rigid separation of the sexes, and men’s sports are seen as more important. Most sports no room for non-binary or genderqueer people. Let’s take these one at a time.

    We may criticize organized religion for being patriarchal, but organized sports is far more patriarchal. While it is true that Title IX requires schools to spend equal amounts of money on boys’ and girls’ sports, in most schools the all-male football team reigns supreme at the top of the sports hierarchy, while women’s sports like field hockey and softball remain at the bottom. In pro sports, the most popular major league teams are always the men’s teams. And there is really no place for non-binary or genderqueer people in sports. The only team sport I could think of where all genders are allowed to play on one team is Ultimate Frisbee, a sport that is so low on the sports hierarchy that it’s below even women’s sports.

    Not only are most sports patriarchal, team sports are also hierarchal and non-democratic. A high school soccer team doesn’t get to vote on who their coach is going to be — the school administration hires the coach without any input from the students. (Compare that soccer team to this congregation, where you vote on whether to call your ministers; and think of the typical soccer coach who is far more authoritarian than you would ever allow me to be.) And then there are the referees, outside authorities who can wield great power over players and coaches. We are so accustomed to the hierarchy of coaches and referees that it’s almost impossible for us to imagine a democratically run team sport where the players referee themselves. Again, the only sport I could think of where players referee themselves is Ultimate Frisbee, which is barely even a sport.

    Now let me turn to another conclusion. If we think of sports as a religion, I suspect a significant part of the well-documented decline of organized religion is not about people becoming less religious — instead, I suspect that people are leaving traditional religions for sports and other cultural phenomena that help people give meaning to their lives. I’m willing to bet that many of the so-called “Nones,” the people who check off “None” when asked their religious affiliation, have simply substituted sports for religious affiliation.

    There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. If you feel you get more meaning from sports than from organized religion, who am I to tell you otherwise? Just remember that sports is not democratic, while by contrast progressive religious groups are bulwarks of democracy, training people in democratic skills and generally supporting democratic principles.

    Ours is one of those congregations that is a bulwark of democracy. If you participate in this congregation, you get to practice basic skills of democracy, things like participating in committee meetings, joining with like-minded people to influence policy-makers, learning how to do public speaking, and voting in our annual meeting. We also openly advocate for democracy. We remind each other to vote, we remind each other to contact our elected representatives, sometimes we gather with others to exercise our right of peaceful assembly. In this, we are like many more progressive religious groups that support democratic process. I was just talking with my friend the Reform Jewish rabbi, and his congregation is as big a supporter of democracy as is ours; like our congregation, his congregation advocates for democratic principles and uses democratic principles to run their congregation. The Sikh gurdwara that I got to know about while living in Silicon Valley was another congregation that serves as a bulwark of democracy. In fact, aside from the Christian nationalists and some fringe groups like the Scientologists, it seems to me that most of the religious groups in the United States support democracy more than organized sports does.

    So let’s return to the question with which I began: Is sports a religion? The answer is still — yes and no. No, sports is not a religion because the IRS doesn’t automatically grant tax exemptions to sports teams. No, sports is not a religion because you don’t have to believe in God or pray (but by those criteria, Therevada Buddhism isn’t a religion either.)

    But — yes, sports is a religion because it gives meaning and purpose to people’s lives. Sports is a religion for many people who no longer have a religious affiliation, where it fills a religion-shaped hole in their lives. And sports provides additional meaning and purpose in the lives of many people who are part of more typical religious groups like our congregation. We should honor all the things that sports brings to the lvies of many people.

    But even if you can’t accept sports as a religion, it seems pretty clear that while organized religion is in decline, sports continues to grow. And there’s a problem with these two trends. Sports does not provide major support for democracy in the way that many religious groups do. Yet we live in a time when democracy is under attack; democracy needs all the help and support it can get. We need as many institutions as we can possibly get to support democracy, and democratic principles. So religious traditions like ours remain critical bulwarks of democracy.

  • Why I Don’t Pray (But Maybe You Should)

    Please note: I did not have time to fully correct the sermon text, so no doubt it’s full of errors. Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading is by the Unitarian Universalist choral conductor and composer Nick Page:

    “I composed a piece of music called ‘Healing Prayer,’ to be sung by combined choirs and congregations. I wrote it because a dear friend had been diagnosed with leukemia. He asked that his friends neither visit him nor call him, but rather that we simply pray for him. And people prayed—even many who had never before given prayer a thought. My friend is now well on his way to recovery. I am far too scientific to say that our prayer healed him, but I know that those of us who prayed found a deeper connection to him, to each other, and to the world we live in — and I know that my friend also found that connection between self and all things. I also know that this connection was more than mere thoughts — it was tangible — as tangible as the medical treatment he also received.”

    The second reading is a poem by Denis Levertov, from her book Oblique Prayers (1984). The text is online here.

    Sermon: “Why I Don’t Pray (But Maybe You Should)”

    Back in 1999, I was serving on the Pamphlet Commission of the Unitarian Universalist Association. These days, pamphlets are produced by staff at the Unitarian Universalist Association, but back then they relied on volunteers to create pamphlets. We were working on a pamphlet titled “Unitarian Universalist Views of Prayer.” This was part of a series of pamphlets where we asked a variety of Unitarian Universalists to give their views on topics such a God, the Bible, prayer, and so on. Each pamphlet showcased the wide range of opinions that can be found among Unitarian Universalists, and part of the point was to show that we Unitarian Universalists don’t have a doctrine or dogma. We find our way to truth, not by having someone else tell us what is true, but through dialogue and through trying out ideas on other people and having our ideas modified and changed through our participation in a religious community. Ours is a pragmatic approach to religion, a pragmatism that is related to scientific method.

    Cathy Bowers was the Commission member charged with coming up with material for this pamphlet. She solicited brief essays on prayer from a wide range of Unitarian Universalists, who held a wide range of viewpoints. Cathy solicited an essay from Anita Farber-Robertson, and Anita wrote about a devastating illness she had had in her thirties, saying, “For the first time in my life, I understood intercessory prayer…. I asked my friend to pray for me. He did. I was astonished at its power.” Intercessory prayer is the classic type of prayer where we ask God or some other divine power for help in our lives.

    As a way of contrast, Cathy then got James Ishmael Ford, who is both an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, to write about prayer from the Zen perspective. James wrote, “I’ve found through ordinary attention I can know enough to find authentic peace and joy.” This type of prayer is sometimes know as centering prayer, or meditative prayer, and it need not have anything to do with God. in a similar vein, Cathy then asked Roger Cowan, an avowed humanist, about prayer, and he wrote: “I am a humanist who prays, who begins each morning with devotional readings and a time of silence and prayer.”

    And Cathy also got some people to write about types of prayer that we might not usually term prayer. Nick Page, the Unitarian Universalist choral conductor, wrote about how music became a form of prayer for him. We heard part of Nick’s essay in the first reading this morning, and he concluded by saying that he wrote his “Healing Prayer” composition “not because I believe in a higher power, but because I believe in a living universe with energies both powerful and subtle — all mysterious.”

    In the end, Cathy came up with a really good collection of seven different UU views on prayer. In typical Unitarian Universalist fashion, each of these seven people interpreted prayer in different ways, but each of them spoke movingly about the power of prayer. She presented these essays to us at the next meeting of the Commission. Everyone on the Commission (except me) spoke enthusiastically about the seven essays. I kept quiet for a while — Cathy was an old friend of mine, and I didn’t want to sound negative — but I finally asked: “Where’s the essay that says prayer is a crock of beans?” Because, as I pointed out, there were a lot of Unitarian Universalists — people like me — who don’t pray at all. If we were going to be true to the title “UU Views on Prayer,” then we needed to represent those of us who don’t pray.

    Cathy and the rest of the Commission readily agreed, somewhat to my surprise, and Cathy promised to contact several well-known Unitarian Universalist atheists and humanists to ask one of them to write a brief essay on why they didn’t pray. But she ran into a problem: no one seemed to be willing to write such an essay. One well-known Unitarian Universalist humanist just didn’t answer her inquiries. A well-known Unitarian Universalist atheist gave a reply that could be boiled down to, “What is this, some kind of joke?” Others were more polite, but all came up with excuses to not write about why they don’t pray.

    At that point, everyone on the Commission turned to me and told me that I’d have to write the piece about how prayer was a crock of beans. Now, I was in no mood to write anything. My mother had died a couple of years earlier, I had just started a new job, and I was trying to complete a master’s degree in my spare time. But they wouldn’t let me off the hook. “It doesn’t have to be long,” they said. “Just a paragraph.” So here is what I wrote:

    “I don’t pray. As a Unitarian Universalist child, I learned how to pray. But when I got old enough to take charge of my own spiritual life, I gradually stopped. Every once in a while I try prayer again, just to be sure. The last time was a couple of years ago. My mother spent a long, frightening month in the hospital, so I tried praying once again but it didn’t help. I have found my spiritual disciplines — walks in nature, deep conversations, reading ancient and modern scripture — or they have found me. Prayer doesn’t happen to be one of them.” Nearly a quarter of a century later, I have a different set of spiritual disciplines or practices or whatever you want to call them — but prayer still isn’t one of them. Every once in a while, I still try praying, and it still doesn’t do anything for me.

    However…. That brief essay only talks about personal prayers I might do for myself. If someone else wants me to pray for them, I’m more than happy to do so. So, for example, if I had known Anita Farber-Robertson during her thirties when she was so ill, and if she had asked me to pray for her, of course I would have prayed for her. Now I’m a minister, and when you’re a minister people ask you to pray for them all the time. Of course if someone asks me to pray for them, I will do so, and I will put my heart into it. I don’t believe the notion that dominates modern Western culture, that religious belief must underlie religious ritual. I agree with the ancient Greeks and Romans — you don’t have to believe in the gods in order to participate in religious rituals.

    In fact, for me as a Unitarian Universalist, I think it’s most accurate to say that religion centers on community, and that ritual exists to keep the community healthy. For us Unitarian Universalists, our main ritual is coming together once a week as a community; if we pray for each other, the biggest effect of those prayers is to help us draw closer to one another. While many of us are believers (and many of us are non-believers), our communal religion is primarily based on connections between people, and the connections we humans have with the rest of the world around us.

    Speaking as a Unitarian Universalist, then, if someone asks me to pray for them, it doesn’t matter whether I believe in prayer. It doesn’t matter whether prayer is part of my personal spiritual community. What matters is that someone has asked me for something that’s very simple to offer — a prayer. If I pray for them, I’m helping to strengthen the interdependent web of humanity. So if someone asks me to pray for them, I’m generally going to say yes. When Anita Farber-Robertson asked her friend to pray for her while she was so ill, he said yes. It didn’t matter whether he had a regular prayer practice, or whether he was like me, someone who never prayed. He prayed for Anita, and she found herself “astonished at its power.” This is the power of human interdependence.

    This raises the interesting question of what happens when someone prays for someone else. Anita wrote about the astonishing sense of power she felt from intercessory prayer. Was this sense of power real or imaginary? I can almost hear some of you thinking: “But scientific studies have shown that prayer [choose one] does / doesn’t work.” That misses the point. Prayer cannot be adequately studied with the kind of objective statistical analyses that science does so well. Prayer is about your very subjective experience. Anita felt the power of intercessory prayer, which we could also call the power of human connection. By contrast, I’m one of those people who doesn’t happen to feel the power of human connection if others pray for me or if I pray for others. I happen to feel the power of human connection in other ways. There is a great range of subjective experience among human beings, which is part of what makes it so difficult to be human.

    James Ishmael Ford, the Zen Buddhist priest and Unitarian Universalist minister, wrote about another kind of prayer from his perspective, saying: “I’ve found the beauty and mystery and grace of our existence are revealed in prayerful attention. Through attention we can come to know the connections.” Christians might call this type of prayer “centering prayer.” Secularists might call this “meditation.” These types of prayer involve stilling your thoughts, and simply paying attention. This is another way that we can become aware of the power of human connection, and indeed the power of our connection to nonhuman organisms and indeed to the non-living world as well. Many of us in this congregation find this type of prayer to be extraordinarily meaningful, providing shape and even purpose to your lives.

    As is true with other kinds of prayer, meditation or centering prayer doesn’t work for everyone. I meditated regularly for many years, then finally stopped because I sometimes had negative experiences, where meditation wasn’t calming; instead it threw me off balance. It turns out that negative experiences during meditation are fairly common, with perhaps a quarter of all people who meditate having had some kind of negative experience. As with intercessory prayer, people differ in their experience of centering prayer and meditation — for some of us, centering prayer or meditation is an essential part of our lives; for others of us, centering prayer and meditation don’t work.

    It is fortunate for us that we are Unitarian Universalist, so we don’t feel like I have to keep doing something that either doesn’t work for us, or leads to negative experiences. We are a pragmatic people, we Unitarian Universalists. If a Unitarian Universalist wants to learn centering prayer, the rest of us encourage them to give it a try. If it doesn’t work for them, they are still just as welcome in our community.

    Similarly, if one of us Unitarian Universalists asks the rest of this community for prayers — prayers for healing, prayers for getting life back on track, whatever the request might be — we as a community are going to pray for that person. This is what we do each week during our worship service when we listen to one another during the candles of joy and concern. While a few of us may be so creeped out by prayer that they really feel they can’t pray, it doesn’t matter, the rest of us can pick up the slack. Some among us may not believe in prayer but are still willing to offer up a prayer; if the recipient of the prayer feels it’s meaningful, then it’s meaningful.

    I’m sure the people sitting here this morning, or participating online, represent a wide diversity of views of prayer. We have Buddhists among us who might agree with James Ishmael Ford’s views of prayer. We have Christians among us who, along with Anita Farber-Robertson, may feel the power of traditional intercessory prayer. We have agnostics and atheists among us, some of whom pray, and other who think prayer is a crock of beans. We doubtless have some Pagans and New Age people among us who might or might not use the word “prayer” but who engage in some kind of prayer-like practice. A few us of are mystics like me, and as is typical of mystics our views are going to be all over the place. And I’m sure there are musicians among us who, like Nick Page, feel that making music is what they do for prayer.

    Yet even with this great diversity of viewpoints on prayer, we come together in community. We are bound, not by doctrine or dogma, but by the ties of community. If someone asks us for prayer, we’ll do our best to comply with their request . This is what community members do for one another. We do our best to support each other. Some of us are overwhelmed by life, and it’s all we can do to show up on Sunday morning, either online or in person — or maybe we don’t even show up on Sunday morning, but we still think about this community. Yet even when you feel overwhelmed by life, you can still be supported by this community. And maybe that’s the real power of prayer: it doesn’t require extraordinary effort. All you have to do is think of someone else, and if you want you can say a few words that sound like a prayer to you. It doesn’t seem like much. But the power of that tiny little act might astonish us with its power.

  • Religion 101

    Sermon copyright (c) 2023 Dan Harper. Delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon text may contain typographical errors. The sermon as preached included a significant amount of improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading is from Introduction to World Religions, a college textbook on religion edited by Christopher Partridge.

    “The word ‘religion’ likely tells us more about the user of the word than it does about the thing being classified. For instance, a Freudian psychologist will not conclude that religion functions to oppress the masses, since the Freudian theory precludes this Marxist conclusion. … As for those who adopt an essentialist approach, it is likely no coincidence that only those institutions with which one agrees are thought to be expressions of some authentic inner experience … whereas the traditions of others are criticized as being shallow and derivative.”

    The second reading comes from the book The Ideology of Religious Studies by Timothy Fitzgerald.

    “It is sometimes claimed that there is a common-sense use of the word ‘religion’ that refers loosely to belief in gods or the supernatural. No doubt this use will remain with us in common parlance, for example in connection with churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. This is really an extension of the traditional European usage: religion was traditionally used to mean something like faith in God or faith in Jesus Christs and in the church and priesthood who serve him. However, … various writers such as the deists at least since the eighteenth century have self-consciously attempted to transform the meaning of religion, reduce its specifically Christian elements, and extend it as a cross-cultural category. This has stretched the meaning of ‘God’ and related biblical Jewish and Christian notions … to include a vast range of notions about unseen powers. This has given rise to intractable problems…. For example, are ghosts, witches, emperors, and ancestors gods? How about film stars? What is the difference between a superhuman being and a superior person? Why should Benares, Mount Fuji, or the Vatican be considered sacred places, and not the White House, the Koshien Baseball Stadium in Osaka, or the Bastille?”

    Sermon: “Religion 101”

    Everyone in the United States seems to think they know all there is to be known about religion. Many people like to make very definite pronouncements about religion: “The United States is a Christian nation!” “Religion is the cause of most of the evil in the United States!” — and so on.

    But the American Academy of Religion, a professional organization for scholars of religion, tells us that religious illiteracy is widespread in the United States today, adding: “There are several consequences that stem from this illiteracy, including the ways it fuels prejudice and antagonism, thereby hindering efforts aimed at promoting respect for diversity, peaceful coexistence, and cooperative endeavors in local, national, and global arenas.” They say this specifically about religious literacy in grades K-12. These scholars are telling us there are basic things that every high school graduate should know about religion, because to know these things will promote peaceful coexistence. They are telling us that these are things we need to know to participate effectively in democracy. I would add that a significant part of the intolerance and prejudice and antagonism we see in American politics today is a direct result of religious illiteracy. Thus, this become a topic of serious concern for those of us who would like to strengthen democracy, while reducing intolerance and prejudice and antagonism.

    There are three basic elements to religious literacy. First, someone who religiously literate has basic knowledge about the core values and practices of at least some of the world’s major religious traditions. Second, someone who is religiously literate knows that within any given religion, we will find diverse practices and beliefs and ways of expressing that religious tradition. Third, someone who is religiously literate recognizes how religion plays a “profound role” in the world’s cultures, in politics, and in human society in general.

    So the American Academy of Religion says a high school graduate can be considered religiously literate if you know something about the basics of half a dozen or so religious traditions, the practices and worldviews of those religious traditions today, and how those religious traditions have been shaped the wider human context in which they exist. Here at First Parish, religious literacy is one of our key educational goals for our children.

    I believe we adults also need basic religious literacy. Because religious literacy promotes tolerance and peaceful coexistence, it is actually an important part of democracy.

    For the purposes of maintaining our fragile democracy, we should know who our religious neighbors are, not just in our town, but in the surrounding region — the people we see at work, at the shopping mall, on the beach, and so on. Then we should know some basic facts about our religious neighbors, enough so that we can be good neighbors. And of course we need to understand that every religious tradition has a great deal of internal diversity, so our local religious neighbors may be different from whatever Wikipedia says about their broad religious tradition.

    I’ve been researching the religious diversity here in southeastern Massachusetts, and it is simply amazing the diversity we can find near us. Within an hour’s drive of here, we have Baha’i, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim religious communities. Then if you drive a little further, say two hours, there are Daoist, Humanist, Jain, Sikh, and Zoroastrian religious communities. This means we are very likely to run into people, co-workers or acquaintances, who belong to one or more of these religious traditions.

    Mind you, these are just the religious groups that are willing to go public with their religion. There are other religious groups that prefer to stay out of the public eye, either because they like having a low profile, or because they are avoiding potential prejudice and discrimination. Thus there are also Santeria, Pagan, and Native or Indigenous religious groups within a forty-five minute drive of us. We may not see much evidence of them, but they’re here, too.

    For the sake of democracy, we should know something about our religious neighbors, just as a matter of politeness and basic intercultural competence. Learning about these religious groups, however, can be a challenge for those of us who grew up in the United States. Those of us who grew up in the United States have been shaped by Protestant Christianity. Because of this, we have some assumptions about religion, assumptions that work well for Protestantism, but that don’t work so well for other religious groups. For example, most people in the United states assume that religion is mostly about belief — because Protestant Christians believe that religion is about belief. When we meet someone from another religion, one of the first questions we’re likely to ask them is, “What do you believe?” (I find myself asking this question, even though as a Unitarian Universalist I should know better, since we Unitarian Universalists don’t have any required beliefs.)

    A less biased question would be to simply ask, “What is your religious (or spiritual) identity?” This is also a better question because there is diversity within every religious tradition. If you know someone who is Christian, and you ask them, “What do you believe?” they might reply, “I believe in God.” But while most Christians believe in God, there are major differences between different Christian groups. If we just look at the Christian groups within about an hour’s drive of us, we see evidence of this.

    Take, for example, the difference between Roman Catholics on the one hand, and the Latter Day Saints, or Mormons. Roman Catholics typically have daily and weekly meetings where they have a ritual known as the eucharist, or holy communion; they have dedicated clergy who wear special clothing and who officiate at their rituals; they meet in buildings that typically feature sculpture and paintings with subjects taken from their religion. By contrast, Mormons typically meet weekly (but not daily) with a worship service that features communion; Mormons do not have paid clergy, they have volunteers who rotate clergy duties among them; local Mormon buildings are typically fairly simple inside. So you can see that Roman Catholics differ quite substantially from the Latter Day Saints. There are other significant differences, too: the Latter Day Saints have an additional book of scripture, called the book of Mormon, which they venerate along with the Hebrew Bible and Christian scriptures they share with Roman Catholics; nearly all Latter Day Saints wear special clothing; they have a prophet named Joseph Smith who is not recognized by other Christians; and so on. In fact, the Church of the Latter Day Saints are so different from Catholics and Protestants, that some Catholics in the United States insist that Mormons aren’t really Christians.

    Catholics and Latter Day Saints are just two of hundreds of Christian groups n the United States. These two groups differ significantly from each other, but they also differ significantly from other Christians: from Ethiopian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Pentecostals, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses — to name just a few of the Christian groups with established groups not too far from Cohasset. How do they differ from these other groups? Ethiopian Orthodox churches divided from the rest of Christianity in the fifth century of the common era, so both their beliefs and practices differ significantly from both Catholics and Mormons. Russian Orthodox services last up to three hours, and you stand up the whole time. Pentecostal services may feature things like speaking in tongues or faith healing or other workings of the Holy Spirit. Seventh day Adventists say that Saturday is the correct sabbath day, not Sunday. Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the doctrine of the Trinity and the concept of hell, and are well-known for their door-to-door proselytizing. There is an astonish amount of diversity within Christianity.

    There are other religious traditions that also contain a wide range of internal diversity. As one example, take the other great proselytizing religious tradition in our area, Buddhism. Like Christianity, Buddhism has adapted itself to a wide range of cultures. Like Christianity, Buddhism has divided into many different sub-groups. If we just look at the Buddhists near us, we find Insight Meditation groups and Zen practice groups and a Buddhist humanist group, all types of Buddhism which have adapted in various ways to Western culture. We also find Cantonese speaking Pure Land Buddhists in the Mahayana tradition in the Thousand Buddhas Temple that our religious education program visited a few weeks ago. We find both Thai and Vietnamese Therevada Buddhist temples near us; Therevada Buddhists interest me because they are not theists, they have almost no supernatural element in their tradition. We find Tibetan Buddhists nearby, and there’s even a Sokka Gokai group outside Boston; just as the Latter Day Saints differ greatly from other Christian groups, Sokka Gokai differs so much from traditional types of Buddhism that it is sometimes called a new religious movement. In short, there is a great diversity among Buddhist groups near us.

    So you can see, we have all this amazing religious diversity right here in eastern Massachusetts. We have all these different religious traditions living in close proximity. This is why we need religious literacy. We need people to know that “religion” means more than just Protestant Christianity and Catholic Christianity. We need people to stop defining religion in terms of Protestant or Catholic Christianity. We need people to know just how diverse our religious landscape is.

    The religious illiteracy in our country has led directly to the rise of Christian nationalism. A lack of religious literacy allows people to define “religion” any way they want, which means they can use “religion” to promote their own destructive ideology. Many of the people who promote Christian nationalism have no clue about the wild diversity within Christianity; in their lack of knowledge, they mistakenly believe that “Christian” means “white Protestant evangelical Christian,” and maybe includes anti-abortion Catholics. They also have little accurate knowledge about non-Christian traditions, so some of them attack Sikh men wearing turbans in the mistaken belief that Sikhs are Muslim. Religious illiteracy fosters the growth of intolerance and hatred.

    To become religiously literate, on the other hand, means opening ourselves to learning about the religions and the cultures and the worldviews of neighbors who are different from us. In fact, to become religiously literate is to further develop your intercultural competence. In our increasingly multicultural democracy, we all need to work on our intercultural competence; we need to improve our skill at talking with people who have very different worldviews from ours; we need to learn how to understand each other better so we can work together towards common goals.

    I suppose the Christian nationalists would way that we define religion to promote our own ideology. We define religion as being a part of the cultural identity of an individual or a group. This definition promotes our ideology of tolerance and mutual respect. This promotes our worldview in which we remain always open to and curious about the people around us.