Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Religion in society

  • Changing Views of Motherhood

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

    Readings

    The first reading was the poem “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats,” by the Unitarian poet Sylvia Plath.

    The second reading was a poem titled “Mother’s Day” by Bruce Lansky, from his book If Pigs Could Fly and Other Deep Thoughts: A Collection of Funny Poems.

    Sermon

    The past decade or so in the United States has been an interesting time for those of us who consider ourselves to be feminists. Feminism has become a bad word, a pejorative term, so much so that now when I use the word I have to define what I mean. It actually has a very simple definition. A feminist is someone who believes that all genders are equally worthy as human beings. A feminist is someone who does not believe that there is one gender that is stronger, smarter, more authoritative than other genders. Or, as we used to say back in the 1990s, a feminist is someone who believes that women and girls are just as good as men and boys.

    For us Unitarian Universalists, feminism also has a religious dimension. We are the inheritors of the Universalist tradition. The old-time Universalists decided that if God really was good, then God would extend God’s love to all persons everywhere. These days, not all Unitarian Universalists believe in God; but regardless of our belief or lack of belief in God, we still remain convinced that all persons are equally worthy as human beings. Because of this, Unitarian Universalists almost have to be feminists — because of our religious worldview, we will affirm your inherent worthiness and dignity no matter what your gender is.

    Those of us who are feminists have a perspective on motherhood that differs in some respects from non-feminists. If you’re a feminist, you tend to see each woman or girl as an individual, as a separate and unique human being with distinctive talents and abilities. Traditionally, there was a tendency to equate motherhood and womanhood — if you’re a woman, then you have to be a mother. But those of us who are feminists recognize that the universe is more complicated than that. Some women want to be mothers, some women don’t want to become mothers, some women are ambivalent about motherhood, some women cannot become mothers regardless of their wishes. Just because a person is a woman, it does not mean they must be a mother. Our feminist worldview has changed our understanding of motherhood.

    I became very aware that I’m a feminist during last year’s presidential election cycle. This awareness hit me especially hard during the childless cat lady kerfluffle. If you’ve forgotten the childless cat lady kerfluffle, let me remind you of how it played out. Back in 2021, J. D. Vance claimed that the United States is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”(1) That is a direct quote taken from a video clip. The video clip of Vance saying this was posted on Twitter, and caused a bit of a buzz across various social media outlets. Perhaps the most notable social media buzz occurred when Taylor Swift posted a reply on social media in which she openly proclaimed herself a childless cat lady.

    Now it turns out that the cat-lady trope is not a new invention. According to Dr. Corey Wrenn, lecturer in sociology at the University of Kent, Great Britain, there is a long history of stereotyping feminists as cat ladies. Over a hundred years ago, women were seeking the right to vote were portrayed as cats in anti-suffragette propaganda. According to Corey Wrenn, “anti-suffrage postcards often used [cats] to reference female activists. The intent was to portray suffragettes as silly, infantile, incompetent, and ill-suited to political engagement.”(2)

    Knowing this helps give us some more insight into the cat lady we heard about in the first reading this morning, in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats.” Before I talk about that poem, I have to tell you a little something about Sylvia Plath. First, of particular interest to us, Plath was a Unitarian: she grew up in Unitarian churches; in college, she described herself an “agnostic humanist”; and in her twenties, she called herself “a pagan Unitarian at best.”(3) Second, Plath was born in 1932, and based on what I’ve seen of that generation of Unitarian women (which includes what I saw of my Unitarian mother), I’d say many of those women were strong-minded feminists, even if they didn’t describe themselves using the term “feminist.” In short, Plath was both a Unitarian and a feminist; that is to say, in terms of her worldview, she was one of us.

    Plath’s short life — she died at age 30 — was not an easy life. While still a girl, she showed promise as a writer. But after a summer internship in college, she had a major depressive episode which culminated in a six month hospitalization. After recovering her health, she went to study in England on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met the poet Ted Hughes. They married, but Hughes turned out to be an abuser who physically assaulted her; he also conducted affairs with other women. After the birth of her second child, Plath separated from Hughes, only to die by suicide less than a year later.

    I know, this is a pretty grim story for a Mother’s Day sermon. I apologize.

    So on a more positive note, let’s consider Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ella Mason and her Eleven Cats.” This is a poem that’s both funny and serious. When the unnamed narrator of the poem was a girl, she and her friends used to go to spy on Ella Mason. They would peer into Ella Mason’s house, where they could see her eleven cats purring around her — this is the funny bit, with little girls peering in to Ella’s house to stare at all the happy cats. The little girls giggled when they saw the cats purring on antimacassars. The girls had heard that when Ella Mason was young, she had been a fashionable beauty, and so they make fun of her because by conventional standards Ella had thrown away her opportunity to get married. Now Ella is old, and she has to settle for the love and admiration of eleven cats. But in the final stanza of the poem, the girls have grown up, and as they begin to marry they look upon Ella Masson more kindly. They realize that they had misunderstood Ella Mason. Ella did not suffer from vanity, as the girls had assumed, but instead Ella possessed a sense of self-respect which allowed her to realize that in her case, her happiness did not require marriage.(4)

    The point of the poem is not that every woman should become a cat lady. Nor is the point of the poem that every woman should get married and have children. The point — as I see it — is that each of us has choices about how we’re going to live our lives. Many people make their life choices based on the expectations of society, while others among us make our choices based on knowing our deepest selves. Sometimes someone winds up making a choice that society disapproves of — when, for example, a woman chooses not to get married, causing little girls peer in her front door and giggle at her — but when they make that choice based on a deep knowledge of self, they are able to ignore the the disapproval of other people. In fact, given the diversity of opinion in human communities, no matter what choice you make, you can be fairly sure that someone is going to disapprove of it. Thus it is always best to make your choices based on a deep knowledge of who you really are.

    I see something of a parallel between Ella Mason and Taylor Swift. Swift, who is now 36 years old, has thus far chosen to focus on her career instead of marrying and/or having children. She knows that there are people who disapprove of her for not following a conventional path and putting aside her music to become a mother; but she also knows herself well enough to know that she is being true to her self. When Swift saw J. D. Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies,” because she knew who she was and why she had made the choices she had made, she was able to post a very measured response on Instagram (in which she urged her followers to register to vote). And she was secure enough in her own self that she could sign her post “Taylor Swift / Childless Cat lady.”(5)

    So why am I talking so much about childless cat ladies on Mother’s Day? The point I’m trying to make is that there are quite a few people in our country who feel that the single most important role for all women is to bear children and be mothers. People with this viewpoint seem to find it quite threatening when some women — like Taylor Swift — prioritize their careers, putting off motherhood, or maybe choosing not to become mothers at all. They say they have a good reason to feel threatened: they see that the birthrate is falling in the United States, and they worry that the future of the human race is threatened by women who don’t have children. But I suspect that they are really worried because the old gender norms to which they have grown accustomed seem to be fading out — those old gender norms that say the primary purpose of women is to bear children and be mothers. And so they grow anxious when they see women who prioritize something other than motherhood.

    By contrast, we Unitarian Universalists do not assume that just because someone is a woman, their primary duty is to bear children and become a mother. We are also quite aware that some women who might want to become mothers cannot do so, for a wide variety of reasons. We are also aware that there are many different ways to become a mother: there are mothers who give birth to a child, there are mothers who adopt a child, there a mothers who become a mother by marrying someone who already has children.

    And finally, we even understand that there can be many kinds of mothers. For example, there are people who serve as mothers to children who are not their biological children, adopted children, or step-children. Sylvia Plath had a biological mother, but she also had a literary mother. The Unitarian novelist Olive Higgins Prouty adopted Plath as a kind of literary child, paying for Plath’s college education and paying for Plath’s medical expenses during her first hospitalization for mental illness.(6) Or in another example, some decades ago I knew a teenaged girl who had a difficult home life and got her mothering from a woman in her church community who was not her biological mother; this girl spent as much time as she could in this other woman’s household (and sadly, this teenager’s biological mother was actually glad that the girl spent so many of her waking hours away from their home; not everyone enjoys motherhood).

    As feminists, we understand that men can also be mothers. I remember a gay couple I once knew who had adopted children, and both men in that couple served as both mothers and fathers to their children. But I also think of a co-worker of mine back in the 1980s whose mother had died when he was an infant; from the way he talked about his upbringing, it was clear that his father had been both a father and mother to him. Most non-feminists probably wouldn’t admit that men can be mothers; but the evidence of my own experience shows that men can indeed serve as mothers.

    Once you adopt a feminist viewpoint, the category of “mother” becomes a little bit broader than just a biological woman who has biological offspring. Mind you, we who are feminists acknowledge the great importance of those women who physically give birth to infants. Giving birth is crucially important, it can put a huge strain on a woman’s body, and we are grateful for women who choose to give birth. But we also understand that motherhood, broadly construed, means more than physically giving birth. Motherhood encompasses all of the intensive nurturing that a human being needs to grow from infancy into adulthood; and this includes both physical, emotional, and spiritual nurture.

    It is actually quite astonishing how much nurture human beings need to get from infancy to adulthood. In contemporary Western culture, we like to pretend that all that nurture can be provided by a nuclear family with one mother and one father, but that really isn’t true. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that it takes a much bigger community than that to provide the nurture that children and teens require. Lawrence Mbogoni, a retired professor from William Paterson University who was raised rural Tanzania, put it this way:

    “[The proverb] ‘It takes a whole village to raise a child’ reflects a social reality some of us who grew up in rural areas of Africa can easily relate to. As a child, my conduct was a concern of everybody, not just my parents, especially if it involved misconduct. Any adult had the right to rebuke and discipline me and would make my mischief known to my parents…. The concern of course was the moral well-being of the community.”(7)

    While Lawrence Mbogoni was speaking specifically of rural Africa, the same principle applies more generally to all human beings and all human communities. It does in fact take a whole village to raise a child. In rural Tanzania, that community was the village in which the Mbogoni family lived. In the industrialized West, where villages no longer exist except in fantasy, it is more difficult to find a community of adults who will help raise children and teens, who can help provide all the nurture that a child or teenager needs.

    But such communities do exist, and our First Parish congregation is one such intergenerational community. As a community, we know that a central part of our identity is to be the whole village that raises a child. We do not want to supplant a child’s own parents, but we are here to support and help parents. We see this happening at social hour, where there are many adults, not just parents, who know the names of First Parish children and who talk with the children. We see this in our Religious Education Committee, which includes two people who do not have children in the Sunday school, a grandparent-age person, and a high school student. We see this in programs like the current pen-pal program, where kids and adults get to know one another through exchanging weekly pen-pal letters. We are doing our best to be the kind of village that it takes to raise a child.

    This is how we help support motherhood. And our support of motherhood is firmly rooted in our feminist worldview. Our feminist worldview helps us understand that the rest of us can help take a little bit of pressure off the biological and adoptive mothers who are part of our community. Those biological and adoptive mothers know that they can come here to First Parish and for a couple of hours each week there will be a whole community of other adults who will help look after their children. Because if it takes a village to raise a child, that implies that motherhood is more than a full-time job for one person.

    Without denying the importance of biological and adoptive mothers (some of whom may be men), we recognize that entire communities also provide mothering. In such communities, the mothering provided by biological and adoptive mothers is supplemented by the mothering provided by elders who may be other people’s grandparents; by young adults who may still be thinking about whether or not to have children of their own; by child-free couples like my wife and I; and, yes, by childless cat ladies. We have embraced a changed definition of motherhood, where nurturing children is the responsibility — not just of two parents in a nuclear family — but rather of an entire village, and entire community,.

    So on this Mother’s Day, we honor and support biological and adoptive mothers. We also honor communities that provide the additional nurture that children need; we embrace the proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child.”

    Notes

    (1) My transcription of a video clip of Tucker Carlson interviewing J. D. Vance in 2021, as posted on X / Twitter by Ron Filipowski @RonFilipkowski on 22 July 2024 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1815503440983867598 accessed 9 May 2025.
    (2) Corey Wrenn, “Woman-as-Cat in Anti-Suffrage Propaganda,” posted on 4 December 2013 in the Sociological Images category on The Society Pages website https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/12/04/the-feminization-of-the-cat-in-anti-suffrage-propaganda/ accessed 9 May 2025.
    (3) Details of Plath’s Unitarianism and personal theology from Wesley Hromatko, “Plath, Syliva,” Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, Unitarian Universalist Study Network https://www.uudb.org/plath-sylvia/ accessed 10 May 2025.
    (4) I’m basing my interpretation of the poem’s last stanza on Valerie Doris Frazier, Battlemaids of Domesticity: Domestic Epic in the Works of Gwendolyn Brooks and Slyvia Plath (Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Georgia, 2002), pp. 119-120. Frazier writes: “When the speaker grasps at an answer for Miss Ella’s unmarried state, a sense of tension erupts in the last lines. Miss Ella’s flaw is apparently vanity, as the young women of the town have learned. But those in the town have misread the textual meaning, for there is a significant distinction between Narcissism and self-love. For narcissism means vanity or love for one’s physical body, but self-love which takes on a spiritual rather than physical quality means a concern for one’s happiness.”
    (5) Swift’s Instagram post, which includes a photo of her holding a cat, is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C_wtAOKOW1z/
    (6) Hromatko; see also Lynn Gordon Hughes, “Prouty, Olive Higgins,” Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, Unitarian Universalist Study Network https://www.uudb.org/prouty-olive-higgins/ accessed 10 May 2025.
    (7) Lawrence Mbogoni as quoted by Joel Goldberg, “It Takes A Village To Determine The Origins Of An African Proverb,” on the “Goats and Soda: Stories of Life in a Changing World” blog on the National Public Radio website, 30 July 2016 https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/07/30/487925796/it-takes-a-village-to-determine-the-origins-of-an-african-proverb accessed 10 May 2025.

  • “WWWD”

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

    Readings

    The first reading was from The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell:

    “Scientific technique requires the co-operation of a large number of individuals organized under a single direction. Its tendency, therefore, is against anarchism and even individualism, since it demands a well-knit social structure. Unlike religion, it is ethically neutral: it assures us that we can perform wonders, but does not tell us what wonders to perform. In this way it is incomplete. In practice, the purposes to which scientific skill will be devoted depend largely on chance. The men at the head of the vast organizations which it necessitates can, within limits, turn it this way or that as they please. The power impulse thuswahas a scope which it never had before. The philosophies that have been inspired by scientific technique [as opposed to scientific theory] are power philosophies…. Ends are no longer considered; only the skilfulness of the process is valued. This is a form of madness. It is, in our day, the most dangerous form [of madness].”

    The second reading is “Eagle Poem” by Joy Harjo.

    Sermon: “WWWD”

    When I start to think about ethical issues raised by immigration, my thoughts often turn to the earliest immigrants to southeastern Massachusetts, the Pilgrims, and how they were received by the Wampanaog Indians. That’s where the title of this sermon comes from: “WWWD” stands for “What Would the Wampanoags Do?” And I ask that question, not because I think the Wampanoags are some kind of special moral and ethical exemplars, but because the Wampanoags had to confront the challenging question of what to do when your society is faced by a wave of immigration. Looking past the myths that have grown up around the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags, it seems to me that in 1620, the Wampanoags dealt with the Pilgrims with a salutary mixture of common sense and compromise. And I think their actions offer an interesting insight into immigration.

    The story of the Wampanoags is often told like this: The Pilgrims show up in the middle of winter. That first winter, the Wampanoags kindly share food with them so they don’t all starve. In the spring, the Wampanoags show the Pilgrims how to grow corn. Then in the autumn, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags sit down together for the first Thanksgiving dinner.

    But that’s an oversimplified version of the story. The real story was a lot more complex. For one thing, the real story began well before 1620. Europeans had been landing on the coast of southeastern New England for a century or more before the Pilgrims arrived. Some of those first Europeans were decent people who treated the Wampanoags well. Others engaged in random acts of violence, like the Englishman who abducted a young Wampanoag named Tisquantum and sold him into slavery in Spain; Tisquantum eventually made it back to his homeland and became known to the Pilgrims as Squanto. So when the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, the Wampanoags had good reason to distrust them, and even treat them as potential adversaries. Why then did the Wampanoags treat the Pilgrims as well as they did?

    Partly, it boils down to politics. Prior to 1619, the Wampanoag had been decimated by an epidemic — literally decimated, since in some areas 10% of the population survived the unknown disease.(3) As a result of their greatly reduced population, the Wampanoag grew worried about the military threat posed by their historical antagonists, the Narragansetts, who lived just to the west and who did not experience the same epidemic. From Tisquantum’s personal knowledge, and from other sources, the Wampanoags knew about the Europeans’ impressive military capabilities. Thus it may have made political sense for the Wampanoag to try to build a military alliance with the Europeans.(4) Even though the Wampanoags knew first-hand of the dangers posed by Europeans, the benefits of a military alliance seem to have have outweighed those dangers.

    But while politics were clearly involved, there was also an ethical side to the Wampanoag actions: they helped the Pilgrims because it was the right thing to do. This is a perfect example of what we New Englanders call “enlightened self-interest.” We take care of our self-interest, but we do it in such a way that we take into account the needs and concerns of other people. New Englanders talk about “doing well by doing good”: that’s enlightened self-interest. When New England small business owners pay their employees a decent wage, partly because it’s the right thing to do, but it’s also self-interest because their employees are potential customers: this again is enlightened self-interest. Indeed, sometimes I wonder if the New England concept of enlightened self-interest has its roots in the way the Wampanoags treated the Pilgrims.

    While enlightened self-interest still exists here in New England, another pattern of behavior is also widespread. Today, our world is dominated by what Bertrand Russell calls “scientific technique,” or technical science as opposed to theoretical science. (This is what we heard about in the first reading this morning.) A society based on “scientific technique” — that is, on technology — requires large numbers of human beings cooperating together under the direction of a single authority. Both capitalism and communism arise from this same principle, the difference being that in capitalism, the coordination of a large group is mostly under the authority of the handful of persons who run large corporations; while in communism, the coordination of large groups is entirely under the authority of the handful of persons who control the Communist Party. These large groups, whether corporations or communists, are ethically neutral, which means that the handful of people in charge of these vast organizations can direct them to whatever ends they please. As a result, said Bertrand Russell, “The power impulse thus has a scope which it never had before.” To this he adds: “Ends are no longer considered; only the skilfulness of the process is valued. This is a form of madness.”(5)

    Russell wrote these words in 1943, while the Second World War was going on. Clearly he had the madness of fascism in mind while he was writing. But he was also aware of the dangers of the power impulse inherent in any society dominated by complex technology, because there are no widely-accepted ethical guidelines to determine societal goals.

    In today’s American society, quite a few people actually agree with Bertrand Russell that we lack ethical guidelines. Because of this, many right-wing Christians genuinely believe that they need to inject their own ethical principles into American society. I happen to disagree with the ethical principles of right-wing Christianity, and I have no use for those who use right-wing Christianity as a cover for naked grabs at power — but I respect the desire of the genuinely ethical right-wing Christians to attempt to articulate ethical principles which they sincerely believe would help direct the goals of our society. I can also respect the secular progressives who sincerely champion diversity, equity, and inclusion policies based on their ethical grounding in natural law and human rights. Again, I have no use for anyone who uses DEI as a way to grab power for themselves — but I respect the desire of the genuinely ethical political progressives to try to articulate ethical principles which they sincerely believe could help direct the goals of our society.

    Neither the right-wing Christians nor the proponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion have been able to convince a majority of Americans that their ethical framework should be central to our society. Nor has anyone else been able to propose an ethical framework that attracts broad-based support. This has left us vulnerable to persons with no firm ethical principles, who seek power simply for the sake of seeking power.

    In the middle of the last century, we did arrive at a consensus for an ethical framework. This framework was our ethical commitment to democracy, which included individual rights, the rule of law, and checks and balances in government. All this was derived from the political philosophy of John Locke, a political philosopher who inspired the founders of the United States. But the polarization of the United States in the past half century means we no longer have such a consensus, and so we have descended into an era of power politics.

    Contrast this with the situation in the days of the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims. Both Wampanoag society and Pilgrim society were founded on solid ethical principles. Four centuries on, it’s difficult to put ourselves in the worldview of either the Pilgrims or the Wampanoags. But it appears that the Wampanoag had a strong ethic based on kinship and community; and the concept of kinship probably extended beyond humans to non-human beings.(6) As for the Pilgrims, they believed in subordination: the subordination of the ordinary man to the magistrate, the subordination of woman to man, the subordination of child to father, and above all subordination of man to God.(7) While the ethical principles of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag had radical differences, nevertheless both groups felt the importance of connection between individual and family and community, and between individuals and the transcendent. Thus Pilgrims and Wampanoag had enough common ground in their ethics to be able to establish relations that remained mostly peaceful for four decades. Of course there were conflicts, sometimes violent ones. But for a long time, both groups managed to hold on to their higher ethical commitments. Forty years of peace is no small achievement.

    That was in the early 1600s. Now let’s return to the year 2025. The United States is now a technological society requiring the cooperation of large groups of people under the single direction of a very small number of persons. As the mid-twentieth century ethic of individual rights, the rule of law, and checks and balances has eroded, the power impulse has come to dominate our politics. Fewer and fewer political leaders or corporate leaders practice enlightened self-interest any more; fewer and fewer of our leaders have genuine ethical commitments.

    The lack of ethical commitment leads to a unfortunate result. Our political system is based on the political theories of John Locke. One of the flaws in Locke’s political philosophy is that in certain disputes, there is no good way to judge between the two sides of the dispute, with the result that in these cases decisions can only be made by fighting it out. In noting this weakness in Locke’s system, Bertrand Russell pointed out: “Where such a view is embodied in the Constitution, the only way to avoid occasional civil war is to practise compromise and common sense. But compromise and common sense are habits of the mind, and cannot be embodied in a written constitution.”(7)

    This helps explain what has been going on with immigration policy over the past few decades. Too many of our elected officials have lost the habits of mind of compromise and common sense. The inability to compromise, even when common sense indicates the necessity, is characteristic of power politics. This is not good for anyone.

    How can we return to the habits of compromise and common sense? How can we get back to enlightened self-interest? I found one possible answer coming from a source I had not expected. In his book “White Poverty,” published last year, William J. Barber suggests that confronting White poverty could help Americans of all political persuasions to work together.

    This makes sense to me because I’ve long felt that the most important problem facing America today is the problem of poverty. In 2018, the Federal Reserve — a body that tries to remain non-partisan — issued a report stating that “Four in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either not be able to cover it or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money.”(8) Given what I’ve seen over my years as a minister, this sounds about right. And from what I’ve seen, poverty cuts across racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, whether you’re able-bodied, and so on. Even here in Cohasset, despite our picture-postcard-perfect image, too many households are just one medical emergency away from economic disaster. Nor has either political party been able to make much of an impact on poverty. From what I’ve seen as a minister, both the Democrats and the Republicans need to acknowledge that they have not done enough to address the fact that too many people live so close to economic disaster.

    So Barber’s book caught my attention because of his focus on poverty. In addition, Barber is a Black man, yet he says we must deal with White poverty. This shows his common sense, because he’s trying to get past polarization and divisiveness by focusing on an issue where he believes people of all political persuasions can find common cause. This also shows his willingness to compromise, because even though he’s Black he’s willing to focus on White poverty, knowing that if we address White poverty, we will have to address all poverty.(9)

    While it may seem as though I’ve diverged from the topic of immigration, I haven’t. Think about it this way. Four in ten Americans could not cover an emergency expense of $400. One in four Americans skipped necessary medical care in 2017 because they felt they couldn’t afford it. Three out of five non-retired adults say their retirement savings are on track.(10) It is true that compared to the developing world, we Americans have a very comfortable lifestyle; nevertheless, a great many of us do not feel economically secure. If you do not feel economically secure, it would not be surprising if you wondered whether immigrants were going to have an impact on your economic well-being.

    In other words, perhaps we can begin to address the immigration crisis by invoking enlightened self-interest. The “enlightened” part of “enlightened self-interest” recognizes that we do have some degree of ethical responsibility for people from elsewhere in the world who show up on our doorstep. The “self-interest” part of “enlightened self-interest” makes sure that we ourselves get taken care of, and also that we’re taking care of people already in America; this includes attending to already existing poverty in this country.

    What would the Wampanoags do? Back in 1620, they followed enlightened self-interest. They were enlightened when they extended a helping hand to the strangers who showed up in their land without invitation. This was also an act of self-interest, since these newcomers were potential allies and supporters. And as is always the case with enlightened self-interest, the Wampanoag used both compromise and by common sense to achieve their ends.

    As for those of us sitting here in the Meetinghouse, I think we can set an example of enlightened self-interest for others; and we can exemplify the habits of compromise and common sense that go along with it. How can we do this? I’ve heard from quite a few of you that you make a real effort to listen respectfully to those with differing political opinions. This is an example of enlightened self-interest; these days, no one wants to listen to opposing political viewpoints, but it is in our self-interest to do so; for by doing so, we set an example of how to restore democracy. This is a small example, but it is something that one person can accomplish by themselves.

    Beyond that, common sense indicates that it makes sense to find some issue that people of many different political affiliations can work on together. Perhaps that issue could be White poverty, although I’m open to compromise and willing to listen to other common sense ideas. However, I would point out that our congregation is already addressing White poverty. The South Shore where we live is roughly 95% White, and we are staunch supporters of anti-poverty initiatives such as the Cohasset Food Pantry, Habitat for Humanity, and the new Cohasset Community Aid Fund. It is true that addressing White poverty doesn’t directly address the issue of immigration. But it does address the underlying issue of needing to strengthen our democracy.

    And with that in mind, I’ll close with a short common sense poem by Unitarian minister Everett Edward Hale:

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

    Notes

    (3) Scholars still debate what the disease was. For the most recent hypothesis, see J. S. Marr and J. T. Cathey, “New Hypothesis for Cause of Epidemic among Native Americans, New England, 1616–1619,” Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 16, no. 2, 2016, pp. 281–286 — this paper reviews some of the earlier hypotheses, and concludes, “The causes of most historical epidemics may never be proven.”
    (4) Many of the historical facts come from Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1650–1775 (University of Oklahoma, Press, 1996). However, the interpretation of the historical record is mine.
    (5) Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, Simon & Schuster, 1945/1972.
    (6) Bragdon, chapter 6, “Kinship as Ideology.”
    (7) For a good discussion of this worldview, see Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (Knopf Doubleday, 1997). Norton cites the political philosophy of Sir Robert Filmer as exemplifying this, which she calls a “Filmerian” worldview. (Filmer was one of the thinkers against whom John Locke was arguing.)
    (8) Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2017 (Washington, DC, Federal Reserve Board), p. 2.
    (9) For an overview of Barber’s argument, see chapter one in William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, White Poverty: How Exposing the Myths about Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (W. W. Norton, 2024).
    (10) Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, pp. 2-3.

  • Religion and Public Education

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

    Readings

    The first reading was the poem “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes.

    The second reading was from the essay “The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy” by John Dewey:

    “It is no accident that all democracies have put a high estimate upon education; that schooling has been their first care and enduring charge. Only through education can equality of opportunity be anything more than a phrase. Accidental inequalities of birth, wealth, and learning are always tending to restrict the opportunities of some as compared with those of others. Only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” [John Dewey, Manual Training and Vocational Education (1916)]

    Sermon: “Religion and Public Education”

    Unitarian Universalism has a long history of being concerned with public education. This begins at least as far back as the work of Horace Mann, a Unitarian who served as Secretary of Education in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century, and did more than anyone to establish the idea of universal, free, non-sectarian public schools as the norm in the United States. Our own congregation was also deeply involved in public education in the mid-nineteenth century; we allowed our then-minister, Joseph Osgood, to serve as the superintendent of the town’s schools while he was serving as minister. Osgood worked tirelessly at the local level for the same goal of universal, free, non-sectarian schools.

    The involvement of Unitarians, and to a lesser extent Universalists, in public education continued through the late twentieth century. Many Unitarians became teachers; many Unitarians served on their local school boards; and Unitarians also advocated tirelessly for universal, free, non-sectarian public education at the national and state levels. Our reasons for doing so are fairly straightforward. We Unitarian Universalists believe that public schools are essential for a strong democracy; and we believe in democracy as the governmental system best designed to help us establish a society oriented towards truth and goodness. We are well aware that both democracy and public education are imperfect vehicles for helping to establish a society devoted to truth and goodness. Both democracy and public education can be diverted away from truth and goodness, towards lesser goals like personal gain and power politics. But, to paraphrase the old saying, so far they’re better than any other system anyone has come up with. And public education is essential to democracy because an informed electorate is essential to democracy.

    Besides, we Unitarian Universalists are idealists, in the sense that we believe in the perfectibility of humanity. As the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker said, and as Martin Luther King, Jr., later paraphrased, the moral arc of the universe may be long, but it bends towards justice. Thus the reasons why we Unitarian Universalists support public education are fairly straightforward. I’d like to review with you some of our past support for public education, and then I’d like to talk about why we should recommit ourselves to public education.

    And by looking back at education in Cohasset, we can see how far we’ve come. Prior to about 1830, those who wanted their children to have more than basic literacy had to pay for their children’s schooling. Younger children paid to attend “dame schools,” often taught by a widow who needed income. For young teens who wanted the equivalent of a high school education, Jacob Flint, minister at First Parish until 1835 and one of the few people in town with a college education, would prepare students for college for a fee. There was also the Academy, a private school organized in 1796 by well-to-do parents who wanted to prepare their children for college. Cohasset finally established a public high school in 1826. At first, the town’s high school was so poorly funded that it shared a teacher with the Academy, and only operated when the Academy was not in session.

    Cohasset finally established a school board in 1830, and that committee slowly improved the town’s public education offerings. By 1840, the “dame schools” had mostly given way to publicly funded primary education. It took longer to establish a year-round high school; it wasn’t until 1847 that the town finally provided funding to keep high school open for all year.

    When our congregation hired Joseph Osgood as our minister in 1842, we specifically chose him because he had a background in education. According to town historian Victor Bigelow, Joseph Osgood brought about “uniform teaching and systematic promotion in our schools.” Osgood established graded classrooms and regular oversight of teachers. To support his efforts, Osgood could point to the work of Horace Mann. To train teachers, Mann had founded three so-called “normal schools” across the state; one of these normal schools was in Bridgewater (now Bridgewater State University). Mann also published “The Common School Journal,” a periodical filled with practical advice and best practices. No doubt Joseph Osgood read “The Common School Journal,” and (when he could) hired his teacher from the Bridgewater normal school.

    Of special interest to us today, given what’s going on in public education elsewhere in the United States, is that both Osgood and Mann believed that publicly funded education should be non-sectarian. This did not mean that Horace Mannn believed that religion should be excluded from the public schools; it only meant that no one denomination or sect should have control over what was taught. In 1848, Mann wrote: “our system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals based on religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible; and, in receiving the Bible, it allows it to do what it is allowed to do in no other system — to speak for itself. But here it stops, not because it claims to have compassed all truth; but because it disclaims to act as an umpire between hostile religious opinions.”(1)

    I think Mann was wrong in saying that public schools should be founded on Christian morals. In his own day, there were Jews and freethinkers in Massachusetts who did not wish to have their children inculcated with Christian morals. Even among the Christians of Massachusetts, it proved impossible to find common ground. Roman Catholics felt that Massachusetts public schools taught Protestant Christianity, with the result that they established Catholic parochial schools to provide appropriate schooling for their children; indeed, Catholics sometimes referred to public schools as “Protestant parochial schools.”

    Yet although I don’t agree with everything that was done by the mid-nineteenth century educational reformers, people like Horace Mann and Joseph Osgood, I give them credit for greatly extending the reach of free public schools. Here in Cohasset, Joseph Osgood provided leadership to extend the school year, and to open the schools to as many children as possible. Over time, other educational reformers worked to further extend the reach of the public schools, and to further reform the content of public schooling.

    One of those reformers was one of my personal heroes, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. A Unitarian and a teacher, Peabody became interested in the education of young children. She traveled to Europe to learn about a new educational approach called kindergarten. Peabody and other educators helped to establish kindergarten as an accepted part of the public school system, extending free schooling down to five-year-olds.

    One of the people Elizabeth Palmer Peabody trained was Lucy Wheelock, who went on to found Wheelock College. My mother got her teacher training at Wheelock College while Lucy Wheelock was still active, and thus had a direct connection to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. My mother was both a career schoolteacher and a lifelong Unitarian, and I’d like to use my mother’s example to talk about the connection between mid-twentieth century Unitarians and public education.

    Unitarianism in the mid-twentieth century was deeply influenced by the Progressive movement. Please note that what was meant by “Progressive” back then is not what is meant by the adjective “progressive” today. The Progressives of that time (spelled with a capital “P”) wanted to reform human society: they believed in the essential goodness of human beings; they believed in the capacity of human beings to progressively establish a more just and humane society; they believed in the power of reason; they believed in democracy. They differed from today’s progressives (spelled with no capital “P”) in that the older Progressives founded their Progressivism in their liberal religious outlook; by contrast many of today’s progressives either have no religious outlook, or they try to divorce their religious outlook from their politics. I’d even say that the earlier Progressivism was not so much a political movement as it was a religious movement.

    The wars and economic disasters of the mid-twentieth century caused many people to abandon Progressivism, to abandon their hope for progressively establishing a more humane and just human society. These other people turned to a grim view of humanity, and a grim view of human society; we can see some of this grimmer outlook in today’s political progressives.

    But we Unitarians and the Universalists, and some other liberal religious groups, held on to our belief that human beings are basically good. We held on to our belief that human society can be improved through human effort. My mother was one of that generation of mid-twentieth century Unitarians who believed we could make the world better. Like so many Unitarians of her generation, she and her twin sister both trained to become teachers. This was a classic strategy of Progressivism: to reform the world through education. With their sunny view of human nature, my mother and her twin were drawn to John Dewey’s educational philosophy. Dewey said that it was through public education that we could establish a truly democratic society. Dewey taught that “only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy.”

    My mother’s idealism was quickly tested. She got her first job right after the Second World War ended, teaching kindergarten in the public schools in Fort Ticonderoga, New York. In 1946, Fort Ticonderoga was a backwater. At the end of her first year of teaching, the school principal told her that if she wanted to continue teaching in Fort Ticonderoga, she would have to begin to use corporal punishment. This went against my mother’s belief in progressive education. She found another job.

    She wound up teaching in the Wilmington, Delaware, public schools when those schools were being desegregated. Once while she was walking down the street with her class, some men drove by and shouted racial slurs because she, a White woman, was holding the hand of a Black kindergartener.(2) The Progressive Unitarian teachers of the mid-twentieth century believed, with John Dewey, that “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” In the 1950s and 1960s, the crisis in democracy centered on racial segregation; and educators and education were the midwives to a very messy birth of equal access to the public schools, all in service of strengthening democracy.

    Today, seventy-five years later, we face a different educational crisis, and we Unitarian Universalists are still trying to figure out how to respond. The current presidential administration is in the news this week with their efforts to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education. While this act grabbed the headlines, it’s actually just one event in a longer history of efforts to privatize education. These efforts can be traced in part back to the work of the influential economist Milton Friedman. In 1955, about the time when thugs were shouting racial epithets at my mother, Milton Friedman wrote an essay titled “The Role of Government in Education,” in which he advocated for what he called school choice, based on a voucher system. School choice has been widely adopted both by both political and religious conservatives, and by political and religious liberals. Friedman’s ideas for school choice are rooted in his notion that economic freedom is the crucial freedom that a democracy needs to flourish.

    We are in the process of discovering some of the downsides to school choice as promoted by Milton Friedman. School choice policies have encouraged for-profit companies to get involved in education. In theory, this is not a bad thing, but it has led to a definite tendency to establish financial profit as the most important goal of a school, rather than education. School choice also means that one city can see separate schools reflecting the values of a small group of families rather than the wider community. In theory, this is not a bad thing, and indeed Unitarian Universalists have used school choice to establish charter schools that reflect their ideals and values. But this goes against the notion that public schools are where we can learn to live with people who are different from us, an essential skill in a democracy.

    At the same time, school choice could be a useful tool for promoting educational reform, because it allows for the testing of innovative ideas. If school vouchers existed in the day of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, perhaps she might have established a charter school to demonstrate that kindergartens really do benefit young children. Similarly, we can imagine John Dewey establishing a charter school, to show that the educational methods he first tried out in the University of Chicago laboratory school could also work in a public school.

    And we do face some serious educational problems today. For example, the quality of the schooling a child gets depends a great deal on what city or town they live in. In 2023, the high school graduation rate in Cohasset, where I now live, was 98.3%; in that same year, the high school graduation rate in New Bedford, where I used to live, was 78.6%.(3) Nor can this disparity be explained solely by the per-pupil expenditures; for while Cohasset does spend more, at $23,212.40 per pupil in 2023, New Bedford is not that far behind, at $20,943.37 per pupil in 2023. The reasons behind these educational disparities in Massachusetts are hotly debated, and I’m certainly not qualified to end that debate. My point is simply this: educational reform is still necessary to ensure that all children have equal access to education, and to ensure an informed electorate which is necessary for democracy.

    Unitarian Universalists used to see education as a key area where we could make a difference in helping to improve human society. After all, we are one of the top two or three most-educated of all religious groups; thus not only do we place a high value on education ourselves, but our educational attainments mean we should be able to help strengthen the educational system of this country. And as a religious group, we remain committed to education, both as a way to strengthen democracy, and as a way to allow human potential to flourish.

    Yet it feels to me as though Unitarian Universalism, as a wider movement, has drifted away from seeing education as a key area where we can make a difference. In the past couple of decades, I’ve heard lots of Unitarian Universalists talk about their commitment to social justice, but I’ve rarely heard a Unitarian Universalist say that their commitment to social justice led them to get elected to their local School Committee, or try to influence state or local policy on education. Similarly, in the past couple of decades, I’ve often heard older Unitarian Universalists encouraging young people to go to college to “get a good job”; much less often have I heard older Unitarian Universalists encouraging young people to go to college so they can become teachers. And in our denominational publications, I read quite a bit about how we should be active in promoting justice, but I don’t read much about the importance of teachers and teaching and education.

    Our own congregation is better at seeing education as a central way for us to make a difference. We have quite a few teachers and educators in our congregation, and we honor them and their profession. I’ve listened to older Unitarian Universalists in our congregation encourage young people to follow careers in teaching. A primary part of our mission as a congregation is operating Carriage House Nursery School, a progressive educational institution providing innovation in the area of outdoors education for young children. I should also mention that our congregation provides state-of-the-art comprehensive sexuality education for early adolescents and a week-long ecology day camp; these are both small programs, but they fill an educational need here in Cohasset.

    In these and other ways, we’re continuing Joseph Osgood’s legacy. We still consider teaching and education to be a central part of our purpose; we still consider teaching and education to be a central part of how we contribute to the betterment of human society. It might be worth our while to be a little more forthcoming about taking credit for all the ways our congregation supports public education, supports early education, supports teachers, supports other kinds of education — and for us to be a little more forthcoming in taking credit for the way we are thus supporting and strengthening democracy.

    Notes

    (1) Horace Mann, Life and Works of Horace Mann, vol. III, ed. Mary Mann, “Annual Report on Education for 1848,” pp. 729-730.
    (2) I don’t know when exactly this took place. My mother left Wilmington, Del., c. 1956; I can’t find out when primary schools were desegregated. One source I consulted said that desegregation didn’t occur until after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling; see: Matthew Albright, “Wilmington has long, messy education history”, The [Wilmington, Del.] News Journal, 10 June 2016 accessed 22 March 2025 https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/education/2016/06/10/wilmington-education-history/85602856/
    (3) The Massachusetts Department of Education has a website where you can compare educational outcomes between school districts: go to the “DESE Directory of Datasets and Reports” webpage, click on “School and district performance summaries.” https://www.mass.gov/info-details/dese-directory-of-datasets-and-reports#school-and-district-performance-and-indicators-