Dan Harper | Sermons – Page 12 – Online archive of nearly all my sermons

Inner peace

March 2, 2025

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

Readings

The first reading was from a commentary on Psalm 23 by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. This is an interpretation of the phrase, “He restores my soul.”

“The root of the Hebrew word yeshovev, translated here as ‘He restores,’ sometimes means ‘to grant rest,’ but its basic meaning is ‘to return.’ When one’s soul is troubled or worried, it is not at peace, as though it is not in its natural place, but distanced and dislocated. When the soul returns to its true place, the result is inner peace.

The second reading was from the Confucian classic, The Great Learning, translated by A. Charles Muller, professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo:

The way of great learning consists in manifesting one’s bright virtue, consists in loving the people, consists in stopping in perfect goodness.
When you know where to stop, you have stability.
When you have stability, you can be tranquil.
When you are tranquil, you can be at ease.
When you are at ease, you can deliberate.
When you can deliberate you can attain your aims.
Things have their roots and branches, affairs have their end and beginning. When you know what comes first and what comes last, then you are near the Way [of the Great Learning].

The third reading was “The Peace of Wild Things,” a poem by Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Sermon: “Inner Peace”

For us Unitarian Universalists, the third reading this morning, the poem “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry, might be one of our most popular visions of how we might achieve inner peace. The poem tells us that when we are overwhelmed by despair and fear, we should go outside, find a pond where wild ducks and heron live, and there we can find peace.

This poem reminds me of the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Walden tells the story of how Thoreau went and spent two years living next to Walden Pond, a small deep pond of clear still water. There’s a back story to Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond. While he lived there, he was writing a book about a boat trip he and his brother had taken some years before. His brother had died of tetanus a couple of years before Thoreau went to live at Walden. I’ve always imagined that part of the purpose behind living right next to a pond “where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water” was to allow Thoreau to regain the inner peace that had been overwhelmed by his brother’s sudden death at a young age.

Nor is this idea of finding peace in wild places limited to Wendell Berry and Henry Thoreau. Many of us in this congregation will say that when we need respite from the cacophony of current events and the stress of day to day life, we take a walk in the woods. We are lucky here on the South Shore that even though we live in an area with a high density of human population, we also have lots of relatively wild places where we can “come into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief.”

As much as I personally like going outside to seek the peace of wild things (as Wendell Berry puts it), there are people for whom it doesn’t necessarily work to seek inner peace by being out in Nature. Some people just don’t find it peaceful to spend spend time outdoors. Then there are those who find it difficult to get outdoors, due to health or mobility limitations. There are also those who, because of our work or school schedules, find it difficult to get out into wild places except on weekends or holidays. What Wendell Berry calls “the peace of wild things” is one of my favorite ways to seek inner peace; but there can be times when it’s hard to do, and even though it works for me, it doesn’t work for everyone.

This is going to be a theme for the first part of this sermon: There are many techniques for finding inner peace. But since we are all different, some techniques will work well for some people, but not others. And since we all change over time, a technique that works for you now might not work for you a few years from now; or a technique that didn’t work for you in the past might work for you now; or you might have a technique that you like but you just don’t have the time you need to devote to it right now.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at some techniques for finding inner peace. I’d like to start with an ancient Western technique for finding inner peace: prayer. In Western culture we usually think of prayer as a Christian practice, but it’s not that simple. Jews were praying before Christianity existed, and so were the ancient Greeks and Romans. Since both Jewish prayer and ancient pagan prayer predate Christianity, we should think of Christian prayer as just one subset of Western prayer practices and techniques. Today, there are humanists and atheists who pray, not because they believe in God — obviously they don’t — but because the technique of prayer is a part of our Western cultural inheritance.

When we think of prayer more broadly, it tends to subvert the usual conceptions we have about prayer. Pop culture has reduced prayer to asking God for something you want. This is known as petitionary prayer, because you’re petitioning God for something. Scientists have even studied this aspect of prayer — what happens when people pray for someone who is sick, does it improve their health outcome? But petitionary prayer is only a part of the Western prayer tradition, and I’d like to look at two forms of Western prayer that are aimed at improving your inner peace.

First there’s the technique called contemplative prayer, or as it has been popularized in recent years, centering prayer. The famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton did much to popularize this kind of prayer with his 1971 book titled “Contemplative Prayer.” As a Christian, Merton described centering prayer as a practice where you simply focus your attention on the Christian god. Non-believers use this prayer technique by focusing attention on this present world. So Henry David Thoreau, for example, wrote about sitting outside his cabin at Walden Pond and becoming “rapt in a revery” for hours at a time; I’d say that what Thoreau was doing was a type of centering prayer that focused, not on God, but on the natural world. Centering prayer is specifically designed to achieve inner peace through the contemplation of that which is good in this world.

A second type of prayer that can help achieve inner peace is the practice of remembering others in your prayers. Traditionally, in Western folk practice, during your daily prayers you’d go through a mental list all the people whom you think might need or appreciate prayers. Sometimes this takes the form of petitionary prayer — petitioning God to heal someone from cancer, for example — but often it takes the form of simply thinking of people who are important to you. Humanists and atheists who pray aren’t going to petition God, but they may still devote part of their prayer time thinking of people they know who might appreciate their attention. Prayer lists like this aren’t specifically designed to achieve inner peace, but I’ve seen how people who remember others in their prayers do in fact achieve some degree of inner peace. This makes sense to me, because reminding yourself of how you are connected to other people you can be a calming influence. It’s a way of remembering the ties of love that bind you to other people and give your support. And while praying for people who are ill or facing other troubles may or may not help them, I’ve seen how it can have a calming effect on the person who is praying.

So both centering prayer and old-fashioned prayer lists can help some people achieve inner peace. However, prayer doesn’t work for everyone. I’m one of the people it doesn’t work for. For some years, I tried many kinds of prayer, including centering prayer and prayer lists, and I finally concluded that prayer just doesn’t do much for me. But prayer does help a great many people achieve inner peace, and you can’t know if it works for you until you give it a serious trial.

Next, let’s consider meditation and mindfulness as techniques for achieving inner peace. Meditation and mindfulness became popular in this country in the middle of the last century. Most of these meditation and mindfulness practices came from Hindu or Buddhist traditions. Transcendental Meditation, a hugely popular meditation practice in the 1970s and 1980s, came out of the Hindu tradition. Sitting meditation, which also became hugely popular in the 1970s and 1980s, was popularized in large part by Zen Buddhist practitioners like Alan Watts. People like Dr. Herbert Benson also created secular adaptations of meditation and mindfulness. In his 1975 book “The Relaxation Response,” Benson claimed that all you needed was some mental device to keep your mind from wandering, along with a passive attitude towards the process. According to Benson, you didn’t need the arcane mantras of something like Transcendental Meditation, nor did you need the elaborate religious structure of something like Zen Buddhism. Through such secular adaptations, many humanists and atheists have adopted meditation and mindfulness practices.

Meditation and mindfulness are now a part of mainstream culture. Schools teach meditation to children and teens to help lower stress, and maybe find some inner peace. Some employers offer meditation classes and meditation rooms in the workplace. When you talk about achieving inner peace, many people assume that means meditating or engaging in mindfulness practices. This tends to annoy Christians and Jews who feel that prayer can offer the same benefits as meditation and mindfulness; how come it’s OK to teach Eastern religious techniques in the schools, but not Western religious techniques? I don’t want to get in the middle of that particular religious debate, but I do want to point out that meditation and mindfulness don’t work for everyone. Recent research has shown that a minority of people experience negative effects from meditation and mindfulness. I’m actually one of those people. I meditated for years, and meditation did help me achieve some degree of inner peace, but there were enough times that it didn’t make me feel good that I finally stopped.

Sadly, then, although I gave both meditation and prayer a fair trial, although I had some success with both, eventually I wasn’t able to make them work. This, by the way, makes me feel inadequate as a minister; I’m supposed to be setting an example, yet here I am, a failure at both prayer and meditation, the two most popular techniques for achieving inner peace. Yet just be cause I failed doesn’t mean that you’re going to fail. If you’re searching for techniques to achieve inner peace, it’s worth trying prayer and meditation techniques.

My failures with prayer and meditation have led me to an interesting conclusion that I think might be helpful to others. Part of my problem with both prayer and meditation arose because they are basically solitary activities. Yes, you can go to a meditation group, or you can join a prayer group, but prayer and meditation ultimately take place inside your head. I find this is also true in seeking out the peace of wild things: in Wendell Berry’s poem, he went out by himself to spend time with the wild drake and the heron. All this makes sense, because in order to achieve inner peace, you do need to spend some time in your head.

Yet I began to realize what worked best for me were practices where I had to interact with other people. I think I first became aware of this through making music with other people. I’ve never found much inner peace in practicing music on my own, but I realized that doing music with other people was a fairly reliable way for me to achieve a degree of inner peace. Maybe in part this was because I’m not an especially good musician, and it was much more satisfactory to do music with people who are good musicians. Regardless of my own failings as a musician, I consistently found that when I did music with other people, I felt an increase in inner peace.

Then I realized that the same thing was true of congregational life. When I was cooperating with other people in the congregation to make something happen, I could feel myself growing more peaceful. Although I didn’t have much success with individual spiritual practices like prayer or mindfulness or meditation, the experience of being part of a religious community did help me achieve inner peace. As more and more people began to say they were “spiritual but not religious,” I began to call myself “religious but not spiritual.” That is, although I was kind of a failure at individual spiritual practices, the communal and social aspects of communal religion did lead me to inner peace.

I’ll give you some specific examples of communal religious activities that have helped me achieve at least some inner peace. And while you may skeptical about some of my examples, hold on to your doubts for a bit and I’ll try to explain.

One obvious example of a communal religious practice that has provided me with some inner peace is being part of a congregation’s choir. I’ve sung in traditional choirs, once or twice with a gospel choir, with a folk music group, and now I play in this congregation’s bell choir. As I said before, I’m not an especially good musician, and I often find participating in choirs is difficult and frustrating — at the end of bell choir rehearsal, I often feel like my head is going to explode. Yet despite the frustrations, the sense of coming together with other people to do something I couldn’t do alone makes me feel less anxious and less alone, and ultimately moves me towards a feeling of inner peace.

I also love being part of a team teaching in religious education programs. Last year, I taught in our OWL comprehensive sexuality education program with Mark and Holly; this year I’m teaching in the Coming of Age program with Tracey; and in the summer I help Ngoc run the ecology camp. Just like participating in a choir, teaching is often difficult and frustrating. Yet here again, despite the frustrations, I find I benefit the social aspects, both working with other adults and working with the kids. Teaching always takes me out of my own little personal concerns so that I feel a part of something larger than myself; that in turn lowers my levels of stress and anxiety; and that ultimately leads to a sense of inner peace.

Another communal religious practice is committee work. I am not very good at committee work; I’m too impatient, and sometimes I find it hard to take the long view. But working with other people towards a common goal turns out to be good for me. If I can get past my impatience, if I can work through my frustrations, I eventually find I feel more peaceful when I’m a part a group working on a project together.

I could go on, but you get the idea: working with other people to make a religious community function can lower stress and anxiety, reduce loneliness and isolation, and ultimately help us achieve a greater degree of inner peace. There may be a simple reason why this is so — perhaps it is merely because we humans are tribal animals, and we are meant to be working with others — and there may also be a deeper spiritual reason — we humans need to strive towards something greater than our individual selves.

Whatever the case may be, I would argue that these days in-person contact and cooperation has become perhaps the most important benefits of religious communities. This is because we have so few opportunities to work together selflessly with others. We are increasingly isolated in today’s society. We increasingly buy everything we need online, so we don’t even have to go to the store any more. As a result, we’re in the midst of a well-documented epidemic of loneliness epidemic. Loneliness and isolation reduce your sense of inner peace, and yet there are fewer and fewer places where we can join with other people to work together on values-based projects. Because of this, while solitary spiritual practices like taking walks in the woods or meditating or praying still offer spiritual benefits, today the most important spiritual benefits come from being part of a religious community.

We live in a strange world these days, where people on both sides of the political divide are convinced that they no longer have anything in common with the other side. We’ve gotten to this point in part because we spend so little time working together in face-to-face communities like First Parish. And with the diminishment of community life has come loneliness and isolation. We try to repair the damage through social media, but it turns out social media only makes things worse. It becomes a downwards spiral. The unsurprising result is a steep increase in anxiety and depression, political conflict, and a general feeling of malaise. Our lack of community involvement has greatly decreased our inner peace.

So it is that I’ve come to believe that in this historical moment, the most effective technique for seeking inner peace is through community. It’s fine to seek the peace of wild things through solitary walks in the woods, but remember that Henry Thoreau actively participated in anti-slavery meetings while lived at Walden Pond. Prayer and meditation are well worth your while, but then you need a community to make sense out of the prayers and meditation. It is through being in community that we may transcend our troubles and worries, and return to the sense of inner peace.
World Peace

February 23, 2025

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

Readings

The first reading was a short excerpt from the poem “Jerusalem” by Naomi Shihab Nye:

I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.

The second reading was from a poem titled “Poem” by Muriel Rukeyser:

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons….
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,…
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace….

The third reading was from the poem “Making Peace” by Denise Levertov:

…peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.

Sermon: “World Peace”

When I was in my teens and early twenties, a fellow by the name of Dana Greeley was the minister of my Unitarian Universalist church, and he used to preach regularly about world peace. He had been a pacifist since before the Second World War, not only because violence was wrong but also because war could not solve the problems it was supposed to solve. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, he became opposed to war for yet another reason: once atomic weapons became available, then war had the potential wipe out the entire human race. So as I recall it, Greeley had three good reasons to reject war: on moral grounds, because violence was wrong; and on pragmatic grounds, both because it could not obtain its stated objectives, and because it threatened all human existence.

I was convinced by these arguments, and became a pacifist myself. I was convinced to the point that I even registered with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, a Quaker group, just in case the draft was reinstated. But I must admit I was not entirely convinced by Greeley’s vision for what a peaceful world might look like. Greeley was an internationalist and a strong supporter of the United Nations. The United Nations offered a concrete vision of international cooperation that was especially compelling to those who lived through the Second World War. However, I think that while people in my age cohort found the humanitarian mission of the United Nations compelling, what we saw of the Vietnam War decreased our confidence in the ability of the United Nations to end war.

Put it this way: Yes, of course there should be an international community, and of course that community should promote international cooperation in areas like public health and economic development. But what does a peaceful world look like? It’s not enough to say: a peaceful world is a world without war. That’s a vision that’s essentially negative. But what are the positive aspects of a peaceful world? There must be more to a peaceful world than merely the absence of war.

This reminds me of an old Chinese story that presents a vision of a peaceful world. The story of “Peach Blossom Spring,” first told by Tao Yuan-ming, tries to answer the question: How are we to build the kind of peaceful community we long for? I’m going to retell this story for you using the 1894 translation by Herbert Giles.

In the year 390 or thereabouts, when the north of China had been conquered by the Mongol invaders from central Asia, and refugees from the invasion filled the south, there lived a fisherman in the village of Wu-ling. This was during the Qin dynasty. The Qin emperors were powerful, and while some people said they did what had to be done in troubled times, there were others who said that government officials were vain and greedy, and did not have the interests of the ordinary people at heart. (How often do we hear the same complaint, even in our own day!)

To get back to the fisherman of Wu-ling:

One day, while out on the river, this fisherman decided to follow the river upstream. At one point, he came to a place where the river branched, taking the right or left branch without paying attention to where he was going. Suddenly he rounded a bend in the river and came upon a grove of peach-trees in full bloom. The blossoming trees grew close along the banks of the river for as far as he could see. The fisherman was filled with joy and astonishment at the beauty of the scene and the delightful perfume of the flowers. He continued upstream, to see how far along the river these trees grew.

When at last he came to the end of the peach trees, the river was scarcely bigger than a stream, and then it suddenly ended at a line of steep hills. There where the river began, the fisherman saw a cave in the side of the hill, and a faint light came from within it. He tied up his boat to a tree, and crept in through the narrow entrance.

He emerged into a world of level country, with fine houses, rich fields, beautiful pools, and luxuriant mulberry and bamboo. He saw roads running north and south, carrying many people on foot and in carts. He could hear the sounds of crowing cocks and barking dogs around him. He noticed that the dress of the people who passed along or were at work in the fields was of a strange cut. He also saw that everyone, young and old, appeared to be happy and content.

One of the people caught sight of the fisherman, and expressed great astonishment. When this person learned whence the fisherman had come, he took him home, cooking a chicken for him and offering him some wine to drink. Before long, all the people of the place came to see the fisherman, this visitor from afar.

The people of the village told the fisherman that several centuries ago, during troubled times, their ancestors had sought refuge here. Over time, the way back to the wider world had been cut off, and they had lost touch with the rest of the human race.

They asked the fisherman about the current politics in the outside world. They were amazed to learn of new dynasty that ruled the land. And when the fishermen told them of the Mongol invasions, they grieved over the vicissitudes of human affairs.

Then each family of the village invited the fisherman to their home in turn, each family offering him hospitality. He saw that this was truly a land of peacefulness and contentment. But at last, the fisherman longed to return to his own family, and he prepared to take his leave. As he said his farewells and began to make his way back to his boat, the people said to him, “It will not be worth while to talk about what you have seen to the outside world.”

But of course the fisherman hoped to return to that lovely peaceful land. He made mental notes of his route as he proceeded on his homeward voyage. When at last he reached home, he at once went and reported what he had seen to the ruling magistrate of the district. The magistrate, greatly interested, sent off men to help him find the way back to this unknown region of peace and plenty. But, try as he might, the fisherman was never able to find it again. Later, a famous adventurer attempted to find the land of Peach Blossom Spring, but he also failed, and died soon afterwards of humiliation. From that time on, no further attempts were made.

The story of “Peach Blossom Spring” is a Utopian story. And in fact, the Chinese name of the story, Táohuā Yuán Jì, has come to mean much the same thing as our English word Utopia: a place of perfection that doesn’t really exist.

We can find versions of the Paech Blossom Spring story in our own time. When you hear people who want to go back to a simpler time, they’re looking for a land that’s stuck in the past, just like the land the land the fisherman found. Or when you hear people who don’t like the current political administration say that they’re going to emigrate to another country, they’re actually looking for a land like the fisherman found, removed from the real world.

Utopian fantasies have become our primary means of expressing our vision for a peaceful world. I consider this to be unfortunate, because we know that Utopian visions are impractical and can’t come true. Utopias can only exist if they are completely cut off from the rest of the world, but this is impossible in an interdependent world. A Utopian vision for the world is a dead end.

Yet we are still liable to fall under the spell of utopian visions. Many people in our own time fall under the spell of religious Utopian visions. So, for example, the Christian vision of heaven can function as a kind of Utopia: you can only reach heaven after you die, and you can only reach heaven if you’re extraordinarily good or lucky; this kind of vision of heaven neither pragmatic nor fair the vast majority of humanity. Our Universalist forebears rejected this conception of a Utopian heaven, saying that everyone gets to go to heaven, and also saying that the only hell was the one we humans created here on earth. Thus our Universalist forebears conclude that it’s up to us to fix the problems in this world, to create a Utopia in the here and now. I agree with our Universalist forebears, but this still leaves open the question of what is a positive vision for the world we’re trying to create.

I don’t think that any one person can provide us with a perfect vision for a peaceful world. That vision can only emerge through communal endeavor. And I suspect when a compelling vision for a peaceful world emerges, it will be far less grand that either the United Nations or Peach Blossom Spring. I think it far more likely that we will find a truly compelling vision for a peaceful world in the mundane details of life. So if we’re going to look for compelling visions for a peaceful world, we might do well to begin with images like the one offered by Joy Harjo in her poem titled “Perhaps the World Ends Here”:

[This copyrighted poem is online here.]

Of course if we’re not careful, even this prosaic vision can seem a bit Utopian. Anyone who knows anything about domestic violence, for example, knows that a kitchen table can be a place of fear and even violence. But the poet acknowledges this when she says that the kitchen table “is a place to hide in the shadow of terror.” There will be violence even in a peaceful world; but perhaps the difference is that the existence of violence will be recognized, and instead of being glorified it will be addressed openly.

I see one big barrier to a widespread adoption of this particular vision for a peaceful world. Joy Harjo’s vision of the peaceful kitchen table owes a great deal to her roots as an enrolled citizen of Muscogee Nation. That is to say, hers is not a vision of the individualistic suburban American nuclear family, but rather a vision of peace rooted in the human connection of extended family and supportive wider community. This is not a vision of life as portrayed on a picture postcard, but rather life as it really is, messy and complicated, but also filled with love and connection.

This makes the image of the kitchen table compelling to me. The kitchen table in the poem is messy: babies teethe at the corners, so at the very least it’s a table covered with baby drool. The kitchen table in the poem is also the place where people put themselves back together after having fallen down. That is to say, the kitchen table in the poem is not some kind of Utopia. But at the same time, it is a place where you can find support when life gets difficult; it can be a place of joy and of triumph; it can be a place to give thanks. It is a human-scaled vision, and a vision grounded in human connection.

I think if we’re going to envision a peaceful world — not as the absence of war, but as something positive — we need to include in our vision the importance of human connection. Not some abstract connection, but the connection that can happen around a kitchen table. If we’re going to envision a peaceful world, we need to include all the messy complexities of human life. It’s not enough to have some big abstract vision, we need a vision that includes teething babies, and drinking coffee, and raising children, and preparing and eating meals together.

Actually, this sounds a bit like what we’re trying to do here in our congregational community. God knows, we are not perfect. But we try to be a community rooted in human connection. I might wish we had some teething babies, but we are a place where people can put themselves back together after having fallen down. We do give children instructions on what it means to be human. We do sing with both joy and sorrow, we do pray with both suffering and remorse. And we do give thanks. Probably the most important thing we do is to give thanks that we are here, and that we have the strength and the ability to make this world just a little bit better.

Detail from a painting by Qiu Ying illustrating the story of Peach Blossom Spring (public domain image from Wikimedia Commons).
Our Civil Religion

February 16, 2025

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

Readings

The first reading is from sociologist Robert Bellah’s article titled “Civil Religion in America,” first published in the journal Daedalus in 1967:

“The words and acts of the founding fathers, especially the first few presidents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion [of the United States] as it has been maintained ever since. Though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity. For one thing, neither Washington nor Adams nor Jefferson mentions Christ in his inaugural address; nor do any of the subsequent presidents, although not one of them fails to mention God. The God of civil religion is not only rather ‘unitarian,’ he is also on the austere side, much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love. Even though he is somewhat deist in cast, he is by no means simply a watchmaker God. He is actively interested and involved in history, with a special concern from America. Here the analogy has much less to do with natural law than with ancient Israel; the equation of America with Israel in the idea of the ‘American Israel’ is not infrequent. What was implicit in the words of Washington [in his inaugural address] becomes explicit in Jefferson’s second inaugural when he said: ‘I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.’ Europe is Egypt; America, the promised land. God has led his people to establish a new sort of social order that shall be a light unto all nations.”

The second reading is from an interview with the philosopher Jonardon Ganeri, in the recent book Talking God: Philosophers on Belief:

“Taking Christianity as the exemplar of religion skews philosophical discussion towards attempts to solve, resolve, or dissolve difficult philosophical puzzles inherent in monotheism: problems about God’s powers, goodness, and knowledge; attempts to provide rational arguments for God’s existence; the problem of evil; and so on. Hindu philosophers have traditionally been far more interested in a quite different array of problems, especially questions about the nature of religious knowledge and religious language, initially arising from their concerns with the Veda as a sacred eternal text and as a source of ritual and moral law…. Some of the more important Hindu philosophers are atheists, arguing that no sacred religious text such as the Veda could be the word of God, since authorship, even divine authorship, implies the possibility of error. Whether believed in or not, a personal god does not figure prominently as the source of the divine, and instead nontheistic concepts of the divine prevail.”

Sermon: Our Civil Religion

The subject for this morning is civil religion in the United States. Our U.S. civil religion has been explored by scholars going back to 1967 when sociologist Robert N. Bellah published an article on the topic. While talking about our American civil religion is nothing new, at the same time in the current political situation it’s also very much of the moment.

I do have to admit, however, that not everyone agrees that the United States has a civil religion. Conservative Protestant Christians, for example, are often uncomfortable with the notion that our country has a civil religion, for at least two reasons. First, the U.S. civil religion does not fit into their definition of religion, because our civil religion does not center on belief. On the contrary, U.S. civil religion centers of performance of rituals rather than belief. Second, conservative Protestant Christians are quite certain that a person can only have one religious commitment. For this reason, they deny that a civil religion exists; and then they conflate their performance of the religious rituals of U.S. civil religion with their conservative Protestant Christianity. As a result, conservative American Protestantism sometimes becomes a mash-up of Protestant Christianity and U.S. civil religion; using the technical term, it is a “syncretic religion.”

By the way, it can be controversial to point out the fact that U.S. civil religion is different from Christianity. Robert Bellah points out that “from the earliest years of the nineteenth century, conservative religious and political group have argued that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion.” (1) Yet even though conservative Christians find this controversial, it’s important for us to see clearly that an American civil religion actually does exist — and further, it’s also critically important to see clearly that the American civil religion is not Christianity

So that we can see more clearly, let’s admit that (all too often) we Unitarian Universalists default to the conservative Protestant Christian definition of religion. All too often, we just assume that a person can only have one religion at a time; that religion centers on belief in a transcendent deity; that the purpose of religion is salvation; that religion is entirely a personal matter; that every religion must have a single sacred text like the Bible. Of course, by this standard, Unitarian Universalism would not be a religion, because we don’t require belief in a deity, we don’t mind if you follow more than one religious path, we don’t have a founding figure, and we’re pretty loose about what constitutes a sacred text. We should know better: the conservative American Christian definition of religion does not work. To be blunt, it is just plain wrong.

So let’s put that definition of religion aside. And to better understand our current U.S. civil religion, let’s take a look at ancient Rome. The religions of ancient Rome can teach us a lot about the religions in our society today.

Ancient Rome was a multicultural society, somewhat similar to the way the United States is a multicultural society. Many different religious sects flourished throughout the Roman Empire, sects like the Eleusinian mystery religion in Greece, the religion centered around Isis in Egypt, Judaism in Judea, and so on. A person could join any of these religions, but that person would also be expected to participate in the rituals of the Roman state cult. The Roman state cult provided a measure of social cohesion across the vast empire, with an elaborate calendar of ritual events. Everyone in society had a part to play in the various ceremonies and festivals and sacrifices. Ancient Rome even had sports events as part of the Roman state cult — the Taurean Games, which helped propitiate the deities of the underworld.

In ancient Rome, Judaism was notable because it was perhaps the only group whose adherents were not required to participate in the ritual sacrifices of the state cult. Admittedly, a few emperors sometimes forgot that the Jews were exempt; so for example, the mad emperor Caligula, who had gotten the Senate to deify him, threatened to place a statue of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem. When the Christians came along, as an offshoot of Judaism they tried to piggy-back on this exemption from the state cult, but got thrown to the lions instead. Thus, with the occasional exception of the Jews, it didn’t matter what other religion you practiced, you had to participate in the state cult of the Roman Empire, or face the consequences.

I think you can begin to see the parallels between the ancient Roman state cult, and today’s U.S. civil religion; although there were also significant differences. Like the ancient Romans, our civil religion has a calendar of events. The high holiday of this calendar is Independence Day, the fourth of July, which is widely celebrated with fireworks, barbeques, and other standardized rituals. Unlike the ancient Romans, you don’t have to go to a barbeque or watch the fireworks, but at some point in our lives most Americans do participate in these rituals. The rest of the yearly calendar is filled with lesser holidays and their associated rituals: Memorial Day parades, commemorations of 9/11, Martin Luther King Day celebrations, and so on.

Just as the ancient Romans integrated sports into their state cult, so too are sports an integral part of our U.S. civil religion. Every sports event in the U.S. includes an important ritual from our state cult, the playing of the Star Spangled Banner during which everyone is supposed to stand. When we understand this is a religious ritual, we can understand why there was such a strong reaction when Colin Kaepernick (KAP er nik) took a knee during the Star Spangled Banner. By refusing to participate in a ritual of the state cult, Kaepernick was was actually emulating what the ancient Christians did; and while the lions he got thrown to were metaphorical, he was still thrown to the lions. Interestingly, many conservative Christians didn’t understand how his action was somewhat analogous to the ancient Christian martyrs.

Another feature of our U.S. civil religion is that we deify our presidents. When I say “deify,” there’s a tendency to confuse that with the Christian idea of the relationship between Jesus and God-the-Father. But deification in ancient Rome was something quite different. When Caesar Augustus died, the Roman Senate voted to deify him — that is, human beings could turn another human being into a god through a legislative act. Once Augustus was voted a deity, then he became part of the Roman pantheon, the government built temples to him and staffed those temples, and his name was invoked on a regular basis in political rhetoric. In U.S. civil religion, we have a similar process with some of our past presidents. Consider Abraham Lincoln for example. His birthday was made a holiday through a legislative act; his portrait was placed on coinage; the government built a temple to him which we call the Lincoln Memorial; and Lincoln’s temple is staffed, not with priests, but with uniformed National Park Service members. Once you understand that Lincoln is analogous to those deified emperors of ancient Rome, you can better understand the bitter reaction to two initiatives of the current presidential administration: the proposal to do away with the penny means doing away with the deified Lincoln’s portrait on our coinage; and cutting National Park Service staff means cutting the uniformed priesthood that cares for the Memorial.

This also helps us understand why the Trump administration was so upset about the flags flying at half staff for Jimmy Carter during the Trump inauguration. In the last hundred years, every president has received some level of deification upon his death; at a minimum, that deification involves U.S. flags being flown at half staff for a month. But Donald Trump and his followers have begun to sound a little too much like the ancient Roman emperor Caligula and his followers; Caligula and his followers decided to deify him before his death, not after. Increasingly over the past two decades, our presidents and their followers have been trying to deify them before they’re dead. As an independent, belonging neither to the Democratic nor the Republican party, I find this concerning. Barack Obama and Donald Trump are well on their respective paths to deification, and I don’t think either one of them deserves it. While they are each human beings with strengths and weaknesses, in my view neither one is worthy of deification — and I make that last statement with a certain amount of trepidation, knowing that statement will anger their respective followers. It’s almost as if our American civil religion has been torn apart into competing subsects.

In 1976, a decade after he proposed the idea of a U.S. civil religion, Robert Bellah wrote that our civil religion was at that time in disarray. He wrote: “The legitimacy and authority of all our institutions, political, economic, educational, even familial, as well as religious, has never been shakier.” (2) Civil religion was one of those institutions whose legitimacy and authority was called into question. And when the country as a whole drew back from American civil religion, the conservative Christian view — that Christianity is the state religion — won by default.

Yet, as Bellah pointed out in 2002, a broader civil religion can serves an important unifying function: “Without some degree of ethical and religious consensus [Bellah said], the burden of social coherence must rest entirely on economic, political, and military structures — just the structures that our highly individualist society most abhors. Religious individualism, then, leads to a purely secular society which can be held together only by external coercion. [This is] a contradiction indeed.” (3)

Bellah wrote that in 2002, and it seems to me that we are still facing that same contradiction nearly a quarter of a century later. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have been able to propose any unifying ethical and religious consensus; nor has our one lone socialist, Bernie Sanders. Increasingly, our social coherence rests on external coercion through economic, political, and military structures.

It is tempting to point fingers of blame, and say that the other political party is at fault for destroying social cohesion. The Republicans point the finger of blame at the Democrats, accusing them of destroying social cohesion by attacking marriage and the family, killing unborn babies, and the like — and if you think my rhetoric sounds outrageous, I’m actually toning it down from what I’ve heard in public discourse. For their part, the Democrats point the finger of blame at the Republicans, accusing them of destroying social cohesion by wanting to reinstate slavery and subjugate women and go back to the Stone Age — again, for the sake of this sermon, I’m toing down the rhetoric as we actually hear it in the public square.

So what happens when American civil religion breaks down? When we can no longer promote social cohesion through the relatively benign means of American civil religion, then people start trying to promote social cohesion through external coercion. Yet for us Americans, external coercion is a form of social cohesion we find abhorrent. When the Republicans talk about “owning the libs,” that’s a mild form of external coercion. When the Democrats talk about how only stupid people could vote for Trump, that’s a mild form of external coercion. Both these forms of social coercion strike at the roots of our cherished ideal of valuing the individual.

We Unitarian Universalists, as a matter of religious principle, place a high value on the individual. We are still followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spent eight years as a Unitarian minister before transitioning to a full-time career as a writer. In his essay on Self-Reliance, Emerson taught us to value the powers of the individual, and to appreciate both personal responsibility and the right to not conform to societal expectations. Emerson’s protege Henry David Thoreau, a Unitarian for the first two decades of his life, promoted individualism in his famous essay on civil disobedience, in which he taught that individuals must heed the promptings of higher principles. The teachings of both Emerson and Thoreau lie at the core of who we are as Unitarian Universalists: we place the highest value on the worthiness and dignity of individual persons, and we do not like external coercion in any form.

Because we don’t like coercion — and because we value the individual — I would suggest that we may want to revisit our attitude towards the U.S. civil religion. Over the past few decades, we Unitarian Universalists have been inclined to remove examples of American civil religion from Unitarian Universalism. For example, the last two hymnals published by the Unitarian Universalists Association removed all the patriotic hymns that we used to sing — including the removal of “My Country Tis of Thee,” in the absence of which some of Martin Luther King’s sermons lose their meaning. There have been very good reasons for every action where we’ve removed ourselves from American civil religion. But the effect of all those actions has been that we’ve participated in the erosion of “ethical and religious consensus” in the United States. As a result, we’ve helped to create a climate where some form of external coercion is increasingly required to maintain social cohesion.

Now because we Unitarian Universalists value individualism so highly, I’m not going to try to tell you what to do. But I’d like to suggest that it would be beneficial for us Unitarian Universalists to re-engage with American civil religion. And in fact, our congregation has been re-engaging with American civil religion over the past few years. We’ve been flying both the United States flag and the Progress Pride flag outside the Meetinghouse (at least, we were flying those two flags alternately until one of this winter’s wind storms broke the flagstaff). Here inside the Meetinghouse, a committee consisting of Bill Baird and Rory Toyoshima recommended moving the U.S. flag down from the gallery to the main floor of the Meetinghouse, and now we display the U.S. flag along with the progress pride flag, the African American national flag, the state flag, and the United Nations flag. Holly Harris and I have started an annual tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence here in the Meetinghouse on the Sunday before Independence Day. In each of these small acts, we as a congregation have re-engaged with the U.S. civil religion, while putting out own interpretation on it.

I hope that none of these small actions is perceived as being in any way coercive of your rights as an individual. This is part of our interpretation of the U.S. civil religion. No one is going to tell you what to believe. No one is telling you that you have to participate in any ritual that you don’t want to participate in. And if you are sincerely opposed to any of the actions of the U.S. government, we will uphold your right — no, your responsibility — to engage in civil disobedience if your conscience calls upon you to do so.

But our small actions — things like flying a U.S. flag in front of the Meetinghouse — can signal that we as a religious community are equal participants in American civil religion. And if we can manage our own strong feelings that have been bubbling up because of the current political situation, we are actually well placed to provide powerful spiritual leadership to help this country find common ground. We can present an expansive vision of those famous words from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And we can do this without requiring belief in unbelievable things, without having to deify presidents; and also without having to demonize presidents, for as Unitarian Universalists we know that presidents are neither gods nor demons, but merely fallible human beings.

Will we convince everyone of our expansive vision of the Declaration of Independence? No, not everyone. But I believe the vast majority of Americans actually do share this vision. And this is a shared vision that could promote social cohesion without external coercion, allowing us to work together as a nation once again.

Notes

(1) Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus, Winter, 1967, vol. 96 no. 1, Religion in America (Winter, 1967), footnote 1.
(2) Robert N. Bellah, “The Revolution and Civil Religion,” in Religion and the American Revolution, ed. Jerald C. Brauer (Fortress Press, 1976).
(3) Robert N. Bellah, “New-time Religion,” The Christian Century, May 22-26, 2002, pp. 20-26.

Inner peace

Readings

Sermon: “Inner Peace”

World Peace

Readings

Sermon: “World Peace”

Our Civil Religion

Readings

Sermon: Our Civil Religion

Notes