World Peace

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.

Our Civil Religion

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.

The Experience of Homelessness

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 an essay by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi titled “Two Cheers for Symbolic Capitalists”:

“Referring to homeless people as ‘unsheltered individuals’… [is a] discursive maneuver that often obscures the brutal realities that others must confront in their day-to-day lives. If the intent of these language shifts is to avoid stigma, the reality is that these populations are still heavily stigmatized….

“Critically, however, pointing out unfortunate consequences of [this] approach to language and social justice does not invalidate the idea that language matters. In fact, it powerfully illustrates that how we choose to talk and think about society, alongside the ways we try to influence others’ thoughts and discourse, actually can have important social consequences — for better and for worse.” [https://musaalgharbi.com/2024/09/30/two-cheers-symbolic-capitalists/]

The second reading is from the recent book “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission To Bring Healing to Homeless People,” by Tracey Kidder:

“The modern era of homelessness began in the 1980s, when the size and visibility of the problem began to rise dramatically. Driving south on I-93, Jim O’Connell tried to draw me a picture of what had gone wrong in Boston. Coming out of the tunnel in the center of the city, he gestured to a portion of the South End. ‘Just look at this. Look at these new buildings, all along here. All those are apartments and all the ones behind them. There’s got to be, by my calculation, at least four thousand new units there, right next to the Pine Street Inn. But no a single one for homeless people.”… Back in the 1920s, Boston had 35,000 single room occupancy units for rent. They had served as homes for immigrants and low-wage workers, elderly people on fixed incomes, and, more recently, for struggling Vietnam veterans. In 1965, the city and South End residents had overwhelmingly approved a plan to turn the neighborhood into ‘an economically, socially and racially integrated community’ with rental housing for ‘all displaced low-income residents wishing to remain.’ The destruction of the old buildings, with their inexpensive … rooms was widely praised as an act of civic virtue, and it might have been, if anything like that plan had been followed….

“A severe recession in 1980 had inaugurated the era of rising homelessness. But the problem was driven and sustained by many long-brewing problems: the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans; … the grossly inadequate provisions made for mentally ill people;… the continuation of racist housing policies…. Also the arcana of applying for Social Security disability — a process so complex that anyone who could figure out how to get assistance probably didn’t need it.

Sermon — “The Experience of Homelessness”

Today is the date of the annual Winter Walk for the Homeless, sponsored by Boston Health Care for the Homeless. This is a fundraising walk to raise money to help fund healthcare for people who are homeless. First Parish has a history of supporting both this annual walk, and Boston Health Care for the Homeless. We most recently supported Boston Health Care for the Homeless by donating the entire collection from our Christmas Eve candlelight service. And this year, quite a few of us from First Parish planned to go on the walk, though because of the snow it’s not clear how many will be able to make the drive up to Boston.

Two things are especially notable about the Winter Walk for the Homeless: first, it takes place outdoors, regardless of the weather; and second, it includes both housed and unhoused people walking together. Thus it’s more than just another fundraising walk. It’s also a chance to experience the conditions that people who live on the street have to cope with twenty four hours a day, seven days a week; and to be out in the weather with some folks who live outdoors all the time.

Now — there are quite a few of us who cannot participate in the Winter Walk for the Homeless, for a wide variety of reasons. But I thought it might be worthwhile to talk with you about the experience of homelessness, as a way for us to participate at a distance (as it were) in the Winter Walk. I’m not going to try to explain the causes of homelessness and housing insecurity. At the end of the sermon I’ll make a couple of ethical observations. But I’m not going to suggest policies to end homelessness, or tell you what we should be doing about homelessness. I’m just going to talk about the experience of being homeless.

The last two congregations I served had members who were homeless, and both those congregations were in places where there were significant numbers of people who were homeless. As a result, I got to know people who were homeless, and I got to hear some of their stories. Since I’m a minister, I do need to protect people’s confidentiality. So the stories I’m going to tell you will provide no details that can be used to identify individuals; you won’t even know whether they lived on the East Coast or the West Coast. To further protect privacy, I’ll be combining elements from different people’s stories. All this means that the stories I’m going to tell you are, in a sense, fictionalized; at the same time, they’re entirely true.

I’ll start by telling you about someone who came close to being homeless, though he ultimately managed to avoid it. Harry had started his career as a computer programmer. Then there was one of those sudden changes in technology, and suddenly his skills were no longer in demand. He tried to pivot in the new job market by learning new computer skills. Unfortunately, he guessed wrong: just when he had spent six months becoming proficient in the new skills, all the jobs using those skills dried up. By this time, he had used up all his savings, so he didn’t have the money to start yet another training program. Then too, he was well over fifty, and the high tech industry is notorious for its age discrimination. In order to pay the rent and put food on the table, his only viable option was to take any job that he could. He wound up working at Walmart. It was supposed to be a full-time job, but (as was typical with Walmart jobs) after he’d been there a couple of months, they cut his hours to about twenty-five hours a week, and gave him an irregular schedule so it was impossible for him to pick up another part-time job.

When I met Harry, he was living in studio apartment in a rough part of town, barely able to make the rent each month. After he paid the rent and bought food and gas, he couldn’t afford things like dental care. But between his siblings, and his friends in our Unitarian Universalist congregation, he just managed to stay in his apartment. What finally saved him was that he turned sixty-two and was able to taken Social Security; and because of his days of earning good salaries as a computer programmer, he received enough money to get by. So, by the skin of his teeth and with a lot of luck, Harry managed to stay housed. But though he was never homeless himself, he experienced the constant threat of homeleness.

In his recent book called White Poverty, the Rev. William Barber, organizer of the Poor People’s Campaign, argues for an improved definition of what it means to be poor. Barber argues that if you can not find the money to pay an emergency bill of four hundred dollars — that is, you could not borrow against home equity, you could not take it out of savings, you could not put it on a credit card — then you’re poor. By this measure, Harry was poor. Barber says that by this measure, about a quarter of all Americans are poor. And if you’re poor like Harry, it’s much easier to fall into homelessness.

This brings me to the next person I’d like you to meet, whom I’ll call Alice. Alice was in her late twenties when I knew her. She began attending our Unitarian Universalist congregation regularly. She was interesting, intelligent, and articulate; and I always enjoyed chatting with her at social hour. At one point I asked her if she wanted to be listed in the congregation’s directory. It became clear that she really didn’t have a home of her own. She was staying with friends and acquaintances for a couple of weeks at a time, with no set address. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was couch-surfing. Thus, even though she wasn’t living on the streets or in her car, she was homeless.

One of the big drawbacks to being homeless is that it can make it hard to stay connected with other people. The homeless people I’ve known all have had cell phones, but their phone plans have very limited minutes, so if you try to call them it’s likely you won’t get through. The homeless people I’ve known all have email addresses, but because they don’t have regular internet access they may not be able to respond to email right away. Being homeless can be isolating, and if you have a friend who’s homeless, it can be tough to stay in touch with them.

Alice was able to check email regularly because she had email access through her job. However, she didn’t like to receive personal email at work, and asked not to be listed in the congregation’s directory. She still showed up every week for Sunday services. I finally said to her, “Look, you’re here nearly every week, you’re obviously a Unitarian Universalist, why don’t you become a member of this congregation?” And then she told me her good news. She had managed to navigate the Byzantine application process for Section 8 housing. (From what I’ve heard almost requires a college degree to navigate successfully, and Alice did in fact have a college degree). There is so little Section 8 housing that actually getting into Section 8 housing is almost like hitting the lottery. But Alice hit the lottery, and got Section 8 housing. I congratulated her on her great good fortune, and then she told me the bad news — the Section 8 apartment she had gotten was an hour’s drive from our congregation. In fact that was the last Sunday she was going to be with us. Not surprisingly, we never heard from her again.

Here I’d like to interject a short description of the different kinds of homelessness.

First, there’s couch-surfing. Alice was a couch-surfer, doing short-term stays in other people’s homes. Couch surfing can feel relatively stable, if you have hosts who are willing to let you stay for long periods of time. But couch-surfing ranges all the way to very unstable, where you’re staying for short periods of time in homes where you don’t feel safe.

Next is car dwelling. In Silicon Valley where I was based for thirteen years, car dwellers included people who owned homes in the Central Valley, a three hour’s drive away, but who lived in their RVs during the week while working at Silicon Valley jobs. And all the local state colleges had students who were full-time car dwellers during the school year. At the other end of the car dwelling scale were people who lived full-time in their cars, and barely had enough money to keep the car insured and registered.

Next are the people who live in shelters. From talking with shelter dwellers, I learned that homeless shelters can be a mixed bag. At the upper end of the scale, there were the shelters like Heart and Home in Palo Alto. This is a women-only winter shelter housing its guests in churches in Palo Alto; volunteers bring meals, and sit with the guests to talk and share dinner together. At the lower end of the scale are the big city shelters, some of which can feel overcrowded and unsafe to the guests. Not everyone feels safe in a shelter, and some people would rather live on the street.

And that brings me to Anna. When I first met Anna, she was living in a shelter. She had heard about our Unitarian Universalist congregation, and decided to come check out a worship service. After the service, she found me and, like a typical newcomer, asked me a series of questions about Unitarian Universalism. She came back again the next week, and pretty soon she was calling herself a Unitarian Universalist. A couple of months later, she went through the formal process to become a member of the congregation, making an annual financial pledge; and she pledged a greater percentage of her disposable income than most of our middle class members.

Anna was a regular at Sunday morning services, so we began to worry a bit when she missed two weeks in a row. Anna was in her mid-seventies, and we wondered if she had gotten ill or injured. I tried calling her, but not surprisingly was unable to get through — she paid by the minute on her phone plan, and didn’t pay for any minutes unless she needed to make a call. Fortunately, she showed up the next week, and I asked her if she had been ill. She told me it wasn’t illness, it was that she had decided to leave the shelter because it just didn’t feel safe any more. You have to understand that Anna was clean and sober, and that her mental health was excellent. But not everyone who stays in a shelter is sober or mentally healthy, and the staff in shelters are usually overworked and can’t monitor everyone adequately. What had really gotten to Anna was the drinking and drug use in the shelter where she had been staying; she had 35 years of sobriety, attended Alcoholics Anonymous regularly, and had little tolerance for people who wouldn’t deal with their addictions. She decided she preferred to live on the streets, rather than live with “a bunch of drunks and druggies” (using her words, as best I can remember them).

From then on, we only saw Anna at Sunday services about once a month. It all depended on where she wound up spending the night, and whether she could catch a bus that would get her to the church in time for services. Of course, the church offered to give her rides; but she didn’t know where she was going to be on any given Saturday night, nor could she afford the phone call to arrange rides. Nor would she accept money from the congregation’s fund for members in need. Anna felt it was her duty as a member to financially support the congregation, not to have the congregation financially support her.

When I talked with Anna at social hour, she was mostly interested in talking about the sermon, or about Unitarian Universalism. She kept saying that here she was in her mid-seventies, never knew about Unitarian Universalism before, but she realized now that she’d actually been a Unitarian Universalist all her life. So that’s mostly what we talked about. But sometimes she told me a little bit about her strategies for living on the street safely. Since her methods were so idiosyncratic and creative, I feel like talking about them would betray confidentiality; suffice it to say that she developed creative ways of navigating life on the streets.

As I was leaving that congregation, I heard that Anna had been finally put on the waiting list for permanent housing — not in a shelter this time, but in an actual apartment. I don’t know if that worked out. All too often, such permanent housing deals fall through for homeless people at the last minute. But I hope that she did get housing. I’d grown fond of Anna — a good conversationalist, an incisive observer of other people, smart and funny and independent — and like to think that she wound up living some place safe. I don’t like to think of her living on the streets into her eighties.

So there you have some suitably anonymized stories of a few people’s experiences of housing insecurity and homelessness. I’m reluctant to make generalizations based on these experiences. I told you about Harry, who was housing insecure and just missed being homeless. His experience was very different from Alice, the couch-surfer — not just because of their different situations, but because of their different ages, and their different personalities. And Anna had yet another completely different experience. Therefore, I’m not going to make any generalizations about the experience of homelessness.

But I would like to make a couple of ethical observations. First of all, despite what many politicians try to tell us, homelessness cannot always be blamed on the person who winds up being homeless. That is to say, homelessness and housing insecurity do not always result from some individual moral failing. The people I have told you about were all upright and moral people; they were all intelligent, none of them was mentally ill, none of them was an addict or an alcoholic. Based on the homeless people I’ve known, homelessness is just as likely to result from bad luck as from personal failings. I still remember the thirty-something man who arrived at a homeless shelter in Palo Alto who said he had grown up in Palo Alto, graduated from Palo Alto High School, returned to Palo Alto after college, and wound up homeless due to medical bills he couldn’t pay. He did everything right, and ended up homeless through bad luck. Unfortunately, one of the legacies of the Christian tradition that lies at the root of so much of American political culture is a strong tendency to say we are each individually responsible for our sins. Even though Jesus taught us to help those who are poor, Americans have a strong tendency to blame those who are poor. This is a theological position that we Unitarian Universalists categorically reject.

The second ethical observation about homelessness I’d like to make is related to the first. If we can’t blame the homeless person for being homeless, then that means that society is to blame. And society actually includes all of us. This, I believe, is why so many politicians prefer to blame homeless people for being homeless — because if homeless people are not to blame, then it’s within our power to do something about homelessness. This, by the way, helps explain why the American tradition tries to put the blame for being poor on those who are poor — because otherwise, the blame falls on the rest of us for allowing homelessness to occur. And that’s a very uncomfortable feeling.

So end my brief ethical observations. I hope we can get past our feeling of discomfort about all being responsible for homelessness. I would like it society changed so that a responsible sober women in her seventies no longer had to worry about living on the streets.