Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Is It Religion? (part 2) — Christian Nationalism

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

    Readings

    The first reading is an excerpt from a poem written in 2007 by Margaret Atwood:

    The Last Rational Man
    in the reign of Caligula

    The last rational man takes his old seat in the senate.
    He’s not sure why he’s still here.
    He must be on some list or other.
    Last year there were many more like him,
    but they’ve been picked off one by one.
    He bathes daily, and practises slow breathing
    and the doctrines of Stoicism.
    Lose your calm, he reminds himself,
    and you will lose everything.
    Nevertheless he’s getting tired.
    The effort of saying nothing is wearing him down….

    The second reading is from The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart. In this excerpt, the author has just attended a meeting of the Family Research Council, a Christian nationalist group, with Rev. Chris Liles, a Bible-believing Southern Baptist preacher. As they leave the meeting, Rev. Chris begins speaking:

    “‘It’s ten degrees hotter than normal, and these people don’t believe in climate science,’ he grumbles. Then his words start tumbling out like a waterfall.

    “‘Do we not owe people more than simply reducing “pro-life” to one issue?’ he says. ‘I mean, no one wants babies to die. No one is “pro-abortion.” That is a false dichotomy. Do we not owe people more than to force them into one box or another? As much as abortion is a pro-life issue, so is affordable health care, access to contraceptives, and real, comprehensive sex education. Minimum wage. Fighting poverty. These should all be part of the “pro-life” conversation.’

    “Chris falls into silence for a few minutes, then speaks again.

    “‘And shouldn’t we show compassion to people regardless of how they identify? They, too, are made in God’s image. We find in Scripture the imperative to love our neighbors and care for the least of these. That is by far one of the clearest messages we receive.’

    “I feel bad for Chris [says Katherine Stewart]; he seems dismayed by the event precisely because the Bible is his greatest source of comfort and moral direction….. Stopping at a red light, Chris picks up his Bible and turns to the Old Testament book of Amos.

    “‘Here, for instance, in chapter five, the prophet says, “You, Israel, you were supposed to take care of the poor and you’re not doing it,”’ Chris says. ‘“You’re using power and wealth to tilt the system in your favor.” For society to be just, it was necessary for everyone to be seen as equal.’ He falls silent for a few moments. ‘Sometimes,’ he adds, ‘it’s almost like people are reading a different Bible. That’s the trick with Scripture. You can make the Bible say just about anything you want it to.’”…

    Sermon: Is It Religion? (part 2) — Christian Nationalism

    So. Is Christian Nationalism a religion, or not?

    Probably everyone in this room wants to believe that Christian nationalism is NOT a religion. We want to be able to say that Christian Nationalism cannot be a religion because it so clearly violates the teachings of the Hebrew Bible. We want to be able to say that Christian Nationalism cannot be a religion because it so clearly violates the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. How can a movement that treats poor people as less than human be considered Christian? How can a movement that demonizes immigrants be part of the (to use their term) “Judeo-Christian tradition”? We would much prefer to say that Christian Nationalism is not a religion, but a political movement that uses religion as a cover.

    As much as I’d like to say that Christian Nationalism is just politics, I believe it is in fact a religion. Mind you, it is a very different religion from ours. Christian Nationalism is the kind of religion that relies on unquestioning acceptance of authority. Christian Nationalism values hierarchy and submission over individual conscience. Christian Nationalism does not welcome dissent, nor is it tolerant of other worldviews. When we list all these attributes, Christian Nationalism looks very much like one of those creepy cults we used to hear so much about — the cults that suck people in and modify their way of thinking so that converts cut ties to the rest of society. And like some of the worst of those creepy cults, the Christian Nationalists want to remake society in their image.

    Let’s not begin by calling it a creepy cult, though. At the end of the last century, scholars who study religions mostly stopped using the term “cult.” When you begin studying a religious movement by calling it a “cult,” that terminology tends to stop you from thinking clearly. When you call something a “cult,” you have already made a strong judgement about it, and often you feel like you don’t have to think any further about what it is you’re studying. Christian Nationalism may be a cult, but calling it a cult isn’t going to help us address the threat it poses to our democracy. Instead, we’ll use the appropriate term from religious studies and call it a New Religious Movement.

    Once we call Christian Nationalism as a New Religious Movement, we begin to think more clearly about it. First, we realize that it’s not all that new. In its current incarnation, its roots go back to the middle of the last century. A decade after the Civil Rights Act extended full rights to Black Americans, the Internal Revenue Service began threatening to take away the tax exempt status of Bob Jones University, an all-White college that was committed to segregation as a religious principle. The conservative Christians who ran Bob Jones University got together with other White conservative Christians and began to come up with strategies to maintain what they saw as their religious right to segregation. Journalist Katherine Stewart tells what happened to these conservative Christians:

    “…They had a problem…. Building a new [political] movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. ‘Stop the tax on segregation’ just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that [they] envisioned. They needed an issue with a more acceptable appeal. What message would bring the movement together?… School prayer worked for some, but it tended to alienate the Catholics, who remembered…that for many years public schools had allowed only for Protestant prayers…. Bashing communists was fine, but even the Rockefeller Republicans could do that. Taking on ‘women’s liberation’ was attractive, but the Equal Rights Amendment was already going down in flames. At last they landed upon the one surprising [issue] that would supply the key to the political puzzle of the age: ‘abortion.’”

    So writes journalist Katherine Stewart.

    In other words, the core religious belief of these White conservative Christians was that White people should not be forced to mix with non-White people. They felt that U.S. society was changing such that they were unable to practice their religion properly. They felt there was another competing religious point of view that had come to dominate the United States, threatening their very existence. Those White conservative Christians called that other religious point of view as “secular humanism,” choosing what was to them the most pejorative term possible.

    But the true opponent of these conservative Christians was not secular humanism. The true opponent was actually a broad coalition of religious groups, including mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics, liberal Jews, and a smattering of other religious groups like the Unitarian Universalists. Back then, most presidents, senators, congressional representatives, and Federal judges belonged to one of the religious groups in this broad coalition. While this coalition of religious moderates and religious liberals included both political liberals and political conservatives, on the whole they mostly agreed that racial segregation was an evil that must be ended.

    The White conservative Christians who wanted to keep their schools and universities segregated did not want to fight the battle of re-segregating society. So they used the abortion issue as a political strategy to build support. And they took the battle beyond the political realm, into local congregations, where they helped their supporters turn abortion into a key theological question.

    I’d say it was at this point where they became a New Religious Movement. Their earlier focus on racial segregation was nothing new, for segregation was part of American religion from the beginning. (Even our own First Parish was segregated during its first hundred years — African Americans and Native Americans were not allowed to sit on the main floor of our Meeting House, they had to sit in the gallery.) But to put such a strong emphasis on abortion — that was new. And, as we heard in the second reading, they emphasized abortion to the exclusion of other issues that formerly had been important to most American Christians — things like helping the poor, showing compassion to others, and recognizing that all persons were created in God’s image.

    This emphasis on abortion was a radical reworking of American religion. Prior to the 1970s, about the only religious group to explicitly ban abortion was the Roman Catholics — and the Catholic ban on abortion only dates to 1869. Even considering the Catholics, abortion simply wasn’t an important religious issue for most Americans. When religious Americans thought about social issues, they were most likely to focus on things like poverty, hunger, and so on. So it was a dramatic change when, in the space of just a few years, abortion became a central issue in American religious life.

    Since the 1970s, those conservative White Christians added other issues to abortion, such as opposition to LGBTQ rights and opposition to feminism. At last they came up with this notion that the United States should become a Christian nation (by which they seem to actually mean a White Christian nation). So now we have a name for this New Religious Movement — we can call them the Christian Nationalists, and indeed some of them have begun to use this very name to describe themselves. Just remember that they started out as a segregationist group, so a more accurate name for this New Religious Movement might be White Christian Nationalists. But for now, we’ll stick to the name they seem to prefer, and we’ll call this New Religious Movement the Christian Nationalists.

    Now, some New Religious Movements have no interest in seeking out money and power; I think of the Neo-Pagans, whose groups mostly seem to operate on a shoestring. Most other New Religious Movements have other priorities besides money and power. So, for example, many scholars consider the Unitarian Universalism and the Reform Jews to be New Religious Movements, and when I look at myself and my friend the Reform rabbi, we don’t spend much time seeking out money and power. So most New Religious Movements aren’t concerned with money and power. But a small minority of New Religious Movements make money and power one of their top priorities. One example is Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (sometimes called the “Moonies”) which has been in the news recently because it obtained unprecedented access to the halls of power in Japan. That’s the goal of the Christian Nationalists — like the Moonies, they want to obtain unprecedented access to the halls of power here in the United States.

    As you can see, we have learned quite a lot by thinking of the Christian Nationalists as a New Religious Movement.

    First, we have gotten some clarity about their core religious beliefs. They were founded to maintain racial segregation, to keep Black people out of their all-White institutions; while that original purpose is somewhat hidden today, that remains one of their core beliefs. We can also see that they believe a rigid hierarchy — most obviously the hierarchy of White people over Black people, but also the hierarchy of men over women, the hierarchy of heterosexual people over homosexual people, and so on. Because they believe in a rigid hierarchy, their support of democracy is going to be limited. They claim to be Christian, but as we heard in the second reading, people like Pastor Chris say that Christian Nationalists interpret the Bible very differently from more conventional Christians.

    Coupled with these core religious beliefs, we learned that they are extremely effective at organizing. In the political realm, they have begun to wield unprecedented power. In the religious realm, they have used wedge issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights to cause schisms in moderate religions like the United Methodist Church, and they have used this power to effectively immobilizing their primary religious opponents. They have even managed to fragment American Catholicism by converting several key bishops to their cause, bishops who have become emboldened enough to openly defy Pope Francis.

    Their organizational effectiveness extends to the individual level. They’re very good at spreading their religious message. They still mostly hide their core religious belief of racial segregation, and instead focus attention on issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights. At this level, they prefer to organize using diffuse networks; scholars call this strategy “network Christianity.” This clever organizational strategy allows them to have their people infiltrate other religious groups, without having to found new local congregations.

    Thinking of the Christian Nationalists as a New Religious Movement helps us to take them more seriously. I hear people talking about Christian Nationalists using terms like “crazy whackos” and “nut jobs” and “idiots.” These are inaccurate terms. The Christian Nationalists are smart, sane, and well organized. They’re quietly spreading their religion everywhere, and indeed they’re here on the South Shore. They’re here, and they’re not going to go away any time soon.

    So how do we take back America from the Christian Nationalists? This is not a time for Stoicism; this is not a time to say nothing and to do nothing; this is a time to actively engage with other people. Remember that a core religious belief of Christian Nationalists is hierarchy. They are inherently anti-democratic. So one of the most important things we can do is to strengthen democracy.

    We can strengthen democracy by participating in democracy, and in democratic institutions. It may be more comfortable to sit at home and play video games, or watch NetFlix, or whatever you prefer — but we have to get out of the house and do things like attend meetings of local government bodies; volunteer at democratically-run nonprofits; and so on. When it comes to our online lives, we have to do more than post cute cat pictures or engage in flame wars with political opponents — we can build up our own networks to spread our own messages of inclusion and love.

    We already do this here at First Parish. We use democracy to run this congregation, and this congregation is a great place to learn how to do democracy, a great place to teach kids how to do democracy. In addition to running our congregation by democratic principles, we serve as a clearing house for information about democracy: we tell each other about what’s going on in our local governments, we raise up social issues that need to be addressed. We’re also quite good at building face-to-face networks, an essential skill for keeping democracy strong. And we’re not bad at building our online network to spread our messages of inclusion and love — and with that in mind, thank you to all of you who “like” the First Parish Facebook and Instagram posts, helping spread our message.

    The nice thing about all these efforts is that they feel good when you do them. We’re not just fighting the Christian Nationalist power grab. Doing democracy here at First Parish feels good. Building face-to-face networks feels good. Building positive online networks to spread positive messages feels good. And once we manage to restore manage to democracy to health once again — once we help it recover from diseases like Christian Nationalism — we just keep on doing democracy, which means we can keep on feeling good.

  • Why I’m Not a Buddhist (But Maybe You Should Be)

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

    Opening words

    The opening words were the poem “Interbeing” by Thich Nhat Hanh. To read it, go to this webpage and scroll down.

    Readings

    The first reading comes from the book “Why I Am Not a Buddhist” by Evan Thompson, a philosopher who has studied Buddhist philosophy extensively:

    “I didn’t want to be someone who just wrote about Buddhist philosophy without practicing meditation and experiencing what the philosophy was supposedly about. ‘That’s like readings about sex and never having any,’ American Buddhist devotees would say to me…. Looking for a path forward, I visited many Buddhist meditation centers over the years of writing my philosophy dissertation, … and doing my postdoctoral work. But I couldn’t connect with any of them. It didn’t feel right to count my breath in Korean or chant in Japanese or try to do complex visualization of Tibetan Buddhist deities…. I wonder whether I was being too uptight and why I couldn’t just let go….”

    The second reading is from an essay by Rev. Takashi Kenryu Tsuji titled “The Heart of the Buddha-Dharma: Following the Jodo-Shinshu Path”:

    Shinran Shonin and the teachers before him explained that the Pure Land was situated in the western corners of the universe, zillions of miles away. It was pictured as a very beautiful place, free of suffering, where everyone is happy. Philosophically speaking, however, the Pure Land does not refer to a specific location out there somewhere. Rather, the Pure Land is symbolic; it symbolizes the transcendence of relativity, of all limited qualities, of the finiteness of human life. In this transcendence, there is Compassion-Wisdom, an active moving, spiritual force. The Pure Land ideal is the culmination of the teaching of Wisdom and Compassion.

    (As quoted by Jeff Wilson in Dixie Dharma, UNC Press, 2012)

    Sermon: Why I’m Not a Buddhist (But Maybe You Should Be)

    I’m going to begin with some introductory remarks. Then I’ll tell you why I’m not a Buddhist, even though I’m fascinated by Buddhism. And I’ll wind up talking about some forms of Buddhism that seem worthy of your attention.

    First, the introductory remarks:

    When First Parish posted this sermon topic on the Cohasset 143 Facebook page, one or two commenters made it clear why they are not Buddhists. One person made their point in simple, straightforward terms: “I am a Christian. I believe in Jesus Christ as My Lord [and] Savior.” Another person, presumably also a conservative Christian, wrote: “They [meaning Buddhists] don’t worship a God!” Actually, what this person meant was that Buddhists don’t worship the Christian God, which is a true statement. And if you’re a conservative Christian, these are both worthy reasons for not being a Buddhist.

    Yet another conservative Christian scornfully wrote: “‘I am the Lord thy God thou shalt not have false gods before me.’ — The First Commandment. (Did you not ‘get’ that basic point Reverend?)” This comment is worth paying attention to, because it’s an example of a conservative Christian assuming that everyone should believe exactly what they believe. But it’s not just conservative Christians who make this assumption. The vocal critic of religion Richard Dawkins takes the same attitude towards those who are not the kind of atheist he is; and Dawkins has an unfortunate tendency to anathematize atheists who differ from his own views, as for example atheists who belong to a religious organization like this one.

    I find these kinds of comments troubling mostly because they reveal an unpleasant truth about the current state of society in the United States today. All of us in the United States today are prone to believe that we are right and that people who disagree with us are wrong. We either hate Donald Trump or we hate Joe Biden, and anyone who disagrees with us is a horrible person. We are either right-to-lifers or we are pro-choicers, and anyone who disagrees with us is a horrible person. We are either conservative Christians, or we are not, and anyone who is not like us is a horrible person.

    Unfortunately, this kind of attitude makes it difficult to listen to those who might have different viewpoints or experiences from ours. As we are seeing in the House of Representatives right now, this kind of attitude makes it hard to have a functioning democracy. And we are all guilty of it. It’s so much a part of the atmosphere that I’m willing to bet everyone in this room has made a disparaging comment about someone with whom they disagree. I know I’ve done it.

    It’s not good for us to be this way. This kind of thing can make us angry, and when you get angry you can feel the negative effects of that anger in your body.

    That’s one of the reasons I wanted to give this sermon. I am not giving a sermon titled, “I’m not a Buddhist, and you shouldn’t be either or you’ll burn in hell.” I am not giving a sermon titled, “I’m a Buddhist and if you were a truly good person, you’d be one too.” Instead, I’m trying to respect the diversity in our world, while at the same time trying to think with you about what is true.

    That’s the introduction. Now I’ll tell you very briefly why I’m not a Buddhist.

    When I was a Unitarian Universalist teenager, Pat Green, the assistant minister of our church ran our youth group, and one week he talked to us about Zen Buddhism. Pat told us about “the sound of one hand clapping” and sitting meditation and all the rest. All of us in the youth group were fascinated. And I continued to try to learn about Zen Buddhism over the next couple of decades. Ultimately, I discovered that learning about Buddhism was a lot of work — I’m one of those people who, if I’m going to do something, have to pursue the highest level of excellence. I could have wound up like the philosopher Evan Thompson in the first reading, who not only read Buddhist philosophy in the original languages, but also spent a great deal of time learning Buddhist practices. Unlike Evan Thompson, I had grown up in a religious tradition that I felt comfortable in, and I finally realized that I was doing just fine as a Unitarian Universalist. Maybe I was simply lazy, but eventually I stopped trying to pursue Zen Buddhism, or any kind of Buddhist practice.

    So that’s why I’m not a Buddhist. But one thing I hope you noticed in that little story is that it’s perfectly acceptable for a Unitarian Universalist to participate in more than one religious tradition. You can be a Unitarian Universalist, while at the same time practicing Buddhism, or taking Buddhism seriously. Nor is this something that’s limited to Unitarian Universalists. It is increasingly common in Western society for a person to have more than one religious affiliation. This has long been the case in other societies — as for example in some east Asian societies, where it is common for an individual to feel connected to Buddhism, Daoism, and folk religions all at the same time. We began to see multiple religious affiliations emerge in the West in the middle of the last century. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton was one of the people who popularized the notion of multiple religious affiliations, when he began to augment his Christian practices with Buddhist practices.

    The notion of having multiple religious affiliations seriously annoys some conservative Christians, as we heard at the beginning of this sermon. We have a different point of view. We feel it’s OK to have multiple religious affiliations. Even if you have only one religious affiliation, we feel that encountering other religious traditions can help widen our perspectives and give us a better understanding of what it means to be human. With that in mind, I’d like to point out some varieties of Buddhism that might be worthy of your attention.

    First and foremost, we have a Buddhist meditation group right here within First Parish. This group is led by Christine Allen, who is both a practicing Buddhist and a Unitarian Universalist. She has spent years developing her own Buddhist meditation practice, and has a deep understanding of Buddhist philosophy. You can find one of her dharma talks on the First Parish website, a talk she gave at a meditation retreat she led in Trueblood Hall last year. If you’re looking for an introduction to Buddhist practice and thought, Christine Allen and the First Parish meditation group would be a good place to start.

    Our First Parish group represents a strand of Buddhism that we might call Westernized Buddhism. As Buddhism spread around the world from India where it originated, it has taken on the cultural characteristics of the places it has spread to. Westernized Buddhism adapts Buddhist thought and practice to Western cultures and Western languages. This makes it easier for Westerners to engage with Buddhism, without having to learn another language or new cultural norms.

    I do have to point out that there is one form of Westernized Buddhism that it’s best to avoid. That’s the Buddhism that’s become fashionable in Silicon Valley in recent years. That’s the Buddhism that says if you practice meditation and mindfulness, you can become more successful in your career because mindfulness training allows you to work incredibly long hours in spite of poor work-life balance. I like to call this the “Prosperity Dharma,” because it’s analogous to the “Prosperity Gospel” of Christianity. The Prosperity Gospel of Christianity tells you to believe in God, give lots of money to the preacher who preaching the Prosperity Gospel to you, and that will make you financially successful. But the Prosperity Gospel really has nothing to do with Christianity, just as the Prosperity Dharma really has nothing to due with Buddhism — these aren’t religions, they’re ways for other people to make money from your credulity.

    The Prosperity Dharma has a couple of other problems. Carolyn Chen, a sociologist at the University of California in Berkeley, has pointed out that the people who push the Prosperity Dharma in Silicon Valley are mostly affluent White people who are openly dismissive of Asian Buddhist traditions and practices. Instead of being Westernized Buddhism, this is what Chen calls this “Whitened Buddhism”: “it erases the ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ Buddhism of Asians and Asian Americans in favor of the thinking of White Westerners.” It’s a subtle form of racism.

    I’m also troubled when the advocates of the Prosperity Dharma want to teach mindfulness in the schools to help children deal with stress. This perverts the real purpose of Buddhism. Mindfulness is not supposed to help your child deal with stress so they can get into Harvard. Buddhism is supposed to make you a better person. Prosperity Dharma treats children as a means to an end. Real Buddhism, like all real religions, treats persons as ends in themselves.

    Now that we’ve disposed of the Prosperity Dharma, let’s look at a couple of other forms of Buddhism.

    If I were going to affiliate with a Buddhist group, my first choice would be the Buddhist Churches of America. This is a Pure Land Buddhist group affiliated with the Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha tradition based in Kyoto, Japan. Pure Land Buddhism reminds me of our own Universalist tradition. The old Universalists, using Christian terms, said that everyone gets to go to heaven. Pure Land Buddhists say that everyone can can enter Buddha’s Pure land, everyone can achieve Buddhahood. Just as we Unitarian Universalists have translated the old Universalist ideas into modern terms, so the Buddhist Churches of America have translated the old ideas of the Pure Land into modern terms — we heard this in the second reading today, where Rev. Takashi Kenryu Tsuji said, “The Pure Land ideal is the culmination of the teaching of Wisdom and Compassion.” I also like the fact that the Buddhist Churches of America do not place much emphasis on meditation, because I have a hard time meditating. Sadly, the closest Buddhist Church of America is in New York, but if there were one nearby I would love to see if there were a way for our congregations to work together.

    And if I were going to affiliate with a Buddhist group, my second choice would be to affiliate with the Engaged Buddhism tradition, whose best known advocate is the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Engaged Buddhism teaches that a primary purpose of religion is to make this world a better place. Engaged Buddhism started out by working for world peace, and they have since expanded into other social justice work such a human rights work and women’s rights. Beyond that, Thich Nhat Hanh is, in my opinion, one of the best religious writers of the past fifty years. Even though I’m not a Buddhist, I’ve gotten a lot from Thich Nhat Hanh’s books on pacifism and peace. In particular, his concept of “interbeing” — which we heard a little about in the first reading — has given me a new way to think about world peace.

    We began by hearing from some people who commented on the Cohasset 143 Facebook page, telling us how they restrict themselves to one exclusive religious tradition. By contrast, we Unitarian Universalists are open to other religious points of view, and curious about other religion. We believe it is acceptable to have more than one religious affiliation. You can be a Unitarian Universalist, and you can be a Buddhist — just as you can be a Unitarian Universalist and an atheist, or you can be a Unitarian Universalist and a Christian. You can even be all of these things at once.

    This brings me to one final point I’d like to leave you with. When we talk with people who have a different religious outlook from ours, we don’t have to be defensive. We don’t have to immediately tell them about our religious outlook. We can respect the diversity in our world, while at the same time respecting our own religious outlook. We can engage in respectful dialogue that will enrich us, and make the world a more peaceful place.

  • Is It Religion? (part 1) — Sports

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

    Opening words

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

    Readings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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