Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.
Readings
The first reading was from the book God Is Not One by Stephen Prothero. Prothero is a professor of religious studies at Boston University.
“Being honest [about religion] requires being true to the religious traditions themselves…. I repeatedly come across scholars of Hinduism and Buddhism referring to ‘sin’ and ‘salvation’ as if these were Hindu and Buddhist concept. But these are Christian ideas, so when writing about Hinduism and Buddhism, I do not use them. For similar reasons, I do not refer to the Muslim Paradise or Buddhist nirvana as ‘heaven.’ Similarly, I do not assume that scripture is as important to Hindus as it is to Protestants, or that it is used in a similar way. The Vedas are the Hindus’ most sacred scriptures, but hardly any Hindu gives a fig about their content; as almost any Hindu can tell you, what matters is their sounds, and the sacred power these sounds convey. Nor do I assume, as many Protestants do, that religions are about faith and belief. Religions cannot be reduced to ‘belief systems’ and more than they can be reduced to ‘ritual systems.’ Belief is a part of most religions, but only a part, and in most cases no the most important part. (You can be a Jew without believing in God, for example.) So while I do refer to Protestants as ‘believers’ and to their religion as a ‘faith,’ I do not refer to religious people in general as ‘believers’ or to their traditions as ‘faith-based.’” (slightly edited from the original to make an independent reading)
The second reading was a poem titled “The Good God and the Evil God,” by Khalil Gibran.
The Good God and the Evil God met on the mountain top.
The Good God said, “Good day to you, brother.”
The Evil God did not answer.
And the Good God said, “You are in a bad humour today.”
“Yes,” said the Evil God, “for of late I have been often mistaken for you, called by your name, and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases me.”
And the Good God said, “But I too have been mistaken for you and called by your name.”
The Evil God walked away cursing the stupidity of man.
Sermon
During last year’s question box sermon, someone in the congregation wrote about “The great truths of the teachings of Jesus that are common to all major religions in the world.” The question implied is asking to what extent this is true. Are there great truths that are shared by all major religions in the world? While this may seem like an academic question, I feel it is one of the deepest spiritual questions of our time. I’ll be saying more about the spiritual side, but let’s begin by looking into the question of whether all religions share in the same great truths.
This is an especially urgent question because we live in an increasingly multicultural society. We all know an increasing number of people who have very different worldviews from ours. We Unitarian Universalists like to think that we accept all worldviews equally, seeking to find value in everyone’s worldview. Many Unitarian Universalists have been inspired by Huston Smith, the renowned twentieth century scholar of religion. In his book “The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions,” Smith wrote: “It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge.”(1) Many Unitarian Universalists took this to heart — we’re following our own religious path, but we believe that eventually all religious trails end up on the same mountaintop. The belief that all religions have the same ultimate goal results in the laudable impulse to celebrate more than one holiday at this time of year — we celebrate Christmas, but we also want to acknowledge the other paths that lead to the mountaintop — the Jewish path which celebrates Hanukkah, the Hindu path which celebrates Diwali, the Pagan path which celebrates the winter solstice, the Buddhist path which celebrates Bodhi Day, and so on.(2)
Yet we are also aware that there are other ways to understand what religion means in a multicultural society. There is, for example, the possibility of believing that not every religious path will lead you to an exalted place. We all know about the conservative Christians who would disagree strongly with Huston Smith, for they would argue that their brand of Christianity is the only path that will let you get to the mountaintop; or to use their phraseology, it is only through Christ that you can reach God. These conservative Christians would say that if anyone else claimed to get up to the mountaintop by a non-Christian path, they were being deceived by an Evil God.
And there are still other possible ways to understand religion in a multicultural society. Some people doubt whether all trails wind up at the mountaintop. So, for example, those conservative Christians who believe women are inferior to men, and that LGBTQ people are filled with sin — I’m not sure I believe their religious path really leads to the mountaintop. That is, if all religious paths do in fact lead to the mountaintop, I sometimes wonder if getting to the mountaintop might not be as good as it’s supposed to be. Maybe both the Good God and the Evil God inhabit the mountaintop, which does not sound especially attractive. Or maybe there are many mountaintops, and the religions with whom I disagree climb to their own mountaintop, not my mountaintop. Or maybe I just can’t believe that every religious or spiritual journey winds up on a mountaintop — while at the same time acknowledging that other people look at Unitarian Universalism and claim that our spiritual journey will not wind up on the mountaintop.
This in turn raises a host of questions. Do all religions share the same core teachings; is there a oneness to all of religion? Are the various religions different, while ultimately leading to the same final goal? Do the different religions have completely different goals that lead in different directions? Are there some religions which have goals I would disagree with? Are there religions that maybe don’t have a goal or a final destination in mind? Living in a multicultural society confront us with the possibility that we do not live in a straightforward religious landscape with a single mountain and a single path up that mountain; there is also the possibility that a multicultural religious landscape has more than one mountain, to say nothing of valleys and plains and a host of different trails that may lead somewhere or nowhere or everywhere.
If the multicultural religious landscape does indeed have more than one mountain, this can be disorienting. Here in the United states, the militant atheists and the militant Christians avoid being disoriented by insisting the religious landscape is actually quite simple. The militant atheists insist that religion is mere illusion (a dictum they repeat with religious fervor), so there is no religious mountain to climb. For their part, the militant Christians insist that theirs is the only true religion, so there is only one religious mountain to climb with only one path up that mountain.
At the other end of the scale, we Unitarian Universalists are, on the whole, more likely to embrace multicultural confusion and disorientation. We have neither doctrines nor dogmas, and we have long supported the notion that each person is in charge of their own spiritual journey. There are situations that test our tolerance, as for example when a Unitarian Universalist’s adult child decides to join a dogmatic or doctrinaire religious group. But on the whole, we’re willing to accept the chaos of a multicultural religious landscape — actually, many of us find it fascinating.
Yet while we find it fascinating, we also have to acknowledge that the multicultural religious landscape can cause a certain amount of personal spiritual confusion, or even a personal spiritual crisis. I speak from experience; I myself have experienced a certain amount of personal spiritual confusion. I was raised in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and my generation of Unitarian Universalists kids was taught to respect all religions equally because ultimately all religions led to the same goal. But when I got into my late teens and early twenties, I discovered that maybe all religious paths didn’t lead to places I wanted to go.
I went to a Quaker college, and in my first year there some evangelical Quakers invited me to join their men’s Bible study group. I had become interested in the Bible, and I decided this was an opportunity to actually sit down and read it (being a Unitarian Universalist kid, I had read very little of the Bible, although I had read most of the Bhagavad Gita and parts of the Dao de jing). So I began attending this Bible study session, with a really nice group of guys. During one of the sessions, one of the other guys spoke about the power of prayer. As a Unitarian Universalist of my generation, I had absorbed the notion that while prayer could be a literary format, or a way to voice the concerns of a community, you couldn’t just pray for something and God would just give it to you, because the only way to get what you wanted was to work for it. But I realized that when this guy spoke to our Bible study group about the power of prayer, he literally believe that you could pray for something and God would give it to you.
So, being pretty immature and also fairly clueless, I said, “Wait, you actually believe that God will answer your prayers? No one believes that!” Of course as soon as I said it, I looked around and realized that everyone else in that Bible study group did in fact believe that. Fortunately they were polite and courteous, and they kindly and gently explained to me that, yes, they did believe that. I give myself this much credit: at least I was embarrassed by my outburst.
Because of interactions like this one, I began to question some of the religious and spiritual assumptions I had grown up with. I had always assumed that we Unitarian Universalists were pretty much like other religious groups; or if we were different in some ways, we were more or less all heading towards the same goal. But getting to know those kind and courteous evangelical Christians in that Bible study group helped me understand that, as nice as they were, they were on a very different spiritual path than I was. To my astonishment, they placed their highest priority on striving to get into their heaven through spiritual purity; and their striving not only involved a lot of rules and procedures which I didn’t fully understand, but it also involved an other-worldliness that I was not comfortable with. I stayed with them through my first year of college, but the next year I went to the meetings of the liberal Quaker student group instead (there being no Unitarian Universalist student group). The liberal Quakers were more like me: they didn’t worry much about getting into heaven after death, they worried about how they might make the world better here and now; and the way you made that happen was through hard work, not through spiritual purity. This I could understand, whereas I had a hard time understanding spiritual purity combined with petitionary prayer.
Yet I couldn’t dismiss my evangelical Christian friends out of hand. For one thing, several of them were pacifists just like me; we may not have agreed on heaven, but we agreed on non-violence (remember, this was back in the last century before our society became so rigidly polarized, and before evangelicals started carrying handguns). But it wasn’t only that; I was having encounters with other religions as well. One of my Jewish friends invited me to his house for Pesach, for Passover. He and his family were Reform Jews, and so they were religious liberals like me; but they also had a significantly different religious worldview from mine. When they said “Next year in Israel!” at the end of the seder, I could tell they really meant it; whereas while I could understand the phrase at an intellectual level, I really didn’t understand it at an emotional level.
When you begin encountering people from religious traditions unlike yours, you have several options. You can choose to double down and insist that yours is the only valid religious tradition. You can choose to doubt all religious traditions, on the theory that there’s no way to determine which is the correct religious tradition. You can assert that all religious traditions share in the same general truths, which may lead you to draw from the best of various religious traditions. You can leave behind your present religious tradition and find a new one that you feel more attuned to. Or you can choose to stay with your present religious tradition, while questioning its grounding assumptions. There is no single correct choice. As it happens, I chose to stay with Unitarian Universalism while questioning its grounding assumptions.
One of the grounding assumptions of twentieth century Unitarian Universalism that I chose to question is embodied in that statement by Huston Smith: “It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge.” Or as Henry David Thoreau put it, “The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did…” — implying that Hinduism, ancient Egyptian religion, and Thoreau’s own Transcendentalism all share the same great truths. I suspect that many Unitarian Universalists today — perhaps most Unitarian Universalists today — would still affirm that all spiritual paths wind up leading to the same mountaintop. We can still affirm our belief that the great truths taught by Jesus are shared by major religions around the world. We still see an essential oneness to all religions.
However, not all Unitarian Universalists agree with these statements. I’m one of those Unitarian Universalists. I’m no longer convinced that all religions lead ultimately to the same goal. It was feminism, more than anything else, that prompted me to question whether all religions have the same goal. If I, as a Unitarian Universalist, believe that women and girls are just as good as men and boys, what am I to make of the Latter Day Saints, or Mormons, who don’t allow women to be ordained to their priesthood? What am I to make of verse 4:34 in the Qur’an, which says that women should be obedient to men, and if they’re not obedient, then men should beat them? What am I to make of the sexism built into Confucianism? Not that we Unitarian Universalists are entirely non-sexist — but at least as a non-creedal religion, we are not bound by sexist scriptures, and as a democratic religion we are not bound by sexist pronouncements issued by a hierarchy. Yet as a religion which strives for equality between the sexes, I feel that Unitarian Universalism is fundamentally different from the Latter Day Saints, or traditional Muslims, or conservative Christians. Because we Unitarian Universalists affirm that all genders are equal, I find it difficult to accept that our religion winds up on the same mountaintop as patriarchal religions which claim that men and boys are better than other genders. Nor can I accept that those other religions are simply deluded — because that merely echoes their argument that I’m deluded for believing that women and girls are just as good as men and boys. — All this leads me to wonder if there’s more than one religious mountain; to wonder if there are multiple religious truths, not all of which I want to share in. And this in turn leads me to the conclusion that Christmas is something entirely different from Hanukkah, Diwali, Bodhi Day, or the pagan solstice celebrations.
I have found this to be spiritually freeing. Instead of thinking that Hanukkah is somehow similar to Christmas, I can accept what my friend the rabbi says — Hanukkah is actually a minor Jewish holiday that has nothing to do with Christmas. Instead of worrying about celebrating Hanukkah to counterbalance Christmas, I can instead honor the importance of the Jewish High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. That is, instead of trying to elevate a minor Jewish holiday to importance just because it happens to fall at the same time as the major Christian holiday of Christmas, I can accept Judaism on its own terms. Or to give another example, while I can recognize that the Hindu holiday of Diwali prompts almost as much consumer spending among Hindus as Christmas does among Christians and nominal Christians, there are other Hindu holidays with as greater or greater religious significance, such as Durga Puja. Again, I can accept Hinduism on its own terms, rather than trying to fit it into Christmas. This also means I face less spiritual pressure at Christmas time; I can simply focus on Christmas instead of trying to integrate it with Hanukkah and the solstice and Diwali and Bodhi Day, and even Ramadan when it happens to fall in December.
As I say, I have found this to be spiritually freeing. Instead of trying to stuff random holidays of non-Christian religions into a Christmas mold, I find myself more willing to appreciate those other religions for what they are, rather than for what I want them to be. It has been spiritually freeing in other ways too. Rather than struggling to make connections between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of other major world religions, I can simply read Jesus for what he has to offer, appreciating his unique contributions without having to compare him to other teachings. Conversely, I can read the Dao de Jing without having to try to figure out how it pertains to the teachings of Jesus. As scholar of religion Stephen Prothero puts it, “Being honest [about religion] requires being true to the religious traditions themselves.” So while it is disorienting, I find it easier to be true to the religions themselves. And personally, I’ve found the world to be a more interesting place when I accept the essential differences between religions; when I don’t try to make belief central to every religion just because Christianity does; when I’m able to truly listen to what other religions have to say, instead of listening for what I want them to say.
Not that I necessarily recommend this spiritual path to anyone else. It is a disorienting spiritual path. It’s less disorienting to have only one mountain on life’s map — just one peak upon which all trails converge — than it is to deal with a complex multicultural landscape with mountains and valleys and plains and rivers and probably oceans besides. And maybe it’s more fun to celebrate Christmas while at the same time playing dreidel in honor of Hanukkah. It’s certainly more poetic to say along with Thoreau that: “The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did….” In the end, it’s your choice as to which spiritual path you prefer to follow.
Notes
(1) Huston Smith, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions, New York: Harper San Francisco, 1991, p. 73. This is a revised version of Smith’s earlier 1958 book The Religions of Man, which is turn grew out of a 1955 lecture series for television.
(2) Sometimes we even include Kwanzaa, although those who created Kwanzaa have explicitly said that it is not a religious holiday. See, e.g., Karenga Maulana, Kwanzaa, University of Sankore Press, 1997, p. 121: “Is Kwanzaa an alternative to Christmas? Kwanzaa was not created to give people an alternative to their own religion or religious holiday. And it is not an alternative to people’s religion or faith but a common ground of African culture….” Maulana goes on to emphasize that Kwanzaa is not religion, but a “cultural choice.”