Sermon copyright (c) 2026 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 Cornel West’s book Democracy Matters:
“In America, we have tended to underplay the crucial role of the foundational motivation of democracy. From the time of that first experiment in democracy in Athen in the fifth century BC to the birth of the American democratic experiment in the eighteenth century, the consolidation of elite power was the primary object of democratic revolt. This will to transform corrupted forms of elite rule into more democratic ways of life is an extraordinary force, though each new democratic result of the exercise of this will [always] falls short of democratic ideals. This is why all democracies are complete and unfinished, and this is why American democracy is a work in progress.”
The second reading was from the long poem “Freedom’s Plow” by Langston Hughes:
…America is a dream.
The poet says it was promises.
The people say it is promises — that will come true.
The people do not always say things out loud,
Nor write them down on paper.
The people often hold
Great thoughts in their deepest thoughts
And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
Haltingly and stumbling say them,
And faultily put them into practice.
The people do not always understand each other.
But there is, somewhere there,
Always the trying to understand,
And the trying to say,
“You are human. Together we are building our land.”
America!
Land created in common,
Dream nourished in common,
Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
If the house is not finished,
Don’t be discouraged, builder!
If the fight is not yet won,
Don’t be weary, soldier!…
(Excerpt of this poem included under copyright fair use: fewer than 500 words, less than half the poem.)
Sermon
This morning, I’m going try to give a couple of small reasons why democracy matters. The title I gave this sermon — “Why Democracy Matters” — uses a phrase I stole from Democracy Matters, which was the title of a book by philosopher Cornel West. When I first read that book a couple of decades ago, two things stood out for me. First, West made it clear that part of his commitment to democracy stemmed from his liberal Christian faith. Second, West thought that Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the people who was (to use West’s own words) “the life force behind the deeper individual and civic American commitment to democracy.”(1)
Unfortunately, West isn’t an especially good writer, and he uses the book to settle personal grudges; so I don’t recommend it. But I appreciate the title of the book — “Democracy Matters.” Democracy does matter. And I appreciate the thought that those of us who are religious, yet neither fundamentalists nor evangelicals, have something important to contribute to American democracy.
West tells us that a key contributor fo the American democratic tradition is Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson served as a Unitarian minister for eight years before he embarked on his more famous career as an essayist and a public lecturer. As a minister and as a writer, his ideas and his ideals were shaped by the deep Unitarian conviction in the power of the individual, and by the related Unitarian conviction that each and every person can have a direct connection with the divine. His Unitarian convictions led him to reject hierarchies, to reject blindly following authority; as Cornel West phrased it, Emerson “refused to accept the conventional wisdom of leaders.” After saying this, West quotes from Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance”:
“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
After quoting Emerson, West comments that “Emerson offered the empowering insight that to be a democratic individual is to be flexible and fluid, revisionary and reformational in your dealing with your fellow citizens and the world, not adhering to comfortable dogmas or rigid party lines.”(2)
Emerson was a Unitarian, and West was a liberal Black Baptist. We tend to think those two religious traditions are very different, but in one crucial way, they’re very similar. Both those religious traditions agree that it’s up to the individual to know the truth; and both those religious traditions agree that individuals can have a direct experience of divinity, goodness, and truth.
These two religious traditions share these important beliefs because they both come from the same ancient religious tradition. They both owe a great deal to the religious tradition extending back thousands of years to the earliest books of the Hebrew Bible, a tradition that believes in equality and justice for all persons. Martin Luther King was another liberal Black Baptist, who famously quoted the prophet Amos, “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (3). Nor is it just Unitarians and Black Baptists who emphasize the religious tradition of justice for all persons — liberal and moderate Jews, liberal and moderate Christians of all denominations, and liberal Muslims also affirm that there must be justice for all persons.
One of the founding documents of American democracy, the Declaration of Independence, draws on this same tradition when it says: “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.” The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, who was a liberal Christian. In drafting the Declaration, Jefferson worked closely with John Adams, another liberal Christian (in fact, he was Unitarian). The Declaration of Independence was able to declare that all people are created equal, because it can draw from that long tradition of justice stretching back to the prophet Amos and beyond. We all know the limitations of the Declaration of Independence: it left out women, it ignored enslaved African Americans. But we are able to criticize the Declaration of Independence in this way precisely because we draw on the long tradition of justice originating in the Hebrew prophets.
As a former Unitarian minister, Emerson knew this ancient tradition well. He knew it was not a dead, static tradition. The search for goodness and justice is not something that happens once, and then you’re done with it. Emerson said that when you think you’ve found goodness, you “must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if [what you’ve found actually] be goodness” or not. While Emerson never quite accepted that women were created equal to men, and although he never quite accepted that Black people were the equals of White people, even though he favored the abolition of slavery; nevertheless, he went further than many people of his day and age in saying that at least some justice might be extended to enslaved African Americans. Emerson’s disciple, Henry Thoreau, went further than Emerson did, and Martin Luther King took things further than either Emerson or Thoreau, advocating for complete equality of all Americans regardless of race.
This is the way democracy works. It is not static. It is an evolving tradition. American democracy continues to evolve, continues to extend the basic principles of equality further than Jefferson or Adams were willing to take it. We have now extended equality to women, and to people who are not White. And it’s significant that many of the people who worked to extend equality have been able to draw on the ancient tradition of justice that extends back to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.
In the United States today, however, I am aware of at least two religious traditions that do not support equality, and that therefore act to undermine democracy.
One religious tradition that seeks to restrict equality is conservative Christian nationalism. The Christian nationalists do not believe that women are equal; they believe that women should be subordinate to men; and while they may say that women should retain the right to vote, they also say that a wife should submit to her husband, perhaps to the point where she should vote the way he tells her to vote. Increasingly, the Christian nationalists also seem to be drifting into the belief that only White Christian nationalists deserve full equality, while non-White people are not as equal. Christian nationalism is a non-democratic religious tradition. While Emerson believed that people in a democracy must be flexible enough to seek out truth and goodness on their own, by contrast Christian nationalists want people to stick to comfortable dogmas and “rigid party lines.” Democracy requires that we think for our selves; Christian nationalists don’t want us to think for ourselves; they want to tell us what to think and what to do.
The second religious tradition that seeks to restrict equality and to limit democracy is the religion of amoral capitalism. Capitalism has not always been a-moral. There was a time when the goal for businesspeople was to make a profit while providing things their community needed. My first full-time job was in a lumberyard, which made a tidy profit for the family that owned it, while at the same time supplying needed building materials, and providing much needed jobs to the community. The goal for business used to be stated like this: Do well by doing good. But a new religious belief emerged that has taken over the biggest businesses, a religious belief that the only goal is to maximize shareholder value. I consider this a religious belief because its believers cling to it with religious fervor. This religious belief even has a name: it’s called the Friedman Doctrine. The Friedman Doctrine shares Christian nationalism’s commitment to dogma and obedience to authority. Like Christian nationalism, the religion of the Friedman Doctrine is essentially hierarchical and non-democratic: there are no stakeholders except for CEOs and shareholders. The Friedman Doctrine stands in opposition to the long Biblical tradition of extending justice to all persons. Back in 2016, The Economist, a politically centrist periodical, pointed out that the moral result of the doctrine of maximizing shareholder value is “a license for bad conduct.”(4) Democracies must be rooted in a firm sense of justice; they depend for their existence on widely-shared morality that proclaims equality for all persons. Thus the Friedman Doctrine, with its license for bad conduct, is anti-democratic.
How can we respond to these two anti-democratic religions? Recall that passage from Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” To paraphrase this in a more contemporary idiom: If you would be fully human, you must think for yourself. If you would be truly good, it is not enough to let someone else tell you how to be good; you must find goodness out for yourself. You must value your own personal integrity above all else.
And here’s how this applies to democracy. In other forms of government, such as monarchies and autocracies, you simply accept that whatever the ruler of your country tells you is the right thing to do. Similarly, in a big impersonal business, the largest shareholders and the CEO determine what is right, and everyone else — both inside the business, and outside the business — simply has to accept what they are told to do.
Why does democracy matter? Democracy matters because it does not dictate to us. In a democracy, we must think for ourselves. In a democracy, if we would strive for true goodness, it is not enough to let someone else tell us how to be good, we must find out goodness for ourselves. Above all, we must value our own personal integrity. In a democracy, we have to ask ourselves, “Have I been the best person I can possibly be?”
Democracy matters because it continues the long tradition of justice going back to the Biblical prophet Amos, and beyond. We may not hold exactly the same notion of God that Amos does; we may be Buddhist or pagan or atheist or something else; but like Amos, we want justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Thomas Jefferson surely had the Biblical prophets in mind when he wrote the Declaration of Independence; and for all his many faults — that he was sexist, that he was a slaveholder — Jefferson did the best he could to uphold that long tradition of justice; and he made so that we could extend justice beyond what he could have imagined.
Democracy matters because all people are created equal, with certain inalienable rights; and may justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
Notes
(1) Cornel West, Democracy Matters (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), p. 68.
(2) Ibid., p. 70.
(3) Amos 5:24, KJV
(4) “Analyse this,” The Economist, March 31, 2016.