Dan Harper | Sermons

Tag: Rachel Carson

  • One Thing

    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 the poem “Global Warming Blues” by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie. You can hear the poet reading this poem on Youtube.

    The second reading was the poem “look at the blackbird fall” by June Jordan. This poem is available in the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2009), or in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).

    The third reading is usually attributed to Unitarian minister and novelist Edward Everett Hale.
    I am only one
    But still I am one.
    I cannot do everything,
    But still I can do something,
    And because I cannot do everything
    I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

    Sermon

    Right at the beginning, I should tell you that this sermon got the wrong title. I called it “One Thing,” but as you will see, a better title would have been “Ten Times One Is Ten.” I should also tell you, right up front, that while it might seem a little depressing at the beginning, this will wind up being a positive sermon.

    For the past twenty years, one of my sidelines has been doing environmental education with children and adults. Not that I’m trained in environmental education or biology, but I’ve been fortunate enough to work with, and learn from, biologists and environmental educators. The reason I wound up doing environmental education even though I wasn’t trained in it, was because I could see that humanity faces numerous ecological challenges of our own making, challenges which have prompted spiritual questioning and even spiritual crises in quite a few people.

    Let me give an example of a spiritual crisis prompted by ecological challenges. Ten years ago, I was one of the people leading a week-long ecology day camp for grades 2 through 8. We gave kids lots of opportunities to play outdoors and explore the natural world, and we even did a little citizen science with them. We also talked openly about the environmental challenges that humanity faces; we didn’t emphasize them, but we were honest with kids that humanity faced some big problems. In fact, the kids were relieved that we adults were willing to talk openly about those big problems. Children and teens are quite aware of the world’s environmental problems, but sometimes adults don’t want to talk with kids about such serious and discouraging topics.

    Toward the end of the week-long camp, while we were out walking somewhere, one of the seventh graders said to me, with a little bit of fear in her voice, “Are we going to be all right?” There were a couple of levels of meaning contained in this seemingly simple question. At an abstract level, she wanted to know if humanity was going to survive the various ecological crises we’re facing. Then at a personal level, she also wanted to know what their life was going to be like, and over the course of their life how they navigate the problems raised by global climate change, toxics in the environment, and so on. And at a spiritual level, she was facing a crisis of meaning — would she survive?

    My reply to that seventh grader was pretty much what you’d expect. I said that humanity had faced big challenges in the past, and somehow managed to come out all right. I said that in spite of the big problems we faced, I felt humanity was capable of solving those problems. In short, I tried to tell her things that would give her hope for the future.

    This exchange helped me understand the roots of the spiritual crisis many kids — and many adults — experience as we contemplate ecological problems. When we contemplate ecological problems, we wind up confronting several spiritual questions. We wind up confronting the nature of humanity — Is there some evil in humanity, some basic flaw, that has prompted us to do so much damage to other living things? Is there enough good in us to overcome the bad, so that we can solve our ecological problems? Then we wind up confronting the purpose of existence — Is it true, as some conservative Christians tell us, that the only purpose of this life is to prepare us for an afterlife? Is there some deity, or some force in the universe, that will be angered by the damage we’re doing to other living beings? And we also wind up confronting some old stories that have been told in Western culture for thousands of years, stories about how there will be an end time filled with disasters. Are those old stories true? — and before the skeptics among us say, “No of course they’re not true” — I would remind you that old stories like that can shape your behavior at an unconscious level, even if you doubt them at a conscious level. And whether or not those old stories are true, are they maybe affecting our behavior in ways that we don’t like, and maybe we want to retell those old stories so that we behave in ways we do like?

    All these are spiritual questions. They are questions that cannot be answered scientifically or logically, because they are feeling questions. Ultimately, these spiritual questions boil down to whether we feel a sense of hope for the future.

    Getting back to that seventh grader — she was more or less satisfied with the answer I gave her, but I wasn’t. I knew I had only given her a scientific and logical answer to her spiritual question, which meant that I didn’t really address her spiritual concerns. How could we address those very real spiritual questions that those kids had? After talking it over with all the adults who were running that day camp, here’s what we came up with….

    First, we decided that we needed to be more explicit about the ecological problems facing humanity. By not being specific, we made it feel as though ecological problems were huge and amorphous and beyond the capability of any one person to tackle — and when you feel powerless to address something, that can prompt a spiritual crisis. I had heard a talk given by Dr. Stuart Weiss, a Stanford-trained biologist who ran an environmental remediation company. Weiss listed five major threats to earth’s life supporting systems:

    One: Global climate change. Two: Invasive organisms, non-native plants and animals that outcompete native organisms. Three: “Toxication,” or pollution from solid wastes like microplastics, to chemical wastes like PFAS. Four: Deforestation and other land use changes that now affect three quarters of the Earth’s land area. Five: Overpopulation by humans.

    I use the acronym DOGIT to remember these — Deforestation, Overpopulation, Global climate change, Invasive species, and Toxication. Other biologists have come up with similar lists with different acronyms. The biologist E. O. Wilson used the acronym HIPPO, which stands for Habitat loss, Invasive species, Pollution, human Population, and Overharvesting. Use whatever list or acronym you prefer — the point is to get more specific about the challenges facing us.

    At the day camp, we told the campers about Stuart Weiss’s list of five major environmental challenges. Then we told them that they do not have to solve all of these challenges. All they have to do is choose one of them on which they wanted to focus their efforts. We also gave them stories about role models, people whom they could emulate who had taken on one of these big environmental challenges. So, for example, we told them about Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for starting the Green Belt Movement to help reverse deforestation in Kenya. We told them about Rachel Carson, who brought public awareness to the damage that chemical pesticides were doing to the environment. As we talked about Wangari Maathai and Rachel Carson and others, we would make it clear how each one of these people focused their efforts into straightforward and achievable projects. Wangari Maathai didn’t try to solve land use problems everywhere the world, she focused on addressing deforestation in Kenya where she lived. Rachel Carson didn’t try to tackle every kind of pollution, she focused on what she knew best, pesticides like DDT. In addition, for each one of our role models, we made sure the kids understood that these people did not work alone, but rather they worked with others to bring about positive change.

    One of the ways we reinforced this was by reciting the following short poem:

    I am only one
    But still I am one.
    I cannot do everything,
    But still I can do something,
    And because I cannot do everything
    I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

    When talking with kids, I usually attribute this poem to Unitarian minister and novelist Edward Everett Hale even though it probably wasn’t written by him. I like to attribute it to Hale because it captures the spirit of what he believed. One of Hale’s most famous novels was titled Ten Times One Is Ten. The novel begins just after the funeral of Harry Wadsworth. Ten people who had all known Wadsworth, but who had never met before, wind up telling each other stories of the good things Harry Wadsworth had done for each of them. For it turned out that Harry Wadsworth was one of those people who quietly went around doing good things for other people. Not that the good things he did were anything extraordinary — everything he did was something any one of us could have done — but he went ahead and did them, whereas all too often the rest of us don’t.

    As they sat around listening to each other’s stories of Harry Wadsworth’s good deeds, these ten people became inspired by his actions, and they wanted to continue his legacy. They wanted to form a club to carry on his legacy, but because they lived all across the country, they couldn’t have a conventional club with bylaws and meetings and so on. Instead, they decided that each of one of them would go out and do something good in the world; then they would report what they had done to the others. And, to better capture the spirit of Harry Wadsworth, they adopted the following mottos:

    “To look up and not down,
    To look forward and not back,
    To look out and not in,—
    and
    To lend a hand.”

    Since there were ten of them whose lives had been touched by Harry Wadsworth, they set themselves the goal of each touching the lives of ten more people. Now you begin to understand why the book is titled Ten Times One Is Ten. Each of those people did something good that touched the lives of ten more people, so that ten times ten becomes a hundred. Then those hundred people went on and did things to touch the lives of ten more people, until before long it ten times a million became ten million. And the good work spread from person to person, until at last the club realized that they had reached a thousand million people (ten times a hundred million is a thousand million) — which at the time the book was written, in the late nineteenth century, was the entire population of the world. As the narrator of the novel puts it: “When ten million people have determined that the right thing shall come to pass in this world, having good on their side, they will always be found to have their own way.”

    “Ten Times One Is Ten” became a bestselling novel in the late nineteenth century. The novel proved so popular that it spawned a real-world movement of “Lend-a-Hand” clubs across the United States, devoted to making the world a better place. (These nineteenth century clubs have mostly disappeared, although when I worked at the Unitarian church in Lexington twenty-five years ago they still had a Lend-a-Hand Club, and there is still a Lend-a-Hand organization in Boston.) And you can see how the Lend-a-Hand club concept sounds like that poem attributed to Edward Everett Hale:

    I am only one
    But still I am one.
    I cannot do everything,
    But still I can do something,
    And because I cannot do everything
    I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

    So even if Edward Everett Hale didn’t actually write this little poem, the anonymous author captured one of Hale’s most important teachings in a memorable form. Furthermore, Edward Everett Hale would go on to say, though you may be only one — ten times one is ten.

    Regardless of who actually wrote that poem, we taught it to the kids in the day camp. I wish we had also thought to teach them the motto of the club in Hale’s novel:

    Look up and not down,
    Look forward and not back,
    Look out and not in, and
    Lend a hand.

    Yet even though we didn’t teach them those exact words, we taught them that sentiment. Look up for solutions rather than getting pulled down by the problems. Look forward to the future rather than always looking back at the past. Don’t get trapped inside yourself, but look outwards to other people, for there is where you’ll find hope. And finally, of course — Lend a hand where you can.

    This is not to say that we ignored the very real phenomenon of “eco-grief.” “Eco-grief” is a term that I learned from a professor of environmental biology; she uses that term to describe the feelings of her college freshmen students when they realized the true magnitude of the environmental problems we face today. Eco-grief is a real phenomenon; most of us have some feelings of eco-grief. We should not dismiss eco-grief, but if we get trapped in our inward feelings of eco-grief, then nothing will change for the better. Go ahead and look in on your feelings of eco-grief, but remember to then turn and look out, and lend a hand.

    I’m making this sound like while we were running that ecology day camp, we considered all these matters ahead of time, and then implemented a carefully constructed curriculum to help kids maintain a positive attitude, so that they weren’t overwhelmed by eco-grief, so they could go out and change the world. Actually, what happened is that we made it up as we went along. We watched how the campers responded (and, if I’m honest, we watched how we adults responded), and then made adjustments on the fly. This took us several years.

    We knew we had succeeded by watching the campers. We got to a point where they didn’t have to ask us if things were going to be OK, because they already knew how they could contribute to make things better; that is, they were looking forward, and not back. I’ll tell you about two of our very obvious successes. One girl, who started out as a camper and went on to become a junior counselor, told us one year that she could not return to camp again because she had gotten a summer internship in local government working on environmental issues. Another girl who had been a camper then a junior counselor and was about to enter her senior year of high school, announced that she was applying to college programs in environmental science. We had other successes that weren’t as obvious, although they were just as successful. There was the camper who planned to become a high school history teacher, and who wanted to teach his students some of the history of environmental problems. There were the many campers who learned to love and enjoy the outdoors, and we knew they would grow up to become voters for whom environmental protection would be a priority.

    Our successes with these kids grew out of the basic principle that you do not have to solve all the environmental problems by yourself. Do the one thing that you can do, no matter how small. When you do that, see if you can touch the lives of other people. When you touch the lives of others, perhaps you will inspire them in turn to do just one thing to address our environmental challenges.

    This basic principle works for kids, and it works equally well for adults. We can begin by reminding ourselves that it is not up to us to solve all the world’s problems as isolated, solitary individuals. One person can’t do everything. But each one of us can do one thing to make the environment a little bit better. We can focus our efforts even more, to make it seem less overwhelming. We can each pick just one of the five major environmental challenges. Remember the acronym DOGIT — Deforestation, Overpopulation, Global climate change, Invasive species, Toxication. You are only one person, so you only have to concern yourself with one environmental challenge at a time. And for the one challenge with which you choose to concern yourself, you only have to do your part. If you choose to address deforestation, you could support your local land trust to protect natural habitats. If you choose overpopulation, you could support Planned Parenthood in teaching people about contraceptive choices to help reduce unwanted births. If you choose global climate change, you could help local governments in supporting renewable energy infrastructure. If you choose toxication, you could pick up trash whenever you go for a walk. Or if you choose invasive species, you could help remove invasive garlic mustard plants.

    All you have to do is one thing. And it can be a small thing. But when you do that one thing, see if you can touch the lives of others. See if you can bring joy and happiness to other people, helping them feel better about the world. Just as in Edward Everett Hale’s novel, if your one effort inspires ten others, then ten times one is ten; ten times ten is a hundred; ten times a hundred is a thousand; and so on until we reach eight billion people.

    I know this sounds hopelessly idealistic. I know it sounds like pie in the sky. But from my experience with that ecology summer camp, I’ve seen how eminently practical it can be. It is practical because when we inspire each other, we give each other hope. And when we give each other hope, we free ourselves — and we free our children and grandchildren — to make the world a better place….

    Look up and not down,
    Look forward and not back,
    Look out and not in, and
    Lend a hand.

  • Garbage

    Sermon and moment for all ages copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Moment for All Ages

    Members of the Sunday school sang the song “Garbage” by Bill Steele.

    Roger Weiss has posted “Garbage” sung by the songwriter online. Bill Steele had originally posted this recording on his own website, but after his death in 2018 his website disappeared. For Roger Weiss’s remembrance of Bill Steele, along with more recordings, go here.

    Readings

    The first reading was a poem by Ada Limon, “The Origin Revisited.”

    The second reading was from “The Edge of the Sea” by Rachel Carson.

    Hearing the rising tide, I think how it is pressing also against other shores I know—rising on a southern beach where there is no fog, but a moon edging all the waves with silver and touching the wet sands with lambent sheen, and on a still more distant shore sending its streaming currents against the moonlit pinnacles and the dark caves of the coral rock.…

    Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality—earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.

    Sermon: “Garbage”

    The First Parish children’s programs — both our summer ecology camp, and the Sunday school — have been singing the song “Garbage” by Bill Steele. This has become a favorite song of several of our kids. Partly, it has become a favorite song because they sing it as fast as possible — maybe twice as fast as you heard it earlier this morning. Obviously, that’s too fast to really understand the words, but they all have the words memorized. They know exactly what the song means.

    The other reason I think they like the song is because it has meaning for them. Today’s kids seem to be very aware of problems like plastic pollution of the ocean, so even though this was a topical song written back in 1969 to convince peopple to stop filling in San Francisco Bay, it still has meaning for today’s kids. In 2009, Steele told an interviewer, “Writing topical songs can be frustrating because they go out of currency very quickly. What’s frustrating about this one is that 40 years after it was written, it is still current. From the environmental standpoint, it’s frustrating that we haven’t done anything about it, and that this problem is still with us after all this time.”

    I don’t know how the kids feel about it, but for me the most powerful verse is the third verse. That’s the verse that tells us that we’re not only filling up the Bay with garbage, and filling the air with garbage, we’re also filling up our minds with garbage. The song tells how Mr. Thompson goes home after a hard day at work, and settles down to read a newspaper story about “the mayor’s middle name,” which he finishes just in time to watch the All-Star Bingo Game on television. Today it’s more likely to be TikTok and Instagram than newspapers and television, but the phenomenon remains the same — most of us spend way too much time on trivia. While it is important to stay abreast of the news in a democracy, we don’t really need to know about the mayor’s middle name, any more than we need to know about Joe Biden’s dog’s behavior, or that Donald Trump does not own a dog.

    We fill our minds with information of no value, and Bill Steele wanted us to convince us that that was analogous to the way garbage was being dumped into San Francisco Bay back in 1969. I’d even extend that metaphor somewhat. Great tracts of San Francisco Bay were filled in with garbage and other landfill during the 1960s and 1970s. But that kind of landfill liquifies during an earthquake. The U.S. Geological Survey tells us that “When the ground liquefies, it may lose its ability to support buildings and other structures.” Thus, don’t build your house on garbage, because the garbage won’t provide stability in moments of crisis. If we fill our minds with garbage, we will not have a secure foundation on which to build wisdom or ethics. The first time our mind is shaken by some catastrophic event, all that garbage will turn to mush.

    Of course there are alternatives to filling our minds with garbage. This is supposed to be the role of the great spiritual and ethical traditions throughout human history. And indeed, the environmental movement has been cast as a kind of spiritual battle. We are told that we must recycle more, and buy electric cars, and eat more plant-based food. If we could just rid ourselves of our individual spiritual failings — our lack of recycling, our consumption of meat, our gas-guzzling cars, and so on — we could solve the environmental crisis.

    I’ve become convinced that the environmental crisis we’re currently facing does have spiritual roots, but I don’t believe that the roots of the environmental crisis lie in ridding ourselves of our individual spiritual failings. We’re not going to solve the environmental crisis by addressing our individual sins of not recycling enough, not eat plant-based foods, and so on. Instead, I feel one of the main roots of the environmental crisis comes from a collective misinterpretation of the Bible. Specifically, I feel that our society collectively buys into a gross misinterpretation of the so-called “dominion clause” in the book of Genesis, chapter 1, verse 27, which goes like this:

    “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’”

    This passage has been widely interpreted by Western Christians, Jews, and atheists to mean that God gave humankind god-like powers over every other living thing, meaning we humans have permission to do whatever we like to the non-human world. The historian Lynn White thought this misinterpretation of the Bible dated back to medieval times. I don’t know about that, but I do know that in the late twentieth century a theological viewpoint called Dominion theology became very influential. This theology is based on a misinterpretation of that passage in Genesis, teaching that God has given god-like powers to humans, so they can do whatever they want. Dominion theology goes further than this, teaching that men should have dominion over women. And dominion theology also teaches that Christians should be in charge of all human political affairs. Humans have power over non-humans; male humans have power over female humans; male Christian humans have power over everyone else.

    In my opinion, dominion theology is spiritual and religious garbage. Nevertheless, a great many people are filling up their minds with this garbage — not just conservative Christians, but secular people are also being influenced by it. Now the secular people should know better, but let’s look at why dominion theology is religious and spiritual garbage.

    According to Genesis, God created all the creatures that live on the earth, in the seas, and in the skies; God also created all the plants and every other living thing. Periodically during this creation process, God stopped, looked at the latest creations, and “saw that it was good.” That is: God did not stop, look at the latest creations, and say, “Gee, I hope some day the human beings make this animal or that plant go extinct.” Nor does God ever say, “Gee, I hope the humans use their garbage to fill in San Francisco Bay, which by the way I created to be a home for ‘every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm’.” Nowhere in the Bible does God say that humankind is supposed to trash the world.

    Not only that, but the very next passage in the Bible states that men and women are equal. This upends another major tenet of dominion theology. Genesis 1:27 says, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” You’ll notice that God had both male and female characteristics, since both males and females were created in God’s image (if this is hard for you to imagine, that’s no surprise since we limited mortals can’t entirely comprehend God anyway).

    Contrary to what the proponents of dominion theology claim, here’s what those passages in the book of Genesis actually say: Humankind may have a great deal of power over the nonhuman world, but we are supposed to use that power to take care of God’s creation. God created both women and men in God’s image, which means that women are just as good as men. As for Christians being in charge of everyone else, nowhere in the book of Genesis does that come up. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Christians are supposed to run the United States. This is garbage theology. Yet this is the garbage that has been filling many people’s minds.

    So why do people allow their minds to be filled up with this kind of garbage? I suspect that part of the problem is that more than a few people in the United States today feel a sense of spiritual emptiness. They’re tired of conventional organized religion — and let’s face it, too much of conventional organized religion today feels spiritually empty — but they want something that fills that spiritual void they sense within. Then they hear about this spiritual movement that sounds pretty convincing, that gives them a purpose, that makes them feel a part of something larger than themselves, and they decide it fills the spiritual void they have been feeling.

    There are also a good many people who don’t consciously accept dominion theology, but still act in accordance with some of of its values. Yet these people have unthinkingly accepted the tenets of dominion theology. Even though these people may not want conservative Christians running the United States; even though these people may believe that women are just as good as men; they are providing unthinking support to dominion theology.

    So what are we to do about dominion theology? How can we promote the opposite of dominion theology — how can we promote the careful stewardship of planet Earth, the equality of men and women, the separation of church and state?

    Today, a great many liberal Christians and Jews are pushing back against dominion theology. These liberal Christians and Jews are saying: Hey, this is our God and our Bible, and dominion theology has gotten it all wrong. Yes, we believe God created the nonhuman world; but while we humans may have dominion over the nonhuman world, dominion was given to us in order to care for God’s creation. And our Bible teaches that “God created humankind in his image…male and female he created them”; that is, women are just as good as men. Oh, and by the way, it says nothing in the Bible about Christians running the United States. This is some of what liberal Jews and Christians are saying. And if you’re a liberal Christian or a liberal Jew, you can be a part of this; you can say: Hey, stop trying to throw your dominionist garbage into our religion.

    In addition to that, what all of us can do — whether we’re Christians or Jews or atheists or Buddhists or Haven’t-figured-it-out-yet-ists — we can all offer a compelling spiritual alternative to dominion theology. Part of our spiritual alternative will be that we have reverence for all life; we respect all life. We have equal reverence for all human beings, equal respect for all human beings, no matter what their gender. We value all the wonders of Nature and all the wonders of humankind; or, as we might phrase it, we affirm and support the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. Lastly, we can talk about love being the most powerful force in the universe, and we can teach that principle to other people by doing our best to live it out in our own lives.

    We can offer a positive spirituality to replace a negative spirituality. Dominion theology is essentially a negative spirituality; it is not cheerful and filled with love, it is depressing and filled with feelings of sinfulness and inadequacy. We want to replace that with a positive spirituality, a spirituality of hope and of love; a spirituality that helps us live our lives as if we are all connected.

    One way we communicate our positive spirituality is the way we live our lives. Another way we communicate our positive spirituality is through the arts. This is exactly what we did with the two readings we heard this morning. Ada Limon, poet laureate of the United States, wrote about a positive poem about how the beauty of the non-human world can support us and sustain us spiritually. Rachel Carson wrote a prose passage about feeling connected to everything. By reading this poem and this prose aloud, we are creating a positive spirituality. That’s one of the most important things we do here in the Meetinghouse each week: we use the arts to create positive spirituality together.

    Of course there’s more to it than that. The concrete environmental problems we face — invasive plants and plastics in the ocean and so on — require concrete action. But concrete actions will be so much the stronger when they are supported by a positive spirituality; concrete actions are more effective when they are backed up by hope, and by love.

  • Another Alternative: Religious Naturalism

    Sermon and moment for all ages copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading was from the essay “What Is Religious Naturalism?” by Jerome A. Stone:

    “Religious naturalism is a type of naturalism. Hence we start with naturalism. This is a set of beliefs and attitudes that focuses on this world. On the negative side it involves the assertion that there seems to be no ontologically distinct and superior realm (such as God, soul or heaven) to ground, explain, or give meaning to this world. On the positive side it affirms that attention should be focused on the events and processes of this world to provide what degree of explanation and meaning are possible to this life. While this world is not self-sufficient in the sense of providing by itself all of the meaning that we would like, it is sufficient in the sense of providing enough meaning for us to cope.”

    The second reading was the poem “In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, Thinking of Rachel Carson,” by Anthony Walton.

    Sermon: Another Alternative: Religious Naturalism

    Probably most of us here this morning are firm believers in science. We believe that science is firmly grounded in the natural world. Science doesn’t need any supernatural elements — there’s no need of an afterlife, for example; no need for angels or demons or genies; no need for gods, goddesses, or other deities guiding our lives. As a result, many people give up on religions, because religions always seem to be full of supernatural elements.

    This is a social trend that has been going on since at least the seventeenth century in Europe, when Baruch Spinoza rejected the idea that the Bible was divinely inspired, and raised questions about the nature of God. By the eighteenth century, a growing number of freethinkers, people who rejected many of the fundamental doctrines of Western religion, began to emerge. One such freethinker was Thomas Paine, who wrote the pamphlet Common Sense which did so much to further the cause of independence from Great Britain. Paine also wrote a treatise titled “The Age of Reason” which called the supernatural elements of the Bible:

    “If we are to suppose a miracle to be something so entirely out of the course of what is called nature, that she must go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such a miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is,– Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.” (Pt. I, Ch. 17, The Age of Reason)

    Paine said that while he liked the teachings of Jesus, many of the stories about Jesus found in the Bible are lies. It’s worth knowing about Paine because in today’s political debates we hear arguments that America was founded on the tenets of orthodox conservative Christianity; yet here is one of America’s founders arguing quite forcefully against orthodox Christianity.

    The debate about miracles and supernaturalism continued in nineteenth century New England. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who served as a Unitarian minister for eight years before becoming a full-time writer, infuriated the religious establishment when he said that the miracles of the Bible have been grossly misunderstood. Here’s Emerson from his Divinity School Address:

    “Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul…. The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. [Jesus] spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle… and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”

    Emerson’s younger colleague Henry David Thoreau found miracles in his close observations of the natural world. Thoreau said we need to face up to reality as it actually is. This is what he wrote in his book Walden:

    “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

    Thoreau was telling us that this life has miracles enough in it, and we don’t need to add any miracles to it. Thoreau remained open to the insights of traditional religious and spiritual wisdom — not just Christian wisdom, but the wisdom that can be found in all spiritual and religious traditions — but he kept his focus firmly on this world. This present life is sufficient, said Thoreau: “Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” So he did not reject religion. He simply wanted his religion to remain focused on this world, the world he could directly experience.

    Many other religious naturalists emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Walt Whitman, whose poetry dealt with the here and now, could be called a religious naturalist. Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois has been called a religious naturalist. Religious naturalists often felt uncomfortable in organized religion. So for example the poet James Weldon Johnson, who wrote the words to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,” felt he lacked religiosity, but to me it seems like he was forced into that feeling because the only definition of religiosity that he knew involved supernatural religion.

    In the late twentieth century, the philosopher Jerome Stone began researching the various people who could be classified as religious naturalists. One of Jerome Stone’s most interesting discoveries was that religious naturalists cannot simply be lumped in with religious atheists. Some religious naturalists choose to use the word “God,” while others feel “God” is not a useful concept. So the biologist Ursula Goodenough, who calls herself a religious naturalist, and who feels that the natural miracles investigated by the science of biology are sufficiently miraculous, sees no need to use the word “God.” By contrast, Bernard Loomer — he’s the person who gave us the phrase “the interdependent web of existence” — is a religious naturalist who feels that God is a useful and important philosophical concept.

    Thus religious naturalists interpret “God” in a variety of ways. Some religious naturalists interpret “God” as the natural laws of the universe, or as a human social construct, and so on. Other religious naturalists get along fine without God. So if you’re a religious naturalist, you can decide whether to use the word “God” or not. Yet all religious naturalists find common ground in their rejection of the supernatural and their embrace of this world. I like this aspect of religious naturalism, because it can facilitate communication across divisions. The search for truth is always communal, and anything that helps us talk across our divisions helps the search for truth.

    As I’ve said before, I’m a devoted follower of Haven’t-figured-it-out-yet-ism — in other words, I don’t want to put a name to my ill-formed thoughts and feelings. But I guess I’d call myself “religious naturalism-adjacent.” I like the religious naturalists I’ve met in person; I took a class with Jerry Stone twenty years ago, and admired his humane and unpretentious attitude towards life.

    And I appreciate the way religious naturalists have dealt with arguments about the existence of God. I grew up as a Unitarian Universalist, and the old battle between humanists and the theists doesn’t seem to have progressed much since I was a child. Instead of arguing about the existence of God, the religious naturalists want you to define what it is that you mean when you say the word “God,” and that has deepened my own spiritual life.

    I also appreciate that religious naturalists focus on this world. And if we don’t have to worry about some supernatural afterlife, this releases our energies to deal with the problems we face here and now. This also releases us to appreciate the beauties of the here and now. If there’s a heaven, or an afterlife, or reincarnation, it will come in its own good time; in the mean time, here we are with reality all around us waiting to be experienced. Even when beauties exist side by side with horrors, it is better to face up to the horrors and do what we can to end them, than to wait for some heaven which may never arrive.

    Our contemporary society does not encourage us to face both beauty and horror. Instead, our contemporary society encourages passivity and quietism. Religious quietism pervades our society, as when we say: “It’s in God’s hands,” or “It was meant to be,” or “Whatever happens, happens for the best.” Belief in the supernatural need not deteriorate into quietism, and I am firmly allied with those who believe in a God of justice and truth and love. But we live in a world where some religious people use quietism to prevent necessary change, religions that teach that women are meant to be subordinate to men, that White Christians are meant to rule everyone else, that rich people are rich because they are favored by God. Quietism is also encouraged by secular society, by a secular culture that teaches us to remain passive consumers of media. This is a form of anesthesia no different from the numbing effects of religious quietism; both forms of quietism want to convince us that we cannot change the world.

    Instead of anesthetizing us, religious naturalism encourages the kind of spiritual practices that keep us engaged with reality, with the here and now. Think of Henry Thoreau next to his cabin at Walden Pond, kneeling down in the woods in order to the closest attention to the natural world, then writing about what he observed in his journal. Remember, too, that his cabin was a station on the Underground Railroad. Thoreau was not escaping from the world through supernatural beliefs, nor was he escaping from the world by ignoring the realities of injustice. Obviously, religious naturalism is not the only kind of religion that engages fully with this world — but it does set a high standard for other religious attitudes to match.