The Anxieties and Opportunities of Religious Pluralism

September 11, 1983
Lakeland

Preface: Introductory Words

Welcome to our new season of services. We are a religious community gathered to share our love for one another, to reach within ourselves to strengthen the ideals we value and to reach out in good will to all.

We live in turbulent times, but the members of the human family always have. History, myth, legend, art, and song – all disclose that war and suffering, peace and calm, pessimism and ennoblement, hope and fear, hate and love have been alternating impulses along the human network.

We face reality and dream of a kinder human family. We gather together to uplift our human heritage. There are sad songs and lively times. We will begin upbeat with Patty and Judy ....

The President of the United States has asked that today be observed as a day of mourning for the 269 men, women, and children who died when the Soviet fighter plane shot down the Korean 747 passenger plane. Who among us cannot help but grieve at such slaughter of the innocents? Amid the cascade of news reports, charges, and counter-charges, presently available, the Soviet case seems flimsy at best and vicious at worst. We mourn these victims of international fear and hate. Our hearts go out to the families who survive them.

As one who is seldom complimentary of President Reagan, I must commend him in this instance. His angry, condemnatory rhetoric has been balanced by his restrained political response so far. Historically, assassinations of lesser import than this have triggered wars.

I would mention two thoughts that have crossed my mind these past 8 or 9 days.

First, wanton killings for supposed national interests are not newcomers to the world scene. Look at many places in the world – today, Central America, Iran, Lebanon, Chad, as well as the Sea of Japan. Truly, every day can be a day of mourning for innocent victims. The deadly struggle for power, markets, oil, political domination mark the calendar every day with the need to grieve man’s inhumanity to man.

Second, this destruction of Korean flight 007 and the 269 persons aboard should strengthen the resolve some of us feel for nuclear arms control and freeze, not dilute that emphasis.

Fear will increase as the arsenal of total destruction weapons builds in the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. Fear leads to hate, and hate is the highway to destruction.

Steps on the road to world peace be the finest memorial to those we mourn today.

Sermon:

My belief is that religious pluralism creates anxieties, but that such edgy feelings are more than compensated for by the opportunities of religious pluralism.

By religious pluralism, I mean that in the world there is no one faith that is universally regarded as true; no sacraments held to be valid by everyone; no religious authority obeyed by all. In our nation, it is basic that by constitutional sanction no one must adhere to a particular religion or any religion; no particular religion should have advantages another may not have; a person professing no formal religion at all does not lose any of the rights of a citizen because of such lack of religious affiliation.

Historically, of course, this has seldom been true. One faith, one creed, imposed by a king, a pope, or a prophet many times, many places has caused cruel punishments or frequently executed those who did not confirm “one true faith.” History teems with such horrible chapters such as the Crusades and Inquisition.

In 1408, to take one particular example of many, Archbishop Arundel of England “decreed that anyone making or using an unlicensed translation of the Bible was liable to the ultimate penalty of death at the stake; ... passed by the King and Parliament in 1400. (It said) ‘Divers false and perverse people of a certain new sect who preach and teach these days openly and privily divers new doctrines and wicked and heretical and erroneous opinions and hold and exercise schools and make and write books and wickedly do instruct and inform people shall be handed over to the secular courts and, if they do not abjure, shall be burned, that such punishment may strike fear in the minds of others.’” (See Tuchman, BIBLE AND SWORD, pp. 85-86).

Much of the world has changed. Religious pluralism – the right and privilege to hold differing faiths or no faith prevails in many countries. One could point to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, some developments of the Protestant Reformation, and the leadership of the United States in establishing the constitutional right of freedom of religion as prime factors in such growing tolerance.

Then, too, Pryser points out (p. 6), “Religion, once the be-all and end-all of primitive societies, becomes special and distinct in complex societies. It becomes an institution next to other institutions, a power next to other powers, a belief next to other beliefs.

“In the long run, differentiation and specialization will also produce the rudiments of religious pluralism, particularly when reading and writing become widely shared, when mobility across national boundaries increases, and when education becomes a value. The essence of pluralism ... is that people get a chance to see options between one religion and no formal religion.”

Unhappily, such tolerance and acceptance does not fully prevail everywhere. A cruel instance is the fanatic, Shiite Muslim dictatorship of Khomeini’s Iran where good, innocent people, including young women, are executed because they are of the Baha’i faith. At the present time there is no feasible way to prevent such persecution and execution in that country. We can only express horror and condemnation.

History teaches clearly that when power and insistence on one faith only are combined, persecution and execution of non-conformists will happen inevitably and the human spirit maimed.

Secondly, pluralism is an inseparable ingredient in Unitarian Universalist religion. The first response we commonly make to an inquiry is that there is no creed which one must believe, no dogma which must be taught, no religious authority to which one must submit. Of our ministers, Conrad Wright, notes, “the minister in a liberal church is not there to hold the keys of the Kingdom by admitting to the Lord’s table only those found worthy, as in churches that seriously accept a sacramental theology. Nor is he there to instruct the people in truths that the ordained clergy are peculiarly competent to expound, as in many confessional churches. He or she is there to live and learn and grow with the congregation.”

The premise of “no creed” leads logically, and in our midst, naturally, to individual freedom of belief. Consequently, among us there are varieties in the ways experience is interpreted – religiously, politically, culturally.

For example, we are willing, or unwilling, as the individual may decide, to use or attach meaning to the word “God.” Prayer for some may be a solace, communion with deity, or petition to deity. For others, “prayer” only raises the questions “To whom? For what?” The concern of many for more justice in the social order; or the strong feeling among many of us for nuclear freeze and disarmament, e.g., leads others to wonder, sometimes, if we gather on Sunday morning as an anti-establishment political caucus legitimized as a worship service by music and a collection.

Because we hold freedom to be a basic value and uphold the right of all among us to search for truth out of their own experience, we are vulnerable to generalizations that may be unfair, incomplete, or wide off the mark. In addition, most of the time when more orthodox persons ask about Unitarian Universalist beliefs it is in the context of what the orthodox person believes, rather than an open inquiry. Thus we seem led to speak most about what we don’t believe, rather than the principles which unite us.

I chuckled at an item this week (Wall St. Journal) that resonated, somewhat, with this difficulty of explaining a religion of inquiry based on ethical principles to someone whose mind-set tuned to particular faith words and traditions. The story is about Lord Curzon, the British aristocrat, who was Viceroy of India at the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th centuries. The story is that Lord Curzon asked friends, “how best he could reach out to the common man. They suggested he could begin by riding a public bus. After lunch, he return[ed] flustered and upset to his club ... with his umbrella waved a bus to halt ... boarded it and ordered the driver to take him home.” Sometimes the questions asked of us are as far off reality as Lord Curzon’s assumptions about what public transportation is and does.

Nevertheless, there are anxieties among us because we do not stand on the firm foundation of the old faiths. Irrespective of the issue, religious, political, occupational, (you name it), there is a certain psychological security in conformity and anxiety in non-conformity. We have large or tiny worries about “what people think of us.” Most people measure opinions with the ruler of conformity.

Kierkegaard, the radical Christian theologian, contended that in being autonomous, one creates anxieties of sufficient pressure that many choose to make [a] leap of faith to one authoritative religion or another just to escape the burden of freedom.

Eric Fromm, the psychoanalyst, dealt cogently with this fear in his classic ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM (written a generation ago but still worth the time if one is not familiar with it).

Some of this anxiety of personal autonomy was kindled among Unitarian Universalists as a consequence of the way TIME magazine reported the 1983 General Assembly in Vancouver. As a part of many proceedings, a commission appointed to review and suggest changes in our statement of principles reported and opened the subject to debate. TIME reported that among Unitarian Universalists there was “a growing consensus toward godlessness” and mentioned “Deleted Deity” and attributed this to the impact of feminism on our movement. I’m not sure of the old adage “to be great is to be misunderstood” but I am rather certain that to be non-conformist is to be misunderstood. I surmise that the TIME newsdesk grabbed on a misunderstanding because it made a more catchy but less truthful news story.

Walter Royal Jones, Chairman of the Commission, was interviewed by a Colorado newspaper. Roy made some points (copies available) which I condense:

“God is just a word. In itself it is not particularly holy, although the concepts it represents are.

“I’m never sure what anyone means by the use of the word ‘God,’ but if what they mean is real, our voting on the definition will not change that. We want to be open to as many languages as people have.”

Autonomy creates anxiety, but this is a paltry reason to give up freedom. Yes, we advocate pluralism in religion, both within our religious community and in the world. There is no creative growth in limiting ourselves to convictions that nobody will misunderstand.

I don’t know in which of Christopher Morley’s plays the following lines are read, but I aspire to such an attitude and believe it is an authentic guide for our communication and conduct:

A Liberal’s Song

From time to time
I have laid my heart bare before you,
And you did not like it;
So I must point out to you
It is my heart, not yours.
My wrongness, perhaps,
Is dearer to me
Than your rightness.
Yet you must not think
That when I disagree with you
I dislike you.
On the contrary:
I love you for having ideas of your own.
I know how you came to have those ideas.
And they are precious to you.
But mine are just as precious to me.

I believe only in such sharing of minds and hearts can we justify our claim to a thoughtful, concerned pluralism. We are kept alive by our I-Thou communication.

The historian Herbert Muller (FREEDOM IN THE WESTERN WORLD, p. 79) tells of an absurd but tragic historical episode which says more about our need to share convictions and ideas than chapters of a learned treatise.

Frederick II, King of Prussia in the latter part of the 18th century, was intrigued and curious about the new worlds that exploration had opened up – the Americas, the Far East, the South Pacific – disclosing cultures and religions vastly different than those of Western Europe, speaking different tongues. Frederick was curious about which was the original language – Hebrew (which he guessed), Greek, Latin, Arabic, or what not, and decided to find out. So he segregated eight infants at birth and strictly forbade anyone to speak to them. Thus sanitized from any one language, whatever they came to speak must be the original human language (or so he speculated). Of course, he never found out. All the children died.

That is a sorrowful analogy, but there are elements of truth in it – at least for us. We may not die physically, but Unitarian Universalism as a small but important part of the religious scene will survive if we maintain loyalty, not to particular words but to personal autonomy, faithful not to a faith but to human enterprise and its hopes and sharing our agreements and disagreements, not just to argue but to illumine the search for truth. Such are the opportunities [of a] Unitarian Universalist pluralistic religion.