Necessities Of Religious Witness

June 1, 1986
Lakeland

Did you ever stop to think what would happen if people took religions seriously and witnessed to their religion? Helen Woodson’s letter from prison is a prime example of a woman who took her religion seriously, witnessed to it, and was sentenced to prison for eighteen years. Although I am not a Christian, Helen Woodson’s witness is an example, a discipline, and a model of religious witness.

If we unloose our imagination for the moment: in this country, there are more than one hundred million persons who are members of some religious organization or who profess some variety of religious allegiance. Admitting that there are vast differences of belief, practice, and tradition in these hundreds of religious groups, would things be different if all of these millions of persons decided moral questions and social issues by the ethics of the religion they affirm?

Would the affairs of business be conducted exactly as they are now if there was honest acceptance of the Golden Rule as the standard for the exchange of goods and services?

Would our system of criminal codes and punishments be unchanged if all the persons who say they are Christians were to insist that the words of Jesus meant exactly what he said, “Judge not that ye be not judged.”

Would there be any difference in the way disagreements are resolved between nations if all persons who trace their religious heritage back to the Hebrews of ancient Palestine, that is, Jews, Moslems, and Christians of all varieties, were to obey, without qualification, the ancient commandment that most persons would SAY is sacred, “Thou shalt not kill?”

Would there still be a serious deficiency of dedication to education by boards, governments, citizens creating the serious shortage of competent teachers to lead our children if all were to take seriously the sayings of Jesus, “Let the little children come unto me, for such is the kingdom of heaven,” or, “Woe unto him who would hurt one of these little ones, it were better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and be dropped into the sea?”

Would it still be a crime to jackhammer a missile silo, or would it be a crime to build a nuclear silo?

Add your own examples.

The question of what could be, or what might have been, if people took religion seriously, is one of those “if” questions which will not be answered soon, if the past is any guide to the future. Progress is so faltering that ages pass before we are able to measure the forward strides of the human family.

There is a parallel question: suppose each of us proposed the following to himself or herself: “What would my life be like if I took religion seriously and witnessed to it? What would I do, or try to do, if at this point in my life I should decide firmly, and with no turning back, ‘This is my religion and I’m going to live up to it, regardless of whether it makes me popular or unpopular – whether I survive or perish.’ What would our lives be like? What would our attitudes be toward others? We know from her letter from prison what Helen Woodson’s life was like, and we know her attitude toward herself and others.

If Unitarian Universalism has any truth, it must be relevant to this twentieth, soon to be twenty-first century world, [and] these ideas might be suggested if we were to take this religion seriously.

First, we would try to understand religion – consider what religion has meant in the known history of the human family. In our understanding, we would have to become sensitive to areas of human need, which religions have served:

We would recognize the priestly element in all religions. The priest is generally believed to be a channel of communication between a person and God, or the gods. In most ancient religions, as well as in the largest religions today, the priest is a man ordained and set apart. In Protestantism, each person is his or her own priest; there is a “priesthood of all believers.” The priestly tasks run the gamut of religious practice, beginning with, maybe, witchcraft or shamanism at one end of the scale, and at the other, the vision of one person assisting another to get right with his/her God. But, I believe, deeper than that, priestly service is when one meets another in personal need, helps in tangible ways to heal. In this sense, Helen Woodson acted in a priestly capacity when she encouraged an illiterate woman to commence school. Helen Woodson was in prison for breaking the law on a painful, pressurizing social issue – she acted on the conviction that nuclear weapons must be disarmed, nuclear weaponry be abandoned as a tool of war and diplomacy. But her love and concern was expressed for others who were in prison for different causes. She served the priestly task of religion serving individuals.

We will not understand religion either as a force in history or a power in our lives unless we recognize that religion has always gathered different groups in fellowship. Whether we consider the ancient Hebrews welded together by the religion of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, with the eventual political/social consequence of liberation from bondage; or whether we think of some of the early Christians defying the most powerful empire and finding strength in common worship; or whether we recall 19th century Americans gathering together on the frontiers, singing, worshiping, and building their social lives around their rude churches – in every instance, religion has fostered a bond that brought a group together and kept it together. Helen Woodson and her fellow inmates are a fellowship – no by-laws, of course, no denomination, no creed, but a religious fellowship. Her letter is witness to that bonding experience. Our worship and programs will [have] little enduring meaning unless we are welded together as a group.

Our efforts will be trivial if we are not able to be bonded together to the end that we will know each other better as men and women, as fellow-learners of religion and life, as fellow parents, grandparents, and friends concerned to lead our children to the experience of a religion that we can teach in honesty and maintain without double-talk.

Then, too, important to our understanding is the recognition of the prophetic role of religion. In our tense, suspicious world, there is nothing that needs greater understanding than the historic prophetic stand of individuals who witnessed publicly to their faith.

Religion in its prophetic role protests and attempts to turn around things as they are. The ethical prophet penetrates through to our individual and group selfishness and charges us to repent, to change. Was Jesus very popular? How many of his multitudes that, we are told, flocked to hear him, stayed with him? Only the disciples were with him in Gethsemane. If the traditions have truth, these scattered in the days of the cross. Amos, in more ancient days, was quickly silenced when he began criticizing swindling merchants and lazy women; John Hus and Servetus were burned to death, the ashes of Wycliffe were scattered on the Thames – the martyrs are many.

We will not understand religion unless we recognize that many of the names we revere and admire were spattered with mud, cruelly treated, and not tolerated in the time in which they lived. Perhaps religious truth has to be forged in the fire of the ignorant or heedless crowd, kindled by unscrupulous tyrants and hardened by prophetic fearlessness. Helen Woodson witnessed to her religion; she will be in jail until 1996. After that, she will always have what we call a “prison record.” That stain and burden she will always carry because she obeyed the inner demand of conscience to witness publicly.

But, at least for Unitarian Universalists, if religion is to be taken seriously enough to witness for it, we must create it for ourselves. Religion is an emotion. Secondhand emotions are never as deep or thrilling as the real thing.

Creating our own religion involves a difficult pilgrimage. The journey is life-long and we will be perplexed by doubts and fears as we try to grasp a religion that answers our need for a secure, buoyant faith. If a banker is wise to ask for credentials before cashing a check for a stranger, then most assuredly we should examine a part of life as important as personal religion.

It has come down to us that Jesus told his followers, “Neither do I tell you by what authority I teach.”

This saying has had several interpretations. But each time I read it, I get the feeling that what Jesus was saying was “Don’t believe me or follow me because you think I’m sent by God; I am not telling you if I possess any authority.” It is as though Jesus was saying, “you develop these convictions for yourself. Then, if they are right and good for you, if they give you the same assurance of the goodness and love of God they give me, then you will be a follower of The Way; you will need no approval from an elder, or even from me to hold fast to the religion you believe.”

If we take religion seriously, we will cherish convictions that not only give a code for moral behavior worthy of the name religion, but also lend zest to our lives, and we will discover that religion can thrill us with profound joy. Think again of Helen Woodson’s letter from prison. Is there not a sense of joy amid the confinement but also opportunities of prison life?

We need to take our religion seriously enough to communicate it – to witness to it.

Dr. Kilpatrick once said, “It can be said unequivocally that the best single measure of an institution’s fitness to serve and to survive – whether the institution be a government, a railroad, the cinema, an art museum, a law, a newspaper, a city slum, ... [and I’m sure he would include the church] is the total educative effect of that institution on the living of human beings.”

That is a test for us, too – what effect is our religion having on others? Can we take it seriously enough to communicate it?

Many of you have read about Brook Farm, the Utopian experiment conducted by some of New England’s leading intellectual figures of more than one hundred and fifty years ago. These high-minded scholars, preachers, and teachers were disgusted by the failure of civilization to measure up to the kind of living that Jesus taught. These persons felt that our competitive, discriminating civilization was a hopeless situation from which to expect religious living and religious attitudes. So Ripley, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Dana, and others set up Brook Farm. All possessions were held in common. Everybody was supposed to do his share of the work and the fruits of the harvest were the property of all. No one was to work for another; no one was to be a slave.

The experiment in communal living failed, as so many failed. Perhaps the idealistic scholars did not become aware that one could not be writing poetry in the library and hoeing potatoes at the same time. But even if the experiment had been more successful for the small group, as Henry Steele Commager pointed out, “while it had brought happiness of a sort to the experimenters ... it advanced society not a whit. It did not solve problems, it ignored them; it did not reform institutions, it evaded them. It was an escape, a retreat, and it left social evils untouched.”

If we take our religion seriously, we will try to witness to it by the lives we lead in this complex, social, political world, not by hiding in some Brook Farm or seven-story mountain.

What is there to witness to today, I can only suggest the words of Andrei Sakharov from his 1975 Nobel Peace Prize address: “We must fight for every individual and every act of injustice and against every violation of human rights....

“We need a flexible, pluralist, tolerant society, which will foster a climate of free inquiry and debate and the open-minded use of all of the successes of all social systems. What is detente? What is rapprochement? We are concerned not with words, but with a willingness to create a better and more decent society, a better world order.”

There are not many who have both the conviction and courage of a Helen Woodson, a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King, Nelson & Winnie Mandela. But the old cliché still holds, “If we do not stand for something, we will fall for anything.”