The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem, Oregon

LET’S BE REASONABLE

The Reverend Richard R. Davis

                                                                                                                       May 24, 2009

            It’s not hard for me to imagine this dialogue between two older people who knew me in my boyhood days back in Columbus , Ga. :  “Wonder whatever became of Rick Davis?”

 “He entered the ministry.” 

“No, seriously, what’s he really done with his life?”

 “I’m telling you for real – he’s a minister.” 

“Well, now I do believe in miracles!” 

            Actually, miracles were one of the things that put me at odds with the church in the first place.  Around Morningside Baptist Church in Columbus , Ga. , it was no secret that I had a pretty dim view of religion in general.  I couldn’t help myself – I was just a natural born skeptic.  

One Sunday we asked our Sunday school teacher – a good man, cast into deep theological waters with restless, pre-adolescent, caged animals – why God, and guys like Moses and Jesus were no longer around to perform miracles like they had in Bible days. 

Our teacher seemed to wonder the same thing but realized he had to be the official spokesperson for the Southern Baptist establishment.  His role was to get us to stop asking troublesome questions and just accept what we were taught on faith.  So he explained to us that back in those primitive times people lacked faith, and God had to pull out all the stops to get their attention and prove to them that he was for real and he meant business.  But now, in modern times we were more sophisticated and didn’t need to witness such miracles to have faith. 

It was a lame, improvised explanation, and we all knew it.   In order for us to have the kind of faith they were asking us to have, we most certainly would have appreciated some miracles to seal the deal.  It seemed so unfair of God - people in Bible days got to see all this amazing stuff:  Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea and Joshua stopping the sun and the moon, making the walls of Jericho come tumbling down with trumpet blasts and Jesus walking on water and healing the blind.   And we got what?  We got to be cooped up in a little cubicle hearing of the great things God and his prophets and his son had done ages ago.  

In truth, I knew the real answer to this question:  It wasn’t that we didn’t get to see such miracles in our own time – no one had ever seen them.  They had made it all up. 

The church had a ready argument for skeptics like me – we were like Jesus’ disciple, Thomas, who needed to see the scars in the resurrected Jesus’ hands before he would believe it was really him and not some imposter.   Thomas was not a total villain like Judas Iscariot, but he was depicted as a grating, whiny character you’d be glad not to have come to your birthday party.   The best disciples and followers were those who had faith without seeing:  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.” (John 20:29)  – that was the ideal. 

Well, I knew I didn’t have that kind of faith and the choice I faced seemed clear to me – either shut off my mind and believe what I was told to believe or leave the church – which is to say, choose religion or choose the truth because you couldn’t have both.   So I chose truth, and left the Southern Baptist church.  I’ve never regretted leaving.

Early American Unitarians struggled with the same dilemma.  From their earliest days they were thoughtful, rational people who esteemed the use of reason in their religious lives.  As William Ellery Channing, often called “the Father of American Unitarianism,” put it:  “Say what we may, God has given us a rational nature, and will call us to account for it.  We may let it sleep, but we do so at our peril.”  Indeed, a primary reason the Unitarians formed as a movement was because they perceived the great peril posed by the great number of people who seemed to completely abandon the use of reason in their religious lives.   When they witnessed the emotional fervor displayed at religious revivals that were sweeping up and down the eastern seaboard of their young nation, they were alarmed.  They didn’t trust strong religious emotion un-tethered to reason.  They knew the harsh lessons of history - they knew that religious fervor that denied the use of reason had so often turned into a demonic force.  Indeed, the European continent, from which their forebears had immigrated, dripped with the blood of innocent victims of irrational religious intolerance.  They wanted none of the cruel oppression of authoritarian religion that denied people the right to think and feel for themselves on this continent. 

Yet embracing reason was a monumental challenge for the early American Unitarians – it forced them to face the same intellectual dilemma I faced when I left the Southern Baptist church – believe in what the Bible says or believe in what your mind tells you.  Now they couldn’t just toss the Bible aside, so they came up with a theological/ philosophical solution called “supernatural rationalism.”   Briefly, they affirmed that what the Bible said, including all the supernatural and miraculous events recorded therein, was true.  But the rest of our lives were governed by rational principles.  In other words, they compartmentalized reality in their minds – there was the ancient, biblical supernatural realm where the miracles occurred and the modern realm of everyday reality where they did not.  This allowed them to affirm both biblical truth and rational truth. 

It was a temporary solution which only lasted a couple of decades before the Transcendentalists came roaring in around 1838.  Their chief spokesman, Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed that our lives are miracle enough and the Christian church created a false vision by insisting upon a belief in supernatural miracles, which he bluntly characterized as “a monster . . .not one with the blowing clover and falling rain.”  The older Unitarian establishment was aghast at such “blasphemous” pronouncements, but time was not on their side.  Soon new biblical scholarship and scientific advances – most especially the publication of Darwin ’s Origin of the Species – pulled the rug out from under them.  And new discoveries concerning the origin of the scriptures clearly showed that a literal belief in the Bible was untenable.  Scholars found solid evidence that the Bible was written, compiled and edited by people from many different times and eras and that those miracles were not literally true.   Thus, among the Unitarians, supernatural rationalism became a philosophical relic.  

From that time forward Unitarians were never united in their theology (and may never be), but we were and remain united in our affirmation of the value of reason--which is to say, no one should be coerced into believing something that flies in the face of reason.  Please don’t get me wrong here.  Reality cannot be reduced to some handy rational formula – the unfathomable, infinite grandeur of reality transcends the powers of human reasoning, it soars far beyond our comprehending minds. Personally I believe there is a spiritual dimension to reality, affirmed by mystics in all religious traditions which affirms there is an underlying sacred unity. And I would not claim that miracles – such as spontaneous remissions of illness – are not possible.   But this appreciation of the trans-rational does not subvert or deny our use of reason.  Reason is like eyesight – we need it to walk on ethical, moral paths.  When we are urged to shut our reasoning eyes by irrational or authoritarian forces, we stray from the path of reason, truth and compassion, and there is hell to pay.  As Voltaire warned:  “Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Consider those who say that theirs is the only true religion, that all others are false.  Why?  Well, because their scripture – or their understanding of their scripture – which they say is the only valid word of God says that this is true, so that’s that.  Or consider those who say that homosexuality is a sin.  Why?  Not because it is inherently harmful but because they claim it is condemned by God in the scripture, and that’s the final word, the ultimate authority before which reason and compassion and humanitarian concern have no say.  There are those who say that women cannot be priests or pastors.  Why?  Is it because women lack the intelligence, the faith, the wisdom, or any of the other gifts that make for good ministers?  No, of course not.   We are told that it’s because God implicitly revealed a preference for male clergy because all of Jesus’ disciples were male. 

Here’s what it boils down to – we have this gift of reason, yet we are told that in order to remain in right relationship with God, we must abandon it when certain scriptural passages or church teachings overrule it. 

One of our earliest liberal religious forbears, the Rev. Charles Chauncey, who struggled against irrational religious adversaries in his own day, spoke of “the disregard they express for the dictates of reason.  They are above the force of argument…. Since they believe that truth has come to them from the Spirit, they take the attitude that they are certainly in the right, and know themselves to be so….[they are] not only infinitely stiff and tenacious, but impatient of contradiction, censorious and uncharitable;   they encourage a good opinion of none but such as are in their way of thinking and speaking.”  

In other words, they believe that the truth has come to them because they have faith – they are not doubting Thomas’s, impious, questioning skeptics.   Rational argument is to no avail since they have joined a religious conglomerate that has a total monopoly on truth.  As one bumper sticker put it:  “God said it. I believe  it. That settles it.”  Personally, I find this very unsettling and painful.  It builds a high wall between people; it separates us and divides us from one another. 

On a number of occasions members here have told me about family members and neighbors with whom a rational discussion about our faith or one’s philosophy of life is not possible.  Now here in America we have bemoaned political walls that divide people, but remain strangely mute concerning the theological walls that split families and society apart.

As Susan Jacoby notes in her book The Age of American Unreason, this tragic state of affairs stems from a false understanding of religious tolerance:  “One of the most powerful taboos in American life concerns speaking ill of anyone else’s faith – an injunction rooted in confusion over the difference between freedom of religion and granting religion immunity from the critical scrutiny applied to other social institutions.”

Religious beliefs should be fair game for public debate. Especially when this affects us all, as when people make unreasonable, unsubstantiated claims about ultimate reality that defy the dictates of reason and compassion, claiming that their source of authority is some ancient text or some church hierarchy, we are called to challenge this.  This is not to be mean spirited or adversarial - I want others to challenge me if they perceive that I am in the throes of some false idea, too.    

Mind you, I’m not at all original in calling for this.  Thomas Paine, a true firebrand (sometimes called “the Michael Moore of the late 18^th Century”) originally issued this summons to apply the use of reason in religion in his widely read, audacious, pull no punches treatises Common Sense and The Age of Reason.  His was a call that helped inspire the American revolution.  Paine knew how essential the free use of reason would be in establishing a democratic society.

Paine bristled at undemocratic, authoritarian faith wherein the priests and the dogmatic theologians insisted that people not think for themselves but to believe what they were told.  His words sound a bit quaint today, but still have the ring of truth:  “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church , by the Protestant Church , nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church.”  We call this freedom of conscience. 

This may sound impious, but really, Paine simply called for the same level of spiritual maturity and freedom as did the ancient Buddha, when he said “Be ye lights unto yourselves” or Jesus, when he challenged the oppressive orthodoxies of his own day and invited people to live a free and abundant life.

Here are two reasons why it is vital for us to champion the cause of religion grounded in reason, not superstition or authoritarian decree.

First, as it stands today, too many people feel they must make a false choice – either choose to have religion or intellectual freedom and integrity, but you cannot have both.   As a consequence, the fastest growing province on the American religious map is not Christian fundamentalism or evangelical faith – it is those who are estranged from religion altogether.  This segment is up to 15% of the population, double what it was just a few years ago – and it continues to grow. There is a cost here, because personal connection to religious community and the role of religious communities is vital to the health of our society.   Those who have no such connections are more likely to be alienated, socially isolated and alone.  And religious communities, at their best, serve as the conscience of a nation, challenging widespread injustice and indifference.  So, this growing secularization does not bode well. 

Secondly, religions that demand that people shutter their minds to new insights and discoveries from the arts, sciences and humanities fuel one of the most disturbing strands in American history – anti-intellectualism, a denigration of the life of the mind.   Thomas Jefferson saw the potential danger here:  “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”   Simply put, this is because ignorance gives the forces of superstition, authoritarianism and irrationality free rein.  And especially during times of social stress and strain, these forces can take us down the road to ruin. 

So stand by this faith – this faith whose founders knew that the betrayal of reason, a denigration of the life of the mind, is a betrayal of the cause of truth.