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Witnessing Liberal Religious Faith
February 8, 2004

By John Ashenhurst

Recently Yvonne and I had a conversation about how to react to friends who in the course of discussion make what could be heard as anti-democratic comments.  The remark might be prefaced by “I'm not prejudiced. I have nothing against (fill in the blank). But you know how they are. They blah-blah-blah.”

The friend's generalization might have an element of truth but that isn't the point. It's the condemnation of difference - difference that isn't illegal on the one hand and may be quite interesting on the other - that is so galling. Why not celebrate and be enriched by difference rather than criticize it. And implicit in these remarks always is a sense of superiority, of being better than this other group, whomever they happen to be.

These situations usually make me mad. How about you?

When anti-democratic remarks are made by friends or acquaintances we would normally describe as nice and with whom we intend to have further interaction, it's tempting to just be silent, not even acknowledging the offensive remark. On the other hand, what one wants to do is to correct the friend, pointing out his ignorance or hypocrisy and then argue until he sees the errors of his ways. But somehow, neither silence nor attack seems quite the right response. Certainly one wants to stand up for, that is witness for one's core beliefs but it doesn't make sense to become some kind of political correctness vigilante either.

Sometimes this witnessing is straightforward. My first mother-in-law liked to point out that people with lighter skin were smarter than people with darker skin. She didn't have a scientific explanation. It was just something she knew to be true. I would argue with her but she never changed her mind. Finally I had to replace her with a more enlightened mother-in-law.

In 1958 when I was a sophomore at all-white York High School in Elmhurst, Illinois, Mr. Kohler, our human reproduction health class teacher, (do you remember that?) told us our next unit would be square dancing - with girls - in the girls gym. I don't remember the general reaction to this news but most of us probably looked forward to square dancing with the same enthusiasm we would a visit to the dentist.

But what Mr. Kohler said next was electrifying. One of the girls in the class was a Negro and he wanted to know which of us would be willing to dance with her. He said once he had his volunteers, it would be possible to make up dance squares so that everyone would be comfortable and the girl, new to the school, would not be embarrassed. A handful of us stepped forward and the square dance session came off without a hitch. I actually enjoyed the class and got to know the, for me, exotic black girl.

Summers during my college years I had some of the worlds worst jobs; hard, dirty, and low paying. I worked with redneck refugees from the south picking orders for Victor Gaskets. I worked with Mexicans on production lines making Wollensak tape recorders and blacks in warehouses loading semi-trailers with 70-pound bags of Spiegel catalogs. In grad school I improved my lot and drove buses for the Chicago Transit Authority - managing to avoid being robbed at knifepoint or running over anyone.

I didn't hold myself aloof from the people I worked with. I talked with them. I heard much about their lives, some of it funny, some of it poignant, some of it cruel and painful. I rarely talked about my other life, at an Ivy League College. It would have been in bad taste. After all, I just was passing through. They were in for the duration. I truly was interested and sympathetic and tried hard never to be condescending. There was nothing I could do for them except respect them and their struggles. I never felt better than the people I worked with - only much luckier.

This last summer I made our youngest son, James, wash dishes at the Starfish Grill. He hated the work but I think believed me when I told him in the long run it would make him more compassionate, help him understand the challenges many people face, and help him realize how fortunate he is. I think at some point he'll forgive me for subjecting him to a summer of living hell.

So what are these anecdotes about?

I'm trying to find some examples of what could be construed of as witnessing liberal religious faith. You each have your own lists. And you've heard amazing, true story examples of official Unitarian witnessing.

My favorite is of Michael Servetus, our reluctant Unitarian martyr. After escaping the Inquisition in Spain and hanging out in what he assumed was safer Protestant Switzerland, Servetus was picked up by Calvin in 1553 and told to abandon his Unitarian faith. Servetus demurred so Calvin had him burned at the stake. Servetus wasn't happy about it. As the flames were about to consume him, rather than make some ringing metaphysical statement Servetus is reported to have observed with some regret “I should have stayed in Spain.”

OK let's step back for a minute.

I want to pick up where I left off last October when I last had the opportunity to address this august body. If you remember I talked about Emerson and Unitarian Faith.

I concluded that talk by saying that liberal religious faith is a deep commitment to the ultimate worth of every human being and their potential to find their way in the moral and religious universe. It's a radical approach to religion and consistent with foundational ideas of democracy. It puts hierarchies and priests aside. It puts human worth and dignity ahead of creeds - and this world ahead of some other. It is profoundly human-centered while at the same time transcendental, that is extending beyond the bounds of scientific proof. It is a commitment to a way of life, a set of values; not a description of the world as it is.

We have some idea of what liberal religious faith is - but what is “witnessing” all about?

For some Christians and followers of revealed religion generally, witnessing is the attestation of some special fact. It is testifying, for instance, that it is historically true that Christ died, is risen, and will come again or that the world was created in six days. In its most active form, witnessing is called evangelizing. Pope John Paul has exhorted his flock: "It's not enough to know Christ, we must bring him to everyone!" or as the Bible commands, “Go out into all the world” to spread the good news.

Once when I was at the Salt Lake airport between flights, I watched scores of smiling families with tear-stained cheeks say goodbye to their earnest young Mormon sons and brothers outbound on their two-year missionary trips. It was a stirring site. Tuesday, this last week, a Jehovah's Witness couple came to my front door with their Bibles open and ready. I told them I'd already heard the pitch and wasn't interested. They were disappointed but they'd done the best they could to save me.

That experience prompted me to try to imagine what it would be like to be a Unitarian Universalist missionary. I can see it now. I'd go door-to-door asking people what their religious beliefs were and when they told me, I'd say, “That's really interesting. That's great. I'm happy for you.” And if they replied that they didn't have any religious beliefs, I would say “I really understand your point of view. I often feel that way myself.” Then I'd give them a card with the U.U. covenant and Website address, and invite them to come to one of our Sunday services.

Why does it seem bizarre to think of UU missionaries? Shouldn't we be witnessing our liberal religious faith to the larger community in order to counteract the evangelizing by religious conservatives?

We can't. Conservative Christian's believe they are testifying to a fact. We, on the other hand, would be testifying to our commitment, our decision about the right way to live. They believe that truth exists independent of human experience. We think it's the result of continuous human struggle. They're promulgating a belief system; we're encouraging a methodology, a social and political arrangement that allows for diversity in religious belief. Christians have religious beliefs. We have commitments to democracy in its broadest sense. Some Christians believe that a theocracy is the best form of government and put up with democracy reluctantly. They think God comes first. We think the constitution comes first.

People of liberal religious faith will always be at a disadvantage to those with conservative religious faith. We see ambiguity. They see truth. We offer a process. They have answers. We're tentative. They're certain. We see metaphor. They see fact. We're comfortable with irony. They see irony as a sort of moral turpitude. Religious liberals may laugh together at the fundamentally paradoxical nature of the human condition. Religious conservatives don't understand what's so funny. We're alone together in the universe. They have God.

Over Christmas I had an opportunity to talk a good deal with my 87 year-old mother. I noticed the book “The DaVinci Code” on her counter. My sister had given it to her but my mother didn't want to read it:

JA: Why not?
EA: It says that Jesus had a wife.
JA: Why is that a problem?
EA: I'm not comfortable with the idea.
JA: If you had grown up in Iran would you be a Muslim?
EA: Oh, sure. We believe what we do because of how we're raised.

My mother likes having a specific belief system and practice. Unitarian Universalism seems a thin soup to her. But she understands that her Christianity is contingent. It's operationally true. It has instrumental value. It's not absolutely true. My mother has a kind of liberal religious faith. It has Christian content but with democratic underpinnings.

I think many Americans are in the same boat. They practice Christianity. They'll even testify to it. But in the back of their minds they're aware of the contingency, the accidental nature of what they believe and are therefore unwilling to impose it on anyone else but they don't want anyone messing with what they hold dear either.

Now I want to talk about Walt Whitman, a Unitarian Great Uncle of a sort, and how he witnessed his faith in the democracy of spirit.

I've had a chance recently to go back to Walt Whitman's poetry and to read a bit about his life. He's the quintessential poet of America and democracy. A hundred a fifty years ago, he posited a society incredibly rich in diversity. His vision is so contemporary and relevant that it seems prophetic - as in fact it was intended to be. He'd be delighted at some of progress that has been made since he died but disappointed at the slow pace of change and recent retrogress. From a Whitmanian perspective, we have very far to go to achieve our country.

In Whitman's view, America has a special purpose and his poetry, especially the protean Leaves of Grass, provides a vision for America. In his 1998 set of lectures, Achieving Our Country, my favorite college professor, Richard Rorty, puts into perspective both Whitman and John Dewey, the activist, pragmatist, philosopher and keeper of Whitman's vision.

Rorty says, “They wanted Americans to take pride in what America might, all by itself and by its own lights, make of itself, rather than in America's obedience to any authority - even the authority of God. He quotes Whitman:

`And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God'

Rorty goes on, “Whitman thought there was no need to be curious about God because there is no standard, not even a divine one, against which the decisions of a free people can be measured. Americans, he hoped, would spend the energy that past societies had spent on discovering God's desires on discovering one another's desires. Americans will be curious about every other American, but not about anything which claims authority over America.”

“Both Dewey and Whitman viewed the United States as an opportunity to see ultimate significance in a finite, human, historical project, rather than in something eternal and inhuman. They hoped America would be the place where a religion of love would finally replace a religion of fear.”

“They wanted to put the hope for a casteless and classless America in the place traditionally occupied by the knowledge of the will of God. They wanted that utopian America to replace God as the unconditional object of desire. They wanted the struggle for social justice to be the country's animating principle, the nation's soul.”

For both Whitman and Dewey, the terms “America” and “democracy” are shorthand for a new conception of what it is to be human - a conception that has no room for obedience to a non-human authority, and in which nothing save freely achieved consensus among human beings has any authority at all. `Democracy' said Whitman, is a great word, whose history…remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.”

What's the goal of America? What is the nature of its democracy? The “full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions,” says Whitman.

Rorty continues “…No past achievement, not Plato's or even Christ's, can tell us about the ultimate significance of human life. No such achievements can give us a template on which to model our future. The future will widen endlessly….Individual life will become unthinkably diverse and social life will be unthinkably free.”

I say, count me in. I find myself enormously sympathetic with Whitman, and I'm eager to understand Dewey more fully.

Emerson, one of our Unitarian great-grandfathers, was already established and famous when Whitman sent him a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Emerson wrote Whitman a glowing response and suspected that Whitman might be the great poet of American democracy that Emerson had called for in his writings. Though Emerson, Thoreau, and the other Transcendentalists thought Whitman paid too much attention to sex (why is that a surprise), all saw greatness in his poetry and its appropriateness to America's unique experiment.

Whitman, of course, thought they were unjustifiably prudish. He intentionally and consistently applied his radical democratic view to the human body as well as human society. He thought that all parts deserve equal acknowledgement and appreciation. Some parts aren't somehow better than other parts. The brain isn't better than the foot, or eye the ear.

For me, one of the most striking things about Whitman's life was the years he spent with Union and Confederate wounded, sick, and maimed young soldiers put up in tents and conscripted office buildings in Washington D.C. He had gone to Virginia seeking his brother George, who his family feared had been badly wounded or killed at the battle of Fredricksburg. He found his brother, only slightly injured it turned out, but once Whitman began to talk to and try to help the hundreds, then thousands of young men he saw suffering he never retuned to Brooklyn and New York. He couldn't leave these young men who gave their bodies up to the vision of democracy. He spent his days walking through the wards. He wrote letters to the boys' families. He listened to their stories. He gave them hope. He gave them love.

Whitman was a witness to his liberal religious faith. He expressed his vision in his poetry, writings he hoped could become a kind of Bible of American democracy. And he gave his time, compassion, and health to the young men whose blood had been spilled so copiously for America's future.

To come back to here and now - to this place, many years later, and far away from the hospitals and taverns Whitman frequented and the desk at which he wrote his poetry.

Our liberal religious faith is certainly close to if not identical with what Whitman so eloquently described in his poetry and so poignantly expressed in his life.

How do we witness this faith in our most simple and everyday circumstances, for instance when a friend says, “Well you know how they are” intending to demean some ethnic, racial, or other group?

What would Whitman say? He might say “Well, I don't know as I do exactly know how they are. But if they're different from us, I sure would like to meet them.”

What would you say?