Daniel Born
Unitarian Universalist Society of Marietta, 18 October 1998
Sometimes it feels like I’m running hard to keep up with history. At middle age I have only started to get comfortable with a secular worldview, something in progress since the age of twelve when I read those glossy National Geographic stories about fossil finds of early humans, Homo erectus and Australopithecus, the whole evolutionary picture, and began arguing with my father. Yet Darwin, who remains the most credible of the nineteenth-century intellectuals, would prove far less damaging to a theistic worldview than the reading I did at a small Mennonite college in the 1970s. This barrage of nineteenth-century thinkers left the edifice of my spiritual dwelling in tatters.
Ludwig Feuerbach taught me that all human thinking about the divine is a projection of human desire: in short, all theology is anthropology. Karl Marx, whose tomb I visited last month at Highgate Cemetery, taught me that religion flows from the material base of reality, it doesn’t precede it, and that religion is “the opiate” of oppressed people everywhere. Marx’s own deeply grieved sense of justice would make him say, famously, “The Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” It should not surprise us that, like Jesus, he would become an inspirational force to millions around the globe, in spite of the horrific barbarism carried out in his name. Finally, Sigmund Freud offered the most damaging assessment of religion of all: in his vastly influential book, The Future of an Illusion, he argued that belief in God stems from childlike wish fulfillment and reflects the human inability to fully grow up, to become adult. The French existentialists--Camus and Sartre, or as I pronounced them in my flat Kansas accent upon first seeing their names, CAME es and SAR truh--simply mopped up this operation, showing me that life was at bottom not meaningful but absurd, and it was up to me and not a religious system to make some meaning out of the mess.
If this intellectual pilgrimage didn’t offer much consolation, it did at least make me think I was a smart 20th-century person who had managed to strip away some illusions. In a sense, I took comfort that my own life reflected the secularizing tendencies of the age. I had always been taught that we were in the world but not of it, and I held onto my pacifist convictions as proof that I was still different in a way that another intellectual influence, Menno Simons, would approve. But taking stock now, at the age of 42, I can say I have entered the secular promised land with a sense of liberation after a lifetime spent in the pew. Feeling like I’ve entered the first gentle phase of detox, I’m no longer in that painful withdrawal phase of worry about departing from the one true faith.
I can smoke a clove without an ounce of guilt with my
brother-in-law, soak in the jacuzzi without worrying whether it
gives offense to the plain people’s ethic of the simple
life, read Ovid, Nietzsche, or Anais Nin and feel, as Melville
told Hawthorne after writing Moby-Dick, “as spotless as the
lamb.” I can attempt to cultivate my social and moral
obligations to the neighborhood and the planet as best I can.
This world rather than the world to come occupies my thinking and
living. I can freely consider the possibility that heaven is, as
Freud and Marx suggested, a projection of wishful human thinking
which functions to take the edge off our suffering. The
metaphysical edifice of my youth is pretty much crumbled and
I’m not sweating it any more.
But recently I’ve had a problem. Just about the time
I’m getting comfortable with my own secularity, my own
profane worldly knowingness, a fellow scholar comes along and
coins the term post-secular in order to make sense of the
explosion of religious interest in our time, and he starts me
thinking. My high-octane secularism begins to look about as dated
and touchingly old-fashioned as an Elliot Gould movie. Remember
Elliot Gould? Those films where he wears a brown corduroy jacket
with leather elbow patches and wears his irony like a badge.
Movies in which he takes on the world, whether it be Pentagon
bureaucrats, bankers or college deans? How quaint!
If the secular hipster is out, another image of the hardheaded secularist also seems dated. In plain terms, people, being a hardheaded secularist anymore isn’t that hip; in fact it’s sort of geeky, like Carl Sagan, or else the kind of thing you associate with WASPy guys who smoke cherry tobacco in carved pipes. You may laugh, but this realization dawned on me slowly. It took me a while to figure it out. But once I did, a certain regime seemed important. I started watching X-Files reruns to try and get a grip on the new gestalt, the age of post-secular fashion. I now listen more patiently when Ray Cicetti explains the hours of meditation he does with a Jesuit priest and Zen master. I listen to recovered alcoholic friends talk seriously about the higher power and the transforming experience of the twelve steps. I watch Xena, Warrior Princess, and realize the goddess talk on the web page is not just symbolic affirmation of women’s empowerment but indeed is about women and deity. (Men, they’re not talking just about women. They’re talking about God.)
We live in a time when demystifiying the world is no longer the principal goal for most people, or even most intellectuals. We’re disenchanted with the demystifiers and demythologizers. They’re rationalist killjoys. We’re seeking for mystery, for a little madness, something over the top. It used to be that intelligent people with liberal arts educations spoke about God with a sense of embarrassment. Now everybody seems to be talking about God, including the scientists looking at nebula 12 billion years old and telling us that once upon a time all the matter of the cosmos “was packed into a point smaller than a proton” (“Science Sees the Light,” Greg Easterbrook, New Republic, 12 Oct. 1998: 24) before the Big Bang erupted into billions of galaxies filled with billions of stars.
A student in my Bible as Literature class talks about a mass baptism conducted in a swimming pool: an event so frenzied that a lifeguard was hired to make sure no one accidentally drowned in the pandemonium. As the class and I break out laughing, I also sense a kind of awe--that people are able to attain this level of intense spiritual experience. We outwardly mock those slain in the spirit, but there’s a little bit of each of our spirits that wants to be slayed. We want epiphany. We want to be shaken. Like Hemingway’s often-parodied characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls, we want the earth to move. Just once! The sirens of romantic love still fill us, as the success of James Cameron’s wildly romantic film Titanic would indicate. We’re more than just heads, we’re even more than just talking heads!
Now I don’t mean to suggest this morning that we should all dump our Enlightenment reason and secularizing tendencies and take up Pentecostal religion like Robert Duvall’s character in “The Apostle,” or go out and handle a few snakes and feel ecstatic delirium.
[Rubber snakes.]
I know; you wanted bigger snakes, and real ones. I’m working
on it.
No, I am not saying we need to renounce reason and take up snakes or some other equivalent of shambala religion. A safer option for many of us, let’s admit it, is a couple of glasses of chardonnay while listening to our old Moody Blues albums.
But what I am saying is that the urge to “break on through to the other side,” as William Blake and Jim Morrison put it, the urge to penetrate everyday reasonable consciousness to another plane of existence, or to some irrational higher way of knowing, is an impulse especially apparent in the age we inhabit now: a time that is Post-Secular. A time when the gods of science and rationality have been found wanting, or not delivering all the goods, is a time when we as Unitarian Universalists need to take a hard look at who we are.
This is of special importance to us, because we of all Protestants are most wedded to the secularizing myth. We have embraced with most enthusiasm the claims of reason and Enlightenment, the triumphant march of scientific explanation. We have been most insistent on the idea that to be religious you don’t have to kiss your brains goodbye in a fog of sentimental enthusiasm. Our intellectual ascendancy is well known. Alfred Kazin writes of our forebears almost 200 years ago,
regression to dogma and obedience to clerical authority . . . hardly interested the descendants and opponents of Calvinism in New England under the leadership of William Ellery Channing, the leading spokesman for Unitarianism in America. Starting from their abhorrence of the doctrine of the Trinity, Unitarians became the most liberal and rational church in America, gathering the intelligentsia into its fold and taking over the Divinity School at Harvard (and the rest of Harvard, too). They were now the body of the elect in the name of what Channing called ‘unremitting appeals to the reason and conscience.’ (God and the American Writer, 13)
Yet Channing himself was split between his allegiance to rationality and his own personal mystical experience of the deity, and he never fully integrated these opposing elements of his theology. David Edgell notes in his biography of Channing that he
succeeded only in maintaining a precarious equilibrium among three more or less irreconciliable forces--Christianity, the ‘rationalism’ of the English Enlightenment, and the self-reliance of the Transcendentalists. He could not permanently unite such disparate elements; he could only teeter back and forth as now one and now the other of them threatened his intellectual balance. At one moment he refused the logical consequences of his Christianity, at the next he shrank from the implications of romantic self-reliance. Nor did he ever completely account himself a rationalist. (58)
Edgell wrote this in 1955, the highwater mark of postwar liberal mainline religion in America, so it is a surprise to read his somber conclusion about Channing: “The result of this unconscious wavering was failure” (58-59).
Perhaps Edgell didn’t understand that being a divided self is not necessarily a bad thing. And I find myself disagreeing with his assessment. Almost a half century after his pronouncement, Unitarianism continues to attract many people who, perfectly aware of the havoc that certain kinds of God talk have wreaked throughout history, courageously insist that fundamentalists need not corner the market on either God or spirituality. At its best, Unitarianism affirms a spirituality of unequivocal love and liberty, not judgment and fear.
But there are strains within Unitarianism that can be traced back to the divisions in Channing’s thinking itself. These strains affect us in this church this morning. Some of us are unreconstructed Enlightenment thinkers, believers in the power of reason, logic, and the empirical method. Others of us are more mystical, seeking insight from any variety of religious sources. All of this makes for some post-secular confusion. Unlike the Lutherans with their 99 theses, unlike the Anglicans with their 39 articles, we Unitarians have sailed out on the sea of faith with very few dogmatic instructions. Even complicating the matter further, we are not all convinced we’re sailing on a sea of faith. Are we a church or are we a society? Our own name leaves us in some doubt. Some of us want spirituality without belief. Still others voice a desire for mystical experience without the trappings of organized religion. Others of us simply crave a community of like-minded liberal folk who appreciate a good cup of coffee. This makes for a complicated agenda. Like Channing himself, we’re divided on some of these questions.
Writing in the December 1997 issue of the World magazine, Warren R. Ross noted the deep division within the ranks of Unitarian Universalist ministers meeting in 1995 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Attempting to draft a new covenant statement for the next century, the group split in noisy debate. The first sentence of the first draft of the statement read: “We covenant to affirm that the heart of our faith is a sense of the holy.” One attending minister reported back to her Minnesota congregation later: “Someone popped up right away to offer an amendment--to add after the word ‘holy’ the phrase ‘and a critical trust in the power of reason.’” Ross notes that the ensuing debate went on for almost two hours and “was never resolved” (World, Nov./Dec. 1997: 14).
It appears that the tensions present in Channing’s thinking two centuries ago have not gone away. And our own congregation illustrates quite vividly the different varieties of emphasis to be found within the Unitarian body proper.
I think it would be a mistake, however, to insist that we all find a perfect consensus on this matter of holiness and rationality, and I wish to end this morning’s reflections by making two observations about the post-secular age.
First, we need to admit that the post-secular age is one of great promise but also considerable peril. One of the most terrifying aspects of the world we live in is the rise of fundamentalism around the globe--not only in Christianity but also Judaism and Islam. Describing the revolutionary fervor gripping his own native Ireland at the beginning of this century, poet William Butler Yeats would write in “The Second Coming” that “the best lack all conviction; the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
We can be assured that fundamentalists, wherever they are, would find beneath their contempt the kind of nuanced thinking, sometimes divided thinking, that characterizes Unitarian Universalist tradition. And we cannot afford to ignore fundamentalism anymore, or condescend to it. It is no longer possible to write if off as a mere anachronism, a throwback of jihad fanatics or redneck good old boys who history is passing by. We enlightened liberal humanists used to think we were in step with the march of history; lately, however, the rise of fundamentalism should give us pause.
We have the specter of the Taliban of Afghanistan striking fear into the hearts of their Iranian neighbors--the same Iranian neighbors who harbor Islamic hardliners who have upped the reward for carrying out the fatwah of Salman Rushdie’s execution. Figure that one out. We have Bible-quoting militiamen in our own neck of the woods, although most of us would rather pretend not to notice. My nine-year-old daughter as well as the teenagers in our coming of age class have all told me lately that the most current phrase of contempt in our public schools is the line: “That’s Jewish.” If you dislike someone, tell them “they’re Jewish.” Yes, that’s what the youth are saying when they want to inflict a put-down. You don’t have to go to Mein Kampf to smell a little anti-Semitism; you can sniff it out right here in Washington County.
We live in a time when the Orthodox settlers on the West Bank quote the scriptures to justify their wresting of land away from the Palestinians, and fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews alike talk of “Third Temple Prophecy,” the rebuilding of the Jewish temple on the site of an Islamic mosque. Talk about a recipe for bloody conflict.
Violent coercion, not love and liberty, lie at the heart of these fundamentalist movements. The fundamentalists, whether Jewish, Christian, or Islamic, are the scary shocktroops of our post-secular age. They are the dark side of post-secular affirmation. Quoting from their holy books, they attempt to enforce the theocratic will not only with sacred texts but also automatic weapons. Claiming the love of Christ, they spew words of hate. We should not hesitate to condemn the fundamentalist distortion of the sacred. We should tell the world that a God who is not a God of love is not worthy of our worship. If we are to answer the fundamentalists successfully, however, we may need to revisit some of the holy texts they like to quote, and reclaim those texts for the liberal tradition.
Second, in regard to our own internal trafficking with the post-secular. Individually, we are at different points on the road to this form of wisdom, whatever it may be. Some of us are still on a secularizing journey, even if the secularizing myth, dominant for the past two hundred years, is now on the wane, as thinkers such as Freud and Marx are subjected to justifiable critique. Yet some of you may need to give me and others space when we admit we’re still kind of fond of those old Elliot Gould movies. Eventually, we’ll get around to Star Wars, the film that perhaps initiated the beginning of Hollywood’s post-secular phase.
To put it another way, within this congregation we need to give each other room to explore the tensions between rational religion and irrational religious experience. With each other, we have to embody the tolerance of the utopian religious community to which we are committed. Because if the words “Unitarian Universalist” don’t signify some element of utopia, what does?
I would suggest a way to embody our tolerance is to talk bluntly about our differences within these four walls in the kind of reasoned discourse that Channing would approve of. That is different from polite silence, the pretense that our internal differences are best left submerged rather than discussed.
Let me conclude this morning to say I’m feeling post-secular and confused. I’ve found some of those secular gods wanting and now I’m wandering in a new kind of desert with unfamiliar signposts. I’m wary of the religious turn in postmodern thinking, and especially wary of the renaissance of fundamentalist and anti-intellectual ways of thinking. Personally, I approach the post-secular with a sense of caution. If we are feeling disillusioned with rational and scientific ways of thinking, let us think twice before we enthusiastically embrace one more garden variety of the irrational. The religious impulse may be simply as Madonna put it in one of her songs a few years ago: “Let’s get unconscious.” I suppose I still want to hope that getting religion amounts to more than a loss of consciousness, more than an abandonment of rationality.
I would offer this vision of the post-secular spiritual journey, admitting to you that I still believe we can integrate rationality and spiritual ecstasy. Maybe Channing didn’t pull it off, but perhaps the authentic spiritual path means attempting the impossible.
Whether we tend more in the direction of Enlightenment rationalism or else in the direction of any variety of mysticisms, we are called to the common goal: to enlarge the sphere of love and of liberty in the world. The acid test of authentic religion is empirical: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
This is the important task of all, this quest for love and
liberty, and if we are Unitarian Universalists worth our salt we
will find a way to do it. I suspect that even the Apostle, though
denouncing us for our sins of intellect, would have to say amen.