“Ethics in the Pulpit”

or

“A Call for X-Rated Civics Education and…To March!”

Rev. John E. Gibbons

Delivered at First Parish in Bedford

October 23, 2005

Like many of you, I was waiting downstairs to have my picture taken for the new photo directory and was entertained looking at some of the old picture directories:  the hairstyles, the paisley shirts, the way families were referred to by the name of the male head of household – the Charles Schwerin Family, for example, and – look! – there’s Mrs. Charles Schwerin.   And then Dean Groves pointed to a teenage picture of himself in which, around his neck, he was wearing a large peace symbol.  I asked if he still had it but, alas, he said no.

Writing this sermon, I was reminded of a button I still have that predates the peace symbol and I put it here on my robe.  It’s sort of a v-sign over a horizontal line, representing (I think) a phoenix rising from the ashes; and it was an early civil rights symbol.  I was about 12 years old in 1965 when I first wore this pin on a Sunday afternoon when – with my minister – I participated in a civil rights demonstration in Oak Park, Illinois.  It was a fair housing rally and march, and we protested the discriminatory red-lining practices of realtors that allowed minorities to live in certain parts of the city but not to “cross the line” into white neighborhoods.  And there were also restrictive real estate covenants that prohibited homes from being sold to blacks or Jews or anybody-but-WASPS.  Many of you recall these things.

Fair housing was a rallying issue all across the country, and there are many people here in this room today whose first taste of social activism came in the cause of fair housing right here in Bedford and who formed lasting friendships and connections with this church as a result.

As a young person, I was so impressed that my church and my minister were not just talking (or studying or praying or meditating or pondering) about our values but we were actually doing something to change the world in accordance with our liberal religious value that all people should be treated fairly.  I wouldn’t have used the word, but the experience of participating in that demonstration was empowering: we knew that we could make a difference.  And, it felt good to be outdoors, singing and shouting slogans, holding signs; and with particular fondness I recall marching down the sidewalk and seeing one of the white secretaries who worked in my quite conservative father’s office.  When she saw me, her boss’s son, at the head of the march, carrying a sign, amidst a noisy multi-racial rabble, the look of shock on her face was pricelessly satisfying.

For me, that was a formative religious and political, civic experience.

It’s important, I think, that we have as much clarity as possible about the relationship between religion and politics.  Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote a book I’ve admired titled Jane Addams and the American Dream about the life of the feminist, reformer and activist. (Another formative experience of my youth was being taken to visit Hull House, the pioneering settlement house which was Addams’ legacy.)  Jean Elshtain is a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School with a background in both religion and political science.  And so, when I saw that she was conducting a workshop in Washington, DC on the topic of Ethics in the Pulpit, asking the question What is effective faith-based political engagement?, I decided to go.  It was last week; Sue and I took the train down; and the workshop was held at the very impressive National Cathedral where there is also a College of Preachers.  I’m not self-taught on my soap-box; I’ve been to college!

Well, it turned out that Jean Elshtain is something of a neo-conservative.  She’s written quite a lot about terrorism and just war and women’s’ roles in war-making.  In the week after 9/11, she was among those called to the White House for advice; she is sympathetic to the Iraq war. She points out that pacifists do not have much of a record in running governments.  Pacifist Quakers were in charge of Pennsylvania for a time, but when it came to fighting the Native Americans, the Quakers paid-for and hired non-Quakers to do the dirty work.

Elshtain is not off in any bluebird cloud-cuckoo land of liberal or conservative illusion.  Though we may disagree with her stance – and often I did – she has her feet on the ground.  She is a pragmatic and rigorous thinker. 

Elshtain is also, she would say, pro-life – anti-abortion – and, in a related way, she is skeptical of genetic engineering.  She recalls that it was the liberals of the first half of the 20^th century – some of them Unitarians - who promoted the quack science of eugenics, weeding out of the gene pool the undesirables, the mentally ill and physically disabled. As the mother of a disabled child, Elshtain has acquired some convictions about these matters.  As recently as the 1970’s, some liberals thought that the way to get some dirty jobs done – cleaning up toxic waste sites, for example – was to have the work done by the mentally retarded.  Elshtain recalled that candidate John Kerry once said “we should have a president who believes in science.” I’m actually not sure for whom she ultimately voted but, recalling some of the misadventures of some science, she did recoil from Kerry’s unqualified endorsement of science.

So I just want you to know that going to this workshop was a bit of a challenging experience for me – I was the only UU by the way amidst lots of Lutherans and Methodists, and I was the most outspoken liberal.  It’s not a bad thing, by the way, to be exposed to convictions different than one’s own, and in general, we do so too seldom.

Elshtain began by noting that, in America, religious and political imperatives have always intermingled.  Lincoln’s four paragraph 2^nd Inaugural is, essentially, a civic sermon.  (The first paragraph, by the way, says refreshingly that he’s not going to talk long, that he had laid out his whole program in his 1^st Inaugural, and that nothing much had changed!)  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well, invoked God and religiosity frequently, even composing a famous D-Day Prayer.  John F. Kennedy used religious language to speak of the civil rights imperative. 

Whatever we may think of the policies he promotes – and I do take exception to his triumphalist suggestions that God has picked “our” side – we ought not be alarmed that the religious convictions of our current president find their way into his public addresses.   

Elshtain observes that religiosity has flourished in this country, not despite but because of the separation of church and state.

In the 1830’s, Alexis deTocqueville observed that Americans share a religiously formed and shaped character due in large part to strength of voluntary associations.  Never forget that we are a voluntary association and that is the source of our strength.  Emily reminded me that until her husband Anders moved to the U.S. 20 years ago, he was an involuntary member of a state church – which explains why the Swedish church is largely moribund.

It is also worth noting – and I will actually return to this point in the punch lines of this sermon – that social scientists have documented that those who regularly attend church are likelier to be civically involved.  Church-going encourages and begets participatory citizenship.

Now, to understand the relationship between religion and politics, there are two pole positions which we must resist:  The first is the temptation to make the nation into one’s religion, and thus to worship the state and to require loyalty to one’s nation above all.  On the other end of the spectrum, we ought also resist the urge to privatize religion, to say that your religion is nothing more than your private business.

Two philosophers can be associated with these competing views, Rousseau and Locke.  French philosopher Jean Jacque Rousseau – coming out of the experience of the French Revolution – said that Christianity makes a terrible civic religion.  For one thing, he said, it feminizes people (I don’t really understand that one; maybe he was worried about men like me wearing long black robe-dresses), and Rousseau said, Christianity’s priests and a strong ecclesiology divide people’s loyalties.  One should not have multiple loyalties, thought Rousseau, and therefore he argued that the state should be a nation’s official religion.

And it is this that explains why the French have their culottes so twisted about Muslim girls wearing head-scarves to school, or Jews wearing yarmulkes, or Christian crosses.  You’ve followed this in the news: they don’t allow such things in their schools and it is because in the French understanding of religion and politics, “thou shalt have no other gods before the state.”

Of course, we too should be wary of uniting church and state; and while I am somewhat concerned these days with having a state church, I am very concerned that we not allow our government to become the object of our worship.

But let’s look at the other pole of understanding:

Englishman John Locke had a different solution to the church/state relationship: he recommended privatizing religion and making it a strictly personal matter.  According to Locke, every religion was equally acceptable, except for atheists and Roman Catholics, but whatever it is, your religion should have no impact on matters of state. “I don’t care if my neighbor is a Hindu, or a Druid, or an Episcopalian just as long as she keeps it to herself.”  In other words, by this view, religion is OK so long as it is irrelevant to public life.  Many liberals have adopted this point of view and yet I think it too is dangerous.  Last week, there was a column by the customarily liberal Molly Ivins in which she accused the Bush Administration of uniting church and state; but her solution was that religion should be a totally private matter.

Both these urges, tendencies, seductions – that of Rousseau and that of Locke – can be seen in America today and maybe even in ourselves; and both, I suggest, need be resisted.

Well, with this as background, Jean Elshtain proceeded to identify a typology of ways that faith-based citizens, people whose religious values shape their political activities, engage the world. And I would encourage us, odd though the words may sound to us, to consider ourselves as faith-based citizens or as people whose religious values shape our political actions. 

She named four ways.  The first she called Full Bore Christian Politics: the Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Moral Majority way of having a Christian take on every imaginable issue.  Clearly, this is a bad idea; and it would be a bad idea even if it were Full Bore Unitarian Universalist Politics.  It’s a bad idea, not primarily because it’s unconstitutional, but it’s a bad idea because it does away with the distinction between religious and political spheres, and collapses them into one, thus sacralizing politics, making politics sacred.

The second way of faith-based political engagement she calls that of the Prophetic Witness in which religious people respond to extraordinary situations, using the language of their faith.  Martin Luther King, Jr. is the preeminent example: he preached, he didn’t make political speeches and yet his sermons always addressed the social imperatives. 

Now, here you can hear a bit of Elshtain’s neo-conservatism because – while she praises the judicious use of prophetic witnessing – she also warns against a steady diet of prophecy du jour.  One must weigh the most significant issues – those that truly rise to a standard of the common good – versus those that may be more transient or superficial.  The biblical prophets addressed major issues, not minor.  Activism and prophetic witnessing is good, but we know this from life around First Parish, we must sometimes weigh needs, costs and benefits.  A steady diet of politics is unhealthy and boring. 

We – again as religious people – we must likewise be wary of narrow partisanship for to identify excessively with the program of any party diminishes the power and effectiveness of a religious witness that is larger than any party.  I again call attention to our First Parish program of affirmative action for Republicans – this is no joke: we need Republicans and people of differing opinions if we are to be whole.

The third way of engaging the world Elshtain calls Radical Dualism.  These are the religious believers who say the world is going to hell and so abandon engagement and withdraw from public life, not wanting to be tainted and even showing contempt for public life.  This is the way that many evangelical Christians used to be – before they changed.  In a real twist, this is the way that some liberals and some Unitarian Universalists have increasingly become.  When religious people convince themselves that nothing makes any difference, or that it’s hopeless, or that anyway it’s all corrupt, tyrants sleep well.

So the final fourth way that Elshtain identifies she calls Contextual Engagement.  I read some advice to ministers the other day that said there are certain words that preachers should absolutely avoid from the pulpit; and they were words much like Contextual Engagement – they cause eyes to glaze over.  But I want your eyes to stay open.  Contextual engagement is clearly her recommendation and it calls for citizen-believers to address public issues in significant but nuanced ways, asking questions like Who is helped? And who is harmed?  Coming to understand issues at a level of depth, and not mouthing bumper sticker platitudes.  And also seeking to better understand the motivations of those who disagree with you while truly striving for the common good.  In part “contextual engagement” is another way of saying we need to pick our battles and not be in a perpetual war, and yet I’m also aware that “contextual engagement” is not a term that promises a steady diet of red meat, it is not a perpetual call to the barricades, and, yes, “contextual engagement” is a somewhat dispassionate gray term.  Elshtain’s an academic; what can I say?  Nonetheless, I as well favor engagement – passionate engagement – according to a thorough understanding of the context of issues, strategies and consequences.

Now I’m sure that this typology doesn’t answer all your questions and may raise more.  There is no one perfect way of interacting religiously and politically and we must live with this ambiguity.  When it comes to reconciling conflicting human wills, it was Augustine who said we must be stout-hearted because we won’t reach some perfect point of equanimity.  And it was Reinhold Niebuhr who observed that there is inevitable tension in public life and yet it is religion that keeps political systems from over-reaching.

So what does all this mean?  What does it matter? What can we do?  We’re coming to my punch lines. 

I am convinced that one of the things most needed in America today is a renewed commitment to citizenship and civic formation.  What does it mean to live in community, in a constitutional democracy?  Civics is no longer a stand-alone course in our public schools these days.  On Friday, I spoke with Jake Sullivan who teaches social studies in the Bedford public schools and he told me that civics is, well, diversified within the curriculum – one might say diffused.  Partially, it has overlapped with what is called character education – what, for example, would you do if someone does something wrong and you’re the by-stander?  That’s fine but character education doesn’t really address the systemic issues.  And the educational system is in some transition: next year in the freshman curriculum, there will be some things about the Constitution and citizenship.  Amidst the demands of the Department of Education, all the things that different groups want to be taught, well, it’s all sort of muddy.

I believe that we here at the First Parish in Bedford can and should provide a variety of civic education, citizen-formation.  What does our liberal religious faith ask of us as citizens?  Of course, we could introduce young people (and older ones too) to our selectmen, to our state representatives and senators, to activists…to all the people and processes that make a difference.  We could visit some of the shrines of democracy (What would they be?  The courts, the prisons, the African Meetinghouse, the offices of the ACLU?)  And we could exercise our liberal principles by learning, lobbying, politicking and, as need be, protesting.

I have begun to assemble a task force that will look at a curriculum of civic education, of citizen-formation, and we’ll make a modest beginning.  Already our church has a curriculum that addresses comprehensive sexuality education in a most explicit, honest, helpful and effective way; why not a curriculum that addresses civics and citizenship in an equally explicit and controversial way?  I want x-rated – by which I mean real what-do-you-do-with-your-body – civics education!  Please let me know if you’d like to part of this brainstorming.  I anticipate a liberally religious civics education to be one of the central and most important things we offer.

Here’s my second punch line:  I want us to provide opportunities for kids and adults to live our faith. And so next Sunday there will be a march – from the First Parish in Roxbury to the Boston Common, 2˝ miles – to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the 1965 voting rights march in Selma, Alabama. Jack Mendelsohn was there in Selma and so was Jim Reeb, the UU minister who was beaten and killed. The march next Sunday will be led by civil rights pioneer and Congressman John Lewis; and it’s sponsored, in part, by the Boston Foundation, the Anti-Defamation League, the ACLU, and our UUA and UU Urban Ministry.  Thousands of people are expected to participate.

The march will follow a route similar to that taken by Martin Luther King, protesting Boston school segregation, in 1965.  This time around, we’re saying that the cause of racial justice is not complete; provisions of the original Voting Rights Act are due to expire and ought not; and we’re saying that voting rights continue to be essential to our democracy.  Next Sunday’s march offers an opportunity to learn some history and be a part of some history.  I want some of our kids to look back on next Sunday and remember that they were there with members of their church.

Next Sunday, the program begins at 1:00 at the First Church in Roxbury; the march starts at 2:00 and ends at the Boston Common and I hope we’ll have enough interest to have a bus.  Probably we’ll leave soon after noon.   There’s a sign-up sheet out after the service.

Now I understand that some people have other plans for next Sunday and I don’t want anyone to feel bad because they can’t participate; but if it’s not this time, I hope that it will be the next time, because civics and citizen-formation is part of what we will continue to offer as part of the core curriculum of a liberal religious education.

It was Langston Hughes who said,

Democracy will not come

Today, this year

Nor ever

Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right

As the other fellow has

To stand

On my two feet

And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,

Let things take their course.

Tomorrow is another day.

I do not need my freedom when I’m dead

I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

Freedom

Is a strong seed

Planted

In a great need.

I live here, too.

I want freedom

Just as you.

“Ethics In The Pulpit” was the alleged title of this sermon and I’m in favor of it.  But let us favor yet more boldly a liberal religion that engages our world in its dining rooms, boardrooms, classrooms and barrooms, in the streets of suburbia and Lowell and Roxbury, in the corridors of power and of poverty.  Let’s take ethics out of the pulpit and into our world.  And the truth of it is that our liberal religion could use some exercise.