When I was a child we challenged each other to be able to spell
antidisestablishmentarianism – it being, we believed, the longest word in the English language. We had no idea what it meant but we worked very hard to learn how to spell it. I still can! And I can now tell you what it means.
An anti-dis-establishment-arian is someone who is - against - removing - the privileged place of a - particular sectarian religion - in a country. The word pertained specifically to the Church of England but it also applied to Unitarians in New England in the early years of the American republic. For, the Unitarian church as well as the church from which it sprang, the Congregationalist chuch, were the churches considered the established religion in Massachusetts. In 1654 the Massachusetts Court of Sessions “was authorized to levy a tax for the support of religion in the various towns whenever a people did not voluntarily make suitable provision.”
Similar acts were passed in 1692 and again in 1703 and, excusing Quakers and Baptists, in 1728. Universalists, however, were not excused. The right and obligation of the people to support religion was reaffirmed in 1760, and after the Revolutionary War, it was written into the third article of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights in 1780. The passage of the United States Constitution and it’s Bill of Rights did not alter this situation. An unsuccessful attempt was made to modify Article III at a state constitutional convention assembled in 1820. The Universalists fought vigorously for the repeal of these provisions in the 1820s and 1830s. It was not until 1834 that the establishment of religion in Massachusetts was finally removed from the Massachusetts constitution.
This was one of the issues that prevented the Unitarians and Universalists from becoming closer in the early nineteenth century. It was only some years after the Unitarians had lost their status as the established church in 1834 that Unitarians came to accept, begrudgingly, that, perhaps, the separation of church and state might be a good idea.
Growing up as a non-Christian, I have always been sensitive to the casual taken for grantedness that this is a “Christian nation”. When I first head someone exclaim that something “was a Christian thing to do” I didn’t know what they were talking about. How could being honest or kind, generous or compassionate be understood as uniquely Christian? It may have been a moral thing to do, a kind thing to do, an ethical thing to do, or even a religious thing to do but what did it have to do with the doctrines of the Christian church?
Last year, when I was in North Carolina, I was told a story by a member of my congregation who stopped to pick up a hitch-hiker on the highway. A Christian radio station happened to be on the radio and the hitch-hiker asked the driver if he was a Christian. “Why?” the UU asked. The hitch-hiker replied that picking him up was the “Christian thing to do” so he assumed that the driver was a Christian. The UU responded that he wasn’t a Christian and then pointed out to his passenger that in most of those cars that passed the hitch-hiker by were probably Christians on their way to church, yet none of them had stopped. It was the non-Christian that had been compassionate and generous, not the Christian. A little bit like the biblical story of the Good Samaritan, don’t you think?
The assumption that to be Christian is to be good and not to be Christian is to be evil is simply “taken for granted” by many. They assume that anyone and anything Christian is automatically acceptable and anything that isn’t, is not.
A friend of mine was working as an attorney at the Justice Department when John Ashcroft became Attorney General. One of the first things that Ashcroft instituted was a Friday morning prayer breakfast for the senior staff. Ashcroft assumed that a Christian prayer breakfast would be a positive addition to the department. Attendance was not required but the group was small enough so that who was and who wasn’t there was very apparent. My friend is Jewish. He did not feel comfortable attending a Christian prayer breakfast and so did not attend. He always wondered whether his employment status had been compromised by that decision. He assumed that it was. He felt that he was branded as a outcast simply because he was Jewish. And this was in the Justice Department, the very office that is entrusted with insuring compliance with anti-discrimination laws!
When my friend won election to the Maryland State Senate he discovered that he needed to join several other senators in objecting to the prayers which opened every session of the Senate. I was honored to be invited to give such a prayer a couple of years ago. My prayer was, in good UU fashion, inclusive and not offensive to any of the Senators, Christian, Jewish, agnostic or atheist as well as UUs. (I know, I asked). I was rare, however. Many of the prayers heard on those Friday afternoons were anything but inclusive. The request by the new senators was summarily ignored. They, then, mounted an effort to place the prayer on the agenda before the session was gaveled in. This was also defeated. The protesters were reduced to standing and whispering in a circle in the back and trying to ignore what was being foisted upon them from the front. Though they were highly respected elected officials they were, here also, made to feel like outcasts.
I know how they felt. I remember in grade school one year when the teacher decided that along with the Pledge of Allegiance a different student every day would be asked to read a prayer or a passage from the Bible. Some weren’t so bad but others were so sectarian that I felt like walking out. I knew that I wasn’t included in the special circle of those who found those prayers acceptable or even agreeable. I never did like that teacher!
Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote: "When the government puts its [seal of approval] on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.”
The problem with John McCain's recent affirmation that this is a “Christian Nation” is not only that it reinforces the assumptions that too many American make that everyone in America is a Christian but that it assumes that there is only one kind of Christianity. The Founding Fathers and mothers of America were very much aware that Christianity was not monolithic. They were far from orthodox, being primarily Unitarians, Deists and Free Thinkers. They believed that a moral compass was important and most believed that it could be found in Jesus. Their brand of Christianity was, however, quite different from that of the orthodox, who were similar to today’s religious right.
The Jesus that the founders revered was the Jesus who not only accepted prostitutes, tax collectors, Samaritans and adulterers, but also welcomed them into his inner circle. He served not the rich and powerful, not those who were well educated and had attained high positions but the outcasts of society. He was the “Prince of Peace” not a holy warrior. His religion was a religion of compassion and love. In his Beatitudes, Jesus blessed the poor, the meek, the hungry and the persecuted. The Christianity that the founding fathers and mothers of this country treasured was compassionate and tolerant rather than judgmental and discriminative. It was a Christianity that sought to affirm the teachings of Jesus without sacrificing the liberation brought about by the Enlightenment. The use of reason and the freedom to seek ones own perspective was seen as a liberating force and in no way in conflict with the teachings of Jesus. They were very much supporters of science and would have been appalled by the biblical literalism that promotes an anti-scientific perspective.
Thomas Jefferson, a Deist and self described Unitarian, was often called by his detractors an atheist. He considered himself a practicing Christian. He wrote "I concur . . . in considering the moral precepts of Jesus as more pure, correct, and sublime than those of ancient philosophers." Yet Thomas Jefferson was author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom which reads:
. . . that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. [We] do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.
George Washington wrote that, "While just government protects all in their religious rights, true religion affords to government its surest support."
And, Unitarian John Adams believed that "[I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand."
Unitarian minister Theodore Parker wrote, a generation after the founding of the United States, of the kind of Christianity that they observed: “Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure morality; absolute, pure religion; the love of man; the love of God acting without let or hindrance””
This was the religious understanding that propelled the Unitarians to move beyond the supernatural to the natural and beyond the material to the transcendental. Although, over the last two centuries, Jesus has lost his place as central to both Unitarianism (now Unitarian Universalism) and the day in and day out understanding of what it means to be an American, the teachings of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes still command a central place for both UUs and Americans in general. The religion of UU and of Americans today is no longer the religion about Jesus, but, rather, the religion taught by Jesus.
Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies, in a book entitled “America’s Real Religion”, published in 1949, wrote that “Americas Real Religion” is “The higher religion of liberty and brotherhood - the religion that said all men are endowed by their Creator with the same freedom, the same inalienable rights, and that every man is his ‘brother's keeper: the religion of courage, not surrender; of inclusiveness, not restriction. . . And, meanwhile, the United States had been founded upon the initial victory of this liberating movement.”
“America’s Real Religion”, for Davies, was democracy “. . . democracy has a religious base . . . it is possible to believe intensely in democracy if you believe in the religion that sustains it . . . democracy exalts freedom, not dogma, it can be world-uniting. The attempt to unite the world upon the basis of dogma, whether political, religious, or any other kind, is sure to fail. Dogma divides. It is dogma that is dividing the world now . . . authoritarian religious dogma.”
Cornell West, in Democracy Matters, wrote that “. . . even as we turn a critical eye on the fundamentalisms at play in the Middle East, the genuine democrats and democratic Christians among us must unite in opposition to this hypocritical, antidemocratic fundamentalism at home. The battle for the soul of American democracy is, in large part, a battle for the soul of American Christianity; because the dominant forms of Christian fundamentalism are a threat to the tolerance and openness necessary for sustaining any democracy. Yet the best of American Christianity has contributed greatly to preserving and expanding American democracy”.
Those who claim America is a Christian nation, in the sense that a vast majority of Americans, at the time of the founding of America, were Christians of one type or another are, in fact, correct. But the brand of Christianity that it was founded upon and which it has flourished under is very different from the Christianity that the religious right assumes is the only kind of Christianity that exists.
Unitarian Universalists is a small denomination today partly because it has actively resisted proselytizing. This has not been out of laziness or a lack of commitment to the ideas and ideals that UUs profess but a religious understanding that each and every human being must come to his or her own understanding of what is religious, what is sacred, what is spiritual. It is for this same reason that the the Constitution asserts that religion is not to be established by law or government at any level. In true Unitarian Universalist spirit, in America, religion is to be voluntary.
In 1964 Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston said:
“I don’t know of anywhere in the history of Christianity where the Catholic church, the Protestant church, or any other church has made greater progress than in the United States of America, and, in my opinion, the chief reason is there is no union of church and state.”
When one religion is preferred over all others in a government that has an obligation to protect and support all of its citizens, the nation, itself, will suffer. A country that gives preference to only some of its citizens stunts and stymies the creative energy of others that would, otherwise, be its to harness. It, thus, loses the wisdom and perspective of those with different backgrounds and experiences.
One of the obvious objectives of the religion clause in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution is to keep the majority from imposing its religion by force of law upon the minority. In America today there are more Muslims than Presbyterians and more Buddhists than Episcopalians.
A. Powell Davies quoted Vernon Louis Parrington, one of the greatest of American historians, who wrote: "American ideals and institutions emerged in large part from the silent revolution which during the middle eighteenth century differentiated the American from the transplanted colonial. . . and which unconsciously wove itself into our daily intercourse and ways of thinking."
Davies concluded: “Anyone . . . who wants to reverse this determining influence by imposing an authoritarian religion upon America must face the fact that he is bent upon destroying the very foundations of our national life; he is trying to rescind American history. And the same is true of anyone who wishes to impose a political tyranny, whether communism or anything else. Authoritarian systems, whether of church or state, are not American, and they cannot become American.”
What Davies called “Americas Real Religion” cannot be separated from a democratic America. For Davies it is an intrinsic aspect of what it means to be an American. America is, indeed, a religious nation. Yet, the religious values of America are, like those of Unitarian Universalism, enlightenment ideals: liberty and freedom, and of welcome and inclusion rather than exclusion.
This is symbolized well by the inscription on the Statue of Liberty: “...Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” (By Emma Lazarus)
The founders would have understood that those arriving from different countries and from different backgrounds would bring with them different forms of worship and belief. They never intended to place any one religion above all others. America's real religion is a religion of freedom, democracy, liberty, tolerance of diversity and a generous spirit of compassion for and acceptance of all under its roof.
The America of the twenty-first century and beyond must be, even more than in the past, an intentionally tolerant and accepting nation that welcomes new Americans enthusiastically and understands the enormous benefits that arise from a country where Muslims and Hindus, Christians and Jews, Pagans and Buddhists, and even Humanists, Agnostics and Atheists are all equally affirmed and welcomed. “America's Real Religion” was, and is, and must continue to be, a religion of compassion and acceptance and love. It may have been and, even, may still be a Christian nation, but a humble, liberal Unitarian Universalist style Christianity that is neither exclusive nor authoritarian but rather a Christianity that models itself on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes. This was the Christianity of the founders of this nation, the Christianity of Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Franklin and Madison. This is “America's Real Religion”.