Unitarian Universalist Church of Baton Rouge
Sunday, October 24, 2010
A few summers ago, a 90-year-old parishioner loaned me a book he apparently found stimulating. I say “apparently” because nearly every page had a sharp comment written in the margins; reading it was like having a conversation with him and the author at the same time.
The book was When Religion Becomes Evil: 5 Warning Signs, by Charles Kimball, chair of the department of religion at Wake Forest. Dr. Kimball’s Harvard degree is in comparative religion, specializing in Islam. As a Christian with expertise in the Muslim world, he writes with insight on how religion can lose its way. In his book, he theorizes about a tendency for religious people to claim that they are the protectors of their faith’s “true core” or fundamentals – thus the appellation “fundamentalist” can, in his view, be applied to any religion. Let’s look at Kimball’s 5 points on how a religion goes bad, and see if any of them can apply – heaven forbid! – to our liberal faith.
The 1st warning sign is an insistence on absolute truth, a dogged resolve by adherents to see themselves as right and everyone else as wrong or evil. Connected to this is the idea that this truth can be found only in one interpretation, a literal understanding of the faith’s scripture, what scholars call “terminal reading.”
All religions make claims about Truth with a capital T, but since final truth is ultimately unknowable by human beings, all such claims involve presuppositions and require interpretation. Most revered texts were written long ago, often in a language not used today, so that reading requires translation of culture as well as words. Sincere people can and do appropriate truth claims in substantially different ways, so healthy religion allows for various versions of their claims, diverse ways of looking at sacred texts and interpreting doctrine.
Can Unitarian Universalists fall prey to this tendency to see one’s self and one’s group as the only ones who are right? Scholar and author Elaine Pagels says, “There’s practically no religion I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms the other’s choice.” (Sojourners magazine, August 2004) Could that include us? Do you know any UUs who believe that their theology is the only one possible for an intelligent person? Do you know any UUs who disparage other people’s religions?
What about literal belief in sacred scriptures – is it possible for UUs to be literalist? Ironically, most Unitarian Universalists don’t hold to the literal truth of any sacred scripture in order to believe in them, but far too many UUs use a literal interpretation of sacred texts in order to dismiss them. “How can anyone with a brain in their head believe in such stupid stuff as miracles or angels or levitation or reincarnation?” these UUs scoff, thus relegating to the trash bin the entire set of holy books of the Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus.
You might say that fundamentalists in other faiths claim ab-solute truth in order to declare other faiths demonic; UU fundamentalists claim absolute truth in order to declare other faiths stupid. Other religious fundamentalists read their sacred scriptures literally in order to say they’re utterly true; UU fundamentalists read scriptures literally in order to conclude that they’re utterly false. Both are problematic terminal readings.
John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal bishop of Newark and author of dozens of books, says he gets asked by liberals all the time, “Why…bother with the Bible at all? Why don’t you just abandon this dated book and start…over?” His answer was that we do not abandon folk tales because our moral consciousness has out-grown them; instead, we must abandon excessive claims being made for either the inspiration or the accuracy of stories found in religious traditions. (Spong online newsletter, 9/29/04)
Claims of absolute truth or absolute falsity must both be rejected. None of us knows everything, and no religion or philosophy has all the answers. Every religious text – even those revered by religious liberals! – contains outmoded tribal values, unscientific explanations of natural phenomena, xenophobic racist hostility toward foreigners and those who are different, and self-interested history, and yet every one also contains glorious poetry, great stories, and universal values of love, compassion, and community beyond boundaries. We should not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Kimball’s 2nd point is a demand for blind obedience, whether to a person in authority or to a certain interpretation of a creed. Usually this is accompanied by apocalysm – talk of the end of the world and the dawning of a new age in which followers will be singled out for special privileges. We do not have to reach far to find examples of how acceptance of unethical or immoral orders from a religious leader results in death and destruction – we all remember September 11, 2001, Jim Jones in Guyana, the Aum Shinrikyo nerve gas attack in Tokyo, the Branch Davidians in Waco. Sometimes a group will enforce conformity by using methods of isolation, deprivation of sleep and/or food, group pressure, or even psychotropic drugs – but whether or not such techniques are used, blind obedience is always a sure sign of religion becoming evil.
This is the least likely temptation for Unitarian Universalists, we who pride ourselves on our nonconformity and anti-authoritarianism. But there can be a kind of perverse conformity expected of UU nonconformity. Sometimes in the French Quarter, I see a group of young people, all dressed in black, their hair all dyed colors not found in nature, all sporting similar hardware and comparable tattoos? And I think to myself, How conformist they are in their nonconformity? We Unitarian Universalists must beware the tendency to enforce a group norm, to expect that we will all be alike in our difference from other religions.
While UUs resist giving much power to their religious leaders, some UUs can unconsciously elevate a particular minister or church or way of doing things to authority status, so that deviance from that theology or vocabulary or worship style can be seen as a kind of heresy. I remember the first time I attended worship in a UU church other than First Church New Orleans – how shocked I was that their Order of Service was so different.
To resist the pressure of groupthink, we should jealously guard our historical traditions of freedom of individual conscience, and congregational polity. The Buddha’s last words to his disciples from his deathbed can be our guide:
Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher… Be ye lamps unto yourselves.
The 3rd thing shared by unhealthy religions is the concept of an ideal time, when everything was in the past, or will be in the future, perfect. This can be an actual period that becomes idealized, as when certain conservative Christian groups extol the 1950s, or the memory of the Islamic caliphate for Sunni Muslims, or it can be an imagined time in antiquity or prehistory, as the Garden of Eden for some Jews and Christians, or Sumer or Crete for some feminist pagans. The perfect world might be in the future, as in the Second Coming of Christ for some Christians, or the return of Lord Krishna for some Hindus. With this mindset, people desire to get back to, or arrive at, the ideal world, and feel they have a mandate to establish their idea of God’s will on earth. Some set themselves apart, and withdraw from a world they consider corrupted.
We UUs don’t usually think there was an ideal past time (although many of us can idealize a certain time in a certain congregation), but most of us are committed to making a better future. Now, there’s nothing wrong with this – in fact, it can be quite laud-able, an expression of our faith in action. But like everyone else, we too can lean toward the view that what is right to us is automatically best for everybody, and a few UUs have been caught declaring – I hope in jest! – that if this law is enacted, or this per-son elected, they will move to Tahiti or Canada to withdraw from a country they consider hopelessly corrupted.
Healthy religion avoids the temptation to idealize a certain time, whether past or future. No one has a divine directive to impose their will on others, no matter how well-meant. (To do unto others without their input is the essence of colonialism.) We must also beware the impulse to leave when decisions are made we don’t agree with. This isn’t good for religious institutions or for democracies. The essence of diversity in religion or politics is that we are guaranteed that things will not always go our way; the nature of our covenant as Unitarian Universalists as well as Americans is that we will stick with our noble experiment despite the inevitable conflicts.
The 4th sign of a religion going wrong is connected to the defense of the first 3, and that is that the end justifies the means. We must defend the truth of our faith and of our holy book – therefore we must eliminate the unbelievers. Infidels are defiling our holy temple or our sacred land – so we must get them out any way we can. Bad people are keeping us from achieving the kingdom or preventing the return of our god – let’s kill them to reach our desired goal. Folks who ought to be in our group aren’t, or who used to be in our group have left – we must stop them. Or some among us have weird ideas, or are asking the wrong questions – we must protect our church.
We Unitarian Universalists don’t go as far as some other religions in this regard. We don’t kill or maim the people among us who think differently or who upset our institutional apple carts – we just find ways to get them to leave on their own, with only psychic injuries to show from the conflict. We act in ways most of our mothers would never have approved – we use insults or rude comments to make folks feel unwanted and unwelcome. Sadly, even UU congregations can erupt in vicious conflict, with folks acting contrary to their own principles.
The remedy to all this is both simple and difficult: Remember what was the whole point of the religion in the first place. Sure, religious tenets, scripture, sacred space and time, communal identity, and institutions, traditions, and structures are all important, and ought to be preserved to a reasonable extent, but they are not the reason the religion exists, they are not the ends of religious life. They may help facilitate a life of faith, they may promote a sense of belonging, but they are not the point. True religion’s mes-sage of compassion, of caring for others, especially those in need, can be lost, and under stress people can act in ways that are explicitly forbidden by their faith. In authentic religion the end and the means are always connected.
The last of Kimball’s 5 signs of a religion turning evil is Holy War. In an interview with Sojourners magazine, Bill Moyers said he keeps a file marked “Holy War” that is filled with depredations of every sort – Jew against Muslim and vice versa, Hindu against Muslim and Christian and vice versa, Christian against Jew and Muslim and vice versa, and even people of the same religion attacking each other. While almost all religions proclaim nonviolence as a primary value, zealous adherents can always find reason to wage war on unbelievers or apostates.
While I’d like to assure you that we Unitarian Universalists are immune to this one, I cannot. Although there’s been no out-right murder over internal conflicts in UU churches, there’s lots of evidence of character assassination and emotional destruction in UU congregations, caused by sincere, well-intentioned, and normally good people who were convinced they were right. District Executives in the UUA all have horror stories about congregations where someone was so convinced of the rightness of their cause that they were willing to nearly destroy their congregation in order to prove their point.
The solution, once again, is to remain true to the core principles of one’s faith tradition. Compassion and community are not just for when all is well, but are guidelines for times of conflict. Jesus told his disciples, “If you only love those who love you, what reward will you get? Even pagans love their friends and family.” And the Buddhist sage Thicht Naht Hanh says, “Peace is not a goal – peace is the way.”
In the final chapter of the book, entitled “An inclusive faith rooted in a tradition,” Kimball gives several “compass points” for direction in the uncertain times that lie ahead, giving the best hope for correcting the corruptions of religion. The 1st is a sense of the Transcendent, called God by many, but which is in essence something beyond the merely material. The 2nd is faith, a conviction of some things that cannot be scientifically proven, such as that life is worth living despite our pain and hardship. The 3rd point is hope, a feeling that things can get better through our efforts. The 4th, most important of all, is love – not as an emotion, which can be transitory, but as an ethic, as a way of life. Kimball adds that diversity and inclusivity are needed in order to see a more complete picture, in faith as in everything else.
“An inclusive faith rooted in a tradition” – Transcendence combined with faith, hope, and love – unity in diversity – welcoming people who are different from those already in the community – this sounds to me like an advertisement for Unitarian Universalism at our best, and is as good a description of our faith as I’ve heard. May we live up to it. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
