"Liberty"

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Pulpit Guest, David Seitz
UUCW Member
July 2, 2006

Good morning. It’s good to be with you this morning on this patriotic Sunday, July 2. July 2, as history buffs will tell you, is the real anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

I appreciate that all of you took time from your Fourth of July weekend activities to spend this time at church. There are many times of the year that could be said to be… confusing for us Unitarian Universalists. We are, after all, a theologically diverse and thoughtful people, so it could be said that confusion… comes with the territory.

This time of year is certainly no exception.

Simply put, for many of us, the messages we hear on the Fourth of July do not always mesh with our Unitarian Universalist principles. We may, for example, have a hard time reconciling the belief that this is the greatest nation in world history with our sixth principle, “the goal of world community.” Or, we may find it difficult to provide unquestioning support for all foreign policy decisions in light of our second principle, “justice, equity and compassion in human relations.” Too often, we hear words we love, words of morally inspiring patriotism, twisted and rearranged to fit a different narrative, one of shallow nationalism.

So what do we do? What’s our alternative? What does Unitarian Universalist patriotism look like?
Albert Camus, the great French existentialist thinker, once responded to the suggestion that he was unpatriotic this way: “No,” he wrote, “I d[o]n't love my country, if …insisting that what we love should measure up to the finest image we have of her amounts to not loving.”

“Insisting that what we love should measure up to the finest image we have.” I think that’s a fine definition of patriotism. When we take the time to think critically about our government and our culture, it shows that we care about our country enough to first of all get engaged and furthermore want to make it better. As I see it, the essence of genuine love of country is that process of critically weighing a nation’s actions against the promise of its enduring values.

Foremost among the values that make up the promise of America is the principle I’d like to examine today: liberty.
Definitions of “liberty” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary include “the quality or state of being free,” “the power to do as one pleases,” “freedom from physical restraint,” “freedom from arbitrary or despotic control,” and “the power of choice.”

Interestingly, as I dug around in the dictionary, I learned that there is no difference in meaning between the words “liberty” and “freedom.” Every other European language only has one word to describe the concept. The reason English has two words is simply our diversity of parent languages; “liberty” emerged from Latin “liber,” which means “free,” and “freedom” came from Old English “freo,” meaning “to love” or “to set free.”

What’s ironic and funny about that is the tendency of English-speaking leaders to use both words in a list to add a rhetorical flourish. The next time you hear a public official say something like “liberty and freedom,” I encourage you to try to imagine him or her saying “liberty and liberty.” That goes for me, too. I’ve done a fair amount of proofreading, but who knows?

In all seriousness, the concept of liberty has been part of the fabric of American thought since well before our country’s founding, and was fundamental to our faith movement as well. Both modern Unitarian Universalism and the Declaration of Independence are products of the Age of Enlightenment, an eighteenth century movement in Western thought that affirmed the compatibility of faith and human reason. During the Enlightenment, religious freedom began to be recognized as crucial to genuine faith, and individual rights began to be viewed as part of the natural order of the universe.

Influenced by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, the influential British advocate of the “natural rights” concept, America’s founders viewed liberty as inseparable from human nature. In his book “The American Creed: A Biography of the Declaration of Independence,” the Rev. Forrest Church notes that just as today’s Unitarian Universalists believe in the “inherent worth and dignity of every person,” Thomas Jefferson wrote that: “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time. The hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”

So we see this common theme between the sacred and the secular, this belief that freedom from intrusion, the freedom of choice, is our birthright as human beings. We call it the “divine spark of the creative spirit in each person,” or the “inherent worth and dignity of every person.” The Founders called it a collection of “certain inalienable rights.” It is a conception of liberty that emphasizes individual protection.

But as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer points out in his book “Active Liberty,” liberty “means not only freedom from government coercion, but also the freedom to participate in the government itself.”

Breyer cites the perspective of French political theorist and writer Benjamin Constant, whose words we heard just a moment ago. Constant differentiated between individual freedom, which he called “modern liberty,” and the freedom that comes with inclusion in democracy, which he called “ancient liberty.” He wrote that ancient “liberty, by submitting to all the citizens, without exception, the care and assessment of their most sacred interests, enlarges their spirit, ennobles their thoughts, and establishes among them a kind of intellectual equality which forms the glory and power of a people.”

What’s more, an emphasis on ancient liberty can facilitate responsiveness in our institutions and policies. Justice Breyer argues persuasively that respect for the liberty to participate in democratic decision-making allows communities to learn from common experience and create law that reflects contemporary realities. By allowing the many conversations that make up the democratic process to play out, we allow each succeeding generation to address its own needs with the right tools. The values – rule of law, equality and liberty – don’t change, but the context does, so the laws need to follow suit.

An important analogy can be made between ancient liberty, a belief about a sort of legal truth, and our Unitarian Universalist belief about the nature of religious truth. We believe, as the great nineteenth century Unitarian minister Samuel Longfellow famously declared, that “revelation is not sealed.” Unitarian Universalists hold that theological insights naturally evolve with new wisdom gleaned from human experience. While our most central values remain the same, time, place, technology, and human events provide each generation with new challenges, new truths, and new ways of understanding and applying those enduring values.

So we see that liberty encompasses both protections of individual dignity from community institutions and opportunities for the individual to “enlarge his or her spirit” by participating in community decision-making and life.
And to promote the common good, as Constant argued, we must “learn to combine the two together.” True freedom hinges on both the integrity of the one and the will of the all. It is as Walt Whitman wrote: “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear… / Each singing what belongs to her, and to none else; / The day what belongs to the day – At night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, / Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs.”
That nuance is reflected in our own Unitarian Universalist theology. Our fifth principle calls on us to affirm and promote both “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.”

So how do we do that? What features of our faith movement promote both ancient and modern liberty, in our congregations and in the wider world?

While there are many important answers to those questions, I have identified three main aspects of Unitarian Universalism that promote liberty. First, an understanding of the history of Unitarianism and Universalism can give us a sense of context and help illuminate the contrast between the two aspects of liberty. Second, the manner in which we govern ourselves, both as individual churches and as a continental association of congregations, is reflective of liberty’s two aspects. Third, and perhaps most importantly, we promote both modern and ancient liberty through collective and personal action, through our ongoing service and advocacy in the community.

A few weeks ago, our minister, the Rev. Suzelle Lynch, talked about a book for UU kids called “Unitarian Universalism is a Really Long Name.” That’s true, of course. The name is and remains long because, up until only forty-five years ago, Unitarianism and Universalism were distinct and separate faiths. Though similar, there were always theological notable differences between the two.

The name Unitarianism, of course, comes from a belief in the unity of God, as opposed to the belief in the trinity espoused by traditional Christian theology. Heavily influenced by the Enlightenment, Early American Unitarians in particular focused on the role of personal intuition and individual experience in seeking religious truth. They made waves by discounting belief in miracles and literal divinity of Jesus through logic and reason.

Universalism, on the other hand, refers to the belief that, either through the power of God’s love or through the goodness inherent in human nature, all people are saved. The Universalists believed that salvation is for everybody, that nobody is going to hell. It was a radically inclusive religious movement. And as the Rev. David Bumbaugh makes clear in “Unitarian Universalism: A Narrative History,” American Universalists distinguished themselves in their day by accepting female students at virtually all their academic institutions and campaigning aggressively against slavery and the death penalty.

These two different belief systems naturally attracted different sorts of people. As the Rev. Jaco B. ten Hove explains in his essay “The Choosers are Chosen,” on the history of our movement, “there was a most notable class distinction” between the Unitarians and the Universalists. “Unitarians,” he writes, “were primarily the elite Bostonians, a learned aristocracy, pioneering cultural and social advances. Universalists, however, by and large, were out in the farmland, relatively uneducated, humble, working with their hands.”

It would be an oversimplification to say that, by and large, the Unitarians were cerebral individualists and the Universalists were agrarian and community-oriented. But the diversity of our spiritual heritage is worth noting. It’s important because it helps us understand modern Unitarian Universalism as a theology that integrates rich traditions of both individual and community-oriented religious experience.

Here and now, Unitarian Universalists promote liberty within our congregations and our continental association by governing ourselves in a manner that is consistent with our principles.

Though many of us – including me – find it convenient to refer to UUism as a denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association is not a denomination, per se. By definition, denominations have a “top-down” approach to governance. Denominational authorities play a large role in the assignment of clergy to churches and determining a faith movement’s moral stances.

Unitarian Universalists, by contrast, have what’s called a congregational polity of governance. We are a decentralized association of congregations, and each UU church shares power over the association. Our churches call our own ministers, based on the input of all voting members. Congregations give financial support to the association, and while recommendations from the association are taken seriously, the final decision about how much to give is up to the lay leaders of each congregation. Every year, we send delegates to district and continental assemblies, and those delegates vote on the social concerns and positions we want the association and our fellow member congregations to address.

In order to ensure that the work of the association is accessible to individuals and member congregations, the UUA Board of Trustees created an Openness Implementation Committee. The committee is charged with ensuring that every UUA committee uses technology to make information about its work available before meetings, and that each committee can receive feedback from interested members.

The ultimate authority lies with each religious community, because we understand that our spiritual experiences take place within the intimacy of our communities.

I think of programming like the Welcoming Congregation curriculum, which helps churches to become truly affirming of bisexual, gay, lesbian and transgender people.

Now, it would be well and good for the Unitarian Universalist Association to proclaim to independently proclaim to the world: “we affirm the rights of BGLT people and their families.” But for that message to truly resonate, it needs a base of authority. For a statement of acceptance and justice to be supported by deep and common understanding, the journey towards acceptance and justice has to be undertaken in individual communities. Somebody else can’t learn acceptance for you. Somebody else can’t love for you. And so the Welcoming Congregation program and other such ministries progress community by community, at the level that includes the most people and starts the most conversations.

Unitarian Universalists reject the notion that authority, that theological insight are reserved solely for the folks wearing robes. In our faith, the insights, the truths, the issues of moral urgency clamoring for our attention are brought to us from the grassroots, by our own members. We trust, we look to and we rely upon our members to speak their conscience and participate in the life of our community. By balancing the rights of individual members and congregations with the need to engage in community, we prepare ourselves to receive theological insights wherever they may emerge.

The most direct, most active way that Unitarian Universalists promote both ancient and modern liberty is through our actions in the wider world. Many of us feel compelled by a deep-seated sense of justice, an appreciation for the inherent dignity of all people, to give to the fight for justice through our careers, votes, activism, financial support, conversations, letters to the editor and many other gifts.

Many of the areas that motivate UUs have much to do with modern liberty, with protections for individuals. We are religious voices for the right of our lesbian and gay friends and neighbors to marry, and for our mothers and daughters and sisters to control their own bodies and their own lives. We work to end the death penalty, which is the ultimate denial of human rights.

But we do not do this work just because we believe in a “live and let live” individual liberty. If that were the case, when all of that was accomplished, we could hang up our hats. We could let the gay folks go off and get married and the women go off and control their own destinies, and rest easy knowing the state had respected each person’s natural right to live.

We don’t, we couldn’t hang up out hats because this is a religious community, one that promotes a pluralist brand of ancient liberty. The Rev. Forrest Church writes that: “Diversity is a fact of American life, but pluralism is the ideal toward which we strive as a people. To put pluralism into practice requires more than mere tolerance. At one level, to tolerate means “to bear with repugnance.” Jesus doesn’t ask us “to tolerate our neighbor as ourselves.” He commands us to love our neighbor. [Similarly, t]he Declaration of Independence doesn’t promote diversity; it inspires pluralism, which endows both freedom and diversity with moral content.”

Our faith’s commitment to liberty also inspires pluralism. We do weddings for our gay and lesbian friends and members! We’re here to support and listen to our mothers and daughters and sisters, and we teach our young women and men about sexuality so they face adult life with a sense of security and confidence. UU churches across the country have prison ministries and support restorative justice programs, being there to show folks who’ve made bad choices that they still, after everything, have that inherent worth and dignity.

Here at Unitarian Universalist Church West, we, too, promote both aspects of liberty by using the tools of democracy and community to advance individual freedom.

Just in the past year, we’ve met with our elected representatives to witness for equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians. We’ve supported efforts in Wauwatosa and Brookfield to bring the democratic conversation on the conflict in Iraq to those communities through referendum. Our “UUs in the News” board is filled with letters to the editor written by our members. Later this year, our Social Action Committee will sponsor candidate forums for local elected offices, to educate both our members and our leaders on the moral stances that are most important.

I’ve just named four actions our members have taken to promote liberty. And there are so, so many more. Our faith’s commitment to liberty, both ancient and modern, challenges us to continue to act.

Liberty is deeply rooted in our principles, in our history, and in how we govern ourselves as an association and as a country. The ancestors of both our movement and our nation enshrined liberty as an enduring value so that we might always persevere as witnesses for justice. That act of witness itself is the process of patriotism, of “insisting that what we love should live up to the finest image we have.”

Informed by our past and grounded by our present, may we always be called and challenged to engage in true patriotism, to promote liberty, to sing in unison and to sing the truth that belongs to us and none else.

Amen, and blessed be.