(This sermon is brought to you by Bob Hansman who is a religious and economic liberal but not a political liberal. He wanted me raise up this distinction as part of a sermon on liberalism. So this morning I will explore the distinctions between them and elevate the message of religious liberalism at the core of Unitarian Universalism)
There was a church in Holland whose members committed themselves to keeping the Sabbath holy. One Sunday, a huge storm swept through their town. The local dikes were in great danger, and if they were not patched up soon, floods would destroy the town. The people of the church were faced with a decision: call off church to go work on the dike, or go to church and run the risk of drowning in the flood. The leaders of the church convened to talk it over. They decided to have their church service, confident that God would deliver them from harm, even if He destroyed the rest of the town. The preacher was the only one who felt that the congregation should go work on the dam. He even cited incidences in the Bible when Jesus worked on the Sabbath to help others. At this point, one old man on the council jumped up and said, "Pastor, there is something that has been disturbing my heart for a long time, but I never felt right talking about it. But now I can't control myself any longer. I must tell you that I've always had the sneaking suspicion that our Lord Jesus was something of a liberal."
Yes indeed, Jesus was a liberal. Jesus cared about people first. He confronted the religious establishment and healed those whom they would not touch. I am continually amazed at the conservative theology I hear which neglects Jesus' liberality and puts their entire focus on his death as if they couldn't wait to get him crucified so he could pay for their sins.
Up until about thirty years ago, and before the Reagan Presidency, the word `liberal' was one many of us rallied around. It was a label we wore with honor. It stood for positive initiatives to build a better world for all people, for toleration of difference, for individual liberty and for freedom from authoritarian rule. Liberalism stood for a strong faith in progress, believing that the best is yet to come.
Today, the word has become a pejorative, even an epithet to be slung as an insult. Those who still have the courage to call themselves liberal feel the need to define what they mean and couch their definition in caveats.
Most of the derision directed at liberals comes from an attack on political liberalism which embraced the idea of the welfare state. Since our so called liberal president has brought an end to "welfare as we know it," many conservatives have been more than happy to dance on its grave. Actually, I'm not so sure we have seen the end of the state welfare system, only its revision into a form which includes more work. The public is still behind welfare for poor children, the disabled and the elderly.
Most conservatives would be shocked to find out that they are really liberals at heart. Modern political liberalism is just the opposite of the classical philosophy of liberalism. Political liberalism is willing to collude with the power of the state to enforce its aims whereas traditional liberalism desires to severely limit the power of the state especially in the arena of the market place.
Political liberalism is also not the same as religious liberalism. Liberalism as a philosophy originated in the rising middle class's resistance to the authority of kings, aristocrats and the church. It arose in Europe during the Renaissance, and took shape in the Reformation and the American and French Revolutions. As the medieval feudal order began to unravel, liberalism emerged out of the new individualistic thinking of the Enlightenment.
At the center of liberalism is the emphasis on individual freedom. Rather than God, human beings and human interests should be at the center of government and trade. The power of government should be separate from the power of the church. The Anabaptist ideas of separation of church and state were grounded in the reading of the Bible that saw no divine right of kings in the text. Liberalism sought to expand civil liberties and to limit political authority of the state in favor of constitutional representative government and promoted the rights of property and religious toleration. The resistance to state control of trade during the demise of the feudal order stimulated the creation of economic liberalism. Economic liberalism, advocated by Adam Smith and David Richardo, championed the forces of the free market to set fair prices and guarantee the supply of goods. The first to formulate a political philosophy of liberalism was John Locke. Other leading voices of liberal thinking of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries included Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine[1].
The departure of modern political liberalism from classical liberalism came during the twentieth century in response to the social disruption of lassie-faire capitalism. To address the suffering created by the booms and the busts of the marketplace, liberals decided that perhaps the power of the state might be of assistance to lower and middle class individuals by allowing it to intervene in the economy to assist them. They believed rather than always playing a negative role, the state could be a positive force to stimulate greater economic opportunities for the disadvantaged. Political liberalism brought us minimum wage legislation, social security, medicare, antitrust laws, public education, health and safety laws and consumer and environmental protection. All these laws work against the original idea of classic liberalism, the defense of the individual from state intervention in their affairs. Thus whether one is politically conservative or liberal, all without a second thought accept the importance of the fundamental bedrock principle of liberalism, individual freedom. Or, as Ambrose Bierce put it, a conservative is a statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Religious liberalism shares the same belief in individual freedom with political and economic liberals yet is distinct from them. One can be a religious liberal and a Republican or Democrat. In fact I didn't believe there could be so many Unitarian Universalist Republicans until I came to this congregation! Religious liberals can be either for or against social welfare spending, for or against big government, for or against any number of divisive issues. What distinguishes religious liberals from religious conservatives is our ultimate source of authority for our religious lives.
Religious liberalism has been around since the early days of human society. The first person to question their tribal religion and to choose to believe the reasoning of his or her own mind was a religious liberal. The current incarnation of religious liberalism was born with the Reformation. When Wycliffe, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin challenged the authority of the Pope to define the orthodoxy of the church, liberalism got a tremendous boost. These Reformation leaders wanted to anchor religious authority not in a person who could be corrupted by money and power but rather in a divinely revealed book. Since the printing press made copies of the Bible much more widely available, the average person could read or hear the Gospel in their own language and be taught directly from the text. Luther found the life transforming power in the Bible he could not find in the Church. He could find no solace in the Catholic teachings until he read for himself in the Bible that God saves by grace not by works.
While making the word the source of authority rather than a fallible human institution had a great deal of merit, it also had problems which the Roman Catholic Church did not hesitate to point out especially before they burned the reforming heretics at the stake. The word may be straightforward and easy to understand in certain places but most of it needs interpretation to grasp God's intended revelation. And where there is room for interpretation there is room for disagreement and misunderstanding of the meaning. The history of all the different Protestant sects is the story of one disagreement after another in interpretation of the very same words. Who would be the one to offer the correct understanding? The priest? The sect? The creed? The catechism? Or the reader?
Religious liberals choose the reader, the individual, as the final authority in understanding scripture. Theologically, this is grounded in the belief that the divine, however we understand it, dwells with us and can guide our understanding. The liberal may open themselves to the influence of others by listening to a minister preach, reading a book on biblical archeology or theology, or attending seminary, but they retain the freedom to take in all the information they receive and decide what to believe and what to reject. Each individual is their own authority in religious matters.
This is a tremendous responsibility! Most people would rather not consider and weigh these matters in their own conscience. And there is nothing wrong with yielding one's authority over one's religious life to one's church. This is a completely legitimate way to conduct one's religious life. Religious liberals, for whatever reason, cannot or will not do this. We want to figure things out for ourselves.
Religious liberalism gained a great deal of energy around the world with Darwin's discovery of evolution in the middle of the nineteen century. The Scopes trial brought into the public's mind the scientific challenge to the story of Genesis. At the same time, biblical scholars were analyzing the text and beginning to dissect it and deconstruct its authorship. The Bible as a rock of people's faith began to crumble into disjointed pieces. The biblical banquet turned into a smorgasbord where one could reject one part and consume another. Instead of a coherent tapestry, the bible became a collage of conflicting parts requiring the addition of even more scholarship and interpretation to make sense of it all. And many seeing these shaky foundations for the entire Judaic Christian enterprise decided to reject the entire book as a complete and unique source of meaning.
The liberal religious movement gained strength from about 1890 until the early 1970's. What ended the reign of liberal religion in this country, to my mind, was probably the excesses of the youthful baby boomers. Liberalism became a threat to the cohesiveness of our society as my generation grabbed the brass ring of individualism and ran with it. The other influences which catapulted the conservative Christians back into prominence was the elimination of prayer in the schools in the 1960s and the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
While liberal religion has lost some ground, our day shall come again. Unitarian Universalism continues to grow as other mainline Protestant denominations lose membership. The reason we shall thrive is because liberal religion has the best response to the challenge of pluralism.
The 20th century has been a century of misguided ideology. Dangerous ideas of the Maoists, the Marxists and the Nazis have brought us untold suffering. Religious zealots who put belief in their particular understanding of God above the worth of other human beings have caused great loss of life for thousands of years. Liberal religion replies that life is of greater value than theology or ideology. Any belief system which does not have at its center respect for the diversity of life and thought is a threat to our planet's well being.
The 21st century will bring even greater diversity of races, languages, and religions into the same geographical region. More and more, Christians, Moslems, Buddhists and Jews are living, working and playing side by side. The exclusive claims of religious authority do not permit us to learn from each other and respect each other. The literalist Christian who believes that "no one comes to the Father but through me" and denies the validity of all other faiths will be in constant conflict with the devout Jew and the faithful follower of Islam. The liberal idea of multiple paths to the truth is the only path to creating a peaceful pluralistic society. The majority of Americans share this liberal view of a pluralistic society.
Liberal religion ranks the authority of personal experience over the authority of revealed text. Words cannot possibly contain or convey the greatness of being in which we participate. A book has no power by itself. The meaning derived from a book must come through individual interpretation. And individuals are human and fallible EVEN IF the original revelation they interpret is completely true. Even the most holy amongst us are imperfect transmitters of truth. The only way to really know what is true is to validate that truth in our own experience. The process of awakening to religious truth requires supporting individual experience. Liberal religion believes our religious growth and development happens best in a climate of free choice rather than coercion.
While we are champions of individual freedom in the face of state repression and church doctrine, we must, in the end, agree with our critics that complete individualism is not the answer either. Gertrude Himmelfarb in her book, On Liberty and Liberalism, warns us well in these words:
"Liberals have learned at a fearful cost, the lesson that absolute power corrupts absolutely. They have yet to learn that absolute liberality corrupts absolutely."
The problem with giving the individual complete power over their lives is very few actually can use this freedom wisely. The epidemic level of addiction, whether it is a disease or not, shows us the inability of many individuals to manage addictive substances in ways that do not harm themselves and others completely on their own. The spread of sexually transmitted disease, the abuse of children and spouses, the reckless endangerment of our ecosystem for personal gain, even our eating habits all suggest a profound deficit in the use of good sense by most of the human race in managing their lives. The ability of the human mind to deceive itself seems boundless. In reality, except for the extremely rare perfected individual, if any but a handful exist, most of us need help and guidance in living healthy, wholesome, and creatively productive lives. I know I do.
Liberalism does not promise salvation in and of itself. Liberalism promises the individual the freedom to choose religious leaders and communities in which to do this work. In liberalism, we are free to yield our authority based on what moves our hearts and inspires our commitment. Just because an institution has historical legitimacy, is guided by revealed teaching and claims divinely selected leadership, does not automatically make them worthy of our trust. We shall know them by their fruits. In the open marketplace of faith, we are free to smell the melons and squeeze the tomatoes before we commit ourselves to a religious tradition.
Ultimately liberalism says that we are responsible for our salvation. No one can do it for us. Each of us must make our own peace with the eternal questions which confound humanity. AND, each of us is a prophet who heals and teaches others. Salvation is accomplished not by attempting to escape this world but rather by becoming fully engaged in it. Liberal religion isn't interested in another world to come, but rather becoming fully engaged in this one today. The realm of God Jesus spoke about is not some far away place in space or time. It is right here today if we only but open our inner eyes and see, and our inner ears and hear.
Copyright © 1998 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.
[1] This information is liberally borrowed from Groliers Encyclopedia.