"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that all are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...."
The man who penned these words believed that Unitarianism would one day become the dominant religion of these United States. Thomas Jefferson said this because he knew the minds of those who fought for independence and framed our Constitution. These men and women were radicals creating a completely new kind of society than any known before. As we explore what they believed, we will see many connections to the ideas and values which built Unitarianism and Universalism. Unlike many other religious faiths, ours is uniquely American enshrining the vision of the founders of this great nation.
Central to our founders' thinking were the ideas of the Enlightenment. The philosophy of the Enlightenment questioned the centers of authority of the medieval world expressing skepticism toward the monarchy and the church. They questioned the divine appointment of kings to rule and churches to control the minds of their flock. Enlightenment thinking had grown out of the work of Francis Bacon advocating the scientific method in the late sixteenth century and René Descartes' promotion of critical rationalism. Flush with the new discoveries and advances in science, the champions of the Enlightenment worked to replace tradition and revelation as sources of truth with reason, empiricism and the scientific method.
This skepticism toward the Bible was common in the leadership of the colonies. The power of revelation was being challenged by the power of science to make sense of the world. Science was winning particularly in the area of technology. The power unleashed by the steam engine invented by Thomas Savery in 1698 shook the world and started the industrial revolution. In light of the advance of science and technology, Biblical revelation could no longer stand unquestioned on its own authority. Scripture was being tested against other sources of truth and some were finding it wanting.
Enlightenment thinking spawned a new way to look at religion called Deism. Many of the founding fathers and mothers were Deists. The Deists of the eighteenth century believed that God existed, created the world and set up the natural laws for the working of the universe which God would not violate once set in motion. God was envisioned as a a master clock-maker who winds up the Universe and watches as it plays itself out from afar. Thomas Paine in his book, The Age of Reason exemplifies the Deist beliefs of his time. He professes this faith in the first chapter as follows:
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.I quote this at length because it articulates what was going through the minds of many of the framers of our constitution and the early Unitarians. While embracing a belief in God, they resisted creedal religion. George Washington attended the Episcopal church with his wife Martha but usually left before communion was served. Jefferson so loathed superstitious faith he made his own Bible by cutting up the pages deleting all the miracles and reassembling what was for him a sanitized version. Their faith was first in the power of the human mind, as Paine says, "My own mind is my own church." James Madison believed that no church should be established in the new nation being formed. In a letter to General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia dated June, 1785 he wrote:I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them. I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, "that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence." The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men:
You wouldn't have heard anything like this written by an Archbishop of the time. To their minds most men were not equal in their ability to grasp the revealed truth in the scriptures without which they would all be lost to the ravages of sin. Madison speaks of a new way of understanding human beings. He speaks of every man having unalienable rights.
Probably the most radical idea, asserted again and again as "unalienable", was the idea of natural rights which we today call human rights. Natural rights posited value in all human beings. The logic of natural rights was derived from the writings of John Locke defending the Glorious Revolution in 1688 in England. It is important to realize just how revolutionary the belief in natural rights is and continues to be today. Writes UCLA political science professor Duane Smith:
Locke held that the inalienable rights of individuals form the basis of all rightful governments. According to him, individuals possess these rights simply by virtue of their humanity. They antedate the existence of any government. The authority exercised by governments is exercised on the basis of the consent of the governed and they consent to the exercise of that authority in order to acquire security for their natural rights to life, liberty and estate."The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property: to which in the state of Nature there are many things wanting."
What is the source of these natural rights? The church of the day believed that unless a man be saved from sin and depravity his life was worthless since he would be damned to hell. His value was hardly inalienable but rather graded by his social ranking. This was the normative aristocratic view of the time. If Enlightenment thinkers desired to assert inalienable rights for all humanity , they had to look for a another authority than the church of that day. Thomas Paine and the other Deists discovered that source of divine revelation in Nature. Paine writes:
It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they be. It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.
That looking to nature for revelation continues to be central to most Unitarian and Universalist thinking. The Transcendentalists of the first half of the nineteenth century had mystical experiences as they picnicked by the Charles River enjoying the lush beauty of New England. Much of the struggle we have been through as a faith in the last 200 years has been driven by resolving the conflicts between Nature and Revelation.
In looking for a model of a natural society, the Enlightenment thinkers were breaking out of the medieval philosophy by studying anew the ancient Greek and Roman philosophies and their political ideas. The founders in particular were fascinated as we still are today by the rise and fall of ancient Rome. Rome presented the image of a democratic pre-Christian civilization with a strong sense of citizenship emphasizing community and good government for the furtherance of the common welfare of all.
But if you look more closely at the values of the Roman republic and the values advanced by natural rights, one sees a conflict that we struggle with today. The republican view puts at its center the value of the community. The Roman citizen farmers dropped their plows to take up their swords and defend the state with their life. The republic was of far greater value than the individual. The natural rights philosophy made the protection of individual primary. This tension was heightened by an awareness of the way Rome fell due it individual excess and luxury.
The key to holding together the emerging American empire was the combination of two civic values which would build a strong social network to bind the individual to the nation. The first was the ancient understanding that developing one's virtue was a crucial civic duty. Virtue was traditionally defined as self-sacrifice for the common good. Those Roman soldier/farmers were ready to lay down their lives for their republic. Unfortunately, this kind of intense loyalty and commitment was difficult to imagine in a diffuse nation of immigrants from different lands and cultures.
In the classical literature were the seeds of a new kind of social virtue. The much read and studied ancient play Cato had a character, Juba, who spoke the enlightenment message for a new age:
This second model of virtue was one that appealed to the emerging Victorian mind. The second model of virtue was a change in the understanding of the natural man as having a social component which could and should be cultivated. This natural care and compassion, then buried under the inequities of the aristocratic hierarchy, would bloom in the climate of egalitarianism which flourished in the New World. The Christian view of the depravity of man must yield to a more enlightened view of human potentiality.
The cultivation of this natural care and compassion was given to the religious sphere. This glue to hold together the society would not be directly cultivated by the state as the founders believed no religion should be established as the state religion. The church which best embodied this new vision of civic virtue cultivating wisdom, discipline, the liberal arts and the embellishments of life was the liberal religious tradition forming in Unitarianism. Listen to some excerpts from the famous Baltimore sermon delivered in 1819 by William Ellery Channing, one of the founders of Unitarianism, which provided the catalyst for forming the new faith:
We profess not to know a book, which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible. In addition to the remarks now made on its infinite connexions, we may observe, that its style nowhere affects the precision of science, or the accuracy of definition. Its language is singularly glowing, bold, and figurative, demanding more frequent departures from the literal sense, than that of our own age and country, and consequently demanding more continual exercise of judgment....With these views of the Bible, we feel it our bounden duty to exercise reason upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter to the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and the aim of the writer, his true meaning; and, in general, to make use of what is known, for explaining what is difficult, and discovering new truths....
We believe, that all virtue has its foundation in the moral nature of man, that is, in conscience, or his sense of duty, and in the power of forming his temper and life according to conscience. We believe that these moral faculties are the grounds of responsibility, and the highest distinctions of human nature, and that no act is praiseworthy, any farther than it springs from their exertion.
Unitarianism couples reason to the development of our innate virtue to guide the development of our mind and heart. The Universalists also saw this same innate virtue in humanity expressed as universal salvation. Today we articulate that faith in human possibility as "the inherent worth and dignity" of all people. It is the bedrock of our faith which also inspired the founders of this great nation. For without this belief in the value of each member of society, democracy could not function.
The political problems we experience today were not in the vision of the founders of this nation but in the imperfect way their vision has been lived. Without a strong sense of virtue and a republican sense of the common good, democracy degenerates into interest centered politics which will eventually undermine the union. Many of our fellow religionists would like you to believe that the founders wanted this to be a Christian nation centered on the religion about Jesus. Our first three Deist presents, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, would disagree.
The way to honor the vision of our founders as we also honor today the men and women who have died to preserve it, is the cultivation of civic responsibility and the virtue of service for the common good. Unitarian Universalism, more than any other religious movement embodies these principles. We are proud to be the American Faith.
Copyright (c) 1998 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.