Reclaiming Freedom of Religion

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

April 30, 2006

In choosing our hymns and readings for today, we wanted to emphasize that our concern for religious freedom begins in our spiritual heritage. We go back a long way on this issue. American Unitarianism first took root in some of the oldest churches founded by the Puritans, those great religious dissenters who were willing to risk everything to find a place where they could practice their faith freely. Universalists and Unitarians were in the forefront of the movements in Massachusetts and elsewhere to end the intimate relationships between religion and governments that allowed states to tax all citizens to support the established churches. Thomas Jefferson’s advocacy for religious liberty is his most unambiguous legacy, the one we are proudest to claim.

Our spiritual ancestors had faith in freedom. And so do we; two of the seven principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Covenant refer to it directly (the right of conscience and the free and responsible search for truth and meaning). This is a legacy we are proud of and one we hope to live up to.

And as Francis David’s story makes clear, it’s a legacy that goes back before the founding of this nation. I’ve been told by the minister of our partner church in Oltheviz, Romania, that in the Unitarian churches of the Transylvanian region, the anniversary of the Edict of Torda is celebrated as a holiday. I’ve also heard from folks who’ve visited Transylvania that many Unitarian churches there, dating back to David’s time, have a famous painting of the event hanging somewhere. It’s a very dramatic depiction of the Council debate, with Francis David pointing skyward, the light is streaming down and his hair is flowing back; you can almost hear him saying the words of our responsive reading: “In this world there have always been different opinions about faith and salvation. . . . If they offer something better, I will gladly learn.”

Isn’t that wonderful?

The religious biography of Thomas Jefferson by Edwin Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God, takes its title from familiar words that appear on the Jefferson Memorial: “I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Stirring words, those; you can imagine them being said in that same sort of pose, hand lifted in the air, head held high, voice ringing and clear.

Those were the days, weren’t they?

There is something in me at least that wishes for that kind of drama. I want to be thundering out the truth in that great council chamber; I want those enemies of freedom to quail at the sound of my voice; I want the bright light of religious liberty to blast away the shadows of ignorance and fear that keep people clinging to the notion that the practice of one faith has to be a threat to others. There’s a little of the demagogue in me, and I know it.

And if you pick up the newspaper any given day, it’s easy to start getting the feeling that maybe this is the time of the great confrontation after all. Maybe you’ve felt it too: that rush of blood to the face, that rising ringing tone in the voice, the now-or-never do-or-die feeling that FREEDOM IS UNDER FIRE and we have to DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW to stop the advance of theocracy.

Of course, for most of us the struggle isn’t so dramatic, and it probably isn’t going to be. We’ll probably never be called on to deliver the ringing speech that sets the nation’s course either toward or away from religious freedom. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do.

The struggle over the right relationship between church and state is not something relegated to a distant and heroic past. It continues to this day; it continues every day, and it promises to grow sharper in the future. And despite what some would have us think, it’s certainly not just a struggle against those Muslim fundamentalists who want to establish theocracies in countries that just happen to have significant reserves of oil.

In a U.S. town that’s dominated by one of the largest and most influential national organizations on the religious right, there’s a college where 90 per cent of the faculty and student body identify themselves as Christian. Prayer meetings are a daily campus activity, and although they’re voluntary, if you don’t take part in them you’re marched to your room in what everyone calls the “heathen flight.” The head of the school sent all the students a message on a National Day of Prayer a couple of years ago urging them to stand up for their Lord and Savior; the head coach hung a banner in the locker room announcing that the student athletes belonged to “Team Jesus.” Students who didn’t fit the evangelical profile reported that they were passed over for leadership opportunities in favor of their more fervent classmates.

If you don’t get a chance to read the news much, you may think I’m talking about Liberty University down the road in Lynchburg—and if you were, the picture would be nothing disturbing; it is a private school and that is its creed. But if you did catch the news about this time last year, you know I’m talking about the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. A report last summer by a military investigative committee acknowledged that students there have experienced a climate of religious intolerance. The report was met by scorn and outrage from by many on the religious right; the vice president of Focus on the Family, which has its headquarters in Colorado Springs, said that he thought a “witch hunt” was under way to root out Christian beliefs at the Academy. But ultimately the Air Force determined that indeed it is not all right for superior officers to try to convert cadets or subordinates, and the Academy is under a new regime these days.

Closer to home, when I first came to Virginia I learned early on that I’d have to get a license to perform legal marriages here, something I’d never needed to do in North Carolina. And when I first made inquiries, I learned that in order to commit marriage, I had to show denominational proof that I was ordained. Now this was a dilemma: In our tradition, the permission of a congregation is all you need to perform marriages, and YOU ordained me, not the Unitarian Universalist Association. It took some strenuous argument, and there was a brief time when I wasn’t sure our religion was going to pass muster with the Clerk of Court for the City of Charlottesville. In the end I walked across the street, and Albemarle County decided you and I were good enough, and I got the papers.

There is an entanglement of church and state in the designation of clergy to sign marriage licenses. Inevitably, the state winds up making judgments about which religions are satisfactory and which aren’t, and even though they make exceptions to the rule—Quakers, for instance, and Muslims, often don’t have ordained clergy but someone in their community still has to be able to make those marriages legal—it’s clear that their religion is outside the mainstream, different from the norm.

The entanglement gets more complicated when the state also decides which of the marriages its licensed clergy perform are legal and which are “only” religious.

During the Equality Virginia Lobby Day a couple of months ago lobbying against the Marshall/Newman marriage restriction amendment, I encountered one state legislator who told me that he didn’t think the General Assembly should be involved in marriage, because marriage was a religious matter. I told him about some religious demonstrators outside who were saying that their definition of marriage should be the only one sanctioned in Virginia. “Given that the Commonwealth is involved in marriage,” I asked, “can you tell me why it should privilege that church’s definition of marriage over my church’s definition?” “That’s an interesting point,” he said, and he acknowledged he didn’t have an answer. But he voted in favor of the Marshall/Newman amendment in a committee meeting later that afternoon.

The struggle for religious freedom is still very much here for us. It’s part of our great legacy and our present situation, and we’re generally glad to claim it.

But there is another part of the legacy of religious freedom that still needs reclaiming. One of the greatest threats to religious freedom has come not from its enemies at home or abroad, but from the way our nation has abused and trivialized religion.

It’s one of the religious right’s most stinging and effective claims that those who resist the domination of American politics and public life by their particular creed are in favor of “freedom from religion.” And we on the religious left have too often been trapped into that position. In my lifetime most of the contest for freedom of religion has been focused on removing vestiges of the dominance of Christianity in American culture—crosses and manger scenes in town squares, the Ten Commandments (King James Version) in courthouses, public prayers in public schools. I’m not saying that it’s not worth fighting that battle, but I think there’s more to religious freedom than just not being spiritually molested by those who insist on sharing their faith in overbearing ways.

When Francis David stood in the council chamber at Torda, he was not arguing that religion had no place in public life. He did not stop with “In this world there have always been many opinions on faith and salvation,” but went on to name his own: “Egy oz Isten,” “God is One.” This great truth of his Unitarian understanding was the foundation for everything else, for his understanding of humanity and for his trust that there was nothing to fear from new ideas and teachings about God and the life of faith.

In this country, John Adams, as an old man, wrote that he thought it might be better for humankind if there had never been such a thing as religion in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, who agreed. But these passionate advocates for religious liberty worked throughout their lifetimes not just for the freedom of individuals not to be “burthened” or persecuted for their faith, but for the freedom of individuals to develop themselves fully according to the dictates of their faith and their consciences. Like David, it was not freedom from religion they sought, but the freedom to be religious, freedom to live and work and pray and worship in their own way.

What are we doing with our religious freedom? Religious liberty is not a religion in and of itself. If the whole focus of our religious activity is making sure we’re never confronted unwillingly with anyone else’s faith, then our own well of spiritual resources is going to be pretty dry.

I think this has been a great downfall of liberal culture in the Western world. We who believe in freedom have been so focused on keeping ourselves free of religious domination that we have neglected the spiritual development of our culture. This makes us vulnerable to the arguments of religious totalitarians, who confuse people of genuine religious faith by telling them that Western culture is necessarily decadent, narcissistic, and spiritually arid. It’s all too easy for those who advocate religious tyranny point to American popular culture and say that there’s no way for a deeply religious person to live out their faith in this context.

This is the legacy of religious freedom that we need to reclaim. The work of a free faith includes developing in our freedom a faith that is worth living for, that is powerful enough and persuasive enough to live with.

We don’t only stand for freedom. We stand for freedom because we believe in the trustworthiness of humanity, because we believe individual human beings living in community have the resources and the moral worth to find their own way to live. We stand for freedom because we believe that truth is not coded or inaccessible without the aid of some special class of religiously superior people, but available to every person. We stand for freedom because we believe in the fundamental equality and worth of every single human being, and in their right to grow into their highest selves, free of force or fear.

We stand for freedom—and we acknowledge love as the greatest power in human living.

We stand for freedom—and we insist that no human being is ever lost beyond the possibility of redemption.

“In this world there have always been many opinions about faith and salvation.” To fully reclaim our legacy of religious freedom, we have to be willing to say what ours are—and willing to stand up for them.