A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
March 14, 2004
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
March 14, 2004
There is an attractive energy that holds the Universe together. Within the human community we know it as love.
It requires space for each thing, whatever it is, with a certain respect for what each thing is, and space to exist according to its own nature. The freedom of each is conditioned by the its meaning or destiny within the whole fabric of being.
Life is an interdependent web and we're all a part of it, all responsible for finding our place and our way, for figuring out how to love this whole universe of life.
And if, as Fritz Perls used to say, I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, — neither am I in the world to thwart the fulfillment of your own destiny and meaning. When there is space for everyone to take their place within the whole, each of us will have a more interesting and fulfilling time of it.
Love is more than a feeling and so is hate.
I realize I have used rather a strong expression: faith-based hate.
I have turned to fairly stark language to portray a stark fact of life. Whether it's found in Wahabist Islamists, in al-Qaeda, or way closer to home, it remains a monumental factor in human experience.
If both love and hate are more than a feeling, then — when we face the hard reality of the consequences of what we do or do not do — then, at least by the sternest measures, maybe we're all guilty. It's a complicated and demanding world.
We may want to escape the human responsibility of being here, showing up, taking our part, finding our way and our place in this world, treading the path of love and not the path of hate.
The Christians and Jews and Muslims I count my dear friends have stood again and again for love and not hate. This is not about Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam. It is about faith-based hate, and it's time to speak out. Sometimes this job requires it.
What was it, in colonial America, when the European settlers fell easily into speaking of the native American Indians as "barbarian, primitive, pagan, savage, idolatrous, heathen, and superstitious?" Or as they said at the Jamestown settlement, Indians were "chayned under the bond of Deathe unto the Divell," or when Indians were referred to as "heathen dogges"? — and, once so labelled, the Indians were in danger, and a colonial leader wrote "better kill a thousand of them than that we Christians should be indangered or troubled with them; Better they were all cut off . . . and so make way for Christians." Good Christians, all; earnest, well-meaning. Is this hate?1
In our course this month on our own spiritual forebears the Transcendentalists during the era of American slavery, we're reading a lot of accounts by firsthand witnesses and participants and these readings take me, like some sort of time-and-space traveling machine, into the heart of a human dilemma.
Here is one account, by a 24-year-old student for the ministry who, too ill to attend seminary, has gone South for his health, and he's in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1827, and the young Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this in his journal:
A fortnight since I attended a meeting of the Bible Society. The Treasurer of this institution is Marshall of the district & by a somewhat unfortunate arrangement had appointed a special meeting of the Society & a Slave Auction at the same hour & place, one being in the Government house & the other in the adjoining yard. One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy whilst the other was regaled with "Going gentlemen, Going!" And almost without changing our position we might aid in sending scriptures into Africa or bid for four children without the mother who had been kidnapped therefrom.2
A whole Christian culture did this. In our course, one of the stars of our story is Moncure Conway, a smart man, certainly — a lawyer; an earnest man, certainly — a Methodist preacher. He and his denomination in Virginia preached a gospel of slavery, slavery as God's will and purpose, against which abolitionism was a great sin. Monc Conway has a conversion and turns up in Boston alongside Parker, Emerson, Phillips, Garrison, and Frederick Douglass. He leaves behind a multitude of earnest religious people who have no conversion.
The British Unitarian Harriet Martineau, during her famous travels in America, complained in 1837 that, with one exception, "I never heard any . . . reference made to grand truths of religion, or principles of morals." Instead of preaching about virtues like "striving after perfection, mutual justice and charity, and christian liberty," the ministers spent all of their time "pretending to find express sanctions of slavery in the Bible . . ."
Shortly before the Civil War the Rev. B.M. Palmer claimed that God had entrusted the black race to the care of the white — a "trust providentially committed to us" — which meant that the South was obligated to "conserve and to perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing."3 How very caring. Was this love, or was it hate?
Hate, like love, is not so easy to define. I suppose we spend our lives trying to define them.
Call it what you will. Consider its consequences.
They didn't mean any harm. Jonathan Edwards owned slaves until the day he died. Was it hate that drove him? Or hate that kept him unconscious of what he was doing? There are times when I am severely tempted to cast judgment on agonized souls whose consciousness never quite arrived at where it we now can easily recognized it should have.
But it isn't the perpetrators themselves that we must condemn. History will find us guilty, too, of some lack of consciousness. It is the thing — this factor in human failure — faith-based hate. It casts blinders over the eyes of the sincere and pious. It subverts the deeds of well-meaning people and makes them wicked.
M.K. Gandhi said that
it is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself. For we are all tarred with the same brush and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To light a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being, but with him or her, the whole world.
It takes a lot of vigilance to escape faith-based hate. Ancient religious traditions preserve, as we know, ancient visions of the world, and the unevolved consciousness of the ancient world. In the Apostle Paul, the message was consistent and undeniable: servants were to obey their masters in all things; defiance toward civil authority was also defiance toward spiritual authority. Isn't that the word of God? The pro-slavery churches said so, and after that, the pro-segregationist churches.
And there's the Curse of Ham. Not many years ago, the whole South and many at the North believed it. Ham was the son of Noah, and because one of his sons, Canaan, looked upon his father naked, all of Canaan's descendants were cursed with perpetual enslavement, forever. And then the curse was extended up one generation to all Ham's sons. I don't remember how this was handled in Presbyterian Sunday School. The Bible says of Noah's sons, "By these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood."4 It was believed that they were the founders of the yellow, black, and white races. It was believed that because of his sin, Canaan was turned black. It's even more explicit in the Book of Mormon.
It's just what they believed. Do you call that hate?
This disastrous idea — the curse of Noah upon the descendants of Ham — was concocted by white religious people out of three verses in the Hebrew Bible — just fifty-one words in the King James. Very few in the Christian world even challenged it. Was that hate?
Many slaves believed it. Frederick Douglass wrote, "I have met many religious colored people, at the South, who are under the delusion that God requires them to submit to slavery and to wear chains with meekness and humility."5 Well, did the fact that some of the slaves themselves believed it — make it true, and not a lie?
This Curse of Ham rubbish even surfaced in the debate about interracial marriage that flared during the presidential campaign of 1864. The editor of the New York Daily News invoked the Curse of Ham and filled three full columns with "scientific" testimony to prove it.6 Jefferson Davis used it to defend both chattel slavery and the foreign slave trade: that's why the accursed race of Ham was brought to our shores.
Distant past? The white-supremacist Citizens' Council's pamphlet about the Curse of Ham, called "A Christian View on Segregation," consisted of a minister's address to the Mississippi Synod of the Presbyterian Church, just after the Supreme Court's desegregation decision Brown v. Board of Education of 1954.
Well — it's just what they believed, you see.
Sometimes matters can be made worse by an unfortunate marriage of church and state. What can we say of the Crusades and the Inquisition? What can we say of the complicity of Pope Innocent XII with the Third Reich — altogether consistent with two millennia of Christian anti-semitism? When church and state are wed, public policy begins to flow from the unquestionable, presumptive authority of creeds and bibles and bishops. There's no room for questions.
These are the bitter fruit of faith-based hate when it is coupled to the marriage of church and state.
Now — you may know that, in 1967, the United States Supreme Court overturned laws in 17 states that banned interracial marriage. It was the culmination of a case that began in 1958, when a Virginia judge ordered an interracial couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, to leave the state for twenty-five years as punishment for violating Virginia's anti-miscegenation law. Here's is what Judge Bazile wrote: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages."
Faith-based hate.
I could go on, but why do it? You could add many more examples yourself.
When, fifteen hundred years ago, the Roman Empire was crumbling into chaos, marriage was one of the secular functions assumed by the stable bureaucracy of the church. It became a sacrament that must be presided over by a priest in a church.
In this matter of marriage, the marriage between church and state has kept the lines blurred ever since.
Right now, many religious institutions, believing they hold a stake in the definition of civil marriage, and driven by some fury not at all accounted for by the content of their arguments, are telling us that marriage must not be extended to same-sex couples because marriage is a sacrament ordained by God that has remained unchanged for three thousand years.
The arguments are absurd; they ring oddly hollow. They don't explain the fury with which they're argued.
The truth is that marriage has changed and evolved as our understanding of human complexities, and freedoms, and dignity have evolved, and it's a good thing that it has, because for long ages, marriage was a work and property contract that upheld the principle that the husband was lord and master in the marriage. Until the Married Womens' Property Acts of the 19th century, marriage meant — for a woman — signing over all she owned to her husband. It took most of that century to pass those reforms in America and Britain because religious people kept arguing that for a woman to own her own property would fundamentally change the nature of marriage and families.
And — until 1967 it was illegal in seventeen states to marry someone of another race.
Yes, marriage has changed, fundamentally, in many ways, and it's a good thing it has, and it's time to change it again.
And how odd to be told that marriage has not changed in three thousand years by a governor whose Mormon great-grandfather had five wives and whose great-great-grandfather had thirteen, according to Mormon records! The arguments, apparently, don't need to be rational. It's really about something else.
What do we call it when, against all evidence, we are told in Thursday's Globe that gay and lesbian people are responsible for the poor quality the author attributes to heterosexual marriages? The author, by the way, was Sean O'Malley, the new archbishop of Boston.
He goes on to say that opposition to the right to marry simply doesn't imply opposition to the civil rights of gay people. So what were those lobbyists from the Archdiocese doing in the legislative chambers in Boston in the 1980s, when, after 17 years, we were still trying to pass a basic civil rights amendment affecting employment, housing, and credit. I was there for the UUA trying to lobby for it. They were there doing everything they could to defeat it. To claim to have supported the civil rights of gay and lesbian people is dishonest.
What is it when logic is contorted to reach a predetermined conclusion? Is procreation the sine qua non of marriage or isn't it? Once, the Catholic church refused marriage to people who were too old to bear children. Now, couples are not asked about their ability or even willingness to do so. Meanwhile, many same-sex couples do raise children. But still the argument is dragged out. Why?
When you deny to somebody else the things you find essential for yourself — the ability to collect the pension or social security benefits, say, or access to the emergency room, and about 1400 other protections — it is disingenuous in the extreme to tell those who are relegated to second-class status that they should — and I quote Sean O'Malley — "be reassured that the church wants all people to live in harmony and mutual respect and to have everyone's legitimate civil rights guaranteed." The denial of these things, and the whitewashing of the facts, cannot be done "with charity."
When we have exhausted the contorted logic and the non sequiturs and dubious assertions of ominous threat — what is left, behind the sentimentality and the pious mask — but the latest manifestation in the saga of faith-based hate. It is the never-failing fountain of convoluted logic and twisted arguments.
The hateful signs at the State House and the epithet yelled at me on the street in liberal downtown Northampton this past week speak more truth about the grounds of queer peoples' second-class status in this society than all the platitudes of the churches about harmony, charity, and respect.
When we hate — do we always mean to hate?
What is hate? Is it a feeling? Who is guilty of it? What does it do to us?
It has long been socially acceptable to bash gay folks. Shame on religious people who practice, rather than challenge, this popular sin of bigotry. It is particularly stunning when the lead spokesman for the anti-same-sex-marriage crusade we've seen in recent weeks in Western Massachusetts, when confronted with charges of staggering hypocrisy, cannot be found to answer to the charges. Really, this ancient hatred and loathing has gone on long enough.
If you ask me: How do I feel about Bishop Dupré? immediately I feel my throat tightening with anger, yes. I will own that.
But I feel, too, the anguish and tragedy of his life — a life so arranged that it required hypocrisy to survive. We must always ask the ways in which institutions shape the lives, for good or for ill, of those who live and work within them.
If we know that an unending succession of wars and crusades and witch-hunts have flowed from faith-based hate, then I think we ought to own it as our mission to reach out to its victims and guard against its destructiveness. And vow to be honest about our own feelings, and to become as conscious as we can of the consequences of our actions and our inaction. Love and hate are more than sentiments.
I call the courageous Goodridge decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court — an act of love.
Our own Unitarian and Universalist forebears agonized, searched their souls, over the meaning of love and hate and their faith. Even the best can betray the demands of love. Our own great William Ellery Channing remained silent about slavery until 1835, and it took a confrontation from the heroic Rev. Samuel J. May, who revered Channing, yet dared interrupt one of Channing's discussions about the reasons he wouldn't join the call for immediate abolition of slavery — by letting loose an indictment that stunned both of them. He heard himself suddenly saying:
Dr. Channing, I am tired of these complaints. . . .The cry of millions, suffering the most cruel bondage in our land, had been heard for half a century and disregarded. `The wise and prudent' saw the terrible wrong, but thought it not wise and prudent to lift a finger for its correction. . . ."Dr. Channing, . . . We are not to blame, sir, that you, who, more perhaps than any other man, might have so raised the voice of remonstrance that it should have been heard throughout the length and breadth of the land, — we are not to blame, sir, that you have not so spoken. . . . Why, sir, have you not taken this matter in hand yourself? Why have you not spoken to the nation long ago, as you, better than any other one, could have spoken?"
And at this the great man sat silent, and then he said, Brother May, I acknowledge the justice of your reproof. I have been silent too long." And he spent the remaining seven years of his life speaking boldy what his gut had known all along.
Before the year was out, in the name of love, William Ellery Channing had published this daring book against slavery, and from that day forward, the attorney general of the Commonwealth, a member of his congregation, would cross the street to avoid looking at him, but that attorney general is long forgotten, and the name of William Ellery Channing is sacred to us, and hallows this faith of ours.
May we never choose the path of hate. If we do, may we not hesitate to turn. May we never fear to tread the sometimes lonely pathways of love.
Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
We gather from a world of illusion and deceit because we seek the light of inward truth, that like a great searchlight, it might search the depths and the crevices of our hearts and minds.
We gather among these friends, these who are drawn by the same yearning, who come seeking their inner reckonings. We come seeking a community of people in whose company we might dare journey to the heart of us, to know what is in us, whether truth or illusion, whether hate or love.
We come trusting that power in us that makes us strong to do this, strong to make the heroic journey to the truth of our very souls. We invoke the power of Spirit in us, that we might be renewed and turned again to the paths of truth, and justice, and divine love.
O Divine Love, holy impulse to deal justly, and kindly, and truthfully with one another — holy impulse to bind up the wounded, free the captive, give power to the weak, to regard one another with reverence and faith — be our strength to do the work that is ours to do, to speak the word that is ours to speak, to trust the Spirit that is the Life and Meaning of every one here gathered.
Let us be in silence.
From William Blake, The Everlasting
Gospel (1818)
The Vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my Vision's Greatest Enemy:
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy Heaven doors are my Hell Gates.
Both read the Bible day & night
But thou read'st black where I read white.
. . . . .
Thou Angel of the Presence Divine
That didst create this Body of Mine,
Wherefore hast thou writ these Laws
And Created Hell's dark jaws?
Tho' thou was so pure & bright
That Heaven was Impure in thy Sight,
Tho' thy Oath turn'd Heaven Pale,
Tho' thy Covenant built Hell's jail,
Still the breath Divine does move
And the breath Divine is Love.
. . . . .
And tho' you cannot Love, but Hate,
[You] Shall be beggars at Love's Gate.
What was thy Love? Let me see it;
Was it love or dark deceit?
Samuel J. May
A Unitarian minister in Connecticut, in his Some Recollections of the Antislavery
Conflict. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1869. see pp. 170-176.
Late in the year 1834 . . . I spent several hours with Dr. Channing in earnest conversation . . . My habitual reverence for him was such that I had always been apt to defer perhaps too readily to his opinions, or not to make a very stout defence of my own when they differed from his. . . . The evils of Slavery he assented could not be overstated. . . . But he hesitated still to accept the doctrine of immediate emancipation. His principal objections, however, were alleged against the severity of our denunciations, the harshness of our epithets, the vehemence, heat, and excitement caused by the harangues at our meetings, and still more by Mr. Garrison's Liberator. The Doctor dwelt upon these objections . . . until I became impatient, and, forgetting for the moment my wonted deference, I broke out with not a little warmth of expression and manner: —
"Dr. Channing," I said, "I am tired of these complaints. The cause of suffering humanity, the cause of our oppressed, crushed colored countrymen, has called as loudly upon others as upon us Abolitionists. . . . We are not to blame that wiser and better men did not espouse it long ago. The cry of millions, suffering the most cruel bondage in our land, had been heard for half a century and disregarded. `The wise and prudent' saw the terrible wrong, but thought it not wise and prudent to lift a finger for its correction. . . . We Abolitionists are what we are, — . . . obscure men, silly women, publicans, sinners, and we shall manage this matter just as might be expected of such persons as we are. It is unbecoming in abler men who stood by and would do nothing, to complain of us because we do not better.
"Dr. Channing," I continued with increased earnestness, "it is not our fault that those who might have conducted this great reform more prudently have left it to us to manage as we may. It is not our fault that those who might have pleaded for the enslaved so much more wisely and eloquently, both with the pen and the living voice than we can, have been silent. We are not to blame, sir, that you, who, more perhaps than any other man, might have so raised the voice of remonstrance that it should have been heard throughout the length and breadth of the land, — we are not to blame, sir, that you have not so spoken. . . . Why, sir, have you not taken this matter in hand yourself? Why have you not spoken to the nation long ago, as you, better than any other one, could have spoken?"
At this point I bethought me to whom I was administering this rebuke, — the man who stood among the highest of the great and good in our land, — the man whose reputation for wisdom and sanctity had become world-wide, — the man, too, who had ever treated me with the kindness of a father, and whom, from my childhood, I had been accustomed to revere more than any other one living. I was almost overwhelmed with a sense of my temerity. . . . I could not suppose he would receive all I had said very graciously. I awaited his reply in painful expectation. The minutes seemed very long that elapsed before the silence was broken. Then in a very subdued manner and in the kindliest tones of his voice he said, "Brother May, I acknowledge the justice of your reproof. I have been silent too long." Never shall I forget his words, look, whole appearance. I then and there saw the beauty, the magnanimity, the humility of a truly great Christian soul. He was exalted in my esteem even more than before.