Religion May Be Hazardous to Your Health: A Sermon by Reverend David Weissbard, February 5, 2017
Preacher: Reverend David Weissbard
Religion May Be Hazardous to Your Health
by David R. Weissbard
First Universalist Society
Central Square, NY
February 5, 2017
The Reading
“Ash Monday”
Armida Alexander
Our reading, Ash Monday, was written by the Rev. Armida Alexander who became a Unitarian Universalist minister after being a member of our church in Rockford, IL. She wrote this words in response to the tragedy in Waco, TX, when the members of the Branch Davidian cult died in a fire during a raid by the FBI back in 1993. Armida wrote:
Ash Monday was too horrible not to notice, as images from World War II crematories come to mind, haunting — with questions.
In the Early Christian Church there were people gifted in the discernment of spirits. Could they tell us who contended here in the desert in Texas?
A new-day David, commanding armies, running from Saul?
Job – who could accept suffering – if only, if only he could understand?
Jesus, a new kind of sovereign with spiritual authority?
Or something of a Rambo, shouldering automatic weapons?
The archetypes of the good, the new being, and the warrior assemble again. Again, the stage is momentarily alive with their conflict as Massada plays again to a full house. Can we discern these spirits? How are we to understand?
Lord Krishna says that people do four dances in the course of a lifetime: wonder, Love, meaning & courage. So judged, perhaps the Branch Dividians danced the intricate steps of wonder and love, and finally amid tears of fire, courage. Bystanders petit bouree (with small steps) toward meaning.
In their longing to be swept up in these dances, some people will gladly abdicate critical reason, the discernment of Spirits. Religion is ubiquitous and inevitable – but not necessarily good.
Do we, as the living repository of a faith that embraces – wholeheartedly – critical thinking – do we have antidotes against the furious swirl of the dance of the dead? I think we do – we have some advice which should be better known:
Beware of any theology – any group, any person, which asks you to set aside, bracket, or quench your critical faculties – for the god’s sake- THINK!
Remain in covenant with a larger group – a church, a district, a nation, a world-wide faith and philosophy, as a check against being swept away by religious enthusiasm
Let this be a group with a rhetoric, a language, sufficiently informed to allow you to distinguish between a true ultimacy and wish-fulfilling delusion.
Therefore, we say think and allign.
Beyond that – the deed is done, the cosmic dance leaves us ashes only, to sift through for truth – which will never be finally known.
And if, erected here, there were a shining stone, etched with names of mothers and children among the men who died, what symbol crowns this stone? Can we name the spirit that visited these children?
Molech’s arms?
Sharp-beaked birds?
What rough beast?
If we could see the form, perhaps we could understand the suffering, the sacrifice, and name the altar.
Is it Pele – from her volcano, embracing the beloved in fire? Jaweh of the spinning wind? What spirit poured out here in fearsome Pentecost? And who has found a tongue to prophecy and who can hear the alien Word?
Out of ashes- They are not ours – nor anything we can claim or comprehend – firm in faith they died as others have – in Roman arenas and Nazi ovens, or OD’d on Kool Aid.
While we seek knowledge – truth, clarity, discernment – How can we understand? We have other altars. THINK!
The Sermon
[Waco]
I still remember the Monday morning in April,1993, as I was preparing to leave for a District Ministers Retreat in the Midwest, there was an almost casual report on the news that, by the way, the FBI was using armored vehicles to break into the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco to pour in tear gas. “And on the lighter side . . . ”
The Jonestown Massacre of fifteen years before was geographically distanced from us, since Jim Jones had moved his followers to an exotic land. But the Davidians were on American turf and harder to ignore.
I wonder if we will ever learn what really happened there? We are told that the so-called David Koresh used to jog in the mornings, and that he went to town regularly for haircuts. There was no crisis that we know of before the compound was stormed by the Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms troops. One is lead to speculate that this was, like so many big drug raids, a Public Relations Show that went amiss.
Restraint was utilized, and then the “good guys” started trying to wear the “bad guys” down with loud music and bright lights. If ever there were a strategy doomed to failure, that was it. You don’t get through to people who are psychologically isolated in a cult by isolating them further and playing into their fantasies of good and evil forces. To all indications, the government never even consulted with people who knew the first thing about cults and the psychology of cult members, as to how best to deal with them.
We may never know who physically struck the flames, but I’m not sure it is entirely relevant – governmental forces created the showdown. There was no way that this story was going to have a happy ending. In fact, the subsequent bombing of the Murray Federal Building was cast as a response to the government’s actions that day.
This was not the first instance of such a happening, and I trust it will not be the last. It seems to me to be important that we try to learn something – about the victims and about ourselves – from this event. I believe we can learn best by stepping back and getting our bearings – by looking from a distance before coming back up close.
[a life cycle of religions]
All religious institutions have a life cycle. They begin with a person who is has a “inspiration.” Inspiration means being filled with spirit. People are impressed by an encounter with an unusual person who seems to have about him, or her, a unique dimension which sets them apart from others. It’s a gift – a charism. There is something about the person and the message which is unusually compelling — which attracts followers. That “certain something” may be good or evil — the only real test of the quality is the outcome. Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, St. Francis, Pope John, and Martin Luther King are examples, as are Adolph Hitler, Aimee Semple McPherson, Jim Jones, Joseph Smith, Father Divine, and David Koresh.
A following is created or attracted by the personal magnetism of the prophet, along with the power of his or her message. But no leader lives forever, and even when the message seems enduring, there is always the question of how it will survive the loss of the teacher. There is a seemingly inevitable process which the sociologist Max Weber called, the “routinization of the charisma.” The leader passes the mantle on to a successor, who may be able to wear it for a time, but what then? If it is to survive, there must be the creation of an institution which has at its heart, the message for which the originator stood.
The problem is, most such messages are not conducive to institutionalization. The movement began with a spirit, and spirit is not easily passed on. Institutions require structure, leadership, finances, power, and in their creation, the spirit usually becomes buried. The personal experience of having been touched by the power of the leader’s gift becomes a story which is passed on — it may be passed on movingly, but it is nonetheless second-hand, then third hand, and as the generations pass, it becomes increasingly obscure.
[reformers]
Such is the history of Christianity, of Buddhism, of Islam. What a movement becomes, if it survives, is often a far cry from its beginnings. As Ronald Knox details in his history of Christian religious enthusiasm in the 17th and 18th centuries, throughout the history of the Christian church, new leaders have emerged who looked at the contemporary institution and its leadership and said, “Stop! This is not the way things are supposed to be! The church is no longer a manifestation of its origins.” The reformer infrequently sets out to start something new — they inevitably see themselves as just trying to restore what once was. Jesus was not trying to create a new religion: he was an articulator of what he believed was important and ignored in the Judaism of his time.
When we talk about the history of Unitarian Universalism, we generally point to the various martyrs of the Christian church as our spiritual ancestors. Reformers are not welcomed by church authorities– au contraire: they are viewed as threats to the peace and, like Jesus, have often been executed, even if theirs is a message of love. They set themselves in opposition to the institutional leadership, and certainly to the complacent majority — by definition the majority is always complacent. The followers of the new perceive themselves as possessors of the truth and of purity: they are sure they know how the world should be organized – they are sure they know what is good for the rest of us. It is not a new story; it is very old.
I was saying, we point in our history to the martyrs of the church. These have been people whose sense of the authority within them empowered them to stand up against the institutional powers. Unitarianism and Universalism were both minority views which were determined by the early church leaders to be heretical notions; those who articulated them were subject to death at an early age. We tend, therefore, to look with sympathy upon those who were courageous enough to proclaim the truth as they saw it, in spite of the consequences; those who said, “I know better than the church does.”
What we sometimes ignore is that many of those whose courage we applaud were persons whose views were very different from our own — in fact, many were persons who, had they the power, would have been happy to light the fires under our ancestors. The fact that they were independent does not mean that they were sympathetic. Many of the heretics over the years were very unpleasant people with very extreme views.
In truth, many of our ancestors, in spite of being rebels themselves, were nervous about the enthusiastic movements in religion because such movements have most often had the characteristic of being illiberal. There is something about believing that you have “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” that gets people very excited. It makes it hard for them to tolerate people who, they can plainly see, are living in error. From the beginning of time there has been a tendency for enthusiastic movements to be anti-rational — their source of truth and power is immediate and personal and NOT intellectual. Such movements have always tended to harken back to a previous, simpler time and have sought to recreate their dream of a golden age that may never have been.
[enthusiasm]
In his book, Beginnings of Unitarianism in America, Conrad Wright detailed how the liberal tendency that was to blossom into Unitarianism became focused in response to the enthusiastic movement known as the Great Awakening, which swept the American Colonies between 1735-45. Reformers came along who believed that the contemporary church had lost touch with the gospel message — that the church had lost its spirit and had become too formal . . . that the clergy were not sufficiently inspired or inspiring. George Whitefield, the English evangelist colleague of John Wesley, came to America to preach a regeneration of the spirit of the church.
In Massachusetts there was a very orderly structure to the church: each town had its Parish church which was supported by tax funds. Ministers tended to be called to their Parish for life-time contracts — it was a secure profession. Needless to say, many of these preachers did not welcome the presence of a traveling evangelist whose very presence was a condemnation of what they were doing: if they were, as they believed, representing the church adequately, who needed the evangelist to come to town? And the evangelists tended to be rabble rousers who appealed to less educated people with less of a sense of propriety. The emphasis of the evangelists on being “born again” bore relatively little relationship to the preaching of the established ministers who stressed ethical living and personal responsibility — the evangelists didn’t have to live with these people – what did they care?
Charles Chauncy, the minister of the First Church in Boston, was offended by the whole evangelical process. He saw the enthusiasm of the saved as being the product of “bad temperament of the blood and spirits; ’tis properly a disease, a sort of madness,” he said. Chauncy preached:
…the human passions are capable of serving many valuable purposes in religion, and may to good advantage be excited and warmed: always provided that they are kept under the restraints of reason; for otherwise they will soon run wild, and may make those in whom they reign to do so too. Light and heat should always go together; and if there be not some good proportion of the former, it will turn to little account if there be ever so much of the latter.
Conrad Wright showed that it was in response to the pressure of the evangelists that the liberals began to draw together. At first they were not Unitarian, they were simply ministers who believed in personal responsibility and the use of reason in religion. The more they talked together, and read together, the more they began to radicalize each other. Within a generation, Unitarian theology began to appear in the pulpits. Had it not been for the emergence of the religious right of their time, the liberals might have remain fragmented with less of a sense of their identity.
I find it enlightening to look back into history – not that it ever repeats itself precisely – but it helps to put our times into context. The Great Awakening of the 1740’s did not have the benefit of television, but its message, its appeal, and its impact bear more than a passing resemblance to today’s religious right which is a contemporary manifestation of the enthusiastic movements of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The promise of a simpler world, the promise of easy salvation, of a personal relationship with God – the rejection of the intellect, of moral relativism, of personal responsibility for the way things are — these challenges are nothing new. Our spiritual ancestors faced them, and created from those challenges a religious heritage which we celebrate.
With that historical base, let’s move closer to our time.
[two dimensions]
Religion, like most things, has two dimensions -a creative one and a destructive one. Religion can be an imaginative process of opening oneself to experiencing the oneness of life; an establishment of relationship with all that is; love of life; the perception of harmony; the excitement of the ethical faculties; religion can be about wonder, and inquiry, and investigation; it can be about the human community, about living with compassion; a celebration of life. These are qualities that many of the world’s great religious leaders have manifested in their lives, and have elicited in the lives of their followers.
But then there is religion that represents the contrary side: religion has also been about dualism (good and evil) instead of oneness; discord instead of harmony; superiority and exploitation instead of compassion; fear and hate, instead of love; control instead of wonder; certainty instead of inquiry; alienation, instead of community; discord instead of harmony; the denegration of life instead of its celebration.
Why have negative religious movements flourished? Because people’s experience of life is not all the same and we seek out religions that help us understand and cope with our personal experience. People’s needs are different.
[cults]
The concept of cults is complex. The common use of the word is to apply it to any group with which we do not agree. For a long time, the Roman Catholic Church taught that all Protestants were cult members – tools of the anti-Christ. There is no question in the minds of most Christian clergy that Hindu’s, Moslems, Buddhists, and Unitarian Universalists are cult members because we believe things that are radically different from what they teach.
The Branch Davidians were an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church – a group that itself broke away from that breakaway group back in the thirties. David Koresh became a part of that group, and then took it over in a power struggle. It always was a cult; it was not always violent.
There are hundreds of cults in America today; groups that do not believe that religious truth resides only in the traditional structures; groups that insist that religious inspiration is not something that existed only two thousand years ago, but that continues today; groups that demand the right to seek and celebrate new truth. So far, it is appropriate to include Unitarian Universalists in the definition.
The next step is where we part. Cults tend to believe that their inspired leader has all of the truth, and that it is incumbent upon followers to swear total allegiance to the leader, and suspend their own judgement. Cults tend to cut their members off from society – from family and friends and outside influences.
The sociologist Erving Goffman suggests that:
Every institution captures something of the time and interest of its members and provides something of a world for them; in brief, every institution has encompassing tendencies. When we review the different institutions in our Western society, we find some that are encompassing to a degree discontinuously greater than the ones next in line. Their encompassing or total character is symbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to departure that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, or moors. These establishments I am calling “total institutions . . . ”
Goffman was writing about prisons and mental hospitals, not cults, but in fact much of what he said about the inmates of those institutions applies equally to cult members. They become dehumanized, lose a sense of self, and adopt a whole new set of values that fit their institution.
By definition, cults are not attractive to people who are happy in the world, who have a sense of belonging. If they felt as if they belonged to common institutions, they would not make the sacrifices that becoming part of a total institution involve. They attract people who are “out of step.”
The existence of cults is a testimony to the failures of our society to serve all of its members. There have always been and there will probably always be cults. The whole concept of the freedom of religion demands that cults be tolerated.
But there are, of course, limits. Several years ago, the Rockford Church offered a seminar with a high school classmate of mine who is an expert on the survivalist cults, the right wing military-religious groups that expect the end of the world to come with armed attacks, probably by African Americans from the ghettos. There are many of these groups holed up in the hills with large caches of arms and supplies of food. Most of them preach gospels of hate and isolation. They picture Jesus holding a bazooka. Many of them make the Branch Dividians look like pikers, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has left them pretty much alone. Given what happened in Waco, there has been an increased tendency to leave them alone. Their access to large scale weapons is a serious threat to our society, but we have been unwilling as a nation to address that issue.
There are many people who assert that the problem is the freedom of religion. They seriously believe that no one should be free to come up with new ideas. “Keep people in the historic religions and you won’t have all this trouble.” That is, of course, no solution. There are so-called legitimate preachers like Pat Robertson who refer frequently to “religious wars” against people who believe differently than they do.
[responding]
How might we respond to the existence of cults?
In our reading, Armida Alexander had two suggestions:
The First was, ” Beware of any theology – any group, any person, which asks you to set aside, bracket, or quench your critical faculties – for the god’s sake- THINK!”
If there is anything that our religious movement has stood for, it is thinking about religion, using reason. I am troubled by hearing increasing calls, even from within our midst, for setting reason aside. It is clear that reason is not sufficient, but that is not to say that it is not necessary. There is more than reason, but we must continue to hold reason as an essential component of the religious life.
Armida’s second suggestion was, “Remain in covenant with a larger group – a church, a district, a nation, a world-wide faith and philosophy, as a check against being swept away by religious enthusiasm.”
That one is trickier. Being part of a large group is not inherently the answer because the Christian Churches, as an example, have fostered a lot of destructive trends. It seems to me to be more to the point that we need to ally ourselves with religious communities in which there is freedom to challenge one another’s beliefs.
The other freedom that is troublesome, but necessary, is the freedom to come and go. People come and go in Unitarian Universalist churches. We attract many new members, but they generally only replace those who have left us behind. People need to be free to come and go in any religious community. The point of danger, the intolerable point, is that at which people cannot leave.
Religious freedom does not make life simpler; it only has the possibility of making it better. As long as there is freedom, there will probably be religious organizations of which we disapprove – groups which we believe are destructive. The reason for this is simply that religion has a destructive side, and it is virtually impossible to conceive of the positive without the negative. The necessity of freedom is that people need to be able to choose the religious community that reflects their views, a religion that works for them.
This sermon can be summarized by the words of Sophia Lyon Fahs, a leading Unitarian Universalist religious educator of the last generation, which appear in the back of our hymnals as responsive reading number 657. Please join me in reading those words.
Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.
Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.
Some beliefs are like shadows, darkening children’s days with fears of unknown calamities.
Other beliefs are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.
Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.
Other beliefs are bonds in a universal brotherhood [and sisterhood] where sincere differences beautify the pattern.
Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one’s own direction.
Other beliefs are like gateways, opening wide vistas for exploration.
Some beliefs weaken a person’s selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness.
Other beliefs nurture self-confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.
Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.
Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.