Values and Valuing: A Sermon by the Reverend David Weissbard, January 8, 2017
Preacher: Reverend David Weissbard
“Values & Valuing”
Dave Weissbard
First Universalist Society
Central Square, NY
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January 8, 2016
[differences]
When people differentiate between religions, they tend to speak about the differences in their beliefs. There is an element of truth in that idea. Very often the formal lines between churches are a function of beliefs: beliefs about the names to which a deity answers, beliefs about how rites are to be performed to appease or worship that deity, beliefs about the relationship of humankind to the deity. But let me suggest that while beliefs may vary from religion to religion, neither deities nor beliefs about them are really at the core of religion: the primary concern of religion is values. While beliefs are the substance of creeds, the focus of the traditions, values are the stuff that lies beneath the surface.
Now let me be clear that what I am expressing is a liberal religious perspective that does not represent how most people actually perceive their religion: most people believe that their beliefs are of crucial importance. Some people can’t see the forest because there are so many trees in the way. Seeing the forest requires perspective. Similarly, looking at religion requires that we pull back for a broader perspective.
[gods as projections]
Many of us believe that the gods of religion are not what they seem. Rather than being an external reality to which humans relate, we see gods as the projections beyond themselves of that which people find to be of the highest value. Some have varied the traditional phrase, “God created man in his own image,” to read, “Humans created Gods in their own image, and then the Gods returned the favor.” It is heretical, but not quite accurate. It is important to recognize that people generally create gods in accordance with their aspirations. Gods have more to do with what people hope will be, than what is. They are an expression of a people’s values.
[values defined]
Values is one of those words from the social sciences that are used imprecisely by a lot of people without much agreement or understanding of their meaning.
A value has been defined as:
that which a thing has or is . . if and when people behave toward it so as to retain or increase their possession of it;
Anything capable of being appreciated or wished for;
any object of need;
a desideratum or anything desired or chosen by someone at some time – operationally, what the respondent says he [or she] wants;
normative standards by which human beings are influenced in their choice among the alternative courses of action which they perceive;
and there are others.
Some definitions give you the impression that a full tank of gas is a value – after all, it is something that we can appreciate or wish for . . . it is something desired or chosen by many of us when we have the opportunity . . . it is an object of some need.
The last definition comes the closest to the context in I will be speaking of values: “normative standards by which human beings are influenced in their choice among the alternative courses of action which they perceive.” “Normative standards” has the ring of being someone else’s expectations, so let’s go one step further and take as our definition of value: “The basis upon which an individual will choose one course of action rather than another, judged as better or worse, right or wrong.” That definition, by the anthropologist Dorothy Lee, makes clear one of the central elements of values, which is that they involve judgements and comparisons – as we say, “evaluations” – the placing of values on alternatives.
[the core of religion]
When you pare religion down to the core, this is really what it is about. People find that there are ways of living to which they aspire and, commonly, to which they believe others should also aspire. Religions are the paths by which people expect to get where they want to get from where they are. “By doing these things and living according to these principles, we can achieve holiness.” And what people have seemed to do from the beginning of time is to put the force of nature and the supernatural behind those principles. Rather than simply saying, “Here is a way of living that you might consider,” teachers and preachers have said, “”This is how our God demands that you live.”
Ultimately though, people are faced with choices. The ancient story from the book of Genesis is a statement of that essential religious truth. Our ancestors acquired the knowledge of good and evil. No longer can we claim innocence. We must make choices between better and worse, good and evil.
Walter Weisskopf has suggested that because of our consciousness, we are capable of transcending situations. You see, we are aware. We are, and we are conscious of being. This is the basis of human freedom. Because we can transcend the limits of a given situation, we are free to consider alternatives. The way Weiskopf puts it is:
The dimension of actuality is left behind and the realm of potentiality is entered, creating the possibility of choice of the necessity of decision based on guiding values . . . Values, then are a concomitant of freedom.
In most religions, tradition has been the primary source of values – the distilled wisdom of those who have gone before. They struggled with the realities we face and they were given the answer’s to the questions we ask. “It’s in the book!” All we have to do is accept and believe.
The problem is that our perceptions of the world as it might be, vary with our experience of the world as it is. If we look at the history of religions, we see that religions change in response to changes in the situation of the people. The nature of the God in the Hebrew scriptures changed significantly as the situation of the Hebrew tribes changed from nomadic to agricultural to urban – it’s all there in the book. Certainly the theology of Christian churches has changed in response to the inputs of science, but not quickly enough. Einstein pointed out:
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.
[the values gap]
Today there is a gap of no small size between the complexity of the world in which we live, and the simple tribal vision of the world to which some people continue to cling. Because religion is generally a conservative force, it is resistant to change. When the conflict between the religious view of the world and the reality with which people are confronted becomes too great, the result is a sense of confusion, and we confront conflicts in values.
Religion often holds up love as a value – caring relationships between people. Religions also hold up truth as a value. There are times when the truth seems to intrude upon caring relationships. Religion teaches us to value our sense of integrity – we are called upon to do good as we see it. At the same time, religion tends to encourage submission to legitimate authority. Integrity and submission often come into conflict. When the conflict gets too great, religion calls in the supernatural to support authority. The Roman Catholic Church is finding this increasingly difficult to pull off.
Abraham Maslow suggested:
We are in an interregnum between old value systems that have not worked and new ones not yet born, an empty period which could be borne much more patiently were it not for the great and unique dangers that beset [humankind.] We need a validated, useable system of human values, values that we can believe in and devote ourselves to because they are true, rather than because we are exhorted to “believe and have faith.”
[values and religion]
The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “The knowledge of values is identical with the knowledge of one’s essential being” –that is, the essence of one’s self. It was Tillich’s belief that we have an intuitive sense of the gap between what we are and what we might be, and that we can check that against experience.
Theologians tend to focus on what they call “ontological” values – that is, ultimate values in a philosophical sense. Social scientists, like Maslow, prefer to deal with values that they can observe in operation.
There are many people who prefer that religion focus its attention on the speculative and safely distant ontological values – that is, that religion not look too closely at how people actually live. While I believe we need to be concerned about ultimate kinds of values, I understand the story of Adam and Eve to demand that we face up to the challenge in our lives of making difficult choices, and that religion needs to play a critical role in that process.
Milton Rokeach is the author of a values survey that has been used by hundreds of thousands of people, probably more than million, since its creation in 1973, and is still in use today. [The survey is appended to this sermon.] Rokeach described his understanding of values as: “enduring beliefs that a specific mode of conduct or end state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end state of existence”.
The late religious educator Bob Miller did a major survey of Unitarian Universalists more than a quarter of a century ago using Rokeach’s Value Survey and found that the highest “terminal values” among Unitarian Universalists were ”Self-respect, wisdom, freedom, family security, inner harmony, and a sense of accomplishment.” Terminal values are those which describe our goals – the destinations in our lives. There is a second list, a list of “instrumental values” – those which have to do with how we get where we are going. Miller reported the highest “Instrumental” values among UU’s to be “Honest, broad-minded, loving, responsible, courageous and independent.”
[values clarification]
A challenge in dealing with values is there tends to be a gap between espoused values and the values we actually apply. There are things we believe we are supposed to value and then there are the values by which we actually live. That isn’t all bad – it is good for us to aim higher than what we accomplish – that keeps us growing. But there is a certain discontinuity, a kind of self-deception when we believe we actually have achieved a level of perfection that far exceeds our practice. I believe that an important function of religion is to keep us looking at the gap between what we do and what we believe we should be doing, and to urge us in the direction of our ideals.
There was a fad in public education several years ago, with which many Unitarian Universalists resonated. Sid Simon, Louis Raths, Leland Howe, and Howard Kirschenbaum suggested that schools needed to move away from trying to impose morality and instead focus on helping students to clarify their values. They got into trouble because conservatives saw the value clarification movement as a humanistic takeover of the public schools. They were not entirely wrong. The underlying assumptions behind values clarification were not that a deity has handed down rules for us to obey, but rather that we must freely explore alternative choices and decide for ourselves which are better.
Simon and his colleagues dealt less with values as nouns and more with the process of how we choose. For them, we demonstrate our values when we choose freely among alternatives and find a factor in the decision that is something that we prize or cherish. If we are willing to affirm that as a value, act on it, and repeat it, then it is truly a value. Values, in that context, are tools that we use in deciding.
It is, for instance, one thing to say that we value honesty. If, when we are confronted by real life situations in which we continually choose not to be honest, then honesty may be an aspiration, but it is not really a value for us. If the fact that it appears that everyone else is cheating, or the government isn’t likely to audit us, or no one will notice, frees us up to be dishonest, then honesty is not serving as a value for us.
For the religious liberal, the role of the church is not to give us a ready-made set of values – nor even to suggest that such a clear cut set exists. I would suggest that Unitarian Universalist churches are, at their best, about a continual process of values clarification – an exploration to help us look at the complexity of the values we espouse and how these relate to the values that we actually apply in our lives. That is a different role for a church than what most people look for in their churches. Most people expect a church to proclaim a clear set of expectations that have a divine authority behind them.
[the checkbook test]
One of the ways in which specialists in values clarification have suggested that we can take stock of our true values is to look in our checkbooks or calendars. The ways in which we allocate our resources are a good clue as to what we actually value.
We might, for instance, take the support of churches as an example. There is good evidence that Fundamentalist Christians really value their churches. We sometimes dismiss it as guilt-motivated, but the fact is that they value their churches so much that active members of those churches allocate at least 10% of their financial resources to the support of their churches. I saw a sign at a 7th Day Adventist church which said, “Give God what’s best, not what’s left.” A 7thDay Adventist ministers magazine I receive in the mail stresses that giving 10% of one’s income is simply what’s expected. It’s only when you give the 2nd 10% that you are being generous. Mormons, of course, require contributions of at least 10% of gross income in order to be in good standing. In order to participate in Mormon ”temple rites” one must have a current “recommend” from the local bishop in which he certifies that you are contributing appropriately.
I want to make a flat out statement: Unitarian Universalists do not value their church as much as Mormons or 7th Day Adventists or fundamentalist Christians do. We don’t. A church for us is a voluntary association: we don’t believe we need it. We choose it. We could do without it if we had to. We participate only so long as we perceive that it meets our needs.
Granting that the UU church is less central in our lives than some other people’s churches may be in their lives, the question still remains: Is there a gap between the importance of the church in our lives and the value we actually place on it? The importance of values clarification is that we recognize that we sometimes make important decisions unconsciously – we don’t always go through the process of thoughtfully considering the consequences of our decisions.
Many, many years ago, when I was serving our congregation in Fairfax Virginia, a woman came in to my office to talk with me about her guilt about being unable to support the church financially, even though it was very important to her. I assured her, of course, that we only hoped she would do what she could in the context of her resources. Later in the conversation she went on to explain how much of a lift she got from going to a salon for weekly pedicures. She could afford to have her toe nails done weekly, but not to support the church in which she actively participated. The pedicures cost far more than she was contributing to the church. [I swear to you that I did not make this up.]
[Dr. King on values]
Fifty years ago this April, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the anniversary of whose birth we celebrate next week, delivered a critically important address at Riverside Church in New York City. Dr. King had made his reputation largely on the basis of his leadership in seeking justice for African Americans, but in that address, “A Time to Break Silence,” he made clear the implications of his teachings for the war in Vietnam in particular, and America’s role in the world in general. In this address he spoke eloquently of the need for a “revolution of values.” I am going to share with you a significant portion of what Dr. King said that night. Dr. King said:
…
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring…
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.”
The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death…
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all… This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept—so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force—has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of [humanity].
When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. …..
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.
Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must move past indecision to action. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter but beautiful struggle for a new world. The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
[living congruently]
At the bottom line, the clarification of our values is an important step toward living harmoniously in the world of which so many have dreamed for so long. The people to whom we refer as “saints” are those who, in their lives, demonstrated the ability to live in accordance with the highest of values. May we, in our shared life in this congregation, find help in moving our own lives toward higher levels of integrity and congruence with the highest of ideals. As Dr. King urged, “Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter but beautiful struggle for a new world. The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.”
[Rokeach Value Survey is on next page]
The Rokeach Value Survey
Terminal Values
A Comfortable Life
a prosperous life
Equality
brotherhood and equal opportunity for all
An Exciting Life
a stimulating, active life
Family Security
taking care of loved ones
Freedom
independence and free choice
Health
physical and mental well being
Inner Harmony
freedom from inner conflict
Mature Love
sexual and spiritual intimacy
National Security
protection from attack
Pleasure
an enjoyable, leisurely life
Salvation
saved; eternal life
Self-Respect
self-esteem
A Sense of Accomplishment
a lasting contribution
Social Recognition
respect and admiration
True Friendship
close companionship
Wisdom
a mature understanding of life
A World at Peace
a world free of war and conflict
A World of Beauty
beauty of nature and the arts
Instrumental Values
Ambitious
hardworking and aspiring
Broad-minded
open-minded
Capable
competent; effective
Clean
neat and tidy
Courageous
standing up for your beliefs
Forgiving
willing to pardon others
Helpful
working for the welfare of others
Honest
sincere and truthful
Imaginative
daring and creative
Independent
self-reliant; self-sufficient
Intellectual
intelligent and reflective
Logical
consistent; rational
Loving
affectionate and tender
Loyal
faithful to friends or the group
Obedient
dutiful; respectful
Polite
courteous and well-mannered
Responsible
dependable and reliable
Self- controlled
restrained; self-disciplined