Why, indeed, should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? [taken from reading #586, “The Idea of Democracy” by Abraham Lincoln, read responsively immediately before the sermon].

Abraham Lincoln knew that the answer to this question surely points to faith. I submit that the faith it points to is deeper, even, than the faith that right makes might. It is faith in the ultimate goodness of human nature, hope that in the end, “the people” will make right decisions and right choices. Whether this goodness is intrinsic or cultivated – or both is of more than incidental interest, particularly to faith communities such as ours, particularly in times such as these.

Times less than two weeks before an election when, in our democratic society, we, “the people,” are asked to make public choices about the things that concern us. Times when I have heard many say this is the most important election of our lifetime. Times when many citizens see the choices as starkly clear, and many more fear the consequences of the “wrong” choices as seen from their individual point of view, as projected on the whole of our society and “all people in all lands everywhere.” [reading 586] Times when, in contradiction to Lincoln’s confidence in the ultimate justice of the people, many are haunted by deep-seated suspicion and fear not only of other points of view, but of other people who hold those points of view.

In times such as these, what does our faith tell us, not about what choice to make, but about how we can and should go about making our choices?

In the last few days, especially, it seems that all the election talk has been about voter registration. People of politics and people of faith alike have been working for months to register new voters. News stories on the radio tell of 1 million newly-registered voters in Florida alone. When voter registration in North Carolina closed on October 8, the News-Times ran photographs of boxes and boxes of new registrations to be processed in Carteret County alone. Unitarian Universalists around the country have participated in Faithful Democracy, described by Unitarian Universalist Association president the Rev. William Sinkford as “an interfaith coalition dedicated to promoting civic participation grounded in religious values and creating and strengthening lasting community partnerships.” [UU World, September/October, 2004, p. 7]. Their most visible work has been registering and mobilizing voters, and Rev. Sinkford reminds us, in his column in the September/October (2004) issue of the UU World, that “We [Unitarian Universalists] are committed to affirm and promote the democratic process.”

Indeed, one of the seven principles which Unitarian Universalist congregations covenant to affirm and promote is “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” But I submit that the spirit of the democratic process is much larger than participation in elections; it begins long before voter registration, and continues long after the casting and the counting of ballots. And I have come to believe that at the very heart of the democratic process is not the size of the majority, not even the rightness or wrongness of the alternative positions, but the interactions – the conversations, if you will – that can and must take place between individuals and groups whose perspectives are different; the dialectic that reveals and refines thesis, antithesis, and ultimately, synthesis that moves beyond either/or to something new, and that grows out of another principle affirmed and promoted by Unitarian Universalist congregations: “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

Furthermore, I am encouraged to discover that I am not alone in this belief. During the election year of 1988 Bill Moyers, beset by a growing feeling that American voters were all “locked away in our separate realities, our parochial loyalties, our fixed ways of seeing ourselves and strangers,” [Moyers, 1989. A World of Ideas, p. vii] traveled the country interviewing a number of remarkable men and women on questions about our changing American values and how these values play out in an increasingly global culture. Political philosopher Sheldon Wolin spoke with Moyers about democratic values in these terms (and I quote): “Democracy really does come down to people trying to cooperate, to make common decisions in contexts where there’s great diversity and strong conflict. … It’s a problem of trying to come to a decision in which there are conflicting legitimate claims. Democracy involves a capacity to deal with differences, and to respect them…The strength of democracy has been its capacity to confront difference and to cherish it, not just to think about it as an impediment to rational decision-making.” [Wolin, quoted in Moyers, p. 103-04]

Democracy grows out of, depends upon, and celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every person. The democratic process works to enhance both worth and dignity, cherishing and challenging each person to participate – first by cultivating her or his own unique capacities and perspectives, and then by bringing them, consciously and conscientiously, into the vital, vibrant turmoil of making, living, and refining decisions that reach beyond and bridge between our separate realities and separate identities.

And such a process, such a dynamic affirmation and augmentation of individual worth and dignity, is a proper religious concern, and a proper organizing principle for a religious community.

On what we might call the “civic” level – the most visible, public aspect – our faith communities sharpen our awareness of issues of ethics and morality, justice and injustice in the society in which we live, and point us to the decisions and choices upon which the democratic process might be brought to bear. In his conversation with Bill Moyers, sociologist of religion Robert Bellah points out that in American society, at least, “… as a religious people, we have been reminded again and again by religion of what the moral problems are. … The tough moral issues the society has to face again and again have been raised first of all by the clergy, and by religious people. Then the politicians pick it up.” [Bellah, quoted in Moyers, p. 284] But this role, however important, is an institutional function of religion; it is the bold, prophetic, justice-seeking function valued in the Judeo-Christian tradition since the days of the Davidic kingdom nearly three thousand years ago.

In the Unitarian Universalist tradition, there has long been valued a more personal, perhaps more private function of religion, one that flows perhaps more organically from the understanding of religion as “that which reminds us that we are connected with something larger than ourselves.” The great, dynamic Unitarian preacher A. Powell Davies, writing in 1951 in the first of a series of essays exploring the meaning of democracy in the context of its Cold War struggle with Communism, referred to democracy as a “faith…[which] demands that men [and women] develop souls: that each consult his [or her] own conscience, reflecting upon right and wrong in the light of reason; that each achieve decisions that he [or she] thinks are right; and that all engage in the struggle of good with evil as free members of a free society.” [Davies. 1951. Man’s Vast Future, p. 24.] Davies’ formulation has much in common with Abraham Lincoln’s idea of democracy of a century earlier, but the imperative that we develop souls harks back even farther, to the theology of another great Unitarian, William Ellery Channing.

Religion, for Channing, is the opportunity to grow a soul. But this does not happen without a great deal of care and tending – what Channing called “self-culture.” Writing and preaching in the 1830s, Channing expounded a doctrine of the human soul as the seat of a rich collection of potentialities and powers which can be called forth – cultivated – by, among other things, education. And by “education” he meant, in the words of contemporary Unitarian Universalist theologian and educator Rebecca Parker, “more than acquiring knowledge or adapting to society. Education is for the unfolding of our powers, the full realization of our human-ness, the full growing of a soul into our God-given, divine nature.” “Thus,” Rebecca Parker goes on to say, “the spiritual practice at the heart of Unitarian Universalism is education.” [Parker in Essex Conversations: Visions for Lifespan Religious Education. p. 209]

And this spiritual practice of education, this cultivation of a soul, is an enterprise that happens not in isolation but in community – in religious communities like this one. Education for the unfolding of our powers is a practice that challenges the individual, in and through relationship with others, to sharpen their own self-knowledge, and to become, through the influence of the community, more fully the person they have the potential to be. Education for the unfolding of our powers is education for analysis and critical thinking, for reflection and reverence; it is experiential and not authoritarian, since telling others what to believe inhibits, rather than cultivates their own innate powers, their own inherent worth and dignity.

Thus, the community functions to form the person, who can neither be nor become fully himself or herself outside of participation in the community. And this spiritual practice of challenging the individual through participation in the ongoing democratic process of the community is part of the unique – dare I say “peculiar?” – heritage of Unitarian Universalist religious communities. It is a heritage that honors the democratic process by putting it into practice, that offers growing adults as well as growing children and youth a forum and a framework in which to stretch and stimulate the unfolding powers of their growing souls, that encourages a fluency with decision-making and problem-solving that is rooted in individual and common values.

The great Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams, writing in 1947, called this function of the liberal church “the prophethood of all believers.” In contrast to the institutionalized prophetic function customarily practiced only by the select few leaders who decry injustice and point the way to moral and ethical repentance, Adams envisioned a “prophetic liberal church…in which all members share the common responsibility to foresee the consequences of human behavior (both individual and institutional) with the intention of making history in place of merely being pushed around by it.” [The Prophethood of All Believers in The Essential James Luther Adams edited by G.K.Beach (1998) p. 112] This is the democratic process at its idealized best. Each member is inherently worthy, each perspective is important to the collective enterprise, and in the use of the democratic process within the congregation all members develop the powers and the tools to understand and shape and refine both the local and the larger community in far-seeing and deeply principled ways.

Indian essayist and novelist Arundhati Roy assesses the state of democracy in that larger world, and her assessment is grim. Democracy is in trouble, she says, threatened by corporate media and multinational capitalism. Democracy can only be reclaimed by concerted public action, action that insists on the free flow of information, the free participation in the democratic conversation of the voices of the powerless as well as the powerful. Radical change is needed, she says, and (quoting here) “Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people.” [Roy. 2004. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. p. 91]

People, I say, who have been formed and strengthened in communities like this one, where the spiritual practice of education and the spiritual discipline of democracy, both rooted in an unflinching respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person, form the core of communal and individual identity.

People who understand the democratic process not as the culmination of a voter registration drive but as a lifelong engagement with self and with others. People who accept the challenge to remain faithful to the democratic process beyond victory, with its temptation to complacency; beyond defeat, with its temptation to despair. People who take their prophethood seriously, and humbly, knowing that only in community and only in dialogue and dialectic, can wisdom be discerned and differentiated from self-serving reassurance.

In such communities and in such persons, I believe we can ground our own patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people. In such communities and such persons, I believe we can dare to hope for the future of the world. In such communities and such persons, we can venture to have faith that right will indeed give rise to might, with all the force of moral imperative and human spirit behind it.

In these days of campaign and election, and in all the days to follow may it be so, for us and for all people in all lands everywhere.

And may it begin now, in silence, as we listen for the inner voice of what we know, the quiet challenge of what we must learn and teach. The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out.

Bell
Silence
Music

Amen.

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