Twentieth Century Unitarianism took on a strong humanist bent that continues to influence (if not define) us today. Has the humanist belief that humans have what we need to save ourselves and the world been affirmed or disproved by the events of the last 100 years?
We’ve been talking the last few weeks about the history of Unitarianism.
Unitarianism is related to monotheism, so we started with a look at Monotheism. First with the Egyptian Pharoah, Ahknanten, then the Monotheism of Judaism.
Our Unitarian line then continues from Judaism into early Christianity where Unitarian ideas were proposed to solve the question of how Jesus could save us, when he hadn’t saved himself from his own crucifixion; or how his resurrection could be beneficial to anyone but himself.
The Unitarian theology of Arius, that Jesus was not God but the first creation of God, was declared heresy at the Council of Nicea, in 325 CE, the same Council which officially declared Christianity to be Trinitarian.
The Unitarian idea arose again in Renaissance-era Italy, propagated by two men named Socinus: Laelius and Faustus, uncle and nephew. From Italy, the Unitarian idea spread to Poland where the first actual Unitarian churches were established. Those churches were closed during the Counter-Reformation, but more Unitarian churches sprung up in Transylvania, where they received the protection of the King and some of those early Unitarian churches still exist today.
Meanwhile the Unitarian idea moved west from Poland, to Holland and then across the channel to England, and then across the ocean to New England. In 1825, William Ellery Channing and his followers organized the American Unitarian Association.
Later in the 19th century a radical and controversial spur broke off from the Unitarian mainline called Transcendentalism. Eventually, though, the Transcendentalist theology became the mainline of our faith. And eventually, from Transcendentalism a further spur broke away that would itself become the mainline of our faith: a philosophy called, Humanism.
Transcendentalism is the theology that every human being, as a feature of our human nature, carries within us a transcendental character, directly accessible to all of us as intuition or conscience. Although we can spend our lives engrossed in the mundane work of the everyday, any of us could, as often as we care to, also access this higher perspective.
The way to spiritual truth, for Emerson and the Transcendentalists, is not to look outward to sources of religion like the Bible, or the church tradition, or the words of a minister, but to create what Emerson called “an original relation to the universe” from us directly to the divine, through what I called last week, “The Rainbow Connection” accessed through our own transcendent natures.
At first, Transcendentalism was framed in the sense that all of the truths of Christianity were available to us directly – without going through the Christian church or the Bible or Jesus to get there. You could use your transcendent nature to prove the truth of Christianity for yourself.
But eventually, even that connection to Christianity became too tenuous. Because, what actually can be proved of Christianity directly by our own conscience? Certainly not doctrines like the Trinity. But also not even more basic things, like the truth of Bible stories, or even the existence of an historical Jesus.
In fact, the only parts of Christian teaching that you can really prove, just by examining your own conscience are the existence of universal values: like justice, peace and love. But those values aren’t the exclusive property of Christianity. As Theodore Parker pointed out, those values would be true even if Jesus never existed. So it can’t be Jesus, or any other part of strictly Christian tradition that forms the foundation of our faith, it must be, instead, those universal values we can know directly: the importance of justice, peace, and love in creating healthy human lives and communities.
Doesn’t it make sense that this is exactly the kind of conclusion that a Transcendentalist like Theodore Parker would come to, in the middle of the 19th century, in America, in the midst of an increasingly fraught national conversation about slavery? When Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister, and also a fierce abolitionist, sees the institution of slavery as an abhorrent violation of every religious principle he is sure of, but Christian ministers throughout the south are using the Bible to defend slavery? Slavery is present throughout the Bible, assumed in the Bible to be a natural part of society, and casually condoned by religious figures in the Bible who we are told should have authority over us. We are told that the Bible should teach us. But we know by consulting our consciences that the Bible is wrong, about slavery and other moral issues. So it must be we, then, our own consciences, that are the real moral authority, not the Bible. Our moral consciences, not the church teaching. Our direct understanding of right and wrong, not the preaching of some self-serving minister clearly defending a social order that is, in fact, morally indefensible.
Transcendentalism, then, made a radical reversal of the earlier relationship of human person and religion.
Each person is lifted up to be their own authority, their own guide, their own minister as it were, their own scripture, and their own tradition consisting of the history of their own life experiences.
Like the Copernican revolution that overturned the Ptolemaic model of the solar system by removing Earth from the center, and making the earth revolve around the sun, the Transcendentalist revolution of the 19th century removed the church and the Bible from the center, and made those traditional sources of spiritual truth revolve around the new source of truth, each individual human being, each a solar system of spiritual truth for themselves.
From Transcendentalism, then, it is only one more natural step to Humanism, the spur off the Unitarian track that became the mainline throughout the 20th century and still today.
Let me define Humanism for you by giving you the words of one of the leaders of the movement himself. This is E. Burdette Backus, a Unitarian minister, one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, and the first Executive Director of the American Humanist Association. Later in his career, while he was the minister of the Unitarian Church in Indianapolis he had a radio show and this is taken from one of his radio addresses, titled, “What is Humanism?” Backus says:
“Humanism has in it three elements. First a philosophy, a world-view; second, a purpose which it desires to achieve; and finally a plan of action by which it purposes to carry out its purposes.”
To the philosophy of humanism, Backus gives the name “Naturalism”, which he defines as this:
“Within the naturalistic world-view the emphasis of humanism is on man himself; that is why we call it “humanism.” Man is a true child of nature, just as much a part of the natural order as are stars and atoms. This is true of all that he is, including his ideals and aspirations, his loves and devotions, as well as his physical organism and his animal appetites… Man, the product of the long evolutionary process of life on this planet, is worthy of reverence because of the qualities and capacities which have been established in him. This belief in the dignity and worth of man is not at all inconsistent with a recognition of his defects and limitations.”
To the purpose of humanism, Backus says, “That purpose is to make human life on our earth-home as rich and satisfying as possible.” And “The fulfillment of life here and now is the purpose of humanism.” “The humanist therefore sets himself to the major task of human life, namely that of so ordering the affairs of earth, so directing the energies of men, that the good things we covet shall be made more accessible, more secure, more widely shared by all men.”
And lastly, here is the humanist plan of action for Backus,
“we will take all the skills and insights which our various sciences have brought us and we will harness them to the task of serving the needs of man; we will bring them to bear on the most pressing problems that are crying for solution; we will use them not only to master the forces of the external world, but also to control and direct the drives of our natures, and see what a fine thing we can make out of life on earth.”
As with Transcendentalism before it, Humanism arose in Unitarian circles as a spur off the mainline, which eventually became the mainline. Like Transcendentalism, Humanism appeared as a threat to Unitarian tradition, was greeted with controversy, and then, over decades became the standard. For Humanism, within Unitarianism, that gradual revolution occurred from the end of the 19th century through the first decades of the 20th century, before becoming firmly established as our faith character by 1936 or so when the humanist, Frederick May Elliot was elected to the Presidency of the American Unitarian Association.
Looking back from the perspective of this side of the Humanist revolution as I’ve called it, the revolution seems inevitable, natural, and actually, not all that revolutionary.
The Unitarian church in America had been established as a non-creedal faith. Our communities were intentionally created to center ourselves on shared values, not shared beliefs. The core of our congregations would be covenant statements describing who we would be in the world, and how we would be together, not metaphysical statements about the nature of God or the afterlife. Already that starts to sound like Humanism, because it shifts the focus of our faith from the abstract and imaginary worlds, to work in this world and our behavior as people in lived community.
In a non-creedal church, open to all beliefs about God, even a belief that there is no God would presumably be acceptable, even from our beginning.
Humanists claim that all morality is human morality, just as the Transcendentalists had said that our own consciences are the arbiter of right and wrong, not the Bible or some other source beyond our own minds.
Humanists affirmed the goodness, the wisdom, and the power of human beings, just as Unitarians had long held that Jesus as a role model showed the potential in all human beings. We are, in short, good enough, smart enough, and strong enough, to save ourselves, and to perfect the world around us as well, to make a heaven of this earth.
Malvina Reyonds sang that optimistic chorus of human potential in our opening hymn, “Why need to look for miracles outside of nature’s law? Humanity we wonder at with every breath we draw!”
Vincent Silliman gives us the optimistic, humanist, sentiment in his words we spoke as our opening words. “Religion, uniting us with all that is admirable in human beings everywhere; Holding before our eyes a prospect of the better life for humankind, which each may help to make actual.
Our centering hymn argued that Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace are human qualities and that there is no need to look beyond humanity for them, or, indeed, anywhere beyond humanity to look.
The optimism of Transcendentalism and Humanism feels good.
But there are two thorns hidden in that bouquet of roses that we should be careful of.
One is the challenge in Transcendentalism that I pointed out at the end of my sermon last week.
If, as Transcendentalism claims, all that we need of religion is already contained in our own minds, that what do we need of churches and ministers? Isn’t Transcendentalism an argument for a solitary religion of yoga classes and hiking in the woods? Those of us who care about Unitarian churches and you who are looking to call a new minister should be aware of that thorn.
And the other thorn, a thorn present in Channing’s Unitarianism that we doubled down on with Humanism is the question of whether our optimism in humanity is really justified? We adopted Humanism as our mainline in the 1930s, and then saw a century of human war, and holocaust, and atom bomb. A century of humanism that has not solved the problems of poverty, and racism, and xenophobia, and that now faces the looming catastrophe of climate change. Can we continue to hold faith in the humanist plan of Burdette Backus, “to master the forces of the external world… to control and direct the drives of our natures, and see what a fine thing we can make out of life on earth?” Are we still so sure that we are, in fact, good enough, smart enough, strong enough, to save ourselves and the world we share?
The way to snip the thorn from the stem of Transcendentalism is to modify the theology so that we put our faith not in human individuals but in human communities.
The fault in Transcendentalism is that it says each person alone is all they need. But this is manifestly untrue. Individual human minds constantly lead us astray. Individually we’re prone to delusions, to biases, to ignorance. Individuals hear voices from their consciences that are just as likely to be demonic as divine.
Churches are necessary, to do the task of helping each of us sort out whether what we think we know from our own intuitions and experience is actually true. I call this, “The Corrective of the Community.” The church is a necessary proving ground. The spiritual community and our faith tradition are laboratories where our misguided thoughts are challenged and our true thoughts are confirmed.
The thorn on the stem of Humanism is more difficult to remove, because it’s not a problem of how we do Humanism, but how much we can expect from it.
I believe in the philosophy of Humanism, “the naturalistic world-view” that Backus describes. That “Man is a true child of nature, just as much a part of the natural order as are stars and atoms.” I agree, with Backus, and Malvina Reynolds, that humanity is “worthy of reverence.” But Backus himself points out that, “This belief in the dignity and worth of man is not at all inconsistent with a recognition of his defects and limitations.”
The thorn is visible in Humanism when we admit that we are good, but not all good, wise, but not all-knowing, strong, but not all-powerful. One helpful strategy to compensate for our “defects and limitations” is to apply here, also, the Corrective of the Community. We are better when we include more of humanity in our moral discussion. We should do that. We are smarter, when we listen to more strategies and proposals, particularly from people long excluded from decision-making roles. We should do that. We are stronger, when we work all together, in harmony and common purpose. We should do that.
But where a community like a church can correct the faults of an individual, a community of humanity, even a world community, cannot correct the faults inherent in human nature itself. We aren’t perfect. And more of us will not make us perfect. So, though our human-created, earthly salvation is certainly a possibility, it certainly isn’t guaranteed.
We must learn to live with that uncertainty, and that responsibility, with hope, but hope ultimately only in ourselves, knowing that despite our limitations that nonetheless we would be good enough, smart enough, strong enough.