Religious forces are behind many of the most serious conflicts and debates of our time.  What is it about religion that inspires people to such extremes? Would we be better off without it entirely? And what does that say about our own religion, Unitarian Universalism?

Our world is full of religion.  Religious impulses.  Religious ideas.  Religious motivations behind legislation.  Religious arguments on street corners.  Religious identities in schools and neighborhoods and ports of entry.

Frankly, I find religion silly, quite often.  Simultaneously religion is one of the most consequential things in our lives, and also so trivial.  Why do we care so much about religion?  Which is a funny thing for a minister to ask, perhaps.

But it’s true, most religious beliefs I find laughable. Some beliefs are benign.  But many are harmful.  Lives are constrained and lives are even lost due to religious beliefs.  Why do we do that to ourselves?

Very often, when religion comes up, I get annoyed.  I resent, feeling forced to be deferential to another person’s religious beliefs, particularly when honoring their belief tramples on my ability to be who I am, or causes other people to suffer.  I bristle when I leave a concert at the Hollywood Bowl and have to stare at the giant lighted cross set on the hillside opposite.  I squirm when a public meeting starts with a prayer.  I resent the assumption that for my own religious arguments to have weight I have to find some Bible verse to back them up, or convince someone that my interpretation of Jesus’ message is more true than their interpretation of Jesus’ message.

Couldn’t we all just be good and kind and helpful without reference to a book or a prophet or an ancient teaching?

I wonder (again, a strange thing for a minister to wonder) wouldn’t we all be better off without religion?

I was raised in a religious home.

I would describe the relationship to religion in my childhood home as respectful, but casual.  Religion was serious, in my family, but not sacred.

We were regular church-goers.  We attended a Methodist church in Santa Monica.  Both of my parents had been raised Methodists, in Ohio.  They met through a Methodist young adult group when they were both attending Kent State University in Ohio.  So Methodism had always been a part of my parent’s identity.  It still is.  They live now in North Carolina and are active in their church, there.  Religion means a great deal to them.  And they get a lot of good from their religion.

And so, as a family in the 1960s, my folks took me and my three brothers to church with them every Sunday.  I went to Sunday school.  I served as an acolyte during worship.  I wore a robe.  At the beginning of the service I processed with the worship leaders and lit the candles.  I carried the offering plates to the altar.  I don’t remember much of the sermons but I enjoyed the organ and the choir.

But ours was a casual faith.  My family went to church every Sunday.  But we didn’t talk about religion during the week.  We didn’t pray at meals or bedtime.  There weren’t any religious pictures in our home.  We didn’t read the Bible at home.  Religion was something we did at church on Sunday and left at the church door.

The rest of the week was secular.  Public school and the library.  Football for my brothers and piano lessons for me.  The profit of those activities was apparent to me.  Which, doesn’t mean that I didn’t spend time goofing off, or that playtime isn’t important for all of us.  I watched “The Brady Bunch” on TV along with every kid my age.  

Religion seemed to promise more than TV.  But the use of going to church was a mystery to me.  My parents were educated.  We believed in science, and medicine, and the power of humans to define our own justice and create our own happiness, not supernatural magic, divine retribution, and Bible stories arranged on a felt board in Sunday school.

I would have called myself a Christian, as a child.  Of course we were Christian.  I knew a few people of other religions, the Jewish pharmacist at the drug store and a couple of Jewish kids in school, equally casual in their faith as I was in mine.  The church sponsored a Vietnamese refugee family and I knew they were Buddhist, but they were “Christian” too, right?  Because being Christian just meant being a good citizen, a good person.

It was only when I got to be 13 and enrolled in the confirmation class at the Methodist church did I realize that being Christian was more specific than that.  Being Christian meant that you held certain beliefs about Jesus, and God, and the Bible.  I learned in my confirmation class that my being good was supposed to follow from my being Christian, rather than Christian simply being another name for the good person I would have been regardless.

It was, ironically, in my Methodist confirmation class that I realized that I didn’t believe most of the things that Christians were supposed to believe.  In fact, I found some Christian beliefs to be quite bizarre.  Three persons in one being?  Come on.  Angels?  Hell?  Resurrection?  I realized, then, that I wasn’t, in fact, a Christian.

I stopped going to the Methodist church after that and didn’t feel my life in any way diminished, or my immortal soul in danger.  I didn’t believe in souls, or eternal life, anyway.  My brothers and I still participated in the youth group, to some extent, because that meant things like playing volleyball in the social hall, or getting invited to a party at the beach.  But my parents realized it wasn’t worth the effort to drag four reluctant teenaged boys to Sunday morning worship.  We slipped from a casual faith to no faith.

But, though as a teenager, I was happy to leave religion behind, I soon realized that religion was too pervasive in our culture to really leave.  Religion was always going to impinge on my life, even if I choose personally to have no religion.

Religion was for many people in American culture a significant organizing principle not just of how they spent their Sundays (or Fridays, or Saturdays, or whatever) but also of their thoughts about the world, politics, and social order, and so on.  I discovered that religion was both kind of silly in what it was, to me, but even so, deeply serious in its impact on the world. 

It was in 1972, that the Methodist church added language to the church’s governing document, “The Book of Discipline” that said that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian Teaching.  As a gay teenager, the message to me was that religion was no place for a person like me.

That message was further amplified in the next decade, when AIDS struck and the strongest religious voices spoke of disgust, contempt, and sin, not compassion or sensible solutions like comprehensive sex education and funding for research for a cure.  Politically, the rise of the so-called “Moral Majority” in the 1970s and 80s, and the religious right’s influence in the election of Ronald Reagan, confirmed that to be religious was to be politically conservative.  Liberal religious voices were swamped in the public sphere by religious voices of bigotry, intolerance, and rejection of science.  

Nowadays, religious freedom, means the freedom to discriminate against gays and lesbians wanting to hire your bakery to make a cake for their wedding.

It was in the early 1990s that I discovered Unitarian Universalism and I realized that a different sort of religion could be compatible with positions like a healthy understanding of human sexuality, and respect for science.  I discovered with amazement a religion that didn’t ground itself in beliefs that were contrary to reason.  I learned about religious humanism.  And when I entered the Claremont School of Theology in 1995 (Methodist, as it happened) I encountered a strain of liberal religion that encouraged logic in theology, humanism in outlook, diversity in community, and a this-worldly goal for social change.

I felt in Unitarian Universalism that there was a religion for me.  And it seemed for a time that there was a calling for me, and for Unitarian Universalism, to reclaim the despised realm of religion.  To point out that what had become “religion” in the United States, in popular perception, was in fact a sad perversion of a tradition that at its best honored good thinking, spoke good words, shared good hearts and called all people to the good we could be.

Hmmm.

That mission of reclaiming religion for liberal religion isn’t as attractive to me now as it was at the start of my career.  That feels like a young minister’s calling, and a young minister’s folly.

Frankly, I don’t think liberal religion is going to win the religious argument.  I don’t despair of our Unitarian Universalist churches.  I think there will always be enough religious liberals to want to make a home for ourselves.  But the popular image of religion will remain the conservative one.  That’s where the numbers are, frankly, and the influence.  The weight of history, not to mention the weight of Franklin Graham and Joel Osteen, is simply too much to mount a counter argument.  As modern societies become more liberal they don’t switch from conservative faiths to liberal faiths, they simply abandon faith.

Throughout Western Europe and Scandinavia there are only two countries (Ireland, Portugal) where more than 20% of the population calls themselves highly religious.  And in only one country in all of Europe does more than half the population identify as highly religious:  that’s Romania.

In England 53% of adults say they have no religious affiliation.  For young adults the number is close to three out of four.

29% of people in the United States are non-religious according to a Pew research poll from a year ago.  They are politically liberal and vote with the democratic party and say that religion does more harm than good and hold virtually no religious beliefs.  Interestingly you could place me in that category and also at the far opposite end of the Pew survey where they count the 17% of the population they call “Sunday Stalwarts” who are “Religious traditionalists actively involved with their faith and engaged in their congregations.”

If the future of the United States is more politically liberal, it is also more secular, not more religiously liberal.  And maybe I should concede that’s a good thing. There is a part of me that agrees that religion does more harm than good.

Examples of religiously based harm, oppression and violence are easy to find.  Both near and far.  In our national politics.  In international affairs.  Not only is it easy to find examples of religion doing damage to people I care about and destruction to principles I hold dear, but it’s almost equally impossible to find a political policy I disagree with or an international action I’m disturbed by that doesn’t have some connection to somebody’s religion at its base.

Perhaps we would be better off without religion.  So let it go.  And God be with it.

But there is part of me that sees the abandoning of religion by the liberal side of society with sadness.

Because there is that part of me that has grown to appreciate, and even love, religion.  The Minister I am who sees the beauty and power and saving grace of our Unitarian Universalist churches week after week, year after year.  The “Sunday Stalwart”, I am, that knows personally the good of religion.  In the nearly 30 years I’ve been involved with this faith, as lay person and minister, I have met people, been exposed to ideas, thrilled to music and words, laughed, and cried and been comforted, and been organized to political effort, and so on and so on, in ways that I simply would not ever have been if I had not had a church, If I had not had a religion.

Religion has its silly side.  Religion has its dangerous side.  In grand total it may be true that it does more harm than good.  But there is its good, too.

I see my parents, born in the Methodist Church.  Met at the Methodist young adult group.  Raised their family in the church.  In old age, the church is still the center of their community.  Sunday Stalwarts.  Volunteering in the church office.  Teaching Sunday school.  Making coffee before the morning Bible study.

When the folks in Europe, in England, and increasingly in the United States walk away from a casual faith to no faith, they are leaving the supernatural beliefs, which may be silly, and leaving the politics, which may be oppressive, but they are leaving also the good of that kind of community.  They are leaving the regular opportunity to contemplate questions of life’s purpose and meaning.  They are leaving the moral teaching, the call to our best selves, and the combined power of a group committed to a shared vision of the world.  Weighing the good and bad, it may be the best bargain to leave religion behind.  But it is a sad bargain, nonetheless.  It pains me that increasingly that choice seems to be the only choice available.

During the time between when I left the Methodist church at age 13 or so, and when I found Unitarian Universalism at age 28, the United States suffered through the height of the AIDS epidemic and I worked at the AIDS Project Los Angeles.  It was my first experience of the world as an adult, that everyone I knew, or loved, or worked with, were in danger, would possibly get sick, could easily die, within a year or two.  Not having a religious community, I dealt with that constant loss, danger, injustice, fear, heartbreak, through whatever I could figure out for myself.  Art, mostly, for me, became my tool to search for understanding and meaning.  And I read a lot.

I went to a lot of memorial services in my 20s and early 30s.  It was good to be with friends and to pay respect to the departed, but the memorial service itself was totally disconnected from any kind of religious teaching or tradition.  There was seldom any minister present who could put our mourning and our questions about death into perspective.  We laid our flowers, or released our balloons into the air, and then we went home as spiritual empty as we arrived, and with no place to go to address our deeper need.

I was dealing with deeply profound spiritual needs and questions, though I wouldn’t have thought of it that way.  But my rootless, self-directed religion wasn’t very helpful.  I wallowed in my experience but made no sense of it.  I circled around the mystery of life and death but came to no satisfying answers.  I had no one to talk to.  I had no community to help me, to point me, or to question me, or challenge me.  I had friends who were going through the same experience with me, each in our own way, but I had no intentional spiritual community to put my experience in a larger context.  No one to tell me the stories of human suffering that come to so many from so many causes.  And no one to tell me the way beyond suffering, that human hearts can break and heal, and that even in a world that hurts, there is joy as well, and beauty, and well, salvation.

I thought of this yesterday, sitting with many of you at Rich Jaffke’s memorial, how different was that experience from the memorials I went to as a young man.  Now there was a community.  A context.  A chalice to light.  A gentle theology of eternal connection.  The confident leadership of a trained minister.  The rabbi’s reflection on Moses’ last words that we look to this earth for meaning and purpose, not beyond.  A song to sing that I know because I’ve sung it many times and that moves me with its beauty and familiarity.  And ending with the knowledge that I would be with you all again this morning because we are a community of faith.  What a difference having that kind of religion makes.  What good, that religion makes.

I wish, and maybe my minister heart is still young enough to hope, that the silliness and destructiveness of conservative religion could be separated from and distinguished in the minds of the increasingly secular public from the life-giving experience that liberal religion has been for me.  

In this religion, for the last thirty years, I have benefited from the religious gift of community, and I have enjoyed my religion without sacrificing my reason, or my liberal politics, or my sexuality, or my intelligence or my sense of humor or any other part of my unique and glorious self.  Indeed, this Unitarian Universalist religion has made me smarter, has made me more appreciative of the complexities of human persons, has made me more compassionate with folks unlike me, more able to see oppression and more willing to defend the rights of others, more free to celebrate my own self and to celebrate the lives of others in all our human diversity, than I would have been able without my religion.

Whether the world would be better off without religion is an abstract question.  Impossible to answer.  And meaningless.  But I know the answer to the question that does matter.  Would I be better off without my religion?

I know that answer.  And I bet your answer is the same as mine.