"THE RELIGION OF SUSAN B. ANTHONY"

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, March 20, 2005

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

Many years ago, when I was a student intern minister at the First Unitarian Church of Portland, an elderly woman approached me early on. She introduced herself and then said something like this:

"I am a committed Unitarian, and I love this church and support it. But I want to be honest with you. You won't see much of me this year. I confess I have only one cause in life, and that is humane treatment of women in prison. I spend almost all my waking moments working for my cause, and that doesn't leave a lot of time to come to church. But it is this church that showed me my cause, and I will always be a Unitarian. I just wanted you to know why you may not see much of me."

She had a rather cool, matter-of-fact tone to her voice when she spoke, and I appreciated her thoughtfulness in telling me this. And, she was true to her word. I may have seen her only once or twice more over the next year of my internship. But I did see her name in the newspaper a few times. It turned out that the women's prison of the city of Portland had been named after her, so whenever the prison was mentioned, so was she.

That encounter crossed my mind more than once as I was preparing this sermon on Susan B. Anthony. I thought about it not because both of them devoted their lives to protecting the rights of women. I thought about it more because for both of them religion was expressed in their lives far more than in their thought.

That is how it is for some people. Religion has little to do with speculative theologies about the nature of God or metaphysical questions about "what is truth?" Religion for some people is simply how you live your values in the world. Religion is committing yourself to making a positive difference in the world, and keeping devoted to your values. Religion is something you live, not discuss.

For both Susan B. Anthony and this woman in Portland, their causes were fueled by religious passion, and they knew it. Their religious passion had no foundation in dogma, but it was deeply rooted in a religious commitment to justice and responsibility.

One of Susan B. Anthony's more recent biographers said it this way:

"Susan B. Anthony's radical egalitarianism became the moral and spiritual base from which she lived. Her conviction that no human being was superior to any other gave her the reference point . . . . Her spiritual life, which found God in every human being and in nature as well, was the inspiration that sustained her moral convictions and therefore her leadership." (From Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist, by Kathleen Barry, 2000, p. 106)

The life of Susan B. Anthony is nothing short of inspiring for its sense of devotion and integrity. Though it was filled with controversy, there is little question that there wasn't an ounce of hypocrisy or ill will in her. To find the religion of Susan B. Anthony, we have only to look at her life and her devotion, for she had little concern for the fineries of theological speculation. Religion was to be lived.

March is recognized as "Women's History Month," and it is instructive to look a bit deeper into the life of this inspirational woman.

She was born on February 15, 1820 near the town of Adams in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. She was born with an unassailable American pedigree in this country that was then only a generation or two old. Her paternal ancestors traced back to the earliest colonists in the 1630s, and for several generations had been devout Quakers. Her mother was raised Baptist, even though her mother's father had been a Universalist. Susan's mother never joined the Quakers, but was supportive of having her children raised in the Quaker tradition of her husband.

It wasn't easy being a Quaker in those days. During the early rule by the Puritans, the Massachusetts colony banished the Quakers to Rhode Island, and declared the death penalty for any who returned to the colony. Several who did return were executed by hanging in the public square.

By the time Susan was born that kind of persecution was gone, but the memory of being outcasts remained. Quakers still formed a closely-knit community, in part because of the history of persecution. Susan's father Daniel was reprimanded, and almost banished from the Quaker group, because he married a non-Quaker.

There were several different schools of "Friends," as the Quakers called themselves, and Susan's father identified with the most liberal group known as the "Hicksites." Her Quaker upbringing brought several positive influences as her life unfolded. First, Quakers value hard work and independence, something she displayed throughout her long life. Second, the Quakers have a long tradition of rejecting discrimination or intolerance against any group. As a result, most Quakers were anti-slavery, a position strongly advocated by Susan's father. And third, the fundamental Quaker belief is that people have an "Inner Light" -- a divine spark inside -- that guides them. We must learn to trust that Inner Light. As a result, Quakers have very little use for creed or dogma, and spiritual belief is something highly personal. This quality also followed Susan B. Anthony throughout her life. Details of her personal beliefs about specific theological questions are rarely found. It was as if religion had to do with how you lived your life and not so much with your theological opinions. This, too, is sound Quaker tradition.

The Quakers did have a high regard for learning, and Susan's father saw to it that all his children had quality formal education. At 16, Susan was sent to a boarding school in Philadelphia. When an economic recession hit her family hard, she began teaching, which she continued doing for a number of years, eventually becoming Headmistress at a girls' school in upstate New York.

During this time, she began her involvement in several reform movements, including anti-slavery, but especially at that time the "temperance movement" which advocated moderation or prohibition of alcohol. When, during a public rally of the temperance society, she was forbidden to speak because she was a woman, her feminist passions seemed to be born.

In 1848, while she was still teaching, her family moved across the state to Rochester, New York. That same year the first Women's Rights Convention, which has since become quite important in history, was held in nearby Seneca Falls. The Convention went longer than expected and it convened its final session a week later at the Unitarian Church of Rochester, New York. Susan's father, mother, and sister attended that convention and signed the "Declaration of Sentiments" for women's rights.

It was during this time that Susan was becoming weary of teaching, and wanted to shift the focus of her life. She was approaching the age of 30, and decided to quit teaching and devote herself to working in various reform movements -- temperance, anti-slavery, and women's rights. Her father encouraged her and offered for her to move home and manage the family farm while he took care of his own cotton mill business. Susan agreed.

By the time she moved to Rochester, the Anthony family had become active in the Unitarian Church there. When they first moved to Rochester, they joined the Quaker Meeting, but found them to be too conservative. The Rochester Meeting (as the Quakers call their local churches) was becoming split over how to approach the issue of slavery. Many of the radical anti-slavery Quakers, led by Susan's father, began attending the Unitarian Church where their position was more generally accepted. It was known, for example, that several Unitarian families were providing their homes as "safe houses" for the Underground Railroad.

The new minister there was William Henry Channing, a nephew of the Unitarian founder William Ellery Channing, and though the church was also somewhat divided on the issue, the Anthony family felt at home. Susan's sister Mary was later to remember it with these words: "The liberal preaching of William Henry Channing in 1852 proved so satisfactory that it was not long before this was our accepted church home."

It took the Anthony family some adjustment. Quakers did not accept professional ministers or hymn singing, but eventually Susan's father joined, paying rent for a family pew, as was the tradition in New England churches then. Susan continued attending the Unitarian church throughout her life whenever she was in town, but it wasn’t until her retirement in 1893 that she finally signed the Membership Book. Over the years, it might be noted, she developed a reputation for strongly critiquing every sermon she heard.

The Anthonys did not resign from the Quakers, though. Susan in particular remained proud of her identity as a Quaker for the rest of her life. On her 80^th birthday she wrote to a Quaker group in Virginia saying, "I still retain my membership in the Hicksite Friends of Rochester."

Once in Rochester, Susan B. Anthony threw herself deeply into reform work. She made friends with a number of other strong reformist women, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was to become her closest life-long friend and colleague in the quest for women's rights.

We all know she lived a fascinating career, and I wish we had time this morning for me to detail the stories from it, but my main concern is how that career reflected her religion. A brief summary will have to do.

She was immediately led to the cause of women's rights, but in the years leading up to the Civil War, it became evident that this cause was interwoven with the cause of abolition of slavery, since both involved human rights. After years spent traveling constantly from town to town organizing and lecturing on women's rights, she was recruited to do the same for the American Anti-slavery society, which she did.

After the War, she organized the National Women's Suffrage Association, and traveled throughout the country, to almost every state, speaking and organizing in the cause of winning the right of women to vote. In later years, she toured Europe to organize women's rights groups internationally. She was to become the best known public voice in the cause, and though she died before voting rights were finally secured by constitutional amendment, it is clear that no person was more responsible for the success of that movement than Susan B. Anthony.

There are numerous stories that go with her career. There was, of course, the story of her arrest for casting a vote in Rochester in 1872. She was found guilty by a judge who declared her incompetent to testify because she was a woman. She was fined $100, which she refused to pay.

There is the story of the time she harbored the battered wife and child of Massachusetts State Senator. The husband was trying to commit her to a mental asylum because she discovered he was having an affair. The law not only allowed husbands to have their wives incarcerated, but also provided that fathers alone had legal custody of children, and the child was eventually given to the husband.

There is the story of the time she went to Boston to recruit speakers for her Women's Rights convention in Rochester. She was able to get Unitarian transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was awed by radical Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker. She wrote in her diary about entering his study lined with 16,000 volumes of books, "and there at a large table in the center of the room," she wrote, "sat the great man himself. It really seemed audacious of me to be ushered into such a presence on a commonplace errand." But Parker agreed to speak.

Her voice in the cause of human rights was among the most radical. When she was organizing for anti-slavery, for example, she didn't mince words:

"Therefore, do we say dissolve this union -- overthrow this government, commit its blood-stained Constitution to the flames -- blot out every vestige of that guilty bargain of the (founding) Fathers. Break every fetter, and let the oppressed go free. And on the ashes of the abomination, build up a new government, based on the immortal Declaration of '1776: 'All men are created free and equal.'"

As radical as she was in her rhetoric, Susan B. Anthony was able to become universally respected as a voice for human rights.

Susan B. Anthony's approached her causes with a strategy of tolerance that was reflected in her Quaker background. There is a lot of "behind the scenes" politics in any nationally organized movement, and the struggle for women's rights was no exception. The organization of the suffrage movement endured a number of factional disputes and internal dissentions. It was always Susan B. Anthony's approach to keep the doors as open as possible.

Some controversy arose in the later years when her dear friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton became strongly offended by the traditional religious attacks on women's rights. Stanton published what became a very controversial book called "The Woman's Bible" in which she exposed the long history of religious persecution of women arising from the biblical tradition. In particular, she criticized St. Paul for his frequent writings against the rights of women.

Many women within the movement identified with traditional Christianity, and found Stanton's book offensive. At a Women's Rights Convention, a motion was introduced to disassociate the movement from Mrs. Stanton's book. Susan B. Anthony rose to defend, not the book, but the principle that there is room enough in the movement for all different views of religion. Here is part of what she said:

"The one distinct feature of our assoiation has been the right of individual opinion for any member. . . . I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. . . . The Christian has neither more nor less rights in our association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself cannot stand upon it. I pray you vote for religious liberty, without censorship and bigotry. . .

While she did not share Stanton's interest in publicly challenging the dominant religious tradition, she did share some of her perspective. At one point Susan B. Anthony said, "I think women have just as good a right to interpret and twist the Bible to their advantage as men always have twisted and turned it to theirs. . . While I do not consider it my duty to tear to tatters the lingering skeletons of the old superstitions and bigotrys, yet I rejoice to see them crumbling on every side."

But again, her heart was in the cause of inclusion and tolerance. At another point when there was a suggestion to purge the women's movement of traditional religious influence, she stood up for the rights of the religious conservatives within the suffrage movement:

"I have worked 40 years to make the (Women's Suffrage) platform broad enough for atheists and agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 years to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon."

She was criticized by the religious traditionalists for being too tolerant of the secularists, and she was criticized by the secularists for being too tolerant of the traditionalists. She was content to keep the movement open to the entire religious spectrum. At one point she went to Utah to try to recruit Mormon women to the suffragist cause, and she received criticism from the liberals for doing so. She responded this way:

"Of one thing I feel pretty sure and that is that I shall not allow myself to act the bigot and persecute women who don't believe about God or Christ or heaven or earth as I do. The trouble with so many is that they can't see that so-called Liberals are likely to become as bigoted and narrow as are the bigots of the various religions of the past or present."

The religion of Susan B. Anthony was to focus on what needs to be done to bring greater justice into the world and make it happen. The pietism of traditional religion was, for her, not part of that effort, but she was respectful of those who practiced religion differently. Near the end of her life, she was asked in an interview whether she prayed. She answered:

"I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees, but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me. I cannot imagine a God of the universe made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him 'great.'"

Susan B. Anthony could not be pinned down on questions of theology, because for her religion was not theological or creedal, it was serving justice and living by principle. Once during a conversation about life after death, she had this to say:

"I am content to do all that I can to make the conditions of this life better for the next generation to live in -- assured that right living here is not only the best thing for me and the world here, but the best possible fitting for whatever is to come in the hereafter."

I know there are lots of people, like me, who relish the intellectual ideas in religion and the give-and-take of ideas. There are lots of people, like me, who benefit from being reminded that religion is actually best expressed in how we live our lives, much more than in our ideas. Susan B. Anthony's life reminds us of that truth.

The religion of Susan B. Anthony was, in many ways like that of the biblical Jesus. Religion meant treating people fairly, establishing justice, and loving mercy. For her, as for him, the speculative philosophies of what the bible calls "the Scribes and Pharisees" was a distraction from the real work of religion which was to promote justice in the world. At one point, she said it this way:

"Friends, the time has fully come to cease to waste all our precious hours in discussing questions of mystical theology and speculative faith and adopt the plain practical principles taught by Jesus of Nazareth."

The "plain, practical principles" were the focus of the religion of Susan B. Anthony. Her devotion to those principles was what she brought to this world, and what she left behind.