“FREEDOM vs. TRUTH”
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday,
I remember how I first got hooked into Unitarian
Universalism. I was in college, up the
road in
I looked around the room very suspiciously. Perhaps, I thought, I made a mistake. So again I read the title. Yep, that’s what it said, “Why I am an
Agnostic”. I also noticed that the
sermon was to be delivered by the church's minister, the Reverend Michael O'Kelly. It wasn't like they had brought in some
radical professor from the nearby college,
And sure enough he did. It wasn't a trick title, a sly and clever
title that said something shocking just to throw us off. No, he told us straightforwardly his reasons
for being an agnostic.
Strange as it was to hear, the most
shocking part of the morning wasn't the sermon, it was the reaction from the congregation. There wasn't any reaction! Or at least there wasn't any negative
reaction. No gasping for breath or
mouths gaping open in astonishment. One
might think that if a minister is going to stand in a pulpit and declare and
justify his agnosticism, the least you'd expect from a congregation was some
form of uneasiness or embarrassment.
Maybe a mass walkout in the middle of the sermon. I don't know.
Something!
But nothing happened. Not only was the congregation not shocked by
what was being said; they seemed to be accepting of the sermon, perhaps
critically, but accepting. What a
strange church, I thought.
And I knew I had found a home.
There is one more chapter
to the story, though. Some fifteen years
or so later, after going to seminary and becoming a Unitarian minister myself,
I met the Rev. O’Kelly at a meeting once.
I approached him cautiously and told him my story. He just laughed and said, “Oh, I remember
that sermon series. If you had come the
previous week you would have heard me speak on the topic, “Why I am a
Christian. If you had come the following
week you would have heard me speak on “Why I am a Buddhist.”
That was probably not the only
time someone was a bit startled on their first visit to a
I tell this story to prepare you for what might sound a bit shocking to some ears, whether newcomers or long-timers. I am going to speak out this morning against truth. I declare that I don't believe in truth. I am always suspicious of it. In particular I am suspicious of, and I don't believe in, religious truth of any stripe.
If there are those of you who think I am stating my case too strongly, let me make it just a bit more palpable: I don't believe in any religious truth that aspires to the status of being unchangeable eternal truth. (Which to my mind is the same thing as saying I don't believe in religious truth). Some beliefs may be more true than others, but no belief qualifies for the label “certain truth.”
I’ve come to the somewhat radical but uncomfortable position because I’ve observed that in many cases, and almost always in the realm of religious belief, truth and freedom are in competition. Affirming one will disclaim the other. And as for me, I’m on the side of freedom whenever it clashes with truth.
Before I focus on the religious dimension of this, let me illustrate it in terms of differing philosophies of education. Is the purpose of a teacher to implant truth into the student, or is the purpose of the teacher to free the student to think and inquire and explore for themselves. Is the foundation of learning the ability to accept what you’re told, or is it to think for yourself about what you’re told? The more emphasis that is placed on truth, on accepting what you are taught, then the less important becomes freedom, or the liberating experience of searching for new answers and new perspectives. On the other hand, the more a student is encouraged to explore freely and investigate new ideas, the more fragile and tentative become the truths they are taught.
Freedom and truth are often in competition with one another. An increase in one results in a decrease in the other. And this conundrum can be seen most vividly in religious belief.
The clash between freedom and creedal truth is perhaps the most persistent form of conflict in Western religions. It was at the heart of the Reformation movement, for example. The heresy of Luther or Calvin or other Reformation leaders was not the content of their belief; their heresy was the fact that they freely chose to reject the creedal truths that were handed down to them by the Roman Church. In fact, the root meaning of the word “heresy” is choice; it is the declaration “I choose” what I believe, not you, not the church, not anyone else. Heresy is not the fact of believing the wrong creeds, it is feely choosing your beliefs. Free choice is the heart of heresy.
And we know it worked. At least in the short run. Christendom was to be forever divided between Catholic and Protestant, each of which chose different creedal truths.
In the long run, though, the creedal truth of Protestantism began to become as rigid and as unyielding as Catholic creedal truth had been. To insist on fidelity to a creed is to discourage the exercise of freedom of belief.
This sad fact
was in many ways the motivation for the birth of Unitarianism in
By
the end of the 1700s century, the Calvinist creedal truth was dominant in
The leaders of
Calvinist creedal truth saw themselves in spiritual warfare against liberal
voices that were beginning to be raised.
There was, for example, a movement among the clergy to exclude and
excommunicate liberal ministers from ministerial organizations in
One of those liberal ministers was William Ellery Channing, who would become the first major voice to declare himself Unitarian. When Channing responded in print to these calls for excommunication, he was most concerned for the threat to freedom of thought, to freedom of belief in religion. He referred back to the days of the Reformation, when Protestants sided with freedom to believe and the Catholics sided with creedal dogma. He expressed fear that the Protestants are now turning their back on freedom in favor of their particular creedal truth. Here is part of what Channing said, though it should be observed that in those days, the phrase most commonly used to describe “freedom of belief” was “the right of private judgment”:
"It was by asserting their right to the free use of Scriptures, and to private judgment, that the Reformers laid the foundation of that purer state of religion in which we now rejoice. Let these rights never be wrested from us. Better to have our persons and property than our minds subjected to a despot.
"This right to consult and judge for (ourselves) of God's word is our neighbor's (right) as well as our own. Whilst we claim it for ourselves, let us not deny it to others.
"There is a strong disposition in (some people) to make their creeds standards for those around them, to cling to the opinions on which they differ from others with peculiar confidence and tenacity.... To this usurping and uncharitable spirit the miseries of the church in every age are to be traced.
"Strange, that, with all history to instruct us, we do not learn to be humble, candid, and tolerant; that we do not remember that we, and not our brothers have erred; and that, even if we are right, it does not become us to pronounce his errors a crime."
This is not ancient history. There were over 200 years between the Reformation and Channing, and a little over 200 years between Channing and our own day, and the clash between religious truth and religious freedom is still with us. In our day in our country, it mostly takes the form of issues surrounding separation of church and state, but it also is felt in more subtle and personal settings, as when a co-worker pursues you as a potential convert to their religion, or a neighbor’s child tells your child their going to hell because your family rejects their truth.
Let
me put it a different way. The
Protestant Reformers were dissenters from a Roman Catholic Church that
prohibited freedom of belief, that is, prohibited dissent from its creedal truth. One of several Protestant movements that
dissented from the Catholic Church was the Church of England which also came to
prohibit freedom of belief, that is, prohibit dissent from its creedal truth. One group
that did dissent from the Church of England was the Calvinist Puritans, who
established themselves in
It seems to me this is still a fairly radical point of view, though it shouldn’t be. The norm in religions is to evangelize, to convert those who believe differently. The norm is to declare creed to be truth, and any effort to stray from or deny that which is true is heresy. Why encourage freedom to question the truth, after all, since truth is by nature non-negotiable?
But we as a civilization have learned through difficult experience that freedom is the only healthy road to truth. People who arrive at ideas through free exploration get closer to truth than those who arrive through indoctrination.
It was this kind of teaching that led me to Unitarianism in the first place. I was raised in a religion that claimed to have truth,and for my tastes, too often discouraged questioning the truths that were given or straying imaginatively beyond the boundaries of those truths. I wanted a religion which was rooted in truth but which also encouraged its followers to explore on their own and ask question about whatever they were taught.
But freedom and truth, when offered by religion, are more often than not incompatible. You can have one only at the expense of the other. If you claim freedom, truth becomes illusive, because with freedom you must remain open to new ways of thinking; if you claim truth in your religion, freedom becomes superfluous. After all, what’s the point of being free to explore new ideas when the answers are supplied before the questions are even asked? Freedom might tempt you away from the creedal truth.
"Homiletics" is the word used in seminaries to refer to the art of preaching. Most textbooks on preaching recommend that in a sermon you present a dilemma, and then end by showing a way out of the dilemma. So here is the dilemma: religion typically must choose between truth and freedom. And here is my problem: there is no way out of this dilemma. Unitarianism is not the answer. It is not the religion of both truth and freedom. Unitarianism is the religion of freedom. Period. It does not offer truth in the way most religions traditionally offer truth.
The point of my comments this morning is not to say that freedom is the right choice and truth is the wrong choice. There are many good reasons for choosing truth over freedom, and there are many problems inherent with the choice of freedom over truth. My point is simply to highlight this choice and to acknowledge that Unitarian Universalism tends to be a religion that values freedom more than it values certainty of truth.
I raise this choice before us as a way of explaining how I see Unitarianism distinguished from most other religions. It is to remind us that, in my view at least, this freedom is the reason we gather together in community. That others choose to gather around what they perceive as truth should not be judged by us as an inferior reason for gathering. Their choice is as much justifiable as ours. But it is not our choice.
I have said that the freedom is the price tag for owning truth. And the reverse is true. To claim freedom, we pay the price of certainty. A religion based on freedom has just as many, if not more, obstacles and dangers as a religion based on creed. I would like to mention briefly some of the problems we face in choosing freedom over truth in religion.
Freedom – as we all know from high school civics – requires a high degree of responsibility and accountability. There are several ways in which our freedom is exercised irresponsibly, and I'd like to list some of them. Each of these is in fact a problem that can be found within Unitarian Universalism today.
Freedom can easily become irresponsible if beliefs or behavior become merely arbitrary. Sometimes our freedom is reduced to arbitrary choice, such as "Well, I can believe anything I want to believe," or even, "It doesn't matter what I believe, I have freedom."
On the contrary, responsible freedom means making reasoned choices, making careful choices, and being able to explain those choices to others.
Freedom in religion does not mean one has no beliefs or the beliefs are arbitrary. We do have reasons for our beliefs though we do not treat those reasons or those beliefs as absolute, eternal truths. A Christian Unitarian and an atheist Unitarian each has reasons for believing as he or she does. And each offers those reasons to the other, not expecting or requiring the other to adopt his or her own beliefs.
When we share our thinking and reasoning with others who value freedom of belief, we enter into an ongoing conversation, which keeps free religion alive and vital. This never-ending conversation is the heart of free religion.
Another irresponsible use of freedom is not about being arbitrary in one's beliefs, but rather avoiding belief altogether in the name of "freedom." It is not uncommon among us to have people who are afraid to have religious convictions for fear it would threaten their freedom. To say we are "free" in our belief leads some to choose not to believe anything.
This, it seems to me, is a bit like living in a democracy and loving our freedom to choose our own government but neglecting to vote. Most of us would say that people who don't vote probably have very little love of political freedom. Is it not also the case that those who avoid religious convictions at all have little respect for freedom in religion?
One cannot take freedom seriously and avoid conviction altogether, being fearful of losing freedom.
Another irresponsible use of freedom is ignoring the tradition from which our freedom took root. As Unitarians and Universalists our religious freedom has been shaped by centuries of struggle with all kinds of religious issues and with many different religious orthodoxies. These roots are thoroughly relevant to our struggles today, and we cannot understand or exercise freedom responsibly without understanding those roots.
Finally, freedom is used irresponsibly whenever we forget that freedom is more important than certain truth. And that happens, too, within our movement. It happens whenever any faction decides that its answers are the only true Unitarian answers. I have heard some atheists do this in claiming that all Unitarians, if they are rational, must accept the atheist premise. I have heard some mystics do this in claiming that all Unitarians, if they have any heart at all, must embrace mysticism. Beware the loss of freedom at the altar of certain truth. It can happen even within a religion which claims to rest on freedom.
I offer this list of irresponsible uses of freedom in religion because they are easy – very easy – to stumble into. I know. I’ve done quite a bit of stumbling myself. In a free religion people are responsible and accountable for our beliefs and behavior. If we should turn out to be mistaken, it is only we who are mistaken, not the church, not the Bible, not the tradition or creed.
Religion remains alive to the extent that it opens itself up to freely exploring new truths and does not rest secure on old truths that will die. The nineteenth century jurist and American poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself an active Unitarian, spoke of this in a poem entitled "The Mind's Diet":
No life worth naming
ever comes to good
If always nourished
on the selfsame food;...
No reasoning natures
find it safe to feed,
For their diet,
on a single creed.
It is not my place, I suppose, to declare that there is no such thing as truth. Who knows? But I can say I put little faith in truth. My faith resides far more strongly in freedom. Over many centuries of human history, very little that has claimed to be eternally true has passed the test of time. The graveyard of yesterday’s truths is overflowing. Old truths die away with each generation. New truths are possible only to the extent that we embrace freedom to explore them more than we embrace the truths themselves.
Again, Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke to this in his poem entitled, "Truth" (which I offered in full as today’s reading):
Alas! how much that seemed
immortal truth
That heroes fought for,
martyrs died to save,
Reveals its earth-born lineage,
growing old
and limping in its march,
its wings un-plumed,
Its heavenly semblance
faded like a dream.
*******************************
Religious truths die frequently. Freedom is immortal.
The time is racked with birth-pangs; every hour
Brings forth some gasping truth, and truth new-born
Looks a misshapen and untimely growth,
That some would strangle, some would only starve;
But still it breathes, and passed from hand to hand,
Comes slowly to its stature and its form,
Changes to shining locks its snaky hair,
And moves transfigured into angel guise,
Welcomed by all that cursed its hour of birth,
And folded in the same encircling arms
That cast it like a serpent from their hold!
That same foundling truth, it grows
To unseemly favor, and at length has won
The smiles of hard-mouthed men and light-lipped dames;
Fold it in silk and give it food from gold;
So shalt thou share its glory when at last
It drops its mortal vesture, and revealed
In all the splendor of its heavenly form,
Spreads on the startled air its mighty wings!
Alas! how much that seemed immortal truth
That heroes died for, martyrs died to save,
Reveals its earth-born lineage, growing old
And limping in its march, its wings unplumed,
Its heavenly semblance faded like a dream!