“UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST FAMILY VALUES”
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday,
All
It has been at least a couple of decades now since the phrase “family values” has been transformed into a code for political agenda. That’s unfortunate. That’s also not what I want to talk about today.
The idea of family values has nothing to do with political issues like abortion or school vouchers or sex education or censorship in the public schools. Family values are personal to each family, and not weapons used to fight a political battle.
The idea of family values is not about what a family should look like. It has nothing to do with whether there is one parent or two, or whether the parents are of two genders or one, or whether children were planned or unplanned, or whether race is mixed or not. Family values are not about how a family looks.
Family values have to do with values – what values we honor by bringing into our family relationships. Each family shapes its own set of values which, within some broad boundaries such as personal safety issues, is no one else’s business.
It may at first seem odd to suggest, as the title of my sermon does, that certain family values can be identified as specific to Unitarian Universalism. Odd, perhaps, but true. There are, I believe, a core set of values within our tradition that address the values we bring to a family relationship. Both the Unitarians and the Universalists have held these values historically, and they continue to shape what we aspire to practice in our own families.
The center of UU family values is in some sense the very center of our reason for existing.
The Unitarian tradition in this
country arose mostly out of a dispute over human nature. In the 1700s, traditional Protestantism in
colonial
These two views of human nature affected attitudes toward children, since children are close to the pure source of human nature. To the orthodox Calvinists at that time, children are born with a selfish and sinful will, and the job of parents is to do all they can to break that will, to repress the natural desires of the child.
Susanna Wesley provides a good example of this view of human nature and child‑rearing. Writing in the 18th century, Susanna Wesley was the mother of thirteen children, two of whom were John and Charles, later the founders of American Methodism. Susanna Wesley believed that,
"Self‑will is the root of all sin and misery.... Religion is nothing else than doing the will of God and not our own: that the one grand impediment to our temporal and eternal happiness being this self‑will, no indulgence of it can be trivial, no denial unprofitable. Heaven or hell depends on this alone."
Her view of human nature led naturally to a strict form of childraising. She reflected a very commonly held view in her advice to parents:
"In order to form the minds of children, the first thing to be done is to conquer their will and bring them to an obedient temper.... Subjecting the will is a thing that must be done at once, and the sooner the better. When a child is corrected it must be conquered,...and when the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of the parents, then a great many childish follies and inadvertencies may be passed by. I insist on conquering the will of children because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education, without which both precept and example will be ineffectual."
Susanna Wesley's view of human nature and child raising might be contrasted with that of Theodore Parker, a 19th century Unitarian minister who was widely viewed as a radical and a heretic. Parker noted that "(People) often speak of breaking the will of a child. It seems to me (that's no better) than breaking the neck”:
"I should sooner think of breaking the legs of a horse in training him, as a child's will. The instruction of children should be such as to animate, inspire, and train, but not to hew, cut, and carve; for I would always treat a child as a live tree, which is to be helped to grow, never as a dry dead timber, to be carved into this or that shape, and to have certain mouldings grooved upon it."
The character of human nature is in fact one of the most important religious questions, and our views of it do affect how we treat children. Perhaps the most foundational family value is how we should view the soul of a child, and how we choose to nurture it. We know that children do wish to please, and that children do want to make good choices. We know that positive affirmation is more effective in raising a child into happy adulthood than heavy-handed discipline. We know all this because we see children respond to affirmation, encouragement, and praise. This response is a lesson to us, taught by children themselves, about the good that resides in human nature.
There is no question that children can learn to make good choices in life through guidance, and this is more constructive, and truer to human nature, than learning by breaking their will. In particular, the purpose of education, and especially religious education, is not to conquer the will, it is rather, in the words of Channing, to "awaken the soul." Most Unitarians and Universalists, I feel safe in assuming, accept this precept of the potential goodness inherent to human nature, and attempt at least, to apply that value within the family.
Another key value taught in Unitarian Universalist tradition is that of tolerance – to respect each other’s right to their own religious quest. This is a value we aspire to bring into our families as well, something we hope to instill within our children.
But I confess that in raising children, it is easy to stumble over this value. Most of us have done it, and I’ve done it. The stumbling block is often this: we want our children to find their own religious belief system, not just accept what they are told.
Without much fear of contradiction, I feel safe in asserting the following generalization: Most Unitarian Universalists find it difficult to talk about religion to children. While this isn't always true, it is true enough to make us wonder why. By and large, we are not too flustered by the questions kids have. We’re not afraid of the old “where-do-babies-come-from” question – or at least we’ve practiced the answer in our minds ahead of time.
But the most difficult, fearful, and pulse‑raising questions for us are of this sort: "What happens when we die?" or "What is God like?" or "Why is it wrong to lie?" or "Who made the trees?" or "Why did Uncle John have to die," or "Is Jesus God?" or "What is a Unitarian?"
These are the sorts of questions we tend to have difficulty with. And there are several reasons we find them difficult, not the least of which is the fact that often, we're not sure of the answers ourselves.
Even when we do have an answer, even when we have a belief or a conviction about these questions, we often find it difficult to answer because we expect our answers will not satisfy the child. Children tend to look for literal answers, and many of the religious questions demand metaphors and symbols.
The good old question, "where do babies come from" is tailor‑made for kids because its answer is grounded in fact -- however we may shape those facts according to their ability to understand them. So we should be so lucky as to be asked that question. But these religious questions, by and large, do not have "factual" answers, certainly not answers that satisfy the literal mind of a child. Most children will not be satisfied with an answer to the question, "Who made the trees," unless they are able to form a mental picture in their minds of someone making them.
But there is another reason Unitarians sometimes avoid answering a child's question about religion. It is that we don't want to indoctrinate the children, we want him or her to decide for themselves and not be overly influenced by our opinion. "Let the children get the information," we say, "and when they get old enough, they can make their own decisions."
While I certainly understand this point of view, and often feel it myself, experience has shown -- I should say painful experience has shown -- that this approach simply does not work.
Years ago, in the 1960's and 1970s, the denomination developed much of its children's curriculum based upon this strategy of complete neutrality, and the message the kids got was not what we intended. If we fail to share our beliefs with the kids, out of fear that we may indoctrinate them, the message the kids receive is this: "it doesn't matter what you believe," "beliefs are not important," or "any one belief is as good as another." As it turned out, that message seemed to confuse and alienate many of our children.
Since that time, as a movement we’ve re-thought this family value. The idea is to teach tolerance, but without suggesting that beliefs are important. Beliefs and convictions are very important, and tolerance is taught by showing how someone can hold strong beliefs and still respect different ones. The question coming from children, “What do you believe” shouldn’t be avoided any more than the “baby” question.
It may be that some ideas are too abstract or too complex for children at different ages, yet the lesson is not to avoid conviction; it is to re-examine and try to understand what we believe in their simplest and most reasonable ways. There is an important difference between being tolerant of other beliefs and being indifferent or "wishy-washy." The children know that difference.
There is a story told about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the 19th century English poet and philosopher:
Coleridge was once involved in a discussion with a man who firmly believed that children should not be given formal religious instruction of any kind. They would then be free to choose their own religious faith, the man reasoned, when they reached the age of discretion. Coleridge did not disagree as he spoke.
Later in the day, Coleridge invited the man into his somewhat neglected garden. “Do you call this a garden?” exclaimed the visitor. '”here are nothing but weeds here!”
“Well, you see,” explained Coleridge, “I did not wish to infringe on the liberty of the garden in any way. I was just giving the garden a chance to express itself and choose its own production."
Sophia Lyon Fahs, the theologian of Unitarian religious education, reminds us that it does matter what we believe.
"Some beliefs," she writes," are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one's own direction. (They) weaken a person's selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness. Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration. (They) nurture self confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth."
It does matter what we believe. And if beliefs are important, it is also important that we model this fact to our children. The UU value of tolerance is an essential part of family values for us; it is a mistake to confuse tolerance with indifference.
The fact is that there are some religiously-grounded ideas that come easily to children -- in some ways more easily to them than to adults. Justice is one such idea. All children seem to develop a keen sense of fairness. They know when they are not treated equally or with the same consideration. They recognize unfair treatment of others as well. "That's not fair!" is the common insight, a feeling that is easily transferable over the years to countless situations involving bigotry, oppression, or any other kind of injustice. One UU family value is to hone and encourage that inborn sense of justice.
Another religiously-grounded idea that children seem to have a radar for detecting is hypocrisy. They are very alert to situations where someone, especially an adult, talks one way but acts another. If they hear someone say lying is wrong, but they catch that person in a lie, their hypocrisy radar goes off. If they hear from someone about a God of love and then hear from the same person about God's cruel punishment, they can sense the contradiction. Children look for consistency between beliefs and actions, and if they don't find it they know something is wrong. Many of us came to our Unitarian Universalist associations as a result of sensitivity to hypocrisy, and we want our children to develop that sensitivity as well.
It has been claimed by some that Unitarian Universalism is "an adults‑only" religion. That is, our religious values, being particularly rational, require a certain level of abstraction and maturity that few children can attain. I think that idea is often mistaken.
For example, many of us hold to the idea that there is no external authority that determines truth; that truth is continuously revealed, and what we hold to be true today may in fact be revised tomorrow in light of new understandings.
This view is difficult for kids to understand, we may think. In a child's world, things are more often just true or false, right or wrong, good or bad. To the extent that the child cannot comprehend these subtleties -- subtleties that are vitally important to us -- some argue that ours is an "adults‑only" religion.
But that is not the case. Our religious values reflect deep human concerns that are accessible and understandable for children as well as adults. For example, any child old enough to have a memory can recall when he or she believed something they later found to be untrue -- that cartoon characters were real, that you aged a full year on your birthday, or that at night the sun burns out and a new one appears the next morning.
Any child who can remember changing his or her opinion about what they believed is capable of understanding that our perspectives continue changing when we learn new things. It is not too big a stretch to explain this abstract principle to them. If they know they change ideas as they grow older, why can’t we help them understand that this is a life-long process?
There are plenty of values in our religion that children can readily understand, and in some ways are easier for young minds: the worth and dignity of every individual, freedom of thought and expression, tolerance of those who disagree, the authority of reason and the value of critical thinking, the motive force of love, and the pursuit of justice. Many of these values, spoken in age-appropriate language, are understood by children of any age.
One of the family values we aspire to carry to our children is not so much “what” to believe as it is “how” to believe and “why” to believe. It is sometimes thought that religious education of children means teaching them right doctrine. That is not our aspiration. We hope to teach right thinking and right values, and the doctrine they choose will flow from that. Most of all, we wish to teach a hunger for knowledge and truth.
In two Sundays, on March 9, Nancy and I will be leading a class called "Parents as Spiritual Guides." It is designed for anyone who is involved with children to help them be more comfortable and confident about discussing religious issues with them -- questions about God, questions about death, or questions about life values. To do this, the curriculum is designed to help us clarify our own views, for when we talk these issues through with children, we need to understand more clearly our own thinking.
It may be important that we talk with them about what we believe, but how they see us live out our beliefs and practice our values is far more important. Children have a way of perceiving our real values and motives regardless of the opinions we profess. And it is our lives, after all, that declare our values much more than what we say.
The Unitarian approach to education of children was eloquently summarized a century and a half ago by William Ellery Channing, with the words we spoke together in the reading earlier. I close by repeating an excerpt of those words, in part because I think it’s also inspirational to think of these words according to how we respect others as adults:
AThe great end of religious instruction . . . is not to stamp our minds irresistibly upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own; not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth; not to form an outward regularity, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought; not to bind them by ineradicable prejudices to our particular sect or peculiar notions, but to prepare them for impartial, conscientious judging of whatever subjects may, in the course of Providence, be offered to their decision; not to impose religion upon them in the form of arbitrary rules which rest on no foundation but our own word and will, but to awaken the consciousness, the moral discernment, so that they may discern and approve for themselves what is everlastingly right and good. In a word, the great end is to awaken the soul, to excite and cherish the spiritual life.@
These words identify, it seems to me, the values Unitarian Universalists aspire to live – our UU “family values.”