"Diversity and Its Discomforts"

Religious liberals may celebrate diversity, just as we have, with gestures as positive and unambiguous as the display of world religion banners on our sanctuary wall. But such statements – as needed as they are, do not speak of the challenge and discomfort they also represent. There are real and often contentious differences not only among us but throughout our world.

I have attended any number of interfaith gatherings in which earnest people have minimized these differences, often with references to the mistaken idea that we all worship the same God or to the hope that we are all headed ultimately to the same place. At such meetings I am quiet, for outspoken dissent does not come naturally to me, and I am confused by such pronouncements. When are we all – as the Unitarian Universalist children’s story I read earlier suggests – separate rivers flowing to the same sea? And when are we destined never to meet or merge?

I recently read an article in a religious journal about a series of meetings that the U.S. State Department has sponsored since 9/11. The purpose of the meetings is to introduce Muslim scholars from around the world to “the American way of separating church and state,” and to show how “American society … [nurtures] faith traditions and support[s] religious diversity.” The author, Patricia Chang, a sociology professor at Boston College, had the task of directing the first gatherings.

Once her guests overcame their shock that the nearest mosque was a twenty-minute drive away instead of a short walk to the corner, they tackled the larger problem of religious pluralism. “Rather than appreciating the benefits that religious pluralism offers to the larger society,” Patricia Chang writes, “some of our guests were clearly puzzled. On the second day of the program, … a Pakistani cleric asked me, ‘If you believe your religion to be true, and you believe it is your duty to share this truth with others, then why would you think that religious pluralism is a good thing?’”

It’s a very important question, especially for Unitarian Universalists. For we insist that religious pluralism is “a good thing,” proudly pointing to our history and its connection to American democracy. We say that religious pluralism enhances individual faith, not diminishes it. We fervently believe in the separation of church and state. We protect the right to dissent, distrust conformity, and proclaim that this is what makes us what we are.

And it is. But we rarely look at the challenge and discomfort such a position invites. We trust, as Unitarians and Universalists have always trusted, that somehow by some cosmic ultimate reckoning, we are all one and belong to a universal whole. That consolation takes the edge off the pain of realizing that we are not all together right now.

A couple of months ago, a guest speaker at our Sunday service gave a sermon about his Christian faith as a Unitarian Universalist. He spoke unapologetically and stridently, insisting that Unitarian Universalist Christians have a right to belong to our community and to invite others to join them. His message had an unsettling effect. People had very different reactions – some quite strong. Some told me they were disturbed.

I’m glad I wasn’t here! I don’t like being disturbed, especially not here in this sanctuary, which I associate with comfort and acceptance. The speaker’s message was a kind of dissent, a minority opinion, offered from the margins of our faith community. And even though I wasn’t here, the incident prompted a lot of reflection for me on the necessity of such dissent and the inevitability of the discomfort it causes.

American society and our faith tradition are both rooted in the awkward and the contentious. In a recent Harper’s Magazine essay, Edward Hoagland writes, “Originally we Americans were a revolutionary people in religion and politics – misfits in Europe or adventurers of a modest kind – and crossed a lot of deep water to try someplace new. Voting with our feet was inherently a dissent, and our democracy was raucous to start with: coonskin cap versus top hat, hillbilly or flatlander, city slicker, bohunk, or blue blood,” he goes on. The diverse mix that forms our society continues to this day. Out of it has come a form of American individualism that celebrates difference and thrives on dissent.

But dissent, like religious diversity, makes us uncomfortable, or worse. “Dissent is a bit more like Jesus being rude in the Temple,” Hoagland writes, “including the chance of a walk down the Via Dolorosa if mob rule or a dictator prevails. Argumentative, confrontational, it’s seldom a path to career advancement.”

It is risky, yet essential. “Dissent is the sourdough that starts bread rising,” Hoagland adds, “or the reckless protest that ignites reform. But it’s not for breadwinners. It’s a marriage-breaker, embittering the kids; and there is wastage – peacemakers such as Rabin, Gandhi, and King killed, and lesser, luckier people vilified, pauperized, with ulcers and palpitations.”

This is the real landscape of difference, whether it be in the arena of politics or in the sanctuary of faith. When you get right down to it, if you say what you believe, you take risks, you make others mad at you, you never get invited back. Our own Unitarian history confirms this truth. After Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his “heretical, now celebrated ‘Divinity School Address,’” Hoagland reminds us, Harvard didn’t ask him to speak again for thirty years.

This is the tension of religious pluralism. It asks people holding conflicting beliefs to create a community in which everyone has an equal right to believe, to belong, and to be powerful. Their disagreements are not trivial; their unity is not evident. They will not give in. Yet they must coexist. Only the practice of tolerance and the spirit of inclusion will help them.

A new book by church historian William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America, explores the rough and tumble world of our diversity. Although the United States Constitution assures religious toleration, there is plenty of evidence that discrimination, prompted by fear and ignorance, occurred regularly throughout our history. The migration of the Mormons is one example of a group motivated by persecution and economic necessity. “Religious freedom,” Hutchison notes, “frequently consisted of the freedom to be elsewhere.” Inclusion has not always been an option.

Our experience in Unitarian Universalist congregations reflects many of the currents in American society. For just as we share an intertwined history, we also share tensions and struggles. I have sat uncomfortably through animated Unitarian Universalist meetings in churches and General Assemblies, as people argued over everything from a budget item to the American flag. I have sometimes wished that we could avoid such confrontations. I have often wished we could all agree.

But then I remember the necessity of dissent, though it is rarely gracious and people-pleasing. And I realize the need to make room for difference if all people are to be free. What allows us to live with these tensions is a choice that each of us makes. We choose discomfort – even though we don’t like it – because we believe that difference and diversity are worth it.

I have always assumed that understanding and promoting religious pluralism was an intellectual exercise, a stretch of the imagination to see that truth has many angles. But religious pluralism is not just a state of mind. It is an emotional experience, with feelings that run deep and primal.

Accepting that fact has a very positive benefit. It helps us build a stronger community. Knowing that we may feel the twinge of difference, we make our values relevant and alive. Tolerance is more than an ideal invoked when people don’t like each other but have to get along. Tolerance is active self-control and emotional discipline. It is what holds us together, in this community and in any free society.

Will we ever be one, as our own Unitarian Universalist literature hopefully proclaims? Yes, I say, but not in the way we have sometimes imagined. Not as people who think alike or believe alike or look alike. Rather, we will be one as people who make room for one another; as people whose hearts and sanctuaries open to the spirit of inclusion. Living by the values a free society requires, we create a community in which we can freely acknowledge – and celebrate – our differences. If this is the lesson of religious pluralism, let us learn it well and teach it to our troubled world.

References used to prepare this sermon include Puzzled by Pluralism, by Patricia M.Y. Chang, in Christian Century, September 6, 2003; and Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal, by William R. Hutchison (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).