"Faith After Religion "

There's a certain kind of discomfort I associate with interfaith gatherings - earnest, constructive, and necessary as they are. The discomfort arises whenever I hear people talk about what we hold in common. "We may have our differences," someone will often say, but we all believe in God." This well-meaning expression of unity always leaves me feeling awkward and somewhat dishonest. While such an occasion is not the time to pipe up, "Actually, we don't all believe in God," I'm quietly crossing my fingers. I understand the need to recognize our similarities - I want to do that too - and yet I can't agree about which ones they are.

Do I believe in God; do you? The question has become unanswerable for me. Not because I cannot appreciate how little we know about the mystery of life; and not because I cannot respect others' answers. I cannot answer the question because belief - the idea of holding something to be true even though we cannot prove it - just doesn't seem relevant to my faith. My problem is not with God, an idea that is hard enough to grasp, but with believing in belief.

This is a key concept in Daniel C. Dennett's critique of religion, in his recent book "Breaking the Spell." Religion asks us to believe in belief: whether we take as truth one version of holy scripture or more simply, assume that all people of faith believe in God. If we can't go along with these assumptions, then is our Unitarian Universalist tradition something we can call a religion? What are we doing here, in this sanctuary, if not affirming our faith?

If this sounds extreme, listen to this explanation. Dennett writes, "We may be too close to religion to be able to see it clearly at first. This has been a familiar theme among artists and philosophers for years. One of their self-appointed tasks is to 'make the familiar strange,' and some of the great strokes of creative genius get us to break through the crust of excessive familiarity and look at ordinary, obvious things with fresh eyes. Scientists couldn't agree more. Sir Isaac Newton's mythic moment was asking himself the weird question about why the apple fell down from the tree. (‘Well, why wouldn't it? asks the everyday nongenius; it's heavy!' - as if this were a satisfactory explanation.)" So it is with religion. "To say that it is natural is only the beginning of the answer, not the end," Dennett argues.

Dennett defines religions as "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is sought." His understanding of religion is much the same as the one invoked at interfaith gatherings. But where does it leave us? Whatever our varied and individual feelings about God, prayer, or what happens after we die, we Unitarian Universalists do agree that the scientific method is a valid search for truth. We are grounded in the same world view that gave rise to Isaac Newton's discovery of gravity and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. As religious liberals, we see no conflict between our faith tradition and scientific progress, except, perhaps, when we ask ourselves what we really have in common with religion itself.

If that three-footed Martian were to look at our church, he or she or it would see something very similar to the Lutheran church down the street. We have a nicer church bell, but from the outside looking in, it's easy to see why it looks like we belong to the same club. Our architecture, hymn tunes, and rituals are similar to those of other Judeo-Christian faiths, not to mention the fact that we meet on Sunday mornings. We should step back and see whether we can reconcile who we really are with the trappings of religious tradition.

Liberal religion is grounded in the idea that faith should be open to new truth. "Revelation is not sealed," our nineteenth-century predecessors liked to say. They were excited about Darwin's discoveries and thought that reason and the power of the intellect could only improve religious insights.

Our skepticism about the supernatural goes back a long way too. William Ellery Channing preached in the early 1800's that one did not need to believe in the divinity of Jesus in order to practice his ethical teachings. Thomas Jefferson made himself a bible with all the miracle stories deleted. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others in the Transcendentalist movement insisted on direct experience of the natural world as their spiritual path.

It's been a long time since we held in common anything that looked like a belief in the supernatural. Even the theists among us are different. What many of us might call God is much more likely to be associated with nature, than with the deity of holy scripture.

And yet, the impulse to come together for worship; the need to celebrate rites of passage - to name our children, sanctify the love of two persons, say farewell to those who have died; the yearning to make a difference in the world through service and prophetic witness - what is all this activity, if not our religion? According to Daniel C. Dennett, it is a highly developed cultural idea, which has evolved just as genes have evolved, and we are its stewards and hosts. "Breaking the Spell" is all about how "the great ideas of religion," to use Dennett's words, "have been holding us human beings enthralled for thousands of years . . . ideas that spread from mind to mind, surviving translation between different languages, hitchhiking on songs and icons and statues and rituals, coming together in unlikely combinations in particular people's heads, bearing family resemblances to the ideas that inspired them but adding new features, new powers, as they go." We Unitarian Universalists have differed in some significant ways from other faith traditions, but we are not immune to the contagion of religious ideas.

I recommend this book to you all. It is a good reminder that the search for truth is bracing and intensely honest, unsettling though that may be. Where does that search lead us?

I ask these questions because I sense, at least in myself, some hesitancy about the answers. I am, as the Martians observed, one of those "specialist practitioners" supported by religion. As the shepherd of cultural ideas grazing on our minds, I have an obligation to be clear about what this means to me. Liberal religion as we Unitarian Universalists practice it may well be a transition out of religion altogether. It's for a reason that we have the old joke that Unitarian Universalism is a way station for people who have left the Methodist church and are on their way to the golf course. The egalitarian, life-affirming values we cherish are cultural ideas just as religious ideas are, but they are open to examination and debate. When we come together for services or celebrations, we strive to take the best of the old traditions and enact them with contemporary meanings and language.

We are evolving too. Everything does. What we haven't quite articulated to ourselves or others, however, is that we are evolving by what we learn - knowledge of the world, of the self, of life, not by what we believe. We have a direction - moving forward - that is leading us further and further away from traditional understandings of religion. Something is going to be left behind, but much more will be gained.

The faith we are in the process of creating - in the same manner, most likely, as all cultural ideas have come about - is actively committed to the search for truth, whatever the challenges. If this choice only heightens the difference between us and other religious traditions, I say, so be it.

The benefits of traditional religion have lost out (in my mind) to its capacity for violence, malevolence, and hate. I am tired of living in a world in which religious wars and culture wars destroy lives and communities. Heightened religious fervor seems to generate intolerance, not tolerance, resulting in a clash of beliefs and people who will stop at nothing to enforce them.

I'm casting my lot - and my faith - with those who are willing to live without the assurance of belief and willing to work with others to learn, understand, and grow as human beings. I'm not going to give up on people.

I put my faith in our astonishing ability to search for truth, to see the world in new ways, and to learn how to make it better. Is that a religion? It is now. Why can't we set religion free from its dependence on belief, and help it evolve so that it will free us all?

If we look again at this church, as a Martian might do, and listen to what people say and watch what we do, we might understand quite quickly how different we are. The human need to gather in community, to replicate rituals and customs that comfort us and tie us to our ancestors, is only one facet of our faith. We do share it with others, regardless of our other differences. But we are here together because we are committed to the values by which we learn and grow; the value of tolerance and an open mind, the value of searching for - and facing - the truth, the value of cooperation not only for survival but for peace, and the value of life itself, a gift we try to use wisely. There's enough here to create a whole new faith, evolving out of our liberal religious heritage, and leading to a new and better day. I won't go back. Then there is only going forward.

The book on which this sermon is based is "Breaking the Spell: Religionas a Natural Phenomenon," by Daniel C. Dennett (New York: Viking, 2006)