"An Unrepentant Liberal"

READING

Like his contemporary Frederick May Eliot, A. Powell Davies was a Unitarian minister and a prominent liberal. Davies served as minister of All Souls Church (Unitarian) in Washington, D.C., from 1944 to 1957. It is his sermon, "The Faith of an Unrepentant Liberal," published in 1946, that inspires our service this morning. Here are some excerpts.

"Never was the need for faith as desperate as now; and never was it more essential that belief be genuine. We cannot face the future empty-hearted; we cannot face it with an untrue creed. Yet it is one of the perversities of the modern world's most crucial hour that many who could find and share the faith we need devote themselves to its obstruction.

"In the age of opportunity and peril that confronts us, only disaster can be harvested from false beliefs. The religions of the creeds are obsolescent; they have no will to face reality; the basis of their claims expired with yesterday; to what is now required they are irrelevant; the authority of myth and miracle is over. Surely it should be clear at last that all the compromises of religion must be ended. The world is much too dangerous for anything but truth. . . .

"Yet there are those so frightened by the future, and at the same time so fettered by the past, that even today, while we race with catastrophe, they call upon their hearers to repudiate the only faith and purpose that could save them, and be dedicated to a dying system of belief. 'Come back!' they cry. 'Back to the ancient worship and the ancient ways. Back to the supernatural! Back to a helpless and imploring piety! Back to dependency!' Back to everything, in fact, which proved too weak and false to hinder or prevent two deadly, world-engulfing wars. . . .

"To solve the problems of the modern world we need both better liberals and more widespread liberalism. Certainly such problems will never be resolved by those who in their outlook and belief remain enslaved by doctrines which are false. Realities will never yield to creeds which draw their nurture and support from ignorance and have to be protected from the naked light of truth. . . . While liberalism did not produce the problems of the modern world, it is the simple truth that only liberalism, lifted to the level of the present need, can ever hope to solve them. . . .

"I am an unrepentant liberal. If the gods of yesterday are dying, I am willing that they die. For there is a God who never dies, the one and only living God whose face is ever set towards tomorrow. And for those who follow where [this God] leads, the winds of morning are already blowing, and however long the night may linger, the day of triumph is in sight."

SERMON

The 1940's must have left many people badly shaken. Shell-shocked from the Second World War, its grim revelation of the Holocaust, and the final sobering victory over Japan, Americans returned to private life hungry for home, family, and faith. The comforting traditions of the past helped smooth over nuclear anxiety. Many retreated into those traditions out of fear and longing for normalcy at any cost.

It was in this context - characterized by a thin layer of conformity over a deep well of unease, that the preachers of liberal religion made their case. They boldly named the fear and the clinging to outworn traditions that went with it. They offered an alternative: a faith that was progressive, that kept pace with science, that looked optimistically towards a better tomorrow.

Hearing the words of such Unitarian preachers as Frederick May Eliot and A. Powell Davies, leaves one struck by the sheer confidence they possessed and the hope and power that confidence generated. They had no difficulty articulating a liberal stance or sharing their conviction that liberals would save the world. As Davies' sermon title makes clear, they also felt no need to apologize or temper their position. They had the vision and the faith to go with it.

They made it sound easy to be a liberal. "What we require," Frederick May Eliot wrote, "is not faith in some distant paradise, distant in either space or time . . . What we require is faith in ourselves, faith in the reality of our own dreams and the validity of our own hopes. We need faith in the truth as we discover it by the use of our own human powers of observation and reason. We need faith in the universe of which we are a part, of which our ideals are a part. [And] we need faith in the long, slow, painful process by which [humankind] has made its way upward and onward, one step at a time . . . ."

Liberal religion, according to Eliot, was a profoundly positive view of humanity and our potential, of the world and life itself. It threw its lot in with science and reason and with the progress they yielded for society. It allied the struggle for freedom with the search for truth and declared that each could be achieved.

Liberal religion also had an intuitive side. It affirmed a sense of goodness inherent in all life. It offered a vision of the unity of all creation and the belief that people were not so different - or divided - as they thought.

Liberal religion, according to Davies, "stood for the unhindered use of the free mind in arriving at conviction. Truth," he added, "is more holy than any creed . . . ." Revelation comes from experience, not scripture. And "not only mind but conscience must be free," the combination leading to what Davies called the "unsheltered truth."

Davies was not afraid to criticize the traditionalists as people who clung sentimentally to the past. He noted that most of them "do not take the consequences of their own assumptions," a habit which produced real blind spots. People reject science when it comes to their religious faith but benefit every day from penicillin, Davies pointed out. Even more to the point, Davies wrote, "the fundamentalist believer who puts on spectacles to read the Athanasian Creed is demonstrating scientific laws of optics, which, if he thought about them, would make the creed a waste of time to bother with."

It's a lot like what's happening today, isn't it. All over Georgia, there are people who insist that science textbooks state that evolution is just another theory, while the story of Genesis is to be taken on faith. A pervasive sense of insecurity, heightened in the past few years by economic woes and the threat of terrorism, has kept people anxious and yearning, once again, for normalcy. Fear has made us sheepish, lacking the emotional resilience to challenge authority. In this climate, traditional religion - in its most extreme form, fundamentalism - has easily reasserted itself all over the world. People have flocked to it, yearning for something that is certain, confident, and strong.

Once again, liberal religion bucks the trend. But this time, it is not quite so easy to be confident or optimistic. Aware of how deep the divisions really are and realistic about the minority we represent, we lack the boldness that Eliot and Davies displayed.

We are also sensitive to the way in which religion and politics have merged around many issues. As fundamentalists drew together to form the "religious right," they defined the liberal religious territory as the secular left. Those of us who belong to liberal traditions have struggled to define our faith apart from politics - as we should do - but the exercise leaves us talking more about our own differences with each other than about how our faith can save the world.

This development has been even harder on the mainline Protestant churches than it has been on us. Consider how the Protestants have split over the issue of gay clergy. Just this week, another Methodist minister was defrocked for announcing to her congregation and her bishop that she was living with her partner of the same sex. Gene Robinson, bishop of New Hampshire and a gay man, continues to be the center of a controversy that has global implications for the Episcopal community. Closer to home, yesterday's "Los Angeles Times" told the story of a lesbian Lutheran pastor whose church has lost its official recognition because she is in a committed relationship.

These conflicts are tragic and unnecessary, from the liberal religious point of view. But they are one more indication of how much resistance there is to moving forward. It is always safer - or so many think - to move backward instead. In truth, however, it is a disaster.

And this is where the liberal religious message comes in today. We have a vision - a vision of the future in which our dream of a better world is fulfilled. And with that vision, comes hope. Here is where we stand, we say, and we will go forward from here. The struggle is worth it, for the struggle for freedom and truth is more holy, as Davies said, than any creed.

Liberal religion calls us to go forward, because we believe "in the long, slow painful process by which [humankind] has made it way" so far. We will not abdicate from it because we are afraid. Liberal religion answers that fear with faith: faith in ourselves, faith in the validity of our hopes and dreams, faith in our ability to use our "human powers" to seek the truth and build a better world. That's all the faith we need. Actually, it's quite a lot.

The time has come to proclaim this faith, boldly and unapologetically, once again. It's interesting to read Davies and Eliot these days because they did not hesitate to declare that liberal religion was the only faith for the time, the only faith "possible," as Davies put it, the only faith that can "march with truth:" immodest claims, and very nearly intolerant. Our awareness of religious pluralism has grown greatly since then, and with it comes a reluctance to lay the only claim to truth. There are real differences to honor.

But Davies and Eliot truly believed that the embrace of liberal religion was wide enough to handle it all. Religion expresses the unity of humankind, argued Eliot, not the superiority of one faith over another. And "only liberals can take this position," Eliot concluded, "just as it seems to us the only position that liberals can take." In today's world, it doesn't take long to find this out either.

Every day we are reminded of how uncertain the future is. From the threat of terrorism - as we are so often told, it's not whether they will strike again, but rather when - to the far more insidious condition of global warming, fear is abundant and it calls for faith. But the kind of faith we choose will have everything to do with the kind of future we inherit.

Our faith, grounded in the liberal religious tradition, has a message of hope the whole world needs to hear. Our faith is for everyone, for our trust is in humanity, in freedom, and in truth to be gained through our common struggle. After all that has happened - in Davies' time and in our time, then and now, we still believe there is reason to hope. This is our faith. May it set us free to move towards the future together.

References used to prepare this sermon include "The Faith of An Unrepentant Liberal," by A. Powell Davies (Washington, D.C.: All Souls Church, Unitarian), 1946; "Frederick May Eliot: An Anthology," edited by Alfred P. Stiernotte (Boston: Beacon Press), 1959; and the "Los Angeles Times," Saturday, December 4, "San Bernadino Lutheran Mission Loses Its Sanction Over Gay Pastor," by Seema Mehta, page B4.