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Davidson Loehr

October 29, 2000

SERMON: Spooks from the Depths

Halloween comes to us in costume. It wears a mask, covering a much older, and much different, mask. Under that mask, still another mask. And after we unmask Halloween, we will find some spooks from the depths of ourselves and our world. Since you have a lay service next Sunday that will also be dealing with symbols and myths connected to the concept of the Goddess, I’ve decided to take a slightly different approach here, using less myth and more history and social commentary, so you don’t get over-mythed.

Let’s start with recent history. In 1967, by Lyndon Johnson’s presidential decree, Halloween officially became UNICEF day, when little children, dressed as make-believe goblins, frighten you into making the sacrifice of some spare change.

Going back another century, Halloween first became a national event here after more than a million people from Ireland emigrated to the US after the Irish potato famine of 1848. At that time it was the adults rather than the children who dressed up in costumes, pretending to be all kinds of evil spirits and other supernatural beings. They visited homes where friends made offerings of food and drink to them. So it was partly a creative way to party. But that too was a caricature, a cartoon. Halloween itself is a kind of mask put on over something much older, more primitive, more powerful, and perhaps more healing.

The Christian church invented Halloween and All Saints Day in the 9th century, then added All Souls Day a century later. They were invented to “cover” an ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (“Sow-en”), just as Christmas was moved to December 25th in the year 336 to “cover” the birthday of the solar deity Mithra, and Easter is a Christian “cover” over older festivals celebrating the vernal equinox. Our November first was the Celtic first day of winter, and first day of their new year. So Samhain was to the Celts something like Rosh Hashanah is to the Jews-a day of reckoning, a day of atonement.

Above all, Samhain was a time when the barriers between the human and supernatural worlds were broken – or as we might put it today, the barriers between the conscious and unconscious levels of our awareness. They believed that the whole spectrum of nonhuman forces roamed the earth to take revenge for human violations of sacred duties. To bribe the gods – always our first impulse, it seems – they offered animal and sometimes human sacrifices. So this beginning of the new year was a terrifying time of year in the old days. It is not surprising that they needed some relief from it. I would not be surprised if the custom of dressing up like goblins and bad spirits went back to the beginning.

This is such fantastic talk! Gods, demons, goblins. When we hear things put in such otherworldly, supernatural ways, we can be pretty sure we’re talking about something terribly primitive, something that has probably been part of our human psyches since we’ve had human psyches.

This business of supernatural powers and unseen forces sounds a little spooky nowadays. Most of us don’t like to think of invisible forces that direct our lives. But they are still present, still pulling our strings, and are often still fearful, though there isn’t anything otherworldly about them.

Let’s go to a different level of history to find a metaphor for exploring this subject of Halloween. Five or six centuries ago, before the Spanish and the English began sailing around the world, world maps looked very different than they do today. One of the most interesting things about those old maps is that in the unexplored areas, the mapmakers used to print “There be monsters here.” Once we had explored and incorporated the rest of the world into our maps, the monsters disappeared. But when those spaces were still unknown, we thought they must be filled with monsters, because we tend to think that everything unknown to us might be filled with monsters — as most of our science fiction movies still show.

Like unfinished maps, incomplete selves and uninformed worldviews are havens for the monsters of our imaginations. The unknown is usually fearful. To defend against it, we create tyrannies of partial visions, walls of our comfortable biases, to protect us from the monsters that always seem to lie just beyond the limits of the familiar. In that way, we’re still like the medieval mapmakers and sailors.

And Halloween, or Samhaim, is one of those special times of the year that open the door, that offer us another chance to incorporate the unknown, to dig deeper into ourselves and make our worlds bigger. When we can assimilate the unknown into ourselves, the monsters disappear. What we cannot assimilate haunts us like goblins and demons.

Another way of saying this is that life’s deepest problems can’t be solved; they have to be dissolved, by enlarging our maps, by incorporating the things that we fear. The solution of the world can’t be found on the surface. It’s not simple. It has to be complexified before it has enough nuance, enough room, to spread out the full-sized map and begin filling it in.

But we don’t tend to do this, do we? We tend to stick to a kind of comic-book simplicity. Our heroes are big bulky physical characters: big bodies, thin characters. Rambo was an angry adolescent who never did grow up. Professional boxing matches get millions of viewers at $50 each on pay-per-view television to watch a few exciting minutes of two guys beating each other senseless. Wrestling matches also earn big bucks, and feature cartoon-like characters with huge bodies and cave-man actions.

Preachers often seem to describe God as though he were just like a bigger version of Arnold Schwarzenneger, powerful and fearful, interested in obedience rather than in our ability to make subtle grown-up distinctions about morality and ethics. That does poor service to the concept of God! Movie superheroes, wrestling champions and even the sense of the heroic have become like brute versions of a social Darwinism, a kind of survival of the biggest and meanest.

Our heroes have become as simplistic as masked Halloween characters, and this simpleness does not serve us well. Religions have not helped this picture much, too often defining people’s refusal to believe in unbelievable gods as faithlessness. But that’s wrong. For the worst form of faithlessness is the fear that the truth will be bad. The worst kind of faithlessness is the belief that there be monsters here, when what there is instead is our failure to see, to understand, to assimilate the nuances of difference into ourselves and our world.

Sometimes I look at our world as a kind of masked ball. Or like playing ostrich, refusing to see beyond very simplistic terms, shrinking our world, and turning it into a fantastic video game between heroes and monsters, winners and losers.

Ostriches hide their heads in the sand, perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of denial. But when they do, they are vulnerable to everything they can’t see, and so are we. The “trick or treat” game of Halloween is like this too. The game was played most directly, perhaps by the Irish adults of 150 years ago. Their trick-or-treating was saying “Reward our masked, phony role or we’ll do terrible things.” This is the message of hate-groups, too, who are also playing masked roles. When a group like the KKK throws its costumed tantrums, it is saying “Support our rage, our non-integrated rage, or we’ll strike out at you.”

When we’re wearing the masks, we easily become the roles, and think that our simple certainties are letting us see more clearly. Really the masks are blinders, narrowing our field of vision, burying our heads deeper in the sand. And then everywhere we cast shadows by blocking the light, something deep inside of us whispers “There be monsters here!” But the monsters are the parts of ourselves and our world that we haven’t learned how to incorporate, how to include on our map. The monsters are not external dangers, but internal failures of integration.

There is a rule in religion, and the rule seems to be that either our world must get bigger, or our defenses must, to protect against the imagined monsters.

I’ll give you some examples of how we draw lines and create monsters to defend a world that is too small.

A few weeks ago I spoke about what I have called “the dark god of capitalism.” I tried to persuade you that putting profits ahead of people has unavoidable, and terrible, consequences. If we are measured by our financial success, if that’s a measure of our worth as people, then financial failure is a personal and moral failure. The poor people, the losers, are no longer our brothers and sisters, but failures, almost like India’s caste of Untouchables. Then we draw lines on our maps to keep them away. They vanish from TV commercials; they’ve almost vanished from TV and media coverage completely.

Not all the lines we draw are invisible. Some are built of reinforced concrete. In Austin, I-35 is one of those lines. We all know what it means to refer to “east of I-35” or “west of I-35.” There be monsters east of I-35 because we don’t know how to incorporate them into our world.

The more people there are without a realistic chance of making a decent living, the more people make indecent livings, and the more people we put into our growing number of prisons. There be monsters there, too: growing numbers of them.

Other unassimilated people may not be considered monsters, but they rarely appear on our maps. The more than 16% of children in Austin living below the poverty line; the roughly 40 million Americans without health insurance, the child mortality rate, the highest in the developed world, the so-called “working poor” who have jobs but are homeless because they can’t afford houses.

These are among the areas of our society that don’t make it onto our maps, that we don’t know how to incorporate into the body politic. We don’t know how to think of them, or treat them, as brothers and sisters, children of God, so we call them other things: the poor, the disadvantaged, the homeless, prisoners, outcasts, and sometimes monsters. And still the number of people from whom we distance ourselves, and of whom we are afraid, continues to grow, and we don’t see that our whole society is playing a masked role that is not worthy of us. Ostriches.

Our masks, are our blinders. They reduce the size of our world, draw the lines between our kind of people and those other kinds of people. Once the map is complete, it’s like a vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Could it be different? Is it naive and foolish to hope for a change as fundamental as enlarging our world? Am I just spouting ignorant and childish preacher-talk? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s either naive or foolish. We have done it many times in many ways, we just don’t seem to be doing it as well lately. 135 years ago black people were freed from slavery. Just over eighty years ago women were given the right to vote. Less than fifty years ago our public schools were ordered integrated, and less than forty years ago it happened in Texas, the last state to integrate its public schools. During the past thirty or forty years we have seen huge increases in the numbers of women graduating from colleges, law schools, medical schools. Women have gone into space, been nominated for Vice President, become presidents of prestigious schools. I think that the University of Chicago was the first such school to hire a woman as president. She had wanted the job at Yale, the university where she taught, but they would not hire a woman president. I served on a committee with president Hanna Gray at Chicago, and remember thinking on several occasions how foolish Yale University had been to lose such a woman.

The range of acceptable sexual identities has expanded within our memories, in ways no one would have imagined possible fifty years ago. And while some church leaders may still try to restrict options, the fact is that we are now beginning to accept as natural an immense range of religious options and styles. I will be offering one of the prayers at an ecumenical Thanksgiving service next month in which at least eight major religions are represented. This couldn’t have happened during the good old days of Ozzie and Harriet.

In all these ways — and in more ways that you can think of as well — we have enlarged ourselves, our maps, and our world. And with each enlargement, each new incorporation, more monsters vanish, and are replaced by fellow citizens, brothers and sisters. Don’t think we can’t change, don’t think we can’t become more whole, more inclusive, more noble. It’s a realistic hope. We’ve been doing it, and while we still have far to go, some of the strides we have taken seem gigantic.

Each time, in order to grow, we have to confront some more of our individual and societal biases, fears, bigotries. Each time, we must take off another mask. Each step of growth involves incorporating more former outsiders into the organism of the body politic, and expanding the membership of the human family. Each time we do it, we are reaching out to another group of people and saying “We welcome you. You are one of us.” Powerful, magical words.

It’s not hard to make monsters vanish. Sunlight kills mildew, and it does a good job on our demons and goblins too. But first, it takes being aware of them, and it takes the courage to confront them.

In the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” the monster is dissolved in an unusual way. The wicked witch of the West is finally destroyed — dissolved — when a determined girl throws water on her, and she melts. You know, I don’t think it was water that did it. I think the water was just stage business. What dissolved the witch was a girl having the courage to confront her face to face, without blinking. It took a girl who was not afraid of anything. The trick looks like outward magic. But it isn’t magic, it’s growing up.

Ambrose Pierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defines a ghost as “The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.” One lesson of Halloween is that all of our ghosts are outward and visible signs of our inward fears. Other lessons of Halloween are that ghosts vanish when enough light is shined upon them, and that fears, once faced, can be transformed into possibilities. On second thought, maybe that’s magic after all.

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Davidson Loehr

October 22, 2000

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STORY: “The Raft”

The Buddha said, “A man walking along a highroad sees a great river, its near bank dangerous and frightening, its far bank safe. He collects sticks and foliage, makes a raft, paddles across the river, and safely reaches the other shore. Now suppose that, after he reaches the other shore, he takes the raft and puts it on his head and walks with it on his head wherever he goes because of the important role that raft once played in his life. Would he be using the raft in an appropriate way? No; a reasonable man will realize that the raft has been very useful to him in crossing the river and arriving safely on the other shore, but that once he has arrived, it is proper to leave the raft behind and walk on without it. This is using the raft appropriately.

“In the same way, all truths should be used to cross over; they should not be held on to once you have arrived. You should let go of even the most profound insight or the most wholesome teaching; all the more so, unwholesome teachings.” (Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus, pp. 135-6.)

SERMON: Religion for Atheists

No matter how intelligent or sophisticated we think we are, it has always been the case that good stories teach us better than a slew of philosophical footnotes. And the more important an insight is, the more likely we have learned it from a story.

During my very first year of graduate studies in religion over twenty years ago, I had an experience that came wrapped in such a story. It came at the end of a course on constructing worship services that was taught for both University of Chicago Divinity School students and students from Meadville-Lombard, the small Unitarian seminary a few blocks away. The Divinity School students were all getting ministry degrees rather than academic degrees, and preparing for some brand of Christian ministry. Meadville’s students were also getting ministry degrees and preparing for the Unitarian ministry. Since I was a Divinity School student getting a Ph.D. rather than a ministry degree, and preparing for the Unitarian ministry, I usually found myself between or outside both those camps.

Our teacher was a gifted pastor and preacher, with a remarkable ability to bring others to a quick and powerful appreciation for what religion is really about. For our final assignment, he told us to plan and conduct a worship service together. Then he left us to our task, eavesdropping from the other side of the large room as we proceeded to make fools of ourselves.

The fights were about language, and they began when the Christians wanted to put in an intercessory prayer to Christ. Whereupon the Unitarians threw a fit, insisting that this “Christ” character wasn’t a part of their religion, and wasn’t welcome as a part of this joint worship service, either.

The Christians put up some struggle, but did agree that for this particular service they could leave Christ out. After all, one of them said, the purpose of Christ was really to point to God, anyway.

Whereupon some of the Unitarians again complained. “Let’s not call it God,” said one woman. “That’s so archaic and patriarchal and all. Couldn’t we just call it “the sacred”?

This time, the Christians fought quite a bit longer and harder. Some said that a worship service that left out God was a contradiction in terms. After all, this was to be a worship service, not a discussion group. But the Unitarians dug in too, and after one woman suggested that we might bring God in as long as we also had a prayer to the Goddess, the Christians relented, and agreed that in this increasingly strange service we were planning, there would be neither Christ nor God. One of them, trying to lighten things up a bit, quipped that we had just wiped out two-thirds of the Trinity. “At least,” she said hopefully, “we’ve still got the Holy Spirit.”

Whereupon – yes, one of the Unitarians objected to that word “Holy.” “It sounds so pre-modern,” he said. “Why don’t we just call it “The Spirit,” or maybe “Spirit of Life”?

This time, however, the Christians would not give in. One shouted something about flaky New Age Unitarians who were frightened of anything remotely religious. Another wondered why the Unitarians were even bothering to go into the ministry, rather than just joining a book club somewhere. And one passive-aggressive woman sweetly suggested that we all needed psychological help.

The Unitarians, for their part, tried to say that they liked the idea of having the “spirit” in the service in some way, they just didn’t want to call it “Holy.” This time, the Christians would not yield.

Finally, when the harangue had reached a completely embarrassing level, the professor, who had been listening in from across the large room, made his dramatic entrance. He got up slowly, walked toward us very deliberately, sat on the corner of a table in the middle of our space, gave us that “Father-is-displeased” look, and said sternly “What is your problem?”

Immediately, we all began acting like six-year-olds trying to shift the blame, pointing to the other side and complaining about their unfair demands.

He glared at us: “And the only thing you have been able to agree on is that you would like the Spirit to be a part of your worship service?”

Yes, we all stammered: “But we don’t know what to call it.”

Still the stern father, he shot us a punishing glance and said three words: “Call it forth!”

“Call it forth.” Unless you can call forth the quality of spirit that is rightfully called holy, you don’t have a chance of staging a worship service anyway.

For me, that story is about the very soul of religion, and the core of what it means to be a human being. For all of human history, we have tried to call forth more in life: deeper and more enduring meanings, causes and ideals to serve that can survive us, and grant us a feeling of immortality. We have tried to “call forth” a larger and more encompassing context for our lives, and to claim that we are intrinsic parts of this larger reality. We’ve always done this.

We have discovered Neanderthal burial sites in China, for example, from 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, in which the dead were buried in fetal positions, in womb-shaped graves, facing east, toward the direction of the rising sun. It looks like they were trying to call forth the invisible powers of the sun and the earth to give their dead people a kind of rebirth. So some of the oldest evidence of human activity we have found shows these early two-legged animals treating the ground as Mother Earth, and burying their people in styles and positions suggesting that they believed they were parts of a benevolent cosmic whole that might, somehow and somewhere, let them be “born again.”

More than thirty thousand years ago, primitive hunters painted hundreds of pictures on the walls of an underground cave at Lascaux, France. This cavern system was used for nearly fifteen thousand years, and has been called the world’s largest and oldest religious shrine. The pictures still exist, and were only rediscovered during this past century. They show the animals that tribe hunted, but among those ancient colored drawings was the drawing of one of their shamans. In hunting cultures, a shaman was a highly intuitive man who had a kind of sixth sense about successfully hunting the animals on which they relied for food. The picture of this shaman showed him to be composed of the parts of a dozen different game animals. Here was one of our most ancient efforts to claim a transcendent kind of relationship with the other animals on earth. Here were our ancestors, trying to call forth those unpronounceable spirits that seemed to guide both themselves and the animals they hunted for food.

Also around thirty thousand years ago or more, others among our ancestors made a lot of small “Venus” statues that our modern archaeologists have unearthed. They were small stylized figures of women without heads or arms, but with large breasts and hips. We’re not sure how they used these symbolic figures — though one woman scholar told me a dozen years ago that we are sure than men controlled both the societies and the symbols then, because only men would reduce the visualization of women to faceless, armless breeders! But the statues imply that they had already identified human females as possessing the same kind of generative powers they found throughout their world. Here were our earliest statues showing that some more of our ancestors had conceived of “Mother Earth.” And to do this, they had to assume that they were somehow part of a cosmic style of communication that included not only animals, but even the plant kingdom — indeed, all the creative life forces on earth.

And the human animal hasn’t changed much since then. Back in 1972-3, we sent the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 rockets up, the first spacecraft intended to go beyond our solar system, our first such attempt to communicate with whatever other intelligent life there might be in this corner of the universe. And on these spacecraft, we included small gold plaques with crude drawings of a human male and female. The male has his right hand raised in what we must assume all life in the universe might recognize as a peaceful gesture. We still assume that we are, somehow, small parts of a great and wondrous reality that beggars our imaginations, and yet with which we can somehow, intuitively, communicate.

We have called these unseen dimensions of life by many names, and depicted them in many ways. But always, those who were the most religiously musical or imaginative have tried to call them forth, to make the greater context of our lives visible and memorable.

We have created gods in human form or in animal form, and invented a thousand rituals — from lighting a fire to reciting the same words in the same ways to begin and end ceremonies. It may look like we are worshiping those gods, whether drawn as an ancient shaman made of animal parts or created in our own image, like the gods of the Greeks, Jews, and Hindus. But we are not necessarily worshiping those gods or enslaved by the rituals. Instead, the gods are among the vehicles we have created along the way to carry this great burden of ours.

That “great burden” is the unending quest that lies at the heart of religion. In our society, where fundamentalists have taught most of us our basic understanding of religion (even atheists are atheists in a game invented by fundamentalists), we’re used to hearing this quest called the longing for salvation. But even the two words “religion” and “salvation” give the game away. “Religion” comes from a Latin word meaning “reconnection,” as though we were once connected but have somehow come loose. And “salvation” comes from the same Latin root as the word “salve”: it means to make healthy, to make whole. That is the quest that has defined our magnificently flawed species since before we could even formulate the question: how to get reconnected to a larger kind of reality than our daily lives usually show us.

And we come to churches, including this church, still hoping that somehow something might happen this Sunday to help us find the path between who we are and all that we are meant to be. We come hoping that greater set of possibilities and connections might somehow be called forth.

Unfortunately, we also have an equally deep and ancient flaw. And that flaw is our inability to tell the difference between the sacred quest, and the temporary vehicles we have used in pursuit of it. The quest, the continual human search for greater connections or enlightenment, is sacred. The vehicles are not. Yet we generally exalt the vehicles — and forget the search. Religious wars are the most violent and comic examples of this. We kill one another in the name of our peculiar gods, the same gods whose primary purpose is to help us see that we are all brothers and sisters.

We worship the doorways rather than going through them. Symbols and metaphors seem to confuse us completely, and we are forever mixing up dreams and reality, imagination and fact. In some ways, we are a terribly primitive and unformed species.

When you look at human history, from the caves in Lascaux, France to the Greek gods and goddesses, one of the loudest lessons we learn is that eventually all gods die, all religions pass into other religions, or pass away. Finally, all the vehicles fail, and we are left to go on alone — sometimes, comically, still carrying the dead vehicles on our backs, like lucky charms, or for old times’ sake. Then the spirit has gone out of the religion, and what’s left is little more than a potentially dangerous social club.

Maybe we shouldn’t call it the “spirit.” We tend to be such literalists that we might try to imagine some kind of a ghost, or a cosmic consciousness sort of hovering about, and that isn’t what it is about at all.

So I’ll put it a different way. The ancient Chinese sage Lao-Tzu spoke of “the Way,” which is usually called the Tao, as in the religion of “Taoism.” But he was writing about this same deep quest, this same journey, that has identified the religious dimensions of humans since the beginning. This “Way” is the way of living that we’ve always sought, a way of living that reconnects us with that Spirit, makes us whole, makes us one with the way things really are. Here is how Lao-Tzu put it 2500 years ago:

The Way is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.

I don’t know who gave birth to it.

It is older than God.

Lao-Tzu might have added that it gave birth to God, or that it created all the gods as temporary vehicles to carry us on our searches for this Way. But it is that Way of living and being that we have always been trying to call forth, through all the religious and poetic and ritual languages humans have known. And the way you can tell when someone has found that Way, or is nearing it, is through the quality of their character. Martin Luther King Jr. used to say he dreamed of the time when we would all be known by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin. The content of our character is the clearest measure of whether or not someone has found the Way, or is still lost. And there is something terribly deep within all human beings that knows this instinctively.

A few years ago, people the world over were willing to overlook Princess Diana’s adultery and other nude chicanery, because of her many humanitarian activities on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged. People saw her as a vehicle for a sacred kind of concern for others. And they were willing to accept imperfections in the vehicle because it was a vehicle that seemed to have found the Way.

Mother Teresa was recognized by many as a saint, and it had nothing to do with her religion, only with her actions. Gandhi the Hindu was revered by Christians, Jews, Muslims and others all over the world because there was something sacred about him, too. He had “found it,” and we recognized it. He had found that reconnection, that wholeness, that “Way,” that we all recognize as the most sacred of all human quests. Tibetan Buddhism’s Dali Lama is likewise recognized by people of all faiths as one who has that special dimension, one who has called forth that elusive Spirit, found the Way.

This isn’t limited to religious figures. Muhammad Ali is still revered all over the world, and only partly because of his once-great gifts as a boxer. He’s more revered for his great gifts of integrity and moral courage, because those show us that he too had found the Way. How we adore and chase after those who seem to have found it! And we all know that the secret of Mother Teresa’s character, or Gandhi’s, the Dali Lama’s or Muhammad Ali’s had nothing to do with their official religions of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam. The secret of their character came from a place far deeper. It came from that place in us that preceded the gods, that identified us before any of the world’s religions were ever born. That’s why people all over the world can so easily recognize people who have found that Way, whose lives have that deep spiritual dimension, regardless of their religion: because what all religions are after is something older than religion itself: older than God, as Lao-tzu put it. And what we are after is that same quality of spirit, wherever it is found.

But do you see what has happened here? There is a rich irony here, an irony worth trying to put into words. It means that within us, within each of us and all of us, are the yearnings that gave birth to the gods. And salvation, or wholeness, or finding what Lao-tzu called the Way, happens only when we are reconnected with that level of ourselves, responding to that level in others, anchored in that level of life itself. All salvation, in other words, is salvation by character. And we know it instinctively. We admire Muhammad Ali and are repulsed by Mike Tyson because the first had a quality of character that the second did not. We neither know nor care what Princess Diana believed, because that deeper quality of character showed so brightly in her crusades against land mines and for the disadvantaged.

Some of you may have heard about, or seen televised clips from, Mike Tyson’s fight with Andrew Golota Friday night (20 October 2000). Golota was taking a beating, and after the second round he simply refused to fight any more, and left the ring — still guaranteed the three million dollars or more he received for the fight. What was most interesting about the sportscasters’ comments afterwards is that they never mentioned his boxing — only his character.

If you doubt that we know what is and is not sacred about people, go to funerals or memorial services. Imagine a eulogy saying the best thing about this person was that they faithfully recited all of their religion’s prescribed creeds. What a thunderously damning eulogy that would be! No, if we are to speak highly and warmly and honestly of people, we must speak of the quality and content of their character. They cared, they tried to serve noble ideals. They tried to be constructive parts of a world not made in their image. They showed moral courage when it counted, and so they were a blessing to the world as they passed through it. That is where salvation dwells, and we all know it. People may pass through the doors offered by their particular religions or philosophies to find that deeper level of life. But the doors are not holy, only the passage through them.

When we reach the foundations of the religious quest, we find, like Lao-tzu did twenty five centuries ago, that we are standing in a place older than the gods, older than religion. We are standing in that place from which we came, and to which we have sought a reconnection all of our lives and for all of our history.

Then we aren’t asking questions about orthodoxy. We’re asking much simpler and more eternal questions. We are asking “Who am I, and who am I called to be? What do I owe to others, even to strangers? What do I owe to my species, and to history? Where is the path I can travel to fulfill these questions? Where is the Way that can make me whole again, by reconnecting me with all others who live, all who have ever lived, and all life that ever was or ever will be? How can I live in proud and noble ways, rather than selfish ones? How can I live my life under the gaze of eternity and still hold my head up high?” Now we are looking for the Way, and calling forth the Spirit called “Holy.”

How this changes everything!

 Now when we ask where the sacred dimension of life, the Spirit, the Way, is to be made manifest, the answer comes back “Perhaps here.”

Now when we ask when this sacred dimension of life is to be called forth, the answer comes back “Perhaps now.”

When we ask whose task is it to call forth this saving spirit that can make us feel more whole, the answer comes back “Perhaps it is our task.”

When we look around our world with a thousand different religions and cultures, and ask how on earth we are to accomplish such a sacred and eternal task here and now, the answer comes back “Perhaps together.”

One of the greatest ironies in all of human history is the fact that when we arrive at the very foundation of all our religious questions, we have moved beyond religion, to a place older than the gods. It is the religion of salvation by character and wholeness. It is the religion of atheists — and, ironically, it is the deepest religion of everyone else, too.

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Davidson Loehr

October 15, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Before moving to Texas, I never gave much thought to the death penalty. Here, in a state that executes more criminals than almost all countries, it’s hard not to think about it. As I read and listen to the standard religious arguments against the death penalty, I’m not convinced that there are any problems as simple as those religious prescriptions. The best I’ll be able to do in this sermon is to expand the horizons of thinking, and explore a variety of arguments of varying persuasiveness. But for now, I’ll confess that my guiding thought is that the quality of human lives follows a bell curve, with saints at one end, most of us in the middle, and some truly evil people at the other. Perhaps this will give us all the chance to re-examine our feelings and values on this complex and emotionally loaded issue of the death penalty.

PRAYER:

We pray to the angels of our better nature as we approach the subject of capital punishment, a subject on which we do not, and will not, agree. In our disagreements, we would seek to engage each other as moral equals. Moral equals. If we can know that much about each other, even our disagreements may be ennobling. We ask this depth of compassion from ourselves. Realistically, we can probably ask no more. As a people of faith, we can ask no less. Amen.

SERMON: “Not Fit To Live?”

Honest religion is supposed to develop our souls and expand our understanding of the world. The result is almost never a clear and unambiguous answer that all good people must follow like marching orders. Instead, it is a broadening and deepening of our understanding of the world so that our differences may be enriching and fertile, rather than divisive. That’s a noble goal, seldom achieved. It is my goal here this morning.

Those of us here today represent almost the entire range of opinions about capital punishment. Some here are deeply against it, considering it too barbaric to be defended. Some are strongly in favor of it and consider it a just and appropriate end for those who have committed the most heinous crimes. Most are somewhere in between. It is a complex, emotionally loaded issue on which intelligent people of good will can and do disagree.

Most religions, though not all, are against the death penalty. Their arguments are almost all variations on the same theme, which is that life is sacred, period. Western religions have this in spades; the creation story in the book of Genesis makes it clear that we were just dirt until God breathed life into us. So life, in Western religions, has been seen as a gift of God, not a byproduct of nature.

Of course, this idea that life is sacred has seldom been honored in the real world. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have never had much trouble killing others of God’s children, as all religious wars have witnessed to, and as we’re still seeing today in the Middle East. And the Christians have had a long list of scapegoats: Jews, Muslims, witches, native Americans, and anyone else who got in the way of their “Manifest Destiny” to rule the world have always been fair game for killing. So the reality has never matched the rhetoric. Still, the notion that life is a kind of sacred gift is in almost every religious argument against capital punishment. Also, it’s an emotionally appealing notion, even if it’s not historically common.

The most coherent — and my favorite — form of this argument is what the Roman Catholic Church calls its “seamless garment” argument for the sanctity of life. Catholics are officially opposed to killing life at any stage, whether in an abortion or a state-sanctioned execution. The reason, again, is that all life is a sacred gift from God, so beyond our authority to destroy.

We’re so used to hearing this that we tend to forget how ancient it is, this idea that all human life is sacred — and that it had historical origins. The reasons life was considered so sacred — especially the lives of males, we should add — are easy to discover. Children represented more workers for the farming or herding through which the family fed itself. Children were the “pension plan” for their parents, expected to take care of them in their old age. Infant and child mortality rates were higher, so more children increased the chances that some would live to adulthood. And we can’t forget how important it seems always to have been for men to have a boy to carry on their name. This was true in the ancient story of Abraham. It drove the English King Henry VIII, and many, many fathers today. I’m not demeaning this, just observing it as a persistent part of our human nature. And of course we think life is sacred because we want to think that something about us is deeply sacred, worthy of respect and protection.

All along, it seems that the sanctity of human life has been driven, in part, by a feeling of scarcity — the fact that life always seemed fragile, and we needed more people. The feeling made sense when the population of the world was less that 1/60th of the population today. Just a look at the population figures from the last three millennia can show us how much has changed.

In 1400 BCE, about the time traditionally assigned to Moses, the total population of the world is estimated to have been about a hundred million, a little over a third the size of the United States. (Daniel Quinn, The Story of B, p. 264. I hope and assume that Quinn did his homework on figures so easy to check, since I didn’t do my homework.) By the time of Jesus, the world’s population had doubled, to about two-thirds the population of the United States today. (Quinn, p. 267)

By 1200, in the Middle Ages, it had doubled again. So 800 years ago, the total population of the world was about the same as today’s population of the United States plus Canada. Wars, plagues, high infant mortality and early deaths still made life seem fragile, and high birth rates were still defenses against all kinds of both real and imagined extinctions. (Quinn, 269)

In just five hundred more years, by 1700, the population had again doubled, to about eight hundred million people — less that the present population of China. (Quinn, p. 270) The next doubling took only two centuries. And then, from 1900-1960, the population doubled again, in only sixty years, to three billion humans. (273) And in the thirty-six years from 1960-1996, the population doubled again, to more than six billion people. (Quinn, 274)

Human life, which must once have seemed as rare as diamonds, is now as common as pebbles. And today all over our country and all over the world, in ways both large and small, our behaviors show that in fact we do not think of life as sacred, or as something that automatically trumps all other considerations:

— Abortions. Whether or not life is regarded as even desirable, let alone sacred, depends on whether we are willing to support it, to give it the time, energy and money it would cost. I think these are the real arguments most women would make for abortions, and I think they are valid arguments. Furthermore, our society and the societies of almost all industrialized countries also treat life as something we can choose or not. Not only birth control, but also abortions, and now the growing availability of the RU-486 pill, the “abortion pill,” have let our actions speak for us. Life is natural, not supernatural, and it’s a choice, not a demand.

— Our wars, most of which have been for economic advantage, show that we regard money as more important than life.

— While many religious conservatives still argue that birth control and abortions are sins against God, Even Roman Catholic women have abortions at the same rate as non-Catholic women. Life isn’t that rare, and we say No to life every day. Like it or not, we have higher priorities.

— Nicotine causes nearly a half million deaths a year. If you’ve ever smoked, you know as I do that the alleged sanctity of life can’t hold a candle to a good smoke.

— We could even mention that we know every year about 50,000 Americans will be killed in traffic accidents. We also know that we could probably save 49,500 of those lives every year by reducing the national speed limit to 10 mph. Almost nobody would vote for it. We’ve got places to go and things to do that are a lot more important to us than 50,000 lives.

So the ancient religious insistence that the mere quantity of life, even the possibility of life is sacred, is no longer held by many people at all. We have shifted to valuing quality over quantity of life.

But a few romantic preachers aside, life has never been regarded as the ultimate value, sacred beyond compromise or cancellation. We have always believed that certain social behaviors are required of human beings, and that if you are dangerous to others, you may lose the right to live. Not just to live in society, but even to live. One of the costs of living in any society is that we must give up some control to the society. It sets the rules, and when we go over the line, all societies have the right to deprive us of our money, our freedom, our property, even our lives.

This idea that some anti-social behaviors make us unfit to live also has roots in one of the most misunderstood and mistaught stories in the Bible, the story of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The famous part of the story, which you probably know, is that a group of local men wanted to sodomize — as it’s now called — a visitor to town, and that his host (after offering his daughter to the mob) finally gave the man over to be sodomized and murdered.

When religious literalists say that God’s destruction of the city was because of homosexuality, they are mis-teaching the story, and every good biblical scholar knows it. The crime for which the city was destroyed was the crime of giving over a visitor to be murdered. The crime was uncivil and murderous behavior, not sodomy. The visitor wasn’t a heretic, wasn’t an enemy of the faith, he was just a human being with a right to expect civility and protection from other human beings.

This failure to provide the most basic of human protection and kindness, the ancient Hebrews taught, was so hated by God that those who transgressed it were no longer fit to live. You don’t have to agree with the story, but it does help make the point that for all of recorded history we have found some people unfit to live because of their behaviors — whether you choose to call those behaviors anti-social, psychopathic or evil.

There seems to be something deep inside of us that sees certain criminal or psychopathic behaviors as putting us beyond the pale, making us unfit to live.

When it’s said this way, the idea sounds so foreign it’s hard for me to relate to, and I imagine many of you also find it foreign. For some of you, the idea that someone can do something so heinous that they are not fit to live will never be an acceptable idea. For others — and apparently for quite a majority of Americans — it is a very acceptable idea.

I want to see if I can help us relate to this idea, even if we will never find it attractive. If we can’t relate to the idea, we will not be able to understand the position of a majority in our society. So I’ll use two stories, one strong but fictional, the other true but weak.

I suspect that many of you watched the award-winning television miniseries named “Lonesome Dove” a few years ago. I think it was one of the finest and most powerful dramas ever aired on television, partly because the actors were so powerful. Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall and Robert Urich are the three I’m thinking of, and they were involved in a very powerful scene that I want to remind you of.

Robert Urich’s character seemed to lack something essential — a moral center, a sense of right and wrong. He fell in with two psychopathic murderers, who tortured, killed and then burned a farmer. Urich didn’t help with the killing, he was just there with them, watching, and not stopping them — kind of like the host in the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

When Robert Duvall’s and Tommy Lee Jones’s characters found the murdered and burned farmer, they became agents of retribution. They tracked down and caught the three men. They were surprised and saddened to find the Robert Urich character among them, for he was their friend. Urich’s character didn’t seem to understand what he had done wrong. As I remember it, Duvall said “You crossed over the line.” “I didn’t see the line,” said Urich. “I’m sorry,” was the answer, and the three men were hanged.

That scene has seemed to me very profound, with an insight into the nature of human nature and of justice that I can’t shake. There is a line, I believe, that we cannot cross, and when we do we are beyond the protection of society. We’re even beyond the love of God, according to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I think almost all of us know this line intuitively. What we do with people who cross that line is a political and legal decision. Is it worth spending money to keep murderers, rapists and other psychopaths alive for twenty to fifty years? We know prisons will not rehabilitate them. Is that how a society wants to spend its resources? I don’t think this is a question to which there is an obvious answer.

Still, it is so hard to put ourselves in the place of the two cowboys in “Lonesome Dove” who hanged the three men. This is where this whole subject feels most likely to slip away from my ability to grasp it, and perhaps from yours.

So I offer you a second story, from my own past. You may decide it is a weak analogy, and it is a weak analogy. But it’s all I have. Twenty five years ago my wife and I raised purebred dogs. It was a fairly rare breed called Briards, a French sheepdog. The males could stand 28″ at the shoulders and weigh over 110 lbs. My wife was obsessive about the breeding, and matched our females with the best-bred stud dogs in the country. Many of the puppies we sold later became champions. They were just wonderful dogs. But over a period of four years, two of the puppies we sold grew to become dangerous. One female was so protective that when her owner’s two-year-old daughter ran into the room in the middle of the night because she had had a nightmare, the dog attacked her. The animal shelter called us the next day when the recognized the breed, and we picked up the dog and brought it home. A couple years later, a big male dog simply had something wrong, he was like a dog version of a psychopath. My wife and I both felt completely safe around this 110 lb. dog. But he chased and bit two children, and then without any warning attacked a friend of ours during a bridge game in our home, tearing open his face so badly it required over thirty stitches. He was a professional photographer, and nearly lost an eye.

I don’t have to tell you these dogs crossed over that line. You know they did. And you probably know what happened next. Both times, I took the dogs to the vet and had them killed. I had to feed these dogs tranquilizer pills so they would not be a danger to the vets or the teenagers working in the clinics. I will tell you without shame that both times I cried all the way to the veterinarian’s office, and all the way home again.

We had had such high hopes for these animals! They had the best breeding, the best food, excellent obedience training. Anyone here who has owned a pet knows how much we can love animals, and both my wife and I loved all the dogs, even these two, named Mairzy Doats and George. We could have chosen to build on to the kennel, to keep them separate from our other dogs and from our friends, and kept them alive for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t worth it. We didn’t have that much money or space, which is to say there were many other ways we preferred to use what money and energy we had.

But we shed many tears, even over these animals that had done terrible things, had crossed over that line, and who we chose to — well, we use the euphemism “to put down,” but it means we chose to execute them. I don’t want to imply for even a second that I equate dogs with people. It is a different order of being. I tell you the story partly to say that I know what it is like to decide to kill a dangerous animal, even one I loved. Our reasons for killing the dogs were reasons of money, space and priorities.

The subject of executing human psychopaths, murderers, dangerous people who have crossed over that line is not this simple. And there are several dimensions of the capital punishment debate on which we would probably all agree. I need to mention some of these.

— First, the legal system that sentences and executes our prisoners is imperfect. Blacks and other minorities, but especially blacks, are both imprisoned and executed in disproportionate numbers. I don’t know if this is race or economics. I suspect that much of it reflects the fact that poor people die in disproportionate numbers both in and out of prisons. They can’t afford the best lawyers, the best doctors, the best education, the best health care. American children raised in poverty are up to five times more likely to die of various causes than the children of more privileged families, regardless of their race. The system isn’t adequate and we all know it.

— Some prisoners who are executed are innocent. In Illinois, in Texas, everywhere. The legal system is a human institution, so it will never be perfect. We don’t like to admit it, but innocent people die in almost every human endeavor. In war, some soldiers are killed by what we call “friendly fire,” meaning that our own troops mistakenly killed their comrades. Even when we do the best we can, some innocent people die. However, even if we can’t make the system perfect, it can and should be continually monitored and improved.

— It is also clear, I think, that capital punishment is no more a deterrent than prison time is a rehabilitation. It is retribution, punishment, the vengeance of society. If there is a persuasive argument that either imprisonment or capital punishment are any more than that, I haven’t heard it.

There are more areas besides these three that we could probably all agree need to be addressed and improved, no matter what our position is on the death penalty.

However, they don’t change the basic issue of whether the most proper and desirable punishment for those who have crossed over that line is life imprisonment or execution. And I don’t think many people on either side of this argument are likely to have their minds changed.

But in a society where so many of our laws and behaviors show that we do not consider the mere fact of life to be sacred, or even to trump all other considerations, I don’t think the “seamless garment” argument of the Catholic Church is adequate. It’s a seamless garment built on an assumption that doesn’t fit any enduring human society.

I do like the idea of a “seamless garment” argument, a consistent attitude toward life that we can use both for abortion and for the subject of capital punishment. I don’t find it a black-and-white picture, however. I find it filled with grays. The quality of human lives seems to be like a bell curve. Most are precious. Some few are exquisite, even saintly. We can all think of some people in that category. And some, at the other end, have crossed over a line that even some of our most ancient religious teachers have believed make us unfit to live. As ugly as that sounds to say, and perhaps to hear, I believe it is true.

And my personal opinion, I am somewhat surprised to discover, is that I can’t find any persuasive arguments against capital punishment, especially from religious writers. Yet the logic isn’t enough. It isn’t enough for me, and I hope it isn’t enough for you. The intellectual arguments, the mere logic, aren’t enough. At least two more things are needed.

First, since we will probably never agree on whether or not capital punishment is just, ethical or moral, we must strive to broaden and deepen our understanding of the issues involved so that our disagreements can be insightful rather than spiteful, informative and enlightening rather than merely divisive. We need to understand that intelligent people of good will — people just as intelligent and just as moral as we know we are — can and do disagree on all complex issues, from abortion at the beginning of life to capital punishment as an end of life.

But something is still missing. There is sometimes what seems like a hardness, even a smugness from some people on both sides of the capital punishment debate. I have heard Governor Bush’s attitude during the recent presidential debates described as smug, even taunting, when he bragged that in Texas murderers are killed. I hope he doesn’t feel that way, because that attitude will make us miss what I believe is the most important of all attitudes toward these prisoners who are condemned either to die or to rot away in hellish, inhumane prisons.

What’s missing are the tears.

Even with the two dogs I had executed, I cried like a baby. God, there were so many hopes and dreams that died with those two dogs.

Where are the tears for the failed humans? Where are the tears for all the hopes and dreams that die, die, every time we slam shut forever another prison door or kill another prisoner?

I believe it is possible for good and moral people to decide that capital punishment is appropriate and just. The voting majorities in 38 of our 50 states, and both of our major presidential candidates, apparently feel this way. But I do not believe that it should be possible for us to accept either the growing prison population or the growing number of prisoners we choose to execute, without hurting so badly that we have to cry. Unless we feel, and live with, the terrible sense of loss of dreams and hopes and all that we have always wished were sacred — unless we have the tears, I think we will lose more of our own humanity than we can afford to lose. And to lose that degree of humanity is finally to suffer the irony of having capital punishment execute a piece of our own soul, and the soul of our nation.

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Davidson Loehr

October 8, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

I want to talk with you about capitalism and economics – not as an economist, but as a theologian.

I know very little about economics. I’m not a CPA either, and couldn’t begin to analyze complicated financial pictures. But I am a theologian, and I do know about gods. I know how they work, how powerful they are, how invisible they usually are, and know that beneath nearly every human endeavor with any passion or commitment about it, there will be a god operating, doing the things gods do.

Gods aren’t “Critters in the sky,” like big cartoon characters, even though it’s common to speak of them that way. Gods are those central concerns that our behaviors show we take very seriously. We commit our lives to them, we are driven by them, and in return they promise us something we want, or think we want. Whether what they promise us is good or bad is a measure of whether the god involved is an adequate or an inadequate one. Good gods really have the power to bestow a greater and nobler quality of life. Bad gods pretend to, but in the end it turns out that we serve them. They get their power, we learn too late, by sucking the life out of us. In return, we get very little that was worth the sacrifice of our lives. The Greeks have a wonderful picture of the seduction, and the consequence of following, idols. It’s in Homer’s Odyssey, on Odysseus’s return home. Just before he comes to the Straits of Messina (where he is given another choice with profound psychological and existential echoes today), he has his famous encounter with the Sirens. Sirens were powerfully seductive goddesses whose sweet talk lured any sailors who heard them to their deaths. The sweet voices promised a life of love, ecstasy, ease, and all-round wonderfulness that was just too good to be true. When you looked on the beaches of their island, you saw nothing but the bleached bones of the fools who had followed them: they were too good to be true. Odysseus, you may remember, wanted to have the experience and feel the temptation, but was wise enough to know that no mortal can long resist the sweet voices of Sirens. So he had his men tie him to the mast, making them swear they would not untie him no matter what he may say. Then they put beeswax in their own ears, and sailed past the Sirens. The Sirens were so persuasive that Odysseus screamed at his men to untie him, that he might sail toward them. But they couldn’t hear him. So-in spite of his momentary wishes, you might say-Odysseus lived to serve nobler causes.

As a theologian, I’d say that the most important fact we can know about ourselves is to know the gods we’re serving in our lives and in our societies, and whether they are really worth our lives.

And in this age of skepticism and disbelief, one of the biggest misunderstandings about us is the thought that we have no gods, that we’re not a religious people. In general, we serve our gods well, even when they’re not worth serving at all.

Gods and Idols: Serving People or Profits

I’m interested in this battle between gods and idols, and how that is being played out in our economy today. It isn’t a simple thing, the contrast between people and profits. Its roots go all the way back to comments made by the Founding Fathers, over 200 years ago. Our founding fathers had very mixed opinions of “we the people”–many of them pretty insulting.

Alexander Hamilton declared that the people are “a great beast” that must be tamed. Rebellious and independent farmers had to be taught, sometimes by force, that the ideals of the revolutionary pamphlets were not to be taken too seriously. (Noam Chomsky, Profits Over People, p. 46).

Or as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme court, put it, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” (Chomsky, 46) Others among the founding fathers agreed wholeheartedly. The primary responsibility of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” said James Madison. (Chomsky, 47) Those “without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights,” Madison explained. His solution was to keep political power in the hands of those who “come from and represent the wealth of the nation,” the “more capable set of men.” (Chomsky, 48)

This sounds like today’s cynical capitalism, but it was not. Like Adam Smith and the other founders of classical liberalism, Madison was precapitalist, and anticapitalist in spirit. But education, philosophical understanding and gentility were associated with money (I don’t think they would see that connection between money and character to be as strong today).

Still, Madison hoped that the rulers in this “opulent minority” would be “enlightened Statesmen” and “benevolent philosophers,” “whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country.” Such men would, he believed, “refine” and “enlarge” the “public views,” guarding the true interests of the country against the “mischiefs” of democratic majorities, but with enlightenment and benevolence. (Chomsky, 51-52).

For a man of James Madison’s depth and brilliance, that’s quite a naive hope!

He soon learned differently, as the “opulent minority” proceeded to use their power much as Adam Smith had predicted they would a few years earlier. They were living by the motto “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.” By 1792, Madison warned that the rising developing capitalist state was “substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty,” leading to “a real domination by the few under [a merely] apparent liberty of the many.” (Chomsky, 52)

Thomas Jefferson also distrusted the emerging class of capitalists: “The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.” (Jim Hightower, If the Gods Had Meant for Us To Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates, p. 283). Sounds surprisingly modern.

The battle between democracy and private profit-making has been a continuous thread in our history since the country began. A century ago, the American philosopher John Dewey was still writing, in the same key as Jefferson and Madison had, that democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of “the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” John Dewey wrote this in the days before radio, television, or mass media. He also wrote that in a free and democratic society, workers must be “the masters of their own industrial fate,” not tools rented by employers. (Chomsky, 52)

It is a little eerie how much John Dewey sounds like James Madison, when Madison wrote more than 200 years ago that “a popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.” (Chomsky, 53)

So there are these two powerful and opposite ideas in our society, both with roots going all the way back to our founding. Both centers of thinking are still battling to be the gods (or idols) that define us, our hopes and possibilities, our society. Will the people rule the country, or will big businesses rule the country and the people, while bamboozling the masses to keep them from understanding how badly they are being manipulated?

We live in the time when the scales have tipped heavily toward capitalism and away from democracy.

How did they get tipped so badly this time? One obvious culprit–or hero, depending on your perspective here–is the great economist Milton Friedman, who said, in his influential book Capitalism and Freedom, that profit-making is the essence of democracy, so any government that pursues antimarket policies is being antidemocratic, no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy. (Chomsky, 9) That’s a powerful, terrifying, revolutionary redefinition of democracy. It’s amazing to me any anyone would ever have let it pass, let alone enshrined it.

But once you decide that the goal is profits over the wishes of people (“no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy”), the manipulation of us masses is a constant part of the scheme. Because of course people don’t want to do more work for less money, to lose their power, their possibilities, even their chance of realistic hope. So the art of deceiving us has been with us a long time, too.

The art of bamboozling us is not a secret art. Until recently, it was talked about quite openly, going all the way back to at least the 1920s. The name from that time, one of the most important names in the art of bamboozling the masses, was Edward Bernays. Bernays had worked in Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, the first U.S. state propaganda agency. Bernays wrote that “It was the astounding success of propaganda during the [First World] war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind.” (Chomsky, 54)

Here are more words from this most influential American: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” To carry out this essential task, “the intelligent minorities must make use of propaganda continuously and systematically,” because of course they alone “understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” and can “pull the wires which control the public mind.” This process of “engineering consent”–a phrase Bernays coined–is the very “essence of the democratic process,” he wrote shortly before he was honored for his contributions by the American Psychological Association in 1949. (Chomsky, 53)

Another member of Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda committee was Walter Lippman, one of the most influential and respected journalists in America for about fifty years, and a brilliant, articulate, man. The intelligent minority, Lippman explained in essays on democracy, are a “specialized class” who are responsible for setting policy and for “the formation of a sound public opinion.” They must be free from interference by the general public, who are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.” The public must “be put in its place”; their function is to be “spectators of action,” not participants–apart from periodic electoral exercises when they choose among the specialized class. (Chomsky, 54)

About a trillion dollars a year are now spent on marketing. Much of that money is tax-deductible, producing the irony that we are paying many of the costs of the manipulation of our attitudes and behavior. (Chomsky, 58)

But that’s just local news. And capitalism, like all gods, is a jealous god, and knows no boundaries. Eventually, most gods and idols seem to want to rule the world.

Enter NAFTA

When the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) legislation for Canada, The United States and Mexico was rushed through–over about a 60% public opinion against it–contradictory studies were suppressed or ignored. The Office of Technology Assessment, for instance, which is the research bureau of our Congress, published a report saying that NAFTA would harm most of the population of North America. That report was suppressed. (Chomsky, 102)

The defenders of NAFTA sometimes slip up in their public acknowledgements of how it is producing such record profits for corporations at the expense of workers. Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee in February 1997, for example, Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan saw “sustainable economic expansion” thanks to “atypical restraint on compensation increases [which] appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity.”

What NAFTA made possible on an international scale was the ability of corporations to serve profit for the owners and shareholders by disempowering and dismissing the masses who worked for them. Workers were and are terrified that the owners will take the business to Mexico, Saipan, Burma, Vietnam and other cheap labor and forced-labor markets, which is what they are doing. We have become a little numb to the fact that whenever the stock market rises it almost always means that tens of thousands of our neighbors have been fired, their benefits or insurance cut or eliminated, and work is being done by dollar-a-day workers in other countries, often in conditions of inhumane forced labor. This is capitalism working perfectly, and it is an unmitigated disaster for almost every economy it touches.

After all the hype to push the passage of NAFTA through in spite of public objection, we don’t hear much about the post-NAFTA collapse of the Mexican economy, exempting only the very rich and US investors (protected by US government bailouts). Mexico was successfully transformed into a cheap labor market with wages only 1/10th of US wages, as the people, the masses, have been driven down farther into poverty, and their American counterparts lost their jobs. In the past decade, the number of Mexicans living in extreme pov-erty in rural areas increased by almost a third. Half the total population lacks resources to meet basic needs, a dramatic increase since 1980. The list goes on, it is quite a long and sad one. You don’t have to ask who won. This is capitalism. The people who control the capital won. Nobody else.

We seldom read about many of the effects of NAFTA in this country, either. Shortly after the NAFTA vote in Congress, workers were fired from Honeywell and GE plants for attempting to organize independent unions. The Ford Motor Company had fired its entire work force, eliminating the union contract and rehiring workers at far lower salaries. (Chomsky, 125)

Wages here have fallen to the level of the 1960s for production and non-supervisory workers. The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment predicted that NAFTA “could further lock the United States into a low-wage, low-productivity future.” (Chomsky, 126-127) But that report, like the others, was suppressed.

The Almighty Stock Market?

The quality of our economy, according to the pundits on television, is determined by the stock market. Yet again, we must ask what small part of the economy we’re talking about. Half the stocks in 1997 were owned by the wealthiest one percent of households, and almost ninety percent were owned by the wealthiest ten percent. Concentration is still higher for bonds and trusts. (Chomsky, 147) Today’s upper-class prosperity is built almost entirely on the bloated prices of corporate stocks. (Hightower, 149)

While the number of Americans getting college degrees is increasing, there are some who feel that this is a cynical ploy to make the degrees more worthless, because the real growing job market looks to be low-tech and low-paid. Between now and 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the thirty fastest-growing job categories include only seven that require even a bachelor’s degree. More than half of them pay under $18,000 a year. (Hightower, 152-153) And these are the thirty fastest-growing jobs coming up, the immediate hope for desperate people.

Times like this make me think of the great American philosopher Yogi Berra, when he said, “Half the lies they tell me aren’t true.”

Let’s bring it closer to home. Here in Austin, there are some 350 developers putting up some ten thousand homes a year. Less than five percent of these houses are priced below $100,000. Apartment construction here is also up. But of the 4,312 units built in 1998, only five percent were moderately priced. A bitter irony for the construction crews building these apartments is that they’re averaging about ten bucks an hour, and can’t find any place they can afford to live here. (Hightower, 157) Across the US, seventy percent of renters now pay more than a third of their monthly income on rent. (Hightower, 163) Indeed, some in this church are paying more than half their monthly income on rent. It isn’t because they can’t handle money well, it’s because prices are going up while wages and benefits are going down.

Twenty-five percent of the jobs in today’s celebrated economy pay a poverty wage. That’s 32 million people. (Hightower, 165)

Farmers today get only 20′ of the food dollar you and I spend, a nickel less than just a decade ago. That’s a 20% drop in income, in just one decade. (Hightower, 240)

If you back off to think of this battle of the rights of profits versus people, you could imagine, at least theoretically, an extreme kind of world in which the rights of corporations–which, incidentally, have no rights at all, only the privilege of existing as long as the public believes the corporations are serving the public’s general good–could actually trump the rights of people, states, even nations. Imagine a world in which corporations could sue nations if those nations took actions that cost the corporations revenues. In other words, imagine that a nation decided a gasoline additive was toxic to the environment, and banned gasolines containing it, and that nation was then sued by the corporation for loss of revenues. Or imagine a case where a corporation went into another country, used its power to create an illegal monopoly driving local firms out of business. Let’s say the locals caught on, took the corporation to court, ruled against it and even fined it for illegal business practices. It could happen. But in this most bizarre of imaginary worlds, imagine the corporation could then sue the entire nation for loss of profits. And imagine, since we’ve already crossed over into the insane, that the corporation could bypass all the courts in the nation it was suing, and win a multi-million dollar judgment against a country decided by a three-person team of financial advisors, of which the corporation got to pick one

Welcome to Chapter Eleven of the NAFTA agreement, for that world is already here, and so are the lawsuits.

First is a case reported on Jim Hightower’s radio show by a staunch, even rabid, Republican from Mississippi, a man named Mike Allred. Allred got involved when a funeral parlor owner from Biloxi, Mississippi came to him for help. A massive funeral home conglomerate from Canada named the Loewen Group had come into Biloxi, as it had come into many other cities in the United States, and used a variety of unlawful practices to force other funeral parlor operators out of business, then jack up the prices. One man sued them. In 1995, a Mississippi jury agreed that the Loewen Group was unscrupulous. The local man was awarded $100 million in damages by the jurors, and they added another $160 million in punitive damages. Loewen’s lawyers got the judge to force the jury to reconsider the punitive award, and the jury increased punitive damages to $400 million. The Loewen Group tried a couple other legal end-runs to avoid payments, but were unsuccessful.

Then one of their lawyers discovered Chapter Eleven in the new NAFTA agreeement. In 1998, Loewen suddenly sued the U.S. government, claiming the Mississippi court system expropriated the assets of its investors and harmed their future profits. The fact that Loewen was guilty of illegal and un-scrupulous practices was irrelevant. The Mississippi court took money from the corporation, in violation of the investor rights granted them in the NAFTA agreement. In other words, NAFTA had bestowed a legal right on foreign corpo-rations that allows them to avoid the punishment our state courts impose on them when they break our laws, allowing them to demand that our national government pay for any fines and financial losses the corporation incurred as a result of the guilty verdict. Loewen is now demanding $725 million from the US taxpayers.

There’s more. The case bypasses all US courts. It goes before a special “corporate court” of three trade arbiters, one of which is chosen by Loewen. The results are imposed on our nation, our taxpayers, and are not subject to review by any of our courts. The people from Mississippi were not allowed to appear, since their testimony that the Loewen Group’s behavior was illegal, monopolistic, unethical was irrelevant.

There is also no requirement that either the corporation or the government has to make the case public. Some feel that a victory for Loewen would completely undermine the American civil justice system, putting the profits of foreign corporations above any and all interests of all of our citizens and all of our laws. But even if Loewen loses this case, the rights are still there, guaranteed to investors but not to nations, for other corporations to try.

At least two other such cases have been filed, I’ll talk about only the shorter one. The Ethyl Corporation, based in Virginia, has already sued the Canadian government for banning their leaded gasoline and labeling its additive toxic (our own EPA is working to ban the same toxic additive). Canada was sued for $251 million, the little panel of trade arbiters met with government officials, and settled for having the government pay them $13 million and apologize for implying that their gasoline additive is dangerous, even though they, and our own EPA, know it is dangerous. By doing this, they have set a precedent for corporations being able to sue governments for loss of profit, and by denying people and whole nations the right to protect their people and their environment from poisonous chemicals added to their fuel or food, as long as some corporation is making a profit from it.

Remember Thomas Jefferson’s prescient statement from two centuries ago: “The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.” The spirit of capitalism is a lot like the spirits of the Sirens, promising what they can not deliver, but doing with so very seductively. What is happening is what Thomas Jefferson and many of the other founders of this country feared would happen. The power has shifted from the people to the corporations, and laws are being enacted and enforced that let profits trump people and international corporations trump nations. This is the logic under which the media and politicians of both major parties can define ours as a “strong” economy while wages for the majority of Americans are lower in constant dollars than they were thirty years ago, personal bankruptcy rates set new records every year, we have the highest child poverty rate in the developed world, the highest mortality rate for children under five in all the industrial nations, our nation’s companies are eliminating about 64,000 of the better-paying jobs each month, and Americans in their 20s are the first generation who can not expect to do better financially than their parents. If this is a “strong” economy, we need to ask “for whom, and at whose expense?”

To me, this story is about the only story worth writing about, it is a betrayal of democracy barely short of treason. I think it will become a “cause” for me, something I’ll devote some time and energy to in the wider community. I’ve called Jim Hightower’s office and the Austin Metropolitan Ministries, suggesting that clergy should become involved in sponsoring public lectures and panel discussions on the subject of the systematic selling out of people for profits, and I’ve offered to serve as either lecturer or moderator for public panels.

If you think I’m wrong, I challenge you to produce some data and arguments that can account for these facts in another way, and suggest that this church could provide an important service to itself and the greater community by sponsoring public discussions of what, exactly, is happening in our country in this age old battle between profits and people.

Perhaps I’ve made some mistakes here. I’m not an economist. I’m not a CPA, I don’t even balance my checkbook. But I am a good theologian. I know the difference between gods and idols, and I know how deadly the worship of idols is and has always been.

Capitalism is doing very well. It is serving the needs of those who control the capital above all other needs, as it is supposed to do. Our economy, despite the raving stories, is not doing well. It is doing poorly. It’s bad housekeeping, it’s making a bad home for us as a nation.

But our problems are not primarily economic. They’re religious. We’re worshiping false gods. For the past generation in this society, our social and political policies have been increasingly dictated by the overriding concerns of capitalism, of bottom-line profits for the few who control capital, at the price of dismantling and disempowering the middle class.

You see, it’s all happened before. We’ve always been so seduced by the glitter of gold that we’re on the verge of making it into a god. There’s nothing new here. And there’s nothing new about the results, either.

Once money is turned into a god, it is–like all deities–a jealous god, and will not permit any other consideration to come before it. So we sell the righteous for silver, and Vietnamese girls for a pair of Nike tennis shoes. We transfer wealth, power, and possibilities from the common people to the very few who have gotten enough money to be players in the game of capitalism.

When we exalt capitalism as we have, when we change tax structures and income distribution to create, as we have, the greatest disparity between rich and poor since the Middle Ages–I can see, and feel, that our problems aren’t about money. They’re theological. We’re worshiping false gods again.

And unless we stop it, everything else will follow inexorably from that–as it always has.

Afterthoughts:

In many ways, this was a very frustrating sermon to write. It touches so many areas, it should have been a five- or six-sermon series. In final drafts, I cut more than half the material from the sermon–which was still too long.

I notice that I’ve also referred to only two books here–Noam Chomsky’s Profits Over People and Jim Hightower’s If The Gods Had Meant for Us To Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates. Some of the other books I read to pre-pare for this ‘ obviously a list far too short to “prepare for” any topic this vast ‘ included the following:

Arianna Huffington, How to Overthrow the Government

Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy

Michael Janeway, Republic of Denial

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, How to Watch TV News

While this is a partial list, it’s obviously not long enough to give me an “expert” understanding of the disciplines touched on. One of the thrills and frustrations of the liberal ministry resides in the fact that every subject has religious implications if taken deeply enough. This makes us, by definition, generalists rather than specialists.

However, I’ve always been blessed with very bright and informed congregants, who seem forever eager to help me learn more about whatever discipline they think I’ve slighted–especially when it’s their discipline! Perhaps you’ll be among them?

Addendum:

Since this sermon has appeared here, been sent to several other servers and gained a small life of its own, I have received several letters insisting that it contains some important factual errors, especially concerning the case involving the Ethyl Corp. and Canada. I don’t have time or resources to check, but want to include some of these points (and invite other critiques of fact or argument). Here are some of the points I have received. Again, I don’t know if they hold up, but want to share them:

That the MMT additive is NOT toxic to the environment. It harms the exhaust system of cars, but not (directly, anyway) the environment.

One respondent said the ‘horrible toxin’ (MMT) is methyl tertiary-butyl ether, which is used undiluted in the human body to dissolve gallstones. Check this out in Merck Manual. Far from getting rich in the manufacture of this lead replacement the stock has dropped to less than $2.00, and all dividends have been discontinued.

Others have insisted that the real culprit is not merely capitalism, but our whole social structure of priorities that endorse and strengthen the more greedy and individualistic varieties of capitalism. Among these larger social trends, they include the ‘winner-take-all’ mentality (which sanctions big winners and ignores the vast majority of other players), and the superhero (and super wealthy) status of top sports stars and celebrities.

I appreciate and agree with this larger framing.

Davidson Loehr, 11-27-00