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Davidson Loehr

October 8, 2000

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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

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Davidson Loehr

17 September 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

 

PUPPET SHOW

A. (Head hung down, looking sad)

B. What’s wrong?

A. I’m lonesome

B. Lonesome? I can help you! You know what you need?

A. A friend?

B. You need Crest Toothpaste!

A. Toothpaste? I need a friend!

B. Well, the reason you don’t have a friend might be because your breath stinks! If you buy this Crest toothpaste and brush your teeth with it, your breath won’t stink and maybe you’ll get some friends. Here, give me a dollar.

A. (Gives a dollar to B, who gives toothpaste to A. Both disappear.)

A. (Head hung down, looking sad when A. reappears.)

C.What’s wrong?

A. I’m lonesome.

C. Hey, that’s because you need some new Nike tennis shoes!

A. Tennis Shoes? I’m lonesome, not barefoot!

C. Well, you’re lonesome because you don’t have cool Nike tennis shoes, that’s why? Here, just give me a hundred bucks and I’ll give you some cool Nike tennis shoes, then you’ll be set!

A. (A gives C money, C gives A shoes. Both disappear.)

A. (Head hung down, looking sad when A. reappears.)

D. What’s wrong?

A. Oh, I don’t want to talk about it.

D. You know what you need?

A. Go away.

D. You need fifty bucks’ worth of Pokemon toys!

A. Yeah, right. (A gives fifty dollars to D, who hands A the toys. Both disappear.)

A. (Head hung down, looking sad when A. reappears.)

E. You look lonesome.

A. I need a friend.

E. Me too.

A. (Brightens up) You want to be friends?

E. Oh, yes! (They hug.)

A. This is what I’ve needed!

E. Me too! You wouldn’t believe all the junk I’ve bought when what I’ve really wanted was just a friend!

A. Tell me about it!

Exit.

 

‘THE VOICES’

A. (A sweet feminine voice.) Looking good isn’t a matter of luck. It’s a decision. Call us, we can save you. Smith and Roberts, Austin’s most caring plastic surgeons.

B. (A gruff, macho male voice) Get it. Today. Pit Stop. Tough enough for famous race drivers. Because it doesn’t matter how smart you are, how good looking, even how successful. If you stink, you stink. So listen to me. We can save you. Get it today. Pit Stop. Famous race drivers’ favorite deodorant.

A. (Woman’s voice) Oh no, Jane’s great date turned into a disaster ‘ again! She’ll never find anyone to love her as long as she has those yellow teeth! If only she would buy SparklyWhite Toothpaste and Bleach. Then she could find a man who would love her, buy her things, and she’d be saved. Otherwise, she’ll probably just be alone forever.

B. (Gruff macho voice). Hey Jack! Yeah, you ‘ the loser in that dinky little compact car. When are you gonna get it? The kind of woman you’re looking for doesn’t like guys in dinky little cars. Size matters, Jack. Wanna be saved from more years as a loser? See this Ford F-150 V-8 pick-up truck? It can save ya, Jack. Buy it today, before we run out of ’em.

A. (This is a ‘straight-from-the-heart’ kind of pitch. She’s selling, but trying to seem genuine, like the listener’s friend. If it were TV, she’d be looking directly into the camera, acting sincere.) You want to be saved? We’ve got your salvation right here. But it isn’t free, you’ve got to buy it. And there’s a lot to buy, if you want to look good, smell good, feel good, and impress your friends and boss with how cool you are. The right clothes, shampoo, toothpaste, deodorant, perfume, diamonds to get and keep the lady, beauty and sexiness to keep the guy. There’s a lot to buy. You’ll probably be in debt forever, at 21% interest rates on your VISA card. And there’s always more to buy. It never ends. (Minister gets up and walks to podium.) But if you really want to be saved, we can save you. We can ‘ hey, who’s the guy up there in the robe?

B. He’s the preacher.

A. What’s he doing? He messed up my pitch.

B. He’s going to try to get them to ignore us.

A. Fat chance!

B. Shhhh! It’s his turn now.

 

SERMON: Salvation, American Style

Those voices are everywhere. They are the priests and priestesses of the religion of salvation, American style. I want to convince you this morning that it really is a religion, that it’s a very bad religion, and that the alternatives are not hard to find.

Now you’re a very bright group, and I doubt that any of you are convinced yet. You think I’m exagerrating for effect, or to set up something in a few minutes. You don’t think I really mean that commercials represent a real religion in America. But I do. And by the end of the morning, you may too.

I’m not just picking on television programs, though most of them are silly, too full of sex, violence and vacuousness. But picking on sit-coms is too easy. I want to argue that all of television exists primarily to serve The Voices that are selling us this religion of salvation, American style. I even want to argue that news programs aren’t really about news that matters, or that we need to know for any reason. Instead, they are entertainment shows, and their primary purpose is to attract an audience through their sensationalist stories of blood, violence, sex and gossip, so The Voices can make their pitch to this crowd. I want to argue that television programs, and television news, both exist almost entirely to serve the real God behind the television industry. And that God’s name is Our Sponsor, Who Art in Heaven.

Why are there so many news programs on? Thirty years ago, there was only about fifteen minutes of national news a night, and it seemed to be enough. Why is there now an entire CNN network with news 24 hours a day? Is there that much that we need to know, or about which our knowledge could make any difference at all?

We could spend hours dissecting news programs, as many authors have. The best known of these media critics, and the best writer among them, is probably Neil Postman. I’ve read several of his books, including one called Amusing Ourselves to Death and How to Watch TV News.

Basically, the problem is controlled by economics, as so much else is. It costs about half as much to produce a news show as to produce a comedy or drama. And people who watch the news are good attentive audiences. That’s attractive to advertisers, and during the past twenty years or so, news programs have eliminated most of their in-depth investigative journalism and concentrated instead on more exciting and titillating stories that can be produced more quickly ‘ as newspapers also have. Violence, sex, intrigue, gossip and blood dominate the news programs because, like car crashes, they attract audiences. And the job of news producers is to keep putting new and exciting stories in front of us every day, then dropping them when something more titillating comes along tomorrow. The news casters are like carnival barkers, and their main purpose is not to educate us, but to draw us into the tent so the sponsors can make their pitches to us.

Perhaps you won’t agree. Perhaps you think that at least the national news must be important, must be relevant to our lives, must be something we need to know. If you believe this, if you think the news is important, rather than just a carnival barker’s show to get you inside the tent so you can see the commercials, I have some questions to consider. How much of the news from two weeks ago can you still remember? If it was important, if it was worth all the shouting and hype the news producers wrapped it in two weeks ago, why isn’t it still news? Have all the problems of last month’s news been solved? And if they were important but haven’t been solved, why aren’t we still being told about them? How many people are starving in Biafra or Rwanda today? Where are they getting their food? What has changed since the news stories of a few years ago got the whole country excited about these terrible human tragedies?

Questions like these ‘ and you can think of dozens more ‘ help show us what should be obvious: The news isn’t important. We’re really not supposed to care about it. At least not for long. It isn’t put on to educate us, it’s put on to draw us into the tents on the carnival midway so the snake-oil sellers can preach their story of salvation, American style.

Whenever I get into this subject, whenever I spend much time reading or talking about it, I am reminded of that great American philosopher Lily Tomlin, who once observed that ‘No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up!’

But none of this is news to advertising firms or television executives. They know that the purpose of all television programs is to draw a crowd for the commercials to play to. That, plus the highly competitive market, are the reasons the news has become dominated by car-crash journalism, why there is so much violence, sex, terror and blood on the news.

Some years ago the media critic Marshall MacLuhan was asked if there was any good news on television. Yes, he said, the commercials are the good news. The commercials take your mind off the bad things happening, and show you in just thirty seconds how you can improve yourself, become lovable, popular, and successful.

The phrase ‘Good News’ is a religious phrase. That’s what churches are supposed to be offering: the Good News that can save us. And like religious teachings, most commercials take the form of parables, teaching viewers what the Good Life looks like and what we need in order to have it.

Let’s do a commercial to show this. You’ll recognize it as being like most other commercials you’ve seen. Like most commercials, it’s a thirty-second drama done in three acts.

Act One shows a man and woman saying goodnight at her door after an evening out. She closes her eyes and tilts her head back, expecting a kiss. He steps back in a state of polite revulsion and says ‘Well Joan, it was nice meeting you. I’ll call sometime soon.’ That ends Act One, which took ten seconds.

Act Two shows Joan whining to her roommate. ‘This happens to me every time, Betty! What’s wrong with me?’ ‘Your problem,’ Betty says, ‘is your mouthwash. It’s all mediciny and it doesn’t protect you from bad breath. You should try Minty Fresh.’ Then Betty holds out a new bottle of Minty Fresh, very nicely lit. That ends Act Two, also ten seconds.

The final scene, Act Three, shows Joan and her formerly-revolted date getting off the plane in Hawaii for their honeymoon. Joan is deliriously happy, he adores her. Minty Fresh mouthwash has done it again!

You have seen tens of thousands of commercials with this plot. It is the plot of salvation, American style.

But now let’s go back to that commercial and make a slight change, to make it a little more real, to make it sell a different kind of religion.

Act One is the same. But in Act Two, when Joan asks her roommate what’s wrong with her, Betty says: ‘What wrong with you? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you. You are boring! You are dull, dull, dull. You haven’t read a book in years, couldn’t tell Beethoven from the Beastie Boys, and have no idea what’s going on in the world outside of your boring little life! It’s a wonder any man wants to spend more than ten minutes with you!’

‘You are right,’ says Joan, ‘but what can I do?’

‘Read a book! See a movie! Listen to some good music! Take up a hobby that excites you!’ screams Betty. Joan looks forlorn: ‘But that will take forever: months, maybe even years!’ ‘That’s right,’ replies Betty, ‘so you better get started!’ The commercial ends with Betty handing dull Joan a copy of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Joan looks sad, but begins to finger the pages.

Now this is also a parable. And its message is more like the messages of real life, where there no problems as simple as the answers provided by The Voices speaking in commercials. But you’re never likely to see this parable on television. It could break the spell that commercials need in order to work, the illusion that all our problems can be solved by a chemical.

The advertisers know something that enables them to ignore criticisms like this. They know that the average television viewer will see about 30,000 commercials in the next twelve months. They know our kids will spend about 19,000 hours in front of a television set by the time they graduate from high school, compared with only 13,000 hours in school. They know those children will see, in that time, about 650,000 commercials. And they know that repetition is an effective teaching method, and that eventually, most of us learn what we are taught.

Whether you call commercials religious, anti-religious or something else, they are the most constant source of value propaganda in our culture. Don’t underestimate them. Commercials are never about anything trivial. They address our deepest needs and fears. Mouthwash commercials are not about bad breath, and commercials for clothing and hair products aren’t about clothes or shampoo. They are about the need for social acceptance, the need to feel attractive, to be lovable and loved. Automobile commercials are about our need for autonomy or social status. Behind every successful commercial there is a very real human need and fear, the same kind of needs for which other religions give very different prescriptions.

Boredom, anxiety, rejection, fear, envy, sloth and the rest ‘ in TV commercials there are easy remedies for each of these. The remedies are things like Scope, Comet, Toyota, Bufferin, Alka-Seltzer, and Budweiser. In the religion of salvation, American style, they take the place of good works, restraint, piety, awe, humility, character, and transcendence. On TV commercials, The Voices try to convince us that moral deficiencies as we usually think of them do not really exist. A commercial for Alka-Seltzer does not teach you to avoid overeating. Gluttony is perfectly acceptable ‘ maybe even cool. Your gluttony is no problem: Alka-Seltzer will handle it.

The Seven Deadly Sins, in other words, are superficial problems to be solved through chemistry and technology. Make no mistake. Commercials are trying to convert us to a new religion, and the religion is almost always the same one. My academic training was in religion, and I know one when I see one. Here are some of the parts of the religion of salvation, American style. See if you don’t recognize them too:

1. We begin in a state of Original Sin. And our original sin is that we are ignorant of the products that we need to buy in order to be saved.

2. The Priests and Priestesses of the American salvation story are The Voices who come at us through the ether, to show us what our problem is and tell us the products we must buy in order to solve our problem. They serve the God of this salvation scheme, Our Sponsor, Who Art in Heaven. And their mission is to make it on earth, as it is in the commercials.

3. Like great religious teachers, the Priests and Priestesses teach us primarily through stories and parables. Almost every commercial is a story or parable, showing us what’s wrong with us, what awful things might happen unless we get saved, then showing us the product that can save us, and giving us a glimpse of heaven ‘ like the Hawaiian honeymoon.

4. But just as in religious fundamentalism, we must believe in order to be saved. A voice from above has given us the facts we need, and we must believe. Unless we believe, we are among the unsaved, the damned. We won’t have friends, no one will ever love us, no one will think we are cool, we’ll spend our lives alone and being laughed at.

5. One of the great advantages of this American salvation scheme is that it is so very easy. Think of all the things that are not parts of this religion. There is no introspection, no soul-searching. We don’t need to be good people, to care about anybody but ourselves, there are no good deeds involved, no notion of needing to develop a full and healthy character, no concerns for our character at all. We just simply watch, listen, obey and buy, and we will be saved. Then it will be on earth as it is in the commercials, and we will be honeymooning in Hawaii because once we started using the right mouth wash we were cleansed of our sin, we were lovable, and we will spend the rest of our lives in a heaven on earth, happy beyond our wildest desires ‘ all because of Minty Fresh mouthwash.

The picture painted by the American salvation story is a lot like the portrait of Dorian Gray. You probably know this story, written a century ago by Oscar Wilde and made into a powerful movie. Dorian Gray was an attractive, even seductive, young man. He was also cold and selfish, and often quite nasty. He wished he might never change, that he might forever look like the portrait which has just been painted of him. In a bizarre kind of devil’s bargain, he got his wish. He never aged, never looked a day older or a bit different. He remained attractive and seductive ‘ and cold and selfish and often quite nasty. But while neither time nor the effects of his nasty character ever showed up in Dorian Gray, they all showed up in his portrait. Hung in a secret place in the attic, the portrait showed a man becoming older, uglier, and more vile.

Our lives, and our illusions, aren’t this dramatic. But it’s a reminder that when something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Andbehind the pretty, wrinkle-free, stain-free, forever-young images with which commercials bombard us, there are some ugly truths, some details of the aging portrait in the attic. Like the fact that credit card debt and personal bankruptcy filings are at an all-time high. All commercials act like the last problem we would have is coming up with the money to buy the products they want to sell us. And both politicians and newscasters talk incessantly about our strong economy. But we can’t afford to buy our way to salvation. And behind the high employment figures is the fact that unemployment is low because couples can’t make it on one salary.

Most of the new jobs the politicians and newscasters are bragging about are low-paying, without insurance or other benefits. Job insecurity keeps workers from fighting for living wages, as well as competition from lower-wage workers abroad. In nearly 30% of American families, both husband and wife now work. But the actual earnings of these families are now 12% less than they were in 1973 in constant dollars. The men’s paychecks have fallen by 30% during the past 27 years, and even with women working, the family income ‘ now with two workers ‘ is still 12% less than it was in 1973. Also since 1973, the number of workers with at least a four-year college degree has doubled, as their pay has shrunk by about 16%.

The money has been systematically diverted from the workers to those who own and control the capital. I heard Al Gore brag this week that our economy is the strongest in this country’s history. That is cynically misleading. The gap between the richest and the poorest in our society is the greatest it has been in this country’s history ‘ some have written that it is the greatest gap between rich and poor in the past thousand years of Western history.

It’s hard to get our minds around a gap this big, but here are a few figures that might help. Bill Gates’ personal wealth is now about double the Gross National Product of Central America. While the top 1 percent of American households doubled their share of national wealth since the 1970s, the percentage of American children living in extreme poverty has also doubled. If the poorest member of the Forbes 400 list gives away a million dollars to charity, that’s equivalent to the median American household ‘ which makes about $35,500 a year ‘ giving less than $75. That’s not the strongest economy in our nation’s history.

Nor is it true that ‘a rising tide floats all ships.’ The average incomes of families with children in the bottom 20 percent of the U.S. income distribution fell by 21% between 1980 and 1996 (from $11,759 in 1978-80 to $9,254 in 1994-96). The top 20 percent, by contrast, rose by over 23% during the same period (from $94,158 to $116,200). During the period of 1977-1994, the bottom 20 percent of families in our country lost 16 percent of their after-tax income; the top 20 percent of families gained 25 percent and the top 1 percent saw their after-tax income go up 72 percent. A rising tide floats the yachts, while many of those who can’t afford boats are paddling for their lives.

These are among the features on the portrait in the attic of the American salvation story. And so salvation, American style is a lot like the story of the portrait of Dorian Gray.

It’s also like a puppet show. When we back off and admire the manipulative genius of the advertising industry, it’s easy to marvel at the brilliance with which they have learned to pull our strings. I use Crest toothpaste, Scope mouthwash, and Right Guard deodorant, and I don’t know why. But the advertising industry probably does. Over the past generation or two, the very best research into human motivation and understanding why we do the things we do has been done by, or used by, the advertising industry. These folks are very, very smart. In some ways, they know more about us than we know about ourselves.

We walk through a world of strings held by invisible puppeteers, voices from somewhere above us, pulling us this way and that, promising salvation so sweet, cool and sexy we jump like fish toward baited hooks, or like puppets pulled by strings we can’t even see.

The strings are there, and they are real. But they are not the only strings connected to us. There are also other strings, of a better kind, that might help fill the emptiness so abundant in our culture, and that hardly cost a thing:

We have strings tying us to our families, and our friends. People who love us for who we are instead of for what they can get out of us. Those are also strings to which we could respond.

We have strings ‘ no, whole webs ‘ that could connect us with neighbors, our community, our world and the future if only we would attend to them. They take energy and compassion and time, but no VISA charges.

And we have our heart-strings, to tie us to what we really love. We have those tugs from the angels of our better nature, pulling us toward deeper affections and more meaningful allegiances in place of the passing fancies, passing before us in thirty-second commercials, more than thirty thousand of them a year for most of us.

Life has a lot of strings attached. What a tragedy it will be if we settle for shallow bit parts in someone else’s designs on us, and lose ourselves in the process. It was Jesus who asked ‘What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?’ ‘ the question’s still relevant.

It is our show, our life. We are children of God, precious bits of the universe, made entirely of stardust. We don’t need to buy our salvation. We are already worthy, and real. In all the ways that matter, that’s enough, if only we could see and believe that good news. And that good news comes without any strings attached.

 

‘THE VOICES’

A. (As minister sits down.) Well I didn’t like that at all!

B. It was unAmerican.

A. I didn’t like that silly puppet show, either!

B. It was unAmerican.

A. If anybody actually listened to stuff like that, we’d be in serious trouble!

B. Don’t worry.

A. Don’t worry? Why not?

B. He only gets an hour. The rest of the week, they’re ours.

A. Ah! Then it’s ok!

B. It’s time to leave.

A. Yes, let’s get out of here. This place gives me the willies!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

10 September 2000

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY: On the ABCs of Music

A. A girl walked down a sidewalk she had walked down many times before, when she suddenly noticed a new building she had not seen before. Looking in the window, she was stopped by an odd sight. There was another girl, about her age, standing in a far room of the building, doing what looked like a kind of dance, or at least a dance done from the waist up, for her feet hardly moved at all. She seemed to be biting the end of a metal rod. She was holding the rod in her hands, out to her right side, and she seemed to have the other end of the rod in her mouth, biting it, or at least chewing on it. As she bit it, she moved a little, a kind of gentle swaying motion.

The girl could not see clearly, for the window was dirty, or cloudy. Still, it was the strangest sight! She began stopping by this building each day to watch the strange dance, always about the same, and soon found herself wondering whether perhaps she wasn’t looking into the window of some kind of a hospital where they put people who did these slow little dances while biting metal rods.

B. One day when she walked by, the window was open. And now, when the girl looked in, she heard the sound of a flute playing. It was a flute player, not a dancer, and the point of it all had not been the movement, but the music, which the girl had never heard before. “Aha,” said the girl, “now I understand!” Then, no longer interested by the spectacle, she turned to leave.

C. But the flute player saw her, and called out to her. Surprised, the girl stayed by the open window as the other girl approached. “Here,” said the flute player when she reached the open window, “wouldn’t you like to play? This is yours, after all, and it is your turn now.” With that, she handed the flute through the open window to the girl who had, until then, been only a spectator.

And then the flute player disappeared, the whole building disappeared, and the little girl found herself standing there with her whole life still ahead of her, holding a flute – and trying to remember the movements, and the music.

READING: On Reading Scripture

This morning’s reading is taken from the writings of an early 3rd century Christian writer known as Origen. Late in his life, he was declared a heretic by the Church for his belief that there was no everlasting hell, and that all souls would eventually be redeemed, making him the first “Universalist” theologian in western religion. He was a powerful thinker, however: some of his writings are still taught in graduate religion programs, and his influence on western religion has been significant.

Since Origen is not well known today, few realize what an intellectual giant he was. When he died, he left behind a massive body of writings numbering close to a thousand titles. Saint Jerome called him “The greatest teacher of the Church after the apostles.” He was born about 185, probably at Alexandria. He died, after imprisonment and extended torture, in 253. These remarks are taken from his book called On First Principles:

“Divine things are communicated to men somewhat obscurely and are the more hidden in proportion to the unbelief or unworthiness of the inquirer.”

Moreover, some of the simpler folk believe such things about God that not even the most unjust and savage of men would believe. And the reason why they have a false apprehension of these things is that they don’t understand scripture in its spiritual sense, but only in its literal sense.

There are three layers of meaning in scripture, each suited to different degrees of intellectual development and spiritual maturity:

A. The simplest folk may be edified by what we may call the body of the scriptures (for such is the name we may give to the common and literal interpretation);

B. Those who have begun to make a little progress and are able to perceive something more than that may be edified by the soul of scripture;

C. Finally, those who are most advanced in both mind and spirit may be edified by the spiritual dimension of scripture: by those parts that may be said to have been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. These are the believers who are led to live sacred lives, rather than merely understanding sacred words.

How then should you understand sacred scriptures? You should understand them by knowing that these mysteries were portrayed figuratively through the narration of what seemed to be human deeds and the handing down of certain legal ordinances and precepts. The aim was that not everyone who wished should have these mysteries laid before his feet to trample upon, but that they should be for the ones who had devoted themselves to studies of this kind with the utmost purity and sobriety and through nights of watching, by which means perchance they might be able to trace out the deeply hidden meaning of the Spirit of God, concealed under the language of an ordinary narrative which points in a different direction.

In other words, we should try to discover in the scriptures which we believe to be inspired by God a meaning that is worthy of God. And here the Holy Spirit can guide us, for the Spirit calls the attention of the reader, by the impossibility of the literal sense, to an examination of the inner meanings.

In summary, all our reading of sacred scriptures must be guided by two considerations. We are seeking, with honest minds and pure hearts, for those things which are both useful to us, and worthy of God. If we keep these things in mind, we will not easily be misled.

(From Origen’s On First Principles, Book IV, adapted)

CENTERING:

By Rachel Naomi Remen

I bought a little, falling-down cabin on the top of a mountain. It was so bad that when [a friend] came to see it, he said, “Oh, Rachel, you bought this?” But with two carpenters, an electrician, and a plumber, in three years we have remodeled the whole thing. We started by just throwing things away – bathtubs, light fixtures, windows. I kept hearing my father’s voice saying, “That’s a perfectly good light fixture, why are you throwing it away?” We kept throwing away more and more things, and with everything we threw away, the building became more whole. It had more integrity. Finally, we had thrown away everything that didn’t belong. You know, we may think we need to be more in order to be whole. But in some ways, we need to be less. We need to let go, to throw away everything that isn’t us in order to be more whole.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are. Not a better you, but a more real you.

SERMON: The ABCs of Religion

It’s surprising, the number of times the study of religion seems to have three levels, three stages of understanding – like the little story of the flute-player. You could call those three levels A B and C.

A. The literal or “factual” level; like standing outside a closed window thinking that the meaning of the sight must be in going through the motions because that’s all you can see.

B. The metaphorical or intellectual level; like opening the window and discovering the motions were just by-products of the music, which was the real point of it all.

C. The existential or personal level; when someone hands you the flute, and you realize that you are not just a “spectator” in life, that it is your turn.

When I began studying religion in graduate school, I began the way most of you would have – with no previous education in religion at all. I had no undergraduate courses, very little knowledge of the Bible or any other religious text. I didn’t have much of a notion of what religion was about, beyond the general understanding that on the surface religion usually seems to be concerned with gods or goddesses, and then on a deeper level, it’s concerned with some of the important questions about life. Beyond that, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

What I didn’t expect was to read things like you heard in this morning’s reading from the 3rd century writer Origen, which we were exposed to almost immediately. I knew that modern liberals looked on the Bible and other sacred scriptures as symbols, metaphors and myths that depicted life in poetic imagery and stories, but I never expected that the better religious thinkers had been saying this for over two thousand years. So the first time I read some of the writings of people like Origen, I could hardly believe it.

Here was a voice from almost 1800 years ago saying that reading scriptures literally is the unimaginative or uneducated sort of thing that children do. If you’re serious about understanding this subject, he was saying, the literal level isn’t even worth bothering with, because it has missed the whole point of religion. The real concerns of religion can only be understood if you grow beyond that literal level, and realize that scriptures are speaking in poetic images about a different level entirely “concealed under the language of an ordinary narrative which points in a different direction,” as Origen put it.

It was almost as though the real meanings had been protected from casual observers by being written in code – although it is the same code that most great literature and poetry have used, too. Religious scriptures are written in the code of symbols and metaphors, allegories and myths. We learned, over and over and over again during the early parts of graduate school, that a literal reading of any religious scripture, like a literal reading of good poetry or fiction, is unacceptable: it is useless to us, and unworthy of the subject of religion. It is like watching a flute player through a closed window, wondering what all the strange movements are for. This was the first level, the “A” level, of approaching any great literature, including religious literature.

It is hard to overemphasize the effect that reading thousands of pages like this from dozens of writers throughout the history of religion had on doctoral students, at least those of us with no previous education in religion. The 22-year-olds who came with an undergraduate degree in religion were already past this, but for the rest of us, it was quite a surprise.

Here you’ve come to graduate school to join the fairly small group of those for whom religion is a serious and life-long subject of study, and the first thing you realize is that most of the things you have ever heard about religion – and most of the things you’ve ever said about religion – now feel like silly children’s games. For many of us, it was a little humiliating, and a lot intimidating.

The second level, the “B” level, which Origen had called the “soul” of scriptures, showed us that the great religious writings are really concerned with existential insights into the nature of life itself. Even Origen’s notion that treasures this important aren’t meant for literalists or people unwilling to work at them was an appealing idea. After all, the same is true of music, poetry, and all the rest of the arts. It was true of most subjects covered in the humanities.

But all of a sudden, when you move from level “A” to level “B” and then look at the history and writings of religion again, simply everything changes. Because if religious writings were only meant to be taken on a literal level, then they were easy to dismiss – as though they were a simple True/False test – and we could feel smart and smug without any effort at all, imagining that all those old writers were just shallow fools compared to us! But now here they are, nearly two thousand years ago, describing the whole literal approach to scriptures as childish, and unfit for adults or other serious students of religion. Again, you can hardly overstate the impact that this has on students of religion, especially religious liberals, who pride themselves on being well-educated, at least in their own field of religion.

Nor was this man Origen alone: He was not the exception, but the rule. Nearly all of the great thinkers were that dismissive of literal readings of scripture. Many of you probably never heard of Origen. But think of Saint Augustine, whom you probably have heard of. Here was this remarkable man, writing in the 5th century, who was such a powerful and influential writer that he nearly defined Roman Catholicism for a thousand years. He has also been called the grandfather of the Protestant Reformation, because Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk, strongly influenced by his works, and nearly a third of John Calvin’s major theological work was adapted from Augustine’s writings. You might expect the person who nearly invented Roman Catholic theology to be busy cranking out creeds, but it is not what you find when you read him. Instead, you find things like this:

“Some people imagine God as a kind of man or as a vast bodily substance endowed with power, who by some new and sudden decision created heaven and earth. “When these people hear that God said “Let such and such be made”, and accordingly it was made, they think – that once the words had been pronounced, whatever was ordered to come into existence immediately did so. Any other thoughts which occur to them are limited in the same way by their attachment to the familiar material world around them. These people are still like children. But the very simplicity of the language of Scripture sustains them in their weakness as a mother cradles an infant in her lap. But there are others for whom the words of Scripture are no longer a nest but a leafy orchard, where they see the hidden fruit. They fly about it in joy, breaking into song as they gaze at the fruit and feed upon it (Confessions, p. 304).”

If you are a student of the arts, if you love the humanities, this kind of writing and this kind of insight has an immediate appeal to you. It is like the window has opened, and you hear the music, and suddenly you know what the instrument has been for all along. The “instruments” here are religious scriptures, in all traditions, and one of the most important things you learn in a good religious education is that the symbols, stories, legends and myths of religion are meant to make music, not dogma. They are about life, not belief. And if you just stay on the surface, you miss all of that: you miss nearly everything that sacred scriptures are about and have always been about, because you miss the “spirit” that inspired those scriptures.

Annie Dillard tells a story toward the same point, in which she describes how she learned to split wood. At first, she said that she aimed at the tops of the logs, but all she produced were useless slivers of wood. Later she learned to aim for the block – past the target – to get the job done. Understanding religion is like that. While there are some things that have merely literal meanings lying just on the surface, there aren’t many, and those that do aren’t very important. You have to aim beyond the words, to the more fundamental truths lying beneath them.

You could wonder why writers don’t just say what they mean – not just in religious literature but in all literature. Take a book like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, for instance. Many people have taught that Steinbeck was saying through this book that the American Dream was only a dream for the rich few, carried on the backs of the poor, and that the only nourishment most of us will find is what little milk of human kindness we can give to one another. Well then, why didn’t he just say so, instead of writing a whole book? He could have said that in a letter to the editor!

Or take F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, the book some have called the greatest American novel: Why didn’t he simply say “The American Dream isn’t enough to sustain a life, even for the rich”? Why did he have to invent all those characters, and all those happenings that never happened?

Or for that matter, why can’t movies just get to the point and tell you what they’re about, and save everyone a lot of time and money? Why don’t they just make their points about good, evil, integrity and courage in a straightforward way, instead of inventing all those unlikely characters?

These are all questions from “Level A.” And the answer, which can only come from “Level B,” is that the kind of truth that literature, including religious literature, is about, is not a truth about the characters in the stories, but about life. And truths about life are most clear and most useful when told in stories that recreate a living context for them: stories that put the insights into life situations that we can identify with, and can feel. It is like Origen wrote 1800 years ago: they are a kind of truth “concealed under the language of an ordinary narrative which points in a different direction.”

And so once you get it, you think “Aha, now I understand!” like the girl watching the flute player. And you go out to teach or preach religion as great literature, written in symbols and metaphors as all great literature is, and you think you’ve got it now. This religion business took some mental gear-shifting, but it wasn’t so hard after all. You can do it all in your head.

But then you think of things like Origen wrote in his third level, about “the believers who are led to live sacred lives, rather than merely understanding sacred words.” This third level, this “Level C,” means that religion is, at bottom, not an intellectual issue at all, but an existential one: it is our lives that are at stake here. If we live only once, if all the heavens and hells in all the world’s religions are metaphors for qualities of life here and now, and if this really is all there is, then we’re not talking about mind-games. We’re talking about the fact that life is short, it matters a lot how we live it, and there aren’t many clear guidebooks.

I remember how St. Paul’s statement that “we work out our salvation in fear and trembling” took on entirely different meanings in a seminar where we were asked how we were working out our salvation. There was not a person in the room who believed in a literal or supernatural religion. You hardly ever find that in a good graduate school of religion. We all knew that both life and religion are about the here and now. But then whatever salvation there is to be is also here and now: and how are we to work it out? With our whole life at stake, how are we to live it?

You give your life over to the demands of education, and think that whatever your life was worth must then be measured, somehow, in the field of education. But what there is worth a life? Only if you are serving not just education, but the noblest demands of education: those far horizons and challenging depths of understanding that undergird the very best sorts of education. Only, in other words, if you are serving a transcendent ideal, a transcendent spirit, that spirit that gives life and significance to education.

We were mostly concerned with education, whether we were going into college teaching or into the ministry. But the questions of what makes life worth living are powerful questions in any area, because so much is at stake: your whole life!

There was a 19th Century Danish existentialist named Kierkegaard who was immensely important in my education, and in my understanding of religion and of life. He once wrote about the kind of games we play with religious beliefs when we keep them as merely intellectual pursuits unrelated to our real lives. We are like passengers on a cruise ship, he said, who spend their time arranging the deck chairs in neat little rows. And this, said Kierkegaard, is supremely funny: not because neat little rows are bad, but because the ship is sinking.

Every day, 24 hours at a time, the ship is sinking. We move each day of our lives toward that moment when we shall not move at all. Life isn’t a snapshot, it’s a motion picture, moving toward its ending. We stand there with the flute in our hands, our life before us, and we’re not sure just what the movements were supposed to be, or just how the music is supposed to sound.

Until there is that sense of anxiety, until there is that sense of “fear and trembling,” the flute hasn’t been placed in our hands, and we haven’t really felt the full impact of what this religion business is about.

This is why the language of religion is so often filled with gods and goddesses, with images of eternal reward or punishment, with such exaggerations of speech: like heaven, hell, God, creation, suffering, crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation. The language is extreme because, since we only live once, there is so much at stake – every day, the ship is sinking.

This is the third level of religion, the “Level C,” the level where it finally dawns on us that there is a sense in which every religious scripture has been written from the yearnings of the human soul, yearnings we have too.

We have a funny way of thinking about religion, especially among the educated sorts of folks who find their way to Unitarian churches. We usually think of a religion as a collection of pseudo-intellectual propositions. We judge the acceptability of those propositions, then accept or reject the parts of the religion that fit our understanding of what is intellectually coherent and defensible.

In other words – and this is quite ironic – religious liberals often tend to operate at about the same level as Christian fundamentalists do. By thinking that religion is about belief, we tend to take it at the same literal level that fundamentalists do, though we oppose them. They take their religion at the literal level. They say God is some sort of a critter somewhere up there, heaven is a literal place we go after we die, and so on. In other words, they say it is all literal and it is all true.

Often, we also take our religion at the same literal level. Yes, we say, the terms of traditional religion are talking about a God who is some sort of a critter somewhere up there, and yes heaven is referring to a literal place we’re supposed to go after we die. But they’re wrong. In other words, it is all literal and it is all false. Like the fundamentalists, most of those who attack fundamentalists operate at the same literal level, level A.

If you think about it, concepts like atheism and agnosticism and questions about whether or not you “believe in” God, are only coherent at the literalist, fundamentalist level. Once you understand that the key terms of religion aren’t literal at all, but are symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical, then words like atheism simply become incoherent, don’t they? After all: if God is Love, then what would it mean to be an atheist? Or an agnostic?

Perhaps religion is really as easy, and as hard, as ABC:

A. Have we grown past the literal level? That is the question posed to us at level A. Have we understood that all the talk of gods and angels, heavens and hells, deaths and resurrections and the rest of it, doesn’t really have anything to do with actual gods, angels, heavens, hells, deaths or resurrections? If not, then we fail before we can even begin. We fail to understand what religion is about, and are left facing a locked door. We stand outside the closed window, watching the odd movements inside, and having no way of knowing what they are really about.

B. At Level B, we are asked a second question. We’re asked if we can now begin to hear religion in a new way. Can we listen to its teachings as messages about life expressed in the poetic code language of symbols, myths, allegories and metaphors? If so, we can gain entrance to this second level of religion. Once the window is opened and we can hear the music, then we need to reframe our earlier understanding of those strange movements with the flute we had been watching from the outside. If the point of it all isn’t “going through the motions” but “making music,” then what is religion about? How now do we understand it?

C. And at Level C, it all changes again. For just when we begin to think that once we’ve got it in our heads we’ve mastered this religion business, then suddenly the flute is handed to us. Now we are faced with our own life, and the things we have been serving with our life. What are the gods we’ve served with our lives, and what kind of a life have they led us to? Is it useful to us? Is it worthy of God? There is so much on the line, and so little to stand on that is absolutely certain.

So here we are. We stand here with that flute in our hands. Ahead of us lies our whole life. We finally understand that it is our turn to make the music. So we stand here, holding the flute we thought belonged to someone else. Holding that flute, trying to remember the movements. And one reason we come to church is to listen for the music.