{"id":3276,"date":"2010-07-26T10:06:21","date_gmt":"2010-07-26T16:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.austinuu.org\/wp2013\/?p=3276"},"modified":"2010-07-26T10:06:21","modified_gmt":"2010-07-26T16:06:21","slug":"what-do-fundamentalists-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/austinuu.org\/wp2013\/what-do-fundamentalists-know\/","title":{"rendered":"What Do Fundamentalists Know About Religion That Unitarians Have Forgotten (and Need to Relearn)?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"powerpress_player\" id=\"powerpress_player_7289\"><audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-3276-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.austinuuav.org\/audio\/2010-07-25_What_Fundamentalists_Know.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.austinuuav.org\/audio\/2010-07-25_What_Fundamentalists_Know.mp3\">http:\/\/www.austinuuav.org\/audio\/2010-07-25_What_Fundamentalists_Know.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div><p class=\"powerpress_links powerpress_links_mp3\" style=\"margin-bottom: 1px !important;\">Podcast: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.austinuuav.org\/audio\/2010-07-25_What_Fundamentalists_Know.mp3\" class=\"powerpress_link_pinw\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Play in new window\" onclick=\"return powerpress_pinw('https:\/\/austinuu.org\/wp2013\/?powerpress_pinw=3276-podcast');\" rel=\"nofollow\">Play in new window<\/a> | <a href=\"http:\/\/www.austinuuav.org\/audio\/2010-07-25_What_Fundamentalists_Know.mp3\" class=\"powerpress_link_d\" title=\"Download\" rel=\"nofollow\" download=\"2010-07-25_What_Fundamentalists_Know.mp3\">Download<\/a><\/p><p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><strong>Gary Bennett<\/p>\n<p><\/strong> <\/span><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><strong>Member, First Unitarian Church of Austin<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Sermon, delivered Sunday, July 25, 2010<\/span><\/strong><strong> <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">The title of this sermon is a bit <\/span><span style=\"font-size: small;\">deceptive<\/span><span style=\"font-size: small;\">.\u00a0 Today I wouldn\u2019t use the term \u201cfundamentalist\u201d to mean evangelical, conservative or traditional, and these are the religious groups I really want to talk about.\u00a0 Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Saudi Arabian government are fundamentalist, as are Pat Robertson, various recent presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention and a host of others who have done such outrageous things as praise terrorist attacks on Americans, plot political takeovers in church services, foment the murder of abortion providers, spit on mourners at funerals for fallen soldiers and advocate revolutionary violence against the United States.\u00a0 They are a recent phenomenon, a cancer on most major world religions, an attack on all modern thought and values; they are Fascists who masquerade using traditional religious language.\u00a0 In contrast, the denomination I was raised in, Southern Baptists before 1979, was by basic principle apolitical; members tended to be politically conservative, but people like Jimmy Carter, Bill Moyers and my parents had no trouble fitting in.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Why should we be interested?\u00a0 These are, after all, the traditions that many of us feel we outgrew; if anything, we think we have a bit to teach them.\u00a0 Perhaps we do, but demographics have not been kind to us in recent decades.\u00a0 We are grouped with liberal or \u201cmain line\u201d Protestant groups, which also include the Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches.\u00a0 We all share one problem today:\u00a0 we can\u2019t convince our own children that what we do is worth preserving.\u00a0 UUs have mostly made up for these losses with adult conversion, which has so far kept us out of the other denominations\u2019 apparent race to extinction; but we are still in trouble.\u00a0 Politicians have taken notice, of course; and where in 1960 it was main line Protestant voices that they used for moral cover, today it is usually conservative Catholics, evangelical Protestants or Mormons, even outright Fundamentalists, that dominate the public forum.\u00a0 It is not that\u00a0 these groups are especially successful at proselytizing <\/span><em><span style=\"font-size: small;\">our<\/span><\/em><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> children, who mostly become unchurched and thus invisible as far as the political culture goes; but the conservatives at least are keeping most of their own children.\u00a0 For some groups, like the high birth rate Mormons, that alone would be enough for rapid growth.\u00a0 If these changes in American culture and politics bother us, and I think they should, we have lots of serious \u2018splainin\u2019 to do.\u00a0 We think that we have a better approach to religious experience, but it is they who do the better job of convincing the children that what they have is important.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">From the beginning, human beings have been bonded into groups by all believing in the same \u201csix impossible things before breakfast.\u201d\u00a0 Once these groups started stepping on one another\u2019s toes by living together in cities or traveling to far places, religion began to be something distinct from the overall\u00a0 culture; religion was where you met with your support group.\u00a0 You would still prefer to shut up those fools who disagreed if you had the power to do so, but the religious group helped you to endure if you could not.\u00a0 Christianity by the 4th century had its own share of crazy ideas and also the power of the Roman state to shut up everybody who disagreed.\u00a0 Despite the fall of the Western Empire, this state of things persisted in Europe until a century of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants ended in the 17th century in a peace of exhaustion; neither group had been quite able to exterminate the other.\u00a0 By the late 18th century in places like the English colonies in America, toleration came to be seen as a virtue in itself; the idea was that different religious groups could scream all that they liked, but had to leave the swords, battle-axes and torture chambers at home.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Today UUs profess not to feel threatened by all these competing ideas, believing that our ideas are strong enough to survive out in the marketplace.\u00a0 Our advertising campaigns try to persuade the unchurched that they are very much like us; we are at one with the larger intellectual world, with science, human reason and American moral values.\u00a0 But traditional religious groups feel more alienated from the overall world of ideas.\u00a0 Their beliefs are quite distinct from those of the larger world and from those of each other.\u00a0 Small doctrinal differences are assumed to be important.\u00a0 For us Baptists, we asserted our lack of a creed, but at the same time accused other Christians of getting the rite of baptism all wrong.\u00a0 We, like most traditional Christians, believed that salvation was by the grace of God, rather than by good deeds of human beings; but I and my Church of Christ cousins, little lawyers all of us, went round and round on whether Grace was enough or whether participation in the rite of Baptism by the One True Church \u2014 that was them \u2014 was also necessary.\u00a0 What, said I, if you are saved by grace on Monday, but die before you are safely baptized in church the following Sunday?\u00a0 I will spare you various other Great Ideas Seminars we conducted.\u00a0 The point is,\u00a0 if the UU view of matters is pretty much the same as that of most of the secular world, why bother with church at all?\u00a0 Why not sleep in Sunday mornings, read a good book, go to a public lecture?\u00a0 If you are blessed to move in an academic environment or live in a cosmopolitan city of great cultural offerings, why do you need a UU church at all?\u00a0 But if you are an Evangelical,\u00a0 you will not get much reinforcement of your \u201csix impossible beliefs\u201d except in your own church group.\u00a0 You will need to spend a lot of time there, perhaps attending every time the church doors are open; and at other times, you might want to limit your socializing to other church members.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Then there is moral behavior.\u00a0 For UUs, ethics is about helping others:\u00a0 helping the poor, the sick, the elderly, children and other victims of social injustice; when we collect \u201cpennies for peace\u201d and try to build schools for girls in remote Asian villages, we are acting in the great ethical tradition.\u00a0 We have support in the teachings of Jesus, of the Hebrew prophets, of Mohammed, of Confucius and of many other seminal religious teachers.\u00a0 But for evangelical religions, most of these things are not so much morals but political issues on which good Christians can differ.\u00a0 As a young Baptist, most of my time in church and Sunday School seemed to be spent in being warned against various \u201cgateway\u201d evils:\u00a0 gambling was wrong because it led to playing cards, promiscuous sex was wrong because it led to dancing and smoking marijuana was wrong because it led to tobacco.\u00a0 There were never any lessons on the evils of racial discrimination, poverty in the midst of wealth, unjust wars, the rape of the world\u2019s resources or other environmental disasters. Religious morality was about individual perfection, about keeping the temple of your body pure for God.\u00a0 UU moral positions tend to integrate us into the larger society in which we operate; evangelical Protestant positions tend to separate us into little self-absorbed clusters.\u00a0 And these all become more reasons to structure your life around other church members,\u00a0 people you can socialize with and not imperil your immortal soul.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Traditional religions require constant work on the part of their members.\u00a0 Orthodox Judaism has seemingly an endless list of requirements of diet, clothing and other rituals.\u00a0 Jewish friends have tried to explain to me how the laws of kosher are perfectly sensible; it seems the bans on eating pork, shellfish and mixing meat with dairy products were all put together by ancient nutritionists, protecting people from trichinosis, oysters out of season \u2014 do Hebrew months provide any rules comparable to r\u2019s being safe?\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 and we all know the grim truth about eating fast food bacon cheeseburgers.\u00a0 Stuff and nonsense:\u00a0 the lawgivers wanted people to have to think about their religion every single day, in even the most trivial actions, just as my Baptist morality was designed to remind me of who I was, not to accomplish good.\u00a0 For Jews the result was a tough faith that people preserved in even the most extreme circumstances, for thousands of years of living in isolated ghettos surrounded by hostile societies.\u00a0 Few things have threatened Jewish identity more than living in religiously tolerant America over the last generation or so, where their declining numbers are similar to those of liberal Protestants.\u00a0 A rabbi once told me he considered UUs the greatest threat to Jewish survival, as we gave shelter to couples in mixed Jewish\/Christian marriages! \u00a0 In an old fable, the sun and the north wind bet on which is the more powerful.\u00a0 The north wind tries to blow a traveller\u2019s cloak off, but he only wraps it ever more tightly about himself; then the sun comes out, warms the land, and the traveller\u00a0 removes the cloak voluntarily.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Other religions have also found ways of making life tough for members.\u00a0 Devout Moslems have to stop whatever they are doing five times a day to humble themselves before God; the fasting month of Ramadan and the required ultimate pilgrimage to Mecca are also hard.\u00a0 Mormons require two full years\u2019 missionary work from every young member as a rite of passage into adulthood.\u00a0 I have seen firsthand how much more serious and religiously committed a person can become after that experience.\u00a0 And then there are the Amish, who make their religious beliefs central to everything that they do in daily life.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> And let us not forget the early radical Protestants.\u00a0 Medieval Hell might have been a terrible fate waiting after death, filled with every juicy torture and humiliation a fevered imagination could come up with; but at least Catholics could feel safe as long as they remained obedient to and in good standing with the Church.\u00a0 These Protestants took upon themselves the burden of finding the way to avoid Hell, without ever being sure they were right.\u00a0 They became puritanical, self-denying, hard-working people who, by all work and no play and by avoiding idle hands, the Devil\u2019s own workshop, might hope to escape damnation.\u00a0 There was of course no room for compassion in this \u2014 if other people were mostly bound for eternal torture after death, any extra suffering they encountered in this life was trivial anyway \u2014 so it tended to generate a lot of excess wealth that came to be called capital by economists and ultimately to our rich modern society, all as a trivial side effect.\u00a0 Children brought up in such hard faiths knew the seriousness and importance of what was going on, and usually continued to practice them in adulthood.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> I haven\u2019t talked as if the theological content mattered much in the success or failure of these religions.\u00a0 Not entirely true:\u00a0 some things obviously do matter a great deal.\u00a0 The doctrine of Hell tends to grab one\u2019s attention; for an imaginative child who has been exposed to it, anxieties can last a life time, even if he has rejected the idea of it in his head.\u00a0 Heaven is more like an afterthought for most believers, whether it is supposed to be souls singing hymns for eternity \u2014 a prospect mercilessly satirized by Mark Twain \u2014 or if is supposed to be filled with the reward of 40 virgins \u2014 which can double as the place bad virgins go to be punished, some suggest.\u00a0 Anyway, whatever goodies await, it is all kind of a bonus to go along with the biggie of avoiding Hell.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> Above all, successful religions demand the belief that there is something that is greater than us, something before which we must humble ourselves.\u00a0 Arrogance is the opposite of real religious sentiment, something to remember the next time you encounter a swaggering televangelist with an obvious financial or political agenda.\u00a0 That we humble ourselves is more important than what we humble ourselves to.\u00a0 Our own tradition is mixed.\u00a0 Universalists supposedly thought God too good to condemn humanity to Hell, and Unitarians, that humans were too good to be condemned.\u00a0 If I have to choose, given what I have seen of human behavior, I really, really hope the Universalists were right.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> I started by asking what traditional religious groups know, and what we can learn from them.\u00a0 Some lessons we will reject out of hand.\u00a0 I cannot imagine UUs declaring war on science and reason.\u00a0 Nor do we want to limit our concept of morality to keeping our bodies healthy while ignoring the world\u2019s problems, and some of us even believe that \u201cpurity\u2019s a noble yen, and very restful every now and then.\u201d\u00a0 But I think we do need to make the practice of Unitarian Universalism more difficult, if we want to survive.\u00a0 We need an integrity about our lives, a sense that we are the same people, with the same values, on weekdays as Sundays.\u00a0 We need to be in covenant with one another, so that our disagreements may be resolved without injury to any, and so that members always feel that being here or being with other UUs in any situation is a safe place.\u00a0 We MUST give more; it\u2019s hard to believe your faith is important to you when your giving is so embarrassingly poor compared with conservative churches, so low that they have severely crippled the mission of your church.\u00a0 I know how hard my Baptist parents struggled to tithe \u2014 that means 10% of gross income, if any of you are in doubt \u2014 in what were often very grim circumstances.\u00a0 Our own household falls far short of that standard.\u00a0 But Jesus\u2019 words are still relevant:\u00a0 where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.\u00a0 Contribute to the church\u2019s mission AND to charities AND to just political causes that the church itself cannot involve itself in; contribute money AND time.\u00a0 If Moslems can stop to pray five times a day and Orthodox Jews can expend the effort to keep kosher at every meal, can we UUs not require ourselves to do at least one thing every day that reminds us who we are?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> And we must also make religion harder for our children. How we strive to keep them entertained; it would be unthinkable to require them to sit through a boring old church service, or so we believe.\u00a0 Nonsense.\u00a0 Most children will live up or down to consistent adult expectations.\u00a0 Consider family discussions of moral issues; the \u201cpennies for peace\u201d project would seem a perfect opportunity to talk about what the problems are, and what Greg Mortenson is arguing in <\/span><em><span style=\"font-size: small;\">Three Cups of Tea<\/span><\/em><span style=\"font-size: small;\"> are solutions.\u00a0 The long term feedback will come in part by what happens in rural Asia, but also by what part of you your children decide in adulthood is worth carrying forward.\u00a0 And that, above all,\u00a0 is what UUs must learn once again about religion, or die.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gary Bennett Member, First Unitarian Church of Austin Sermon, delivered Sunday, July 25, 2010 The title of this sermon is a bit deceptive.\u00a0 Today I wouldn\u2019t use the term \u201cfundamentalist\u201d to mean evangelical, conservative or traditional, and these are the religious groups I really want to talk about.\u00a0 Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Saudi&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":66,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[19,22,18,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-available","category-gary-bennett","category-guest-speakers","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/austinuu.org\/wp2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/austinuu.org\/wp2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/austinuu.org\/wp2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/austinuu.org\/wp2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/66"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/austinuu.org\/wp2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/austinuu.org\/wp2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/austinuu.org\/wp2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/austinuu.org\/wp2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/austinuu.org\/wp2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}