UU Church of Berks
November 27, 2011
Rev. Sandra Fees
How Broad Is Our Church Welcome? or Why Atheists Come to Church
Driving home from the church last week, I heard a news story about a Springfield businessman who had put up a sign refusing service to religious skeptics and atheists. A group of about 1,000 agnostics, humanists, and atheists were gathered for the skeptic’s convention known as Skepticon, there in the Bible Belt. The business owner said he had been serving individuals from the conference all day in his café with no problems. Then, when things slowed down and he went outside to learn more about the group, he overhead comments that were offensive and disparaging to his Christian beliefs. In reaction to those comments, he penned the sign – “Skepticon is not welcomed to my Christian business.” He thought better of it almost immediately, almost.
But not before a passerby had shot a photo of the sign and posted it on the internet, where it went viral. The shop owner was inundated with negative responses from all over the world. He had already removed the sign, and now publicly apologized for his temporary lapse of judgment. A business can’t refuse service to someone on the basis of their beliefs – no matter what they might want to do. The café owner is paying the price in negative publicity. I’m glad to know that there was a public outcry. I think it’s positive that the owner himself realized his mistake and apologized. But the continuing tension between people who hold differing religious ideas in a country we describe as religiously pluralistic is noteworthy and troubling.
It is also noteworthy that religious institutions, unlike businesses, can deny membership to those who do not adhere to certain beliefs. Our congregations, as you know, do not have a profession of faith or a creedal test. However, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have subtle and not-so-subtle ways that individuals with particular beliefs are made to feel welcome or unwelcome.
We sometimes critique ourselves as being unwelcoming to Christian beliefs in our congregations. Next week I’ll be preaching about “Who Owns Jesus?” and, in part, why it is that individuals who find inspiration in the life and teachings of Jesus would want to be part of our religious community. I’ll also be exploring who gets to decide who Jesus was.
So why is it that atheists and other skeptics sometimes want to be part of our religious community? Is our church broad enough for these theologies? And why would we want to be? When people ask me why atheists come to church, I usually can’t help myself. I begin by saying: “for the same reasons everyone else comes.” That’s true. But what this question raises is another, fundamental question about our understanding of religion. Can there be religion without God? To many that’s an oxymoron.
Twentieth-century Unitarian ministers John Dietrich, Charles Potter, and Curtis Reese didn’t think so. They were pioneers of religious humanism. So let me offer just a brief historical perspective about how we got where we are today, thanks to their work.
Curtis Reese gave a controversial address at Harvard Divinity School in 1920, entitled “The Content of Religious Liberalism.” In it, he said, “theism is philosophically possible, but not religiously necessary.” He insisted that religious liberalism needed to remain open to the question of God, but he concluded that, “Liberalism is building a religion that would not be shaken even if the very idea of God were to pass away.”
In 1929, John Dietrich similarly said that “one does not need to believe in God to be religious.” Dietrich was born in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and attended seminary at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster – a Reformed school. As a minister, he preached about the idea of religion without God. His bold new ideas centered religion on humans rather than on God. Dietrich was still considered a theistic Protestant liberal. When speaking of religion without God, he meant without God as God was traditionally understood. His bold positions led to a heresy trial by the Reformed Church he served, and he was ultimately “defrocked” for his liberal religious ideas. Can you guess what happened next? He was then invited into ministerial fellowship by the Unitarians. In truth, the idea of religion without God was revolutionary, even among Unitarians at the time.
As Dietrich, Potter, and Reese developed their pioneering theologies, they wanted to find the earliest threads of humanism in the West. They were already aware of nonwestern religious humanistic traditions. These included strains of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism that were nontheistic. They found humanism in the West in several places, including Greece in the 5th century B.C. It was there Protagoras said: “[Humans are] the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.”
Dietrich, Potter and Reese also discovered Renaissance humanism, which started in Italy in the 14th century. Renaissance humanism began as a revolt against the otherworldliness of medieval Christianity and emphasized making the best of life in this world. It made the study of classics, the use of knowledge and reason, and the study of religious texts using historical criticism central. In the modern period, they found Nietzschean humanism, which was shared among European philosophers such as Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Nietzsche, as many of you know, spoke of the death of God, viewing God as human conjecture, and arguing that humans created God, not the other way around.
I want to mention one last group of humanists – the naturalistic humanists. They viewed the world of nature as the sum total of reality. Nature, they said, is everything, and there’s nothing supernatural. This perspective was shared by John Dewey, among others. It was Dewey who said: “Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality.”
Each of these western strands of humanism had a religious dimension. They shared the perspective that religion pertains to enduring values, to the pursuit of human knowledge, and to the drive to understand human existence – what it is and what it is not. Each supported the assertion that religion without God is possible.
These views still come as an affront to what some people understand as religion. Those who find it strangest can be found on both sides of the aisle, so to speak, in secular humanism and conservative theism. The latter you would expect. But why would secular humanists find it odd, even objectionable?
Let me share a story. This summer at PrideFest I visited the Pennsylvania Nonbelievers booth. I started reading all the signs and bumper stickers. Some of them were humorous and cute. I was trying to be a good sport. I kind of like, “My dinosaur ate your Jesus fish” and “It’s okay not to believe” and “freethinker” or “kindness is human, nothing supernatural required.” I had a different kind of reaction to, “Religion, the easy way out of thinking” and “religion is hazardous to world peace” and “too stupid to understand science? try religion.” I was trying not to be defensive. I was telling myself, they don’t mean you. This line of thinking was not working out for me on a couple of fronts.
I noticed one of the women working the booth had moved closer. Maybe she thought I was going to buy one of these bumper stickers I was reading with such intensity. I caught her eye, and the words tumbled out of my mouth: “not all religion is like that,” I said. I could see her expression change. She was sizing me up, trying to assess my point of view so she could decide how to respond. I had a feeling she was used to people challenging her “nonbelieving” beliefs. As I watched her, realizing her discomfort, I added, “I’m a Unitarian Universalist,” wanting to make a bit of a peace offering. Her relief was visible. She relaxed. She said, “oh, we meet at the Unitarian Universalist Church in York.” We now seemed headed toward a happy connection, a meeting of the minds, a budding kindred spirit kind of moment. Then she added, “well, you’re not really a religion.”
I’ve heard this often enough to have some sense of what people might mean when they say it. It reminds me of that saying, I’m spiritual not religious. To some people, the word “religion” conveys particular dogmatic and doctrinal associations, some of them quite painful. They categorize traditions like Buddhism and Taoism as philosophies, rather than world religions, and a religion like ours, an ethical society, rather than a religion.
I prefer not to get too fixated on what might merely be semantics. In this case, it’s goes deeper than that. Our congregations have a charitable designation as religious bodies. We have clergy and rites of passage, like weddings and child dedications. We have worship services, like this one. Her words echoed in my ears: “you’re not really a religion,” she said – to which I said simply: “we really are a religion.”
One of the things I recognize is that the café owner who had an allergic reaction to the skeptics, who according to him had also expressed an allergic reaction to Christianity, and the skeptic who had an allergic reaction to religion are reacting in similar ways. Here in our congregation, we are striving to break down these kinds of barriers, to extend a broad religious welcome. It can be a challenge to be open and accept each others’ perspectives, we know, but we embrace this struggle as part of our religious work.
Our liberal religion made the choice years ago to broaden its welcome to those who wanted a religion without God. It came to welcome religious humanists to come and sit in the pews and worship alongside those who want religion with God – without any expectation that either would need to change their beliefs. That historic choice kept us on a trajectory that has been re-affirmed in recent years. We continue to insist that revelation is not sealed, and consequently we have opened our welcome still further. Earth-centered and goddess-oriented spiritualities, paganism, theistic and naturalistic process thought, eastern traditions, and naturalistic theism as well as naturalistic humanism are expanding our collective religious consciousness.
Why do atheists come to church? For the same reasons the rest of us do. We come to make sense of the world from a liberal perspective. We come seeking to make meaning of our lives using the tools of reason, conscience, freedom of thought, science, transcendental mysticism, and direct experience. We want human companions with whom we and our children can explore ethical values – such as compassion, justice, love, and truth - and with whom we can enact them in the world. We come because we want to make the world a better place. We come because we believe fiercely in freedom of religion.
We want to explore the big questions in spiritual community, questions such as, where do we come from? why are we here? what happens when we die? what ethical principles will guide us along the way? We come because we want to strive to be part of something bigger than we are – no matter what we may call it. Beyond the many theological “isms” is the reason we come to church. We come to experience the holy by whatever name we know it, or by no name.
Resource: American Religious Humanism, rev. edition, Mason Olds, published by the Fellowship of Religious Humanists, 1996