The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
3/14/04

Reading   

“Zero?” by UU minister, Gordan B. McKeeman [from his book, Out of the Ordinary (Boston:  Skinner House, 2000)]

 

Some time ago I expressed doubt as to whether or not Unitarian Universalism is really a religion.  In response, the Rev. Dan O’Neal, then struggling with advancing cancer wrote:

 

I have often thought of UUism as a zero in mathematical terms. … I really respect the zero in math.  It was a brilliant invention by Arabic mathematicians, a place holder which doesn’t inject a specific content, but which holds the space as important.  And yet, the human soul longs for that content, and is not satisfied ultimately with just a place holder.

 

Yes, of course, the space is important.  Dan found it of great importance. When he left evangelical Christianity, he thought there was no religious option left for him.  Unitarian Universalism offered him a religious option.  He embraced it enthusiastically.  But, important as it was, it became insufficient.  He wanted (needed, he said) more.

 

I believe there is more.  The long histories of our faith’s traditions speak in an affirmative voice of our belief in human possibilities.  They reject the notion that we are fundamentally sin-sodden, disobedient creatures bound for perdition unless divine intervention saves us.  They reject the notion that human destiny may be either heavenly or hell-bent.  Rather they see all of us bound together and with but a single fate.  Despite our fumblings, failures, foibles, and faults, we still entertain the liberating conviction that we can live in peace on this globe, that we can learn the conditions of our survival soon and well enough to prevent the species from becoming extinct.  We see the promise of humanity in its arts, its literature, its ideals of love and world friendship and community.  We are not the only folk ever to have embraced such a hopeful vision of our future, and we are happy to join hands, hearts, and hopes with others who share these convictions for our possibilities.  This is a long way from zero.

 

Zero is important, and it’s an acceptable place from which to begin a religious journey.  But it’s not a good campsite.  Moving on requires discovering what we believe about who we are, where we are, and what we’re trying to do/be.  It also involves reviving those convictions every day in the face of people and events that seem to derogate and devalue all that we believe. It’s so easy to forget, so easy to be swept along in tides bent toward destructive and life-denying directions.  The impulse toward wholeness is natural.  But to turn its potential into the actual in day-by-day words and deeds on behalf of human possibility requires devotion, perseverance, and continuing commitment.  That takes practice.  A daily pause for refreshing our faith is indispensable. 

 

Zero is important. But by itself it doesn’t add up to very much.

 

Sermon

In an essay in last May’s issue of The Atlantic Monthly (May 2003), correspondent Jonathan Rauch heralds the rise of an attitude toward religion that he believes is “nothing less than a major civilizational advance.”  This attitude is one to which he subscribes, along with, he contends, more and more people of all faiths in our country today.  He stumbled into a descriptive term for this way of thinking about religion when, at a party, he was asked where he would place himself in the spectrum of religious thought.  Rauch said he was about to own up to his long-time and unapologetic atheism, when he realized atheism was no longer a good enough description for his theological position.  Not because he was no longer an atheist, you see, but because many years had passed since he really cared one way or the other. He decided a more accurate description for his religious perspective would be “apatheism,” which he defines as a “a disinclination to care all that much about one’s own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about other people’s.”

 

He explains in the article that apatheism concerns not what one believes, but how one believes it; therefore, apatheists can be atheists or agnostics, but perhaps even more importantly, and the real triumph of apatheism in Rauch’s view, is that they can be believers, too. The major qualifying factor that makes someone an apatheist, then, is not her belief system per se, but her attitude about her belief system, and about belief systems in general.  Apatheists are comfortable viewing religion as a personal preference and they do not get caught up in the details of different perceptions of God, or a lack thereof.  Apatheists are not anti-religion; they just don’t care enough about it to want to insert themselves in the religious lives of others.  As I understand the concept, apatheists would end up at one end of a continuum of religious attitudes, the other end of which would hold evangelical fundamentalists of many stripes, those people who not only follow the cut-and-dried answers of their rigid belief systems, whether they be Christian or Islamic or even atheistic, but who expect others to agree with them or suffer the consequences (hell, jihad, or intellectual insignificance, as the case may be).  

 

On the surface, apatheism sounds like a good idea, and compared to the rigidity of fundamentalism, it is definitely a cultural improvement.  Certainly most of us would agree that, throughout recorded history, enormous amounts of damage have been done by humans wound too tightly in their own religious zeal.  An increase in the number of people who are committed to more relaxed religiosity, who do not see it as their religious duty to separate the saved from the unsaved, the sheep from the goats, the pure and holy heterosexuals from the wicked and evil homosexuals, just to name one currently pertinent example, can’t be anything but good, right?  The rise of apatheism, then, could be seen as a welcome indication that more and more people are not taking religion so seriously and frankly, in a world where those holding fanatical religious views can put entire countries on the defensive, it’s about time.

 

So, on the one hand, I appreciate Rauch’s celebration of the apatheists out there, folks like himself who can see that their perspectives are inherently limited…and that others can have equally valid “nonviolent, non-coercive” theological viewpoints that may or may not inform one’s own. After all, no matter what form our perception of the divine might take and whatever way we may choose to describe it, there is far more mystery than certainty when it comes to God; therefore different perspectives should not only be expected, they should be welcomed.  I also can go along with the idea that the world would be a better place if people were more at ease with religious difference.  I should clarify here what I mean by “at ease.” I don’t mean tolerance, which in its most common usage has an air of teeth-clenched condescension about it.  When we say we will tolerate someone, I think we are implying that we will put up with him even though we still think he is beneath us or not as in touch with the truth as we believe ourselves to be. Tolerance, in my opinion, is inherently closed off, not curious about difference, and therefore has more in common with the fundamentalist pole of religious attitudes than the apatheist pole. The ease I’m talking about comes from a sense of humility…a sense of humility that encourages us to attempt to develop mutual respect for and understanding of another’s beliefs…even if we must agree to disagree.

 

On the other hand, though, the more consideration I give to this idea of apatheism, the more concerned I become.  Before I go much further, you should know that I really identify with the apatheists; so the critique of apatheism I will offer in this sermon is as much a critique of myself as it is of anyone else.  At many times in my life I would have easily identified as an apatheist, had I known the term, because my parents, whether they intended to or not, raised me as one.  At the weekly services in the Methodist and Presbyterian churches of my youth, I stood beside my mother, who took communion and recited the creeds, and my father who not only didn’t recite the creeds, but also oftentimes didn’t even sing the hymns.  As a result, from an early age, I learned that different belief systems could coincide…even get along…and that it didn’t make much difference what I or anyone else believed about God.  It’s no surprise then, when I turned 18, that I did what many of my peers did, and probably some of you, too:  I avoided religion all together, thereby fully embracing what I now know was my apatheism.  I didn’t walk away from organized religion angry at the church, or angry with God…how could I be angry when I wasn’t even sure what I believed?  I walked away because I didn’t care one way or the other, and my youthful religious apathy fit me just fine.  As a side note, you may find it interesting to know that, according to a recent study, at least 1/3 of Americans share a similar relaxed attitude toward religion, as evidenced by their declaration that they never go to church or synagogue.  Most of these people say they believe in God, however differently they perceive him, her or it; essentially, they just don’t care enough to want to go to church.   By my count, that’s a lot of apatheists!

 

When I first discovered Unitarian Universalism, I confess I was mostly drawn by what I perceived to be its institutional apatheism (though I wouldn’t have used that term at the time). The initial information I received about UUism assured me that my individual journey and my “free and responsible” search for truth and meaning would be respected, wherever that journey might lead.  It was clear that UUs would do their best to leave room for those of different religious perspectives…even those who have trouble with the notion of religion at all, believing that, as we are wont to say, the questions are more important than the answers.  I delighted in the idea that I could gather with others to celebrate life and consider its limitless mysteries without having to subscribe to someone else’s vision of the divine.  Understand, I didn’t mind hearing what other people thought about God; I just didn’t want to be expected to believe the same things they did about something that was inherently too much of a mystery to fully comprehend.  The good news was that in a UU setting, I didn’t have to.  I knew there were general principles that most people in the church claimed to affirm and promote; after all, I could read them in the front pages of the hymnal and on the little wallet cards I picked up on the visitor table. But these struck me, at first anyway, as innocuous truisms that were not all that difficult to accept.  More intriguing to me was the list of the sources from which Unitarian Universalists claimed to draw:  the wisdom of different cultures and religions, science, ethics, literature, philosophy, and so on.  I also appreciated the open acknowledgement of the religious pluralism of our world.  In fact, in my first UU church, The Community Church of New York, banners featuring symbols of the world’s great religions were all prominently displayed in the sanctuary, and the first Sunday School curriculum I helped teach not long after I joined was “Faith across the street,” the program in which the children and their adult teachers visit the worship services of other religious institutions.  This visiting other churches stuff was incredible to me, almost too good to be true.  From the start, I had the impression that the entire Unitarian Universalist movement was based in the understanding that each member could choose her own religious path as she felt internally compelled to do so, without coercion or even strong persuasion from fellow members or ministers. Therefore, other than the fact that people actually were encouraged to come to church each week, the UU approach to religion seemed to be an apatheist’s dream.  I fit right in.

 

Over the years, however, I learned that the living tradition of Unitarian Universalism, a tradition over 200 years in the making, is about far more than apatheism.  In fact, the most important figures in our denomination’s history were people who were anything but disinclined to care about religion (either their own or the religion of others).  Indeed, these people invested themselves enough in their religious perspectives to not just articulate their theologies, different though they may have been, but to be able to act on them…to challenge themselves to participate in the world accordingly. These were people who took the time to intimately get to know what they believed, to never stop growing their convictions and refining their passions in the fires of thought…people who made it a spiritual practice to hold their own beliefs up against the light of other religious perspectives and who translated their Unitarian and/or Universalist faith into something that was much greater than a simple place holder…much greater than zero. From the anti-Calvinist preachers of universal salvation, John Murray and Hosea Ballou to the transcendentalist cultural and literary icon Ralph Waldo Emerson; from the devoted abolitionists Theodore Parker and Octavious Brooks Frothingham to early feminists like Margaret Fuller and leaders of the women’s suffrage movement such as Olympia Brown; from A. Powell Davies, who spoke out against the witch hunts of the McCarthy era, to James Reeb, who was killed while marching for civil rights in Selma, Alabama in the 1960s, Unitarians and Universalists throughout history have not shied away from unpopular positions that question or challenge the status quo. This is the legacy with which we have been left.  And this legacy goes far beyond what I perceive to be the easy indifference of apatheism.  It is a legacy that reminds us that our UU churches are more than just holding tanks for individual differences; they are places of inspiration that exist to remind us that it matters what we believe and how we live out those beliefs in the world.

 

As I have pondered the concept of apatheism this week, I’ve come to see that I’ve moved away from it as a descriptor for my own beliefs because I now realize that there is too much at stake to be indifferent about matters of religion. 

 

I recognize that I can’t be an apatheist because, while I don’t wish to deny your individual perceptions of the God you may follow, I do care and am affected by what you think the God you may follow feels about me, my friends and companions, and this earth we share. 

 

I need to be something more than indifferent, for example, if your God is telling you to discriminate against, withhold civil rights from, or persecute people simply based on their gender or sexual orientation, class, race, or politics.

 

I need to be something more than indifferent if your God requires you to support wide-ranging censorship or the disregard of scientific fact in favor of creationism.

 

I need to be something more than indifferent if your God requires you to support unfair distribution of income or privilege.

 

Or if your God sanctions misuse of the planet or doesn’t question a lack of environmental responsibility.

 

Or if your God is calling upon you to take up a crusade or holy war against another people, whether the facts support this crusade or not.

 

My ever-evolving Unitarian Universalist faith has helped me see that in all of these cases, and many more, I need to be something more than indifferent, something more than apatheistic.  That is the gift and the challenge of this liberal religious faith we share…a faith that sees divine intervention not as something that comes from without, but from within.  A faith that, as our reading this morning claimed, “requires discovering what we believe about who we are, where we are, and what we’re trying to do/be” and that “involves reviving those convictions every day in the face of people and events that seem to derogate and devalue all that we believe.”  A faith that may enable us to start from zero, but that asks more of us than we might have ever imagined when we first wandered into a UU church.

 

So now that you are here, what is this faith asking of you?

And what are you willing to give in return?  After all, “zero is important. But by itself it doesn’t add up to very much.”

 

Closing Words (Rev. William E. Gardner)

“We all have two religions: the religion we talk about and the religion we live.  It is our task to make the difference between these two as small as possible.”

 

 © 2004 Rev. Mark Stringer, Minister, First Unitarian Church of Des Moines.