Well, it is election week, and as Gerald Ford once said, if Abraham Lincoln were alive today, he’d be spinning in his grave. Raise your hands if you’ve ever heard of a man named Maher Arar. One person? Well, our media are doing a good job.
Maher Arar is a 33-year-old Canadian computer expert. He was taking a vacation in Tunisia, and heading back home to Ottowa. He was passing through a United States airport in New York City. Because he had once met a man named Abdullah Almalki, to buy ink-jet printer cartridges, his name was on a watch list. He was sent to Syria, in a secret detention center. He was missing from his family and from the Canadian government for nearly a year. He was beaten with cables on a periodic basis. He was told by those who were torturing him—I’m sorry, we don’t torture, we do rendition—in the rendition process, he was told that tomorrow will be worse than today. He looked at the small cell in which he found himself for a year, without reference to a lawyer or to his own representation by the Canadian government, and he called it “my little grave.” Daily life in that place was hell, Arar said. By 2003, he was finally home. He was declared innocent by his government, and the Syrian government that had done the outsourcing. (We outsource torture.) He said, “I know that what I went through was just beyond imagination. I know the only way I will be able to move on is if I can find out what happened to me.” And if we can find out as a people what has happened to us.
In 1919, William Butler Yeats wrote a poem:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Is it true that the best lack conviction now? In a democracy, such tests come to us constantly. They are not over and done with just because the Declaration was signed a long time ago. Just because the Emancipation Proclamation is in our back pocket as a people, does not mean that the tests of democracy do not come with depressing regularity. In fact, they come every election cycle; and we have to ask ourselves, not just as citizens, but as spiritual beings, as spiritual people, how do we respond? How do we answer such a test?
It is an old Puritan tradition to preach the election sermon. I take it seriously. I am mindful of the IRS guidelines that tell me I cannot tell you how to vote; but I would never insult you by telling you how to vote. Leading Unitarian Universalists, it is said, is like herding cats. You don’t need to be told how to vote; I don’t want to do that. But the way we vote, and when we vote, it has its moral implications; and the ancient divines knew that. It’s not about who you vote for on Election Day. It’s about reasserting a moral center in the American dream, taking very seriously the words of Thomas Jefferson, who said, “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” Now this intersection of religion and politics of church and state is a very, very tricky thing. I can’t solve it in 20 minutes, and you know I can’t. But I do know one thing: that our forebears talked about the gift of liberty from what they called Nature’s God, of the doctrine (and please excuse the male imagery) that all men are created equal, and that all are “endowed by their Creator with certain inherent and unalienable rights.” This is more than just political science; it is essentially, at its depth, a political and spiritual vision of unbelievable importance to the world. Yes, our forebears took seriously the reason and doctrine of the Enlightenment. But they took, as well, a deeper spiritual insight. If it was really true—unlike all world history to that point—that you could base a society on the doctrine that all are equal, then surely there was some spark of equality that was imbued there, that we carry within us. You are not granted this right; you are not given this by your betters; a democracy functions because of an inherent spiritual insight that we are all equal, because we are all children of God.
Now, that opens up an interesting question. Is it true, as some politicians assert, as some divines from their pulpits assert, that we are a Christian nation? And the answer to that is no. The Supreme Court has been clear on it, and in every aspect the Founding Fathers and Mothers were very clear. We are not a Christian nation. We are a nation deeply imbued with Jewish and Christian values; but they had an opportunity to enshrine this in the Constitution and in the Bill of Rights, and in subsequent doctrines that flow across three hundred years of history; and at every turn it has been resisted, because in the end we are all equal. It does not matter what religion you bear, or no religion; you are still equal. Jefferson, who talked about life and liberty as a gift from God, was also the same man who sat up late in his White House, taking the Gospel accounts and scissoring them, taking out all the miracles and doctrines he felt he couldn’t agree with, so he could produce what he called a pure and reasonable Gospel—the Jefferson Bible that you can buy at any bookstore. On another occasion, he said, :
Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them, and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves priests of Jesus.
No, he did not believe we were a Christian nation. Washington wrote to a Hebrew congregation in 1790, assuring his Jewish countrymen that America “gives bigotry no sanction.” As well, in 1797, the founders were engaged in a bit of a diplomatic to-do with Tripoli, a Muslim nation; and in the resolution, these words are written, with not one Senator of the time disagreeing: “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
So what we have here is an interesting doctrine. We believe that the essence of democracy has its basis in a stunning and stirring spiritual vision, but this spiritual vision does not belong to one religion, and it never has. Indeed, it must reach out and contain a multitude. That’s what democracy is. Lincoln called us “God’s almost-chosen people.” I love that phrase. He was once running against a Methodist evangelist named Peter Cartwright, and he sat in the back as the evangelist was going on and on about who was going to go to hell; and everyone stood up saying they were going to go to heaven, except for Lincoln. Cartwright saw this, and he said, “Mr. Lincoln, I inquire of you, where are you going?” Lincoln then did rise, and he said, “Well, Mr. Cartwright, I’m going to Congress.” There is no temptation for people quite as grave as to believe that you have God in your hip pocket, to be part of the Chosen People.
A book that profoundly influenced me this week as I wrote this sermon was by Andrew Sullivan, called The Conservative Soul. It was a very powerful and moving book; it reminded me of my own conservative years, from junior high to my freshman year in college, where I read William F. Buckley and Edmund Burke and others, and I believed deeply that there was something to the conservative vision to conserve, to preserve. My vision of course changed along the way, but Sullivan reminded me of what I had so admired and been drawn by, into that tradition. I later did draw away from it, because I began to notice that the conservative movement had had a lot to answer for in the civil rights revolution. I had used that as my lodestar, my centering point, and then I went and looked beyond.
But Sullivan concludes that the real threat to the conservatism that he loves is not liberalism, but a new and what he calls virulent strain of conservatism that has transmogrified into something that he calls fundamentalism. It’s not just religious fundamentalism; it is a political fundamentalism that has somehow twisted its DNA to contain a religious ideology quite as powerful as its political ideology, a kind of false veneer that is more truly what that he calls “theo-cons” than a political philosophy, and the more dangerous for that. He says true conservatism understands that human beings are limited creatures, and therefore if you are going to set up a government, you probably want that government to have the least amount of power over your daily life: the way you spend your money, the way you make decisions, and the way the government itself is set up, so that no one person gains too much power. And so therefore, in the forebears’ conception of how we were to run ourselves, there would be a judicial branch, a congressional branch, and an executive branch, and an innate sense of checks and balances.
Well, this is not just high-school political science. There was actually in the forebears’ thought process a theological notion at work, which was that human beings make mistakes, that they must be checked at all times. No one should have too much power over your life. And he said this was essentially a conservative vision, and it made sense. It made sense because of certain spiritual assumptions. The forebears had seen a world in Europe torn by religious doctrines. They understood what it was like when the king said, “I bear all the power of God.” They saw it, and they saw what happened, and they decided they would construct something new: something that rested not on virtue, but on this radical doctrine of the pursuit of happiness—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not virtue, not God, but your happiness.
They presumed that most of the citizens would be Christian, but not all; not then, and not now. And within these prudent limits, they had a stunning vision of how it was that we were to be a people together; that these checks and balances were to hold us together as equals. But we are now living in a time of fundamentalist politics, and the paradox of people who say they want to keep government out of your life, but are only too happy to move into your bedroom—this transmogrification to understand no longer that government is the engine of the pursuit of happiness, but now of something new, of rectitude, of righteousness, of right beliefs, and a vision of normalcy. And a vision of believing in freedom and limits and checks and balances has moved inexorably into a grand program that is called by some the re-moralization of America. And then the old checks and balances were being broken down. Instead, now there was a new vision of constant reinforcement. It wasn’t just the presidency that was being shorn of its old limits and constraints; it was the entire structure of government itself, reinforced by the judiciary and rubber-stamped by Congress, and even the Fourth Estate of the media. They all were on the same page, but that page had very little resemblance to the Declaration’s assumption of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
No, instead of the pursuit of happiness, consider what the old checks and balances were called by the conservative thinker Richard Neuhaus. He had three definitions of the old vision of government. He called it (1) the culture of death, (2) secular monism, and (3)—and this one is a beaut—perverse pluralism. Have you ever heard that phrase? Perverse pluralism. Well, what’s perverse about pluralism? Can you define democracy that does not contain pluralism? Pluralism in the old conservative sense is now seen as a danger to the new agenda of the re-moralization project; and there’s no more trust in people’s freedom; now, your freedom has to be earned by your good behavior. Pluralism is seen as perverse. The old limits of government are now replaced, fueled by theological certainty and an undergirding that is more and more comfortable with what used to be called big government. The President of the United States went and signed a bill for the life of Terri Schiavo, one person, despite her spouse’s wishes. This is where we are today. Frankly, this is not a partisan issue, because Democrats enthusiastically voted for virtually all of the doctrines I’m talking about today.
This is not about Republican and Democrat; it’s not about specific candidates. I wish it were, but it is not. It is a profound virus at the heart of the American dream. And so, we have become impatient with government limits. People are to be kept alive despite their spouses’ wishes. Babies are to be born no matter what the circumstances (and look what’s happening in South Dakota). Marriages are to be federally defined and politicized; and we saw how well that worked in the 1950s with laws against interracial marriage. And there is the scrapping of something called habeas corpus, which goes all the way back to Runnymede. Wars of choice are now presented as battles of good and evil. What was seen as a preventive invasion of another nation is seen and sold as one battle in a never-ending war upon evil itself, a war that by its own definition can never be fully won. And if you’re fighting evildoers, there are two assumptions: (1) that you are the good-doers, and (2) that the war will never end, and the limits need not go away. We are not facing people who disagree and resist us; we are, it is said, facing evil itself; and if it’s evil that you are fighting, the old conservative niceties of checks and balances no longer matter. Alberto Gonzales describes the Geneva Conventions, in the face of what is now the famous torture memo, as “quaint.” That’s the word he used in the memo—“quaint.”
You know, ministers learn along the way that you minister to people wherever they are along a political spectrum. That’s just the truth of it. You just learn to love and care about people, no matter what their political views are. And hence, in 27 years of ministry, I’ve become a raging moderate; and in writing this sermon I’ve realized my two greatest heroes are a Tory leader named Winston Churchill, and a Republican president named Lincoln. So here’s that conservative proposal. It isn’t who you vote for that concerns me. It is, in fact, that spirit of democracy that is so perilously close to being tortured itself. Lincoln was right:
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history …. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.
And so it is. The test keeps coming back. The test stands before us. It’s not about liberalism or conservatism. It’s about the essence of who it means, and what it means, to be an American—of what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Amen, and so be it.
