This is the text of a sermon, Survival and the Sacred, delivered to Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds on 26th February 2023
One of the most recurrent and decisive themes in the Hebrew bible is the need for the children of Israel to keep themselves apart from other nations, even though they lived cheek by jowl. Again and again you hear the prophets talking about the disaster that comes on the nation when they forget their distinct culture and start to adopt the ways of the other peoples in the land.
Put like that it sounds pretty oppressive, with our modern sensibilities about respect for different cultures. But then you come across passages like this in Leviticus where God says:
Leviticus 18: 21
This is in the middle of a long list of dos and don’ts, but the text returns to this in more detail two chapters later where it says:
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Say further to the Israelites:
“Any of the Israelites or of the aliens who reside in Israel who give any of their offspring to Molech shall be put to death; the people of the land shall stone them to death. I myself will set my face against them and will cut them off from the people, because they have given of their offspring to Molech, defiling my sanctuary and profaning my holy name. And if the people of the land should ever close their eyes to them, when they give of their offspring to Molech, and do not put them to death, I myself will set my face against them and against their family and will cut them off from among their people, them and all who follow them in prostituting themselves to Molech.
Leviticus 20: 1-5
Obviously, no one’s a cultural or ethical relativist when it comes to child sacrifice. In the same way today, no one is defending FGM - female genital mutilation, which is a long established custom in many cultures.
So, we all agree that respect for other cultures has its limits. There are rape cultures, misogynistic cultures, racist cultures - and we don’t find it morally complex to denounce them.
Imagine circumstances in which your family found itself in the midst of a culture where such things are considered normal. If we construct a scenario like that it becomes easier to appreciate the biblical concern about keeping the Israelites separate from the cultures around them .
Many parents will recognise the concern that their children are picking up ways that they don’t approve of.
It’s a prickly subject, this whole idea of keeping your family or your people separate from the culture around you.
What if you live somewhere where kids join gangs, carry knives, deal drugs, and so on? Of course you want to keep them away from all that.
But then we look at other situations where teenagers have to hide their sexuality, aren’t allowed to report abuse, or have extreme restrictions on them compared to their friends, and we can’t approve.
So, it’s not black and white. We want our young people to fit in with their peers and be happy doing so, but we also want them to have the same values as us, and sometimes this creates a real tension. So, if I, or any other Unitarian, tries to draw inspiration from the Biblical messages about hanging on to your values in an alien culture, we have to do it in a nuanced way.
Still, I do think there is a message for us. Because we Unitarians have taken on all sorts of ideas and beliefs and practices that don’t originate in Unitarianism, and it would do us good to reflect on whether this is always a good thing.
Very frankly, it seems that most of the theology, and the politics, and even some of the worship, in Unitarianism is imported. Now, to acknowledge that doesn’t mean that we necessarily disapprove of it. But Unitarianism is very open to outside influences. You might even say it is dominated by ideas and practices that have come from outside. That may be a good thing or a bad thing but it’s definitely how it is.
What is there that is distinctly Unitarian? Christians who don’t know us think we are defined by believing in the oneness of God and not believing in the Trinity. Would that it were so! That’s from the core of our history, but its not enshrined in our constitution and so where is that belief today? What else do we have that is distinct? Maybe Candles of Joy and Concern, some of our hymns.
But even within what we think of as Unitarian resources: what is there that is peculiar to British Unitarianism, that hasn’t been copied from the UUA in America? And by the way, there are Unitarians in Transylvania, Poland, India, the Czech republic, and Unitarian Christians in Nigeria, Pakistan and elsewhere. Why do we only copy what the Americans do?
What is a Unitarian? It’s hard to say, isn’t it? We don’t have a creed. The General Assembly of Unitarians & Free Christians has a constitution, but does that really describe who and what we are?
Now someone is going to say, wait a minute - Unitarians are so different from other churches. We’re totally on the margins. Yes, we are. We’re certainly different if you only compare us to other churches.
But even then it’s hard to say what exactly we are. When we tell people about Unitarianism we always describe Unitarianism in terms of what we don’t believe. We don’t believe that gay sex is a sin. We don’t believe that women should be subservient to men and so on. We’re against racism. We’re against lots of isms but what are we for?
And then we end up describing ourselves in terms of a list of causes that we support - but what does any of this have to do with being a religion?
In religious, spiritual terms - what is a Unitarian?
It worries me that we are only able to say what we are by saying what we aren’t. We need this Fundamentalist Christian bogeyman to point to and say that’s not us. Take that away and what are we left with? Can we say who we are and what we believe - not as individuals but as a body of believers?
I see Unitarianism defining itself in three sets of relations.
Firstly, we define ourselves against Christians, and against straw man Christians at that. We define ourselves negatively against Christianity.
Secondly, we define ourselves in relations to all the other world faiths, but not in opposition to them. We’re really positive about anything we can take from any other faith than Christianity, though in truth we don’t really embrace their core beliefs.
Isn’t that strange? We define ourselves against Christianity and in favour of every other religion - even when it’s clear that so much of the teaching of those religions is antithetical to our values. I wish we could be more consistent. I wish we could see the good in Christianity as much as we do in other faiths. I wish we could criticise other faiths as much as we criticise Christianity.
What’s the third relationship we define Unitarianism with? It’s with secular society, with all its values and causes and conflicts. We’re not separate from that at all. There’s no distance between what we believe and what the world out there believes. We’re so immersed in the thinking of secular Britain that it’s hard to even see the join.
Let’s look at this from the angle of all the Biblical authors, who worried about their religious and national culture being dissolved into the nations around them. I think they would say that whatever Unitarianism was, it has since been dissolved and merged into the belief systems of others. Our thought and action has become indistinguishable from the secular world, except for a sprinkling of religious language.
I say this from a particular position - because I am by conviction a Unitarian Christian. A seventeenth century movement known as Socinianism came up with a revolutionary, and literally Unitarian, reading of the Bible that I find compelling. I don’t just find it attractive. I believe it is a more authentic representation of Jesus and his message. And so I look at the history from Socinianism and Unitarian Christianity onward as the gradual dissolution of that core of distinctive beliefs. Like the Biblical authors despairing of the syncretism of Israel, I see a denomination that has absorbed so much from the outside while forgetting its own religious and cultural history and resources. So much so that it’s all but disappeared.
I’m concerned that the lack of clear identity and clear, distinct beliefs within this denomination is the major cause of its decline. And of course we’re declining, to the point of irrelevance. I get that we can’t go back to everyone being Christians, let alone Unitarian Christians. But then what are we?
Different chapels have different flavours. To stand a chance they need to turn that flavour into something much clearer and more distinct. This chapel is better placed than most with its creativity, its talent, its energy and engagement and its compassion. But even our most promising chapels need to get a stronger identity to really thrive.
Revival happens at the local level when a congregation develops a clear identity and set of beliefs. Visitors need to be able to see what we believe, not just what we don’t believe. And they must learn what you believe from how you worship and what you do, as much as from what you preach.
If we can only define ourselves in terms of social justice, then people will always wonder why on earth we need a church or a chapel to pursue these causes. Social Justice work alone cannot sustain a faith community. It’s futile for churches to pursue social justice without an underpinning faith as the motivating factor. Churches that do this are ineffective compared to real social justice organisations and they’re dead compared to real faith communities.
That’s why Jo is so right in what he says about the necessity of the sacred for our worshipping communities. We hear a lot about allyship, of being an ally to the marginalised. Well, it’s not just communities of people that get marginalised. Social customs, ideas and practices get marginalised too.
The sacred has been well and truly marginalised in our society, and we need to step up as allies to it. And doing so would be an act of allyship towards all those communities whose life and self-understanding is underpinned by their relationship to the sacred. Allying with the sacred will bring a certain amount of tension between you and the outside world, but would that really be such a bad thing? It might, actually, be the making of you.
Rodney Stark, a hugely influential Sociologist, developed 10 marks of successful religious movements. They’re all worth talking about, and I’ll happily talk about them if you invite me back. For today, though, there’s one mark of a successful religious movement that we need to be aware of more than the other nine. It’s what he called ‘medium tension’.
According to Stark’s research: the most successful religious movements have a moderate tension between their beliefs and the beliefs of the surrounding society.
The fundamentalists have way too much tension. Being a hard line fundamentalist puts extreme tension between you and wider society, and that’s why their churches fail.
Now, we certainly don’t suffer from this problem. Our problem is the lack of tension between our beliefs and those of wider society.
Someone says, ‘that’s not true. There are people in society who hate our values of diversity and inclusion’. True, but it misses the point. Medium tension means living your life slightly at odds with mainstream society. Lining up with tens of millions of fellow citizens, alongside mainstream institutions and even government departments and QUANGOS doesn’t count. It might be the right thing to do, but it involves no tension unless we do those things as the outflow of a spirituality that is slightly challenging to the way that our community and society thinks and lives.
The values, attitudes and beliefs prevalent within Unitarianism are so in tune with so much of wider society, especially in the cities, and among the young, that there is zero tension between us and them. We can’t style ourselves as outsiders and rebels when our values are being enshrined in school and university curriculums and in workplaces up and down the country.
There is no tension between us and the worldview that dominates secular life. That may be good. That may be commendable, but it’s lethal to the survival chances of faith communities.
The only thing that will give us that necessary medium tension is faith. Real faith.
You don’t have to be a Christian. You don’t have to be a conservative. You don’t have to be a Theist. But only the sacred will give you a degree of distinctiveness, of separation, of medium tension, relative to the world around you. So you really do need to make contact with the sacred and to stand on that ground. Because whether we like it or not, the evidence strongly suggests that it’s the only way we can make a go of it.
Which takes us back to the Biblical voices, screaming, imploring, begging their people not to allow their distinctive religious culture to be absorbed to the point that it disappears. They put it in polemical language with plenty of hyperbole. That’s because it’s not contemporary to the events being described. It’s being written by and for a people who have lost everything and gone into exile. It’s written to and for a people who are looking back and asking themselves where it all went wrong. That’s the question so much of the Bible is trying to answer.
They may sound like they’re calling for total separation but really they were just trying to move the dial back to the centre because the assimilation had gone too far and they saw their religious community disappearing. It was a real concern then and it’s a real concern today. These verses are a warning to us that we risk disappearing, and they are a resource from within our sacred tradition, imploring us not to let it happen.
We mustn’t let it happen. Take a stand for the sacred. Accept the tension that comes with it. Don’t be afraid of being different. Be afraid of not being different enough.
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