SERMON: "Calvin's England"
Rev. Paul Beedle
September 30, 2007
MEDITATION: words of James Martineau (1805-1900)
Let any true man go into silence; strip himself of all pretense, and selfishness, and sensuality, and sluggishness of soul; lift off thought after thought, passion after passion, till he reaches the inmost depth of all; remember how short a time and he was not at all; how short a time again, and he will not be here; open his window and look upon the night, how still its breath, how solemn its march, how deep its perspective, how ancient its form of light; and think how little he knows except the perpetuity of God, and the mysteriousness of life: - and it will be strange if he does not feel the Eternal Presence as close upon his soul as the breeze upon his brow; if he does not say, "O Lord, art thou ever near as this, and have I not known thee?"- if the true proportions and the genuine spirit of life do not open on his heart with infinite clearness and show him the littleness of his temptations and the grandeur of his trust. He is ashamed to have found weariness in toil so light, and tears where there was no trial to the brave. He discovers with astonishment how small the dust that has blinded him, and from the height of a quiet and holy love looks down with incredulous sorrow on the jealousies and fears and irritations that have vexed his life. A mighty wind of resolution sets in strong upon him and freshens the whole atmosphere of his soul, sweeping down before it the light flakes of difficulty, till they vanish like snow upon the sea. He is imprisoned no more in a small compartment of time, but belongs to an eternity which is now and here. The isolation of his separate spirit passes away; and with the countless multitude of souls akin to God, he is but a wave of his unbounded deep. He is at one with Heaven, and hath found the secret place of the Almighty.
SERMON: I heard on the radio this week an interview [1] with a fellow who's written a book called Shopping for God: How Christianity Went From In Your Heart To In Your Face. The author's name is James Twitchell, and what he talked about was how megachurches have affected denominations and small churches. He characterized megachurches as being like Wal-Mart, with a huge efficient delivery system that just takes over the church market – he says, “No money is wasted, everything that happens in the megachurch stays in the megachurch.” Which is what they say about Las Vegas, you know, so I think maybe he has an opinion about megachurches. He says what megachurches have done is commandeered the rock concert: they aim to thrill. He also compares megachurches to shopping malls, saying there's little difference between them (hence the title of his book: Shopping For God). He says their effect on denominations is that now denominations are undertaking big marketing campaigns and have learned “all kinds of language that only marketers used to know.” Rather than reach out to evangelize out of their faith tradition, they're hiring agencies. (By the way, the Unitarian Universalist Association is launching a marketing campaign this week – you'll see it in TIME magazine and on time.com.) And small churches, he says, “are dropping like flies ... they disappear at the rate of about eight a day.” Like smaller retailers do wherever Wal-Mart builds a store.
Now, I have friends who keep urging Unitarian Universalists to learn from these megachurches. One of them is my colleague Ken Brown, the District Executive of the UUA's Pacific Southwest District, which includes Arizona, southern California, and yes, Las Vegas. What Ken points out is that if we want to reach people with the message of our faith – and I hope we do – then we have to use the channels that people are using to connect with others in their daily lives, and we have to speak the language that is current in our culture. We need to keep up with the way young people communicate and experience the world through their cellphones and computers. And we do have a consumer culture, so we do need to market. “Shopping” is more than an activity in our culture, it's a metaphor and a worldview, isn't it? Otherwise why would people buy bottled water in such volume, and in such small bottles? Megachurches have the resources to apply the “shopping” metaphor to religion. And, as Twitchell points out in his book, they're very efficient at it. One of their big successes is that they get hospitality right. And they develop and package their adult faith development classes very smartly, too. So there are things we can learn from megachurches, and probably from Wal-Mart.
But here's the nut of it: when your marketing gets people to come, you have to meet their needs to keep them coming. Did you hear the story this week about Wal-Mart cutting back on customer service? They took the customer service phone number off their website, and now it points people to a self-help page. Everybody's always said that Wal-Mart's success is about low prices and low wages. But think of all those low-paid folks who stand by the door and greet you when you go into the store. I think Wal-Mart's success must owe something to their level of customer service. I think that's a basic tenet in economics, that businesses succeed when they provide value. And that labor adds value. I would predict that when customers are given as little value as Wal-Mart's employees, Wal-Mart will have less success. Megachurches know that, even if Wal-Mart doesn't, and that's why they grow. Their members and visitors consistently have their needs met in a way they find satisfactory.
I tell you all that as a way to frame the development of Unitarianism in England. [2] Does that surprise you?
For Wal-Mart, substitute the Anglican Church. For Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, substitute King Henry VIII. For quite narrow reasons – Walton wanted low prices, Henry wanted a divorce – each founded his organization. Actually, English kings had been trying to limit the power of the Roman Church in England for 400 years: Henry's divorce was just the straw that broke the camel's back. His father had brought peace to England after the eighty-year turmoil of the Wars of the Roses, which had started because of rival claims to the throne. Henry felt it was vital to have a male heir, and thus a smooth succession, to keep the peace. The Pope's reluctance to grant him a divorce – because it would offend Henry's wife's family and cause political difficulties for the Pope – highlighted the Church's power in England. It was like Wal-Mart, coming in from out of town and limiting local people's influence in their own community. So Henry took over management of the local Wal-Mart. He made himself head of the Church of England.
His intention was to keep the English church pretty much the same as it was. After all, he had published a book refuting Martin Luther's reforms, and been named “Defender of the Faith” for it by the Pope. What he wanted was a church that wouldn't block his goals, and would help keep the peace. After some religious unrest under his successors Edward VI (who allowed further religious reform) and Mary (who tried to re-establish the Catholic Church), the Church of England was set up along Henry's lines by Queen Elizabeth. It did develop its own doctrine – known as the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion – but emphasis was laid upon uniformity in the form of worship of congregations, not uniformity in the beliefs of individuals. There were cases of persecution and execution for heresy in England, but these were exceptions to a trend toward tolerance. Over time this trend was articulated and cultivated, and came to be called “latitudinarianism” – individuals should be allowed latitude to interpret the language and forms of the uniform worship in ways that satisfied them.
We should note how different this situation is from that in Transylvania and Poland, where Unitarianism had flowered in Henry VIII's lifetime. Transylvania was on the border between Christian and Muslim civilizations. Its king or queen – when it had its own monarch – ruled without great power over a religiously diverse people and had to take care that religious conflict in the country would not invite a neighboring ruler to invade. Queen Isabella of Transylvania was Catholic, but upheld religious tolerance. Poland was governed by a parliament of princes, each sovereign in his territory. None of them was powerful enough to dominate the others or to enforce religious practice beyond his own estate, so religious tolerance held among the princes, and for the people if it pleased their prince. Unitarians in Transylvania organized with their weak king's support; Unitarians in Poland thrived under a prince who protected them and built them their own town of Rakow.
In England, Unitarians could have their private views if they didn't disturb the forms of public worship with them, and they didn't go out of their way to alarm anybody with them. If it was within the ability of their neighbors to tolerate them, they would not be harrassed. That was English culture. Then along came King Charles I, who didn't want to share power with Parliament and who, folks feared, would bring back the Roman church. His attitude provoked the English Civil War, and brought about the era of Calvin's England. The Puritans who took control were Presbyterians – they believed the church should be governed by elders rather than ruled by bishops. They wanted to reform religious doctrine, to purify it of errors that crept in after Constantine married Christianity to the Roman state. They disestablished the Church of England – allowed it to exist, but separated it from the state. And the man remembered in history as “the father of British Unitarianism,” John Biddle, was spared persecution by none other than Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan Lord Protector.
How different was Calvin's England from Calvin's Geneva! In part the difference is due to the trend toward religious toleration that was already seeded in England's national culture. And in part it was due to the absence of Calvin himself. Calvin became so intolerant in Geneva – even burning heretics at the stake like the Inquisition did: he caused the early Unitarian thinker Michael Servetus to be burned in Geneva – because of the power he had there. He alienated a great many people because of his personality and temperament, but he provided needed intellectual leadership to Geneva's religious reforms. The town council banished him once, and found they couldn't do without him. And they found it difficult to control or tame him after they had invited him back. He gained the power to shape the limits of religious reform and to persecute and sometimes to destroy those who opposed him. Had he been in England, it's very likely he would sooner or later have opposed the Puritans whom he inspired.
And it's very likely that in England he'd have been marginalized. The trend toward religious toleration continued in England, rolling over religious bigotry. Another Calvinist, William of Orange, became England's king and got Parliament to pass the Toleration Act in 1689. It excluded Catholics (because Catholics were still fomenting political rebellion) and deniers of the Trinity (because to deny the Trinity was still an idea too novel and scary), but it put the trend toward toleration into law. After the last Catholic rebellion – led by Bonnie Prince Charlie of Scotland – toleration was extended to Catholics. The laws against deniers of the Trinity were finally repealed in 1813. Prejudice against Unitarians migrated then from criminal law to property law: Unitarian congregations' right to their property and to trust funds they administered were challenged in court. The courts ruled against the Unitarians in 1842, but soon after Parliament passed the Dissenters' Chapels Act, which said if a group had property or a trust fund for more than twenty-five years, their rights to it could not be challenged. That closed the last channel of legal power by which the intolerant could persecute English Unitarians.
Calvin's England also created a way to give latitude not only to individuals, but also to congregations. Instead of persecuting congregations that did not conform to the language and forms of worship used in the Church of England, ways were found to regulate it. Non-Conforming groups – mostly Presbyterians – got together and created a separate standard they could subscribe to. It's called the Westminster Confession. Presbyterian churches in this country still use it. Congregations in England had the choice of subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England or to the Westminster Confession. In practice this meant that clergy had to affirm their subscription to one or the other when they were called to serve a congregation. And that's why Unitarian institutions were established in England. Certain members of the clergy didn't like to have to resubscribe – to state for the record their allegiance – to a creed in which they did not believe. In the end, the requirement to subscribe was dropped.
There were efforts both within the Church of England, and outside it, to create a Unitarian denomination. From within the Church of England came the Rev. Theophilus Lindsey, who in 1774 founded Essex Street Chapel in London. Benjamin Franklin, when he served as the American colonies' advocate in England, attended worship there – he was present at the first service. Essex Street Chapel used Lindsey's revision of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in its services. Lindsey believed that worship and prayer should be addressed to God the Father, not to Christ, and his revisions of the prayer book reflected that. At about the same time, James Freeman - influenced by Lindsey's writings - made similar revisions to the Book of Common Prayer at King's Chapel in Boston, and if you visit there you'll find the Unitarian Book of Common Prayer still in use. King's Chapel was the first Unitarian church in America. So it was possible that Unitarianism in England and America would turn out looking very Anglican. That's what Lindsey hoped for.
But the fact is that there were many more Dissenters developing Unitarian ideas than there were Church of England clergy. Among them was Joseph Priestley, who became the most influential Unitarian thinker in England before he came to America and founded a Unitarian church in Philadelphia. (So when Unitarianism arose in America as a movement that broke away from the established Congregational churches in Massachusetts, it had not only ties of correspondence and friendship with British Unitarians, but living examples of both English forms – the Anglican-like version in Boston, and the Dissenters' version in Philadelphia.) Priestley was a scholar of wide-ranging interests – he is best remembered for his work in chemistry as the discoverer of oxygen, but to him science was a hobby. His passion was theology, and he studied his way to a faith very much like that developed by the Polish Unitarians in Rakow. Some of their literature came into England via Holland, and either influenced or confirmed him in his beliefs. His form of worship service was like the Presbyterian, spare of ritual and intellectual.
The early English Unitarians were passionate about religious freedom and freedom from superstition and tyranny in general. They tended to support the American Revolution, and later the French Revolution, for that reason. But the French Revolution was widely perceived in England as a murderous and irreligious peasant revolt. As the public mood in England grew more and more fearful, Unitarians were denounced as enemies of church and state. Priestley's home was burned down by a mob because of these fears, which is why he left for Philadelphia. When Napoleon came to power, Unitarians tended to oppose going to war with him because they valued peace. This apparent contradiction – why didn't they oppose the tyrant Napoleon enough to support the war? – if you think about it, stems from the passion for both freedom and tolerance characteristic of Calvin's England.
Calvinist influence may account for the fact that early British Unitarians tended to be determinists – that is, they believed that human behavior and decisions are established by a chain of preceding events rather than human will and choice. Rationalist Presbyterians – valuing both reason and the doctrine of predestination – tended to become Unitarians. This habit of Unitarian thought fell away in the 19th century. James Martineau had something to do with that. [3] Martineau succeeded Priestley as the main shaper of Unitarian thought. He preached widely in Unitarian pulpits, published articles on religion in popular literary magazines, and was responsible for the education and training of British Unitarian ministers for most of the 19th century. He gave up determinism after reading a book by the German idealist, David Friedrich Strauss, called The Life of Jesus, and he became a Transcendentalist, acknowledging the influence of American Unitarians William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson on his thought. At the same time, he “gladly used the methods of historical criticism to understand the Bible ... rejoiced in the light that science shed on theology ... [and] investigated and spoke well of non-Christian religions.”
Regarding traditional Christian beliefs, British Unitarians taught the humanity of Jesus, the unity of God, and critical reading of the Bible. Martineau excelled at explaining how such teachings applied to the problems of ordinary people's daily life. Like early Unitarians, Martineau began by accepting the Bible as a religious authority that harmonized reason and faith; like them he later regarded reason as that authority; and in the end came to the view that conscience was the ultimate religious authority, calling it “the voice of God within.” He said he wanted a “Christianity purified of superstitions, a Church intent only on Righteousness, and a Social habit of justice and charity to all men.” The Puritans of Calvin's England would have recognized in that statement the soul of their movement.
Well, so what? I think that the soul of Calvin's England is still what we're about. Our understandings of the world and of ourselves and of religion have changed down the centuries, but we're still passionate about getting down to what's real and essential in life and faith, aren't we? And if every local community with a Wal-Mart took over its store like Henry VIII took over the Church of England, there'd still be plenty of work for us to do. The challenge we face today, in America at least and perhaps around the world, is how to worship in truth, how to live as love demands, and how to send forth peacemakers to do the work of justice in the face of false gods like The Market and that god who is called Freedom but whose real name is Power. You listen to our leaders in government and industry and see if you don't hear them praising and praying to one or both of those gods. Tolerance and dialogue, conscience and love are the foundations of our faith and the hope of the world.
Emerson said that what we are worshipping, we are becoming. Let us embody the values of our heritage, and not the values of the shopping mall or the rock concert, the market or the military. We might have to market ourselves in a market-driven culture. We might at times have to fight for freedom – it isn't free. But let us strive to become agents of dialogue and tolerance, freedom and peace, wisdom and love. Let us purify ourselves of falseness, commit to what we know in our hearts to be right, and pursue the ways peace, justice and compassion. For that is what our faith calls us to do. And it is what our hearts call us to do. Amen and amen.
[1] http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/09/25/holy_feeling_for_holey_wallet/
[2] Primary resources used are: David Bumbaugh, Unitarian Universalism: A Narrative History (Chicago: Meadville-Lombard Press, 2000); Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); and Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism In Transylvania, England and America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1945).
[3] Material on Martineau is based on http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/jamesmartineau.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Martineau; quotations are from the former (article by Frank Schulman).