One of my favorite lines is from the movie “A League of Their Own.”  When Geena Davis complains to her coach, Tom Hanks, that playing baseball has gotten too hard,  Hanks replies, “It’s supposed to be hard.  If it weren’t hard, everyone would do it.  It’s the hard that makes it great.”  We religious liberals are in a league of our own too, and it sure is hard sometimes.  It’s especially hard when a country is caught up in culture wars with religious conservatives in one camp and non-religious liberals in the other.  But I think religious liberalism is a difficult path under any conditions, and that’s the main reason why Unitarian Universalism is such a small denomination.  We have to steer a course between two opposing dangers: the idolatries that have long plagued organized religion, and the modern secularism that claims to make religion itself superfluous.

Religion tries to identify and connect with something worthy of being held sacred.  This is a noble quest, but we would be wise to regard it as a never-ending journey.  The trouble with thinking that we have completed the journey is that we sanctify a particular creed, or book, or prophet, or institutional structure.  We take something impermanent and imperfect and declare it to be above criticism, and we persecute whoever would dare to suggest any deviations or improvements.  The history of religion is filled with such idolatries, and the result is a cycle of prophetic upheaval and priestly orthodoxy.  Jesus was killed largely because he challenged the religious establishment of his time, but his followers went on to create many new religious establishments in his name.  Those religious establishments in turn sanctioned many of the customs and institutions of their cultural milieus, such as monarchy and slavery.  The religious endorsement of particular political and economic regimes—and even the violence employed to impose them—shows how easily the religious impulse can be corrupted.

The wisest of religious teachers have tried to see beyond such idolatries.  Even in the most theistic of traditions, some have acknowledged that no god conceived or described by humans can be the true God; our feeble human conceptions are at best approximations of an ever-elusive sacred reality.  Karen Armstrong has written: “Some of the most eminent Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians and mystics insisted that God was not an objective fact, was not another being, and was not an unseen reality like the atom, whose existence could be empirically demonstrated….It was even misleading to call God the Supreme Being, because that simply suggested a being like us, but bigger and better….All traditions went out of their way to emphasize that any idea we had of God bore no absolute relationship to the reality itself, which went beyond it.”

Liberal religion, especially a non-creedal religion such as Unitarian Universalism, is less susceptible to idolatry than conservative religion.  We have too long and distinguished a record of embracing what others considered heresy to succumb to rigid orthodoxy now.  But liberal religion may be more susceptible to the threat from the other side, which is secularism.  We can become so disillusioned by the idolatries of organized religion that we give up the spiritual quest altogether.  We can respond to the proliferation of false gods by concluding that nothing is divine.  We can react to the human tendency to create sacred cows by fearing to regard anything as sacred.  The most secular UUs may cut themselves off from even the wisest of religious teachers, assuming that they have nothing of value to say.  As a result, they may get their impressions of religion from more superficial media sources, which often confirm their suspicion that religion is nothing but hokum and propaganda.  Creationists trying to keep evolution out of the schools get headlines, while the best theological work goes unnoticed.

 “Some of my best friends” are secular humanists, and my differences with them are often subtle.  Religious liberals and secular liberals often find themselves agreeing on issues of personal ethics and public policy.  Liberals of both kinds have a lot of faith in humanity, believing that humans working together can ameliorate conditions like poverty, war and injustice.  Where I think a religious worldview may have an advantage is in connecting human goodness to some larger, more fundamental goodness without which it couldn’t exist.  From a scientific perspective, free moral acts are deeply mysterious, if they exist at all, since science normally tries to explain the universe entirely in terms of chance and necessity (law).  Freedom and goodness are superfluous categories, whether we are explaining the actions of a dedicated doctor or those of a mechanical respirator.  How can we defend our belief in the inherent freedom and goodness of humanity if we view reality in general as too mechanical and deterministic to give rise to any such thing?  Frankly, I don’t think that faith in humanity makes a whole lot of sense except in the context of some larger faith.

This problem has mystified the most secularist and rationalist philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant.  In the more theoretical part of his philosophy, Kant denied that the existence of God could be known through any purely rational proof.  But in the more practical part, he argued that humans cannot make decisions without believing that we are free to make them, and without believing in some higher good that gives purpose to our actions without mechanically causing them.  What we call “God” is the ultimate source of that freedom and goodness, a source that we need to believe in in order for our moral actions to make any sense to ourselves.  This is sometimes called Kant’s “moral proof for the existence of God,” but he regarded it less as a proof than as an argument for faith in something that he couldn’t prove.  In the end, we all have to have faith in something, and a religious faith seems to me more coherent than a faith in a moral humanity existing incongruously in a universe devoid of purpose or value.

How should we discuss questions such as the one posed by one of our members recently, “Do you believe in a higher power?”  How can spiritual UUs and secular UUs make such discussions occasions for deepening our mutual understanding, and not just occasions for highlighting our divisions?  Both sides need to acknowledge the elusiveness of ultimate answers, and avoid any appearance of smug superiority.  Each side needs to understand what the other side is afraid of: the idolatries that have driven secularists away from organized religion, and the moral vacuum that has driven spiritualists to seek a religious anchor.  On one side, more religious UUs should appreciate how determined secularists are to avoid being snookered into worshipping any more false gods.  Even a phrase as innocuous as “higher power” can conjure up images of an Old Testament patriarch giving divine sanction to male chauvinism or war.   A liberal religious community has to be just as welcoming to skeptics as it is to believers.  Those who think that they have come farther than others in their spiritual journey might promote their spirituality through their own exemplary behavior, not through attacks on those they perceive as less spiritual than themselves.   On the other side, more secular UUs should appreciate that spiritual UUs are trying to deepen their understanding of the sacred.  They are willing to let go of old idolatries, but not to abandon everything of value in their religious heritage.  While they may welcome the help of skeptics in dethroning old gods, they do not appreciate an indiscriminate trashing of every religious idea and every expression of reverence, on the assumption that every discussion must come to a cynical conclusion.

If religious liberalism is to be more than a meaningless label, religious liberals need to find the common ground where faith can flourish without idolatry, and skepticism without irreverent secularism.  Hard yes, but “it’s the hard that makes it great.”