Freedom and Faith

Reading

As explained in the US government’s National Archives website:

“During the debates on the adoption of the Constitution, its opponents repeatedly charged that the Constitution as drafted would open the way to tyranny by the central government. Fresh in their minds was the memory of the British violation of civil rights before and during the Revolution. They demanded a “bill of rights” that would spell out the immunities of individual citizens. Several state conventions in their formal ratification of the Constitution asked for such amendments; others ratified the Constitution with the understanding that the amendments would be offered.

On September 25, 1789, the First Congress of the United States therefore proposed to the state legislatures 12 amendments to the Constitution that met arguments most frequently advanced against it. Articles 3 to 12, however, ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures, constitute the first 10 amendments of the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights.”

The first seven of those amendments are some of the best-known:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
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Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
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Amendment III
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
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Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
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Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
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Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
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Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Sermon

Freedom and Faith

A good friend of mine preached politics from the pulpit recently; she was disagreeing with US policy and practice toward Iraq, and two people in her liberal, long-time UU congregation walked out and resigned their membership on the spot. There was a lot of discussion in the following week about whether politics belong in the pulpit or not, especially since people often disagree hotly about political issues.

Politics are rarely comfortable when combined with a pulpit, but religion and politics have been bound together since the dawn of humanity. We see it in divine kingships of Asia and Babylonia, and city-states consulting the Delphi oracle regarding matters of state, and religious wars and persecution as state policy and in the teachings of Jesus regarding Rome and Israel, and in the life of the Buddha and the traditions of Confucianism and the work of Martin Luther King Jr. There’s nothing inherently wrong in the conjunction of religion and politics and there’s nothing inherently right either. The wrongness or rightness come according to us - how we honor and respond to that timeless connection.

Freedom is one of the elements at the nexus of that connection of religion and politics, because ‘freedom’ is a term as much religious as it is political. The whole concept, from being a slave to Christ as the Apostle Paul recommended in his epistles, to the modern popularity of Liberation Theology, grounded in the story of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, is fodder for religious consideration. It is also a religious value in Unitarian Universalism, where we hold up the right of each individual to engage in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

This religious concept, just as it is, as a religious concept, has important political implications. It is part of what compelled the eminent Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing to risk his pulpit and prestige at the end of a long and famous career, and come out against slavery. In doing this, he came out against many of his own congregants, wealthy Boston Brahmins with important business ties to slave-based industries in the south.

It is not one of Unitarian Universalism’s more proud moments in the history of our faith—it took a long time for one of our most important ministers to make up his mind and much of his hesitation was clearly about the effect his actions would have on the final chapters of his own life. But in the end he did the right thing, and in his last years of ministry, risked all that his life had added up to, because of this theological principle. People could, and did, defend slavery with all sorts of outrageous, loathsome arguments about ways that slaves were actually better off as slaves. But no one could counter the argument, among people who cared about this, that slaves were not able to follow a free path religiously - and that, of all things, was what finally brought Channing to the sticking point from which he wrested himself and Boston Unitarianism so finally. If there was no freedom for the soul, nothing could justify that—it was the ultimate value, and moved a number of people into the abolition movement.

Often, issues of the day have seemed more complex at the time than they do later. Freedom of the soul seems an extraordinary consideration nowadays, when compared to many other mundane, brutal, hellish aspects of slavery in our country and others, long ago and even now. But there’s no accounting for what moves anyone, not even any of us gathered this morning, to a better understanding of what is right and wrong, what is reasonable and what is beyond the pale, what is security and what is an untenable loss of a freedom as necessary to the soul as it should be to the state.

This is where the issue of balance comes in - for issues that are as complex and hotly contended now as slavery was then. All of this may be pitifully clear 150 years from now, but currently in our country, it is clearly not and we cannot pretend it is, or make it better by simply dismissing arguments with which we disagree.

The Rev. Dr. William Schulz preached recently in the Summit, NJ UU church. He is a past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and is now executive director of Amnesty International, USA. His sermon was called “Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights.” He preached about the attempt to balance the right to security and the right to liberty.

Schulz pointed out in his sermon, many of the conflicts around civil liberties right now are about the conflict of two or more values. He said:

“the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the premier articulation of the fundamental rights that any human being may claim, contains more than 40 of them. What happens when one of those 40 comes in conflict with another? Article 3 of the Universal Declaration provides that “everyone has the right to … security of person.” Being safe from terrorism is not just a nice idea; it is our right as human beings, every bit as important a right as any other. Indeed, some might well argue it is our most important right since, if we are dead, we can hardly claim any of the others.

The U.S. government has contended that in some cases, the release at a public trial of sensitive intelligence information about terrorism might jeopardize the public’s safety. If the government’s claims are true, how do we reconcile the “security right” of Article 3 with the “liberty right” of Article 10 that insists that those charged with crimes must receive a “public hearing”?

Fortunately, the Universal Declaration provides us some guidance in deciding priorities among competing rights. Article 29 declares that rights may be limited to secure “public order and the general welfare in a democratic society,” to protect us against, say, terrorism. This is the international equivalent of Justice Arthur Goldberg's famous remark that, for all its guarantees of freedom, “The U.S. Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

The critical question then becomes “How many limitations are necessary?” If we accept the U.S. government's position, the answer to the question is “Many.” If we accept the opinion of many human rights analysts, the answer is “Few.” But the government has not stopped to consider the full implications of the compromise of human rights, not least for the success of the war on terror. And the human rights community has not provided an adequate strategy for fighting terrorism while still maintaining optimal respect for human rights.

A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI arrested a man named Cheik Melainine ould Belai, the 20-year-old son of a Mauritanian diplomat. Ould Belai's English was limited and the officials provided no translator, and so for more than a month he was shuttled between detention centers from Kentucky to Louisiana, often without access to a lawyer or his family. Then, 40 days after he was apprehended, ould Belai was released. He had never been told why he had been detained, but within a short time he was deported. Before he left, however, ould Belai had one last thing to say: “I used to like the United States,” he observed, “now I don’t understand it. I was going to learn English but now I don't want to ever speak it again.”

The question we must ask ourselves is this: “Are we safer for having mistreated thousands of Muslim residents, or is alienating people who had previously looked upon the United States with admiration and respect, who had wanted to emulate our traditions and learn the English language, a sure-fire way to make the world more dangerous?”

And, similarly, every time we violate rights here at home, we make it harder for moderate Muslims, to say nothing of our European allies, to stand with us. The Office of the Inspector General has confirmed what Amnesty International had been saying all along about the post-9/11 detainees, like Cheik ould Belie—that they had been unduly denied access to family and lawyers, manhandled and treated discriminatorily. The U.S. government is violating the Geneva Conventions by refusing to allow a “competent tribunal” to determine whether prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are “prisoners of war” or, as the government unilaterally and arbitrarily contends, “unlawful combatants.” And did you ever think you would see the day when two U.S. citizens, Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, would be denied the most fundamental rights in the U.S. justice system, the right to know what you are charged with and the right to legal counsel? Or that a man on trial for his life, Zacarias Moussaoui, would be refused the right to question the one man who might exonerate him? Or that foreign students studying in this country would be singled out for registration solely on the basis of their ethnicity? Or that American interrogators would unapologetically engage in torture, as they are alleged by both the New York Times and the Washington Post to be doing with prisoners held at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan? Practices such as these turn white the hair of even our most ardent Muslim supporters, hand fodder to our adversaries, sacrifice the sympathy of the undecided and in the long run make not for a safer world but a more frightening one.

Terrorism is the antithesis of respect for human rights. To stop terrorism, it may be necessary to adjust some of our understanding about rights, at least for a time. We may need, for example, to reconcile ourselves to national identification cards or more cameras in shopping malls just as we have to closer inspections at airports. Human rights advocates have an obligation to work with government, not just always criticize it, to find the right balance between security and liberty.

But at the same time, government needs to recognize that the protection of fundamental human rights—the right to due process; the right not to be tortured; the rights to food and housing—are pathways to a safer world, a key element in the struggle to defeat terrorism. You don't stop terrorism by sitting on your bayonet; you stop it by using that bayonet wisely, fairly and sparingly. That is a lesson the United States seems not yet to have learned.”

Unitarian Universalism has a long history of our allying ourselves with civil liberties. When Daniel Ellsberg was looking for someone to publish the Pentagon Papers, only our own Beacon Press was willing to take the chance—and a chance it was. Among other things, for years after, Beacon underwent exhaustive IRS audits. There was Ellery Schempp who as a Unitarian youth in Pennsylvania, was the plaintiff in the US Supreme Court case Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), the landmark lawsuit that led to the decision to prohibit mandatory prayer in public schools.

As our current UUA president William Sinkford has noted, and as it clear in the bittersweet story of Channing’s position regarding slavery, “Unitarians were by no means of one mind about abolition;… we have not always acquitted ourselves well. But at the forefront of the abolitionist movement were Unitarians such as Samuel May, Jr., Theodore Parker, Maria Weston Chapman, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and John Pierpont. The sculpture of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment which stands directly across from the Massachusetts State House shows Col. Robert Gould Shaw, a member of Theodore Parker's congregation, leading the African American troops of his volunteer regiment, many of whom, along with Shaw, would sacrifice their lives for freedom.”

In the end, our own right to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning is a religious value supported not only by us but also by civil liberties. And that free and responsible search is challenged not only by many other faith traditions, but by the erosion of civil liberties. We cannot understand truth, and we certainly cannot understand others who are different from us, if we cannot point to justice and human rights as ultimate themes we embrace with all, for all.

The justice we want for ourselves, we must fight for others as well. The human rights we expect for ourselves we must expect for others. We must live out our creed not only in our families, and in this beloved community but in our lives as citizens with a liberal faith. Only then can we speak the words of Marjorie Bowens-Wheatly, not in hope but in truth:

If, recognizing the interdependence of all life, we strive to build community, the strength we gather will be our salvation.

If you are black and I am white,

It will not matter.

If you are female and I am male,

It will not matter.

If you are older and I am younger,

It will not matter.

If you are straight and I am gay,

It will not matter.

If you are Christian and I am Jewish,

It will not matter.

(If you are Muslim and I am atheist,

It will not matter.

If you are Arab and I am Western

It will not matter.)

If we join spirits as brothers and sisters, the pain of our aloneness will be lessened, and that does matter.

In this spirit, we build community and move toward restoration, justice and security for all.

Go in peace. Amen.