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Conscience
and Democracy
February 4, 2007
Rev Arthur Lavoie
CALL TO WORSHIP
Though our knowledge is incomplete, our truth partial,
and our
love imperfect,
We believe that new light is ever waiting
to break through
individual hearts and minds
to enlighten our ways,
That there is mutual strength
in willing cooperation,
And that the bonds of Love keep open
the gates of freedom.
Art Severance
READING
Conscience is not the voice of conventional morality. It
is the voice that pulls us deeper and more directly into the worth of all. If
you speak the mythic language of theism, it is the voice of the immanent God speaking within your soul. If you speak the mythic language of humanism, it is the voice of the Profound Human Spirit as it lives
within you.
Conscience is a manifestation of what Taoists call Te, the movement of the unnamable Tao that gives
each of us our individual strength and power. It is the voice of what Plato referred
to as aręte, the wisdom or virtue of your soul that makes you the unique and precious person you are. It is the upwelling of that which the Buddhists call the Buddha-nature that permits every person—and
even every sentient being—to achieve enlightenment. To the Hindu it is
the image of that special step in Shiva’s dance that brings you into existence and allows you to be. It is that which impels us to the Good, that which ennobles and elevates and frees and heals. It is that which must be stifled and ignored when we do injury and harm and bring brokenness to life. Conscience is central to every tradition.
from, Our Seven Principles
in Story and Verse, by Kenneth W. Collier, pg. 75
SERMON
A long time ago, in pre-Biblical times, people were organized in loosely structured agrarian and
nomadic groups. Various warlords and gangs would wreak havoc on the people by
regularly raiding their farms and herds.
Eventually a powerful warlord would declare himself king and make a covenant with people to protect
them from the other gangs as long as they paid him a tribute. But the king would
eventually get greedy and be consumed by his wealth and power. Life under his
rule would become no better than what it was with the gangs and warlords.
People would wish for something better. They would
imagine that their gods would protect them and treat them better than the king did.
They would make covenants with their gods and make sacrifices of their crops and herds as their tribute in exchange
for the protection of their god.
As the religion of the Hebrew people evolved, covenant became enshrined as a sacred set of promises
between the people and the one God, Yahweh.
The word “covenant” may come to us from the Bible, but we must also remember that covenant
was originally a word used to describe political realities, a set of commitments between a ruler and the people being ruled.
Moving ahead to more recent times, when our puritan ancestors broke away from the hierarchical
structure of the Church of England, they returned to the language of covenant for inspiration.
But this time they took the Biblical language of covenant and returned some of its original meaning, creating covenants
with God and among the people.
In the Mayflower Compact written when that ship landed in 1620, it’s authors determined “solemnly
and mutually, in the presence of God and one another, [to] covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic,
for our better ordering and preservation.” They pledged “to enact,
constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall
be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony: unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.”
Forest Church in his book “The American Creed”
tells us that these “newly free people . . . did something on their own for which no other group in England would have
mustered the gumption.”
Forrest Church, The American Creed, pg 4
Church continues, “In America, religious covenant and civic compact have a similar character
and derive from the same source. Each is freely entered into; and, ultimately,
the authority for both is granted by higher authority that that which an earthly king can bestow. In practicing their religion and in creating their government, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony acted freely,
despite the royal imprimatur of their charter. By so doing they sounded the keynote
of American democracy.
Forrest Church, The American
Creed, pg 5
Of course, the way it was practiced in Puritan New England, this political dream had elements of
a fairly hierarchical theocracy. But the foundation of individual freedom had
been laid and would be revisited over and over again in both church and civil governance.
These early colonists were doing an incredibly radical thing here, for they understood that being in right relationship
with each other and with God involved a measure of personal freedom and shared responsibility and decision making. And for them, right relationship was one that was infused with the spirit of Christ, which to them meant
the embodied spirit of Love.
Every Sunday morning when we say the words, “Love is the Doctrine of this Church,”
we not only speak of our desire to live in right relationship with each other. We
also echo the words and spirit of our founding religious ancestors.
Alice Blair Wesley writes:
“The 17th-century articulation and practice of (what was then) the radical covenantal
doctrine of the free church preceded and led to secular doctrines of political freedom, to the constitutional and democratic
government of free states. Two historic political documents, The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut of 1639 and The Massachusetts Body
of Liberties of 1641, written and adopted by our earliest church founders, served as models for the U.S. Constitution. In both, you can see the doctrine of congregational governance carried over and applied
to civil government.”
The Lay and Liberal Doctrine of the Church, Alice Blair Wesley, pg 48
Our constitutional democracy was founded on the theology of covenant; a sacred promise between
people that brings everyone to the table. It asks not that we believe alike,
but that we commit ourselves to working things out together in the spirit of a loving community.
In our fifth Unitarian Universalist Principle, “we covenant to affirm and promote the right
of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” And the commitment of covenant and the ideals of conscience seem to often be missing in our current national
conversation about democratic values.
So, what do we mean when we speak of the “right of conscience?” What is this thing we call conscience, this often “still, small voice” within our being that
Ken Collier describes in our reading as “central in every tradition?”
Are we talking about something that makes us feel guilty when we’ve done something that we
think we’re not supposed to do? Is it a fear of misbehaving or looking
badly in front of others? Is conscience what some might call the “voice
of God in our souls,” or the “highest virtue,” calling us to be the best human beings we can possibly be?
I would like to think that conscience can best be defined as moral awareness, an inner sense of
right and wrong. Conscience is something that wells up from within yet it is
also something which speaks to us with a divine authority. Conscience is the
process by which we internalize our values and put them into practice. And, our
conscience has the ability to grow, to change, and to develop as we mature, and as our knowledge expands and our understanding
deepens.
Conscience is never the license to do whatever I want, it is a deep reflection on my choices and
values; choosing the direction that best realizes the principles that I profess. Unitarian
Universalism, our liberal religious tradition, has elevated conscience as the primary source of religious authority.
One of the ways that the development of conscience is realized is through religious communities
such as this one. Here we have the opportunity to be in deep conversation and
communion with each other, enhancing our growth and the development of our spiritual and moral values.
In the words of the Rev. Marni Harmony, “The rights of conscience demand the same rigorous
scrutiny as does our search for truth.” She continues: “The rights
of conscience must not become a license for self-indulgence or an apology for a shallow, narcissistic individualism. As much as we must be heard, we must (also) be hearing others.”
from, We Covenant to Affirm and Promote, pg. 91-92
Not only do we affirm “the right of conscience” in the Fifth Principle, we also acknowledge
“the democratic process” as the political structure that we uphold. According
to our history, this very church community started the town meeting form of government, where every citizen, and at that time
probably every male, land-owning citizen had a voice and a vote in civic affairs. The
town meeting form of government was practiced throughout New England from early puritan times and is still practiced in some
communities today. This practice was both communal and covenantal in nature.
We know, quoting John Mears, that “democracy is not an efficient system.” Ask anyone who has sat through a town meeting or a corporate or congregational meeting in one of our churches. Mears writes: “It is untidy and uncertain.
It easily generates conflicts and divisions. It can produce absurd outcomes
to unpleasant scenarios, leave issues unresolved, allow poor leadership, encourage mediocrity, permit the many to stifle the
few, and sometimes, the few to dominate the many.” What UU’s
Believe, pg. 55
But we also know that the democratic process is one where there is an ongoing mechanism of change,
one where we can make corrections when we disagree with the process, or with the outcome.
It may not be a perfect system, but it may be the best one that human beings have yet devised.
And, the Rev. Earl Holt suggests that “democracy . . . is more than a mechanism of governance. It is an expression of faith in the power of human beings to shape their own lives,
a faith that is most explicit in the ideals of our religious tradition.”
With Purpose and Principle, pg. 72
That faith in our power of self-determination is more than a “mechanism of governance.” It is at the heart of what we as Unitarian Universalists believe deeply and fiercely
about human beings; that our future lies in our own hands, and that truth is found in our own spiritual imaginings, discerned
through collective engagement with each other. And this is grounded and cultivated
in a covenantal relationship where the sacred and the conscience are witness, inspirer and judge.
Paul Beattie writes:
“The survival of our religious movement or any like it will always be in doubt, not from
without but within, for in each age large numbers of people will be anxious and ready to abandon this approach to religion
for something which seems to promise greater certainty, greater assurance. We
have to learn and relearn in each generation that the quest for certainty is the great illusion. We have to learn and relearn in each generation how wonderful it is to say to each person who comes to
us: in religion—in life—you must learn to think for yourself and act for yourself—no one can or should do
it for you.”
“The Only Basis for Unitarian Universalism,”
quoted by
Earl Holt in With Purpose and Principle, pg. 76
BLESSED BE
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