patrickmurfin

It’s Two-fer-Tuesday!

On February 16, 1808 young Lt. Stephen Decatur of the U.S. Navy entered the harbor at Tripoli aboard a captured Barbary ketch by stealth of night and under the guns of the shore defenses succeeded in burning the U.S.S. Philadelphia, one of the Navy’s prized 36-gun Frigates which had run aground and been captured the previous year.  Britain’s Lord Nelson, no stranger to high adventure himself, called the action, “The most bold and daring act of the age.” Decatur returned to the U.S. as the first great hero of the new Republic not associated with the Revolution.  Several inland, dusty frontier settlements were named in his honor.  Decatur served with distinction again in the War of 1812 and in the Second Barbary War the squadron under his command finally put an end to Mediterranean piracy against American ships and extracted reparations for previous damage.  As Commodore he settled into senior command and the Washington whirl-wind social scene.  He is now remembered for the favorite toast of knee-jerk patriots, “Our country!  In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!” In 1820 Decatur was shot and gravely wounded in a duel with a jealous naval rival.  As he lay dying, his wife hosted a ball honoring the marriage of James Monroe’s daughter in the elegant home.

On February 16, 1838 Henry Adams was born in Boston, the son of diplomat Charles Francis Adams, Sr., grandson of John Quincy Adams, and great-grandson of John Adams.  As a young man the burden of such a linage and the attendant high expectations were almost too much for him to bear.  After a so-so brush with a Harvard education and the usual, for his class, Grand Tour of Europe after graduation, Adams returned home and was pressed into service as his father’s secretary—a tradition in the Adams family that signaled that he was expected to the political heir in the new generation.  He served in London during most of the Civil War while his father was Minister to the Court of St. James.  He moonlighted as a correspondent for New York Times.  These years in London set Adams apart from most of his generation—he did not experience the battlefields of the war and he settled into confirmed Anglophilia when antagonism to Britain was still considered the mark of a patriot.  Adams decided to reject a political career but settled in Washington taking up a career in journalism as a kind of early muckraker exposing the corruption of Grant administration.  From 1870 to 1877 he was lured back to Massachusetts to serve as Professor of Medieval History at Harvard.  While there he married Clovis Hooper and honeymooned with her in his beloved Europe.  Adams retired from Harvard and relocated to a fashionable home on Lafayette Square across from the White House.  He took up the life of a self-described “public intellectual” pursuing both journalism and independent historical research and writing.  The home was the center of intellectual Washington, built around the tightly knit “Five Hearts”—Adams and Clovis; John Hay, Lincoln’s former secretary and a future Secretary of State and his wife Clara; and the geologist Clarence King.  This happy arrangement was shattered with the suicide of Clovis, reportedly doubly depressed by her father’s death and learning that Henry was having an affair.  Adams restlessly traveled and wrote furiously.  His magna historical opus was the epic nine volume History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, chronicling the Republican ascendency that his great grandfather had abhorred and that his Grandfather had served as Secretary of State.  As he grew older he rejected his family’s Unitarianism and was comforted by the mysteries of Catholicism.  In 1904 he privately published his Mont Saint Michel and Chartres celebrating the values translated into stone by the great cathedrals of France.  Adams’s keen intellect was marred by a particularly virulent anti-Semitism which he scarcely tried to hide.  At a time when such sentiments were common in the WASP elite, he astonished even his close friend John Hay with the level of his bigotry.  Today Adams is best remembered for the wistful, ironic, self-depreciating and even comic memoir The Education of Henry Adams told in third person about his internal struggle coping with the transition from a traditional age to the dawning scientific/industrial world.  It’s still a pretty good read.

On February 1, 1862 Julia Ward Howe saw her poem The Battle Hymn of the Republic published for the first time in The Atlantic Monthly.  Howe, a noted poet and writer and ardent abolitionist, was in Washington when she was caught up the stampeding retreat of defeated Union troops after the First Battle of Bull Run.  Officers tried to rally the demoralized troops with patriotic songs, including the popular John Brown’s Body (lies a moldering in the grave.)  A member of her party, the noted Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke said that better lyrics were needed for the song.  Howe retreated to her hotel room and dashed off the words.  And they became the marching song of the Union Army and a rallying cry for supporters in the North.  By the time the war ended the awful carnage had turned her into an ardent pacifist.  She spent decades promoting peace around the world.  She was also an ardent feminist and a founder with Lucy Stone of the American Woman Suffrage Association, which advocated a more militant stance than Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s National Association.  Howe combined her feminism and pacifism when she launched a call for an International Mothers’ Day as a mother’s strike for peace in 1872.  Howe died in 1910 at the age of 91 acclaimed as the leading woman of literature in the United State.  But fame is fickle and for all her accomplishments she is only dimly remembered by most folks for one song.

Call to Worship:

Times are hard and getting harder.  Few among us sitting here have been untouched by the economic collapse that has turned our safe, secure world upside down.  If we have not lost our jobs, had our wages or hours slashed, lost the value of our homes and investments, we have loved ones who have and we live in gnawing dread that we are next.  If soup lines do not stretch around the block and broken men in gray overcoats and battered fedoras do not shuffle forlornly by, it seems only a matter style and time until something very like those old grainy scenes are visited upon us again.

In other times and other circumstances Thomas Paine wrote that “These are the times that try men’s souls.” And Shakespeare lamented the “winter of our discontent.”  They aptly describe our common condition today.

These times challenge our old assumptions about ourselves, our communities, and our place in the world.  We no longer feel we are the captains of our own destiny.  The gulf that divides our old identities as beneficent givers of alms to the less fortunate and the alien recipients of that charity has collapsed.  Suddenly we are not us and them.

To survive—even to thrive—in such a time calls us to turn, quite unexpectedly, to a new way of being, and a new ethic.  It is time for us to consider the unique working class virtue of solidarity.

Sermon—The Working Class Virtue of Solidarity

We have to start somewhere.  This is a sermon on working class virtue of solidarity, so maybe the best place to start is by asking what solidarity really means.  Like so many other things, it is easier to say what solidarity is not.

Solidarity is not sympathy.  Sympathy is a passive emotion.  It also implies a separation from the object of sympathy and can teeter on pity, which is just sympathy tinged with revulsion. Empathy might be closer to the meaning in that it implies a common understanding of the distress.  But empathy is also passive.  Solidarity demands action.

Solidarity is not charity.  Charity implies a power and privilege differential.  The more powerful and more privileged deign to give to the less fortunate who are expected to respond with appropriate gratitude and humility.  Solidarity is mutual aid among equals.

Solidarity is not altruism.  Altruism is supposedly selfless giving requiring sacrifice but expecting no reward—except perhaps praise for being saint-like.  Solidarity recognizes the commonality of our conditions and expects to by right receive support as well as give it.

Solidarity is not family.  Families—and by extension surrogate families like clans, nations, religions, races and others—are expected to support their members out of blood obligation.  Solidarity demands respect for commonality with the other.  Solidarity with the stranger dismantles walls and promotes peace instead of a mad scramble over scarce resources.

Solidarity is not utopian.  Utopians conjure up sweet dreams of the perfect.  Utopians may simply drift on in the opium cloud of that dream. More dangerously, some utopians construct rigid ideologies around their vision which eventually require the ruthless suppression of anything and anyone not in conformity to that ideology.  Solidarity is rooted in the common realities we face together and is interested in addressing the roots of the problems as well as ameliorating the immediate effects.

Solidarity is not all warm and fuzzy.  Warm and fuzzy denies oppression.  Solidarity recognizes that there are those whose own narrow self-interest causes them to exploit, subjugate, and abuse others.  And solidarity demands common action to defend against such depredations and—yes—boldly to ultimately defeat the oppressors.

Solidarity is a recognition of our place in humanity, an ethic, and an active response to our common interests.

The roots of solidarity are ancient.  Most fundamentally they can be found in the variations of the Golden Rule that, famously, can be found among all of the great religious traditions

Let’s go back to that fellow Jesus, an itinerant preacher in a dusty and insignificant corner of the Roman Empire a long, long time ago.  We only know of him maybe third hand.  The oral stories of his life and teachings only got written down nearly a century after his death and reported resurrection.  Depending on who was telling the tale, the message that he preached was either a narrow call for Jewish renewal and rebellion against Roman authority, or an expansive new message of hope for all humanity.  Hundreds of years latter squabbling Bishops would pick just a few among many “gospels” and declare them authoritative.  And since that time many interpretations of the words attributed to him in the approved stories have been offered—and often bloodily fought over.  So it is hard to declare with certainty what he said or meant.

But if he really did say the things attributed to him in the Beatitudes and elsewhere, then to my ears, he was talking about something very like solidarity. He was arguing for a mutuality of respect and support.  Elsewhere the story is told thus:

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

 
 “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

Christians, who came to believe that Jesus—on whose life, teachings and behaviors they were supposed to model their own—were thus powerfully instructed in the rudimentary basis for solidarity.

But the question is, to whom did this concern apply?  Jesus and his disciples considered themselves observant Jews.  For them the poor and the sick were their own people, Jews like themselves.  The prisoners were likely not just common criminals, but Jewish victims of the occupying Romans.  And who was the stranger?  The parable of the Good Samaritan taught that even despised aliens were capable of kindness and were thus worthy of respect.  Yet the Samaritans were Semitic kinsmen who had lived cheek to jowl with Jews for centuries and whose religion was a variant from the same root stock.  Jesus did not preach about the Good Roman, Greek, Egyptian or Babylonian whose people and cultures were seen as historic enemies and oppressors of the Jews.

When Paul and others transformed the Jewish sect that had grown up around the memory of Jesus and took it to the Greeks, Romans and other Gentiles, the pool of those who were included in the community of concern was greatly expanded.  But after the defeat of the paleo-universalists of Egypt and the Levant who argued that Jesus’ sacrifice saved all humanity, the Church codified itself as the sole legitimate custodian of the Truth in the West, sharing authority with the waning temporal power of the Roman Empire.

Under this formula it was critical that only those who were “saved” i.e. members of the Church constituted the community to whom succor and support were due.

And now the very Jews from whom Jesus and his disciples sprang, were branded, by virtue of their status as “Christ killers,” the ultimate outsiders unworthy of aid or support and deserving of suppression and persecution.

After the collapse of the Empire when the Church was consolidating itself as the only unifying power in the West, it adopted for itself the duty of providing charity and alms to the poor and sufferings—as long as they were loyal to the church.  They ruthlessly suppressed all other agencies of support save the occasional direct gift of a noble to a vassal or serf.  Private agencies for mutual aid were crushed, their adherents often fell victim to the Inquisition.  Thus the simple teachings of Jesus were subjugated to the political needs of the church.

It took the worst natural catastrophe in Western history to change things.  The Black Death swept Europe in successive waves over nearly two hundred years.  By some accounts it depopulated the continent by as much as two thirds.  And the Church, for all of its power was helpless against it.  But the sudden loss of population empowered the survivors in startling ways.  Those with skills—masons, weavers, smiths of all sorts,  coopers, wainwrights and others—suddenly found themselves unteathered from traditional relationships and free to travel anywhere they found their skills in demand.  They set up guilds to protect their craft secrets, but also for mutual aid and to protect them from the demands of the Church and of the crumbling feudal civil authority.  Membership in the guilds created new wealth and a new locus of power.  And in turn the guilds encouraged the establishment of city and town governments to protect their interests from the land based aristocracy.  The growing independence of the city states and the growth of a burger class challenged the Church as the sole dispenser of charity and thus de-legitimized its endless accumulation of wealth, fueled by the corrupt sale indulgences and participation in Feudal land holding.  Thus Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Of course the invention of the movable type printing press in the middle of all of this changed things, too.  With a printed Bible available relatively cheaply and an expanded class of literates, the Roman Church lost its authority as the sole interpreter of scripture.

Increasingly reformers including John Calvin in Geneva and John Knox is Scotland maintained that scripture itself, not the Church was the authority.  But that meant that each reader must interpret for him or herself the meaning and intent of scripture.  That led to no end of doctrinal squabbling—and not a little bloodshed.  But it elevated the Individual.

The Enlightenment took the ideas of late Renaissance Humanists like Erasmus, and enthroned reason and the individual side by side as the highest authorities.  Our own founders were the direct inheritors of the Enlightenment, particularly its Scottish variant. Thus Jefferson’s great declaration speaks of “inalienable rights” and cavalierly calls for the “severance of the bonds” that had tied the colonies from the previously undisputed legitimacy of the English Throne on the basis of those rights. 

And philosophers like Adam Smith would find in the rise of Protestantism and in the Age of the Enlightenment a justification for a whole new economic system which would become known as Capitalism and would be described in the Twentieth Century as the product of the “Protestant work ethic.”

On the whole this new individualism and the vigorous emerging capitalism that accompanied it, had little room for the old charity of the Church or any tolerance for emerging alternatives.  Indeed the poor were seen as shiftless and sinful, poor because they did not possess the strength of character to succeed.  Strict Calvinists sometimes held that wealth was a sign of God’s approbation and that the wealthy might be wealthy because they were among the tiny fraction humanity, the Elect of God, who were destined since the dawn of creation to be saved.  Thus the poor were not only immoral, they were damned by birthright.

There were some countervailing tendencies.   Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan “Commonweal”  implied an obligation to each other among its members.  The Pilgrims in their “Mayflower Compact” and the Puritans with their church covenants recognized mutuality—but only among the subscribers and members of the group.  No responsibility to “strangers” was recognized.

Half of our tradition, the Unitiarians, have their roots among those New England Protestants and, to a lesser degree, among the national Founders, who were often Deists in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the erstwhile Unitarian minister and Transcendental philosopher, took individualism to new heights in his most famous essay, significantly titled “Self Reliance.”  “Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique,” he  opined.  Every man/woman could build his character by dint of appreciation of his or place in the cosmos as received directly in moments of Transcendent experience, and application of steely resolve.  But he believed that, while all humans possess the potential for self-realization, in practice only those who belonged to a class allowing for the leisure to ready, study and speculate could effectively could actually achieve true self reliance.  Thus the great unwashed legions of the laboring classes and the poor were at best children who should rely on enlightened to look after their interests.

Emerson, like his Unitarian contemporizes, was a social reformer.  He shrewdly observed,   “Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.”  He advocated many reform movements, including abolition and contributed to the private charities that were springing up around America, the “voluntary associations” that Alexis de Tocville in Democracy in America identified as the critical counter weight to heedless individualism in a democracy.

When the early Unitarians responded to the rapid growth of the urban poor in Boston, they created the Beneficial Fraternity, commonly know as Benfrat.  This was one of the first forerunners of what became the settlement house movement.  It offered direct relief to the poor, but also tutored children and adults alike.  It even operated chapels that were widely attended among the poor.  But the Unitarians never allowed these chapels to become self governing congregations.  Ministers were appointed to them and worshipers given no role in either running the affairs of the chapel or in supporting it.  Nor were the ragged worshipers welcomed into the many existing congregations in Boston.  It never occurred to the generous hearts of the benefactors that the poor might be capable of managing their own affairs—or their own spiritual development.

On our Universalist side things were somewhat better.  After all if a loving God will eventually gather all souls to his bosom, then his grateful children on earth should be willing to do the same.  They participated in—and often led—the same social reform movements and some of the same charities as the Unitarians.  But they welcomed the poor and the wretched into their congregations as equals, encouraged them to found and maintain their own congregations,  Famously although abolitionists and early women’s rights advocates can be found in both camps, the Universalists often even embraced blacks and women as leaders, not just as passive recipients.

Meanwhile working people were developing their own institutions.  Most early unions had two sources.  The first was basically an extension of the old guild system.  It strictly followed craft lines.  But when master craftsmen morphed into capitalists employing journeymen and bound apprentices the employees and bondsmen often united against them.  This was the model of British craft unionism, and, to  a lesser extent, the American craft unions that eventually evolved into the American Federation of Labor (AFL).  The word solidarity began to crop up.  But it was solidarity within the craft.  Workers of one craft felt no compulsion to support workers of another, even when they might be employed on the same job or in the same industry

The other source was the beneficial societies, brotherhoods and lodges that were created often in support of “the widows and orphans of the brothers and the lame and aged in their need.”  Some of these societies were ethnic like the Loyal Order of Hibernians among the Irish.  Others were organized within an industry or across a community.  They often aped the popular Masonic lodges with mysteries, rituals, and secret wisdom of their own.  But if workers gathered for mutual support, it was no stretch for them to come together under the auspices—official or unofficial—of these lodges and brotherhoods to confront their employees to address grievances, demand reductions of hours and boosts in pay.

In the dangerous Pennsylvania coal fields, where any dissent was ruthlessly suppressed by employers, Irish miners came together in the Hibernian lodges to create the super secret Molly MaGuires who terrorized their bosses with blasting powder and assault until they were finally penetrated and broken up by an Irish Pinkerton detective.

The first truly national American labor union, the Knights of Labor, was just such a fraternal organization complete with its own mysteries and ritual.   But its lodges admitted workers of all industries, skilled and unskilled alike, immigrant and native, and sometimes even including non whites.  Its leaders, including Grand Master Workman Terrance V. Powderly, abhorred strikes and sought to prevent them.  But the members thought otherwise and freely exercised the option.  The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, while not called by the Knights was spread and supported by its lodges.

It was in the Knights, and in the anarchism, socialism and other working class movements developing in Europe, that the modern concept of solidarity was honed and developed.

The Russian Anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin laid out the basic principles in his classic book Mutual Aid:  A Factor in Evolution.  For the first time he argued that commonality of interest and mutual support was a positive trait in evolution both among animals and among humans.  Mutual aid countervailed against “the law of fang and claw,” and the Spenserian corruption of Darwin’s theory into the ruthless “survival of the fittest” then used to excuse exploitation of the working and poor classes.

Karl Marx applied the same idea and based his hope for liberation of the masses on the basis of solidarity of the working class across all artificial divisions.

Internationals—global associations of working class union and political organizations—began to promote solidarity across borders as a way to end wars.  Workers, they argued, should not be “recruited to shoot holes in each other just because they wear different uniforms.

Of course the dream of international solidarity to end war was shattered by the First World War when the labor unions of Europe and the extensive Socialist Parties by in large failed to rise up against the war and sometimes enthusiastically enlisted in patriotic support of their various Fatherlands.

In the aftermath of the dreadful carnage of that war, the dream revived.  But now it was identified with the new Bolshevik regime in Russia.  Communism became the international bugbear of the ruling elites across the globe.  And although the apparent success of the Revolution in Russia appealed to many workers, the eventual realities of Stalinism dimmed their enthusiasm.

Capitalists everywhere furiously attracted every demonstration of working class solidarity as part of the “Red menace.”  In this country it let loose the worst repression in our history, the Red Scare of 1918-20, during which  thousands were deported, labor unions and socialist organizations suppressed, and hundreds jailed—including the entire leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World and the man who had attracted three million votes for President of the United States in 1912, Socialist Eugene V. Debs.

In Europe it was even worse.  Fear of Communisms was the door through which the Fascists and Nazis swept to power unleashing their own forms of “White terror.”

Debs may have been the most articulate advocate of solidarity.  He said:

“We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; 'Am I my brother's keeper?'…Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.”

Since that time we have gone through much, including the Great Depression, war on an unspeakable global scale, unprecedented prosperity, a civil rights revolution, the women’s movement, more war, and now economic emergency again.  All during those years the advancements that have changed world for the good have come through the exercise of solidarity.  Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, all recognized its power.  Their victories would have been impossible without it.

Conversely, the ills we have suffered have occurred when solidarity failed, when we allowed ourselves to be divided against each other by race, religion, language, age, or sex.  Certainly the beneficiaries of inequality recognize the value of solidarity—and practice it among themselves.

The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko asked with exasperation, “Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?”

Now, to survive and thrive we must turn away from unmitigated individualism without losing respect for the individual.  We must observe true solidarity in our community, nation and the world or we are all doomed to an ugly future.

Maybe Holocaust survivor Ellie Weisel said it best:

“This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.”

--Patrick Murin

Trumbull’s Death of Montgomery.

Thomas Starr King in his former glory in the U.S. Capitol before being usurped by Ronald Reagan.

It is sad that Thomas Starr King has been demoted from his place as one of California’s icons in the U.S.Capitol’s Statuary Hall.  He was replaced by another transplant—King was a New Yorker—Illinois’ own Ronald Reagan.  

Reagan, the highest saint in the pantheon of conservative Republicans, is not bereft of memorials.  Even before he died Congressional Republicans announced a drive to have something major named for the Gipper in every Congressional District.  They may not have succeeded, but they came damned close.  Across the country airports, highways, bridges, schools of all levels, parks, libraries, and museums now carry his name—and that’s in addition to an aircraft carrier and a Congressional office building.  Some were new, but many other were already in existence, and many were previously named for local notables.  Starr King is hardly the only one elbowed aside by GOP school boy adulation.

Perhaps the current shriveled rump of the once mighty Republican Party that Reagan restored to glory is particularly gleeful that a Unitarian got the hook.    Modern UU’s, with our advocacy for same sex marriage, support of abortion rights, a propensity to always be loudly protesting something that the Religious Right holds dear, and our harboring of atheists and pagans is loathed by the party’s “base.”  A few years ago a Rockford, Illinois conservative think tank said something like, “pick the scab off of any social abomination and the puss that oozes out is Unitarian.”

They probably don’t care that Starr King himself was a loyal Republican who carried the state in 1860 for Abraham Lincoln and who worked tirelessly to elect at Republican legislature to prevent Democrats from swinging the state to the Confederacy.  His barnstorming speaking tour of the Golden State and legendary eloquence was credited by no less than Winfield Scott, Commanding General of the Army, with “Saving California for the Union,” a sentiment echoed in the Eastern press.  

That was no small thing.  Although California was too far from the main theaters of the Civil War to provide many troops for the blood soaked battlefield in the East, the wealth of its gold mines was largely the economic engine that kept the Union afloat.

Neither do the religious zeaots who dominate the modern Republican Party, such as it is, seem to know or care the Reagan was maybe the least religious and most secular of Twentieth Century Presidents.  Even Richard Nixon could at least claim a Quaker upbringing and famously forced secular Henry Kissinger, a secular Jew, to kneel with him in prayer.  Only another Republican icon, Dwight Eisenhower, came as close to total indifference to religion as Regan.

I don’t want to begrudge Regan the honor.  But it is interesting that Illinois never thus enshrined Lincoln.  Our state is represented by the justifiably obscure James Shields, a forgotten politician and sometime soldier, and Frances E. Willard, founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  New York never elevated either of the Presidential Roosevelts, both of whom are commonly listed as among the top five best occupants of the White House.  The Empire State is represented by members of two of the state’s early political family dynasties—George Clinton, the State’s first Governor and Jefferson’s Vice President, and Robert R. Livingston, a lesser Founding Father who served with Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence (although he is unknown to have contributed even a comma to the document.)

Any way, Starr King will not be without honor.  His statue will be relocated to a place of honor at the California Capitol in Sacramento.  Maybe busloads of future students on class field trips will pause before it to learn of his distinguished career—that is assuming bankrupt California still has public schools and busses.  He is also commemorated by two--count them two--mountains, one in New Hampshire and a more significant peak in the Sierra Nevada range.  Another statue adorns San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

Unitarian Universalism’s West Coast seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry honors him and will continue to do so if it can survive the current UUA Board’s—the hey-most-ministers-go-to-other-schools-anyway-what-do-we-need-them-for-anyway crowd—hostile indifference to denominational schools.  Sigh.  Maybe in the end they will give him a greater break the California legislature gave Starr King’s statue.

Modern UU’s are apt to remember Starr King most for an oft quoted, and oft paraphrased, bon mot.  The young preacher, who served both Universalist and Unitarian congregations, famously observed, “Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them.  Unitarians believe that they are too good for God to damn.”

Susan B. Anthony in later life.

The Sunday edition of the Northwest Herald caught my attention with an interesting cover story celebrating International Women’s Day. The article stated:

"Later, as published in the Woodstock Daily Sentinel on June 30, 1934, the noted suffragist Susan B. Anthony delivered a lecture in the Congregational Church.”

This is a version of my correction:

Susan B. Anthony did not address the First Congregational Church of Woodstock, now known as the Congregational Unitarian Church, in 1934 as stated in Sarah Sutschek’s  otherwise excellent Sunday feature in the Northwest Herald on women in McHenry County.  Anthony died in 1906 in Rochester, New York at the ripe old age of 86.  I am sure that the Woodstock Sentinel article, which was the source of the story referred to a presentation by what these days we call a historical re-enactor.  However that such a performance took place is testimony to concern for social justice and equal rights that has always been the hallmark of our 144 year old congregation.

William J. Johnson’s 1913 tome was only one of many attempts to lay claim on Abraham Lincoln’s religious identity.

As we approach the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (Happy Birthday, AbeyBaby!) interest in all things connected with the 16th President is high.  Next week Barack Obama, who has embraced the Lincoln legacy from his announcement of candidacy at the Old State House two years ago, will return to Springfield to be the featured speaker at the annual Abraham Lincoln Banquet.

An understandable part of the interest in Lincoln is unraveling his personal religious beliefs.  A few days ago blogger Scott Wells at Boy in the Bands weighed in on the tendency of folks widely different identifications to lay claim to the Great Emancipator as one of their own.  Unitarians and Universalists have been among those throwing elbows and casting nets.  Scott, a Southerner by birth claims to immune to the general adulation conferred on Lincoln, but is intrigued by his religious sensibilities. What follows is adapted from a typically long-winded comment I left to Scott’s Post.

Hagiography aside, there are many reasons to put your understandable regional bias aside and spend some time studying Lincoln. As flawed and inconsistent as any man, he is still rewarding for the subtlety and depth of his thought and his life long struggle to reconcile a true and deeply held idealism with both personal ambition and the need to act in a brutal and unforgiving environment. Even Harry Truman, a Missouri Democrat whose unreconstructed Confederate mother never forgave him for making Lincoln’s Birthday a national holiday, came to deeply admire his ancient tribal enemy.

Lincoln’s relationships to religion are not a murky as some suppose. Certainly any denomination that would attempt to claim him as its own is self-delusional. Here is some of what we know.

1)     At no time in Lincoln’s life did he ever claim to be a Christian as understood at his time or to be “saved.”

2) As far is known he was never baptized and never became a member of any  church.

3) Among his earliest published writing,  were attacks on a political rival, Peter Cartwright who was a fire-and-brimstone style Methodist circuit rider who had accused Linclon of “infidelity” and had used his wide Methodist connection to build a Democratic political operation.  Articles appeared under a nom de plume which mocked both the man’s religion and his attempts to use his followers as a political base.  Lincoln claimed never to have “denied the truth of scripture” but did acknowledge that he was not a church member.  Lincoln defeated Cartwright for a seat in Congress, but Cartwright’s charges—and his own tart responses—would dog him for years.

4) Like most self-educated Americans who had literary aspirations and who were not versed in the Latin and Greek of the Eastern college educated elite, Lincoln had two primary sources to draw from for both inspiration and style—The King James Version of the Bible and the popular plays of William Shakespeare. He knew both. But his writing was infused with the cadences and majesty of the Bible. He could also, if the occasion called for it, usually in response to some hypocrisy from the mouth of a believer, quote verse with ease.

5) He deeply admired Thomas Jefferson and treasured the Declaration of Independence as the essential founding document. He borrowed from Jefferson, and from George Washington, the language of Deism in public discourse. He frequently spoke of Providence, Creator, and other Deist constructions. He did not avoid the word God, but he did not invoke an explicitly Christian God. One can search in vain for much use of the words Christ or Savior outside of the context of letters of condolence to the families of fallen soldiers often echoing back sentiments expressed by the bereaved. He was all for giving what ever comfort he could.

6) In Springfield he attended Mary’s Presbyterian Church and was friendly with its minister but never joined the church or partook in the Spartan Presbyterian communion.

7) He read the published sermons of both William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker and appropriated or adapted words from each in his speeches. But in practice as President, despite a personally close and cordial relationship with Radical Repuclican Senator Charles Sumner, he found Abolitionist Unitarians to be pig-headed impediments to a practical prosecution of the war and a move toward healing a post-war, re-united country.

8) He believed deeply and viscerally in Fate and implacable Destiny. This was part and parcel of his widely reported melancholia. Some scholars have attributed this to a sort of Calvinist hang-over. Could be. But Lincoln’s sense of fate and destiny seem to rise from far more ancient impulses.

9) There is nothing to connect Lincoln to institutional Universalism. Steven Rowe at A Southern “Universalist Church” History responded to Scott Wells by post with an excerpt from memoirs by Universalist minister quoting appreciative comment by Lincoln: 

"I used to think that it took the smartest kind of man to preach and defend Universalism; I now think entirely different. It is the easiest faith to preach that I have ever heard.  There is more proof in its favor, than in any other doctrine I have ever heard. I  have a suit in court here to-morrow and if I had as much proof in its favor as there is in Universalism, I would go home, and leave my student to take charge of it, and I should feel perfectly certain that he would gain it." Such were his words. “

Unfortunately there are no other witnesses to Lincoln attending the debate described or speaking this assessment of it.  And I am sure a diligent search of the memoirs of ministers of other denominations can turn up appreciative Lincoln quotes, some perhaps true, others the product of devout wishful thinking.  Yet there is much to suggest that Lincoln privately embraced a kind universalism of spirit that accepted a common struggle for understanding a greater mystery that transcended mere denominationalism.

10) In the White House, with the gruesome burdens of a war-time presidency on his shoulders and the private grief over the loss of his beloved son, Lincoln followed Mary’s lead and seemed to take Spiritualism, then at the height of its American popularity, with due seriousness. At the time many Universalist ministers were also toying—to considerable controversy—with Spiritualism. But again Lincoln never publicly endorsed Spiritualism, or acknowledged it as his faith.

In the post-war years both the Abolitionist preachers with whom he sparred during the war and a generation of new Unitarian leaders bloodied on the battlefields of that war—Jenkin Lloyd Jones being a prime example—participated in the myth making that turned the martyred President into a kind of a Saint. They went too far. And rubbing the defeated South’s nose in it exacerbated the regional disdain with which you grew up.

But I think many modern Unitarians and Universalists can find much with which to resonate in Lincoln’s personal spiritual journey.  It so resembles so many of our own.