Please read the the Sunday sermon below or watch the complete service by clicking here.
You know, I want to talk to you today about the First Amendment. But I can’t do that without first talking about the Second Amendment. You know the one. The one that says we can own as many guns as we want, regardless of who we are or what we’re going to do with them? The one that says we can’t require background checks or waiting periods? The one that allows a high school kid to walk into a gun shop two days after his 18th birthday and buy an assault rifle on the spot, and just as many bullets as he wants, without batting an eye? The one that says “don’t mind those words about a ‘well-regulated militia,’ because our guns are more important than our children and our grandmothers, more important than the sanctity of our schools, our supermarkets, our movie theaters, our churches. That sacred Second Amendment that says Americans can buy nearly 23 million guns a year for themselves, that says in a country of 330 million men, women and children it’s okay that there are nearly 400 million guns out there right now. The one that allows the gun lobbyists to buy off politicians by spending nearly $16 million a year, outspending gun control advocates five to one to make sure that not one meaningful piece of gun control legislation is passed, that an assault weapons ban is allowed to lapse. The one that says we need to arm teachers, harden targets, give kids ballistic blankets and bulletproof backpacks instead of limiting easy access to weapons of mass carnage. It sickens me. It truly sickens me to hear our nation’s elected officials say that nothing can be done. And I don’t know how parents do it. How they send their kids off to school in the face of this epidemic of wanton violence. Nothing changed after Sandy Hook and I doubt anything will change after Uvalde. Is this the nation our soldiers fought and died for? Is this the nation our Founding Fathers sought to create with the Bill of Rights? I don’t think so.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. Because there’s a First Amendment out there that precedes the Second Amendment. One that guarantees religious liberty for all. One that says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And I guess I feel about the First Amendment the way the gun lovers feel about the Second Amendment. Religious freedom is baked into our Constitution, enshrined by the Bill of Rights. But unlike the Second Amendment, it’s not qualified by language like “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…” The so-called “Establishment Clause” of the First Amendment is absolute and unqualified. And yet, it is being systematically undermined and trampled upon by the radical Christian right, or what are called the “Christian Nationalists,” at every turn. Christian Nationalists believe that, despite the wording of the Second Amendment, the United States is and should be a Christian nation. Christian nationalism abuses the concept of religious liberty, using it as a rationale for circumventing laws and regulations aimed at protecting our pluralistic society, such as nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people, women, and religious minorities. Many who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and who advocate the violent overthrow of the government subscribe to the tenets of Christian Nationalism. Amanda Tyler, whom we heard from in today’s reading – herself a Christian and the Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty – has called Christian Nationalism “the single biggest threat to religious freedom in the United States.”
The separation of church and state is a gift, not a given. Before and after the Constitution was originally adopted – before the Bill of Rights – many of the original colonies and the states thereafter had established, state-sanctioned religion. Taxes would be levied to support the church, government officials were required to be members of the faith, and failure to subscribe to that religion could result in arrest or worse. It’s why Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and why he established Rhode Island as a religiously permissive colony. So, the idea of a state-sanctioned religion was not unfamiliar to the Founding Fathers. But within a few short years after the ratification of the Constitution, free thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison saw how this system limited personal freedom to practice and express one’s own religious beliefs. As one historian wrote, “The object of the religion clauses… was not to prevent general governmental encouragement of religion, but to prevent religious persecution and to prevent a national establishment.” The purpose of the First Amendment was twofold: to allow and encourage personal expression of religious beliefs and to prohibit the establishment of a national religion.
What we’re seeing in our country today, however, flies in the face of these long-held and long-settled principles, principles our service men and women fought and died for. No, we’re not seeing attempts to enact laws establishing Christianity as the state or national religion. Nothing that overt. But what we are witnessing, I’m afraid, is a planned, strategic, systematic chipping away of religious liberty that began in 1973 when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade. Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, which has evolved into the Christian Nationalist movement, have waged a half-century long war to establish Christian doctrine as American law. And, at least on the abortion issue, it appears that they’ve won that war. They’ve got a solid 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court and a tenuous but effective hold on the U.S. Senate, and at the statehouse level, nearly 55% of the chambers are controlled by Republicans. Of the 50 states, 23 have what are called a “trifecta,” where the house, senate and governor’s mansion are all controlled by the Republicans. Now, I do not mean to infer that all Republicans are Christian Nationalists. But as we’ve seen with the ongoing power that Donald Trump continues to wield in the party, loyalty to Trumpian ideology, which is closely aligned with Christian Nationalism, is necessary for political survival.
The establishment of an American theocracy, where Christianity becomes the de facto state-sponsored religion, is not far-fetched. Look at what’s happening with book bans. Or the teaching of Creationism. Or the use of public funds for school vouchers. Anti-abortion measures, while couched in terms of “pro-life,” are on their face religiously discriminatory. Did you know that both the Torah and the Quran require abortion under certain circumstances? So, any abortion ban should, by definition, be held to be a violation of the First Amendment. But I don’t have a lot of faith that it will be, not with the Court stacked the way it is.
One commentator puts it this way: “From the Puritans to the present day Evangelical Protestants, there has been a conviction that God’s intent was to establish a Christian nation in America, and they have struggled with secularists over this goal. This is not a struggle for religious liberty, which an amendment to the Constitution subsequently assured, but ‘evangelicals have become seriously motivated to critique, redesign, and restructure not only American culture but American political institutions’.”[1] Amanda Tyler warns that “Christian nationalism undergirds a number of threats to religious freedom, including anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-Semitism, and government-sponsored religion.”[2]
I want to quote at some length the words of church pastor and social commentator Josh Pavlovitz. Pavlovitz, a one-time Evangelical Christian pastor whose theology has become more liberal and progressive over the past two decades, describes himself as an “undercover Liberal in an increasingly extremist movement.” In a recent blog post, her writes: “White evangelicals need to be stopped now… we won’t recover from the theocracy Evangelicals are constructing once it is established. If we fail in 2022, they will have a political power that will render every election null and void, and we will never have a voice again in our lifetimes. Women will lose autonomy over their own bodies. LGBTQ people will have the rights to marry and adopt taken away. People of color will be fully squeezed out of the electoral process. Immigrants will be denied access to opportunity and refuge here. These are not creative projections. They are precisely what Evangelicals have repeatedly stated as their intentions, and they’re closer than they’ve ever been to having a rubber stamp…
We can still stop it, though. We just need a unity and coordination that transcends theirs. We need a sustained, passionate, dedicated defense of humanity that rivals their relentless assaults on it. I hear many people say they’re terrified, but being terrified alone doesn’t do anything but help these people. Be terrified and get angry. Be terrified and get busy. Be terrified and go to work. Be terrified and fight like hell.”
As Unitarian Universalists, we are committed to the principles of religious pluralism. We recognize that there is no one “right way” to be or to believe. We respect and find value in every faith tradition and, as our Statement of Principles and Sources says, we “draw wisdom from the world’s religions, which inspire us in our ethical and spiritual life.” Replacing the flag with the cross is antithetical to who we are as people of faith. Religious pluralism demands democratic vigilance. We ignore the threat of Christian Nationalism at our own peril. The radical Christian right has demonstrated, in stark relief, the power of organizing, voting, and playing the long game. Nearly 50 years of focused, persistent effort has managed to overturn Roe v Wade, and it has claimed many smaller victories along the way. The radical Christian right has provided us with a roadmap to success. Maybe it’s time for we who value diversity, pluralism, equity, justice, and compassion to follow it. That is how we can best honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, whom we remember today.
May it be so.
[1] https://mikescrafton.com/2021/01/26/an-american-theocracy-the-advance-of-christian-nationalism/
[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/christian-nationalism-is-single-biggest-threat-to-americas-religious-freedom/