This sermon was given in Stevens Chapel on May 19, 2002 by the Rev. Kenneth Warren.

A KIND OF DEISM

We occasionally hear and sometimes enjoy the definitions of Unitarian Universalism that supposedly come from people outside our churches: that we believe in the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man and the Neighborhood of Boston; that Unitarians believe that there is, at the most, one God; that we are actually atheists who just cannot break the church-going habit; that while Jews pray to God, Catholics to Mary and Protestants to Jesus, Unitarian Universalists pray to whom it may concern.

And there is a somewhat more recent one: What do you get if you cross a Unitarian Universalist with a Jehovah's Witness? You get someone who continually comes knocking at your door for no particular reason.

I came across another one of these comments. It comes from quite a long while back. It was spoken by someone who was not affiliated with any of our churches. It was not intended to be humorous; he said it in all seriousness. And it seems to me that it gives us something to think about.

A man named Abner Kneeland said that Unitarianism is nothing more than a fashionable kind of deism.

Now to appreciate fully this remark, we have to remember what deism was in his time and how many people felt about it, and we have to know who Abner Kneeland was.

Deism is the name given to a particular religious point of view. This is not an organized religion; its adherents never formed a denomination or even one congregation, but it was a fairly well defined set of religious beliefs.

These beliefs arose in England in the 1600's. They crossed the Channel to Europe and the Atlantic to North America. They were adopted by many prominent persons and sharply criticized by many of the clergy. They were the subject of considerable controversy throughout the 1700's and well into the 1800's. Then the dispute subsided, although the ideas continued to have an influence. Now we rarely hear the word, but I am sure that the beliefs have had a continuing influence and have helped to shape our thinking.

The deists believed in God. However, their understanding of the nature of this one God was different from that of Christians or Jews, different from the Unitarians and the Universalists of that time. They understood God as the Creator of the universe. But, unlike people of other religions, they believed that God created the universe, decreed the rules by which it was to operate, then did nothing more, left it to continue spinning through space forever, functioning in accordance with natural law, left humanity to learn natural law, to discover and discern truth and right for themselves, to work out their own salvation.

Their belief was that once the world was created, God never again intervened in its operation, that once Adam and Eve began to walk the earth, God never guided or goaded, never intervened in human life, but left the universe running as a perpetual motion machine and humanity striving to find its way and determining its own destiny.

This meant that, in the opinion of the deists, God did not reveal knowledge to humanity. There is no revelation in the bible or anywhere else. God does not reveal knowledge; human beings discover it. This meant that there was no point whatever in praying for protection from peril or for providential favor. God does not step into the world and suspend natural law, either to help or to hinder. Things happen by cause and effect. God ordained the principles of cause and effect but does not supervise their daily operation and does not ever change them. Nature and our response to it, chance and how we cope with it, this determines fortune and misfortune, not the decisions of a deity who sits somewhere in outer space watching every little incident of our lives.

Deism is the doctrine that God is to be understood as a power that created the universe and created humanity and created in humanity the capability to build a happy home on this earth. God is not to be understood as a power in whose hands we are as pawns, utterly dependent for benefit and forever fearful of disfavor.

This may sound admirably rational to us today. It was, of course, the religious expression of rationalism as it arose in the Seventeenth Century. But to most Christian clergy then there was nothing admirable about it. To them it was a diabolical doctrine, calculated to corrupt faith and morals. In saying that God did not intervene in human life, it seemed to deny the validity of revelation, to dismiss prayer as an exercise in futility; it challenged the entire system of Christian theology. Officials of the churches denounced the deists.

Some of the founders of our United States were much influenced by deism: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others, and they were reprimanded vehemently. Tom Paine avowed his deism openly and eloquently, so he was denounced as an atheist, and only in recent times has he been given the recognition that is rightfully owed to him. Until well into the Nineteenth Century, Abner Kneeland's time, deists were subject to severe criticism.

Kneeland probably was a deist at one time or another. Throughout his life he was continually changing his religious beliefs; he must have been a deist at some time. Certainly he was an individualist. He went his own way regardless of what anyone else might have thought about it. He had a varied and interesting career.

He was born in Gardner, Massachusetts in 1774. As a very young man he practiced the trade of carpentry. He joined a Baptist church, and soon he felt a call to the ministry of that faith. He moved to Dummerston, Vermont and took a position teaching in the village school in order to work as the part-time preacher of the Baptist church there.

After a few years, when he was thirty years old, he decided that he was a Universalist. He served as minister of the Universalist church in Langdon, New Hampshire, then in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He was very active in denominational affairs.

After ten years of this he abruptly left the ministry and went into business. Two years later he was back in Universalism as minister of the church in New Hartford, New York. Two years after that he moved to Philadelphia. There he preached to a Universalist congregation, also worked in business at times, for the government at times, invented a phonetic system of spelling, compiled a hymnal, published his own translation of the New Testament, and he edited a Presbyterian magazine.

Some seven years he spent there in Philadelphia, then he moved to New York City. He considered himself to be a Universalist still, but the other Universalists were not so sure of it. His continually increasing skepticism made him a controversial figure. He was the minister of a church that was nominally Universalist, but it was rather different from other churches of the denomination, rather more radical.

At one time he invited a woman to lecture to his congregation. For a woman to occupy a pulpit, even as a guest, was, of course, unusual then even in Universalist or Unitarian churches. And this was not an ordinary woman; she was a social reformer, a militant abolitionist and an outspoken agnostic. This was a bit much even for Kneeland's congregation; many of them left the church. Those who stayed followed Kneeland as he through the few years following, abandoned Christianity and renounced Universalism. They decided to call themselves Moral Philanthropists.

Next he decided that he should live in Boston. In Boston he was employed as a lecturer, not preacher or minister, a lecturer for the Free Inquirer's Society. He called himself a freethinker. A letter written by him during that period indicates beliefs that we would call pantheism. A little later he was an avowed atheist. A subject of much discussion in Boston in those days was what were called infidel meetings, at which he was very often the principal speaker.

After many complaints about him officials of the government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts charged him with blasphemy. He was tried and found guilty. He was sentenced to two months in jail. In 1834, he was the last person in the history of Massachusetts to be imprisoned for blasphemy. Both Hosea Ballou and William Ellery Channing were living and working in Boston at the time. Neither agreed with him, but both urged the Governor to pardon him. The Governor did not do so; Kneeland served out the sentence. But he was none the worse for it; he seemed to enjoy the persecution. Theodore Parker, who was also living and working in Boston and was himself a controversial figure, commented, "Abner was jugged for sixty days . . . he will come out as beer from a bottle, all foaming." And he did return immediately to his speaking and writing.

A few years later he left Boston never to return. He went to a new town on what was then the western frontier: Salubria, Iowa. He hoped to make it a center of free thought. He died there in 1844 at the age of 71.

Just before leaving Boston he delivered a farewell address to his congregation, the First Society of Free Inquirers. He urged them to continue to meet regularly as long as they could; but if and when they could no longer maintain the society, then they should join the Unitarians. That would be the church least offensive to agnostics and atheists, he said, because the Unitarians are nothing more than a fashionable kind of deists; "They have little to say in their preaching about heaven or hell, God or devil . .. not in a way by which anyone can tell what they mean, and as I am told, they deliver many good moral lectures."

Abner Kneeland was right about at least one thing. He may well have been right about several things. In the course of his checkered career he was at one time or another everything from orthodox Christian to atheist, fundamentalist to freethinker. He must have been right part of the time. I feel certain that he was correct at one point anyway.

I think it is true that we are deists - most of us anyway - in the sense that we do not expect God to intervene in our lives and in world affairs, to alter the inexorable course of cause and effect, to suspend the natural law which governs the universe. The Creative Power and the evolutionary process has provided for us by placing us here on this wonderful planet, by giving us minds with which to learn and hearts with which to love. Beyond that there is no providential protection, no miraculous solutions, no supernatural salvation. We must provide our own protection, solve our own problems, work out our own salvation. I think that most of us have the conviction that there is a creative power for good, whatever we may call it, in this universe and in us. This gives us confidence and courage. But what we do with the confidence and courage, with the world, with our lives, is up to us.

I think it is true that this conviction is characteristic of us. Most of us, I am sure, believe that what happens to human society depends upon human society. Whether or not we have international peace, control crime, find cures for diseases, establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility: this depends not upon an anthropomorphic god's answering human prayers but upon human beings accepting their responsibilities.

Also, the quality of our individual lives depends upon us, not upon God or Satan. Of course, luck, good or bad, makes a great difference. But chance does not make as great a difference as how we cope with chance occurrences; how we treat what Kipling called those two impostors, success and failure. Our own efforts, our acceptance of information and insight, our friendliness: these more than anything else determine the quality of our lives.

I think we agree on this. We have differences of opinion and emphasis on many things: our understandings of God, our analyses of human nature, our ideas of immortality; there is a rather wide range of belief among us. But I believe there is near unanimity on the thought that what fulfillment we find, what contentment and peace of mind, is really up to us, that God helps those who help themselves.

I would say that to confirm this conviction is one of the principal reasons for the existence of our church. In our services of worship we are not performing some magical rite to ensure some supernatural favor. We are expressing our hopes for ourselves and for all people, our confidence in ourselves and each other, our gratitude for the faith, hope and love that we have found.

Here we are trying to encourage each other to feel that we are endowed with the ability to change this world and to chart the courses of our own lives, that we ought to and that we can build for ourselves a good life and make this little planet a good home for our human family. I think we believe, and I think it is profoundly true that whatsoever we sow that shall we also reap, that if each day little by little we sow seeds of good and not evil and not be weary in well doing, then in due season we shall harvest honor and happiness.