Pilgrim's Progress II- God and the Unitarians

I wanted to go to church in the original church that was attended by John Winthrop, Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson, and it still stands in Boston. It's Unitarian now, which I figured would be pretty good, since I attended UU churches for about 10 years before finally finally leaving them for the Presbyterians because I couldn't stand the way they sing.

I have not been in a UU church in a while, and it was interesting to be back in there. I remember always being antsy and frustrated in the pews, and I remember thinking that it was because the sermons were more like lectures, and the lectures were rarely to my liking.

This week's sermon was for Thanksgiving. It started with the minister inveighing us to keep gratitude journals. OK, I realize this is a common practice, often recommended by therapists, and that it's good for people and whatever. I don't love it, it's not giving me anything new to work with, kind of some lazy ministering. But OK. Gratitude journal.

Then he assumes "some of you are thinking, Hey, Stephen, my life is rough. Things aren't going so good. I just don't have that much to be grateful for right now."

"Well," he answers our unspoken protest "listen to the words of a 14 year old girl,"

I do not remember the quotation, so I will paraphrase. It was something like "You got to always be grateful even when things are bad."

"That girl's name," he said "Was Anne Frank."

Oh, seriously? There are so many...you know what. Finish your sermon.

"So don't tell me 'I'm too depressed to be grateful.' If Anne Frank, with all that she went through can say that, then certainly you can find something to be grateful for."

Ugh.

Yeah. You're right, Reverend Stephen. I was suffering from a chemical imbalance until I realized that the important thing is that my race isn't being systematically murdered. Now I'm walking on the sunny side of the street. Happy Thanksgiving.

Here's the thing about Unitarian sermons like this. Unitarianism is non-doctrinal, except that you can't both be non-doctrinal and preach. So what they end up preaching is American Theology.

American Theology starts (in that very church!) with the Puritan ideas about predestination and visible saints:

God saves some people and not others and the only way to know who God picked is who has material wealth and the only way to know if you are saved is to see if you prosper and the only way to prosper is to have faith in god and work hard, and if you aren't prospering you probably aren't working hard enough and it's probably because you are not saved.

Then it takes the God part out.

Now it reads:

In life there are winners and losers, and the only way to know who is a winner is to look at material wealth and the only way be a winner is to have faith in yourself and prosper and the only way to prosper is to work hard, and if you aren't prospering you probably aren't working hard enough and it is probably because you are a loser. 

Removing God from Puritan theology takes a harsh reality tempered by God's saving grace and leaves a harsh reality.

Look, I don't think America needs the Christian God. Like Roger Williams, I think that God belongs safely behind the wall of separation where he can't get political muck on Him.

But I kind of think churches need God. Not because The One Anthropomorphic Dad will keep us all in line, but because without God, you can basically do secular materialism (which is fine, atheists, you guys do that, it's just not a church) or you can do Bootstrapian Platitudinalism, which is a religion I just made up to encompass the American Theology of Self Reliance.

At least with the nutso randomness of Calvinism, it wasn't your own fault. God in his providence made some rich, some poor some saved and some dammed. What're you going to do?

But in Bootstrapian Platitudinalism, God may have made us unequal, but we are equally responsible for dealing with our lot. The worst sin of a Calvinist is to lose his faith in God, but the worst sin of an American is to lose his faith in himself.

And that's different. Because God is omnipotent. It's hard to lose your faith in an omnipotent being if you assume that He knows what He is up to, and what may seem like His making a mistake is just you not understanding the bigger picture. A belief like that might bring you comfort.

But you are not omnipotent. In American Theology it is total heresy to lose faith in yourself, or your dream or to think that obstacles are real. A belief like that might bring you comfort up to a point. And it might make you insane.  Unlike with God, if you lose faith in yourself, it might be because you were wrong. Or because you are legitimately incapable. Or because you face a actual obstacle.

The purpose of a religious or spiritual life, is at it's core, to reconcile that you are alive, and that also you will suffer and you will die. Submission, a facet of faith that Americans hate, is nothing more than this. There is a limit to what you know, there is a limit to what you can control. One day, you will die.

American Theology expects people to bootstrap their way out of suffering. That's why when we fail or hurt or are weak or sick we get angry with ourselves. That's what allows us not only to criticize those who are poor or lost or weak, but to blame them. They are the visible damned, the outcome proves what they deserved all along.

But truly, no matter how great your faith, you cannot bootstrap your way out of death. It doesn't matter how positive you are. All the gratitude journals in the world will never give you control over your fate. At some point, you will have to submit.

A valuable faith allows you to practice that. Submission, sometimes, is unavoidable. Sometimes it is good to try out.

Our American faith that tells you that you are in control of everything, and that what you don't have is only that you haven't worked sufficiently to take. It's not just false, it's false in a way that allows you to embrace your puritan birthright of self-hatred and anxiety.

I do not want to hear that shit in church. I like the church that tells me I have to submit, because that is true. We can quibble over what metaphor I'm submitting to. Nature? Guan Yin? White Jesus? I only care as much as I care about aesthetics. It's just practice, anyway.

If you're telling me I can control my destiny with a gratitude journal, you don't belong in a pulpit, you belong on a talk show. And that's true for all the Positivity Prophets and anyone else who is carrying the message that you are responsible for your happiness and have the power to remove your own suffering. It's a dirty lie.

There's not any heaven, actually, that is not a place, that would be totally inefficient. And there's no hell either, with all the chairs on fire and whatnot. You cannot be a happy person all the time. Anne Frank was sad sometimes, because her life was shitty. The fact that she was happy sometimes too is not a stick for you to beat yourself with when you are sad. It's the actual beautiful truth of being a person. That joy and sadness are both part of the thing, and are both OK responses.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.