Sam Smith – As a long time Seventh Day Agnostic who majored in anthropology I both ignore religion’s theology and respect its moral and ethical role in society. As Americans increasingly grow less interested in religion, moral and ethical matters are also losing their longtime home.
Consider, for example, the role that religions have played in our civil rights and peace movements. Did one have to become a Baptist to follow Martin Luther King? Of course not.
As I wrote back in 2015:
I’m a Seventh Day Agnostic and, as such, I don’t give a shit about what you believe, only what you do about it.
The Quakers have a nice way of expressing it. One of their meetings, for example, explains, “Friends are people of strong religious views, but they are quite clear that these views must be tested by the way in which they are expressed in action… Friends are encouraged to seek for truth in all the opportunities that life presents to them. They are further encouraged to seek new light from whatever source it may arise. Their questing and open attitude to life has certainly contributed to the tolerance with which Friends try to approach people and problems of faith and conduct.”
I went to a Quaker high school and attended meetings every Thursday for six years. Only once can I recall a confrontation on theological matters, and that was quickly eased by a “weighty” Quaker elder who explained that a meeting was not the place for such debates.
Later, I was introduced to existentialism - the notion, it has been said, that “faith don’t pay the cable” and the view that “even a condemned man has a choice of how to approach the gallows.” I came to realize that the Quakers had beat Jean Paul Sartre by several centuries in the realization that it is what one does and not what one believes that makes the real difference in life.
So I was somewhat prepared for what I found as a journalist and community activist in 1960s DC - namely religious leaders who translated their varied beliefs into common action and left faith on the back seat.
I was, for example, pushed into starting a community newspaper in an ethnically mixed neighborhood east of the Capitol by a minister trained by Saul Alinsky and who even got me a grant from a local Lutheran Church to get going. Neither the minister nor the church questioned my faith because it was clear we were all on the same track..
By the time the 1960s were over, I had worked with about a dozen preachers, most of whom would seem strikingly odd to many today. None of these ministers ever questioned my faith or lectured me on theirs.
They ranged from the head of the Revolutionary Church of What’s Happening Now to past and present Catholic priests. Meanwhile in the larger capital, we had two Catholic priests in Congress, one as Assistant Secretary of Housing, and one elected to the DC school board.
One of the assets these preachers had were basement meeting rooms in their churches. Among the scores of times I found myself in such rooms, we pressed anti-war protests, started the DC Statehood Party, began a mixed ethnicity pre-school, and upped the eventually successful battle against freeways in DC. And you didn’t have to recite a creed before the meetings began.
When I try to figure out why this seems a bit strange today, one reason has been the huge influence of evangelical churches on the definition of religion, especially in the media. Until Pope Francis came along, think how rarely we’ve heard about non-evangelical religious activism in recent years. As I watched Francis is action, I felt strangely comfortable because I had known, and worked with priests, who would have done much the same if they had become Pope
With the most immoral and unethical president in history now running the place, it may well be time to bring back that existential link between religion and action that one found in the 1960s.
How you do this is uncertain. But one possibility would be to create regular non-religious gathering places for folks known, say, as Communal Friends or the Community of Decency. It doesn’t have to be complicated. After all the Quakers have lasted for centuries in some of the dullest large rooms you’ll find anywhere.
The Quakers are, in fact, not a bad model in other ways. Such as the idea of a meeting place without an agenda where people can arise and discuss what’s troubling them. Or you could have some in which one or two leaders give a brief talk to set off the larger discussions of the day. Or places and events created by a coalition of religions who agree to create havens for moral discussion without theological interference.
It’s not just traditional religion that has been in a down fall. There has been a noticeable decline in visible academic leadership and a media willing to take on issues more complicated than some politician’s lies.
The invitation for new gatherings might include this nice distinction between morals and ethics offered by the web page Daily Writing Tips:
Although the words can be considered synonyms, morals are beliefs based on practices or teachings regarding how people conduct themselves in personal relationships and in society, while ethics refers to a set or system of principles, or a philosophy or theory behind them. … Morals are the tools by which one lives, and ethics constitute the manual that codifies them.
When did you hear something like that on MSNBC? Yet aren’t morals and ethnics more important than which politician exaggerated the most today?
In short, we must find new ways to share beyond religion consideration of decent way of living. After all, you don’t have to take communion to realize what a mess we’re in and why we need to talk more about it with each other.
