Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing

February is “Black History Month, but I think it is important to lift up the history of people of color each and every month of the year as we did with our Kwanza celebration and focus on Fannie Lou Hamer last month. Ours is a diverse congregation when it comes to theological perspectives, religious backgrounds, gender identification and sexual orientation, but not as much when it comes to people of color. I decided to focus on Theodore Parker as a model for present day Unitarian Universalists. Parker was a white Unitarian minister who radically broke through some of the racially stereotypical thinking of his time. Of course he did not break free completely of racially stereotypical thinking any more than we can today. Yet, in so many ways he was a role model for Unitarians of his day and Unitarian Universalists of today.

First, Parker was passionate about his liberal religious faith and he took its principles seriously. When more traditional Unitarians attacked Ralph Waldo Emerson after his Divinity School Address, Emerson was not willing to defend himself. But Theodore Parker rushed to Emerson’s defense both against conservative Christians and the more traditional Unitarian Christians. Just out of Divinity School and newly ordained, Parker seemed willing to take on the whole of American Unitarianism single-handed.

In 1841, at the age of 31, Theodore Parker preached an ordination sermon entitled: “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.” That sermon sharply challenged traditional Christian thought and shook the foundations of the young American Unitarian Association. You see, Parker identified as transient all the doctrines about Jesus and all the forms of the Church. He pointed out that the bulk of what is taught as Christianity had significantly varied over the centuries, thus it is transient and not the essential meaning or message of Christianity. That which is permanent and that which is essential to Christianity, Parker claimed, was not the religion about Jesus but the religion of Jesus. “It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man; the love of God, acting without let or hindrance. The only creed it lays down is the great truth which springs up spontaneous in the holy heart - there is a God. …The only form it demands is a divine life; doing the best thing, in the best way, from the highest motives; perfect obedience to the great law of God.”

In his sermon, he advised the newly ordained minister, to let the transient in Christianity - the doctrine and forms of the church - pass away - but rely on the permanent, the religion of Jesus. This sermon caused the American Unitarian Association to shun Parker. His name was removed from the registry of Unitarian ministers. Most of his fellow ministers refused to exchange pulpits with him. They pressured him to resign his pulpit and leave the ministry. Parker refused.

However, if most of the Unitarian leaders did not approve of him many ordinary lay people did. Some of these lay people decided to form a new Unitarian congregation that would provide a wider audience to hear Parker’s sermons. That congregation grew to 7,000 members with an average Sunday attendance of 3000 - talk about an early version of a Unitarian Universalist mega church. Parker’s words were not gentle on those Unitarian colleagues and institutions that tried to ostracize him. He boldly said, “The Egyptian embalmers took seventy days to make a mummy out of a dead man. The Unitarian Divinity Schools take three years to make a mummy out of a live one. At Meadville, I think they do it in less.”

He spoke out against most Christian doctrines. Of the doctrine of sin, he said that he utterly hated it. Interestingly he thought that if women had been consulted about Christian theology it would be in a better state. He said things like: I do not think any woman would have ever preached the damnation of newborn babies, or eternal damnation or total depravity. (Excerpted from a dramatic reading by Alice J. Smith).

Today, I especially want to emphasize the role Theodore Parker played by his actions and his words in respect to the enslavement of African Americans in America. It is important to place him in historical context. In the 1840’s and 50’s most Unitarians like most Northerners were not abolitionists. Most Unitarians were from middle to upper social classes. They did not encounter the pain and horror of slavery. And remember, the American Unitarian Association was a young unsteady institution of only 20-30 years. It broke with the Congregational Church and was accused of being religiously heretical and generally immoral due to its liberal religious principles. The AUA remained sensitive to criticism from traditional Christians. Also remember, the States had only been United for about 50 years when abolitionists earnestly started raising the issue of slavery.

There were three general groupings among Unitarians, specifically, and among Northerners generally on the issue of slavery. There were the outspoken abolitionists like Parker. There were the gradualists who were troubled by slavery, and hoped in time it would end, but were not politically involved. There were the conservatives who may or may not have approved of slavery, but who benefited socially and financially from it and refused to do anything about it.

Those whites people who protested against slavery paid a social and economic price for voicing their principles. Never-the-less, the Reverend Theodore Parker and another Unitarian minister actually led a raid on a courthouse in Boston to free a fugitive slave who was about to be returned to slavery. In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law was the law of the land.

Theodore Parker, as a parish minister, went out of his way to meet and listen to the stories of hundreds of fugitive slaves. It is said that he knew all the Negroes in the Boston area; some like Frederick Douglas were his parishioners. Parker was not only involved in the abolitionist movement; he was part of its innermost circle. Such was Parker’s reputation that when a man by the name of Moncure Conway came looking for the husband of a female slave so they could be reunited in freedom. it was Parker who could and did guide him to the hiding places of the fugitives slaves because they knew and trusted him. Conway wrote, “Every room into which we entered was hushed with reverence as if God had entered.”

Remember, the north and south were economically intertwined. People feared that if the north did not compromise on slavery the young union would split. Many in the north hoped that no fanatical excitement would emerge to threaten to divide the union.

Daniel Webster, United States senator from Massachusetts debated with John C. Calhoun, senator from South Carolina and Henry Clay, senator from Kentucky for eight months until they arrived at a compromise. The political leaders may have thought that the Fugitive Slave Law was a positive move, but suddenly slavery was no longer out of sight in the north. Northerners now saw human beings treated like run away animals and sent back to their owners. The gradualists could no longer sleep at night. They were repulsed by what they saw and they began to sense the pain and the agony of slavery.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required citizens in the North to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves. It denied a fugitive’s right to a jury trial. Commissioners handled cases and were paid $5 if an alleged fugitive were released and $10 if he or she were sent back into slavery. Additional federal officials were provided to enforce the law. It was disaster for former slaves in the north. During the next ten years, an estimated 20,000 blacks left their homes in the north and fled to Canada. The law was “the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population.” (Harriet Jacobs, a fugitive living in New York) Even free blacks, were captured and sent to the south as slaves. They had no legal right to plead their cases.

In 1852, Theodore Parker preached the following words about Senator Webster: “Mr. Webster was not alone at fault. Boston was at fault, Boston that had bribed him; the Hunkers (a name used for excessive conservatism) of the North were at fault, they had corrupted him; politics was at fault, its morals were unclean; the churches were at fault, they had renounced the Higher Law and called him good. Slavery, above all, was at fault, and Webster’s catastrophic end showed how slavery contaminated all things that it touched.”

Impassioned, Parker continued: “Slavery, the most hideous snake which Southern regions bred, with fifteen unequal feet, came crawling North, fold on fold, and ring on ring, and coil on coil, the venomed monster came. And then Avarice, the foulest worm which Northern cities gender in the heat, went crawling South. With many a wriggling curl, it wound along its way. At length they met, and twisting up in their obscene embrace, the twain became one monster, Hunkerism; … Northward and Southward wormed the thing along its track, leaving the stain of its breath in the people’s face; and its hissing against the Lord rings yet in many a speech. Then what a shrinking there was of great conscience, and hearts, and minds.”

Parker and other Unitarian and Universalist abolitionists felt morally impelled to speak out and act upon what they knew was right. They proclaimed the worth and dignity of white and black. They felt to just stand passively by was a betrayal to their belief in human freedom and dignity.

Parker was by far the most powerful abolitionist voice of his time. He directed his strongest words not to the south but to his friends and neighbors in the north. Henry Steele Commager wrote, “This was the work of a moral agitator, and Parker was on familiar ground. It was not as an economist that Parker made his special contribution to antislavery, nor as an organizer, but as a minister. When he hid Ellen Craft from the kidnappers, it was a minister, taking care of his parishioner. When he demanded the nullification of the Fugitive Slave Bill, it was as a minister preaching on the ‘Function of Conscience in Relation to the Laws of Men.’ When he advised jurors to ignore their oaths and follow their consciences, it was as a minister, comparing the Laws of God and the Statues of Men. He made Abolitionism a religious duty…”

He chastised leaders in north who were willing to compromise their morals. He led others in breaking the law of the land to protect fugitive slaves. Great politicians and public leaders came to Parker for his wisdom and his words about slavery. Wendell Phillips received facts from him about slavery in Rome. Senator Sumner got facts and figures from Parker so he could better denounce the slave-owners in Crime Against Kansas. Horace Mann received information from him so he could better refute Daniel Webster. Theodore Parker’s good friend Will Herndon in Illinois asked for his latest essay against slavery to give to his partner Abraham Lincoln for his debate with Douglas for a Senate seat. Parker sent it and Abraham Lincoln marked and saved the part where Parker wrote: “Democracy is direct self-government, of all the people, for all the people, by all the people.” The very words Lincoln used in the conclusion to his Gettysburg Address.” And “… government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Parker’s house was a stop on the underground railway. He hid runaway slaves and wrote his sermons with a pistol cocked and ready on his desk while they were with him. He claimed that no minister would get away with telling his parishioners that it is their duty to come and kidnap mine. He complained, “We (northerners) are vassals of Virginia. She reaches her arm over the graves of our mothers, and kidnaps men in the city of the Puritans; over the graves of Samuel Adams and John Hancock. The south goes clear up to the Canada line. There was a Boston once.”

Theodore Parker was kept awake at night because he felt the deep pain of those who were enslaved, beaten, mutilated, and separated from their children and partners at the whim of their owners. He saw fugitive slaves running for their lives to escape, only to have the law of the land say they must be returned. He could no longer accept such terribly unjust treatment of other human beings. Parker became part of the “Secret Committee,” six people who met secretly to help make John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry possible. Five of the six were Unitarians and three including Parker were Unitarian ministers.

“How can I tell what is right?” the young Theodore. asked his father? Was Parker right in this instance, arming others for an invasion to free slaves? He was, after all, the grandson of the man who joined others at Lexington who fired the first shots of the War of Independence. How do you know what is right?

I ask you today to pause this week and think about the issues of our day that keep you awake at night, issues that fill you with pain as you listen to the radio or watch the news. We often block out such moral dilemmas with our work, watching television, eating or other forms of consumption. But there are times when the pain and agony of others penetrates our minds and our hearts.

Friends, we know that inequality and injustice are growing within our land. The number of homeless people increases in our nation and right here in our area. The number of people without health insurance, adequate food housing and medication is on the rise. Our leaders have created a prescription program for retirees that is so confusing that only a fraction of the people know what they should sign up for or how to sign up. We steadily increase the size of our jails rather than adequately provide education, motivation and employment for the young people of our nation. We, as a nation, talk about freedom and equality, but when it comes to actions that might correct historical wrongs, are unwilling to make the needed changes.

This week I attended and was asked to speak at a final Town Meeting for Same Sex Marriage. It was hosted at the Unitarian Universalist church in Cherry Hill. Next week, the week of Valentines Day, the case for same sex marriage will reach the highest court in New Jersey. Will equality be granted, or will an inadequate compromise be formulated? Be sure you write a letter to a newspaper and send it to your state legislators or better yet, call them. And, if you can, attend the Marriage Equality rally in Montclair on Tuesday evening February 14.

Let us listen to the voices of pain and agony in our nation and in our world calling us to do what is right.
Let us focus our abilities and our strengths on concrete actions.
Let us seek out allies who share some if not all of our values & principles.
Let us respond right here, where we live, to timely community events.
Let us invest our lives as if our principles matter.