Rev. Stephan Papa
December 10, 2007
It
is good to come home, to reaffirm connections.
Thank you for welcoming me once again into your caring and empowering
community of faith. Back in 1969 when I
started attending services here, you probably didn’t realize how much it meant
to me and how your welcome would influence my life—but you did.
I
was born and raised here in
I
remember conversations at coffee hour in which I would feel so emboldened as to
honestly proclaim the fact that I considered myself an atheist at the
time. I waited for people’s reactions
wondering if they would be as negative as that of my Catholic family. But, no, you did not criticize or condemn me;
what I found was acceptance and something more.
People would say something to me like, “Fine, young man, you are welcome
here, and we are glad that you have discovered what you don’t believe, but have
you started to explore what you do believe?”
I did, I have. I believe in
you—and something more—something sacred, an interdependent web that calls for
reverence and service.
I joined
your church in 1971 and went on to Meadville/Lombard Theological School to
prepare for our ministry, and have been serving Unitarian Universalist
congregations and the good we can bring to this country and world ever since. After 31 years of parish ministry, I now
serve the UUA by traveling around to promote Association Sunday, which is an
opportunity to acknowledge our connection through that “interdependent web”
that is our association of congregations, and an opportunity to help UUism
grow.
We are
all connected and can empower one another for the greater good as you did
me. The members of this congregation
back in 1969 did not know what good they were doing but they believed in the UU
way of religion and had a vision for the future. Thank you for accepting and challenging me,
and for continuing to prepare for the future.
Your new building looks beautiful.
Congratulations on your vision, and on Paul your kind and capable
minister with whom I met yesterday.
Clearly together you are building a better future for this community,
country, and world. It is good to be
back home. Thank you for being such an
inspirational part of our association.
The Reverend Abner Kneeland
wrote the following “Philosophical Creed” in 1833: “I believe in the existence of a universe of
suns and planets, among which there is one sun belonging to our planetary
system; and that other suns being more remote, are called stars; but that they
are indeed suns to other planetary systems.
I believe that the whole universe is NATURE, and that the word NATURE
embraces the whole universe; that GOD and NATURE, so far as we can attach any
rational idea to either, are synonymous terms.
Hence, I am not an Atheist, but a Pantheist; that is, instead of
believing there is no God, I believe that in the abstract, all is God; and that
all power that is, is in God, and that there is no power except that which
proceeds from God. I believe that there
can be no will or intelligence where there is no sense; and no sense where
there are no organs of sense; and hence, sense, will and intelligence, is the
effect, not the cause of organization. I
believe in all that logically results from these premises, whether good, bad or
indifferent. Hence, I believe, that God is all in all; and that it is in God we
live, move, and have our being; and that the whole duty of [a human being]
consists in living as long as they can, and in promoting as much happiness as
they can while they live.”
These words don’t sound so
scandalous today, but in the early 1800's, they got the Universalist minister, Abner
Kneeland, jailed for blasphemy. Some
things have changed since, but some have not.
In this country, we possess unparalleled freedom--for which we ought to
be grateful. But even more--we ought to
use it, seize the opportunity to continue to make ours a more just, peaceful,
society, and world. We can. We have the gift of religious freedom from
those who have fought for it, leaders such as Abner Kneeland, who in 1838
became “The Last Man Jailed for Blasphemy” in our land of liberty. He was once famous, infamous, rather, but he
has been lost to history; most people including Unitarian Universalists don’t
know about him and should. Let me share
something of his story in the hope we might be inspired to use his gift of
freedom.
Abner Kneeland was born in
1774 in
In his time, Abner was very
productive. In addition to his ministry
in the church, he edited a Universalist monthly journal, published a hymnbook,
wrote several books, undertook a missionary tour of the South, debated orthodox
clergymen on Universal Salvation and won; all the while working as a government
inspector of imported women’s hats. His
Sunday services were very popular, and so was he. In 1825 he accepted the call to the Prince
Street Universalist Society in
It was there he became
involved with Robert Owen and Fanny Wright and their rationalist, egalitarian,
Freethought Movement. Owen was best
known for his communitarian experiment in
As Kneeland took leadership
in the Freethought movement, as he opened his pulpit to its leaders, and as he
became more liberal in his theology and social ethics, he got into trouble with
his church and the Universalists Association.
He was voted out of both, the latter in 1829. Abner then became the leader of the “Moral
Philantropists,” the Freethought Society in
In These Live Tomorrow Clinton Lee Scott wrote that: “Abner Kneeland was the most controversial
character ever ordained to the Universalist ministry. He anticipated by a century opinions now held
without opposition, or even curiosity, in Unitarian and Universalist
churches. He would not be considered a
heretic today in our association, but in his own day, despite the already
liberal nature of the Universalist movement, he was ostracized and evicted from
ministerial fellowship.”
In Freethought in America the historian, Albert Post, wrote: “Abner
Kneeland was a heretic--a cantankerous, inflexible heretic. Worse still, he was regarded as an immoral
being who had crawled forth from the darkness of the Stygian caves to menace
Abner was audacious; he also was an idealist,
and an activist. For example, he became
“a pioneer in phonetic reform” publishing The
American Pro-nouncing Spelling Book, and a Key to the new System of Orthography….[which] was “...an attempt to
rid our language of silent letters. He
originated a new alphabet with a character for each vowel sound and claimed
that his system abridged the language one sixth part, that children could learn
it in one tenth the time ordinarily required, and that it would lessen the size
and expense of books. Some children
struggle to read our non-phonetic language; Abner’s system would help them,
but, though the system received recommendations from professionals, it did not
catch on with the public and was “characterized as visionary and
impracticable....”
Abner also wrote many hymns
several of which were in the first Universalist hymnbook of 1808 which he
helped edit. However, his words, more
polemic than poetic, were rather confrontational. For example, Abner penned one called “A View
of Christendom” which went like this: “As ancient bigots disagree, / The Stoic
and the Pharisee, / So is the modern, Christian world / In superstitious error
hurl’d. / God, when shall all these errors cease, / And Christians learn to
live in peace….”
Perhaps you can see why the
Universalists disowned him. He was too
radical for the Universalists and the Unitarians of his time. Following his dismissal he wrote an Appeal pointing out how lamentable it
was that “the persecuted for conscience’s sake have almost invariably in their
turn become persecutors; not of those who persecuted them, but of those who
attempt to go one inch further than they had marked out the way….”
Abner wanted to go further;
he wanted to reform society, to go way beyond the social conventions of his
time, to make it more just; he did not see the religions of his time trying to
do that. Rebuffed, in anger, frustration and disappointment, he rejected them
even the religious liberals. In their
place he started new progressive communities.
At his Free Enquirers Society in
To get the word of justice
out he started his own newspaper, The
The newspaper’s motto was
“Hear all sides--then decide.” It was
this publication that got Kneeland
into trouble because some people didn’t want to “hear all sides.” Especially not his side; it was too
threatening. What exactly was he
saying? There was always much
controversy and confusion about him.
For example, it was said
that one Sunday as Abner spoke from the pulpit of his Universalist church he
opened the Bible and read from the Book of Leviticus, “Suffer not a woman
during her time of the month to be near you, for she is unclean!” He paused, which aroused the attention of his
congregation. Then, as they watched
aghast, he said, “That’s not true! Women
are not unclean anytime. They say this
is a `Good Book’. I don’t think it is a
very `good book’ in its attitudes toward women!” After saying this he raised the Bible and
threw it from the pulpit down the center aisle where it hit the back doors and
fell to the floor. Abner, it was said,
continued with the service, but someone apparently sneaked out the back door,
went to get the sheriff and Abner was arrested, tried, and became “The Last Man
Jailed for Blasphemy.”
Well, it’s a good story,
and it’s close to true. That passage is
there in Leviticus 15:19-30, and again in 18:19. He did throw the Bible after making those
comments, but it was not in a
The trials show that it was
not for this he was found guilty of blasphemy, but for a statement he printed
in the Investigator in 1833, in which
he set forth why he no longer considered himself a Universalist. He wrote, “Universalists believe in a god
which I do not; but believe that their god, with all his moral attributes,
(aside from nature itself,) is nothing more than a chimiera of their own
imagination.” Though he said many more
controversial things it was this passage that lead to his imprisonment.
They charged him with
blasphemy for denying the existence of God.
He went through five trials.
After his attorney died during the second, Abner defended himself in the
following proceedings. He argued with
the court that his statement “Universalists believe in a god which I do not;”
meant only that he disagreed with the Universalist conception of God. He pointed out that pretty much everyone else
in the courtroom did too. When that
argument didn’t work he tried arguing theology with the court asserting that he
was not an atheist as they claimed, but a pantheist as witnessed in his
“Philosophical Creed” where he said God and Nature were synonymous. He concluded, “...I did not intend to deny,
neither does it deny, the existence of God in a general sense of the word; and
if I did, I did no more than what I have, and every one has, a constitutional
right to do.”
However, the juries and
justices didn’t agree; he was repeatedly found guilty. While he was trying to argue theology with
the court, they were really more concerned with his political views. He was a radical. As noted he believed in equal rights for
women and equal rights for African-Americans.
He believed in inter-racial marriage.
He wrote, if they love each other...why not? (The same can be said for same sex marriage;
and we should thank our UUA President Sinkford for his leadership on this
right.) Abner suggested women should
keep their maiden names after marriage and maintain their own bank account and
property. He advocated in his newspaper
for the right to birth control in the 1820's.
He wrote of the right to divorce.
He proclaimed that a woman shouldn’t have to suffer all of her life for
a decision made when she was young and unwise of the ways of men and the
world. He was president of The Family Guardian Plan which called
for all children to be clothed, fed, and educated at government expense. He was a radical, way ahead of his time--and
of ours--and I wish we would catch up!
When you read the
transcripts of the trials you can see that he was found guilty not for his
theology, but his politics. For example,
the prosecuting attorney in the first trial said, “We can’t allow Mr. Kneeland
to continue with what he is saying or women and blacks will be wanting equal
rights, marriages will be dissolved, `prostitution will be made easy and
safe,….and the foundations of society broken up,...[as private] property
[is]...invaded and made common....’”
The prosecutor in Abner’s
Massachusetts Supreme Court hearing said it was “not for an offense against God
that he is this day called to an earthly bar.
It is because by his conduct he has committed high treason against the
vital interest of society.”
Indeed, Abner was found
guilty of trying to mix his religion and his politics, of trying to live his
faith in the radical ethics of Jesus, in the human potential, live the theology
of equality and rationality he affirmed.
For this he served 60 days
in a
Through his jail cell
window that summer Abner Kneeland watched as the Battle of Bunker Hill was
commemorated with the installation of its now famous monument. As he sat there in his cell, he wrote:
“...but what was [this fighting] all for?
Abner Kneeland became The Last Man Jailed For Blasphemy because
he made it so embarrassing for the “powers that be,” that though the blasphemy
law is still on the books in
However, after Abner was
released from jail he was a broken man; he had about lost his faith. He decided to leave the so called “civilized”
world for the West. He went out to the wilds of
I have been to the site;
there are only a few grave stones left on the hillside, but down below it I saw
a sign for the abandoned quarries of the “Ideal Sand” and the “Ready Mix
[Cement] Company.” His ideals, the
foundation for our effort, are still with us, as are the opportunities, and
responsibilities.
Religion and politics do
mix. The only question is whether they
do so openly and honestly, or narrowly, divisively. Let us mix our religion and ethics so that
our religion is more than words, more than just saving ourselves. Rather let it lead us to work for a better
society and world.
Most people including
Unitarian Universalists know very little about Abner Kneeland and his role in
our liberation and development. Many
people today profess the pantheism he proclaimed over a hundred and fifty years
ago. His rationalism and scientific
epistemology became common among religious liberals. His proclamations for equal rights were ahead
of his time. We have religious freedom,
thanks to Reverend Abner Kneeland. And
yet he has received no credit for his courageous witness. There are no paintings, or statues of him, no
rooms, or buildings named in his honor anywhere. He led the way in social justice. He challenged us to become clearer in our
theology and more inclusive. His
sacrifice helped establish a separation of church and state, giving us the
religious freedom we have today. Let’s
use it to witness to the unity of creation and its goodness, the value of
diversity, rationality, reverence, and the human potential for good. Let’s use it to grow our movement, and to be
an influence for good on this community, country, and world. As the religious conservatives do, let us
work together, let us join together in association for greater affect, in order
to balance and best their influence. Let
Abner be “The Last Man Jailed.” Let us
be free and faithful to our vision of justice, and peace. So may it be.
Amen.