Sermons by Rev. Don W. Vaughn-Foerster
Salvation and Patriotism [Or, Is It Still Okay to Massacre?]
Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
May 27, 2007
There are some beautiful and patriotic lines from the Indian poet, Tagore:
"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; / Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; / Where words come out from the depth of truth; / Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection; / Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; / Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action - / Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
[From Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore.]
These words speak of an ideal espoused by people the world over. It is a patriotic ideal like that vision which inspired the "fathers" of our country when they broke with Great Britain and constituted these United States. But, it is an ideal to which we have only partially awakened, for there are still many fearful minds, downcast heads, domestic walls, false words, dead habits (apathy) among us.
Actually to attain this ideal world we would have to give up many material and political advantages over others that we have acquired through the years. We would have to give up the way in which we tend to perceive ourselves in relation to other peoples.
When I speak of "the way we tend to perceive ourselves" I refer to our national mindset about our identity and our destiny. This mindset is not something we have suddenly created for ourselves. It did not come with the advent of the gas powered internal combustion engine or with nuclear power. It has steadily grown out of the Christian religious account of the history that produced us. Because of the Biblical roots of the men and women that first settled this continent, it was fired in the ovens of Sinai and the Palestinian wilderness. Ancient Hebrew shepherds and wanderers of Old Testament times created a vision of destiny that inspires our national spirit even today. This vision has been proclaimed for over two hundred years from fundamentalist and moderate pulpits.
It began as early as when Joshua took over from Moses and led the invasion of the land of Canaan. This military incursion was successful; the Israelites took possession of Canaan's lands and cities and began the process of assimilating and being assimilated. So complete did this process become that the Israelites began to adopt the gods of the peoples they had conquered. Joshua called the people together at their most holy ground, the shrine at Shechem, and laid down the law. Either they "serve God" or they were subject to the same violent fate that they had already inflicted on the earlier inhabitants.
In his speech to the assembled tribes, Joshua told them that, led by God, the patriarchs had first come to Canaan and established claim to it, that Jacob and his children went into Egypt, that Moses led them successfully out of Egypt across the Red Sea, that they had wandered in the desert before finally retaking Canaan for their own. He asserted that God had led them, had given them their strength and faith, and that God was the true power that destroyed their enemies. He declared that their covenant with God entitled them to God's concern and power, but that to turn against this covenant was to turn God's power against them. In short, he proclaimed that they were God's people and their destiny was to be God's instrument in dealing with foreign gods and foreign peoples. God had saved them; now they must serve God or be destroyed by God.
According to many biblical scholars, Joshua's speech summarizes the main concern of the first five books of the Old Testament, books that contain Hebrew traditions and fashion them into a special kind of history: the history of God saving Israel - Israel's salvation history, as it has been called. It has been said that "some people make history, and some make it up." On that day at Shechem, Joshua, or whoever put the words in Joshua's mouth, made up the salvation history of the Israelites - at least in its most succinct form. Apparently he understood something that Winston Churchill understood later. Churchill is reputed to have said during World War II that history would deal gently with him because, in his words, "I intend to write it." [from J. F. Kennedy, 10/2/61] The success of Joshua's invention is clear. It has prevailed as a mindset for centuries. This sense of a divinely controlled national identity has had an undeniable effect on western history, especially in this country.
In the beginning Christianity sought to make salvation universal and nonviolent by replacing God's "might", as the power whereby human beings were "saved", with God's suffering. Had this Jesus-centered conception of salvation held its own and replaced the old one, the world's history and our own national self-perception might have been different. But Christianity was adopted as Rome's official religion and the image of God's might in the service of national policy was revived and applied on a broader, more effective scale. Since that time, the notion that nations are to be used by God to serve God's own purposes (or, more honestly put, God is to be used by a nation's leaders for their own purposes) has become a part of almost every western people's psyche, especially our own. Nations (especially European nations) have claimed their own unique salvation history to rationalize and defend their actions every time they invaded a "new Canaan". The mindsets that produced Spanish and British imperialism, France's de Gaulism, and even Nazi Germany are cases in point.
We, in the democratic republic of the United States of America, have done the same from our treatment of the Native Americans to the Monroe Doctrine to the Spanish American War to Nicaragua to Afghanistan and now to Iraq. Our salvation history harks back to Joshua at Shechem. We hear it told and retold on our national "holy days", such as Memorial Day, Independence Day, Armistice Day, Thanksgiving, and at election time. It is hammered into almost every child in our public schools. It is a history exemplified in our most important public documents, including the Declaration of Independence, some of Lincoln's most gripping remarks, and including, perhaps, some of the utterances of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Our current president clearly tries to sound like a modern day Joshua when he declares that we must stamp out evil and impose our political system on others.
A summary of our salvation history goes like this: Our forebears were pilgrims who fled want and tyranny in the Old World for the tremendous challenge of making a new land of wealth (milk?) and freedom (honey?). They were led by Divine Providence, which blessed them, sustained them, and taught them how a free people should live. Those who began our country were, thus, inspired by a holy vision that enabled them to throw off the imperial yoke of Great Britain, conquer a continent of wilderness and savages, and build a mighty economy based on individual enterprise - one that apparently works best when inspired not by mutual concern for the needs of the community but by unrestrained greed. Because of Divine Providence we now are predominant among the nations of the world. God has saved us to be a land of "liberty and justice for all." It is, therefore, our duty to defend and extend our "American Way of Life" as we, through the guidance of God, have created it. We are a "chosen people" of freedom and it is our "manifest destiny" to see to it that people everywhere are free on our terms, of course, not theirs. It is as if Joshua stands at the Washington Monument every July 4th and tells us, "God has brought you out of the land of tyranny and has made you a free people. Now you must destroy all who will not be as you are, or be destroyed yourselves." If you live here and do not support this "divine mandate", you are, in effect, traitors to the divinely inspired motives of our divinely inspired leaders.
Our salvation history (our collective perception of our mandate and destiny) gives us a mission, but one based on fear - fear that requires us always to be on the physical attack for our own spiritual self defense. It gives us an identity, but an identity based on the derogation of the worth of others - the same identity that Joshua gave the Israelites and that the Roman Emperor Constantine gave the Christians. It is also an identity that in former days asserted that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian," or, as I heard in Korea, and was later said in Vietnam, "One American soldier is worth at least 10 gooks." It makes it okay to have strafed retreating Iraqi soldiers as they were in flight from combat in the first Persian Gulf War, to have inflicted uncalculated collateral damage in the first Persian Gulf War, and to continue to occupy, control, and devastate Iraq in the current "war on terror" - which, ultimately, is a political effort to "slant well drill" into oil profits that actually belong to the Iraqi people. It makes it okay for the United States to be the new imperial power serving its own god -- not Yahweh in this instance, nor even Mars, but, in actuality, Mammon, the god of material wealth [i.e. "money"].
Our salvation history actually is also our damnation history of other peoples. It makes us special by making others of no value. By making us agents of morality and judgment, it justifies the destruction of others for being immoral and wrong. Some anonymous person has said, "I'd rather deal with a 'God-loving' person than a 'God-fearing' one." How true!
Believing that because we are "saved" others must be "damned" is the all too common way in which all too many of our citizens perceive this nation in relation to other nations. But it doesn't stop there. In competitions among ourselves we treat one another as either "saved" or "unsaved". We cut out any middle ground for cooperation, knock down the ladders which might get us over our walls of separation. The conflicts between the races, the economic classes, the sexes, the political ideologues have all been grounded in an elitism and exclusivism that our salvation history continues to promote.
If you believe what Jesus and other Hebrew prophets said about loving your neighbor, or what Socrates said about humility and honesty, or what Buddha said about gentleness, then it is obvious that to be "saved" while "damning" others is actually to be damned as humane beings ourselves. For, fear for oneself, and the disdain for others which that fear instills, generates hatred and eats away at the human qualities that are the soil from which equity and cooperation grow. Our salvation history, to paraphrase Jonathan Swift, has "just religion enough (about it) to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
We must save ourselves from our salvation history. I don't mean we should renounce our heritage as a free people, or our opportunity to make democratic and humane values a viable way of life, or our loyalty to the nation in which we are citizens. Rather, we must renounce that fearful exclusivism which parades as commitment to the "American Way of Life" but contradicts the very principles of openness, equality, justice, and freedom which that way of life is said to represent. We must rid ourselves of the self-serving rationalizations that make it all right to support dictatorships in order to spread freedom, to hate fellow citizens because they are not in our tribe, to kill the immoral in order to spread morality. We must rid ourselves of the gullibility that leads us as a people to cheer when our civilian Commander-in-Chief appears in public in military garb rather than suspect that there is a Praetorian Guard hidden in the wings. To me a certain flight suit is only an updated version of Fidel Castro's combat fatigues.
I believe we can save ourselves from our salvation history if we allow ourselves to perceive others as just as irreducibly human and valuable as we are, if we can always keep that mutual respect and toleration for persons which has long been the humane ideal. Not that we have to approve of everything others desire or think - that is not toleration or respect but enslavement to them - but that we perceive them and ourselves as beings each with our own personal integrity and meaningfulness, which we mutually accept in one another.
It is possible for us to do this, for even as our salvation and damnation histories have continued in our world so have the humane principles of reason, love, respect, and cooperation - principles that Tagore assumed in his poem. Apparently, the time still is not quite yet when these principles will govern the human world. Perhaps there are some self-serving salvation histories yet to be written. But humane principles continue to exist and, now, more than ever, are the hope of our world. We should take heart and expand their effects in all we do. Not to do this is to give insults, massacres, and torture our tacit approval as appropriate ways for people to treat one another. It is to believe that narrow domestic walls will never be breached. It is to sacrifice that high and healthy patriotism which advances the moral integrity of a nation and its citizens for that low and diseased patriotism which places fear and material interests over ethical and humane practices.
On this Memorial Day weekend, when we give our attention and honor to so many that our salvation history has had a hand in destroying, may we remember the better, the more humane and caring way, and try to make that way more real in our world. After all, isn't it the more humane and caring way for which we are told they died? When we and all around us can approach life humanely and caringly then, truly, will our minds be without fear, our heads held high, and our country and our world awakened into a heaven of freedom.