Sermons
A Tale of Two Cities
September 8, 2002, All Souls Unitarian Church, NYC
Rev. Forrest Church
(see also: A Tale of Two Cities,
9/8/02 and Four
Views From New York, 9/11/01)
I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to be back, not in the pulpit
so much, as in the heart of this remarkable community. I wonder sometimes
how people without a community such as ours make it successfully from
one year to the next. That may sound silly to you or self-serving, but
I really do wonder. For obvious reasons, I've found myself pondering
this question all the more deeply over the past twelve months. Life
is filled with so many trap doors and such odd passageways. We are tripping
the light fantastic one moment, dancing on our pedestal, and then-bang-toppled
into darkness the very next, shuffling through the wreckage, taking
baby steps again, relearning how to walk. It is not an unmixed disaster
when this happens by the way. Spiritually it is useful every now and
again to be reminded that we are not in charge here. When our minds
are preoccupied by illusions, displaced in an imagined future or trapped
in an imagined past, it can be cathartic for a demanding present to
blow our shuttered doors off their hinges. This is only true, however,
when we are not alone. Disruptions are beneficial only to the extent
that what otherwise could weaken us or pit us against one another opens
our hearts instead and brings us together.
On September 12, I recalled the Chinese ideogram for the word "crisis,"
two word pictures, one meaning danger, the other, opportunity. In our
personal lives and also in the life of our nation and the world, danger
and opportunity come packaged together. If we focus only on the danger,
we may miss the opportunity that accompanies it. This morning I shall
begin with the larger picture, on Wednesday allude briefly to both the
political and personal aftermath of 9/11, and next Sunday devote my
full attention to our individual soul maps: where we are spiritually
as individuals and where we might go from here.
Throughout, my reflections will be guided by the work I did this summer,
putting the finishing touches on my new book, a biography of the Declaration
of Independence that will be published later this month. In it I define
the United States as a union of faith and freedom, in which faith elevates
freedom and freedom tempers faith. The freedoms established in our War
of Independence were based on a higher law than had ever before been
invoked in the history of state building. The lofty ideals of the founders-that
all are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable
rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-not
only represent America at its best, but anticipate the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights and our own Denominational Principles, which you can
read on the back of the morning calendar. I call this the American Creed.
It has inspired and chastened our nation's greatest leaders. In a way,
our entire history can be measured according to the extent that our
deeds have lived up the promise of our creed. In his "I have a
Dream" speech, Martin Luther King, Jr., looked "forward to
the day that this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning
of its creed." The essence of that creed, is E pluribus unum,
"out of many, one,"
Today this ideal is in jeopardy. With freedom in a pitched battle against
faith-pluribus pitted against unum-we find ourselves in a situation
where the sovereign individualism fostered by post-modernism and the
totalistic imperatives of post-traditional fundamentalism are increasingly
unable to co-exist. E pluribus unum may once have represented
the founders' idealism, but today-both for this nation and for our shrinking
world-it signifies nothing less than hard-headed realism. In the nuclear
age, either we learn somehow to co-operate or else we all perish. Given
our technical capacity for murder-suicide, it can truly be said that
a world divided against itself cannot stand.
E pluribus unum has redemptive consequence not only for America, but,
with our shrinking globe, where discrete backyards no longer exist,
for the entire world as well. Abraham Lincoln said, "that sentiment
in the Declaration of Independence . . . gave liberty not alone to the
people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time."
Among the many ironies that followed hard on the premature declaration
last fall that irony is now passe, is the irony that many in the world
today perceive us not as a harbinger of hope but as a danger to world
peace.
The United States should and must lead the world in the war against
terror. We are the world's only super-power. We also are founded on
a set of democratic ideals that represent the world's best hope. The
irony, even tragedy, is that today we are more alone in the world and
more hated, than we were before 9/11 united the world's leaders against
the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and evoked enormous popular sympathy
for our nation and its people. I spent a week this summer with Karen
Armstrong, the great religious historian. She told me that when she
visits places like Brazil and Germany instead of being called on to
defend Islam by, as she does, differentiating it as a whole from the
actions of its most zealous crusaders, she finds herself instead having
to defend the United States. In short, our self-image and our image
abroad are in sharp and increasing opposition to each other.
For this reason, I am particularly concerned-terrified might be a better
word-by the administration's apparent eagerness to instigate a war against
Iraq. Not that the object of our aversion is in any way noble. On the
contrary. Simply that this solution in so many ways seems to compound
our own and the world's problem. One only sets a backfire to control
a burning forest when the conditions are favorable. Otherwise the backfire
spreads the very flames that it was intended to quench.
Anyone who glibly claims to know for sure what we should or should not
do in response to the menace posed by Saddam Hussein possesses a knowledge
that simply does not exist. The situation is exasperatingly complicated.
It would be naïve and irresponsible to ignore his apparent attempts
to develop instruments of mass destruction. The question is not whether
to respond to the threat Iraq poses, but how, and for this there are
no easy answers.
Before acting, however, we must ask ourselves some hard questions,
the very questions our allies are asking. Would a war on Iraq, even
a successful way, impede terrorism or foster it? Would it stabilize
or de-stabilize the Middle-East. Would it keep Iraq from employing biological
and chemical weapons, or prompt Iraq to use them on our own soldiers?
What if an American invasion of the Middle East leads to revolution
and a new anti-American government in Pakistan, which already has nuclear
weapons? Do we then take out Pakistan, which would be, by our own definition,
a much greater danger to world peace than Iraq is? What if Israel, as
they have said they would, retaliates against an Iraqi scud attack with
nuclear force? And that is just the war. What about the peace?
I wonder sometimes whether those who are shaping our nation's foreign
policy are suffering from ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder. The present
administration ran on a platform of no nation building, no foreign adventures
that were not easily explained to and broadly supported by the American
people, and clear exit strategies for any overseas engagement. In response
to 9/11 that policy was abandoned, in part for good reason. But our
first experiment in nation building is hardly promising, the first war
against terrorism has certainly not proved victorious, and the American
people are more divided than they have been since Vietnam. Yet today
all we hear about is Iraq.
As great a concern, and one that surely affects America's stature overseas,
is that while we proclaim ourselves ready to act unilaterally if need
be against Iraq, we are more doggedly isolationist and imperious than
ever before in all the collegial work being done by the world's leaders
in response to the shared environmental threat, racism, the establishment
of a workable world court, and so many other area of joint concern.
At a time when E pluribus unum-however idealistic, however difficult
to accomplish-is becoming the world's motto, the United States, whose
founders gave this vision as a gift to the world, stands apart.
This explains the greatest post-9/11 irony. Why we, in so short at
time, have moved from a position of leadership in a world-wide campaign
against terrorism, in to one of isolation. In the weeks after 9/11,
we won not only unprecedented sympathy around the world, but also the
support of almost every world leader in our campaign against the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden. Were we to give as much attention and provide as
much leadership in fostering democracy in Afghanistan as we did in toppling
tyranny there, however difficult the challenge, we might still be in
that same position. Moreover, we would be working to establish a model
that would inspire aspirations for democracy throughout the Arab world.
We would be modeling our values of liberty and justice for all, not
applying them rhetorically and hypocritically only when they suit our
nation's self-interest. Almost everything our leaders have said in condemning
Iraqi tyranny could as easily be said of Saudi Arabia, whose outrages
against human rights go almost unmentioned. It is hardly surprising
that many in the world see the United States not as a beacon of liberty
and hope but as a self-serving super-power bent on revenge and insensitive
to any but our own economic concerns.
I can understand those who want to attack Iraq. Not only are hurt national
pride and chauvinistic expressions of patriotism understandable following
the first foreign attack on the continental United States in almost
two centuries, but Iraq does pose a danger to world peace. We should
be doing everything we can, together with the United Nations and our
allies, to disarm Saadam Hussein. If this effort fails, as well it may,
we will then be in a much stronger position convincingly to muster an
international coalition as we did the last time we invaded Iraq. Beyond
this, there is no moral equivalency between anything America has done
and the slaughter of innocents on September 11. We do no honor to the
memory of those who died by indulging in paroxysms of guilt. But there
is some truth in how America's critics view our influence in the world.
The United States exports no goods or services more intrinsically valuable
than our standard of living and dedication to liberty. Yet, when the
former can be caricatured as decadence and the latter as libertinism,
the immense moral capital we have to offer is squandered. Faith, as
we know too well, can serve as the handmaiden of terror, but freedom
alone offers insufficient moral sinew to answer faith's critique. Freedom
finds its meaning-moral, amoral, or immoral-in the nature of its expression.
Though predicated on the virtue of freedom, both untrammeled free-market
capitalism and unfettered personal liberty can have unintended consequence.
Free markets open themselves to exploitation; free morals contribute
to social dissolution.
If free global markets have a stabilizing effect on the world (and
in many ways they do), economic efficiency is independent of civic responsibility.
Democracy may be naturally suited to free market capitalism but free
markets in no way guarantee democratic ideals. Corporations have a more
natural affinity with stability than they do with democracy. The transnational
corporation has no home and no loyalty beyond the bottom line. In oppressive
societies that collaborate efficiently with global free market forces,
to the extent that Western culture is identified with Western commerce
America is more likely to be perceived as the oppressor than as a liberator.
Beyond this, any struggle to the death between faith and freedom can
only cripple both. When Osama bin Laden said of the terrorist destruction
of the World Trade Center that America was "hit by God in one of
its softest spots," he may actually have been right-not in imputing
this act of terror to God, but in recognizing that American economic
power alone, uncoupled to an underlying trust in something higher and
more eternal, is indeed vulnerable to the hatred that it, as an idol,
can inspire. By the same token, the radical faith that bin Laden confesses
and enforces may also prove to be one of fundamentalism's softest spots,
for it too inspires an international backlash dedicated to its eradication.
A year ago, the world's anger was pointed at bin Laden. Today it is
pointed at us. We might be wise to remember the greatest lesson that
history teaches: Choose your enemies carefully for you will become like
them.
In 410, Alaric and his Goths sacked the city of Rome. Four years later,
St. Augustine began writing his response to the end of the world as
he had known it. The City of God is, in fact, a tale of two
cities: the Earthly City (which he calls the City of Man) and the
Celestial City (or City of God). These cities, Augustine argues, are
ruled by contrasting loves. Citizens of the Earthly City are driven
"by the love of self in contempt of God;" in the celestial
city, they are lovingly "united in the enjoyment of God and of
one another in God." To Augustine, Rome's ruin was a foregone conclusion.
At the turn of the third millennium, Islamicist Fundamentalism and
Western modernism epitomize equally conflicting worldviews: the City
of Faith versus the Secular City. The increasingly explosive struggle
between their citizens can be summed up, respectively, either as a war
between freedom and evil or one between faith and evil. Though one could
argue that today the barbarians and the faithful are one and the same,
unless common ground can be established, this tale of two cities is
a preordained tragedy.
So long as the City of Faith and the Secular City are trapped in a
zero-sum game, there is little hope but that the tale of two cities
will continue to be a tragic one. Benjamin Barber argues that "Democracy
remains both a form of coherence as binding as McWorld and a secular
faith potentially as inspiring as Jihad," but a "secular state"
without spiritual underpinnings lacks the grounding necessary to answer
the language of faith. Mark Juergeusmeyer comes closer to the vision
of America's founders when he concludes, "Religious violence cannot
end until some accommodation can be forged between the two-some acknowledgment
of religion in elevating the spiritual and moral values of public life
. . .. The cure for religious violence may ultimately lie in a renewed
appreciation for religion itself." Fortunately, our nation does
have spiritual underpinnings. We were founded as a union of faith and
freedom. E pluribus unum is a sacred construct. Our freedoms
are based on a higher faith, one that should, as Abraham Lincoln said,
"give hope to all the world, for all future time."
St. Augustine (whose City of God was a city of peace) set down his
vision as the walls of Rome were crumbling before the onset of barbarian
hoards and Rome itself crumbling within, a victim of its own decadence.
Today, he would have recognized his Celestial City neither in the metropoli
of modernism nor in the citadels of fundamentalism. If the former show
little respect for God, the latter show as little respect for humanity.
Augustine would call on both parties to answer to a higher law.
Even the Celestial City in its pilgrimage makes use of the earthly peace and
guards and seeks the convergence of human wills concerning what is
useful for man's mortal nature as far as sound piety and religion
allow, and makes the earthly peace minister to the heavenly peace.
This is so truly peace that it must be considered and called the only
peace, at least of a rational creature, since it is the best ordered
and most harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God and one another
in God.
I can think of no more eloquent summation of E pluribus unum,
in which the City of God and the City of Man (to use Augustine's language,
might become one city), a city in which freedom and faith are united.
Rather than faith smothering freedom or pluribus undermining unum,
E pluribus unum offers a spiritual template both for the nation
and to a riven world. Only by the cultivation of such harmonious fellowship
will our tale of two cities find a happier ending.
