In Virginia, the American Revolution led to the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, which had been tied closely to the royal government. Then the question arose as to whether the new state should continue to impose taxes to be used for the support of all recognized churches. The proposal had a number of supporters who, even if they no longer accepted an established church, still believed that religion should be supported by the public purse.

For some Virginians, however, imposing religion on people smacked of tyranny. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both of whom would later be president of the United States, argued that religious beliefs should be solely matters of individual conscience and completely immune from any interference by the state. Moreover, religious activity of any sort should be wholly voluntary. Not only did they oppose taxing people to support an established church, but they also objected to forcing people to pay taxes even for their own church. To Jefferson, a high wall of separation should always keep church and state apart.

Jefferson drafted the following measure, but it was Madison who skillfully secured its adoption by the Virginia legislature in 1786. It is still part of modern Virginia's constitution, and it has not only been copied by other states but was also the basis for the Religion Clauses in the Constitution's Bill of Rights. Both men considered this bill one of the great achievements of their lives, and Jefferson directed that on his tombstone he should not be remembered as president of the United States or for any of the other high offices he held, but as the author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and as the founder of the University of Virginia.

Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as it was in his Almighty power to do; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time; that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which in common with his fellow-citizens he has a natural right; that it tends only to corrupt the principles of that religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion, and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:

Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

And though we well know that this assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act to be irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present, or to narrow its operation, such act shall be an infringement of natural right.

Am I leading the life that my soul,

Mortal or not, wants me to lead is a question

That seems at least as meaningful as the question

Am I leading the life I want to live,

Given the vagueness of the pronoun "I,"

The number of things it wants at any moment.

Fictive or not, the soul asks for a few things only,

If not just one. So life would be clearer

If it weren’t so silent, inaudible

Even here in the yard an hour past sundown

When the pair of cardinals and crowd of starlings

Have settled down for the night in the poplars.

Have I planted the seed of my talent in fertile soil?

Have I watered and trimmed the sapling?

Do birds nest in my canopy? Do I throw a shade

Others might find inviting? These are some handy metaphors

The soul is free to use if it finds itself

Unwilling to speak directly for reasons beyond me,

Assuming it’s eager to be of service.

Now the moon, rising above the branches,

Offers itself to my soul as a double,

Its scarred face an image of the disappointment

I’m ready to say I’ve caused if the soul

Names the particulars and suggests amendments.

So fine are the threads that the moon

Uses to tug at the ocean that Galileo himself

Couldn’t imagine them. He tried to explain the tides

By the earth’s momentum as yesterday

I tried to explain my early waking

Three hours before dawn by street noise.

Now I’m ready to posit a tug

Or nudge from the soul. Some insight

Too important to be put off till morning

Might have been mine if I’d opened myself

To the occasion as now I do.

Here’s a chance for the soul to fit its truth

To a world of yards, moons, poplars, and starlings,

To resist the fear that to talk my language

Means to be shoehorned into my perspective

Till it thinks as I do, narrowly.

"Be brave, Soul," I want to say to encourage it.

"Your student, however slow, is willing,

The only student you’ll ever have."

Election sermons are a long and cherished part of the Free Church tradition of which our Unitarian Universalist faith is a part. Our faith tradition sees the institution of the church to be at its best a means for the connection of humanity to God through freedom; not by providing you with the beliefs you must hold, but invigorating the spiritual capacities within each individual to freely experience God and discern for the self; whether that experience is inside the sanctuary on Sunday morning or on the beach of Lake Michigan Monday morning. But in our faith tradition election sermons are preached after the polls are closed and the tallies are in, so as not to sell off the human birthright of freedom for the pottage of the preacher’s political view. So I will preach an election sermon next Sunday as is our tradition. This sermon will be something else.

This sermon is about the something else that has gotten lost in all of the vicious divisiveness of this election season. This sermon is about what is left after the signs fade, after the hanging chads are a historical footnote, after the court battles are decided, and half of the nation sighs in relief while the other hunkers down for four years of anxiety. It is, actually, the something else that in our faith tradition is the core of who we are. It is not really an afterthought or an addition, though we may treat it as such. It is the very definition of our faith. It is also the spiritual foundations for our democratic Republic.

This is the not the first democracy to appear in human history. But its uniqueness is in its origins. Our democracy was not founded upon Christian precepts, although it is not antithetical to Christianity. It founders were spiritual though they looked with a suspicious eye upon the tyrannical capabilities of both governments and churches. John Adams was a staunch churchman at First Parish Church Unitarian in Quincy, Massachusetts, now affectionately called The Church of the Presidents. Thomas Jefferson regularly attended a church in Philadelphia, when we would visit that city, which would become the first to take the description, Unitarian. James Madison was active in the Episcopal Church and wrote what characterized this new democracy, "Governments are limited by the essential distinction between civil and religious functions."

Once when I was traveling across the expanse of this country I found myself in Guymon, Oklahoma, out in the panhandle in the middle of nowhere. I had stopped for the night and was sitting on a rocking chair outside my motel door looking at the great western expanse and the slowly setting sun, when the owner of the motel strolled up to join me in a look and some friendly conversation. When we got around to, “What do you do?”, and I told him, he launched into a narrative of his own spiritual path and what it had taught him. I always find these kinds of conversations interesting, and this one was a charmer. As it turned out he was the kind of staunch churchman I like to have in my congregation because of his devotion to the cause of social fellowship and spiritual interaction, like Adams, Madison, Jefferson, and me.

There have been, I think, three great transformations in the life of humanity that bear upon the spiritual foundations of this democracy. The first occurred when human beings emerged into an awareness of their surroundings and knew their mortality. Human beings gained consciousness, realized they would die and that all things of this world come to an end. It is this “contemplation of being and non-being” as one theologian called it, which still gives rise to religious emotion and spiritual experience, and questions of evil and good and the righteous life.

The second great transformation in the life of humanity occurred in ancient Greece when for the first time human beings developed the critical mind using reason as a guide. “Know thyself,” the core teaching of Socrates, was transformational in opening humanity up to a new and broader way to consider human existence. One’s mortality became the occasion for the disciplined mind to probe its world and human nature, rather than merely being a captive of past custom, familial ways, historical necessity, the way we’ve always understood and done it, and eventually even fate itself. But to undergo this transformation required the pursuit of self-knowledge, a pursuit of a knowledge of the world, and the pursuit of a knowledge of what human nature was. And this, strangely enough, was not something that took hold of humanity’s religious and spiritual life to quite the same extent.

The third great transformation in the life of humanity did not come, I think, with the appearance of a great religious personality like Moses, or Jesus, or Mohammed. Nevertheless it was in the human arena of spirituality in which this transformation appeared. It was a thread that tugged or nudged the soul beyond, “Know thyself,” and know thy mortality. And this common thread can be seen in is infancy in the European Renaissance and Christian Reformation, refined in the Enlightenment to later become the spiritual foundation of this country.

After the motel owner in Guymon, Oklahoma found out what I did for a living he began telling me of his own faith. These kinds of conversations are interesting to me not always because of the content of the individual’s faith. But these conversations are interesting to me because of the mere fact that both individuals are convinced personal conviction is significant at all! It may be so obvious to us that we sleep through its importance, like Rip Van Winkle sleeping through the core of the American Revolution. When you answer someone’s question, “What do you believe religiously?” it is a conversation of query and response that had absolutely no equivalent meaning prior to the European Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment. In 15^{th century Italy, 6th century Mecca, 4th century Nicea, 1st century Nazareth, even 9th century BCE Greece and 13th century BCE Egypt and the Promised Land, the question, “What do you believe?” and the response by an individual as if the individual’s proclamations are ultimately meaningful, was unknown save by a few rare and extraordinary persons. Individual people existed but the individual did not. He did not have a religious opinion that mattered. She did not have a mind that could think on religion freely. He may have loved God and neighbor as himself, but they both looked and thought and believed strikingly like him. She may have pondered the value of the faith tradition she was teaching her children, but rarely and not for long. There existed billions of persons through all the millennia from the dawn of humankind to the beginning of the European Renaissance, but few individuals; that is, until the dawn of the primacy of the individual.}

The motel manager in Guymon, Oklahoma, spoke of his faith with conviction; of course! We all as individuals hold to our beliefs as if there is some credibility to them. That is the marvel!. Regardless of education, preparation, experience, age, years on the job, each person I have ever talked with concerning their religious beliefs holds to them as if they are true, as I do mine, and especially tightly if they are threatened. It is a corollary to the appearance of primacy of the individual. Individuals hold beliefs, usually different, about the way existence is. And individuals hold to them as if they reflect ultimate reality, otherwise, we would discard them in favor of more accurate ones, an “upgrade” or “conversion,” we say, that often happens in the course of our living.

Yet, every lawyer I have ever met, and every doctor, and every plumber, electrician, teacher, mother, airline pilot, if I claimed that my beliefs about their area of expertise was equivalent to theirs, or even superior to theirs, would return my claim with understandable incredulity. “Excuse me, doctor, but I’ll take over the surgery now. I stayed at a Holiday Inn!”

Yet, since the Renaissance, Reformation, and the Enlightenment religion has become different. The motel owner told me of his convictions, knowing I had years of graduate and post graduate education in religion, and telling me with a conviction as to his truth claims which differed so much from my own. He did not own a Holiday Inn, but obviously he had stayed at one! We conceive of each and every individual as someone who has or can have a deep knowledge of religion and their faith derived from their own experience! Individual experience trumps everything else every time; education, doctrine, scripture. From the primacy of the individual came the primacy of individual belief, and this arose because of the authority of individual experience. Each individual holds convictions measured by the self primarily, and other criteria secondarily.. And all in this culture hold to this view of the self’s capacity to discern beliefs, ultimate things, from one’s individual experience, because underneath all of the various religious views in this culture there is this single point of convergence, that individual human experience, various as it is, matters. More to some, less to others, but individual experience matters.. The primacy of the individual can even mean that an individual’s experience holds sway over past custom and inherited belief. Individuals are created by freedom, shaped by liberty, and endowed with spiritual insight from their experience that no church or theology or doctrine can give or take away.

This a priori spiritual capacity within human nature is the source of the prospect that the Guymon, Oklahoma, motel owner, a self-identified faithful member of the Church of God, can enter into a meaningful spiritual conversation with a Unitarian Universalist with whom there is a unfathomable canyon of difference. There is the spiritual self that exists before all.

As it is with spirituality and religion, so it is with political rights. And an individual’s direction connection to political liberty is something that nations and governments can invigorate, but no political party or policy can create. There is a civic self that exists before political rights are acknowledged by governments. There is a civic self that exists before all, too.

The spiritual foundations of this democracy can be found in the recognition that there exists within human nature a spiritual self and a civic self, and that these are two separate and related parts of an individual. They have emerged in a distinct way since the emergence of the primacy of the individual. As individuals we believe religiously different things, and claim from our individual experience a different and sometimes incapable order to existence. So it is with our political opinions, too. As it is with our responsibilities to others concerning spiritual conversation, so also is it with our civic self. As individuals we are created with political liberty that it is our responsibility to guard for one another that our civic square possesses the breadth to accommodate all. The success and continued existence of our democracy depends upon our capacity to hold the spiritual self and the civic self as native to the self, yet distinct from one another, and calling us to responsibilities in the shape of our common public democratic life.

The motel owner in Guymon, Oklahoma, and I argued religion far into the night. He claimed that his religion contained the prospect of being free in Christ. I claimed that my religion allowed freedom enough not to believe in Christ. We could not go to each other’s church, or at least not for long and find our individual experiences of God deepened through the faith tradition of the other. The experiences we had had, and the makeup of our spiritual selves, were as different as the twilit sky was from the solid ground upon which we stood. But there was a thread that tugged both our souls and bound us together, a mystical kind of chord deeper than our faith. As it is with our spiritual selves, so it is with our civic selves, too. There is a public trust we both are called to uphold. Otherwise, as in millennia past, we would have literally destroyed the other. It is the thread that tugs from an individual’s soul, which, knitted together with the threads of others, forms freedom’s coat of many colors that the soul of our nation wears.

I think this first Presidential election of the new millennia has ramifications far beyond the conflicts and animosities that swirl about in our world. History tells us that particular conflicts and animosities change but conflict and animosity themselves never go away. There is something deeper and more permanent at stake. Can we develop the ties of community that uphold the primacy of the individual, the spiritual foundation of democracy? Can we do it in such a way as to fulfill the responsibilities of the civic trust that is needed to make democracy strong? It will require free citizens to see, acknowledge, and hold as sacred the ties of human fellowship that lie deeper than human opinion and interpretation. It will require individuals to uphold the spiritual self by being true to the experiences that informs one’s faith; to be true to the spiritual thread that ties the individual soul to God. At the same time it will require individuals to understand the civic self by being true to the democratic spirit that protects the public square and keeps safe the rights of all; to be true to a civic thread that runs through us all, binding us together into a sweet land of liberty, the chord which when tugged sounds freedom’s ring!

AMEN.