Imagine two children playing hide-and-seek; one hides, but the other does not look for him. God is hiding and man is not seeking. Imagine God’s distress.

[Secularism] is the loosing of the world from religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed world-views, the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols… the discovery by man that he has been left with the world on his hands, that he can lo longer blame fortune or the furies for what he does with it. Secularism is man turning his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time…

Religion has been privatized. It has been accepted as the peculiar prerogative and point of view of a particular person or group. Secularism has accomplished what fire and chain could not: It has convinced the believer that he could be wrong, and persuaded the devotee that there are more important things than dying for the faith… The age of the secular city… is an age of ‘no religion at all.’ It no longer looks to religious rules and rituals for its morality or its meanings…

Urban-secular man came to town after the funeral for the religious world-view was already over. He feels no sense of deprivation and has no interest in mourning.

Liberalism is a term today that is used almost exclusively to refer to a political viewpoint. That is a strange phenomenon historically because for centuries it meant something else, something much, much broader. That it would have this narrow meaning, arising only over the past two decades or so, reveals only our historical ignorance and not its “pure” meaning distilled over time. For our distinct, peculiar definition of liberalism, tied to our time, masks a larger understanding of liberalism that history knew before our decade, as the view that holds as sacred the human individual as a divinely created creature. This “religious” liberalism gave to us the communal bonds we call political democracy, which values individual rights, individual ownership of property, and the consent of people necessary for political leaders to govern over them. In the past it was the religious liberal that saw God at work in the world through “the bonds of love [which] keep open the gates of freedom.”

But it is this larger meaning, this “religious” liberalism, this transcending aim of human communal bonds, Love as spiritualized bonds of affection, that our time lacks. We play hide and seek with God, but we aren’t looking in any of the places where religious liberalism of times past saw God hiding. We look for larger meanings and transcendence in the belief systems of religions, and today we only find there exclusive claims that become the justification to “others” for violence and condemnation, terror towards and the spiritual internment of others. The God the modern liberal seems bent on finding is just a larger version of our particular joys and endorsements, and our narrow dislikes and hatreds. It is the “stranger’s” faith. So modern liberals give up the search for larger meanings, transcendence, God at work in the world, and see the city only as a secular one. Modern liberals don’t look for God in the ways human beings make, sustain, and deepen connection. This is what has happened to liberalism. God is hiding, but the liberal hasn’t been seeking for the second half of the 20^{th century and the first decade of the 21st. So liberalism, having abandoned roots any deeper than political, becomes simply a term with political meanings.}

And for political reasons of their own, others leap to attack a liberalism uprooted from its spiritual soil and dangling in the arid air of secularism.

In her book “Godless: The Church of Liberalism,” iconoclast and media personality Ann Coulter makes the claim that the Democratic Party, the liberalism as nothing more than a political viewpoint, has been captured by secularism. As an aside, lest I be misunderstood, I don’t buy her books or listen to her any more than I do Al Franken and Air America. I use the public library rather than putting money in the pockets of either of them. I have no interest in interpreting the culture’s events politically. Everybody does that, especially people in religion. I am trying to interpret the culture’s events theologically.

The jacket cover of her book gives her argument that “Liberalism rejects the idea of God,” and she puts it in her own words inside: “Liberalism is a comprehensive belief system denying the Christian belief in man’s immortal soul,” adding in a footnote the unintentionally hilarious but telling explanation, “Throughout this book, I often refer to Christian and Christianity because I am a Christian and I have a fairly good idea of what they believe, but the term is intended to include anyone who subscribes to the Book of the God of Abraham, including Jews and others.” Evidently in her world, she controls the meaning of all words such that when she says “Christian” she means “Jew” and “Muslim,” too. Never mind the bothersome detail that they are three different religions, with three different histories, cultural backgrounds, and views of the world.

But Coulter’s inability to show discernment might still hide revelation. The eloquence of the Almighty can clearly sound through drivel or stutter. The lack of transcendence makes the Democratic Party’s brand of liberalism as cynical as Coulter’s comments are drivel!

The party which got elected the most spiritual President of the 20th century, Jimmy Carter; the first and only Catholic President, JFK; and in FDR had the one individual who, alongside of the Pope and Jesus Christ, graced the mantle above more American fireplaces than any other figure, shriveled into an a-religious at best or anti-religious at worst, public face at the dawn of the 21st century. Party leader Senator Barack Obama’s confessed last summer, "I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people and join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy." His confession was timely as a recent Pew Research Center Poll indicated that, The Democratic Party continues to face a serious "God problem," with just 26% saying the party is friendly to religion. And the cynical yield has been the endeavor by the Democratic Party to court the demographic of “people of faith,” as if faith is a demographic to harvest for political gain. I am offended that anyone would conceive of my faith, or religious people, or of the human religious impulse as a demographic category. If the human religious impulse is a part of human nature, which our faith tradition has longed declared it to be – humanity, whose rights and consent are part of the image of God in which each individual is made – than it cannot be dismissed in so shallow and disdainful a way.

I am deep in the middle of a discernment process, trying to grasp the significance of what you are doing as a spiritual community in the liberal religious faith tradition called Unitarian Universalism. Perhaps what you are doing only has private meaning, for you and your immediate children, for your needs and theirs; that the circumference and the distance of meaning lies only with you and your kin, your mortality and theirs. Maybe, though, what you are doing has a meaning of such breadth, length, and profundity that none of us can comprehend it entirely, nor even mostly.

Last night a number of us gathered at Tessell Park at Cascade Road and Thornapple River Drive for All Souls’ annual Banned Books Bonfire. As we’ve done the past four years we roasted marshmallows and read aloud from books that have been banned throughout the centuries. Banned, I might add, by well meaning leaders of churches and governments. It was the same as the previous years except there were about a third of the gathering of 30 or so that were people not from All Souls. This year there was an article in the weekly Advance about this event and it attracted persons who didn’t know us, this church, or this faith tradition. I had to routinely interject in the evening’s events, “Brought to you by All Souls Community Church,” with a couple of extra lines about who we are, where we came from, and what our faith tradition holds as sacred and as transcending the individual. It was GREAT to have to do this, but of course it begged the question.

Why did those “strangers” choose to come? One theologian offers an insight that is, I think, an explanation: The reality of the world from which the liberals [centuries ago] originated and which they resisted was the reality of communal authorities [and the very real oppression community can bring about]. [But] the reality of our world [today] is of community-less individuals, where the hope for community, family, and church is felt very deeply by the otherwise empty individual. (“Eagle of Power, Raven of Guilt: Conversations with Langdon Gilkey,” by Jeff B. Pool, Berea College)

Why did people come to this church sponsored event that “spiritualized” freedom? People feel their aloneness. People feel their own alienation from one another. And they feel their aloneness and alienation from a larger meaning to their mortal days. They yearn for transcendence, long for a larger purpose, are searching for God though God is hiding right before their eyes. People feel secluded, and want something more and spiritual.

They want the yield of human affection and connection. But not just any kind of affection and connection, but their hope and their yearning is that it can be both religious and liberating at the same time. I think it is because people mourn having lost the religious to the brutal intolerance of others and to the restrictions of thought and affection that characterize religion today. I think it is because the secular city is populated by the lonely who ache for a spiritualized form of connection. I think it is because the secular city is populated by seekers who want their lives to mean something more than the span of the birth and death dates that will dot their gravestones. I think it is because people want communal connection and to feel their own religiosity and spirituality in ways that liberate, rather than rebuke, chastise, and reprimand the human spirit. People want something more than the isolation secularism has rendered, and they want something more that will last after they are dead and buried. They want spiritual community; that is, community with a liberating spirit that lasts and which their own living can participate in and enlarge.

But they are afraid of this kind of spiritual community, and with good reason. People possess the fear that to be spiritual in community requires the self to submit to its own demise, as has been as evident in recent history as it remains in present.

It is true that the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st will be seen by historians centuries from now as a time of mass movements and the disappearance of the self in the hysteria of the “great cause.” Nazi nationalism, Soviet Communism, Jim Crow-ism, the Kymer Rouge in Cambodia, the tribal murders in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, now in the guise of the “clash of civilizations” pitting democracy against fundamentalism. If ever there was a time in human history when individuals should turn away from the prospect that there are meanings larger than the individual, manifested by individuals in league with other individuals, now is the time.

Believing in race and nation yielded Auschwitz. Believing in the communal distribution of the fruits of industrial production yielded the Gulag. Yet, this goes deeper. Believing in democracy yielded Watergate and Kent State and Bull Connor. Believing in the Lord’s church yielded clergy fondling children, believing in Yahweh rolled tanks into the West Bank, believing in Allah strapped explosives on young men and women. There will be little doubt in the minds of the future about this time. The individual self is lost in the terrible mass movements that mark our time and culture as the time of terror.

And the liberalism of our day, the “love child” that became secularized, political liberalism, was born at the end of a 20th century well aware of the oppressions when humanity believes in the “great cause.” Political liberalism of our day arose resisting the ways we brutalize and betray one another when beliefs in larger things bring about the demise of the discerning self, like in the case of Ann Coulter. She is such a true political believer she can’t discern the difference amongst various religious beliefs! But in its rebuke of belief in the great cause and the loss of self it can entail, the liberalism of our day has lost sight of human isolation and the need for community. Liberalism embraced secularism and found itself bowling alone and abandoning God. The liberalism of our day has forgotten that man does not live by bread alone, especially not by the stones of political bread. The greater part of human being is the human spirit, as the greater part of existence is the Spirit.

The liberal fear, well founded by the measurement of recent and current history, is that if one is a part of something larger than the self, something more significant than the individual, something more meaningful than “Me,” that “I” will always get swept away and individuality and selfhood will always be lost. The modern liberal fear is that is the only possibility when one becomes part of something meaningful and larger than self. Fear begets neglect. The fear of the statement, “For whoever would save his life will lose it;” gives birth to an abandonment. In being afraid of losing the self by giving away the self to something greater, the greater part is lost. Not all great causes are equal, and not all great causes end in doom. The self given over to a “something more” that liberates the spirit, is the giving over to something that ennobles life and glorifies creation’s unfolding because it judges through freedom. Because it is only through love and justice that freedom comes into existence. It is the one who chooses to play a game of hide and seek with God, and delights in looking for God everywhere, for that liberating spirit that can move through love and justice.

Today it is so difficult to discern anything meaningful in breadth, length, and profundity. In centuries past religion provided that in people’s live, but we live in a time where religion is so overtaken by the political that it no longer holds anything of breadth, length, and profundity. Religion today is the origin of terror, violence, and the certainty of beliefs that provoke human animosity instead of altruism. But the secular world, the “age of no religion at all,” is no better, particularly in this consumerist, celebreality of ours that isolates individuals into purchasing demographics and ends only with a headstone with numbers. A life lived meaningfully in breadth, length, and profundity will today require a spirituality that links humankind instead of dividing it, and creates a community that elicits the virtues and sentiments that extol the human family by transcending the barriers that confine Love.

I dare say I saw that kind of bond of affection last night. On the banks of the Thornapple River, the current flowing from time immemorial, there strangers gathered. Books that had been banned were read; defying to the human propensity to oppress, true, but greater still. Reading was subversive and liberating. Words flowed freely. Marshmallows were toasted. S’mores were created. Children, the future, laughed at the human folly that it can or should control the spirit by banning words and ideas. Children, the future, laughed in delight because its liberation had been fed. And a strange community of the Spirit was made, to a large extent by strangers who did not know one another. But there was felt a hospitality greater than the knowledge they lacked of one another. A spiritual community. And God emerged from the shadows of the evening to call out how simple and profound it is to hide in plain sight. God peeked from around the tree, quietly slipped past a couple and into a circle of love and justice, just before any human cry could declare, “Ollie, Ollie, in come free.”

AMEN.