I have difficulty determining a person’s age, something that almost got me in trouble one summer when I worked in a convenient store and asked for ID from a man who was buying a six-pack of beer. His driver’s license proved he was forty-nine years old. This difficulty almost got me in serious trouble when I went with my wife to her mother’s family reunion in a park in Morehead, Kentucky in the early 1980’s. It was the first time I had met many of her relatives. After we had arrived I was meeting all these people I didn’t know, while my wife and mother-in-law Loraine were off in another part of the huge party talking with family they hadn’t seen in years. I spied my mother-in-law over on the other side of the park, and as I started walking towards her I thought to myself that there was a delightful quality about her I hadn’t noticed before. Around her family she looked decidedly younger, and the sound of her laughter seemed to melt away the years. I marveled that she didn’t even need to wear her glasses and as I got closer I was giddy with this new found youth she seemed to carry so well. I was about to comment on it to Loraine, my mother-in-law, when the woman I approached looked straight at me and extended her hand and introduced herself as Jennifer. I introduced myself and let her do all the talking and slinked away to find my wife to discover what had just happened. I had met Jennifer, my mother-in-law Loraine’s niece, whom everyone in the family knew looked just like a younger Loraine. For once I had kept my mouth shut and saved myself from embarrassment!

Sometimes at first glance two things look identical which, upon deeper reflection and more knowledge, begin to show definite differences. And some things are so dissimilar in appearance that their liknenesses can be obscured.

We will spend several weeks together talking about the differences between us as Unitarian Universalists, and other philosophical and religious groups in our West Michigan culture. If you remember from last week’s conversation with philosopher Stephen Rowe, when one relates to a distinct “other” one comes into one’s own identity.

And as Dr. Rowe pointed out the paradox of existence is that we are all individually both similar and distinct. Our similarities and differences mark us, and we will employ both in the comparisons of the coming weeks. All of this will be in service to the idea that as human beings when we engage “others” we come both to commonalities and our uniqueness. We come to “know thyself” through a relationship with “others.”

Appropriately, the first group we will look at are the Free Thinkers. Every Unitarian Universalist congregation with which I have had a relationship, has included members that were also active in the local Free Thinkers groups. In fact, Grand Rapids is the only place I have not been asked regularly to speak at the group’s meetings, and I attribute that to historic fact that we Unitarian Univeralists are largely unknown in this region because of our 60 year absence. There is an historic relationship between Free Thinker’s in this country and our Unitarian forbears; less a relationship between the Free Thinker’s and the Universalists. And to understand the similarities and the differences we need to start with history, for without this knowledge it is too easy to make proclamations that simply are not true, especially if one has had a limited exposure to or experience of either the Free Thinker movement or the Unitarian movement.

Philosophers use syllogisms to communicate truths. All Great Danes are dogs. But not all dogs are Great Danes. All Unitarian Universalists are Free Thinkers in that they prize the free mind. But not all Free Thinkers who prize the free mind are Unitarian Universalists.

Historically, colonial New Englander Thomas Paine was a Free Thinker but not a Unitarian, while his contemporary Thomas Jefferson was both. Historically, Nobel Prize winning scientist Albert Einstein was a Free Thinker and a Jew, while Nobel Prize winning scientist Linus Pauling was a Free Thinker and a Unitarian. While “identifying” an individual as a Unitarian is a slightly easier task than “identifying” him or her as a Free Thinker – one could “define” a Unitarian in the “loosest way” as an individual who had some kind of relationship with a Unitarian Church – one could “define” a Free Thinker thus: A Free Thinker can be succinctly circumscribed as any individual who prizes freedom and the free mind, over against societal influences that seek control over the mind and its products. A Free Thinker holds reason and scientific inquiry to be a more stable source of human behavior and determinations of the good, than religious dogma, religious authority, and religious tradition. So, someone could be a Free Thinker alone or without declaration of any kind. All Unitarian Universalists are Free Thinkers, but not all Free Thinkers are Unitarian Universalist.

In this country free thought as a “movement” got its impetus in part by the great German migration of 1848. While minister of our church in Milwaukee I learned of this mid-19^{th century migration, and especially of the noted group that formed in Sauk County, Wisconsin, in 1852, the Freie Gemeinde. It is a symbol of this history. Over the years several of our Unitarian clergy formed relationships with this group because of our share views of social progress, racial and sexual equality, and a recognition and abhorrence of tyrannical tendencies of church and state. Dr. Max Gaebler, Minister Emeritus at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin, who officiated at the Memorial Service of his parishioner, Frank Lloyd Wright, was one such Unitarian clergyman. One of our earlier hymnals included the German Free Thinker “anthem,” "Die Gedanken sind frei" ("Thoughts are free"). Like some free thinker groups in the 19th century, the Freie Gemeinde von Sauk County merged into our larger Unitarian association as the Free Congregation of Sauk County (http://www.freecongregation.org/).}

Other free thinker groups, especially in Texas, formed themselves into local and national organizations to preserve their perspective. The Ethical Culture movement founded by Columbia University social and political ethics professor Felix Adler in 1876 is one of these national organizations preserving the free mind. Our historical connection to it is reaffirmed every time we sing hymn # 192, “Hail the Glorious Golden City.”

Modern free thought had its origin as an emerging perspective in Europe in the 17th century, as individuals began to use the 16th century’s Reformation break from the grip of doctrinal Christianity as a means to further reason and scientific inquiry. With the European discovery of this continent there came into play a physical location where individuals could live even freer of the influence of church and state, and so it is no coincidence that free thinking began to thrive here.

Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson are symbolic of the two tendencies in free thought in this country; one towards secularism and the other towards a religious humanism. Paine wrote Common Sense and The Rights of Man to decry the tyranny of monarchy and urge an independence from its crushing political control, and wrote The Age of Reason to urge a similar revolution against the oppressive social control of Christianity. Paine’s intellectual heritage became the secularism that seeks freedom from the withering domination of religion. If you had the chance to read the article a week ago in the local paper about the local Free Thought Association, those interviewed represented this view; that fostering the free mind is antithetical to religion, and therefore if one truly prizes the free mind one must leave religion and religious community. Rabbi Lewis has a good commentary in today’s paper about the article as well. But that is only part of the history of Free Thinking in this country.

Jefferson, on the other hand, likewise decried the tyrannical tendencies of religious tradition and political monarchy, but wrote his own version of the New Testament Gospels and authored the Declaration of Independence, which grounded inalienable rights in a God that transcended humanity. To him the free mind and religion were not necessarily enemies, though a revolution would be needed in churches that would rival America’s political one. While in Philadelphia he would attend the only church he regularly worshipped in, the Unitarian Church, and its minister, Joseph Priestley, was Jefferson’s spiritual mentor. To Jefferson reason could rid religion of its worship of superstition and purge the church of its tradition, belief, and creed that prized past supernatural revelation over reason and observation; even as when reason is applied to government monarchies crumble and the liberty human beings were created for would thrive. Jefferson was so confident of Unitarianism’s capacity to wed religion to reason and free thinking, and how this was consistent with emerging American culture, that he declared in a generation there would not be in the U.S. a man who was not a Unitarian.

This distinction between secular and religious free thought has held from their time to ours as two versions of how reason and scientific inquiry relate to religion. Our 19th century Unitarian forbears helped create the Free Religious Association, a group that overlapped Unitarianism, the Ethical Culture movement, and “free range” free thinkers, with Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson as its first President. Its intense individualism created an unsustainable organization, but in many ways this was the precursor to the 20th century’s American Humanist Association, which continues strong unto this day. The first Humanist Manifesto came in 1933, wherein free thinkers of all backgrounds declared values they had in common across the spectrum from atheistic free thinkers to religious free thinkers. It was followed by the second Manifesto in 1973 and the third in 2003. Unitarian laypersons and clergy were authors and signers of all three, as were secular free thinkers.

Our Unitarian faith tradition began gathering its religious identity distinct from its orthodox, creedal Christian church origins when William Ellery Channing declared the theological importance of “Spiritual Freedom,” the title of his 1830 address used this morning as our Responsive Prayer. From his time to our own we have sought to understand freedom as a religious and spiritual thing, and that the presence of civil liberties and democratic forms of human social groupings, are themselves the manifestation of ideas rooted in religious association. Human consent is sacred because it is the visible expression of freedom as something central to existence, and not occasional or peripheral. Covenant - freely entered into agreements, promises made from human affection - are all more than just utterances or contracts, as somehow these acts of human connectedness reveal a faith in human agency that itself is ingrained in existence. Persuasion, rather than coercion, is the modality for human relationships because it is a quality of human connectedness that best fulfills this understanding of freedom as being at the center of all existence.

What is the difference between someone who is a member of the Free Thought Association and someone who is a member of All Souls Community Church? Sometimes they are one and the same. But, the organizations are different because their history and their focus and their aim and their mission and purpose are different. Yet, there are those who are members of both, though most aren’t. So, what is the difference between the groups?

That’s part of the difference; that it is between the groups, between the nature of human connection when individuals are part of each. In Unitarian Universalist Churches you will find a wide theological spectrum represented by individuals, from atheism to theism, to a theism rooted in the Christianity before there were creeds that confined belief, to a theism rooted in Judaism or a perspective rooted in Hinduism or Buddhism, or a whole variety of different individual paths. One cannot understand us by looking at us through the lens of theological belief. Our culture likes to look at groups in terms of what “they believe,” but here there are no theological or doctrinal consistencies in that way. There is no “theological they” here such that someone can identify us as “believing thus and so” concerning God or no God. Freedom forms the center of our group. That so many different theologies and non-theologies would be evident in a spiritual community makes sense to us because of our history. Our organization is religious not because we adhere to the same theological creed or confession, but because for us the promise make to walk together, to join the community, the church, and this historic faith tradition, that declaration, like the vows that form a union between two people, is a holy and sacred and spiritual act. Two people are joined together not because they agree, and they, when joined, don’t become one. That is the fallacy of human connection our culture maintains. They create a common bond that is in addition to their distinct identities as individuals. Our history as a faith tradition upholds that the promises we make to one another, in an affection aimed at the freedom of the mind and the heart, is the holiest of all declarations because it creates something new. So a Unitarian Universalist is a free thinker, but in addition has made a promise to others to walk with them and be shaped by this faith tradition and its history of communities, personages, and ideas.

Or, to point out the difference between the Free Thought Association and All Souls in another way: Earlier I mentioned Nobel Prize winning scientist Linus Pauling, who was a Unitarian at First Church in Los Angeles and a chemist. Chemists tell us that molecules exist though they are invisible to the unaided human eye. When these “invisible” particles are combined together in certain relationships, materials that make up our world are produced. If you combine carbon and oxygen molecules you can produce Carbon Dioxide, a waste product our bodies create which we must expel in order to live. But these tiny molecules, these tiny differences which the naked eye cannot discern, portend enormous variations. Remove the carbon and add hydrogen, a change you cannot see, and you get a huge variation. Water is created, one of the substances we must consume in order to live!

Similarly, the differences between a free thinker and a Unitarian Universalist, is that the Unitarian Universalist has an addition, which in some is just a tiny variation while in other Unitarian Universalists it is a bigger one. But, to the unaided eye the variations may appear so tiny as not to be seen. But, a new and different substance emerges. The Unitarian Universalist adds the molecule of human spiritual community, the addition of a faith tradition, the enlargement created by their promise to walk together with those whose theological view and faith perspective is different from their own. The Unitarian Universalist uses the creative act of worship to expand and deepen that connection with others and to contemplate it and act upon it as a larger claim. Unitarian Universalists have to consider, as part of their identity as persons, how it is that human beings can exist in a religious community together when singularity of belief and conformity to that theological declaration, does not form the center of communal identity. We are called to discern as something religious, being in community with others whose theological beliefs we do not share. We represent the idea that the limits of human knowledge require us to create a connection between human beings deeper than theological conviction. Thus, to be a Unitarian Universalist is to walk in community with others, in this special fashion, as an act symbolic of the deepest connection that makes existence what it is and creates the freedom that will fulfill it.

Or, to say it another way still, my mother-in-law Loraine, and her niece Jennifer, look strikingly similar. They are in fact related through family history. But, they are two different people who have lived two distinct lives. Thank God that for once I didn’t put my foot in my mouth and declare they were the same!

AMEN.