Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

How Can Religious Liberals Speak with Evangelicals?

Reverend Scotty McLennan
Community Minister
June 3, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

This last Wednesday I received an e-mail out of the blue from somebody who’d found on the Internet an article that I’d written entitled “Finding Meaning in College.” He explained that he was “interested and puzzled” by my religious liberalism. I’d written that there are many paths up the spiritual mountain, not just one. As a new Christian, this correspondent wanted to know why, then, Jesus would have said that “He [Jesus] is the way, and no one gets to … God except through Him.” He explained that “This is quite fundamental to an understanding of what to have faith in, and as a baby Christian, I have a desire to know truth.” How can a religious liberal speak with an evangelical Christian?

It would have been easy for me as a Unitarian Universalist simply to quote from our statement of Principles and Purposes in the front of our hymnal¹ to explain that I operate in a completely different spiritual universe from his, one in which my living tradition draws from many sources: Christian teachings to be sure, but also Humanist teachings, wisdom from all of the world’s religions, direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder, and more. But this would be too easy, too dismissive, and ultimately too limited and limiting. For, if my Unitarian Universalist tradition draws from and claims to respect all the religions of the world, including Christianity, I must genuinely engage a significant reality of much of Christianity, now and historically, not to mention a lot of Islam and other great traditions: namely, an exclusivist view of truth: There’s only one true way to God or enlightenment or ultimate meaning, and all other ways are misleading and put one’s very being at risk, both now and in the hereafter.

But my own personal job in responding was even more keenly focused, because I identify myself as a Christian Unitarian Universalist. I’ve been baptized, I accept the way of Jesus Christ as my path up the spiritual mountain, and I claim to be in communion with other Christians worldwide. But, how can a liberal Christian speak with evangelicals?

By way of answer, I referred my correspondent to an article in the Christian Century magazine by Harvey Cox entitled “Many Mansions or One Way?” ² Harvey Cox is a Baptist minister and a professor at the Harvard Divinity School. He’s a liberal who’s long been involved in interfaith dialogue and in dialogue within Christianity with evangelicals. For example, being married to a Jewish woman, he’s written a book on a Christians’ journey through the Jewish year, ³ and then he’s spent a lot of time among conservative Christian Pentecostalists and produced a book on the rise of this form of spirituality and the reshaping of religion in the twenty-first century. ⁴ The major proof text for evangelical’s exclusivism is John 14:6 — “Jesus said…’I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Yet, several verses earlier is a line often used by liberal Christians to prove Jesus’ pluralism: “In my Father’s house there are many mansions [or many dwelling places].” ⁵ As Harvey Cox explains, those many mansions may well refer to places where Hindus and Buddhists and others eternally dwell alongside Christians in the Kingdom of God.

Cox calls himself a universalist, but he feels that religion really lives and thrives in its particularity, especially personal testimony of one’s own relation to God, which evangelicals do much better than liberals. Ultimately it becomes boring and vacuous just to relate only to those who think in abstract, conceptual terms about the unity of all religions. Religion is a vital and transformational force only when it becomes concrete and palpable and personally engaging. He reminds Christians that Jesus on the one hand spoke of love and peace and unity, but on the hand was never “a model of vacuous tolerance.” He made judgments of people’s faith all the time, as he condemned Pharisees and excoriated the priests of the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus stood in the line of the great prophets of Israel like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Micah, who demanded not ritual and dogma, but social justice: support for the widow and orphan, welcome for the stranger, food for the hungry, and freedom for the oppressed.

This is one of the areas in which liberals and evangelicals should not only be able to speak to each other, but to get out there in the real world and work together. I was reading in yesterday’s newspaper about how effective the Save Darfur Coalition has been in pressing for international intervention to end the genocide in Darfur. The Coalition was created in 2005 by the American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, but today it’s composed of more than 180 groups, ⁶ including the Unitarian Universalist Association and the UU Service Committee on the one hand, and the National Association of Evangelicals and the World Evangelical Alliance on the other. ⁷ For two years now members of Congress have been inundated by coalition members with pleas of assistance for Darfur; the Washington mall and countless other public squares have been filled with protesters; the airwaves have been blanketed with heart-rending commercials — all with liberals and evangelicals linking arms. ⁸ This has been true in the area of environmentalism as well. Last January evangelical leaders like the Rev. Richard Cizik, Vice President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, joined with scientists like Professor E.O. Wilson of Harvard to send an “Urgent Call to Action” to President Bush and congressional leaders on matters of climate change, habitat destruction, species extinction, pollution and other environmental dangers. Rev. Cizic explained that, “Great scientists are people of imagination. So are people of great faith. We dare to imagine a world in which science and religion work together to reverse the degradation of Creation. We will not allow it to be progressively destroyed by human folly.” Nobel Laureate Eric Chivian exclaimed that, “There is no such thing as a…liberal or conservative, a religious or secular environment. We all breathe the same air and drink the same water. Scientists and evangelicals share a deep moral commitment to preserve this precious gift we have all been given.” ⁹

Just a few miles from here, you can visit two churches which are both members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) but which stand firmly on opposite sides of the liberal-evangelical divide. The liberal First Presbyterian Church of Palo Alto explains, in part, that it’s “a church committed to inclusive language,” and it’s “a more light church, welcoming gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered persons into full membership.” ¹⁰ The evangelical Menlo Park Presbyterian Church states on its web page, in part, that it “witnesses the Gospel in the world” by being “focused on Christ” and “proclaiming the truth about God’s rule … and by teaching others how to apply these truths.” ¹¹ However, the mission statements of both the Menlo Park and the Palo Alto Presbyterian churches reference social outreach and social justice. As Menlo Park puts it, “Our God is a God of justice. The Good News we proclaim isn’t just that God cares about our soul, but [also] about our plight here on earth. We are called to fight for justice alongside our God.” So, my first practical suggestion of how religious liberals can speak with evangelicals is to role up our sleeves and get to work with each other on social issues of common concern.

My second practical suggestion is to stop stereotyping each other. I feel very fortunate to have been the Dean for Religious Life at Stanford for the last seven years. We have 30 different religious groups on campus that are members of an organization called Stanford Associated Religions, which operates under the auspices of the Office for Religious Life. Of those 30 groups, some 15 could be characterized as evangelical Christian, while about 5 are liberal Christian. Neither evangelical nor liberal communities are monolithic; there’s lots of variation within both traditions and within individual groups.

Yet, both communities are often stereotyped: Evangelicals are seen by many liberals as biblical fundamentalists who aggressively proselytize others to an anti-scientific view of the universe and to a politically conservative agenda. Liberals are seen by many evangelicals as secular humanists or political leftists who are nominally religious, putting a thin spiritual veneer over their attachment to the culture of the day and over their personal ideological commitments. ¹²

Yet, I’ve been very grateful for the way evangelical clergy and advisors at Stanford have reached out to develop agenda-free personal relationships with me, where we could talk honestly and openly about our faith commitments without judgment. There have been a lot of great conversations over lunch, coffee, and beer after work, on campus and at Palo Alto cafes and bars. Along the way, I’ve come to understand that although evangelicals hold to the final authority of the Scriptures in faith and practice, most of them use modern historical criticism of the Bible and struggle with questions of interpretation just as I do. They’re not fundamentalists, by which I mean biblical literalists. Scientific method is utilized and appreciated; indeed, many evangelicals at Stanford are scientists. Evangelicals by definition support evangelism, but it’s usually done by personal example and respectful dialogue, and rarely by buttonholing and browbeating. And there’s no litmus test of political conservatism for evangelicals; one of our Baccalaureate speakers a couple of years ago was evangelical minister named Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine. He’s an activist who began working in the civil rights and anti-war movements more than 40 years ago, and he’s labored tirelessly ever since to overcome poverty, end war, and eliminate discrimination.

In these conversations with Stanford evangelicals, I feel that I’ve generally been appreciated as a fellow Christian who’s committed to Jesus Christ, albeit in a substantially different way: Although I try personally to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, I don’t see the Christian path up the spiritual mountain as the only way. I take the Bible seriously, but I accept other sources of revelation as well, including the breath of the Spirit of Life in my own personal experience.

My third practical point (and I was once taught that preachers are supposed to have three points in a sermon) is that once evangelicals and liberals can stop stereotyping each other, the next task is to listen carefully and empathetically to each other, seeking first to understand, and only then to be understood. This was realized powerfully in a series of dorm conversations that the Office for Religious Life and Stanford Associated Religions ran after Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ came out several years ago. It quickly became clear that students were seeing completely different films, based on their own theological starting point. Many liberal Christians couldn’t see beyond the violence that they feel they’re working hard against in their daily lives, evangelical Christians were deeply moved by the portrayal of Christ’s sacrifice on their behalf, Jews were offended by what they experienced as anti-Semitism in the film, and secularists wondered why anyone would find anything attractive in Christianity in the first place if this is what it’s all about.

What worked well in the dorm talks, though, were some basic ground rules that helped people to hear each other deeply, without judging or arguing or closing up. Everyone learned something new about the movie that way and also left with a more sensitive and nuanced understanding of other people’s perspectives. We asked the participants to listen before they spoke, trying to put themselves empathetically into the shoes of each person as they were contributing to the discussion. Specifically, we asked that each participant briefly summarize the prior speaker’s comments before contributing something herself or himself, and not begin until the prior speaker affirmed that he or she had been understood. Finally, we asked people to use only “I” statements in their own reactions, making clear that this was not a debate or a time for pointing fingers to criticize others. However, we did want them to express their own feelings, beliefs and values clearly. It seemed to work in creating and maintaining a respectful sense of community, allowing people to express themselves freely, and maximizing learning.

This is the kind of process used in a book jointly written by evangelical Christian Richard Hutcheson and liberal Christian Peggy Shriver. It’s called The Divided Church: Moving Liberals and Conservatives from Diatribe to Dialogue.¹³ In their conversation, they came to realize how much evangelicals and liberals need each other in the life of the church. Each found aspects of the other wing of the church that he or she personally admired. For example, Peggy Shriver, the liberal, wrote of how she appreciated the clear sense of the essentials of faith, like human sinfulness, that evangelicals have, especially in the face of the failures of modernity and the intractability of many social problems that liberals have optimistically thought could be solved. She liked the fluency many evangelicals have with the Bible as a resource, their courage to testify in a society that is often hostile to their message, and their concern for the personal suffering of individuals. Liberals have more trouble living with scripture on a daily basis; they can too easily be captured by the culture around them, and they can ignore the individual in their attention to oppressive structures and systems.

On the other hand, Richard Hutcheson, the evangelical, wrote of his appreciation of the liberal insistence that Scripture is always interpreted by human beings and that God alone has absolute truth; evangelicals can forget this and become close-minded and dogmatic on issues of truth. He was grateful for the liberal emphasis on human rationality and on the necessity for religious scholarship. He also liked liberals’ particular emphasis on social justice and not just one-to-one charity. And, finally, he was deeply appreciative of the ecumenical movement which has been central to Protestant liberalism, reminding all Christians to recognize others as authentic parts of one universal church, rather than fighting like cats and dogs and trying to exclude each other from the Body of Christ.

So we Unitarian Universalists can start bridging the evangelical-liberal divide, first, by looking for areas to work actively together to promote social justice. Second, by refusing to stereotype each other, And third, by listening empathetically to each other. The UU statement of Principles and Purposes describes Christian teachings as calling us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Let’s get to work together, liberals and evangelicals, on sharing the kind of love which Jesus brought into the world. While we may be separated over matters like abortion and gay marriage, let’s not forget to work together on the big issues: like the scourge of genocide and war, and the deeply threatening deterioration of the environment. Let’s work on seeing each other as we see ourselves, remembering that we need each other to survive and flourish. For, though we may speak with bravest fire, and have the gift to inspire, if we don’t have love, our words are as vain as sounding brass and hopeless gain. ¹⁴

 

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