The President and the Pacifist
Sermon by Steve Edington
October 26, 2008
About three or four years ago I was honored to accept, on behalf of this congregation, a plaque of appreciation at the local NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner for the help and support we'd given them in getting a Nashua area chapter started. Melanie Levesque, who would later become a New Hampshire State Representative, made the presentation. Ms. Levesque, who spoke from this pulpit on one of our Martin Luther King Day observances, was recently featured in a New York Times piece about an increasing trend of African-Americans being elected to State legislatures from predominantly white districts, as hers over in the Brookline area is.
What I especially appreciated at that NAACP dinner was Melanie's referring to Rev. John Haynes Holmes as she announced our citation. She pointed out that it was a Unitarian minister, the Rev. Holmes, who was one of the principal founders of the NAACP back in 1909 when he was a Unitarian minister in New York City. This, as she put it, made it especially appropriate that the local Nashua UU congregation was being thanked for its local support that night. I must say I felt unworthy to be mentioned in the same breath as John Haynes Holmes, but was still pleased to accept the thanks of the NAACP on this congregation's behalf.
Holmes was one of the more visible, predominant and, most of all, controversial Unitarian ministers [this was pre-merger] of the first half of the 20th century in America. His radical pacifism actually got him removed from the Unitarian fold for a time - but I'm getting ahead of myself on that one. There's far more to Holmes' story than can be told in a single sermon, and while I'll weave some of his story into this sermon, I'll be mostly focusing on a confrontation between Rev. Holmes and a former United States President, and dedicated Unitarian lay leader, William Howard Taft, at the onset of our country's entry into World War I. But I mean for this to be more than just a slice of Unitarian history that I'll be putting forth today. The Holmes/Taft stand-off is also a good, and sad, example of what can happen when persons of principle and integrity get so locked into their respective positions that they can no longer see or hear one another.
By way of interlude, before continuing on, it was four years ago that I began using the last Sunday of October to hold up a chapter from our Unitarian or Universalist history. And if four years establishes a tradition, then I guess I've now got a tradition to maintain. Back in 2004 Steve Ladew put in the high bid on the auction sermon and asked me to do one on the life and martyrdom of Michael Servetus, who was burned at the stake - at the behest of John Calvin - for his Unitarian views in Geneva, Switzerland on October 27, 1553. I now use the Sunday closest to that date - which this year is tomorrow - to tell a story from our faith tradition. I notice I keep moving up by the centuries. In 2005 I went to the 18th century to speak about Joseph Priestly. Last year I moved to the 19th to speak of Hosea Ballou. Now I'm up the 20th with Holmes and Taft.
This was not one of the happier, or nobler, stories in our UU history, although - as I said - it involves two quite noble people. I'll tell the story and we'll see what it might in turn tell us. So let's get the two principal characters in this little drama on stage beginning with Mr. Taft.
William Howard Taft was the 27th President of the United States, taking office in 1909 - 100 years ago this January. He was, by the standards of that time, a moderate to progressive Republican who succeeded Theodore Roosevelt in office and was expected to continue TR's progressive policies. While he was an advocate of international cooperation and outreach and believed the goal of world peace attainable and worth striving after, he also served as Roosevelt's Secretary of War before becoming President. He was of a long line of Ohio Republicans. His son, Robert Taft, was a US Senator who barely lost the Presidential nomination to Dwight Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican National Convention. His grandson, Robert Taft, Jr., recently completed his second and final term as Ohio's Governor.
While his son and grandson did not follow in William's religious footsteps, President Taft was an avowed and active Unitarian. In 1899, ten years before becoming President, he wrote in a letter to his brother, "I am a Unitarian. I believe in God. I do not believe in the divinity of Christ and there are many other postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe." He then went to say, "I am not, however, a scoffer of religion, (but) recognize the elevating influence it has had in the history of mankind (and that)...it is essential to satisfy the spiritual craving of human nature."
I find it of interest to read those words now, and wonder as I do, where we really are in this country when it comes to religious tolerance. Taft's unambiguous denial the divinity of Christ was not an impediment to his achieving the Presidency. I have to wonder, in today's religious/political climate if he could get away with it now. While the Constitution prohibits an explicit religious test for holding public office, we have evolved all kinds of de facto religious tests for the Presidency, to the point that calling a Presidential candidate - however incorrectly--a Muslim is regarded as a slur. But I digress.
I got a kick out of another quote from Taft when he spoke of his intense dislike for electoral politics. Of the campaign in which he won the Presidency, Taft said it was "one of the most uncomfortable four months of my life." Imagine that, if you can - a four month Presidential campaign! He only served one term. Teddy Roosevelt, out of office, decided Taft wasn't progressive enough for his (Roosevelt's) tastes so TR formed a third Progressive "Bull Moose" Party, which in the 1912 election took enough votes away from Taft to elect Woodrow Wilson. Taft would later become Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and he actually regarded that post as his greatest service to his country, to the point that he remarked near the end of his life, "I don't remember that I ever was President."
In the years between his being President and Chief Justice, Taft become a noted lay leader in the institutional workings of the American Unitarian Association, which included his being the Moderator at a gathering of the General Conference of Unitarians in Montreal in the fall of 1917. This meeting was one of the precursors of our annual UU General Assemblies today. It was here that Taft had his showdown with John Haynes Holmes. So, let's get him on stage.
By 1917 Rev. Holmes had been the minister of what was then called The Church of the Messiah in New York City for 10 years. During Holmes' ministry it would be renamed the Community Church of New York. Holmes was raised in a well established Bostonian family and prepared for the ministry at Harvard Divinity School. Also by 1917 he'd been instrumental in founding, as already noted, the NAACP. He was also one of the founders, and Chair for a time, of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1918 he discovered Mohandas Gandhi and in 1921 delivered a sermon about him titled "The Greatest Man in the World." Holmes was not shy about expressing his opinions. He was also an outstanding pastor and poet. Some of the hymns and readings he wrote have appeared in all of our denominational hymnals over the past 60-70 years. He served the Community Church for 41 years.
Holmes was also an avowed pacifist, and in a very polemical way. On the eve of President Wilson's and Congress' Declaration of War on Germany he delivered a sermon to his congregation titled "A Statement to My People on the Eve of War." He did not mince words. Speaking from his liberal Christian stance he declared that war, under any circumstances was an "open and utter violation of Christianity," and went on to say that "if war is right then Christianity is wrong, false, a lie. If Christianity is right, then war is wrong, false, a lie."
He knew such a stance could cost him his pulpit and was prepared to resign his ministry if the Church's governing board called for it. The Board met on the same evening as his sermon. Only one of the members of the Church Board was in agreement with their minister's position; and yet they voted unanimously to support his right to his freedom of the pulpit. His ministry continued - and the church actually grew.
All of which gets us to that Unitarian Assembly in Montreal in September of 1917 with the United States participation in WWI now well underway. I'm not going to try to address here the rightness or wrongness of this nation's involvement in the First World War. We don't have the time and I don't have the historical expertise to do that. What I do know of that time in our nation is that the sentiment and the fervor for our going to war was at such a fever pitch that scarcely any dissent or any questioning of our involvement was even tolerated. And this sentiment reached right into the Unitarian fold. How the Universalists dealt with it all is something I need to explore further.
Former President Taft led off the Unitarian Assembly with a ringing endorsement of the War, calling on the AUA to get behind President Wilson - Taft's one time political opponent for the Presidency. Taft, like Wilson, truly believed it would be a "war to end all wars." So he said to that Unitarian gathering, "It is the duty of our churches to preach the righteousness of the war and the necessity of our winning it in the interest of the peace of the world...I hope this Conference will by strong resolution express its emphatic approval of all that President Wilson and Congress have done and are doing to win this war."
This probably isn't the best way to put it, given our subject matter, but Holmes quickly returned fire. Speaking from the floor of the Assembly he held forth: "Millions of men are dead on the battlefield or in the hospital, more millions are wounded, maimed, blinded, or diseased. Other millions including unnumbered women and children are nameless victims of famine, pestilence and butchery. And still the fight goes on with a determination as wonderful as its cost is frightful." And that's was just for openers!
For all of his passionate, and deeply held, rhetoric what Holmes was actually asking of the Assembly was rather modest. Whatever resolutions of support for the war they might pass, Holmes also wanted that Conference to also go on record as recognizing the right of any member of the clergy to dissent on grounds of pacifism or conscientious objection, so as to protect their ministries. But this gathering of Unitarians was having none of it. Taft's resolution was overwhelmingly adopted; dissenting clergy and lay leaders became personae non grata in the Unitarian communion. A year later the AUA Board went so far as to vote to withhold any denominational assistance to member congregations whose ministers were not in support of the war effort.
Holmes' response to that move was to pull his church out of the Association and resign his ministerial standing with the American Unitarian Association. His bond with his congregation was strong enough that they backed him on both counts and continued to operate as an independent congregation with the Rev. Holmes as their minister. They changed their name, as already noted, to the Community Church of New York. This was both a way of asserting their independence from the AUA, and to send a signal that they were moving away from their liberal Christian base to become a more religiously and philosophically inclusive congregation - even as Holmes retained his liberal Christian identity for himself.
As I said at the outset, this was a pretty sad chapter in our history in a number of respects. But hopefully there is some wisdom to be gleaned from even the saddest of situations. To quickly round out this story, however, cooler heads did in time prevail. In 1936 the Unitarian General Assembly repudiated the 1918 action taken against dissenting ministers. In World War II, even with its general support of the war effort, the AUA also did support conscientious objectors, and did not suppress dissenting pacifists as they had in the previous world war.
President and Chief Justice Taft died in 1930, so how he would have felt about all that cannot be known. Following his retirement in 1949 Holmes did agree, at the behest of the AUA, to be listed again among their recognized ministers. The Community Church did in time rejoin the denomination they'd left, and is now one of the more racially and ethnically diverse, and socially active, congregations in our Unitarian Universalist Association.
The fact, however, that everything more or less finally turned out OK doesn't mean that there aren't some hard lessons to be learned here, especially since serious damage was done to both individuals and to our movement before that OK place was finally reached.
One hard lesson is that persons of integrity, intelligence, and good will - and who even share the same eventual goals - can get so locked into a stance that they cannot see any merit or validity to any other stance. This is what happened to Mr. Taft. He so firmly believed that the war effort deserved the unreserved support of his religious communion that he really thought it would be dangerous, if not treasonous, to allow for any conflicting opinions. Taft was a great lover of democracy, but apparently could not see that democracy is at its strongest when open debate and dialogue are allowed to flow even in the most perilous of times.
As for Holmes, he was eventually vindicated by the actions the Unitarians later took to undo some of the damage that had been done him and his congregation. I think it's to his credit that he did take some pretty hard hits in order to assure that either pacifism as a philosophy, or that opposition to any particular war, would have a rightful place for expression in our overall Unitarian Universalist family; and would be heard. Those in our UU family - clergy and laity alike - who questioned the wisdom of our going off to war in Vietnam, as well as the wisdom (or lack thereof) of going to war in Iraq are at least partially indebted to Holmes for opening that door. In addition, his achievements as a minister, as an advocate for social justice, as a good pastor to his congregation, and as an accomplished poet and essayist still stand as an inspiration to me and to many of my colleagues in the liberal ministry.
I still cannot completely let Rev. Holmes go completely scot-free, however. I admire his forthright pacifism, but I think he seriously erred in placing - as he at least appeared to do - those who did not share his view as being beyond the bounds of their faith. His position was, as he said in a sermon he delivered several years prior to the US entry into World War I, that war was never justified under any circumstances. I have to ask myself, how much difference is there in Holmes' proclaiming that war, any war under any circumstances, is an "open and utter violation of Christianity," and that of a Catholic Cardinal, Bishop, or Priest proclaiming that one cannot rightfully be in the Catholic fold if they support abortion under any circumstances or conditions?
Indeed, a moral case can be made for the immorality of war; just as a moral case can be made for the immorality of abortion. It is when a moral argument or stance - with whatever degree of reasonableness it may have - gets elevated to a moral absolute that I have a problem. I cannot endorse moral absolutism whether it comes from the right or the left. (And I'm absolutely sure of that!)
I'll close with this. We are, blessedly, approaching the end of a pretty grueling presidential campaign - and one on which I still wouldn't put any serious money on the outcome. Mr. Taft's complaint about having to endure a Presidential campaign for all of four months is downright quaint these days.
Many of us have our preferred candidate at this point. Next Sunday I will speak to what I see as being some of the values issues at stake in this election and leave the choice of candidate to you. Whether it's a Presidential election, or any other issue or concern that stokes our passions, I hope we'll continue to find ways of listening to one another, and of hearing one another - as I think we now do here quite well - even at those times when we're not each and all on the same page.
We should also not lose sight of our larger and shared goal or vision, whatever the religious, spiritual, social, cultural or political paths that bring us to it. And that is that we are indeed striving towards a world blessed with "fruits of peace and love and justice where today we plant the seed."
Stephen Edington
October 26, 2008
