Religion, Science, and Joseph Priestley
Sermon by Steve Edington
October 29, 2006
One of the oft-repeated quips in UU circles - although it probably applies beyond us as well - is that if you do something twice you've established a tradition. I may be doing just that with this sermon today. On the last Sunday in October one year ago here I gave a sermon on the life, the work, and the death of Michael Servetus. Servetus, who is primarily remembered as a 16th century Spanish physician and medical researcher, is also known in our circles as the first Unitarian martyr for his being burned at the stake in Geneva, Switzerland in 1553 at the hands of John Calvin for his religious writings challenging the doctrine of the Trinity. Steve Ladew lit our chalice this morning in Mr. Servetus' memory.
Here's the possible tradition part: I'm going to try using the last Sunday in October to highlight the life and importance of a particular figure in our Unitarian and/or Universalist stories. This time around it's going to be the 18th century British scientist, political philosopher, linguist, and Unitarian minister, Joseph Priestley.
I would classify this as an "eat your vegetables" sermon. It's good for you. Remember, that's what your parents said when they wanted you to eat your peas or corn or beans or broccoli? This stuff is good for you. Well, this stuff that is good for you to know if you place yourself in the liberal religious, Unitarian Universalist tradition - or are considering doing so. And, as those of you who are vegetarians will attest, you can have a very nourishing, full-course meal with vegetables. So, let's hope that's the case this morning.
While they lived in different centuries and in different countries there is an interesting parallel between Michael Servetus and Joseph Priestley in that the way in which they are primarily known has very little to do with their religion or their religious opinions. Servetus is primarily known in the annals of medical history as one who made some of the early and very significant discoveries about the circulation of the blood. Priestly is mostly known in the scientific community - even though he was not formally educated in science - as the discoverer (he was actually a co-discoverer) of oxygen. So while we regard these two gentlemen as central figures in our religious story, their greater claim lies in other areas.
Those of you who were here one year ago may remember that I began my Servetus story as if I were writing the screenplay for a movie about his life, and spoke about how I would set up the opening scene. It was a description of Servetus being led to his death by burning at the stake as dawn broke over 16th century Geneva; and then the rest of the film was a flashback. I'm going to try that one more time with Priestley to see if I can get away with it again. This scene, too, involves a fire; and while it does not cost Joseph Priestley his life - as was the case with Servetus - it does a great deal of damage to his livelihood and well-being. Okay, here we go:
This time the screen would show these words: Birmingham, England; July, 1791. The first shot is through a living room window where we see a rather professorial looking, 58 year old Joseph Priestley and his wife Mary spending an evening at home. Yes, their names really were Mary and Joseph. There's a quick interior scan of the Priestley home, which includes Joseph's study and laboratory. Looking through the living room window from the inside we see the Unitarian Church, which Priestly pastors, next door. Then we focus on the Priestleys as they hear angry crowd noises out in the street, which get louder and angrier and closer. Then they hear their windows breaking and smell smoke as flaming torches come flying through their windows and set their house on fire. Their church is also torched.
Joseph and Mary gather up whatever few belongings they can grab and make their escape out a back door. We see them travel to London where they take refuge with friends. Here we have a scene where Mary and Joseph talk about their four grown children, and wonder about what their fate will be, as well as their own, in the aftermath of this disaster.
Then the screen says, "Two Years Later." We see the Priestleys setting sail from England in April of 1794, for the new land of hope and promise that the Europeans call America. They speak of joining their two grown sons who had preceded them on their own voyage to America a few months earlier, and with whom they hope to settle. Then the rest of my movie would be a combination of prequel and sequel, showing the events in Priestley's life that led up to the Birmingham Riots in the summer of 1791, and some of what came afterwards as Priestley lived out the remainder of his life in America.
I'll hit a few of the high points of that life in a few minutes. To give us a framework though, I'll point to three key components that I see as giving Priestley's life its fullness. They may sound like a rather unlikely combination at first glance as they are science, politics, and religion. Science, Politics, and Religion: I would call these three things the "Priestley Trinity" but I wouldn't want such a devout Unitarian as Priestley was to go flipping around in his grave. So, I'll call it the Priestley Triangle instead, and we'll revisit it later. Let's take a run at the Priestly bio first - the peas and carrots as it were.
He was born in the town of Leeds in 1733. His mother died when he was six years old. This was probably a painful loss for the young boy, but it also had its fortuitous side in that his financially strapped father sent the lad to live with an aunt whose family were "people of means," and who could afford to pay for the education of their uncommonly bright and precocious nephew. By age 16 Priestley has mastered several languages - including Greek and Hebrew - and was considering a career in the ministry. He was, that is to say, the kind of kid who makes his elders proud and his young contemporaries hate him for being so good and smart.
It was, in fact, his study of theology and religion - as he prepared for, and briefly entered, the Calvinist based Presbyterian ministry - that soon moved his religious ideas and beliefs in a progressively liberal direction. He came to see that he was in basic agreement with those in the Unitarian wing of the Protestant Reformation, with their emphasis upon the life and teachings of Jesus as the basis for human salvation and not his death to supposedly deliver humanity from the state of original sin. Later in life, in 1782 Priestley would publish a book called The Corruptions of Christianity, in which he held that the corruptions were the doctrines and dogmas of the Christian faith that actually obscured who the real person of Jesus was. This was the theme that Thomas Jefferson would pick up on when he and Priestley much later became friends here in America.
Much of Priestley's career, then, was taken up being a minister and an academic. He taught languages at various universities and served as a minister to Unitarian churches as they were being established in England in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. He and Mary raised their four kids. He lived, that is to say, a pretty conventional life that was full of unconventional ideas. Unlike the quixotic and sometime bizarre behaving Servetus, Priestly led a pretty safe and secure existence - up to a point, as we'll see.
It was in the course of his conventional life of unconventional ideas that Priestley met another person of unconventional ideas in the person of Benjamin Franklin, when Franklin was making a visit to London in 1766. These two eclectic and inquiring minds immediately connected. I figure their meeting would make for another good movie scene. By now Franklin had done his thing with the kite and had figured out what electricity was; and he regaled Priestley with stories of his various other experiments. It all served to push Priestley's ever precocious mind in still another direction - that of scientific inquiry and the use of the emerging scientific method when it came to investigating the world of nature and natural processes.
So, adding to his credentials as minister and linguist Priestley became a largely self-educated scientist. Natural Science was such a young field in those days that there were few formally established credentialing bodies that deemed who as an "official scientist" and who wasn't. If you wanted to be a scientist you set up your lab and did your thing, which Priestly did. He was able to get some of his early experiments published in a few fledgling scientific journals and in so doing made a name for himself in this still quite young field of inquiry, while still earning his living as a minister and professor.
In 1774, some eight years after Franklin had turned him on to scientific inquiry; Priestley was able to isolate the element of oxygen. When he published his discovery he learned that a French scientist by the name of Antoine Lavosier had been conducting similar experiments, and so he and Priestley actually share the credit for the discovery.
It is a discovery Priestley made two years prior to this, however, that should not go unnoticed. He was living back in his hometown of Leeds, where he was teaching and also had a church; and where he lived next to a brewery. He noticed that certain gaseous properties in the air that was being emitted from the brewery were settling to the ground - meaning that it was heavier than normal air. He had actually found and isolated carbon dioxide. Then he figured out a way to produce this "heavy gas" as he called it in his lab, and further learned that when he dissolved this gas in water it gave the water a tangy taste. That is to say, he invented the carbonization of water. For this he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1772. Think on that: The man who brought Unitarianism to America also made the discovery that eventually led to the creation of Coca-Cola and all our other carbonated beverages. [I'm not sure where to go with that so I think I'll just let it sit.]
It may have been his ongoing contacts with French scientists that made Priestley aware of the stirrings of democratic ferment in that country, as it led up to the beginning of the French Revolution in 1787. And he was also hearing from his old friend Ben Franklin about the democratic experiment that was happing in America following a revolution of our own from Priestley's own country of England. All of this added still another dimension to his career - that of political philosopher and advocate. He issued forth yet another trove of writing defending both the French and American Revolutions and calling for the end to the British monarchy - or at least the end of any real political power being vested in the British throne. Now radical politics had come to be added to Priestley's religiously unorthodox ways.
This is what gets us back to the Birmingham Riots in the summer of 1791, where we see that the manipulation of fear by persons in power is anything but a new phenomenon. What was initially passed off as random violence by a gang of hooligans, eventually proved to be - upon further review - a deliberately instigated piece of action against Priestley and several of his like minded contemporaries who also lived in Birmingham at the time.
The British ruling class, which consisted of those in high positions of power in both the political and religious realms, was getting scared. They had already lost their colony in America, which significantly diminished the power they held in the known world of that day. They see a Revolution in France, just across the Channel, that ends the monarchy there; and that revolution takes, for a time, a violent and bloody turn.
They needed a scapegoat; and they found one in Priestley. Here is a man in our very midst, so they proclaimed, who took the side of those dangerous radicals in over there America, and who has even shown sympathy for those revolutionary terrorists just a few miles away in France. Besides that he is teaching a false religion that undermines the basic fabric of the faith that gives us our moral underpinnings as a nation!
As was later discovered it was the local Anglican Archbishop, in cahoots with the local magistrates, who put that very message out amongst the populace in Birmingham, and then waited for the riots to happen. As just noted, other members of Priestley's congregation and some of his like minded contemporaries in Birmingham were also targets of these fear inspired riots. This leads me to think that perhaps a Priestley movie could be made as a metaphor for our times.
Priestley's final years in America were not terribly happy ones. He and Mary settled, and had a home built, on land their sons had purchased just west of Philadelphia in Northumberland. One of the sons soon died, and tensions developed between Priestley and his other son. Their daughters had remained in England. Mary died only three years after she and Joseph arrived in America.
As he looked for a way to promote his religious views, it was a Universalist Church in Philadelphia, the only one amenable to offering him a public platform that extended an invitation to Priestley to give a series of lectures on liberal Christianity. It was on the strength of these lectures that Priestley, and some of his new friends and followers, founded in the Philadelphia area, in 1796, the first church in America to call itself Unitarian. Among those who occasionally worshipped at his church, or visited with Priestley, were his old friend Ben Franklin, along with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. So, Unitarianism got a foothold in the Philadelphia and Washington area thanks to Priestley, while it was also beginning to gather steam in the congregational churches in New England. Priestley died in Philadelphia in 1804.
One of those debates that Unitarian historians get into is whether or not Priestley's church really was the first Unitarian church in America. About 4-5 years before Priestley's church was founded a congregation to the south of us here, at Boston's Kings' Chapel, declared itself to be Unitarian in theology and changed the language in its Prayer Book to reflect that. But Kings' Chapel never put the actual term "Unitarian" on its church. Priestley's was the first liberal religious congregation to call itself Unitarian by name. So which one was really was the first Unitarian church in America? I report, you decide.
Before I wrap this up I want to go back for a few minutes to that "Priestley Triangle" I referred to earlier. Remember it - Science, Politics, and Religion. Seen in a certain light, or understood in a certain way, I consider these three things to be the three sides of the triangle of religious liberalism. Let's quickly take them one at a time.
By science I do not primarily mean just a particular field of study and activity. I mean maintaining an open and inquisitive and ever-curious attitude toward our natural world and universe. I mean having a spirit of inquiry as to and how our world works and what all it can teach us about who we are and how we got here and how we can best live within the larger web and fabric of all of life itself. I further mean maintaining such an attitude free of any pre-ordained doctrine or dogma that we human beings have devised. I mean having the freedom to explore the world as it is, with all the knowledge and lessons our world and universe have to offer us.
When I say free of doctrine or dogma I'm not only talking about religious dogma. It has been the presence over the past six years or so of a well entrenched economic and political dogma, for example, that has prevented us a society and nation from really coming to terms with the effects and directions of that inconvenient truth called global warming.
The second side of our Priestley-inspired triangle of religious liberalism is politics. Here again I use the term in a very broad sense. Well above and beyond political activity - some of it ennobling and some of it horrible - politics is ultimately about how power operates in any human group, society, community, or nation. It is about how such power is used for good or for ill in human society. It is about who possesses what kind of power and how they exercise it. It is about who has access to power and who doesn't.
Priestley was wise enough to see how a more democratic way of dealing with the workings of power in a nation state was beginning to replace the more absolutist methods of a monarchy, which was quite frightening to those who were heavily invested in monarchial rule. One of the ways we honor Priestley's legacy is by being active participants in the democratic processes that are now available to us.
Then there's religion; the third side of the liberal religious triangle. Here I mean religion as a search for meaning and purpose and value and spiritual depth in living. I mean cultivating a sense of awe and wonder and mystery at this world and universe in which we have been placed for a time. I mean religion as that which gives us our sense of relationship and connection with both our fellow human beings and with all of life itself. Understood in this way, it is religion, in what I take to be the best sense of the word, that anchors the Priestley Triangle.
Scientific inquiry can explain to us why a sunset looks the way it does or why the night stars are arranged in the way in which we see them from our particular planet. But it is something deeper within us that gives us a sense of awe or mystery or wonder when we look at a stunning sunset or a vast array of stars. I call this our religious impulse - the impulse that looks beyond ourselves for some sense of connection with that which is greater than ourselves, however we name it.
Scientific inquiry can tell us how we got here and we evolved into the human creatures we now are. It can explain why we are mortal creatures as well who only get a certain amount of time to live. The search to discover why we are here and how we find meaning in the face of our mortality comes again from that deeper impulse, that religious or spiritual impulse. And if politics is ultimately about how power works in a society, it is religion - again, at its best and most noble - that can teach us how power ought to work in a society, in order to further promote what our Unitarian Universalist principles call "justice, equity and compassion in human relations."
Those three worlds in which Joseph Priestly moved - the worlds of Science and Learning, of Politics, and of an enlightened form of Religion - are what gave his life, difficult and troubled as it was at times, its wholeness and its meaning. These are the same worlds that beckon us to greater levels of wholeness and meaning as well - and we should be thankful to this spiritual ancestor of ours for helping to show the way.
Okay, you've had your vegetables. Now we can go get some coffee.
Stephen D. Edington
October 29, 2006
