SERMONS 

Was Thomas Jefferson Really One Of Us?

My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride,
From every mountainside,
Let freedom ring!

For me, there’s a certain irony whenever I sing the line “land where my fathers died.” The kicker is that there shouldn’t be any irony about the line whatsoever. This is my country. This is the land where I was born, and where my father died. This is the land to which he swore allegiance, this is the country listed as my birthplace on my passport, and, the fathers of which we sing are the same Founding Fathers I read about all through grade school, in my history textbooks -- and on the American Revolution coffee mugs we used at home throughout most of my childhood.

The irony, of course, is that strangers tend to assume none of these things when they meet me. When I get asked, “Where are you from?” the interrogators aren’t happy when I answer “Texas,” which is where I was born, or “Nashville,” where I live now. All too often, I get what I call The Look. The look that says, “You know what I meant.” The look that says, “You are just being difficult.” What they really meant is the second question, which is some variation of “Where were your parents from?”, “What is your ancestry?” or “What is your nationality?”

My husband wasn’t born in this country, and neither was his father –but, they both happen to be white, so neither of them gets the questions on where they’re really from – or, when they’re “going back.” Do I resent that? Yes. Yes, I do. Does it bother me, feeling resentful? Yes. Yes, it does. Do I sometimes feel silly getting all lathered up and irate over well-intentioned small talk? Yes, yes, I do. I wish it didn’t bother me when people inform me that I speak English really well. I wish I could feel more gracious about friendly strangers greeting me in Mandarin or Japanese before finding out which languages I actually speak. It feels terrible when people are disappointed in me because I don’t know how to help them with their origami or tai chi, or when I refuse to be an expert on Hunan cuisine or jade carvings or brush calligraphy. In short, like many Asian-Americans of my generation, I dread being asked where I’m from or how long my parents have lived in the United States, because all too often it feels like I’m being placed into a pigeonhole bearing very little resemblance to my actual life or my actual personality. (You know those cheesy amusement park cut-outs, where there’s a hole to put your face so that it looks like you’re wearing a costume? It’s kind of like that.) It’s been argued that I’m taking the questions the wrong way, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a matter of being asked the wrong questions. If someone truly wants to know about where I’m coming from - what I believe, where I work, what I read and what I cook -- asking questions based on my facial features isn’t going to get them very far.

I am Asian, and I’m also American, but, as with so many other labels, those two little words – “Asian” and “American” – are far too small for the categories they supposedly represent. Whenever I hear a politician use the phrase “The American people” I can’t help wondering, “Which ‘American people’? The Republican ‘American people’? The Democratic ‘American people’? The ‘American people’ descended from the Mayflower pilgrims?” And if I were to shout back, ‘Not this American!’, would my dismay be dismissed with the phrase, ‘But you’re different!’, even though I have been a citizen of this country all of my life?

So, with my background, I’m fairly cynical about how the word “us” is used, and how often. So, in asking whether Thomas Jefferson was really one of “us,” it seems to me critical that we first examine what “us” means when talking about who we define as a Unitarian, a Universalist, or Unitarian Universalist. Is it anyone who’s signed a membership book? Is it anyone who trashes the concept of the Trinity? Is it anyone and everyone who endorses the notion of multiple paths to salvation? Is it someone who believes in neither God nor heaven but embodies the saying “deeds, not creeds” by showing up to every potluck and rally?

On the one hand, it’s so very tempting to say, “Yes! all of the above.” We’re a religion about being inclusive, and we are the answer to many people’s needs and prayers. S A phrase I sometimes hear when UU leaders talk about growth is reaching out to “folks who are already UUs and just don’t know it yet.” So, from one angle, it seems unnecessary and perhaps even unkind to attempt defining who’s Unitarian and/or Universalist. Why not count everybody in, whether they sign a book or not?

But there is very much another side to the coin, and that is whether “everybody” wants to be counted. There are people who have regularly attended this very church for years who have not signed the membership book as a matter of principle. They pledge their time and money just like the official members do, but for some of these people it matters very much that they remain independent of any religious affiliation, no matter how loosely organized or creedless it may appear to be. There are people who come to our servicese who remain members of their prior church. There are people who show up now and then because their spouses are here, or they just like the music. There are people who don’t come here even though they’re completely in agreement with all Seven Principles, because they don’t like getting up early on Sundays or they plain don’t like church. I don’t think it’s fair to call any of these people Unitarian Universalists without their permission. I don’t think it’s respectful. No matter how cool we think they are – no matter how cool we think we are – to insist on labeling them Unitarian Universalists is to ignore the complexity of their lives and of their choices.

Yet it’s all too easy to find the equivalent of this in the lists of Famous Unitarian Universalists that many UU congregations feature on their websites and in their brochures. To me, it’s fascinating how we invoke famous people in UU rhetoric. Sometimes they’re named to prove how influential Unitarian Universalists are, and sometimes they’re named to prove that we’ve been around a long time and not just some freaky new cult or fancy tax dodge. The lists can be a good conversational tool: it’s easier to talk about role models than abstract principles. When we say that both “Paul Revere” and “Ray Bradbury” are Unitarians, there’s a glamour to that that you just don’t get with “interdependent web”. All that said, the lists are also tremendously problematic because there is a tendency to include virtually anyone who’s ever stepped into a Unitarian church or expressed a Universalist thought, which leads to massively disputable, unverifiable claims about things like how many Unitarians signed the Declaration of Independence.

Some of the listings are straightforward, and there’s much to celebrate there: Frank Lloyd Wright grew up in a Unitarian family, and designed the Madison, Wisconsin Meeting House. e.e. cummings was the son of a minister, and sometimes got drafted to help with the offertory at Boston’s South Congregational Society. The Joy of Cooking had its genesis in Adult RE: Irma Rombauer, the original author, first pulled together her recipes as a handout for the St. Louis First Unitarian Women’s Alliance. Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit, was a member of Stalybridge Unitarian Church in Cheshire, England. Herman Melville -- All Souls Church in New York City. Clara Barton was raised Universalist and wrote about it being “a belief in which all who are privileged to possess it rejoice.”

But for some of the other people, it’s not so clear. Kurt Vonnegut, for instance: “In order not to seem a spiritual quadriplegic to strangers trying to get a fix on me, I sometimes say I am a Unitarian Universalist (I breathe).” Florence Nightingale reportedly despised churches and once said, "I am so glad that my God is not the God of the High Church or of the Low. . .that he is not a Romanist or an Anglican — or a Unitarian." John Milton and Isaac Newton were both certainly religious radicals, but anti-Trinitarianism does not by definition equal Unitarianism.

To be fair to the compilers of these lists, many of our Unitarian Universalist forebears weren’t at all clearcut about their religious allegiances. Consider Charles Darwin: Unitarian mother, Unitarian day-school, Unitarian wife -- but he was baptized and buried as an Anglican, and studied to become an Anglican clergyman before getting distracted by geology. Later, he considered himself best described as an agnostic. Susan B. Anthony identified as a Quaker all of her life, but also attended services at the First Unitarian Church of Rochester for over fifty years. Thomas Paine was the son of a Quaker and an Anglican, but whether you count him as a deist or an atheist depends on whose propaganda you’re reading; his critics liked to call him a Unitarian, but he himself had very little use for organized religion: when he wrote The Age of Reason, he declared “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.” Benjamin Franklin was known to worship at the Essex Street (Unitarian) Chapel when in England, but he grew up Presbyterian and his children were baptized as Anglicans.

The evidence is just as messy and inconclusive when it comes to counting up how many Presidents of the United States we can call Unitarian and/or Universalist. Depending on who’s making the claim, and what they’re trying to prove, four, five, six, seven names show up. Abraham Lincoln sometimes gets mentioned as having Universalist leanings, but it’s usually also pointed out that he didn’t personally identify with any one movement. James Madison appears on some lists as a Unitarian and on others as Universalist, but also in many other sources as a liberal Episcopalian. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft were all indisputably members of Unitarian congregations -- but it’s still not so simple when you look at their individual cases: John Quincy Adams was extremely critical about the Unitarianism of his day and there were times he wanted no part of it, preferring Calvinist and Trinitarian interpretations of the Bible. Millard Fillmore rented a pew for years in the Buffalo Unitarian church, but he’s also on record as having written “I sympathize with those who inhance [sic] liberal Christianity. But I am not a member of the Unitarian church.” William Howard Taft was a lifelong Unitarian but his wife and son were not. And technically speaking, John Adams wasn’t a lifelong Unitarian, but that’s because the First Parish Church of Quincy was Congregational until he was 15.

And what about Thomas Jefferson? The consensus seems to be that he had strong Unitarian sympathies, but that he did not formally belong to any Unitarian church. There have been acres of sermons, articles and books written on whether Jefferson thought of himself as a Unitarian, and again, depending on the claims at stake, the authors often choose to emphasize different phrases from his writing. Those who prefer to regard Jefferson as an independent deist tend to highlight the letter where he says, “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” Those who want to hold him up as a UU role model frequently point to another letter where he says, “The population of my neighborhood is too slender, and is too much divided into other sects to maintain any one preacher well. I must therefore be contented with being a Unitarian by myself.” Jefferson was a regular contributor to St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was involved enough to serve on its vestry, but was also known to worship at Joseph Priestly’s Unitarian church in Philadelphia, and had many Unitarian friends. And it was eventually one of his Universalist friends, Benjamin Rush, who brought about his reconcilation with John Adams after many years of not speaking to each other.

And with Jefferson, there’s yet another wrinkle, which is whether Unitarian Universalists ought to be so very eager to claim him at all. Eleven years ago, at the Charlotte General Assembly, a group led by African American UU ministers expressed their outrage at the plans to commemorate Thomas Jefferson’s 250th birthday. They asserted that “Thomas Jefferson's role in the racial history of the United States is not one which African Americans, native Americans, or others victimized by the ‘founding fathers’ wish to honor, ” and it turned out that this was not an isolated complaint from a “politically correct” fringe, but that there had been UUs quietly upset for decades over Jefferson’s exalted spot in the UU pantheon. One result of the protest was four years of passionate debate over whether the name of the Thomas Jefferson District ought to be changed. The final vote was 75 to 51 in favor of dropping the name, but that was short of the 2/3rds majority required to enact the change. So it’s still the Thomas Jefferson District – which includes nine Tennessee congregations, including Greater Nashville. Some UUs have no idea that there was ever a controversy, some people still don’t get what the fuss was about, and others wince every time they hear or see the district name.

The truth is, a lot of labels can be pinned on Thomas Jefferson – hero, statesman, genius, slaveowner, racist, sinner, enlightened, tradition-bound. To call him by any single one of these is to leave out crucial parts of the story. To call him a Unitarian or a Universalist doesn’t really give us a true handle on what he believed – and that goes for all of the other Founding Fathers and celebrities on the lists of Famous UUs, regardless of whether they were official UUs or UUs by association or “UUs-at-heart.” The words “Unitarian” and “Universalist” are no more adequate than “Asian” and “American” when it comes to describing you, me, each other or our ancestors. At best, the words are hints; they are not definitions. In “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” there’s a fourth verse, in which we sing of and to the God of our fathers:

Our fathers' God, to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing;

Whether that God was Unitarian or Universalist or some utterly unknown, unnamed entity, and no matter what God you yourself do or don’t believe in now, it deserves acknowledging that for many of our ancestors, whatever God they believed in provided them with extraordinary strength and solace. It is worth remembering that, regardless of their religious identification or lack thereof, we are blessed that there were so many people who refused to shrink from hard truths and dared to be “in the right with two or three.” Our closing hymn notwithstanding, none of them were saints -- but they weren’t merely sinners. For all of their faults and blind spots and inconsistencies, our Founding Fathers were astoundingly courageous and visionary; no matter which God they personally worshipped, they were able to create a country capable of sustaining believers and heretics, Unitarians and Universalists. It’s an achievement well worth celebrating with “Bells . . .and Illuminations,” and songs, and prayers. Amen and alleluia.