Back in the old days, people used to pay for the privilege of sitting in particular pews here. The better pews, front and center, went for more money and the less desirable ones, maybe in the back under the balcony, were the cheap seats. Of course to some of us the back corners are eminently desirable and we would pay top dollar to be allowed to stay there unperturbed. But that was the system in those days and the church relied on wealthy members to rent the expensive pews for their families. During these days, in the 1850’s, Samuel Longfellow was a minister here and he was a radical abolitionist. Often clergy are more liberal than their congregations and this was no exception. Much of this congregation was content to let the South solve their own problems and leave well enough alone. Some of them may have had financial interests in the cotton plantations – we know this was the case in some New England congregations.
Longfellow’s radical stances on slavery and his insistence on being political from the pulpit offended some of the members. A pamphlet from the era states, “Some of us went around and let all the benches [meaning rented the pews out], and then Mr. Longfellow preached a John Brown sermon and drove them all away.” (John Brown was the fiery abolitionist who believed that violence would be justified and would be necessary to end slavery.) So I guess Longfellow preached in that “extremist” vein and people left this church. Not everyone – apparently many saw him as a saint – but enough that the church ended up divided and struggling financially.
It’s amazing how much times have changed in the Unitarian world and in this country generally. Nobody today would think it’s extreme to declare slavery an abominable evil that must end. No one would question the appropriateness of the topic for a sermon. And most people would not wish that the Civil War hadn’t happened and that the South had seceded despite the violence and staggering loss of life entailed. Most of us – no, I’m going to go out on a limb and say all of us here – would agree that what was considered radical, extremist politics in the early 1800’s is just self-evident, basic human rights today.
This is true for so many things. Take same-sex marriage. Not too long ago, same-sex marriage was widely seen as extreme – a radical redefinition of marriage – a fringe minority agenda that was irrelevant or offensive to the vast majority of Americans. Today, as more and more states legalize gay marriage and the Supreme Court is giving implicit support, the tide is dramatically turning. Marriage is now seen by most Americans as a basic right for all people. Nothing extreme about it. Take the suffrage movement: people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton were lambasted by the “moderate” media and even her husband who supported many of her feminist activities thought that demanding women’s right to vote was too extreme.
Each generation, especially each generation of liberals, seems to recoil from what it sees as “extremism” and laud what it thinks of as “moderation.” Each generation claims to know what the moderate, reasonable middle ground is, even though that middle ground shifts constantly. In the case of the arguments about slavery, the moderate solution was to ship the slaves, most of whom were born in the U.S., to Africa, and of course compensate the slave owners appropriately. What’s considered extreme and what moderate is completely relative to one’s place and time and the 20/20 vision of hindsight.
We know this and yet the ideal of moderation refuses to die. There’s something comforting about a porridge – three little bears style – that’s not too hot, not too cold, but just right. There’s something appealing about the idea of the truth always lying somewhere in the middle between two opposing viewpoints. It can’t be that one is completely right and one is completely wrong because that view leads to ever-dreaded conflict. We like to think of ourselves as the reasonable ones who can see both sides and adjudicate a rational solution.
But sometimes one side is completely right and the other side is completely wrong, as in the case of slavery or marriage equality or women’s suffrage. We think that there’s a safety in staying away from the edges of things. And there probably is. But that safety can also be a retreat from what we really need to do as religious people of conscience.
I take exception to the term “religious extremists” to describe groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda. What’s horrific about these groups is not that they are extreme, as if other Muslims are just a less extreme version of the same thing, but that their politics and theology are inherently violent and oppressive. Religious extremism, depending on the content of your religion, can be a beautiful thing and a tremendous force for good in the world.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about this issue of “extremism” in his famous letter from a Birmingham Jail. The Montgomery bus boycott, several years prior, had seen tens of thousands of people walking miles and miles to work and back for over a year rather than sit in a bus where they were relegated to the back, enduring intimidation, threats, and attacks all the while. That’s extreme in itself. The civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance was continuing and the liberal clergy had been saying to him, “Hey, slow down, let’s be moderate here – you’re being too extreme in your views and your tactics. These things take time. Be patient.”
King writes a letter to them: “Though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” … And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
If we had a crystal ball and could look into the future and see what future generations will look back and say our “creative extremism” should be – our equivalent of abolitionism, suffrage, civil rights, or marriage equality — I would say that it would be environmentalism. With the survival of this planet as we know it on the line, Greenpeace activists blocking oil sands operations, shutting down power stations, disrupting whaling ships, scaling oil rigs to try to stop offshore drilling – they’re not going to seem so crazy 50 years from now. I’m not going to re-preach my sermon from a few weeks ago, but we are going to need to make changes that today are considered not moderate, but extreme. Maybe we’ll need to stop all driving and airline travel except for life-threatening emergencies. Maybe we’ll need a huge carbon tax for corporations. Maybe we’ll need to stop manufacturing clothes. We have enough clothes already in circulation in the world that we don’t really need to make any more for, I’d guess, at least 20 years. Redistributing the clothes that already exist and repairing them when they’re torn should work just fine. Do we really need to cut down trees to print an Order of Service each week? Maybe families need to have only one biological child at most. Will changes like these be bad for the economy? Absolutely. And ending slavery was devastating for the economy of the South. I don’t know what the specific policy answers are, but I do know that any plan that insists on keeping the basics of our society and economy in place while we make incremental, moderate changes is just not going to get the job done.
The liberal ideal of encouraging a free marketplace of ideas, a pluralism even within our ranks, is a noble one. Our tradition values the voicing of opinions from across the spectrum. We resist the hubris of any of us pretending to know the truth. We always want to consider that our political and social opponents may, in fact, have a point. This is a beautiful impulse and it is hard-won, stemming from our historical experience of being the outsider with minority views – the view, for example, that there is one God or that all are saved. This tradition of reasoned moderation and tolerance, never taking too absolute a position, is a source of great strength and dignity for us.
But it is also, I would argue, our greatest weakness. In our fear of being too extreme in any direction, we muzzle ourselves as a community. We allow the strongest, loudest voices in society to be those whose views are opposite ours. Social and religious conservatives do not make this mistake. They are absolutely unapologetic in proclaiming the most outrageously extreme views and refusing to compromise. It’s obnoxious, it’s infuriating, and it works. Think of the success the Tea Party has had in influencing politics in this country. Through their extremism, they have amassed a political power way beyond their size. Politicians are terrified of them. We can’t even get a Surgeon General appointed because he dares to classify gun violence as a public health hazard.
When a person or group pushes the extreme at one end of the continuum, even if they fail to get their extreme goals met, they often succeed in moving the middle. What is considered “moderate” changes from generation to generation and from year to year depending on what it’s being compared to. Even a small group of people can push that river. There is a magic and a power in being extreme sometimes when justice is on the line, when love is on the line, when the health of our earth is on the line. Am I advocating extremism in all things? No. As Emerson once said, “Moderation in all things, especially moderation.” There are times and places and situations when we are called to be moderate and then there are those when we are called precisely to not be moderate.
And really, when it comes down to it, who wants to love moderately or be loved moderately? Who wants to make love moderately? Who, when we’re lying on our deathbeds, will say, “Ah I’m so glad I led a moderate life, a careful life where I never went out on a limb, never went too far in any one direction?” My challenge to you is to use these Sundays of sitting in these pews, the front or the back or the middle pews, to ask yourself, “What do I care about enough to be extreme?”
My hope is that what Samuel Longfellow was to this congregation and what Martin Luther King was to his fellow clergy, we can all be to the world – pushing the edges of propriety on matters of conscience and sometimes proudly bearing the label of “extremists,” knowing that we are part of long and noble tradition of extremists for love.