The Right of Conscience ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
June 15, 2025
On January 21st, 2025, the day following the presidential inauguration, there was a national prayer service held at Washington’s National Cathedral. I read through the service and it was very devout, with worship leaders from a wide variety of religious traditions offering prayers for the United States, and for all who serve the country and our people. Calls for compassion were frequent, and one scripture reading from the Hebrew Bible reminded the congregation of the requirement to ‘befriend the stranger, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.’
The cathedral’s bishop, the Right Reverend Mariann Budde, preached a brief sermon that echoed these sentiments, as I’m sure many of you remember. Here’s an excerpt from her closing remarks, directed to the new president:
“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now… Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. (The) Good of all people in this nation and the world.” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/01/22/what-did-the-bishop-say-to-trump-during-prayer-service-heres-the-full-transcript/)
And in the days that followed there was outrage that a clergy member would use such political language. I found this out myself when a longtime friend posted her support for Bishop Budde on Facebook, and was met with very negative comments, such as “She’s a disgrace!” “She had no right to use political language in a church service!” I figured that if Bishop Budde could speak truth to the President of the United States, I could risk comment on Facebook. So I decided to weigh in briefly, to support my friend, and I commented that as a clergy member, I felt that the bishop’s language was biblical and a very typical message during a worship service. The venom then was aimed at me. I was openly mocked. One gentleman informed me that I was “wrong!” and demanded that I admit the language was political. I told him that I thought it was prophetic. That seemed to be the end of it, but I didn’t choose to stick around for more. It’s OK to wade into an argument here and there, but you have to know when to wade back out.
But I have been thinking about this incident ever since, and how religious institutions are supposed to operate within a political society. For after all, isn’t virtually all human activity political? If you go back to ancient Greek, ‘politics’ is defined as ‘the affairs of the cities.’ Polis is the Greek word for city. So politics is about how we function in groups, how we make decisions, how we distribute resources.
Looked at in this way, it would seem almost impossible to divorce religious organizations from politics. As we heard in our reading a moment ago, “as James Madison would say…, ‘What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?’ Political and religious ideas interpenetrate.” (Earl K. Holt, The Right of Conscience and the Use of the Democratic Process Within Our Congregations and in Society at Large, in With Purpose and Principle, Edward A. Frost, ed., Skinner House Books, 1998, p. 72.)
Religious institutions, such as ours, are part of society. We function in the real world, and we have a role to play. Imagine if we were to try to restrict our role; how irrelevant we would be, how impotent. There are those who would like us that way, who would like us to remain silent on the sidelines, pretending to ignore injustice, cruelty, and oppression. And of course, some churches do just that. But if Madison was correct that governments reflect human nature, what would it say about a church, a congregation, if it were complicit when a government begins to reflect the worst parts of human nature?
Our country’s founders shared some fundamental beliefs about human nature. Their language is familiar to us all, as enshrined in our country’s Declaration of Independence. They based their arguments on the concepts of natural law, first articulated by ancient Greeks, and handed down through the ages by scholars, and by Roman Catholic and Protestant thinkers, and the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, especially John Locke. Natural laws, all these thinkers and philosophers believed, are not created by humans, but are inherent, part of human nature, and universal. They form the basis for our morality, and are eternal. Natural laws would include the right to life, and that all humans are equal.
What makes humans equal? There are two ways to think about that: in religious terms, all humans are created in the image of the Divine, as is spelled out in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. But natural law goes beyond that. Natural law tells us that humans all possess the capacity for reason, for conscience, and therefore have the authority, the right, to choose their lives, and to govern themselves. In other words, given their inherent equality, humans have certain inalienable rights, as Thomas Jefferson expressed them. We can all name them: the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Let me make this statement: because of our inherent human dignity and equality, we reject the divine right of kings. Now, did I just make a political statement, or a religious one?
Since natural law is not created by humans, then it would fall more within the purview of religion. It creates a moral and ethical framework for how humans are to be treated. Since we use this moral law as the foundation for our form of government, how do we separate out religion?
In our reading just now, we heard how the brand-new American experiment with democracy influenced two new religions: Unitarianism and Universalism. Unitarians believed deeply, as articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, that there is no religious guide for us that is greater than our own conscience. He named this authority the Oversoul, and in his words, “Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds.” (The Oversoul, Singing the Living Tradition, #531.)
And the Universalists believed that no one is separate from the Holy, and that therefore, we are equal as children of God. And so, the theologies of these two new religions became part and parcel of the American experiment, based on the belief that humans have the capacity to reason, that we have consciences, and therefore we have the power and the right to order our own lives.
Unitarians and Universalists both understood, from their beginnings in the late 18th century, that they could never be separate from human activity, or politics. Nor would they have wanted to be. Our tradition has always tried to bend the arc of the universe toward justice, has tried to end oppression, to create a more equitable society that reflects the natural law of equality. This is religious work to us, from fighting to abolish slavery to participating in the Civil Rights movement, to fighting for marriage equality and LGBTQ rights, to showing up at rallies to preserve our form of government which is based on natural law.
Yesterday at the No Kings rally, my colleagues and I wore our clergy collars, so that people would know we were there, and that we are standing with them to protect our democratic rights, our natural rights. “You guys rock!” someone said to a group of us. And yet, one of my colleagues was shaking his head as he told me that someone approached him to ask if he was allowed to wear his clergy collar at the event. “Allowed?” we all wondered. “Allowed by whom?” But it speaks to how little people truly understand the first amendment of the US Constitution, and the separation of church and state. People seem to think, as they railed against Bishop Budde back in January, and mocked me online, that clergy have no rights to speak for human rights, for the right of conscience, for natural law. But those are religious issues, every bit as much as trying to understand concepts of an afterlife.
All this brings us to today. We are holding our Annual Meeting. This is another aspect of church life, in Unitarian Universalist churches, that also reflects our democratic system of government. Through the centuries we have been entirely self-governing. We have an association of congregations, the Unitarian Universalist Association, but that exists mostly as a support system, not as a hierarchy that imposes creeds or governing practices on us. We believe that congregations have the reason, and the authority, to manage our own affairs.
And so today, after this service, we will meet as we do each year, to talk about the health of the congregation, to consider our finances, and to vote on next year’s budget. It is our right, and our responsibility. It is where we exercise our freedom of conscience, and our right to vote. And it is our responsibility to consider all the business before us carefully, by reading background material, and listening carefully to the reports of the lay leaders. It’s the work of a democracy, and at the same time, the work of a church. Maybe it’s messy at times, or inconvenient, but we cherish our traditions, and our rights. And as we’ve been finding out in recent months, all the way up to yesterday, our democracy and our congregation are stronger when we exercise our rights and take our responsibility seriously.
Earl Holt, the author of our reading, told this story: A Revolutionary War soldier once explained the difference between a monarchy and a democracy by comparing a three-masted sailing vessel and a raft. The large ship is beautiful and impressive when it’s on the high seas. But it’s not that maneuverable and can be driven aground and broken up in rough weather. That’s a monarchy. But he compared democracy to a raft, virtually unsinkable, he said, but you always get your feet wet.
In Unitarian Universalism, we are always likely to get our feet wet. We participate. We show up. We sit together and govern ourselves and make hard decisions together. And so now it’s time to head downstairs and put our consciences to work, as ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle us,’ always remembering not to take this right for granted, always remembering that rights are bounded by responsibility.
See you downstairs. Put your boots on.
Amen.
