The Fifth Freedom
A sermon offered by Rev. Wayne Arnason
Sunday, May 4, 2008
West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church
Rocky River, Ohio
I think that “freedom” is one of the
most overused, abused, and sacred words in
the English language. When I hear yet
another TV Commercial that promises me
“freedom” if I use this product or that , or
when I’m told I’ll have “freedom from”
something nasty if I use yet another product,
it makes me want to stop shopping! When I
hear a political leader pontificating about
“freedom” as the reason why we should
limit or eliminate civil liberties in this
country or undertake pre-emptive military
strikes, I makes me want to shun the
political process! When I hear a religious
leader talking about the “freedom” that
submission to repressive doctrines and
leaders will bring, it makes me want to stop
supporting any organized religion.
And so, as the old joke goes, I come
here instead – and I find not a disorganized
religion, but instead a religion that takes
freedom very seriously, that has as one of its
central beliefs and traditions the practice of
freedom within religious life. But what does
that mean? And how is it different from the
freedom from sugar, from terrorism, or from
eternal hell fire that seem to be the obsession
of media pundits, politicians and preachers.
Our economic system, our political
parties, and our religious institutions all
claim to be promoting freedom, and I
suppose the fact that they are able to peddle
their points of view about what freedoms we
should want, should fight for, or should die
for, has to remind us that in most respects
the many freedoms that we enjoy in this
great country and at this time in history are
quite unprecedented. So why, then, am I so
suspicious that the great social icon of
freedom that we hear invoked in so many
ways every day is somehow a false god in
our lives, an idol that lacks authenticity but
that that we are commanded to honor and
obey.
I am suspicious because so many
invocations of freedom use the word but
miss the meanings, and freedom is a reality
that has many layers of meaning. We need
to understand all of them, and that is what
we will be trying to do in the month of
worship services ahead of us. We are
considering the theme “Freedom” this
month because of the input we received
from one our worship associates on the
proposals we were discussing with them for
a three year curriculum of monthly worship
themes. When we reviewed our first draft of
the great theological questions and ideas we
were considering we were asked: “Are we
missing any themes that are particularly
important and unique to Unitarian
Universalism?” Immediately we realized
that freedom as a religious value and
principle had to be part of our rotation of
themes.
Later this month, Kathleen Rolenz
will be reflecting on the relationship
between Freedom and Responsibility in our
faith, and Neal Anderson will offer a
Memorial Day sermon on the cost of
freedom both politically and spiritually in a
time of war. Today, I want to touch upon
these issues as well, as we look at all the
layers of meaning that freedom contains.
One of the great poets of spiritual
freedom that inspires Unitarian Universalists
is Walt Whitman, and so when we hear his
psalm of praise to each individual human as
the sum of all known reverence, when we
hear the words : “ I do not say (bibles and
religions) are not divine; I say they have all
grown out of you”, most of us will say
Amen inside and even give a silent little
cheer – because we know that there is no
freedom in any form unless somewhere deep
down in a community, in a religion, in a
culture, in a country there is a profound
respect for each individual person. In this
church, our understanding of what freedom
starts in the same place that our list of
common principles starts – with a belief that
each individual has worth and dignity and
whatever freedom means in any larger
human context, it must begin with that. The
worth and dignity of each person is the basis
for one person, one vote. It is the reason for
believing that speech should be protected. It
is the foundation for human rights.
But freedom is not just an individual
possession – and this is where we must go
beyond the lyric declarations of Walt
Whitman. A hermit in the mountains, a
survivalist who withdraws from society, the
young man whose story was told in the film
“Into the Wild” all seek a certain kind of
freedom, but one that in my mind is
illusionary. Freedom is inevitably relational,
and if it is to be real and to be realizable in
this world, freedom must be built in to how
we live together in communities and nations.
Personal freedom must be multiplied into
political freedom.
For me, one of the great gifts of the
early feminist movement was the insight that
the personal and the political are not two
things. How we express ourselves in our
private and intimate behavior, whether we
hide behind the walls of our homes, how we
step beyond them to engage with the world,
is as much a political act as sending in a
donation to a candidate, or voting in an
election. Writing in the early seventies, poet
Susan Griffin made this point and over again
in her poems, and her line we heard today:
“I cannot shut myself up anywhere? Is that
political?” has stayed with me for all these
years from her poem Is the Air Political?.
Some of the most moving and
harrowing stories in our world today about
the struggle for freedom are stories of
personal aspirations shut up and shut down
by the social systems, by the religions, and
by the power struggles that burden so many
countries. It may be difficult to discern the
layers of meaning that freedom has if we
start with the inner life we experience, if we
start with personal spiritual life, but the
whole world easily recognizes what freedom
means when it is absent in the outer world,
in the world of laws, customs, and social
taboos. The whole world recognizes that
there is no freedom for people in Zimbabwe
because its people have no ownership of and
access to the natural resources that are
theirs. The whole world recognizes that
there is no freedom for people in Saudi
Arabia because although their economic
wealth is in contrast to Zimbabwe, they live
under a fundamentalist sect of Islam that
severely restricts the lives of half of their
people, the female half. The whole world
recognizes that there is no freedom for
people in Tibet if their historic culture is
gradually being crushed by the sheer weight
of
Chinese
immigration,
cultural
imperialism, and religious discrimination.
No political leader in the past
century has done a better job of
understanding, and in one simple speech,
revealing these layers of meaning that
freedom in the political world has than
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the speech he
offered to the Congress in January 1941, a
little more than a month after Pearl Harbor.
In what has become known as “Four
Freedoms” speech., Roosevelt described his
vision of a future world founded on four
essential human freedoms. Two of them
were positive freedoms, things that we
should expect all people to be able to do
within their countries. Two of them were
negative freedoms, “freedoms from”, that
recognized that freedom cannot flourish
unless our positive political and civil
freedoms are built on a deep foundation of
economic justice and spiritual integrity.
Here is what Franklin Roosevelt said
sixty six years ago:
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“We look forward to a world founded on
four essential human freedoms:
The first is freedom of speech and
expression, everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to
worship God in his own way –everywhere in
the world.
The third is freedom from want, which ,
translated into world terms, means economic
understandings which will secure to every
nation a healthy peacetime life for its
inhabitants – everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which,
translated into world terms, means a world
wide reduction of armaments to such a point
and in such a thorough fashion that no
nation will be in a position to commit an act
of physical aggression against any neighbor
– anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of distant millennium. It is
a definite basis for a world attainable in our
time and generation.”
I look back at that speech as one of
the most prophetic statements about freedom
in the 20th century, and yet as we consider it
today and ask ourselves why it has not been
the basis for a world attainable in our time
and generation, we must acknowledge that
something is missing. That “something
missing” I would call the Fifth Freedom.
The first two freedoms Roosevelt
articulated are well-established in human
rights philosophy and law, but still only a
few hundred years old as ideas recognized
and accepted around the world as a positive
evolution within our human experience.
Until recent centuries, most of the world
believed that rulers of all kinds had their
authority because of some form of divine
right and sanction, and that the only
important opinion was God’s opinion
expressed through the ruler and through the
ruler’s religious authority or alliances. The
opinions of ordinary people mattered not,
and so why would their freedom to speak
their opinions matter? Similarly, if there was
only one true religion, as most societies
believed until the 19th century, what point
would there be in having the individual
freedom to believe as you wished in matters
of religion? There was truth and there was
falsehood, and those with a different
religious opinion than the state, the ruler, or
the majority culture were at best deluded
and at worst criminals.
It was a huge development in the
evolutionary history of our species to
imagine what Roosevelt summed up in two
sentences : that freedom of speech and
freedom of religion should be the birthright
of every human being. However, he took his
summaries of freedom one important step
further, a step that is particularly important
for us today. He said that these freedoms
cannot be realized and have no meaning
unless they are accompanied by justice,
expressed in two negative freedoms: the
freedom from want and the freedom from
fear.
The freedom from want is the
principle of economic justice. In 1949 the
country of India rightly took great pride in
establishing the largest democracy on the
face of the earth, with freedom of speech
and freedom of religion protected by law.
Yet with the majority of its people
impoverished, and severely restricted in the
scope of their lives by the way that the
nation’s and the world’s wealth is
distributed, can we say that the people of
India have truly been free all these years
since their independence? India rightly
celebrates its current economic development
as one of the fruits of its democracy and as
an added freedom that is making its earlier
commitments to first two freedoms much
more meaningful.
The
other
negative
freedom
Roosevelt proclaimed has been even more in
the forefront of our concern these past few
years as Americans have felt their “freedom
from fear” taken away from them by
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terrorist threats. For much of the 20th
century
in
prosperous
European
democracies, war and terrorism has taken its
toll in the realization of true freedom, and in
America, Americans of color have long
understood that living in fear takes away the
savor of any other freedoms that we taste.
These four freedoms sound like a
comprehensive list, and so in suggesting that
there is a fifth freedom missing that we have
to consider, I am crossing a line from the
political back towards the personal, and
standing in the territory that lies between.
The fifth freedom of which I speak is the
freedom from self- deception. Sometimes
when my wife and I are having a “spirited
debate” about something, and I use language
like that, Kathleen will say to me “Oh,
don’t go all Buddhist on me now!” – and I
have to admit that my sense of the
importance of this fifth freedom is very
much influenced by my Buddhist studies.
There is something very important and
powerful about the teaching we heard read
today that you cannot be free unless you
have pulled away from all “sides” and
thrown off all chains. But what does that
mean in the context of today’s sermon? Let
me give you some examples of what I mean
by the freedom from self-deception and see
if you will agree that it is so important that it
truly represents the fifth freedom.
I think that we are involved in
intentional self-deception on several levels,
on the political level, in our communities,
and in personal and spiritual lives. On the
largest scale, on the political level, It seems
to me that there is a huge amount of effort
and money expended in our society in
making us believe that everything will be
OK if we just _________ and here you can
fill in the blank.
If we just– achieve a certain standard
of living so we can buy these products and
insure that our economy will stay healthy. If
we just – vote for this candidate in this
election! If we just – change our driving
habits!
In the mountain of public
commentary on the state of our lives and our
world that is available to us today, it seems
to me rare to hear honest, candid, and
insightful social and political analysis. The
odd time we do, it stands out like an oasis in
the desert of partisan and patronizing trivia
that we comes at us. So it is hard to rise
above the clatter of deception that surrounds
us. The President tells us, after all the
original fear-based reasons for going to war
were proved phony, that we are staying at
war to bring freedom to Iraq, to establish
another beachhead for freedom in the
Middle East. The evidence of that freedom is
supposed to be an election and a barely
functional government, while freedom of
speech, freedom of religion, freedom from
want and freedom from fear are all trampled
on in Iraq every day. The regime we
overthrew was no better, mind you, but the
self-deception we practice on the largest
political scale possible is evident when we
are told that freedom was a goal or an
outcome of all that has happened in Iraq.
Hardly any one believes that any more, and
it makes a mockery of our reputation as a
free society that we have continued in this
self- deception for so long.
On the personal level, we continue in
the self-deception that our lives can be lived
in detachment and isolation from events and
problems around the world, and across town,
problems that are eating away at the
foundations of the freedoms we enjoy,
making them less real and less meaningful.
A couple of weeks ago on our Earth Day
Sunday I said that I hoped gas prices would
continue to rise because it would take that
kind of pain to force more people, myself
included, to change habits of energy
consumption that are harming the world
community and the planet as a whole. It was
a confession, as much as it was a
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prescription for you. It was a confession that
I probably don’t have the will to stop
deceiving myself about the interdependence
of my behavior as part of the world energy
market and how that effects climate change
unless it starts to have an impact on
everyday freedoms that I take for granted.
Only then would I be able to acknowledge
my complete interdependence on the rest of
the world’s people and politics .
At the spiritual level, I am living in
self-deception insofar as I am unable or
unwilling to see myself as a part of this
world rather than an isolated individual. If I
let go of that self-deception, I would have to
accept responsibility for the world’s
suffering, and not just feel bad about my
own. In our hymnal, in the section of the
hymnbook titled “Freedom”, there is a hymn
that was composed from a poem by James
Russell Lowell, a poem that framed this
very self-deception I speak of in the context
of the great issue of 19th century America::
slavery. Lowell wrote:
freedoms have come to us because we
deserved or earned them. The fifth freedom
requires the vision and the will to see
ourselves as others see us, and to see
ourselves as a part of a world that is not at
all free, and that requires from us more
sacrifice, more honesty, more generosity,
more humility if those other four freeedoms
that Franklin Roosevelt invoked are ever to
be fully realized, not just for us, but
everywhere in the world..
May it be so.
All whose boast it is that we come of
forebears brave and free –
If there breathe on earth a slave, are
we truly free and brave?
If we do not feel the chain, when it
works another’s pain,
Are we not base slaves indeed,
slaves unwilling to be freed.
Is true freedom but to break fetters
for our own dear sake ,
And with leathern hearts forget we
owe humankind a debt.
No, true freedom is to share all the
chains that others wear,
And with heart and hand to be
earnest to make others free.
So the fifth freedom, if we are to
heed this advice from this our spiritual
ancestor, is to be able to see past the
tempting and routine self-deception that our
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