Community for Freethinkers

I have been working for 30 years within Ethical Societies and Unitarian Universalist congregations because I believe those are places where my vision of community for freethinkers has a possibility of being realized. Similar dynamics probably apply to other humanist and freethinking groups.

A community of freethinkers.  Outside one Ethical Society building, there is a slogan about it being a place that “supports freethinkers.”  I happen to love the term “freethinker” though some definitions of the label are more restrictive than others.

To me, a freethinker is simply someone who forms beliefs and opinions not just because they’re handed to us as dogma or by some authority, or even because they’re traditional, but rather by applying the human gifts of logic and reason and, I hope, also compassion.  The term “freethinker” has especially been applied for a few hundred years to describe those who look with a skeptical eye at traditional religious beliefs. Freethinkers have been those who submit even religious beliefs to the test of skepticism, and often end up with a different view than the traditional one.

I have family history here.  My maternal grandmother (my mormor), born in America to Norwegian settler parents on a farm, as a young woman moved to a big city and joined a Norwegian Free Church for community – an ethnic church where services were in Norwegian, and which did not require adherence to dogma, though it was still within Christianity. She left the more dogmatic Lutheranism of her parents, where a funeral service for a beloved half-brother focused on how he was going to hell because he drank.  (That particular rural congregation has moved considerably since then, theologically, I’m happy to report.)

Grandma married a Swedish immigrant, who had left his home partly because he was uncomfortable in the (state) church in his community and to which there were many generations of family ties. The couple then joined a congregation that had begun as a freethinkers society, and which came to call itself humanist.  That congregation associated itself with the Unitarians before the merger with Universalists, and uses to this day the name Society instead of Church, the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis. 

My mother grew up as a humanist, my father attended that same congregation as a young man when he moved to the city, and I was raised in the humanism of my parents.  Yes, my humanism has evolved – that’s part of freethinking – but freethinking itself is figuratively part of my DNA.

Bertrand Russell was a mathematician and philosopher known as a freethinker for his incisive examination of religious beliefs. He described freethinking this way (I haven’t changed his male-centric language, I just note that he lived before the discovery of women):

“What makes a freethinker is not his beliefs but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because, if he did not, he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.”

And that means that it’s likely that while two or more freethinkers might agree and have a similar conclusion, there’s no guarantee of that. 

One of my key interests is how communities like Ethical Societies or UU congregations grow (and how they don’t).  So I read widely.  I ran into one course on “building community” that looked promising, looking into it though it came from a very traditional Christian church.  And there it was: building community starts with like-mindedness.

Oops.  Unless “like-mindedness” equates to the “how” we hold beliefs, instead of “what” beliefs we hold, a typical Ethical Society or Unitarian Universalist congregation does not start with like-mindedness.  We start with a diversity of individual beliefs. Way back at the beginning of the first Ethical Society, the founder of that first Society, Felix Adler, called for a platform broad enough for what he called the “believer and the infidel,” with “diversity in the creed” – a wide range of beliefs held by individuals, with no enforced “right” set of beliefs.  In other words, he intentionally built that first Ethical Society as a community of freethinkers. Unitarian Universalist congregations also value and practice a wide diversity of beliefs.

Near the end of his life, at the 55^th anniversary of that first speech calling for “diversity in the creed” and a platform broad enough to welcome the “believer and the infidel,” Adler addressed the question of why people first come to, first find, an Ethical Society.  Here, in his somewhat dated style, is what he said back in 1931, about why people through those first 55 years joined:

“I have said that I would speak of the inner sense of the movement. What was the motive that appealed to those who first joined it? I answer: it was the desire to rid their lives of the burden of falseness – the burden of ceremonies of religion which to them were not true. They felt this especially in critical moments of their lives, as when at the [funeral rites] of one beloved the Christian minister would say in the name of Jesus: "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live" – that is to say, immortality on the condition of faith in Jesus; or among orthodox Jews, when at the burial the survivor passes between the ranks of his friends, and they say to him: "Be comforted in the midst of those who mourn for Jerusalem," though it no longer even incurred to him to mourn for Jerusalem. Or again, the call for supernatural intervention in the anguished moment of suspense for the recovery of the sick. They desired to shift the burden of falsity from themselves, because falsity is unlivable; and for their children they wished that nothing unlivable should be put into their minds, that those young beings should not have the picture of life obscured by a mist and cloud of untruth.”

People come, often, to our Ethical Culture or UU congregations because they seek a community for themselves and their children, a community that welcomes their continuing quest for the truth, one that doesn’t impose beliefs based on dogma, authority, or mere tradition.

Adler didn’t talk much about community itself – he accepted it, lived it, but didn’t address it much per se.  We’ve had to evolve many of those ideas ourselves.

There has been, of course, well beyond Adler, a whole other American stream of thought looking at community and what that means.  Some of this has come from within traditional religions, and some from more secular thought.

It’s now 38 years since Robert Bellah and some associates of his published (1985) an important book in recent intellectual history, Habits of the Heart.  The subtitle was Individualism and Commitment in American Life.  The major contention of these authors is straightforward:  from the beginning of our nation's history, the emphasis on the individual has given us a language of individual rights, of privacy, of protection from social control — but it has not given us a language to guide our social connections, to recognize our need for coming together.  We have lost, for instance, the notion of a "common good."  Even freedom has been, they contend, stunted as a concept, as it has become only a kind of freedom from, and not a freedom to.

It is not surprising that this has happened, especially in the U.S.  Historically, we were a nation conceived during the Enlightenment, during the discovery of individual rights and liberating new concepts of the world and nature.  Knowledge for its own sake became central.  Science as a quest for the discovery of truth became important.  The individual could be freed by both knowledge and conscience from arbitrary authority: freethinking in the larger sense of the term.  We began to realize the immense potential of the individual for growth and development.  Economically, it became possible for more people to escape the sheer drudgery of survival, and to have time for learning, for leisure.  The old world was one of authority — the new demand was for freedom, for free thinking.

But, Bellah and his associates argued, this new freedom was couched only in terms of the individual.  New social theories saw only personal interest as important in motivating ethics and the moral life.  Commitment and responsibility were lost.  The final assumption of this “ragged individualism” — a term much earlier than Bellah, from John Dewey — is that it is okay to hurt others — lay off the worker of forty years without a pension, siphon off savings of the millions for the benefit of a few, refuse to wear masks that protect others if you don’t yet know you’re infected with a deadly communicable disease — because it is, after all, every man for himself.

And yes, for most of that history, it was primarily men who were able to exercise individuality.  Women were, at the same time, supposed to sacrifice so their husbands could exercise those individual rights and freedoms, and so a new generation of men with rights and women as homemakers could be raised properly.  Anna Garlin Spencer, who worked within both Ethical Culture and Unitarian circles, wrote about a hundred years ago:

“No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems.” 

But even a woman’s caring was, in this new age of individualism, in service of the individualism of others.  And a critique of women’s role was often that it stifled her own individualism.  Again, Anna Garlin Spencer:

“It is not alone the fact that women have generally had to spend most of their strength in caring for others that has handicapped them in individual effort; but also that they have almost universally had to care wholly for themselves.”

Habits of the Heart reflected, and had an effect on, culture 38 years ago.  We have looked much more seriously at the dangers of too much individualism in these past 38 years, and we’ve added, I think, a better analysis of differences in the ability of groups – like women – to access the privilege of individualism.  Community has become a more important goal.  But this shift is not without its own problems.

It is common today, and Habits of the Heart was guilty of this, to look with nostalgia towards a time that never really was.  Bellah’s book — and many more current thinkers — regrets the easy way people leave marriages — but they seem to assume that marriages dissolve mostly for convenience.  Their analysis doesn't include the damage done by marriages that don't work for anyone in them, or that actually are hurtful.  The authors regret a time when churches held more influence over the values of people — not really analyzing the damaging control religions have often exercised, destroying people's real potential for not only personal growth but better social involvement, seeing their own religious freedom bound up in denying individual freedoms to others who don’t share their religious beliefs.  Better answers lie, I think somewhere in a balance or synthesis of individual and community.  Neither rampant individualism at the expense of relationships and community, nor suppressing individualism and freethinking for the sake of community.

Habits of the Heart struck me 38 years ago and still strikes me as a shallow book.  Perhaps that’s because I’m so clearly in the tradition of freethinking -- though “tradition of freethinking” is itself a bit of a paradox.  Habits of the Heart criticized individualism but didn't really understand the variety of ways in which freedom and the individual can be important.  It called for more commitment and community but held out only a misty image of small towns and strong families that, for most people, if that ever really existed, often fell far short of true community or worthwhile commitment.

The book especially missed the mark for those groups in society which had traditionally been on the short end of the stick — women and people of color, for instance, and religious skeptics.  We have always been told: it is in the community interest for women to keep their proper place.  Pope Francis just a couple years ago pronounced that couples choosing not to have children is selfishness which threatens a nation.  When people of color moved into formerly all-white neighborhoods, resistance was usually in the name of "community values."  The attacks on accurate history education, framed as attacking Critical Race Theory, often speak in terms of that being disruptive of the community, by which they mean the white community.  The traditional church, with its emphasis on obeying God-given, biblically-sanctioned law, was and is appalled at heretical thought — this could break down community!

And, at the same time, I think Habits of the Heart got a lot right.  Individualism had — and has — in our culture, clearly created problems, and has even been self-defeating. Unfettered individualism of the few and powerful make it difficult for individualism in the many to fully flower.  The question that Habits of the Heart raised for me — and I hope raises for you — is this: are the individual and the community necessarily always in opposition?  Can we have more for one without diminishing the other?  How can we be freethinkers and still be in authentic community?

Surveys tell us more and more people in the US are religiously freethinkers. Even more people are freethinkers if we go beyond those borders. So, where are all those people who aren’t in traditional religious communities? 

Some are too independent to be in community.  Or they start groups that meet and discuss philosophical and political questions — or even religious ones, those usually negatively. My experience of many of these groups is that they are often not interested in building community, in connecting with each other as people, not just with ideas.  Those members who look for community eventually search elsewhere.

Some of those people are in traditional churches.  Many ministers, for instance, are the questioning sort, even though they often don't dare share that.  Many of the people in the pews stay there despite disagreement with creeds and statements of faith.  They put up with those things because they value community so highly.  They want to be somewhere where people care, and where their caring is welcome and has a channel of expression.

An illustration: years ago, I worked on social justice issues with a Protestant minister.  He told me privately that he was quite skeptical of some beliefs he “had to” preach on Sundays.  He knew, he said, that his congregation’s members were just not ready to hear what his own Christian freethinking had led him to. But he loved the values and actions of the congregation, as well as the basic values of hope and love he found in Christianity, and the God of good and justice  he found there.  He believed in the role of community in people’s lives including how it inspired social justice work. So he stayed, and kept his skepticism on some of the beliefs he preached. And I had another friend, a lay member of a Protestant church in that same city, who privately told me that he was quite skeptical of the dogmas being taught in the church he attended, and what was being preached from the pulpit on Sunday. But he valued the congregation’s sense of community and the work it was doing in the world. He didn’t want the minister to judge him for his disbeliefs, so he kept his secret.

You probably guessed it: the two were in the same congregation.  I kept both their confidences, so they didn’t learn from me of their separate yet mutual forays into freethinking. I was sad that they were each making assumptions that kept them from what could have been a delightful relationship.

I’m also reminded of a man I met when I did my hospital chaplaincy work.  He greeted me in my chaplain’s jacket one morning with “if you’ve come to save my soul, you’re in the wrong room.”  Somehow I mustered quickly the response, “If you want your soul saved, you’ve got the wrong chaplain.”  We hit it off nicely, and I learned he was an atheist, and rather an ardent one.  Later I learned from his conversation that every Sunday he had been attending one of the most fundamentalist large churches in the area.  It was a church that practiced “women can’t wear pants and nobody can go to movies” fundamentalism.  I asked him how those two facts fit together: being an atheist and a loyal attender of a fundamentalist church.  “Oh, it’s easy,” he told me.  “I love to go to church there. If I don’t show up on Sunday, someone calls me to find out if I’m okay.”  In other words – for him, it was the community, not the beliefs.

Those of traditional belief are usually better at paying such close attention to attendance. We tend to think, as freethinkers, that if someone doesn’t show up some week, they’re probably just off attending a concert or protest rally or staying home with family or to catch up with work or at a self-development workshop. So we might miss that someone didn’t show up because they were in ill health. We are unlikely to call after one missed Sunday.  And unlikely to be received well by most if we did.  A quandary.  But one which may diminish our ability to fully be a community.

So where else do we find the people who value community? In the TV program Cheers, still findable in reruns and streamed, we saw a kind of community.  The theme song — a place "where everybody knows your name" — reflects this longing.  But ultimately, a neighborhood bar only meets a few of the connecting needs of people.

There's another whole direction from which discussion around community has come: liberation theology, the revolutionary changes in Roman Catholic religious circles in places like Latin America.  In places where the real issues individuals face aren't whether to spend your leisure time watching TV or visiting the corner bar or attending a class for your self-development.  The real issues are survival and the transcending and ending of suffering.  In that cauldron, another approach has arisen.  And, interestingly, though it grew from different roots, it is the liberation theology concept of community that is, I think, closest to the one which Ethical Culture or Unitarian Universalism leads us to.

If we are freethinkers, we also look at ideas from others with whom we have disagreements.  Everyone’s not “all right” or “all wrong.” If we value learning and growing, we must value all sorts of diversity, for we’re only really challenged to learn and grow by ideas that haven’t yet occurred to us.

Of course much of liberation theology is based on Biblical teachings and narrowly on the Gospels of Jesus, which many Ethical Culture, UU, and secular freethinkers reject either as untrue or at least not very special.  But in liberation theology, these teachings are interpreted in a very different way than classical, conservative, or fundamentalist Christianity interprets them.  A Jesuit writer, Roger Haight, in a book called "An Alternative Vision," calls the following the major presuppositions of liberation theology – listen to see if they fit your own freethought conclusions or not.

First, an acceptance of the secularization of modern life; second, a recognition of the value of life in this world, and third, that theology (study of what beliefs are true) must have a practical character — in other words, be something that is applied, something that is lived.  That resonates with my understanding of our freethinking community tradition: a focus on life as it is lived in this world; a recognition of life’s value, even a celebration of life; and the essence that deed, or action, is more important than creed, or words. What can we do to make the world and our lives better, here, now?  How can we celebrate and recognize the wonders of life, even as we work to make life better?

Haight goes on to talk about three ideas that he believes are even more central to liberation theology. Again, listen to see if these resonate:  first, that freedom is the essence of human existence. Second, that humans exist in history.  And third, human existence is social.

That first central idea: freedom is the essence of human existence.   In Haight's words, which probably sound familiar to a freethinker, "To be human is to be free.  Human existence is the ability to stand back from matter and nature, to transcend it even in ourselves, the ability to consider, judge and make decisions, to create new things, to take responsibility, to change, to make oneself and the world different, and, if possible, better."

Second, he points out that human existence is historical — "Freedom does not occur all at once, but is a potentiality that becomes a reality through nurture over time; it grows and develops.... It is at once open-ended but limited by time and space and the life cycle; it has a beginning, a fullness and a tapering off."

And, third, human existence is social in character.  Human existence, Haight writes, is a term which "applies equally to the individual person and to the whole of human existence taken generally or corporately."  In his words, "human existence is also essentially and inescapably social...We are individuals with a personal and unique center, but we are also just as absolutely subjects whose central ego is shaped and formed into what it really or actually is through interchange with the world and especially other people.  Human existence occurs and unfolds in solidarity; we are what and who we are through our relations to others taken as individuals and collectively as society." (end of quote)

Liberation theology is rooted in these assumptions — humans experience life as free, historical, AND social.  And so what liberation theology identifies as problems are focused by the observation that for "an enormous portion of the human race," personal and social existence “is so characterized by poverty, by oppression of freedom and by sheer human suffering.”  If we are part of a global human family, with our existence interdependent with all others, then we cannot escape participating in this suffering.

The Christian liberation theologian then goes on to interpret all this in terms of hope for final salvation and in terms of a loving God.  I’m among those religious freethinkers who look for hope elsewhere — in the human community.

I think that our Ethical Culture or UU or humanist version of “salvation” is building communities.  But not just any communities.  Many of us have fled other involvements that suppressed our individuality, our freedom.  We want both community and individuality.

And maybe it’s a surprise: these are not in conflict. Instead, a healthy community nurtures individuality.  And the healthiest individuality and freedom are those that can build community and relationships.  It’s less about balancing the two – which implies a win/lose tradeoff – but synthesizing them – for the win/win.

Without the full development of the best within each person, we are all diminished, the whole of humanity is diminished.  Felix Adler called this the “ethical manifold” -- the idea that the whole is diminished if any part cannot develop its unique best.  This is the reasoning behind what Ethical Culturists have sometimes called the supreme ethical principle:  Act so as to bring out the best in others, and thereby in yourself.  You are your best in part because others are able to be their best.  We are part of the whole.

The healthiest individuality has integrity, is able to be distinct from others, is self-knowing, in today’s psychological terms has good boundaries— and knows others to possess the same integrity, distinctness, uniqueness, boundaries.  This kind of healthy individual will be ethical!

The healthiest community is one in which nurtures individuals within it to this kind of healthiness, for they will be able to connect to others and to manage relationships with others which respect the individuality of the others, the self-hood and integrity of the others.

The kind of community that we as freethinkers strive for is not the kind that wants a return to traditional values, where everyone knows their place and takes to it happily.  It is a community where individual spiritual freedom, free thinking, and material freedom are core values, where individual integrity is foundational.

We are different from the radical individualists, I believe, because we understand that no person exists in isolation. 

An image used by some Native Americans is that we are part of an interconnected web, not only with other persons but with all of life and all the material world. 

Anne Adams has summarized another image of that interconnection, based on one of the oldest writings of humanity, the Rig Veda.  “There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe... At every crossing of the threads there is an individual. And every individual is a crystal bead. And every crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net but also every other reflection throughout the entire universe.”

What happens to one part of the web reverberates with and reflects all other parts.  Thus, personal interest and common interest are intertwined.

When I have felt most free has been when I have felt most connected. Those groups I’ve been in which most fully actualized their potential as communities were those that most fully encouraged the potential of the individuals within.

We do not need to simply balance between community and individual.  We need to have as much of both as is possible. Individual and community are often in tension, but navigating that tension well can produce a more authentic community and a more authentic individualism.  These can reinforce and support each other even more than they’re in tension.

That integration of individual and community I find described best by the words "common good” or “beloved community.” If we keep that as our goal, we are likely to create both a greater human freedom, in both material and spiritual senses, and create more real community.

The more true freedom we have for all individuals, the more real community we can create.  The more real community we create, the more potential for individual spiritual and intellectual and material freedom we open up.  It is not a balancing act.  It is a spiral of creation.  The community and the individual reinforce and build each other.  We need each for the sake of the other.

“It is not enough to say we believe in people, or that we hold that ethics is the common ground for a human life worth living. When we use the word ethics, we mean that it is the way people treat each other; how we see ourselves and others; how we relate one to one, group to group.  It means the struggle to liberate ourselves and others from fear, mistrust, bigotry; from lust for wealth and power….

For no matter how great the achievements in science and the arts, nothing will matter, nothing will survive, and nothing will be fulfilled of the human potential unless we all move toward a more ethical condition in which everyone’s worth and potential is respected and protected and nurtured.”

~ Algernon Black, a mid-20th century Ethical Leader and activist for human rights