An Introduction to Freedom of the Pulpit and Freedom of the Pew

In the 1870s, a Universalist minister out in Minnesota, Herman Bisbee, started speaking freely from his pulpit about his strange ideas. Bisbee soon got in trouble for his use of the Bible and his views of Jesus.
Some members of his church just outside St. Paul wrote letters of complaint to the denomination. An investigation was launched, which led to the Minnesota Universalist Convention voting 47 to 23 to remove Reverend Bisbee from fellowship.

It was a low point in Universalist history, and the denomination from that time on proved to have little stomach for this sort of heresy trail.

But I had to wonder this year if indeed the Universalist spirit was alive here in ways that I had not anticipated. Formal complaints were made to the denomination about my preaching, one of them enclosing the text of a sermon I had preached, and tipping President Bill Sinkford off that he should know this sort of thing was going on.

As far as I could tell, the evil thing that was going on, warranting the attention and action of the president of the denomination, was that I was not saying enough nice things about the Universalists. And, oh yes, that I might harbor Christian sentiments as well. At any rate, I was unorthodox, and probably dangerous.

There is a serious underlying issue here, of course. Freedom of the pulpit and the corollary, freedom of pew, are among the most sacred doctrines of our faith.

It is in my contract, and the contract of most all of the ministers of our Association, that we shall enjoy freedom of the pulpit.

Lip service is paid to the idea frequently. But seldom do we get deeper than that. Perhaps because the doctrine seems so self-evident, there is little teaching about it, and quite understandably, there is not much understanding of its history and scope.

Freedom of the pulpit is an idea born in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Catholic priests were expected to teach and preach the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church. Deviation would lead to defrocking or worse.

Then, in the sixteenth century there was throughout Europe a wind of freedom, and reforming preachers started to say what they thought, to tell their congregations where their search for truth was taking them.

Thus, the earliest record we have of this issue coming before Unitarians was in 1568, when King John Sigismond of Transylvania, the only Unitarian king in history, sought to stop religious persecution by decreeing “in every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel, each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well. If not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve.”

It is probably as compact and complete a statement as has ever been made about freedom of the pulpit and freedom of the pew

King John’s edict sets forth this teaching:

First, preachers, (that is, those educated, ordained and called to preach) may do so according to their own understanding and conscience. They will no longer be required to preach only the official teachings of some hierarchy or orthodoxy.

Second, if members of the congregation do not agree with the preacher, they will not be forced to conform. They may hold and express their own views and convictions. This is the doctrine of Freedom of the Pew.

Third element of King John’s edict:

A preacher cannot be removed by external authorities. No higher authority—Bishops, superintendents, presidents, whatever, may threaten or remove ministers simply because they disagree with what they say from their pulpits.

King John was a brilliant young classical humanist tutored by the finest European religious radicals of his day. His decree of toleration might have provided adequate guidance for freedom of pulpit and pew for centuries, had he not died tragically and prematurely in a riding accident.

Shortly thereafter, his primary religious advisor, Francis David, was imprisoned and martyred because he continued to preach challenging sermons, even after the new king, a Catholic, told him to stop doing that.

When Unitarianism and Universalism emerged in America shortly after the Revolutionary War, it was undoubtedly with a keen awareness of what had happened in Europe since the days of King John’s Camelot of freedom. The blood of martyrs must have made consideration of freedom of the pulpit and the pews more than a casual concern.

Yet the doctrine was little spoken of until some rather nasty things happened in the mid to late 19th century.

First, the most prominent minister in America, William Ellery Channing, known as the Father of American Unitarianism, was by a vote of the trustees of his church in Boston, denied access to the pulpit because of his support of the anti-slavery cause.

It was done in a very indirect and covert way, certainly, but done quite effectively nonetheless.

The matter that curtailed Channing’s preaching career was his desire to conduct a memorial service for Charles Follen, another Unitarian minister and an infamous abolitionist. Follen—whom you may remember was responsible for popularizing the Christmas tree in America as a symbol of more enlightened parenting practices—had died in a steamboat fire on his way to Boston from his church in New York City.

Follen had been forced out of the pulpit at All Souls in New York by the trustees. They suddenly decided that his German accent, which was charming when they called him, had become too thick for him to be understood. The trustees decreed that they could only put up with that accent twice a month.

One essential element of freedom of the pulpit is the freedom of the minister to be in the pulpit, so of course Follen had to resign.

At around the same time, a major incident occurred which helped to establish the widespread acceptance of freedom of the pulpit as essential to a free faith.

Theodore Parker was the grandson of the commander of the minutemen who fired the shot heard ‘round the world, and one of the most popular Unitarian preachers of the mid-1800s. He gave one admirer, Abraham Lincoln, the gift of phrases from his sermons, including “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” His radical version of Christianity packed huge lecture halls, but offended Boston Brahmins. Parker and those who agreed with him were soon subjected to Unitarian shunning.

A diversity of opinion was very much valued in Unitarian churches from the earliest days. The way that diversity of opinion was encouraged was by rotation of preachers.

Sermons were expected to be long, at least two hours, and often there were both morning and evening sermons to be prepared. It was a huge task.

Any minister who had to do this Sunday after Sunday would be worn out and worn down. So the interests of ministers in their own sanity nicely coincided with the interests of their congregants in hearing a variety of viewpoints. Once each month, ministers in the Boston area would rotate, or exchange pulpits. The ministers could thus reuse sermons, saving wear and tear, and the people in the pews were treated to a different perspective.

When the more traditional ministers cut Parker and other radicals out of the rotation, they were acting as a hierarchy to deny freedom of the pulpit, and even more significantly, they were damaging freedom of the pew by denying their congregants exposure to differing viewpoints.

The next major event in the checkered history of freedom of pulpit and pew occurred in 1921 in Detroit. Since the days when Parker had been shunned by those who disagreed with him, Unitarians had been struggling with what we might call “the Broad Church Question.” How broad could the denomination be? Could it be so widely embracing as to include both atheists and theists, and everything in between?

Before World War II, both the Unitarians and the Universalists were unquestionably liberal Christian denominations, but the Unitarians had long tolerated a scattering of atheists and free thinkers in their pulpits. In the 1920s, the term ‘humanism’ was revived as what many felt was simply a socially acceptable euphemism for atheism, and many ministers embraced it. Too many for the comfort of the Liberal Christians, who were then in the majority.

Led by Lawrence Sullivan of Schenectady and then All Souls in New York, the liberal Christians attempted, at a 1921 conference in Detroit, to implement a policy that would have moved toward excluding non-theists from our pulpits. To preach in one of our churches, it would be necessary to “affirm God.”

The eloquence of John Dietrich was perhaps what defeated the exclusionary measure. Dietrich, father of Religious Humanism and minister of the Unitarian Church in Minneapolis, proclaimed, “There is no question of the right to preach either forms of doctrine (theist or humanist) from a Unitarian pulpit.”

Most of the denominational leadership seemed to agree.

The Broad Church perspective held sway until perhaps the late 1960s. Freedom of the pulpit was again being tested, this time by the Vietnam War. In one especially high profile case, the Reverend Arthur Jellis was fired by his Unitarian congregation because of his use of the pulpit to oppose the war.

But the larger issue emerging in the 1960s was the limitation of our pulpits to those who were non-theists, or at least to those who abstained from using theistic language or quoting the Bible.

This may seem odd for a religious movement that had pioneered modern biblical studies and had, according to one of its major historians, emerged in both Europe and America only because of its strong commitment to biblical teaching.

Yet by the end of the 1960s, humanism in its religious, secular and atheistic forms, had succeeded in replacing liberal Christianity as the primary expression of Unitarianism and Universalism.

The result was the closing of pulpits even to those ministers who used traditional religious language only for its poetic, symbolic, mythological, or literary value.

There had been a great influx into the congregations of the new Unitarian Universalist Association of nomads of the newly mobile American society, and especially of those who sought in our churches refuge from authoritarian or abusive religions of their past. These “come-outers” were often and understandably unable to distinguish between the fundamentalisms and orthodoxies they had left behind, and more nuanced, gentle and progressive expressions of Christianity and theism that had long been the mainstay of Unitarianism and Universalism. The baby went out with the bathwater.

When awarded the highest honor of our denomination at General Assembly in Nashville three years ago, Carl Scovel, (graduate of Monroe High School in Rochester) then just retired from King’s Chapel in Boston, the first avowedly Unitarian Church in America, accepted the Distinguished Service Award, our Nobel Prize, on behalf of the many ministers he had known who had been driven from UUA pulpits because of their Christian or theist beliefs.

The tables had been turned, and John Dietrich’s pronouncement of tolerance no longer held up: No one would now say, as Dietrich had, “There is no question of the right to preach either form of doctrine (theist or humanist) from a Unitarian pulpit.”

If there is a tragedy in all this, it is not so much loss of freedom of the pulpit, as loss of freedom of the pew. Freedom of the pew should mean the right first of all to hear a minister who is allowed and encouraged to speak the truth as she or he discerns it.

And perhaps even more importantly, it should mean the right of the members to hold opinions different from those of the preacher. For most of the time in most of our churches, those whose opinions differ from the minister, and differ from the prevailing orthodoxy of the congregation, keep their mouths shut in fear.

This, I have learned, is certainly the case here. No, not that you have been afraid to articulate disagreement with me, but that so many have told me that they are afraid to speak their doubts, are afraid to speak about their relationship to the Holy, their admiration of the teachings and example of Jesus, their fascination with the Bible, or their sneaking suspicion that they may be praying to a personal God.

In a church like this one, it is safe to be secular. One belongs if one is not “too religious.”

It is this tendency toward conformity that more than anything else now limits the freedom of the pulpit and the freedom of the pew.

While I did cause angry eruptions when I challenged, early on, some of the most fervently held assumptions of the political and cultural left, the protestations to the denomination about my preaching have been about my non-conformity to what is in this church a comfortable and narrow range of secular expression. These protests have been few, but enough to make me want to talk with you about it.

When congregants write to hierarchies suggesting that a lid be put on a minister by a supervisory body, it is a chilling reminder of that 1872 Universalist heresy conviction.

When congregants dredge up old sermons on the Internet and circulate them to illustrate the minister’s secret heresy, it is a chilling reminder of Joseph McCarthy’s red baiting witch hunts.

When still other congregants are afraid to speak their minds for fear of being shunned for non-conformity, it is a chilling reminder of the shut-down of pulpit rotation that robbed congregations of Parker’s eloquence and of the diversity of opinion for which they hungered.

And so I leave you with a challenge—to reexamine your commitment to freedom of pulpit and pew, and to preserve what so many have struggled for, for so long.

Most of you have been wonderful. Open and receptive to the messages and perspectives I have brought, even when you doubted or disagreed. You deserve a tribute, and I would offer you one in the form of the words of David Rhys Williams at the funeral of Frank Gannett, the newspaper mogul.

(I have, by the way, had the privilege of writing these words while sitting at the desk of William Channing Gannett, one of the champions of freedom of the pulpit who, while minister of this church, helped to head off the movement to require all our preachers to subscribe to a theological litmus test. Frank Gannett was influenced to become a Unitarian by his cousin, William Channing Gannett.)

Here is the tribute from David Rhys Williams, which belongs to many of you as well:

“Frank Gannett took his religious duties seriously. He made a conscientious effort to be present in the church of his choice on as many Sunday mornings in the year as his health and other obligations would permit.

“I have many reasons to cherish the memory of this man, but I shall cherish it most of all because he faithfully supported not only the freedom of the press…but also the freedom of this pulpit…. He was one who could disagree completely with the content of any specific sermon and still find inspiration in the sincerity of its utterance.

“It has been a rare privilege and a challenging responsibility to serve as his minister, for his religion was bound by no narrow creed. It was to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God.”