Today’s Call to Worship is from an essay by James Luther Adams, a Christian Unitarian and distinguished theologian in the UUA.

Unitarian Universalism, The Rev. Dr. John Buehrens, past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and now serving First Parish in Needham, Massachusetts suggested, paraphrasing another minister a generation earlier, has been living off the theological and intellectual capital of James Luther Adams for two generations.

Adams was a major transmitter and translator of the work of the German theologian Paul Tillich, Tillich, who became his colleague at Harvard, once, said – probably without exaggeration – that Adams knew more about his work that he did himself.

Adams died on July 26, 1994, at the age of 92.

Chris Hedges is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Losing Moses on the Freeway. He was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He caused a bit of a stir a couple of months ago with his May 2005 article in Harpers Magazine about the last National Religious Broadcasters convention titled "Soldiers of Christ II; Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters. Never mind what the right said, I found about twelve UU sermons posted on the net that referenced the article. He concluded the article, in part, with these words:

I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who warned us twenty-five years ago that when we were his age, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Adams told us to watch closely the Christian right’s persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933, then imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and publications. Then came raids on the places where homosexuals gathered, culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first "deviants" singled out by the Christian right. We would be next.

THE ESSAY

RELIGIONS WORD AGAINST RELIGION

(James Luther Adams Papers, "The Unitarian Universalist Christian", Fall/Winter 1993, Vol. 48, Nos. 3-4)

When we speak of true religion and false religion, we may, of course, use nice words, polite words, academic words, respectable words; but when the Bible speaks of false religion, it speaks of blasphemy, of hypocrisy, of idolatry; these are rough words, harsh words:

Depart from me; I never knew you, you who work iniquity.
Woe unto you, hypocrites! You devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense, make long prayers.
If the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness.

Evidently one of the greatest mistakes we can make is to suppose that all religion is good, or that religion is something sacrosanct, something that should be exempt from criticism, something that can escape from the wrath of God. The prophets of Israel and the prophet of Nazareth knew knew. They knew that the Devil is a gentleman, that evil in order to make headway in the world needs the cloak of religion. They even give us to understand that "religion" is the subtlest and most dangerous enemy of God, that "religion" is our human trick for rejecting justice; it is our way of "using" God as an instrument of an ungodly policy.

I once had some conversations with the Nazi Archbishop of Germany, who said that Hitler had been sent by God to fulfill German destiny. I ventured to remind him that the God of the ancient Hebrew prophets had a controversy with the people of Israel, for they thought God had a special destiny for them because of their blood and soil and regardless of their disobedience to the command of justice. The archbishop jumped from his chair and shouted, "How could God be against us? God is in us.

The Germans met destiny with blood and tears partly because they could not hear the word against religion, the word against their church religion before Hitler came to power, and the word against Nazi German Christian religion after he came to power. It is also worth recalling that the old Russian Orthodox Church brought destruction upon itself just because it did not proclaim or could not hear the word against religion.

Religion such as these became what John Milton might have called darkness visible. Perhaps it was for this reason that the Archbishop of Canterbury said, "It is a grave mistake to suppose that God is exclusively, or even chiefly, concerned with religion." The first word of prophetic religion is the word against religion. The Old Testament prophets went so far as to declare that the false prophets of their time went awhoring after false gods. Yes, they said that false believers are prostitutes!

The prophet Hosea had an experience which made clear to him what false religion is. He married a woman who became unfaithful to him. She pretended that she was faithful to her husband, but she was essentially a paramour. Brooding over this sad experience, Hosea came to the conclusion that just as his wife was a kept woman, so the false religion of his people was a "kept" religion. It had all the outer signs of respectability; it received the praise that belongs to piety and virtue; it gave an outward appearance of charity, but it was actually a prostitute.

What an astonishing thought! Very seldom are atheists attacked in the Bible. Hosea hurls his charges at the religious people. Evidently irreligion is not the dangerous thing. The dangerous thing is the false imitation. It claims to serve God, but it is really already possessed. Or, to put it another way, it has taken God into its possession and domesticated deity; it has a "kept" God that does their bidding rather that commanding their lives. A "kept" religion, then, has a "kept" God who rules only for the sake of those who do the "keeping" and not for all the children of God. For it the cross is only a double-cross. That is why the people of this age and every age must never be deaf to the painful, prophetic word of religion’s word against religion.