The Devil’s Playground

Over the years, I’ve heard two major complaints about the titles of sermons given by Unitarian Universalist ministers.

One on hand there’s the complaint that our titles are boring. That’s not too surprising given that we are the embodiment of “the learned clergy” tradition. If you spend too much time reading academic journals, titles like “What Hath Jung Wrought?: [colon] The Use of Keirsey-Bates Temperament Sorters in the Development of Individual Religious Identity” can sound perfectly acceptable, if not quite completely comprehensible.

On the other hand, there’s the complaint that often it’s hard to tell from the title of a sermon just what it’s going to be about. Now I have a theory about this. Back in the good old days (whenever that was) churches would send out a newsletter every week. The minister would have to plan his sermons (and I’m guessing that back in the good old days ministers were usually men) only a week or so in advance, so when the newsletter editor asked for the title of the sermon, it was probably pretty close to the time that the minister needed to start thinking about getting around to writing the sermon in the first place. So coming up with a title for a sermon and coming up with the sermon itself were fairly close together in time.

Nowadays, with newsletters coming out fortnightly or monthly, ministers are asked to come up with sermon titles weeks or even months in advance. So the safe bet is to come up with a title that sounds vaguely important, like, “Right Relations in the Church,” or “Living Our Principles Out Loud,” or “The State of the Separation of Church and State.” Of course titles like that are the worst of both worlds: they’re boring and they don’t really tell you too much about what the sermon’s going be about. Of course, if ministers wanted to be totally honest about their sermon titles, they’d all start with the words “Something About….” So when the newsletter editor asks, “Rev. So-and-so, can you give me the titles for the sermons you’ll be giving next month,” the minister would reply, “Let’s see…‘Something About Right Relations,’ ‘Something About Our Principles,’ ‘Something About Church and State,’ and, oh, what the heck, ‘Something About Jesus.’” Boring and vague, yes; but honest, I guess.

When I needed a title for this sermon, I thought I’d try for something sensational. I mean, after all, how often do Unitarian Universalists talk about the devil in the pulpit? Well, I did a Google search on the internet, and it looks like we do quite a bit, actually. For example, I found this from a sermon by David Weissbard, the minister with whom I did my internship in Rockford, Illinois:

A man was being given a tour of Hell by the Devil. “This is the area where we keep people who have violated the food taboos of their religion,” the Devil said. “Behind this first door are the Catholics. These are the ones who ate meat on Friday. Behind the second door are the Jews. They all ate pork. Behind the third door are the Unitarian Universalists.” The man looked puzzled. The Devil clarified, “They ate their entree with their salad fork.”

The obvious joke here is, of course, the jab at the perceived elitism of Unitarian Universalists (a conservative website recently referred to us “haughty, know-it-all Unitarians”). But the more subtle joke here has to do with the thought of Unitarian Universalists going to hell. After all, if Thomas Starr King’s famous distinction between Unitarians and Universalists is true (“Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them, and Unitarians believe that they are too good to be damned”), then what would it take for a Unitarian Universalist to be damned? Apparently a breech of social etiquette.

But that, I hope you’ll be pleased to know, is not what this morning’s sermon is about. No, this morning I’d like to talk with you about a subject that’s very close to my heart: the Amish.

Now, there are a few reasons why the Amish are close to my heart. One is that I was raised in Northern Indiana, not far from the heart of the Amish country. I have fond memories of seeing a horse and buggy clip-clopping past our house on Strong Avenue in Elkhart, the front of the buggy filled with an Amish family, the back filled with the fresh eggs they had brought to sell in town. You’ll still see plenty of horses and buggies in Elkhart County, although I don’t think they’re bringing those fresh eggs into town anymore.

Another reason the Amish are close to my heart is that I’m about to marry a wonderful woman who happens to be Mennonite (a very liberal Mennonite, mind you). And if you grew up near Goshen, Indiana as I did, you’d know that Mennonites are close cousins to the Amish, sort of (but not quite) like the relationship between the Congregationalists and the Unitarians. I’ve learned a lot about the Mennonites and the Amish as I’ve gotten to know my fiancée, Julia. One thing that’s been made very clear to me is that both the Mennonites and the Amish see their faith as more than a religious tradition—it’s a cultural tradition as well.

Which brings me to a third reason why I have a certain fondness for the Amish: for all of their eccentricities—their horses and buggies and bonnets and beards—the Amish give their children what I believe to be two invaluable things. They give them a faith tradition that offers both a lifelong religious identity and a lifelong religious community. What’s more, they do this in the context of enormous freedom.

This is exactly where the devil comes in. About a year ago, a film came out by Lucy Walker called Devil’s Playground, which documents the Amish rite of passage known as Rumspringa, during which a young Amish person leaves the community to experience the “English World” or “Devil's Playground” before they decide whether or not to join the Amish church.

Now I thought I knew a bit about this subject because I grew up so close to Amish country. I knew, for example, that when Amish boys turned 16 they were allowed to own and drive automobiles (something that is forbidden for full-fledged members of the Amish church). I also knew that they were liable to pick up some “worldly” habits at that time, like smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. I even knew that some Amish youth decide not to return to the church, and that those folks often times ended up as Mennonites or Brethren, and that they commonly referred to themselves as “jerked-over Amish.”

What I didn’t know was that nowadays these Amish youth are likely to work for one of the many manufactured housing businesses in Northern Indiana; that they have a huge amount of disposable income; that they hold massive, all-night parties on their parents’ farms, parties that are attended by Amish youth from as far away as Pennsylvania and Florida. And I didn’t know that a lot of these Amish youth begin to use, and sometimes deal, drugs during this rite of passage. What I thought was a quaint little tradition exercised by a quaint little religion turned out to be an incredibly complex exploration of the volatility of adolescence and religious faith.

But here’s the most astounding thing I learned from Lucy Walker’s film about this Amish coming-of-age custom: 90% percent of the youth who have had a taste of the “English World,” who were free to explore all the dangers of the “Devil’s Playground,” 90% of these youth who have had a chance to experience every facet of a culture that they will be denied once they return to the religious tradition of their youth, 90% of them do, indeed, decide to become members of the Amish church.

That’s an amazing figure to me because it’s almost the exact opposite of our story. For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom about Unitarian Universalism has said that 90% percent of our members come from other religious traditions, and that we keep, at best, somewhere between 10 and 15% of the children and youth who were raised in our congregations.

Now I don’t want to simplify the theological implications here. The Amish tradition has its roots in the Anabaptist side of the Radical Reformation. They believe that only an adult can make an informed decision about where her or his religious affiliation lies (something that most Unitarian Universalists would wholeheartedly agree with). The Amish youth hanging out in the Devil’s Playground are all unbaptized, which means that if they were to die during this period of Rumspringa, they would, according to their tradition, be damned. And it’s clear in Lucy Walker’s film that this weighs heavily on the hearts and minds of these young people. The theology of this tradition is very conservative. They believe in God and Jesus and the Bible and Heaven and Hell and even the Devil. But there are other factors involved as well, namely, a community of faith that offers some degree of shelter from a world that can be painful and uncertain and filled with anxiety. And while we may not call this world the “Devil’s Playground,” it is the very same world in which you and me and our families and friends live and work and play.

Now the Amish have a very clear relationship to this world, a relationship based on the teachings of the New Testament. They live in the world (which means they do go to town occasionally to buy a few items at Wal-Mart), but they are not part of it (which means when they are at home with their families, they try to have as few “worldly” distractions as possible—no television, no radio, no telephones inside the house, nothing that would interfere with their sense of community). Unitarian Universalists, for better or worse, have a less clearly defined relationship with the world. Yes, we live in the world, and we are definitely part of it. And even though we don’t see the world as the “Devil’s Playground,” it does have, as John Newton put it in the words to “Amazing Grace,” “many dangers, toils, and snares.”

One of the biggest dangers I see is the one Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to in our reading this morning: “A person will worship something—have no doubt about that.” And there are plenty of things to choose from these days: a person can worship at the cult of celebrity, becoming obsessed with whoever’s on the cover of this week’s issue of People magazine. There’s the temple of consumption, where we can continuously worry about living in the right neighborhoods, driving the right cars, wearing the right clothes, and taking vacations in the right places. There’s even the sanctuary of political activism, where one can rage against every injustice imaginable, devoting countless hours to addressing all the issues a good liberal should be concerned with (becoming one of those “haughty, know-it-all Unitarians” in the process). And of course there are always the dangers of addiction, of alcoholism, of drugs, of gambling, of sex.

It’s not the “Devil’s Playground” to us. It’s just the world in which we live. And that, I believe, makes it all the more important for us to listen to Emerson’s advice: “it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.” Which brings me to my point: we may not offer our youth the kind of isolated religious community the Amish offer theirs, a closed society safe from the dangers, toils, and snares of the “Devil’s Playground,” but as a people of principle with a long and honored faith tradition, I think we owe it to our children and youth, we owe it to our families and friends, we owe it to ourselves to offer the world something more than a take-it-or-leave-it religion. We need to offer this world what Olympia Brown wrote about in this morning’s other reading: a faith worth standing by, one that comforts “us in sorrow,” strengthens “us for noble duty,” and makes “the world beautiful.”

I believe the good news is we already possess such a faith, the same faith that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Olympia Brown held dear. And we’re becoming less shy, dare I say even bold, about letting the world know it. I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but let me say that right now, at the beginning of this new century, this new millennium, Unitarian Universalism is offering to this country and to this world more than it has in a long, long time. We’re letting our voice be heard on important issues—you can’t pick up a paper in Boston or San Francisco these days without reading an article that mentions how the Unitarian Universalist Association is the religious organization leading the way on the issue of civil marriage for gays and lesbians.

But more importantly, we are offering liberal religious families something they want and deserve—multigenerational communities of faith where people of all ages can learn together what it means to be part of a religious tradition that truly believes the great, good news of our faith: that we need not think alike to love alike.

One place where this is happening is the Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group at the UUA (they used to be called the Department of Religious Education). Right now Judith Frediani and her staff are working on a new curriculum that offers educational opportunities for Unitarian Universalist values, spirituality, identity, and justice. The plan is to develop learning modules that will deal with four important areas: ethical development, spiritual development, religious identity, and faith development. The area that I’m the most excited about right now is religious development. The idea is to address the need we all have for community, specifically through affirming the value of our diverse families, connecting across generations, and promoting stewardship of our living religious heritage and faith.

If we can do these things in our congregations, I truly believe that we will raise a generation of Unitarian Universalists who are proud to call themselves by that name. It’s the difference between someone who has come through the religious education program in one of our congregations saying, “Yeah, my family went to a Unitarian Universalist church when I was a kid,” (something I hear quite a bit, actually), and someone saying, “Yes, I am a Unitarian Universalist.” Ultimately, the best way for us to welcome our own back into this faith tradition is to give everyone—children and youth, young adults and elders—healthy, vibrant multigenerational communities of faith in which they can develop as ethical and spiritual beings while maintaining a Unitarian Universalist religious identity.

If we do that, then I think we will be getting back to one of our original callings, which is, as John Murray put it, to “give” the world “not hell, but hope and courage.” And we can start right here, by giving it to ourselves, our children and youth, our friends and neighbors, and to our families.

--The Rev. Phillip Lund