First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
September 14, 2003

When the feminist activist Matilda Joslyn Gage died in 1898, she was estranged from the two women who had been her friends and partners in the struggle for women's rights for nearly half a century. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are remembered today as iconic figures in the quest for the right to vote - and let us bear in mind from time to time that it will be seventeen years yet before we can celebrate even a century of that right - but for most of their active decades in the campaign for women's suffrage, these two had functioned as what they called a "triumvirate" together with Matilda Gage. Gage broke away from the National Women's Suffrage Association when it combined with the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which sought to bring about national reforms including mandatory school prayer, and a constitutional amendment making Christ the head of government, as well as the banning of alcohol consumption. As other suffragists began to pay lip service to religious and domestic ideals then popular in the culture, Gage insisted that the church was one of the most significant institutions perpetuating the oppression of women. Though married herself, she refused to subordinate her claims of justice for her gender to either the rewards of personal affection, or the promises of life hereafter. In a defiant gesture of rebuke to her former comrades, she had engraved on her tombstone the affirmation, "There is a sweeter word than Mother, Home, or Heaven; it is Liberty."

I think of Matilda Gage in these difficult days more than a century after her death. I think of her willingness to oppose the partners of all her adult life's work in the service of an abstract principle; the ideal of freedom. I think of how ready our culture seems to be to exchange our liberty for the promise of security, and how our fears are played upon so that we might hesitate to protest against the nibbling at the edges that will destroy the fabric of freedom that has taken hundreds of years to weave. From the English meadows at Runnymeade where King John's hand was forced by his barons in 1215 to sign the Magna Carta, to the halls of Philadelphia in 1776 to the Bill of Rights, to the chambers of congress and the benches of the Supreme Court, the object of democracy has been to protect citizens from the arbitrary power of government through the structures of equal protection before the law. Matilda Gage knew that the granting of the vote alone would not make women free, so long as their status before the law was not the same as that of men. It is that freedom, hard won through struggle and sacrifice by those who believed to the core of their beings that the sweetest word was Liberty, that freedom that today is being almost casually disregarded by people like John Ashcroft. The undisputed fact that our government is holding in military custody in South Carolina a civilian United States citizen, who is formally charged with no crime, and refusing to allow him access to a lawyer, ought to scare us more than any envelope of anthrax, or suicide bomber. If they can do it to Jose Padilla and get away with it, they can do it to you or me - and make no mistake, they will. John Ashcroft thinks that if you object to this situation, you are a 'special interest group', and a minority. "The rest of the country," according to his aide, "is saying, 'Just keep us safe.'" If he is right, then Matilda Joslyn Gage has a message from her grave for my fellow citizens - there is a sweeter word than Safety, or Homeland security; and that word is liberty.

How is it that Americans at the beginning of the 21^st century have become so focused on safety, so fearful, and so careless of our rights and freedom? It is impossible not to remember September 11, 2001, and reflect that the destruction of the twin towers of New York City's World Trade Center, like the bombing of Pearl Harbor sixty years before, woke our nation out of an illusion of isolated invulnerability. Yet unlike that earlier attack, this enemy is not an identifiable country, but amorphous and intangible; a mind set, an anger, a loosely woven international network of political and religious fanaticism that only increases its appeal as it is attacked. But religious ideology is not the province solely of the Islamic faith, nor of the enemies of the United States. In fact, what I want to suggest this morning is that there is a connection between the visions that drive suicide bombers and hijackers, and the images that play in the minds of many of those who want to 'protect' us, and keep us 'safe' - and that both of those world views stand in opposition to that sweetest word, liberty. Apocalyptic ideology, whatever its flavor, is the enemy of freedom; the impulse to make us safe, or to make us saved, has the same origin, and it is the opposite of that which makes us free.

Therefore, my friends, if we would wish to carry forward the legacy of Matilda Gage - if in fact our faith teaches that the sweetest word is liberty - it behooves us to understand something about the apocalyptic world view, and how it affects the thinking of those who subscribe to it. The passage that Roger read for us is taken from the final chapter of the Christian scriptures, the book of Revelation, which is perhaps the best known example of this kind of literature, though it is by no means unique, and the format was not original when it was written. Examples of apocalyptic literature can be found in many traditions, including the book of Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures. The word Apocalypse in Greek literally means something uncovered, or revealed; hence the title of Revelation. But what the genre means is a visionary account of the end of the world, at least as we presently know it, with some kind of cataclysmic struggle, and the final, permanent triumph of the forces of good over evil. People turn to apocalyptic predictions when the world as they experience it is so confused and corrupt and uncertain and dangerous and out of control that they truly do not know what to expect next. When things are in such a wretched state that it seems the only way forward is to chuck the whole mess and start over, people begin to tell stories of what that might look like. These kinds of stories serve two purposes; one is to denounce those individuals, groups, and forces that are perceived as having brought about the intolerable conditions. An apocalyptic world view knows with clarity who the enemy is. Second, the story serves to give back to anxious individuals a measure of control over their fate. Maybe not during the present moment of chaos, but eventually according to the story, those who identify with the forces of good will triumph, and be rewarded, while all who struggled against them will be defeated and punished.

Apocalyptic literature often employs the technique of allegory, and refers to the powers that be in the present world in veiled or symbolic terms. If someone were writing an original apocalypse today, and included the line, "And there arose in the land a great Bush, and the Bush menaced the land, and bore much evil fruit, but then the Bush was cut down and cast into the fire," we would make certain connections, wouldn't we? The book of Revelations is full of such veiled references to the government of Rome, but two thousand years later we don't necessarily get all of them, just as someone who wasn't familiar with the sequence of American presidents might wonder what our imagined author had against woody plants. What makes a piece of apocalyptic literature enduring is that its images are both evocative and non-specific enough that later people in completely different circumstances can discover their own connections to the characters and events described, and formulate their own ways of being on the side of virtue that is to triumph in the long run. This almost always calls them to withdraw their allegiance and commitment from the effort to make existing social, legal, political and religious systems work, and instead to focus on hastening the confrontation of cosmic powers that is to end the old world and begin the new. Now this might all be a curiosity of literary history, if it were not for the fact apocalyptic literature is right now enjoying a popularity in American culture that ought to command our attention, and indeed our concern.

Paul Boyer, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, describes this process of contemporizing and commercializing the Biblical apocalyptic vision very clearly. He writes:

Our world, in the wake of 9/11 and in the face of enormous global challenges that make isolated security impossible, is certainly a complex and dangerous and confusing place. It is not surprising that the radiant visions and compelling story telling of the apocalyptic world view appeal to the popular imagination. I suppose that all of us, even liberals and free thinkers, have a picture of what the world might look like transformed by the values we cherish. Certainly Matilda Joslyn Gage had such a vision for women, but unlike her sister suffragists, she was not willing to trade her commitment to freedom for the realization of that ideal. And that is the challenge for all of us; certainly we would like to be safe, certainly we would like to think of ourselves on the side of goodness and virtue, as playing for what will ultimately be the winning team. The question is, what is the sweetest word? Is it home, and safety? Is it heaven, or a new world? Personally, I'm with Matilda; I want safety from the government, in the form of my rights, and I don't believe that giving them up will help one bit to protect me from the ideological dreams of fanatics, whatever their religious flavor.

Look here, Mr. Ashcroft and friends: I do not need the promise of some technicolor new world. I do not expect to be safe, and I do not expect to be saved. There is a sweeter word than home, or heaven; it is liberty. You quit trying to pretend to be god, and do your job. Don't just keep us safe; keep us free.