The Serpent's Choice
by
Jim
Checkley
When I picked the topic for today's sermon, I had no idea that today would be the day of your congregational meeting. I enjoy serendipitous convergences like this-they almost make me feel like there is a method to the madness of the universe. Almost, but not quite. In any event, although I understand there has been a "straw poll" going on, today is the day you will all make big and important choices about the church and its future. It is an exciting day.
There always seem to be important choices to be made in our lives. I don't think this is an accident. Unlike virtually all other cultures throughout history, we live in a democratic culture that has progressively evolved to provide us with as many individual choices as possible. Despite how much money we spend on Big Government, our culture places the emphasis for decision making on the individual. From the question "what to you want to be when you grow up?" to the Constitutionally sanctioned right of privacy that protects a woman's right to be left alone in her reproductive choices, we Americans decide for ourselves almost everything about how we want to live our lives. And the trend over the last half-century has been to provide increasingly more choice for increasingly more people.
The concept of choice lies at the very heart of our society and I would venture to guess that almost nobody would object to the proposition that we all want to be free to choose how to live our lives. Even the advocates of Big Government usually want the government to do things that will assist the less fortunate to be in a position to make the choices the rest of us take for granted. I want to talk about those choices today, and examine the relationship of cultural values and having choices, and the price we pay for having so many choices in so many areas of life. Because, as the late Robert Heinlein recognized, there is always a price.
We are coming up on Christmas, that most secular of religious holidays. Thinking about the unbelievable number of consumer choices we have and how they are presented to us on a silver platter by the media, advertisers, and the like, was one of the inspirations I had to do this service. Christmas has become a materialistic shark feeding and for the next few weeks, the advertisers and the media and the politicians and the pundits will be pushing each of us to choose to spend our money on consumer gifts of all sorts. There is both an expectation and a sense of obligation, whether you're Christian or not, that is nearly inescapable.
The truth is that an ordinary middle class American has more great stuff to choose from than any king had for most of history. Any king of any country on earth for the first several millennia of western civilization would turn green with envy over the choices we have for our Christmas shopping. They might not lament the miserable early morning trek to the mall to buy who knows what the day after Thanksgiving, perhaps, but otherwise, it would be no contest.
But there are so many other choices we make besides consumer choices. We have at our disposal an incredible array of choices for living that both span and define a lifetime. Have you ever thought about how many life choices we have in these early years of the 21" Century compared to say, just a couple of hundred years ago? I'd wager something approaching 90% of all jobs and careers didn't exist in 1850. There was nothing in telecommunications, nothing in electronics, nothing in aviation, nothing in automobiles, nothing in professional sports, nothing in psychiatry or psychology, nothing in television, nothing in the movies, nothing in space technology, nothing in refrigeration, nothing in plastics, nothing in-well, you get the idea. The choices most people have now for how to live their lives are nothing short of overwhelming-and are increasing every day.
And all those choices apply to increasingly more people. Despite the bursting of the "dotcom" bubble, we are still the richest nation on earth and the opportunity to grab a piece of the pie has never been greater. Our culture has redefined itself in the last half-century to be, at least officially, much more accepting of diversity, whether of race, ethnicity, religious belief, or gender. Our own Unitarian Welcoming Congregations is but one of hundreds of examples. Yes, there has been resistance-everybody gets to choose, after all-but the trend has been undeniable.
As I thought about all these choices we have, I began to wonder about the flip side of the coin, as it were. Had we given up anything in the process? What had been the price? I think we have paid many prices actually-like the quality of our environment, for example. But the biggest one, I think, and the one I want to focus on, is our values as a culture. It may have been unintentional, and it may have been unexpected, but I think that the price we have paid to live with so many diverse choices, is that the cultural values that form the foundation of the framework within which we all make our choices, have either been diminished or in some cases, lost altogether. And in the process, the crucible of the free market place of ideas that is supposed to sort through and measure the value of ideas, has been replaced to a great extent by that bundle of rules we collectively refer to as "political correctness."
I believe there is a relationship between having choices and having values. But it may not be the relationship you expect. The stronger your values, whatever they may be, and whatever they apply to, the fewer choices you have. The weaker your values, or not having them altogether, the more choices you have. This is a very simple relationship, one that I think is easily proven. And I am increasingly coming to the conclusion, that this inverse relationship, as it were, holds the key to much about our society that used to be a mystery to me.
Under this theory, and granting that merely having choices is itself a good, then the most important thing culture can do to facilitate choice is to insure that those making choices are free to choose whatever and however they want. But in order to do that, it is important that the system of beliefs within which the people operate, be it religious, consumer oriented, political, or whatever, be as free of constricting normative values as possible. Said another way, our devotion to individual choice has created a highly balkanized culture with few important overarching cultural values to support the burgeoning superstructure. In simple terms, we are no longer "one nation, under God," and we even have a federal court opinion that says so.
Let me give you an example of what I mean that is closer to home. In our Unitarian religion it is both unimportant and, in some deep sense, irrelevant, whether or not one believes in god. This lack of a value proposition for god provides members of our church with the ability to believe pretty much anything they want-theists and atheists sit side by side without rancor. Contrast this state of affairs with a fundamentalist church. There, of course, the value proposition is that there is one God, one savior, Jesus Christ, and there is hence only once choice: belief in the God of fundamentalism. It's their way or the highway.
Here then are two extremes, one with no choice, and the other with unlimited choice. And here is the key: in order to accommodate both Unitarianism and fundamentalism, the culture must be neutral, may not take a stand one way or the other. And obviously, that's precisely what we have. We have a constitutionally prescribed division of church and state, and at least one federal court telling us that nobody has to say a pledge of allegiance that includes god.
Moreover, while the fundamentalist has no real choices, he or she has security and a welldefined path. The Unitarian has lots of choices, but may not be so secure in those choices. The Unitarian may also experience a void when somebody comes up and asks, "Just what do Unitarians believe?" That void is transformed, of course, into a badge of honor when we reply "Everything and nothing." If you are into choice, in this case individual religious choice, there is no better place for you than right here because, besides a requirement to be more or less well mannered, there is literally unlimited choice in one's religious convictions.
What I am suggesting is that the same thing has happened across the board to every value-laden proposition there is. So if you want a lot of individual choices, you have to have more flexible values-whatever those values might be in the context of the choices to be made.
I feel safe asserting that none of us here today view the ambiguity of religious freedom as much of a price to pay for that freedom. But there are millions of people who do think it is a real cost to society, millions of people who think it is both harmful and damning. The pursuit of individual choice as the ultimate freedom has, on every level of activity you can think of, increasingly transformed our culture into one that provides us with a foundation of Jell-O. And this has left many people without a compass, without a path, without security or certainty about much of anything. In this sense, it has left them very vulnerable.
It is important here to distinguish between cultural values and personal values. I believe we live in a society that has, at the highest levels, become increasingly valueless, but also one in which most everyone craves values. On the one hand, the culture itself must be as flexible as possible in terms of its sanctioned values in order for each individual to make his or her own subjective choices, and to accommodate the diversity of beliefs. On the other hand, choices are not made in a vacuum. There has to be some framework, some foundation, some set of reasons, upon which to make those choices. So we have a bit of a paradox here: an increasingly valueless culture, but increasingly value starved individuals trying to make important choices without strong societally sanctioned guidance. Oh, there are local, diverse, and decentralized value sources. But they primarily serve to support subjective individual choices, not to provide cultural norms.
Honestly, if people had strong cultural values to draw upon, do you think they would call Dr. Laura by the thousands to find out how to behave? Even worse, how about all those souls who call the psychic hotline, trusting to a disembodied voice to mystically decide for them what they should do? Do you think these people feel well grounded and confident about themselves and the world? And what about Tony Soprano? The moral ambiguity portrayed on the Sopranos is eaten up each week by millions and millions of people. Here is an award winning show about the mafia, where killing, adultery, and other traditional "evils" are somehow acceptable behavior. I'm sure all of you can easily come up with a few examples of your own.
Meanwhile, while one may not like or accept the values a fundamentalist lives by, those values provide a priori blessed guidance directly from God on how to behave. Not a heck of a lot of choice maybe, but why does one need choice when God has provided a sacred set of rules and values? At least fundamentalists know in their hearts they are doing the right thing, even if we think they are nuts.
All of which brings me to the story of Eve and the Serpent. If we can believe the Bible, they're the ones who got us into this mess in the first place. I don't have the time to talk about the Fall of Adam and Eve the way I want to. I have written a separate essay on the topic, which I would be happy to share with you. But for now, consider this: Because of St. Augustine and his definition of Original Sin, we have been taught for centuries to consider the Fall as having corrupted the entire line of humans, beginning with Adam and Eve. As a result of this corruption, humans are not to be trusted, cannot make good decisions, and are doomed to evil. Hence, western civilization was subjected for centuries to an imperial church in Rome that prescribed truth and right action through the direct connection between the Pope and God.
I think Augustine's idea of Original Sin is a candidate for the worst idea in the last two thousand years. And, interestingly enough, that is not what the words of the Bible actually say. If humans became corrupted, then how could God say that Adam and Eve have "become as one of us, to know good and evil." Gen. 3:22. How could they have become godlike if they were totally corrupted? The truth is, they weren't corrupted; they were freed.
I believe, along with those like Bishop Julian who opposed Augustine, that what really happened in the story, was not a Fall, but a liberation. Adam and Eve were liberated from the bondage of ignorance and became beings capable of discernment, capable of informed choice. God was mad because they were no longer intelligent sheep: they were wise to the ways of the world, and knew the difference between right and wrong. It is instructive to listen to God's words as set out in the Bible: "And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." The simple truth is that God tossed us out of the garden because he didn't want us to live forever and thus become totally free.
Leaving aside the rather puzzling question of why Adam and Eve didn't eat from the Tree of Life before they ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, especially since God had not forbidden it, all this begs the more interesting question: Why did the Serpent tempt Eve? Why did he tell her the truth about what would happen if she and Adam ate the fruit? I think the answer is that so long as Adam and Eve were ignorant, so long as they were not free to make their own choices based on their own discernment of what was good and what was evil instead of the values dictated to them by God, then the Serpent didn't stand a chance of winning them away from God. In order for the Serpent to have a shot at getting Adam and Eve on his side of the ledger, he had to free their minds. He had to make sure that they, like God himself, were capable of knowing good and evil and in so knowing, were free to make their own choices based on that knowledge. The Serpent had to make sure that they had full and complete choice in the matter. Only then, only with their minds freed and the pallor of ignorance removed, would it be possible for humans to truly choose evil. Only then did the Devil have a shot at winning over humans to his-evil-side.
I think this story has a real message for us today. With the advent of the civil rights movement, we became determined to create a culture where people were not judged by the irrelevancy of skin color or ethnicity. We in large part have succeeded, but in the process we also got a culture where we hardly judge at all, where the word discriminate has become an expletive, to be used any time someone makes a judgment we either do not approve of or is politically incorrect. The rise of meritocracy was based on our desire to have all persons judged on their merits rather than their parentage, gender, or economic status. We in large part have succeeded, but in the process we also got a culture where people feel entitled not just to equal opportunity, but to equal success, and often resent the success of others and refuse to acknowledge the hard work that went into achieving it. We wanted to open the free market place of ideas through the democratization of just about everything. We have succeeded in large part, but in the process, we got a society where not only is everyone entitled to his or her own opinion, we have to treat that opinion with kid gloves because somehow, all opinions are created equal, and challenging someone on his or her opinion has become almost a social faux pas.
This is all part of the politically correct shield that we have placed over ourselves. It is a shield that is necessary in order to maintain the kind of soft cultural value structure needed to sustain the megachoices we have and the diversity of people who can make them. Political correctness provides the lubrication to keep our culture as nonjudgmental as possible in order to both protect people in their myriad choices and to insure that various groups within society make nice with each other.
Political correctness also provides me with some of my most cherished cultural moments. For example, again keeping this in the family, so to speak, how many of you know the joke about how the Unitarians asked for a rule change in the church softball league? The Unitarians were concerned for the self esteem of the children and wondered if it would be OK to change the rules so that instead of three strikes and you're out, it would instead be three strikes and you're special. I love that joke-it says so much about us.
This one's not a joke-at least it's not fiction. Some Californians filed suit against the Mars candy company some years ago because they thought the notice on a nonwinning contest wrapper was too harsh and hurt the feelings of the person reading it. The nonwinning wrappers said: "Sorry, you are not a winner." What kind of feeble-minded person would be offended by a candy wrapper, you might ask? I don't know. But I do know this: Mars settled the case and changed the offending wrapper to read as follows: "Sorry, this wrapper is not a winner." I'm almost surprised somebody didn't file another suit on behalf of the wrappers.
The desire to preserve choices and in so doing, protect people from pain, protect them from feeling bad, is not itself a bad thing. But over time standards go away, and with them, markers for acceptable behavior disappear. Eventually people don't feel comfortable judging things to be good or bad anymore and get confused about what is right and wrong. That's when we start asking whether morality is simply a matter of taste, and realizing that in our culture of tolerance, acceptance, and equality, the little boy who shouted "The Emperor has no clothes," would get his mouth washed out with soap for embarrassing the Emperor and his court.
The Serpent, the one in the Garden of Eden, is dancing in the aisles. This-our 21" Century American culture-is just what he wanted, just what he hoped for. Our culture is a gold mine for him. It seems that nothing is off limits anymore and the results are predictable: Kids on drugs, corporate thieves running amok, television and media that teaches that there is no right or wrong, sports where money and winning overwhelm sportsmanship, politically correct discourse that has the sense and feel of a sound bite interview, in short, a bottom line culture of excess, of entitlement, of youth, a culture of sex and indulgence, greed, selfishness and power. With ultimate freedom comes ultimate choice and with ultimate choice comes the Serpent's best opportunity to snare us, to seduce us to the dark side of the force.
The advertisers, politicians, media pundits, and captains of industry are all dancing too. Because they are the inheritors of the mantle of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. They are the ones who ultimately benefit from a culture of choice, a culture with weak foundational values. There is an expression that nature abhors a vacuum. Well, in our vacuous culture, all those power brokers are more than happy to zip in and fill the void by providing answers, guidance, advice, and best of all, incentive, for each of us to act exactly the way they want us to act.
And I don't know about you, but I trust many of them about as much as I would trust the Serpent. But without the crucible of the free market place of ideas, without honest communication, and a real, rather than politically correct, search for truth, without that framework of values against which to measure what we are being fed, they have the upper hand.
Honest adult communication sometimes hurts, but it is the best defense we have against being led down the garden path for the benefit of the power brokers. Because our modem power brokers, like the Serpent before them, revel in our freedom of choice and for the very same reason the Serpent did: it gives them a better chance to ensnare us, induce us to choose badly, to indulge, perhaps not in evil, but in what they want us to indulge in, be it cigarettes, fast food, SUVs, pet rocks, sports, war with terrorists, expensive health care, politically correct education, or the purchasing of just about anything and everything.
And never is that more obvious than in the month of December, when the pressure is on full blast to choose Christmas as fed to us by the advertisers and their clients. As Christmas approaches, I invite you to take note of the commercials, take note of the propaganda, and take note of the spin. And realize you are being played by pros, pros who took their cue from the original advocate of choice: The Serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Amen and Amen.
Presented December 8, 2002 Wildflower Church
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation Austin, Texas
(Revised for Print)
Copyright 2002 by Jim Checkley