Uus and Non-Violent Resistance Rev. Catie Scudera Recently, My Spouse and I Were Visiting Some of My Oldest Friends Down In

UUs and Non-Violent Resistance Rev. Catie Scudera Recently, my spouse and I were visiting some of my oldest friends down in Washington, D.C. As we walked together beside the Tidal Basin and took in the sight of the beautiful cherry blossoms, we came to talk about my service here at First Parish and to the broader MetroWest community. This was in early April, and I was in the midst of meetings and emails organizing with other local UU clergy and lay leaders for the big pipeline protest over Earth Day weekend. So, I told my friends about the West Roxbury Lateral and the rising up of local people to say “no” to the unnecessary and potentially dangerous natural gas line, “fueled,” so to speak, by corporate greed and imprudence; that instead of more natural gas we were demanding that the state invest in renewable energies to preserve our future against climate change. I mentioned to my friends that I and others from our congregation might be trained in non-violent civil disobedience so we could disrupt and delay construction, hopefully giving needed time for the residents and local government officials to fight back against the Spectra corporation. And, to my surprise, one of my oldest and dearest friends snapped at me. “Blocking construction? Blocking traffic? That never does anything, it just ticks people off! Whenever I see protestors getting in the way, it just makes me hate their cause.” I was shocked by this reaction. And, the irony was not lost on me that this conversation was taking place very close to D.C.’s new Martin Luther King monument. And while my friend and I certainly had an exchange of words and facts right there and then, what I want to share with you all today is why I felt personally attacked by his dismissal of this form of protest. Two of the most influential early thinkers on non-violent civil disobedience were Universalist and Unitarian, and there is a remarkable story of how this philosophy of two nineteenth-century Massachusetts writers inspired leaders as far away in time and place as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. UUs and Non-Violent Resistance Rev. Catie Scudera First Parish in Needham, 5/22/17 Our Universalist spiritual ancestor Rev. Adin Ballou was born in 1803 to a Baptist farming family in Rhode Island, and his father expected him to take care of the family farm when he grew up. Three different familial connections in his teenaged years changed his course dramatically: 1. First, he received a vision in a dream from his deceased brother Cyrus, demanding that Adin become a preacher of the gospel; 2. Second, his wife Abigail’s mother, a Universalist, gave Adin the writings of Rev. Elhanan Winchester, an eighteenth-century Universalist preacher who helped found the Universalist General Convention in 1785; 3. And, third, Adin met his famous distant cousins, the Revs. Hosea Ballou and Hosea Ballou the Second, both of whom encouraged him to the Universalist ministry. Though it would mean disinheritance from his father and excommunication from his home congregation, Adin converted to Universalism and, at age twenty-one, began serving the Universalist congregation in Milford, Massachusetts. Adin Ballou served both Universalist and Unitarian churches early in his career, and then began experiments and lecturing in “practical Christianity.” Today, we might understand “practical Christianity” as “ethical living,” an attempt to create a heaven on earth by following our spiritual values in every aspect of our lives. In 1841, Ballou founded the Hopedale community — yes, in what’s now Hopedale, Massachusetts, not a far drive west from here — to show that applying the true principles of Christianity into communal daily life would create a perfected society. Ballou was not alone in Massachusetts in searching for utopia; he had friendly relations with the Brook Farm community, founded by Transcendentalist-Unitarians and located just across the Charles River from Needham’s Cutler Park. But, the cornerstone of Adin Ballou’s “heaven on earth” was his theologically experimental idea of radical non-violence, or what he called “Christian non- resistance.” 2 UUs and Non-Violent Resistance Rev. Catie Scudera First Parish in Needham, 5/22/17 As it says in the UUA’s Faithful Journeys curriculum our second grade class uses, “As Adin grew up, he… noticed when people fought with each other to solve an argument, that didn’t help them to be peaceful. He saw when people were punished for fighting, punishment didn’t make them more peaceful. He saw when nations used war to solve an argument, that didn’t make people more peaceful, either. Adin decided any solution that used violence was not for him. He started to believe that if we really want peace, in our community or in our nation, we must do as Jesus said[: ‘turn the other cheek’] and love our enemies.” Or, as we heard in our reading from Ballou himself, “[One] who aggressively injures another fosters hatred, the root of all evil. To injure another because he had injured us, under pretense of suppressing evil, is to repeat the mischief both on him and ourselves: it is to reproduce, or at least nourish, the very same demon we affect to cast out.” From 1839 until his death in 1890, Adin Ballou lectured, preached, and wrote extensively about “Christian non-resistance.” He was so dedicated to non- violence that he even broke with his old friend and fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison over pacifism and the Civil War; Adin always believed a non- violent solution was possible and preferable. This pacifism made Adin Ballou not particularly popular among his ministerial colleagues and other reformers at his time, and in his later years he had drifted somewhat into obscurity. Our second non-violent resisting spiritual ancestor lived just thirty miles northwest of Hopedale during the same time period. Adin Ballou and Henry David Thoreau had many mutual friends in the radical Universalist and Unitarian communities, but they wrote and experimented independently in non-violence. Thoreau was born into a Unitarian family in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817, and he died in that same community in 1862. Many of you may have read Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience because of your Unitarian Universalist faith, because of a Transcendentalist spirituality or activist ethic, or because it was required in your high school English class. In July of 1846, in the midst of his “living simply” on his friend and fellow Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property at Walden Pond, Thoreau was thrown in jail for refusing to pay six years worth of poll taxes. Henry David explained to the local tax collector that he could not financially support a government that allowed slavery and that planned to expand slave states 3 UUs and Non-Violent Resistance Rev. Catie Scudera First Parish in Needham, 5/22/17 through the Mexican-American War. Two years later in 1848, the essay we now know as Civil Disobedience was first delivered as a Lyceum lecture in Concord. As Thoreau wrote in that famed essay, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is… a prison… It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them… If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution.” Not that anyone paid much attention to Thoreau on these matters at the time. Thoreau’s friends and few admirers knew him best as a naturalist, not a political theorist; Civil Disobedience reached a few listeners at the Concord Lyceum and a few readers in Greater Boston through a small magazine published by his friend and Unitarian educator Elizabeth Peabody, but that was all. Civil Disobedience was fairly obscure for many years. So, how did these two men, Ballou and Thoreau—whose writings on non- violent resistance were not well-known at the time of their deaths—come to influence revolutionaries like Gandhi and King? Adin Ballou’s ideas were passed on through Count Leo Tolstoy, world- renowned Russian author and essayist, who was beginning to convert to radical Christian pacifism and anarchy in 1890, the year of Ballou’s death. In the few months before Ballou died, he and Tolstoy struck up a correspondence, having been sent each other’s works by friends. The Non-Resistant Catechism we heard as our reading was quoted in full by Tolstoy in his masterwork on nonviolent resistance, The Kingdom of God is Within You, published in 1893, three years after Ballou’s death. In at least one interview, Tolstoy declared that Ballou was America’s most important writer. The Mahatma, Gandhi, listed The Kingdom of God is Within You and Tolstoy himself as one of his three primary inspirations for the nonviolent independence movement from Britain, beginning with his time working as an organizer in the Indian community in South Africa when he first read Tolstoy’s anti-colonial Letter to a Hindu. Gandhi would later discover Thoreau’s writings, which emboldened him to continue using civil disobedience as a means toward 4 UUs and Non-Violent Resistance Rev. Catie Scudera First Parish in Needham, 5/22/17 freedom.

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