A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer
Delivered at First UU Church Ann Arbor
2/1/04        
   
                                  THE GODS OF AMERICA


What are the gods of America? What ideals and values do we as a people 
hold dear?  

What are these gods telling us to do? 

Are our gods good for us? Are they good for all people? 

Do we worship more than one god? If so, are the commandments of these 
gods in conflict?
 
It is important to know what gods we follow lest we follow dangerous 
gods. We may do so out of fear, out of habit, out of unconscious 
motivation, or out of innocent yearning.  Violence is such a dangerous 
god. So is addiction, and any compulsion to act which controls us 
rather than our controlling it. 

The gods that help us to lead honorable and decent lives are those that 
represent some form of what the Greeks called the good, the true, and 
the beautiful. These gods may be supernatural and personal. They may be 
an aspect of or the totality of nature. They can be any entity, force, 
or process that inspires us, comforts us, urges us to act, gives us a 
reason for being. 

Each of us, of course, will have our own individual gods. We also live 
in a common culture  whose deities affect us all. It is of these 
cultural gods in America that I would speak today. They are minimally 
five in number.

The first of these gods is change.

Change has been part of the American culture from the beginning of 
European settlement of these lands. 

It was a fateful day for the native peoples of Guanahani Island in the 
Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti when Columbus landed on their shores. Their 
lives would be radically altered. The lives of Europeans were also 
profoundly changed. They would pour over the ocean in the next several 
centuries seeking gold and furs and fountains of youth and slaves and 
converts to Christianity, and later tobacco and cotton and anything 
else that might bring them wealth or power. 

Change for the natives of this hemisphere meant endless degradation, 
disease, and destruction in a wave of white bodies and alien religion 
that year by year eroded ancient cultures and familiar ways. 

In 1635, the course of American mythology was set when Roger Williams 
was exiled out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. John Cotton, 
responsible for that banishment, said that Williams had been "enlarged 
out of the colony." Out there, beyond the colony, was a larger space 
where there was room to do what you wanted. 

In later years, this would become the myth of the frontier that was 
forever receding in the huge spaces of this vast continent. "Go west, 
young man," advised Horace Greeley, and countless young men and women 
did exactly that. When the frontier ran out, as by official government 
proclamation it did in 1890, Americans sought frontiers beyond our 
shores—in Cuba, in the Philippines, in Latin America, in China and 
Japan.

The American ethos has always been that change will improve things.

The impetus to change came in part from the Protestant Principle that 
gave every person the right to interpret Scripture. In religion, that 
meant a proliferation of sects and denominations, all based on 
different notions of what the Bible says. In a broader social context, 
it meant that if life was not  good in this place, then we can just 
move on to some place where it is good..

Another factor making change so important in America is that we were 
becoming a nation just as science was hitting its stride. Science is a 
restless enterprise at best. Its handmaiden, technology, has brought 
wonders to the world, each one of which has altered the way we 
experience and look at life, sometimes radically.

In the last century  alone, there have come into and changed our lives 
airplanes, automobiles, antibiotics, organ transplantation, radio, 
television, space shuttles, nuclear power, computers, lasers, and 
thousands of other inventions that now shape the way we live. 

There is much to celebrate in these remarkable devices—friends alive 
who would once have been dead, cultural events we can participate in 
that once would have been closed to us, opportunities for travel and 
communication and learning never before possible.

Change has been good for us, a worthy god.

There is also a lot that is at best of questionable value and is 
arguably very harmful in this god. Change has brought new weapons of 
incalculable destructive power. Change has wrought grievous damage on 
the environment within which we live. The pace of our lives, like it or 
not, is now dictated by technological change.

The problem arises when we do not ask whether change is good for us, 
something we want and need, or something that for the moment is not 
desirable. Often enough, such questions are not asked. We merely assume 
that if it is new it must be improved.  Too often change is effected 
for the mere sake of changing.

Bill Bryson notes that we have become a society endlessly pursuing more 
convenient ways of getting things done, to the point where, he says, 
"we will put up with almost any inconvenience to 
achieve…(convenience)." 

In a typical year, more than 25,000 "new" consumer products are 
introduced in America, almost all of them nothing more than variations 
on existing products. The changes are described as "revolutionary," 
"exciting, "  "bold," and sometimes "done for our convenience." In 
reality, these changes are mostly minor alterations in color, shape, 
size, or consistency that sometimes improve the product, sometimes make 
it worse, and most often make no difference whatsoever.  But we must 
honor the god of change, so alterations are made.

We worship change—change in our clothes, our car, our job, our house, 
our computer, our hairdo, our weight, our diet, even our route to work, 
whatever artifacts and practices shape our lives. 

As a people, we do not seem to be happier for it all. But the gods do 
not always care about our happiness, only that we honor them.

The god of change is our oldest deity.

A second god in our society is chauvinism, or, if you prefer, 
chosenness.

Many of the early European settlers on this continent believed that 
these vast spaces had been put here by God for white Christian people 
to live in. Many of the earliest settlers compared themselves to the 
people of the Hebrew Bible, a Chosen People, with a mission to 
establish "a city upon a hill" that would reflect the glory of God.

Those who had long resided in these lands were ignored, tricked, driven 
off their ancestral grounds, and often slaughtered. They were mere 
savages with no rights. Europeans were the advance guard of 
civilization.

By the middle years of the 19th century, the language of manifest 
destiny had become commonplace. It was applied to our northern 
expansion—"54' 40" or fight" ran one presidential campaign slogan. It 
was applied to out southern expansion as we simply took over by force 
or guile half of Mexico's territory. It was applied to our westward 
expansion; in the words of Representative Giles of Maryland in 1847, 
"We must march from ocean to ocean…from Texas straight to the Pacific 
ocean…It is the destiny of the white race."

A half a century later, having secured as much territory on this 
continent as we could, we looked outward. Senator Orville Platt 
declared in 1894 that "I firmly believe when any territory outside the 
present territorial limits of the United States becomes necessary for 
our defense or essential for our commercial development, we ought to 
lose no time in acquiring it."

Cuba, the Phillipines, Hawaii, and Panama were all taken under our 
wing. Between 1898 and 1934, under the authority of the Monroe Doctrine 
(1823), by which we asserted the right to control the western 
hemisphere against any other world power attempting to do so, we 
invaded Cuba four times, Nicarauga five times, Honduras seven times, 
the Dominican Republic four times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama 
twice, Mexico three times, and Columbia four times.

The current effort by some, but clearly not all, members of the 
government to establish an American Empire is nothing new. It is built 
upon a sense that America cannot have ignoble motives,  that America 
acts only in the best interests of not only itself but the whole world, 
that we are in Lincoln's words, "the last, best hope of earth." 

That message of our special goodness and destiny was certainly what 
used to be taught in our schools, and may still be

At about the time I was losing faith in that god, so were many others, 
perhaps the most prominent of whom was the Nobel Prize winner for 
Literature, Pearl Buck. In an article she published in the late 1960's, 
appalled by what her nation was doing in Vietnam, she rejected that 
sentiment of a lifetime. She said that our nation like every other 
nation was unique, but we were not uniquely good. We certainly did not 
have the right to claim that belief as a basis for our actions in the 
world. 

While faith in the god of our chosenness has been weakened, it is 
hardly dead. Such a faith, regarding itself as absolute, beyond 
criticism, favored above all others, is dangerous because it is blind 
to the truth of the world, and the truth of our own failings.

Chauvinism is one of our gods. So is consumerism.

In the first confused and frightening days after 9-11,one of the first 
things the president said we could do to be helpful was to go out and 
buy something. He was right. Our society is so constructed around 
consuming that if we stop, the whole society could crumble. Countless 
jobs depend on the production, distribution, and sale of goods. 

M. J. Ryan remembers noticing a few years ago that every weekend she 
was buying something other than food. "I wanted to shop," she writes, 
"to buy, to consume—it didn't matter what. I didn't actually need 
anything, but I wanted to purchase something."

So do we all. We shop till we drop in stores, on-line, on the phone, in 
our neighbor's garage on Saturday morning, even at church. 

Consumption is one of our gods.

Advertising is one way in which we appease this god. Advertising is 
ubiquitous and without scruple.

There are whole television shows the substance of which is commercials.

Two of the magazines I read every week—The New Yorker and The New York 
Times Magazine—not infrequently have so many ads that it is hard to 
find the Table of Contents.

I am sure that I am not the only one in whose head ring advertising 
jingles that I made no effort to learn. Aired so often, I absorbed them 
into my brain unconsciously. As, to my dismay, did all three of my 
children.

The newspapers this past Thanksgiving and Christmas days were crammed 
with ads for the stores. On  these presumably holy days of rest and 
family gathering, we must not be allowed to forget about our obligation 
to buy.

"Moviemercials" now fill up the screen with ads for products used by 
the actors in the film.

The title of a recent article by Margaret Talbot points to the way we 
abuse children in advertising: "Why, Isn't He Just the Cutest Brand-
Image Enhancer You've Ever Seen?"

We can now vote on-line for our favorite Super Bowl commercial, and a 
headline in Wednesday's Ann Arbor News told us, "Never mind game, bring 
on the ads!"

Advertising never lets us forget the deity to whom we owe so much.

Consumerism is so powerful a god that it has even crossed over into 
areas unrelated to the purchase of products and the satisfaction of 
desire, like health care and religion. 

The health care world has been using the term "consumer" rather than 
patient for more than a decade, a term ill-suited to what goes on when 
we seek the services of a doctor, a nurse, a therapist, or a 
technician. 

It is increasingly common in some religious circles to hear religion 
described as a product to be sold, preachers as salespersons, and 
congregants as consumers of values and messages. 

This all began a relatively short time ago. Frank Baum wanted to make 
consumption a high value in America. He wanted to "lift taboos from the 
expression of desire." He created the show window for department stores 
and used art, in his words, "to arouse in the observer the cupidity and 
longing to possess the goods."  

William Leach, in his book LAND OF DESIRE: MERCHANTS, POWER, AND THE 
RISE OF A NEW AMERICAN CULTURE, describes how Baum used even his 
wonderful tales of the land of Oz to further his goal. Dorothy, as we 
all recall, comes back to Kansas at the end of the first book. But in 
one of the last of the books, THE EMERALD CITY OF OZ, she takes her 
aunt and uncle to live in the Emerald City where, the text tells us, 
Dorothy "has everything her heart could desire." 

By the middle of the 1920's, philosopher and journalist Samuel Strauss 
was calling the new god of America "consumptionism." The goal of 
consumptionism, consumerism, is to produce more and more things. Then, 
Strauss wrote, "the new necessity is to make men want the things which 
the machinery must turn out if this civilization is not to perish."

Consumerism is a demanding god. 

Tawnya and I noticed a few weeks ago the message: "Accessorize Ore-Ida 
Fries" on a ketchup bottle made by a company other than Ore-Ida. 
Advertising, having invaded movies, television, education, sports, and 
almost every other human enterprise, has now invaded itself.

That is, of course, one of the chief problems with consumerism as a 
motivating force: eventually it drives us to consume ourselves.

One of the ways we do this is by amassing huge mountains of debt. 
Credit cards make that fantastically easy. The total household debt in 
this country is close to $8 trillion. Juliet Schor, in her essay "The 
New Politics of Consumption," points out that one major problem with 
such debt is that so much of it is for private consumption. When 
private consumption outstrips our personal resources,  we give less 
because we have less to give for public consumption, for the projects 
and services that benefit us all, for the common good.

In his newly published book, THE PARADOX OF CHOICE, Barry Schwartz 
observes that Americans are less and less happy even though we are more 
and more prosperous, while there has been a significant rise in the 
number of our fellow citizens who are clinically depressed. 

The god of consumerism often frustrates and disappoints us, indeed that 
is a prominent part of our worship of this god, that we be constantly 
dissatisfied.

Two other gods are at work in the American spirit.

First, there is the god of equality. 

The Declaration of Independence, copied by tens of nations in the 20th 
century as they gained their independence proclaims: "We hold these 
truths to be self-evident, that all…are created equal, that they are 
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among 
these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

It is correct to say that the men who pledged "their lives, their 
fortunes, and their sacred honor" to those words did not live up to 
them. They did not include women in their understanding of equality, or 
the indigenous peoples of this land, or the black people of Africa some 
of them imported and used as slaves, nor even those who were without 
property. 

But those words were better than the men who wrote them, as is likely 
to be true of any generation of men and women trying to imagine the 
highest and  the best, but limited by their frailty, their prejudices, 
their ignorance from always living up to their ideals.

Those words have inspired revolutions. In our country, they were the 
chief cause of the war fought to end the evil of slavery. Lincoln's 
Gettsyburg Address harked back "four score and seven years ago" to the 
Declaration and its ideal of a society in which all people would be 
respected, honored, and have the chance to live a happy life.

It was to that ideal that the reformers who risked and not infrequently 
gave their lives to establish labor unions looked as well, that the 
laboring man and woman might also have a chance at a good life.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of having a Dream, it was to this 
ideal of equality that he looked, so that black and white can walk 
together as sisters and brothers, joined in the 21st century by brown 
and yellow and red and every shade in the beautiful rainbow of human 
color.

When members of various sexual minorities and people with disabilities 
seek the same rights and opportunities as other people have, it is to 
the words of the Declaration that implicitly they look for inspiration. 

All men and women are created equal in worth and in opportunity. That 
is the divine ideal of our nation, one of the gods that has made our 
land worthy and admired around the world.

The other great deity of America is found in the words of the First 
Amendment to the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting 
an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; 
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of 
the people peaceably to assembly, and to petition the Government for a 
redress of grievances."

Liberty has been the great cry of this nation from its outset.

Liberty said that it was wrong to have religion entangled with the 
government, as nine of the 13 colonies did.The Constitution was passed 
only because the states were assured that an amendment would be brought 
forth guaranteeing the separation of religion and the state.

I am proud to be a minister in a congregation that for half a century 
has had an endowment fund—the Jackson Social Welfare Fund—one of whose 
primary purposes is to support First Amendment causes.

Liberty said it was wrong to deny any individual the right to speak or 
to publish or to gather with others to discuss affairs of state or to 
submit documents of grievance against the actions of government—all of 
which the Founders of this land felt had been imposed on them.

Our history is not unmarked with episodes of the abuse of liberty—The 
Alien and Sedition Acts of the closing years of the 18th century, the 
suspension of habeas corpus by President Lincoln, the jailing of anti-
war protesters in World War I, and the incarceration of Japanese 
Americans in World War II, to name a few of the more egregious 
examples.

What is heartening is that every time such abuses take place, men and 
women rise up to challenge them and to work to overturn them. That is 
happening today in one of the oddest coalitions ever gathered together. 
The most deeply conservative Republicans, the most liberal of 
Democrats, the most passionate of Greens, the most ardent of 
Libertarians, and hosts of other writers, activists, teachers, 
librarians, business people, government officials, relatives and 
friends of those who died on 9-11, and hosts of others are joined in an 
unrelenting struggle to preserve liberty against those who feel that 
liberty must always be trumped by security.

Liberty enables us to be responsible for our own lives. Liberty enables 
us to make our own mistakes, to learn our own lessons, to grow. Liberty 
gives us the chance to be creative. Liberty gives us the opportunity to 
know others and to be touched by their experiences and their ideas. 
Liberty means that each of us gets to choose the path down which we 
shall go to seek meaning and happiness.

Whatever one thinks of the decision to go to war in Iraq, one can only 
hope that the goal of liberty for this people will be realized. What a 
wonderful thing that would be! 

What a wonderful thing liberty is, a worthy deity indeed!

Our gods reflect who we are and what we value.

Change, chauvinism, and consumerism are three gods of America that do 
not always serve us well. 

Equality and liberty are the noble high gods of the American spirit.

Those gods we find unworthy, we can change. Conversion is a permanent 
part of the divine-human encounter.

To our worthy gods, let us give high praise and adoration.

From our worthy gods, let us draw inspiration to uphold the ideals they 
proclaim.

With our worthy gods, let us build an earth that is fair, all its 
people glad and wise.





                                              BIBLIOGRAPHY



Bill Bryson, I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF: NOTES ON RETURNING TO AMERICA 
AFTER TWENTY YEARS AWAY, Broadway Books, 1999.
Robert Jewett, THE CAPTAIN AMERICA COMPLEX: THE DILEMMA OF ZEALOUS 
NATIONALISM, The Westminster Press, 1973.
William Leach, LAND OF DESIRE: MERCHANTS, [POWER, AND THE RISE OF A NEW 
AMERICAN CULTURE, Vintage Books, 1993.
Kevin Phillips, WEALTH AND DEMOCRACY: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE 
AMERICAN RICH, Broadway Books,2002.
Juliet Schor, DO AMERICANS SHOP TOO MUCH?, Foreword by Ralph Nader, 
Edited by Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers for Boston Review, Beacon Press, 
2000.
Howard Zinn, A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES: 1492-PRESENT, 
Twentieth Anniversary Edition, HarperCollins, 1999.





Copyright 2004, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved













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