Harriet’s Voice: A Sermon Celebrating Harriet Martineau
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
Last week, while away at the Annual General Meeting of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches (someone said last year that it wasn’t really a title, but rather a paragraph), I was fortunate to hear a lecture delivered by the Rev Brian Kiely, a Canadian minister who is presently serving as the President of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists. Offering the John Relly Beard lecture on the first day, he focussed on the lovely diversity of the movements around the world that identify with Unitarians, stretching from the Khasi Hills in India, where the Unitarianism has grown out of the animist religion of their ancestors, to Transylvania where it emerged as an early part of the Reformation and where it still maintains a system by which your Bishop assigns you to a church, to Kenya where modern technology has allowed people distant from our world and practices to discover and to wish to be part of the global movement of Unitarianism and Universalism.
After he described the wide practices and theologies that all come into this big tent called Unitarianism, he summed up his descriptions by noting, ‘Religion is and must be an indigenous expression that melds belief with local realities and needs.’
In that one sentence, he captured something that is true to my reading of our religious movement, not just in its modern adaptations as it finds a home in Africa and India and the Philippines, and in South America, but throughout its history.
The three threads of Unitarianism that we tend to talk about in this religious movement come from Transylvania, here in the United Kingdom and in the United States, all three places where the name ‘Unitarian’ was applied to religious communities in which there was the strong application of reason to belief, which in some sense celebrated the wide ranging play of intellect over the usual boundaries of religious thinking and which, because of this was broadly tolerant of differing ideas. Francis David, the man who successfully convinced King Janos Sigismund that each person should be free to find what religious belief seemed to be most true, said ‘We need not think alike to love alike.’ That was over 400 years ago.
Yet, though I quote him, and though I’m now an international minister, having grown up deeply involved with Unitarian Universalism in the United States, the three movements are local, rooted in their countries, and distinct expressions of those ways of being religious.
And still on the other hand, I must say that there is just something about the early 19th century in the United States and here. Something was in the air, or so it seemed. It was a passion about religion. There was an intensity of gaze from Unitarians both in the US and here, and a flowering of the free thought that has been our hallmark nearly since then.
In the US, it was the thinking and writing of people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the exuberant, hopeful Transcendentalists like Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women.
Harriet Martineau was one of the bright lights of England, and especially of English Unitarianism in those same years. Born in 1802 the 6th of 8 children in Norwich, her father was a manufacturer, and, fortunate for Harriet, a Unitarian. The progressive views of her family meant that she received the same home education that her brothers did, and though they went to University and she did not, the idea of that inspired her to write the first of her essays for publication in the Unitarian Journal, The Monthly Repository. ‘On Female Education’ was published anonymously, but when her brother James found that she was the author, he said to her: "Now, dear, leave it to the other women to make skirts and darn stockings, and you devote yourself to this."
And devote herself she did, publishing over 50 books ranging from theological treatises to devotional guides, to reports of her travels, to treatises on the treatment of the poor, to novels.
Publishing her writings wasn’t what she had initially had in mind, but was a path that was, in some sense, thrust upon her. Harriet was only 24 when her father died, and while he had tried to have her married before that time, her betrothed also fell ill and died. The institution which held the small maintenance fund that her father had left failed, and she and her sisters were left to earn a living. As you might guess from James’ comment, she was earning her way by stitching. The other common vocation for a single woman would have been teaching, but due to her deafness, it wasn’t an option for her to pursue. Her keen mind, and industrious spirit found expression in the intellectual enterprise, and she was well appreciated.
She in fact became a wealthy woman, wealthy enough to travel to the United States for an extended trip. She chronicled her time there in a three volume set called Society in America that was to contribute substantially to the start of the discipline of sociology. One modern commentator on her life says:
Her methodological strategy confronted the problem of ethnocentrism. Rather than compare the United States to England, she identified the moral principles to which Americans claimed allegiance, and compared them to observable social patterns – a methodologically insightful distinction between rhetoric and reality.
Instead of the usual comparison of one culture to another, she sought to look inside what the Americans said about themselves, their own claims to their values and ideals, and compared them to the reality, a process that has well served all manner of social reformers since. Another commentator describes that work this way:
The book was mainly a critique of America's failure to live up to its democratic principles. Martineau was especially concerned about the treatment of women and called one chapter The Political Non-existence of Women’. She claimed that women were treated like slaves. They were both "given indulgence rather than justice". Martineau argued for an improvement in women's education, so that "marriage need not be their only object in life."
She was throughout her life, a strong advocate for women, knowing well what was possible when they were freed from the restraints that society laid upon them. She was also a strong voice for the poor, pleading the case for their care and the upraising of their station in her fiction and prose.
And within all of this, she sought to shape the religious and moral sensibilities of children and adults by way of her theological writings. Listen to her words from Devotional Exercises:
I observe, wherever I direct my view, that nothing, in all the vast creation, is made to exist alone. All things depend on one another for something essential to their existence. The sun, and the worlds which circle round it, are balanced by other systems through the power of attraction. We can perceive that the earth could not bring forth fruits, without the assistance of the sun and the rain. The sun draws up steams and vapours from the ground, which fall again in showers, and refresh the earth, and enable it to produce those stores, which serve for the support and delight of the living creatures which inhabit it. These animals, in their turn, serve as food for one another and for man. Man, dependent on the ranks of beings below him for subsistence, can enjoy none of the pleasures and advantages of life without the assistance of his own species.
I find a good bit of delight in her words, the reminder of our interconnection, the tightly woven web of life that we live within. I am in awe of the work of her life. Before her death in 1876, she wrote her own memorial:
Her original power was nothing more than was due to earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range. With small imaginative and suggestive powers, and therefore nothing approaching to genius, she could see clearly what she did see, and give a clear expression to what she had to say. In short, she could popularize while she could neither discover nor invent.
It is sometimes said of Unitarians that we rely too much upon our history, the glorious days of the past when our members were a greater force in the world. Sometimes looking backward, though, can offer us a glimpse of what we might be too, and that’s what Harriet Martineau offers to us. Our forbear in her religious sentiments, in her love of the search for religious meaning and truth, in her activism and concern for human beings, and in her ability to see clearly and to express clearly how the world was. We could do worse ourselves than to seek clear sight and expression.
She saw what was to hand for her, and in doing so, directs our view back to our own time: to see what is here and to learn from it, to watch for the downtrodden and the oppressed of our day, and to be a voice for them, and to know our place within this web of life.
May we know it,
may we live it,
ever and always. Amen.