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Minister and President’s Message

Our faith must find expression in public life of nation

October, 2003
By Nancy S. Taylor

When Congregationalist Samuel Sewall published the first anti-slavery tract in 1700, he intended to engage the soul of the nation on a matter of the highest spiritual import. (Sewall’s tract is a theological argument, quoting liberally and aptly from the scriptures.) He succeeded: many people credit the beginning of the anti-slavery movement to that publication.

When John Quincy Adams argued the cause of the Amistad captives before the US Supreme Court in 1841, he too, intended to engage the soul of this nation (not just the minds of the Supreme Court justices) on theological, spiritual, and moral grounds. He succeeded. The Amistad captives were freed and the abolitionist cause took a huge step forward.

When Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, she used the compelling genre of fiction to engage the soul of this nation with the moral and spiritual blight of slavery. It worked: Abraham Lincoln later described her as the lady who wrote the book that began the Civil War.

In each case, Christians brought the ethical insights of the Judeo-Christian tradition to inform, judge, challenge, and guide a nation in peril of loosing its soul. Unabashedly and unapologetically they brought their Christian faith into the public square. They offered this nation a vision of a common good, a good that transcended any particular caste or class.

In bringing the Freedom Schooner Amistad to Boston Harbor this month, we have an opportunity to engage the soul of the nation – and, indeed, our own souls – on issues of public import and the public good from the perspective and judgment of the Judeo-Christian tradition … the tradition that inspired Moses to engage the powers and principalities in a quest for emancipation for the Hebrew slaves; the tradition that inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. to dream aloud and in public about justice and equality for all God’s children.

Moses, Sewall, Adams, Stowe and MLK remind us that our faith, while always profoundly personal, can never be private. It must find expression in the public life of the nation, and in the service of the public good. God requires no less from us.

It is for this reason that a host of events surround the visit of the Amistad. The vessel is a starting place, a springboard for unlimited opportunities: to initiate thoughtful, if difficult, conversations on race; to provide a racial-justice lens through which to read the daily papers and listen to the evening news; to challenge ourselves to heed the bitter words of the prophets aimed at those with privilege and power; to inform and expand our prayer life to include the alien and stranger; to inspire us to become acquainted with persons of different races, ethnicities, income and educational levels; to learn about the horror and prevalence of modern-day slavery; to turn our Christian hearts to the plight of the most vulnerable; to wonder aloud and in public about the soul of America; to carry our faith into the public square on behalf of the common good.

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