Stranger in a Strange Land: A UU Novel?(a sermon delivered at the Hamburg Unitarian Universalist Church on October 26, 2003) “I’ve never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith—it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.” This statement is made by Jubal Harshaw, a character in Robert A. Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, and I think it epitomizes the impact this novel has had on my in my life. I read Stranger when I was 14, and looking back through the lens of time, I realize that this book, which has been called “the most famous science fiction novel ever written,” probably had a more significant influence on my philosophies and the way I view the world and religion than any other book, course, teacher, preacher, or person in my life. It’s a familiar story about a naïve boy who comes to Earth with a message of hope for mankind. Valentine Michael Smith was raised by Martians. He has Martian sensibilities and a laid back, Martian outlook on life. He tells us that we are all God and that we should love one another freely, with no pangs of jealousy, bitterness, or hatred. He becomes a teacher, a philosopher, a prophet…and in the end he suffers the fate of most prophets. So, how did this Christian allegory send me down a path away from the church of my parents? I had always thought it was the message brought to Earth by the “Man from Mars.” But after re-reading the novel to prepare for this sermon, I found that it wasn’t Mike’s message that I had adopted in my life so much as the cynical attitude of one Jubal Harshaw…Mike’s teacher; his quote-unquote father on Earth. Jubal is a cynical, old, curmudgeon of a writer, and I guess it’s only natural that I relate better to him today, some 25 years after my first reading of the novel (and yes, if you’re counting, that means that I’m less than a year away from the black balloon birthday). But I have come to realize, with the wisdom granted me from nearly four decades on this planet, that Jubal is the real heart and soul of this book. He is, in many ways, the personification of the author, Robert Anson Heinlein. Heinlein was born in 1907 and raised in the Methodist church. But the author abandoned his faith in his teens and much of his later writing shows him to be a skeptical agnostic and humanist. He wrote such books as Job: A Comedy of Justice, which is a hilarious satire of fundamentalists, dogma, and petulant Gods. Heinlein wrote many novels about Lazarus Long, an immortal man first introduced in Methuselah’s Children. Long, who was just as skeptical of religion as Heinlein himself, made statements such as: “Men rarely (if ever) dream up a God superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.” and “Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help.” and “The most preposterous notion that Homo Sapiens has dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery.” I devoured many of Heinlein’s books in my mid-to-late teens. But it all started with Stranger in a Strange Land and Jubal Harshaw. Heinlein’s beliefs ring out clearly in Jubal’s speeches. He pontificates throughout the book and, on a second reading, I found that just about everything Jubal says coincides quite closely with my own beliefs. For example, he says “Religion is a solace to many and it is conceivable that some religion, somewhere, is Ultimate Truth, but being religious is often a form of conceit. The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people; I was ‘saved,’ they were ‘damned’—we were in a state of grace and the rest were ‘heathens.’ … Ignorant louts who seldom bathed and planted corn by the Moon claimed to know the final answers of the Universe. That entitled them to look down on outsiders. Our hymns were loaded with arrogance—self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what hell everybody else would catch come judgment day.” Now, a 14-year-old boy living in Indiana doesn’t often hear this kind of rhetoric, and it obviously had an immense impact on me. I would later reject my Christian faith, much as Heinlein did, but not because I rejected the teachings of Jesus Christ. I simply could no longer stomach the empty rituals, the claim of a monopoly on the ultimate truth, and the proselytizing practices of most organized religions. I came to realize over the years that Jubal was absolutely right when he said, “…each religion claims to be truth, claims to speak rightly. Yet their answers are as different as two hands and seven hands, Fosterites say one thing, Buddhists say another, Moslems still another—many answers, all different.” But why is that? Why, if there is one God, do we have so many different Ultimate Truths? So many faiths? So many religions? Jubal again provides the answer that I learned later in life, but had already known at 14: “Man is so built that he cannot imagine his own death. This leads to endless invention of religions.” We flock to religion to find the answers to life’s questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What do I want? How long do I have? Is this all there is? In the end, I didn’t find the answers to these questions in the practice of religion. As some of you know, I have found most of my answers in science fiction, which, when done well, can be mythological, philosophical, and spiritual. I sometimes think that the practice of religion in many churches is more about the continuation of the church than the continuation of the soul. In this, I may be more cynical than Jubal Harshaw, who goes on to say: “The nature of life … and why each ego seems to be the center of the universe—These are paramount questions … they can never be trivial. Science hasn’t solved them—and who am I to sneer at religions for trying, no matter how unconvincingly to me.” As you can see, Jubal doesn’t blithely believe in science either. In fact, in the novel, he is as suspicious of such modern conveniences as robot taxis and the holographic television as he is of organized religion. While the atheist believes that we are all here due the chance meeting of proteins and amino acids in a prehistoric, biochemical stew, according to Jubal: “Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe—random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.” He goes on to say: “The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.” So, if religion doesn’t hold the ultimate truth and science can’t provide it either, where are mere mortals to turn for answers? At the beginning of the book, I’m sure Jubal would say to turn inward; that a wise person must answer the great questions for himself or herself. In fact, he says: “A desire not to butt into other people’s business is eighty percent of all human wisdom.” In the end, though, Jubal is won over by his adopted son’s message that we are all God. As Mike puts it: “Thou art God and I am God and all that groks is God, and I am all that I have ever been or seen or felt or experienced. I am all that I grok.” If you’re wondering, yes this is the book that brought us the term “grok” in the ’60s. It means knowing or understanding something fully. To grok a thing, you must drink it in; savor it and delve to the very depths of the being of the thing. To grok it, you must become it. So, what does Mike’s message mean? Well, it is a very humanistic outlook on the world. We are all god. We humans are in charge of our own destiny and of the world. Mike says this best. “Thou art God [is] not a message of cheer and hope. … It’s a defiance—and an unafraid, unabashed assumption of personal responsibility.” This is a far cry from a religion wherein all you must do is confess your sins to be saved. In Mike’s world view, we cannot look to some outside power for answers or salvation. We must not look to the heavens for truth or when things go wrong. We must take responsibility for ourselves, our family, our race, our world. For we are God. We have the power to shape our own destiny. This is not all that different from Jubal’s outlook on life. Jubal says: “The faith I was reared in didn’t require anybody to know anything. Just confess and be saved, and there you were, safe in the arms of Jesus. A man might be too stupid to count sheep…yet conclusively presumed to be one of God’s elect, guaranteed an eternity of bliss, because he had been ‘converted.’” However, Jubal is still willing to take personal responsibility for himself and his place in the world. But where Jubal retreated into his cynicism and cared only for himself and his immediate family (which consisted mostly of a bevy of beautiful secretaries), Mike took it upon himself to try to save the world. Where Jubal chose to butt out of everyone else’s business, Mike realized that caring for each other and for the world is everybody’s business. We are all God. According to Mike, “Goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.” In the end, Mike needed Jubal’s wisdom and Jubal needed Mike’s goodness. So, is Stranger in a Strange Land a UU novel? Not really. A strong humanist theme definitely runs through the novel, and I like to think there is a little Jubal in many of us here today. More than anything, though, this novel is a satire on organized religion in all its forms. Even liberal theologies are not spared Heinlein’s poison pen. The Fosterites that Jubal spoke of earlier are the pre-eminent religious sect on Earth in the future depicted in the novel, and his focal point for satire of liberal religion. They espouse happiness as the ultimate truth. Their services are drunken raves. Their vestibules are lined with slot machines. Heinlein paints their priests and selectmen with broad strokes, making them appear as ridiculous clowns. And yet several Fosterite members join with Mike later in the book. They are wonderful, decent people who espouse a beautiful message of a good life through happiness. The Fosterite message is fine—dance, drink, have fun, but be good to one another so that everyone can be happy. It is the trappings of religion that Heinlein satirizes, not the message or the people. But within this satire, I believe he is earnestly searching for some honest, true meaning in life. As Jubal said, science hasn’t found it, so who’s to say that some religion somewhere doesn’t have the truth figured out. Perhaps it’s Heinlein—and good science fiction in general—who have figured it out. If science fiction has taught me one thing, it’s to constantly question everything—life, truth, religion—everything. I read this novel when I was 14. I was probably too young. There are a lot of adult themes and a lot of characters with much more sexual freedom than an Indiana teen should probably be exposed to. This book was published 42 years ago. And while I think it holds up quite well four decades later, Heinlein was a product of his times and didn’t have what we would call progressive views on women. Most of the female characters in Stranger are secretaries or nurses and all of them are well-endowed and physically beautiful. But Heinlein helped teach me to question the status quo and to look at life with a critical eye, which are two gifts I think we should give all of our children. And, if you are looking for an answer—for an ultimate truth—I think there are far worse ideas we can grab onto than the creed espoused by the Man from Mars. I leave you with the words of Valentine Michael Smith, spoken to an unruly mob as he is stoned to death near the end of the novel:
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