An Election Day Sermon

It began in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634 and continued until 1884. The tradition spread to Connecticut in 1674, to Vermont in 1778, and to New Hampshire in 1784. It was called Election Day, although there were no elections on that day. Instead, public officials were installed in their offices in a manner similar to our contemporary Inauguration Day. It was one of the few public holidays in pre-revolutionary America. Stores and schools closed and the day was marked with parades, picnics, and an Election Day sermon delivered to the officials by a distinguished minister. In Massachusetts, the Election Day sermon was initially delivered in May in Boston’s First Church and after 1658, in the Boston Town House. According to Harry Stout in The New England Soul, the audience consisted of the “magistrates who represented the oligarchy, the deputies who represented the democracy, and the ministers who represented the theocracy.” Once Massachusetts became a commonwealth, the sermon was delivered to the governor and members of the legislature.

You may remember the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, who admitted that he was the father of Hester Prynne’s daughter, Pearl. This admission came after Dimmesdale delivered the Election Day sermon in Boston, which was regarded as the most eloquent sermon that he ever preached. (Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody, a Unitarian, were married in 1842 by Unitarian Minister James Freeman Clarke. Her sister, Elizabeth Peabody, called Unitarianism “terra firma.”)

Typically, “New England election sermons,” writes David Hall, “observed the customary Calvinistic tenets: government is initiated by God; the fallen nature of man requires constraints; rulers must be limited and should meet moral qualifications; and law takes precedence over arbitrary opinion.”

Over the years, a few Unitarian and Universalist ministers were invited to deliver the Election Day sermon in Boston. Jonathan Mayhew, minister of the West Church of Boston from 1746 to 1766, delivered the Election Day sermon in 1754. Considered a precursor to the Unitarians, Mayhew said to the newly installed officials, “By wise and good laws, and by proper conduct in other respects, the rulers of a people lay a foundation... not only for the welfare of the present generation, but for the prosperity of those who are to come after.” The concern was not only the immediate welfare of people, but the long term consequences of actions. A century after Mayhew, Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke said that the difference between “a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks of the next election, and a statesman thinks of the next generation.” Our current state of affairs makes it clear that we desperately need statesmen.

Samuel West was another liberal minister considered a precursor to the Unitarians. An ardent patriot, West gave the election day sermon in Boston in 1776. In that sermon, he proclaimed that the colonies were already independent and constituted a new nation. “Any people, when cruelly oppressed,” West argued, “has the right to throw the yoke, and be free.” New England clergy, through the Election Day sermon, played an influential role in the run-up to the American Revolution by providing a theological justification for declaring independence from England.

Universalist ministers chosen to give the Election Day sermon in Massachusetts included Paul Dean in 1831 and Alonzo Ames Miner in 1884. Miner, a leader in the temperance movement, used the sermon to attack the use of alcoholic beverages and the traffic in liquor.

Perhaps most notable was the Election Day sermon delivered by Unitarian minster William Ellery Channing in 1830, entitled Spiritual Freedom. He argued that “civil and political liberty” were of little value if individuals did not possess an inner freedom of the spirit. Channing was concerned that Americans tended to put an “idolatrous trust” in free institutions, believing that they can, by a kind of magic, “secure our rights; however we enslave ourselves to evil passions.” In moving rhetoric, Channing declared, “I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, … which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come.... I call that mind free, which sets no bounds to its love, which is not imprisoned in itself or in a sect… I call that mind free, which is not passively framed by outward circumstance, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles…. I call that mind free, which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat itself and copy the past, which does not live on old virtue, which does not enslave itself to precise rules…. I call that mind free, which is jealous of its own freedom, which guards itself from being merged with others, which guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.”

My Election Day sermon is simple. Vote!