STOP GOING TO CHURCH

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As a Unitarian Universalist minister I am free to preach from all the gospels of the world: those from our long ago ancestors, and those that keep revealing themselves through the ages in poetry and song, in hard truth and uplifting words. As it turns out, one of my favorite gospels to preach out of is the good book of NPR. So many of my sermons have been inspired from something I heard on KQED that I could probably claim my membership dues to National Public Radio as a business expense.

Today's message is a great example. About a month ago as I drove home from an evening meeting, I was listening to one of my favorite programs, Radio Lab. The theme of the show was why people do bad things, a topic most ministers find fascinating. What really caught my attention was the piece they did about Yale Professor Stanley Milligram's famous 1962 Obedience study.

As a quick refresher: in 1962 many Nazi war criminals were on trial in the international court, and the defense being used by many of them was that they were just following orders and thus should not be held responsible for the criminal acts they committed. Milligram wished to study this claim, so he devised an experiment that he believed would show just how far would people go when ordered to do something they knew was morally reprehensible.

The experiment was set up in the Yale Elegant Interactions Laboratory and appeared to be about how pain could be used to help people learn. Two people were brought in at a time; one was assigned the teacher role the other the student. First they went into one room where the student sat down in a chair and was strapped to a machine that connected to their arm. Both student and teacher were then told that the student would attempt to quickly memorize some nonsensical word pairs like blue and Paris, marker and donkey. The student was then left in that room alone and the teacher brought into another room. Here the teacher was put in front of an impressive looking switchboard listing ascending levels of electric shock they could administer to the student in the other room every time they got a word pair wrong.

Now, the teacher didn't know this, but they were the only person that was not in on the experiment. The student was not really strapped into a device that produced shock and they were not really studying how pain affects learning, but rather how people respond to orders. The teacher was then instructed to administer higher and higher levels of shock as the fake student appeared to continue to get answers wrong. The teacher could hear the student scream in pain in the other room and beg to end the experiment. But despite what they heard, even when all indications were that the student was unconscious in the other room, if prodded by the very official-looking scientist in the room, 65 percent of the participants continued administering to the highest dose of electricity which was labeled XXX WARNING/DANGER on the machine.

This experiment is regarded as one of the most famous social-scientific experiments of the 20th century and has been taught in pretty much every psychology classroom since then, explaining why people will indeed do horrible things when ordered to. It is also, it turns out, the exact opposite of what the study actually shows.

It turns out, the study I just talked about, that is so well-known, is actually just the baseline study of Milligram's experiment. He actually repeated this experiment almost forty times, changing major variables every time, and never got anywhere close to the same result again. In fact, this baseline study, when 65 percent of the men in the teacher role administered the highest dose of electric shock was the only one out of all forty with an obedience rate anywhere close to that number. For example if the shocker and shockee were in the same room, the rate drops to 40 percent; if the teacher must hold the student's hand down to administer the shock it goes down to 30 percent; if the person prompting the shocker is not an official scientist-looking person it goes down to 20 percent; and if there are two prodders, and they showed the slightest bit of disagreement between the two of them, it dropped to 10 percent.

And what drops it to zero percent is the most interesting thing of all. The official scientist-looking person in the room in every single experiment had four prompts that they were supposed to advance through when the teacher began showing any signs of reluctance to go on with the shocking. The first prompt was simply: "Please go on." which was highly effective in getting the shocker to continue. If they showed more reluctance the second prompt was given, which was: "The experiment requires that you continue." Now remember we have been told forever that this experiment shows how obedient humans are when ORDERED to do something. This second prompt is still not quite an order; it is more a statement of fact: the experiment requires that you continue, not "You are requested to continue." and this second prompt was generally effective in getting people to continue. The third prompt they delivered at the next sign of reluctance was "It is absolutely essential that you continue." - again, not an order; a very strongly worded statement of purported fact, but definitely not an order either. The final prompt, number four, was finally an order. At this point, if the three other prompts had failed, the shocker was told: "You have no other choice, teacher." - pretty close to an order. This is your only option, you must do this, you have no other choice. And guess what? 100 percent of people, throughout all forty variants of the study, when they reached prompt number four said the same thing: hell no, I absolutely do have a choice and my choice is to be done. That is right: in Milligram's famous study that supposedly tells us that people will do horrible things when ordered to, 100 percent of people throughout the study refused the only true direct order they received.

So, if this study does not show that people slavishly obey orders, what does it tell us, and why did all those otherwise normal people in Germany commit those horrible acts? A professor from Exeter University named Alex Haslem, who happens to be the person who uncovered the other forty version of Milligram's experiment and has been trying to set the record straight on what this study actually says, has found something pretty compelling in the surveys that all the participants to the original study filled out. All of these surveys still exist in the Milligram archive at Yale and recently when Prof. Haslem read through them he was shocked (pun intended) to find that almost everyone who had participated in the study in the shocker/teacher role, upon discovering that they had been duped and put through this very emotionally traumatic experience, still said they were glad to participate in the study. And almost all for the same reason, because they believed they were contributing to the greater good - that they believed that their pain and sacrifice were adding up to something worthwhile for humanity. They believed that the scientific goals of the research were worth it.

This is what Professor Haslem says is the true legacy of Milligram's experiment: not the latent potential of humans to do horrible things they know are wrong just because someone official-looking has ordered them to do it, but that if humans are convinced that the thing they are doing is for the greater good, they will make a huge sacrifice to make it so. I find that to be a pretty uplifting truth, although there is a dark side to this as well. Remember, the original context was trying to understand why ordinary people in Germany had committed such horrendous acts. It looks like the reason is not obedience, but rather that many of them had been convinced that these horrible things were for the greater good - in this case, a highly warped and disgusting vision of the greater good. But if you look at the language used in Germany, that is exactly how everything was presented. Before some of the most horrifying massacres the rally cry was not: do as you're told, but rather, that this had to be done for the greater good of Germany.

What this says to me is not only that the ultimate motivator for people is contributing to the greater good, which is something that I truly want to believe with all of my heart, but also something much darker - something about how easy it is to pervert and misuse that incredible power.

As I was listening to this all play out on Radio Lab I couldn't help but think about the implications for the ministry of Mission Peak UU, where we often talk about doing things for the greater good. I strongly believe that our ministry and the values we support here are essential for the good of the world; that does indeed motivate me and I hope you as well. But how can we be sure that in this work we don't get off track and use that righteous feeling to do things that are not truly for the greater good?

Which brings me to why you should stop going to church. What do I mean by that? Well, first let me quote from one of my favorite church blogs, called Slow Church, where Christopher Smith recently wrote "when we talk of "going to church" what we are typically doing is conflating church with a church service. There's nothing wrong with going to church services, but when we speak as if that is our sole or primary experience of church, we are greatly reducing our imaginations about what church is or could be. On the flip-side, we load up the church service with massive expectations of what can or should be accomplished there in such a relatively small fraction of our weekly lives." This is certainly true for Mission Peak UU. Although this Sunday service is a very important part of our community, and certainly one I am heavily invested in, it is far and away not the majority of what this community is about. Rather than being just about this one hour on Sunday, we are about providing opportunities every day of the week for you to live your values, because we strongly believe that is the best way to help people become the best people they can be.

That is exactly what this blog Slow Church is all about - helping us make the connection that everything we do can be ministry if we stop thinking small about when we are doing church. They are using the term "Slow Church" to draw a contrast with the way many of us currently relate to our faith home in the same way the term "Slow Cooking" is used to draw a contrast from the way many of us relate to our food these days.

In Slow Church - like when we make a good meal - we are invited to be full participants in the entire experience; choosing the recipe, selecting the ingredients, chopping, smelling, tasting along the way. We get so much more out of the experience when we have the time and space to cook for ourselves and fully participate in a meal's creation, instead of grabbing whatever fast food we can and scarfing it down without enjoyment. When we slow down, we are able to appreciate all the aspects of the meal, to be fed not merely nutritionally but emotionally and spiritually. This is exactly the shift that the Slow Church blog invites us into with our faith homes.

When you get involved in committees, when you dive into our processes and vote at our annual meeting, when you join a small group, or help make our community garden grow, you are also getting fed at a deeper level than you ever could be simply by showing up here on Sunday.

So when I say that you should stop going to church, I am of course not saying don't be a part of Mission Peak UU. Rather, I am inviting you to stop going to church and start being church. That is, I believe, also the key to making sure we are moving toward a greater good that is truly for the best, and not one of those perverted and disturbing visions that convinces people to do horrible things. Because those perverted visions come when power is fully vested in a small group of people. When a community is truly owned by the collective because everyone has slowed down enough to participate fully, no one voice or faction can dominate. The needs of the whole naturally become the guiding principle instead of the needs of the few.

This is exactly what we are striving to create here, but it takes all of us together to make it happen - all of our voices and all of our bodies working together. The more we all embrace the idea that church is a verb and not a noun - that it is a thing we do and not a place we go - the more we can accomplish for the greater good. Mission Peak UU is not a Sunday service, or a building or a minister. It is a vehicle for growth, a living, breathing entity that is made up of all of us. May we continue to unfold this truth, together.

Amen and ashe.