Fourth Of July Celebration Thoughts

To the editor: With the celebratory weekend behind us, I have some thoughts about the controversy over where the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were read.

The Unitarian-Universalist congregation and its minister, the Rev. Erin Splaine, knew what they were doing when they decided not to host the public reading of these documents this year. They may have been taken aback by the volume of local and social media responses, but that gives them plenty of food for thought as they spend this 250^th-anniversary year contemplating where we all stand as citizens of the USA.

Much of the push-back has been, to put it kindly, misguided. For a quarter of a century, the congregation has invited the public into their sanctuary for a reading of the documents. This has not been a town of Nantucket event or a Chamber of Commerce event. Nantucketers and visitors have not been entitled to it; it has been an act of hospitality.

This year, the congregation and its leader decided to step back and give it some thought. They did not deprive anyone of hearing the documents or reading them. They could have been read from a platform on Main Street or, as it turned out, indoors at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Since neither the Unitarians’ main church nor St. Paul’s has the capacity to take in all the people who have shown up for the reading in recent years, I think that future readings should take place out on Main Street with plenty of amplification so nobody is turned away.

Suggestions that Unitarianism is not Christian or not really religious at all and that the church should be deprived of its protected tax status demonstrate an abysmal ignorance of New England church history. Complaints that the Rev. Splaine makes the case for herself and her congregation in baseless jargon suggest a lack of curiosity. Almost no one took advantage of her offer to meet with anyone and everyone to discuss the issues. One journalist did and found the conversation unsatisfactory. When she used terms that failed to resonate, it would have been productive to ask her to explain in other, common words, what she meant. There must have been time to ask for clarification with examples.

It's unlikely that the Rev. Splaine and Father Max Wolf planned this together from the beginning, but the way it worked out was brilliant. The Unitarians brought the issues to the forefront for an audience vastly larger than their own congregation, and the Episcopalians created a program that spoke to those very issues. The printed program remarked on the expressions of racism, sexism, and violence in these 18^th-century documents. Before their reading, we were invited to contemplate the contributions of women, many of them people of color, to American history - contributions that tend to be overlooked when we talk about the “founding fathers” of our nation. The capacity crowd in St. Paul’s gave that recognition of women and their contributions an enthusiastic round of applause.

Even the photo on the program cover spoke of this year’s controversy. Under a heavily overcast sky with only a hint of the moon breaking through, St. Paul’s church stands in the foreground, while the lighted dome of the Unitarians’ church looks out from behind it.

Hurrah for everyone who took part in creating this year’s program of music, contemplation, and reading that we could leave smiling. And thanks to the Unitarians for raising the issues that made this year’s reading especially memorable.

We, as citizens of a 250-year-old democracy, have our work cut out for us to remedy the ills that are still with us after all these years.

Frances Karttunen