Sharon Welch quotes Vine Deloria, Jr. "We are in the process of establishing a new kind of American identity, apart from the Pilgrim tradition and it is a very painful process of sorting out our values. We must not take any easy or superficial answers."
I was stuck with this formulation. What is the Pilgrim tradition that Deloria argues is the source of the "old American identity?" It was a racialist identity. It was based on voluntary association with a covenant community, and by extension to society (Mayflower Compact was the Pilgrim's attempt to bring the non-convicted majority of Mayflower passengers into a covenant with the faithful who spearheading the venture. They had hired skilled workers, servants, and soldiers to support their colonizing effort.)
The limits of the traditional American understanding of democracy and who is part of the community is contained in the Pilgrim identity. And that identity is very much a part of the historic Unitarian identity. It is not uncommon for a Unitarian Universalist minister to talk of the Pilgrim's and Puritans as "our spiritual ancestors." And while we may be selecting only the covenant congregation, and the tradition of a learned clergy as worthwhile for our own time, there is a shadow side to that claim. The founders of New England believed that God had privileged them with a destiny, and they believed that the community that they were founding was a "City on a Hill." Much mischief has been done by Americans to this world as a result of those illusions.
Welch is arguing for an inclusive democracy, which she argues requires a move beyond "speaking for others." Liberation theologians assert that the spokespeople of the dominant culture assume that their values, and ideas are universal and apply to everyone. Men can speak for women. White people can speak for humanity. Americans can speak for the world.
I have seen communities transformed when participants begin to grapple with the question of identity, to see the limits of their old way of thinking of themselves, and begin to stretch themselves toward a new more authentic self. A new American identity? A new way of being a nation in the world? Beyond grandiosity and racialism? That is a vision that stretches the mind and the heart.
Check out:
"After Empire: The Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace" (Sharon D. Welch)
Thanks for that, Clyde. I was at a church in Florida when a minister spoke of the Pilgrims of our "spiritual ancestors" and I recall being quite surprised - certainly I'd never perceived of them as such. But that was a UU history lesson I'd had yet to learn.