Calvinism had a concept that Universalism absolutely subverted, and the Unitarians liberalized. Calvin argued that one could not know who was chosen and who was not, but one could make a good estimate. If God had rewarded that person with wealth, with a noble profession, with talents, then they were probably among the elect. The poor, the addicted, the laborers, the slaves were not favored and were probably damned. ۬۬The Universalists by proclaiming God's salvation for all were also saying "God loves you just as you are, and we humans have an obligation to each other to overcome poverty and illiteracy. The Universalist preachers went to the poor, went to the frontier, not out of noblesse oblige, but because God's love compelled them to reach everyone.۬۬The Unitarians on the other hand saw potential in every one, but believed with Calvin that wealth was a blessing bestowed on those further along on the road to salvation, "salvation by character of course." Since each individual Unitarian self cultivated the soul through vocation, and learning, the Unitarians ended up being elitists, and the Universalists ended up being democrats. (Voting patterns indicate differences along class politics between the two relgious movements.) ۬۬Of course that was in the first decades, the Universalists helped enough poor people to become stable and self reliant to become a middle class organization in their own right. I surveyed the history of the one Universalist church that I served from frontier radicalism, to becoming the oh so polite church of the town gentry. ۬
Religious Liberalism and Theology: September 2005 Archives
A relatively new Unitarian Universalist reported to her minister the following conversation overheard in her community's coffee shop. It seems that two women were talking, and one woman expressed dissatisfaction with her mainstream church, it was rigid, do nothing, too dogmatic, and so forth. The other woman commiserated and the began talking about other local churches the two of them dismissing each in turn. Finally they got to the Unitarian Universalist Church, what do they believe? one woman asked the other. "Oh," said the other with authority, "they re-cycle."
"They recycle" maybe that would not be the one thing you would say, if asked what religious liberals believe. But perhaps our neighbors know us better than we know ourselves. Most Unitarian Universalists believe they are environmentalists, but perhaps we are the committed to an environmentalism that is inadequate to the crisis facing our planet. Global warming is bringing climate change, and climate change has given us an increase in violent storms, hot seas, and unusual draughts. Tomorrow Hurricane Rita will come assure, hitting the same region where Hurricane Katrina caused so much damage.
Bill McKibben outlines why the old environmentalism has died of its own inadequacies and why we must move on to entirely new orientation if we are to save our planet. Our religious commitment to being in right relation to our planet will require real change change in our economy and way of life.
Rumbling through my papers, I came upon this reflection written many years ago; at the time I was in Clinical Pastoral Education. Having never really answered the question for myself, I share it with you to ponder. My guess is that many of us have all been in similar situations.
She was 49 years old and going into surgery in the next hour. She was scarred. The appearance of a tall white man claiming to be a chaplain did nothing to calm her anxiety, but she let me sit. Check it out. Does this guy know what's happening?
There is no such thing as a traditional family pattern! How can there be traditional family value?
There are family patterns that have lasted a long time, but the ideal that is put forward Male Dominated, Female as Housekeeper children bearing the father's name, is a concept of the family that is less than four thousand years old and took root only among a minority of the worlds population.
More ancient than Patriarchy, there prevailed a more egalitarian form of family, some in which lineage was traced through the women, but all in which both men and women were equal in law and practice.
In English speaking colonial America, the male owned all property,and marriages were arranged by men, to facilitate property arrangements. That was a "traditional" family, for the male property holding European settlers in North America. The European who settled in North American brought their family pattern with them, but on this continent with lots of land to steal, and so the children were not as dependent on inheritance for land.
In the decades prior to the American Revolution, a radical change in family relations began to emerge. We see it in the church records of marriage and baptism. In Concord, Massachusetts in decade of the 1760s, more than half of the first born children baptized at the church, were born less than seven months after their parents were married! The diaries also indicate considerable concern, anxiety, "what is going on with the children, they are so defiant." Unlike their parents, they were choosing who they would marry, and defying the arrangements made between patriarchs.
With two generations beginning in New England, the old Patriarchal arranged marriage system collapsed in America, and a family formed on the basis romantic love and self initiated courtship emerged.
In the 1840s we begin to see another big change in the family, men going off to work.....for millennia in Europe and Asia, the patriarchal household had been the center of economic work. Silversmiths for example worked in their shops and their residence was attached. Bankers had offices in their residences, as did lawyers. Pastors lived in pastorates, next to the church. Farmers lived in a farm house on the farm, or walked out to their plot from a nearby village.
In the 1840s that pattern broke down, and males began to spend hours away from the residence, in offices, in shops, in factories and middle class women ecame the de facto head of the household, and child rearing The resident patriarch that had been the basis of the European traditional marriage was no longer resident.
The new division of roles for men and women began to become articulated. women as nurturers, men as bread winners. We do not find those ideas before, most women worked in their husbands trade in the centuries before, men had supervised children.
In the twentieth century a new pattern emerged, becoming significant in the middle decades of that century. We see middle class women going off to work, women pursuing careers children being cared for in the day time by institutions and service providers. Again a new pattern, a new way of being family.
I have not surveyed the change in Native American family patterns, the change in African American family patterns, or the changes in the family patterns of Europeans who became industrial workers. Each of these are significantly different from what was considered to be ideal by the dominant groups in American society both in the past and in the present. I have only surveyed the changes in what was considered "ideal" by the white people of property.
But even with those limitations, I believe we can see from this very brief trot through the family history that family patterns change, family dynamics change. There is no one way of being family in the United States today, no singular way of being family that is embraced by a majority, and none of the many ways of being family we see in the United States have sufficient antiquity to claim to be the traditional American family.
One of the great illusions of religious liberalism is the idea that the political division in the United States continues to be between liberals and conservatives. The problem with this understanding is that the new political right is not conservative by any traditional understanding of that term.
I was taught that conservatives sought to conserve that which is good and that which abides, but the new political right is advancing an agenda that is strikingly at odds with traditional conservative understandings of constitutional liberties, church and state relationships, and foreign policy. In two areas the departure of the political right from conservative values is striking, the right's war against science, and the right's attacks against environmentalists. Check out this commentary by Jim Motavalli on right wing think tanks who are misusing science to blame environmental groups for the Katrina disaster.
How does one write a biography? If we explore the complex and contradictory life of a man do we diminish him, or do we deepen our understanding of our subject, ourselves and all humanity? I am thinking of doing a biographical sermon on Horatio Alger.
According to American Dreams "Horatio Alger captured the essence, emotion, soul and especially the spirit of an emerging America. His books all had the same message: no matter who they were, poor, orphaned or powerless, that if they would persevere, if they would do their best, if they would always try to do the right thing, they would succeed. Through honesty, hard work, and strong determination, the American Dream was available to anyone willing to make the journey.
Alger wrote more than 134 enormously successful dime novels targeted primarily at young boys. In each of his books, the theme was pretty much the same. It usually focused on a young teenage boy, from a poor and disadvantaged family who would overcome numerous obstacles along the way and triumph to build his own American Dream against the odds."
Alger had an impact on America, and his novels reflect the ideas of his Unitarian upbringing, especially the idea that progressive development of character is the key to success in life. But what of Alger's life? The Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography and Wikipedia reveal more about Alger's life before he became a popular novelist, some of which I am learning for the first time. This sermon is getting more and more complex.
Did Alger overcome his pedophilia? The wisdom today is that such behavior is incurable, yet it seems the Unitarians covered up his abusive behavior, and he went quietly away and became a best selling novelist.
We arrived at the Woolworth's
and the picket line was already in motion.
The demonstrators Black, White, young and old,
were singing songs I had never heard before,
shooting slogans about Freedom,
holding signs accusing the five and dime chain of Jim Crow,
Segregation, Racism, Bigotry,
It was 1958
and I had come to believe
that Segregation was very, very wrong
so very wrong that I must act.
Richard Hofstader wrote in 1965:
...there is a difference between the paranoid style in politics and the clinical paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, over-suspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him: whereas the spokesman for the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life who fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.
In order to enlist people into the religion of violence it is necessary to have an enemy, who is consciously working to destroy ones community. To create such an enemy we must suspect the motives of the other, fear that enemy because of they "hate our way of life."
In 1965 Richard Hofstader was examining the paranoid style of U.S. politician as they postured against the Soviet Union and "communism." In 2005 the religion of violence has constructed a new image of the enemy, drawing connections between such disparate movements as the Baath Party in Iraq, the corrupt stalinist oligarchy in North Korea, the nascent populist socialist movement led by Hugo Chavez, the Palestinian militants, and the theocracy in Iran. The "axis of evil" may never hold a consultation, but for the politician who has embraced the paranoid style the proof of their enemy status has been established by their existence.
Jeff Wilson making a comment at Coffee House writes " it's worth considering whether American society has also changed over the past couple of generations. I don't feel I'm old enough to have sufficient memory of earlier decades to make such a determination. So, let me ask it here: has American society become more or less racist? Or, if you prefer, how has racism in America changed? Is America more anti-racist than it used to be?
My short answer is that it is not better, and it is not worse, it is just different. Progress, the idea that things get better and better until they are really good is one of white America's favorite myths, and the notion that we have overcome racism in the last several decades is almost an article of faith. And there are markers that point to "progress." Schools are no longer legally segregated, lynchings are less frequent, people of color appear in the popular media in professional and leadership roles, access to public facilities is not openly denied. In the last three decades an African American middle class has grown significantly, and there is an emerging Latino/a middle class.
The images of Native people have improved. When I was a child the indigenous people were despised, "the only good Indian was a dead Indian" was standard operating procedure both in the media and in practice in most parts of the country. Now lots of folks want to be Indian, and search their genealogy for that Cherokee princess that their great, great grand-daddy picked up cheap on the way West to settle on stolen land. Middle class whites embrace native spirituality, and are sweating their way to enlightenment. White suburban youth are into hip, hop, and their parents love Halle Berry and Tiger Woods. Such are the signs of progress.
On the other hand poverty among people of color has deepened, and the gap between "whites" and "coloreds" has grown. The prison-industrial complex now captures more than a third of all young African American males; more than half of prisoners are African American. Native Americans and Latinos are also swept up by the criminal injustice system, while the majority white population experiences less prosecution and lenient sentences. (Drug use among whites and people of color is statistically similar, arrest and imprisonment is disproportionately a matter of color.)
We could go on with many other examples indicating impoverishment has increased for most people of color, and the violent repression of people of color has become the responsibility of the state rather than the mob. People of color will not soon forget that the President of the United States issued a shoot to kill order to the national guard on their way to do search and rescue in a mostly African American city.
Institutional racism has been defined as "the network of institutional structures, policies, and practices that create advantages and benefits for Whites, and discrimination, oppression, and disadvantage for people of color." In the 1950s and 1960s mass movements swept away Jim Crow, or legal segregation. During the same decades we began to see organized efforts to scare white working class people to sell their homes in the city and move to suburbs, and the practice of "red lining" by financial institutions to deprive inner city communities of finances for housing renovation. We witnessed the use of resentment and fear of people of color by a major political party to gain votes and cause a major realignment of voting patterns.
These and other policies by government, political parties, the media, and corporations are only a sample of the institutional reconstruction of racist relations in the United States since the breakup of Jim Crow legalized segregation. After the Civil War the institutional racism of slavery was replaced by the institutional racism of legalized segregation. After the civil rights upsurge institutional racism of legalized segregation was replaced by the institutionalized racism of selected criminalization and the "color blind" discrimination caused by the "wealth gap." Institutional racism has changed in America, and that change has been reflected in American's ideas about race.
There is a rejection of the old blatant racist ideology. Today, Ideological racism among most white Americans is more a denial of their own privilege and choosing to live their lives in isolation from poverty and state violence. Most white Americans try hard to maintain the pretense that they live in a color blind America. They resent people who suggest that this social construction is self serving illusion.
On the one hand the fact that most whites reject open racism is a good thing, and it we must take notice that most people in our country today are predisposed against open racism. Most whites will support efforts that will improve the conditions of people of color. But being "blind to color" also blinds people to the working of the new forms of institutional racism, which has made the work of overcoming the economic, social, and cultural impoverishment of all Americans more difficult. Being "blind to color" means the political impotence for all but the most wealthy, it is just as true today as it was for Abraham Lincoln, "we the people" can not be half free, and half oppressed.
It is not better, it is not worse, but it is different.
(I am in debt to George Tinker for this maxim, we were having breakfast just before his Center presentation and I made some observation about progress. He said "I don't know about progress. Not better, not worse, but different.")
They say that it takes about six miles for an ocean liner moving at full speed to change course. Religious movements are a lot like ocean liners, they have a momentum such that once movement is established in a certain direction it is difficult to change. At the same time, history teaches us that change happens. We can talk about turning points and radical breaks with the past, we have seen nations, communities and even religious movements make qualitative change. Yet, when a community changes it maintains much of its character, its traditions, its past. Thus the historian who examines a community over time examines the interplay of change and continuity.
When I look at Unitarian Universalism as religious movement with a history I am struck by the truth of the maxim: "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Still, I have seen many changes since I first identified as a Unitarian. My guess is I was twelve, and Eisenhower was President. I might have been eleven. I was playing a board game with a Jewish child, and the conversation turned to Jewish/Christian differences. He told me what Christians believed, assuming that he was informing me of my theology. I don't remember ever thinking about theology before that moment, but I must have listened to my mother and my Sunday school teachers. I told him no, I was a Unitarian and we believed that Jesus was a Jewish prophet. That he taught peace and love between people. My religion and my religious family had taught me values! That was over fifty years ago!
A few years later, and I was a teen in Liberal Religious Youth. I had already participated in a peace march, and a civil rights demonstration. My LRY group was totally supportive of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. We were scared during the Cuban Missile Crisis and we turned out to stand vigil for a peaceful solution. We were not divided along political lines, witnessing for peace and witnessing for justice were things Unitarians did. It is what we had always done, all the heros that we learned about as children in religious education had witnessed for liberal religious values, and so would we. We believed that poverty could be eliminated, and we volunteered through the Service Committee's work camps to tutor, and refurbish housing. That was forty five years ago!
Most of my Unitarian friends were Republicans. There were Democrats, but in 1960 my congregation and my friends were not for Jack. We were too young to vote, but we had opinions, and we didn't like Jack and we didn't like Dick. Our parents voted for Nixon, yet they seemed sympathetic to our idealistic support for Civil Rights and Peace.
Recently I read a relatively new Unitarian Universalist argue that UUA President Bill Sinkford is trying to turn Unitarian Universalism into the religious wing of the Democratic Party. That is strong charge, it would be shocking if it were true, and it would be outrageous if it were happening to us and we hadn't even noticed. The Democratic Party's 2004 Presidential nominee supported the war against Iraq, the national leadership of that party have been absent in the struggle for an sustainable economy and against global warming. The last Democrat in the White House presided over the dismantling of the social support system condemning millions to hopeless poverty, and his legacy includes "Free Trade" that has worked to undermine labor standards in the Americas. I would hope that we would remain independent and critical of the Democrats as well as the Republicans.
I ask is there any evidence for the charge? Is there evidence that Bill Sinkford is leading us into the party of Kerry and Clinton? No! Today, just as we have done since the merger, we develop our policies through a democratic process based on the religious values of Unitarian Universalism. The President of the UUA is elected to articulate those values to the public. Every UUA President has done that since Dana Greeley. Our liberal religious values have political consequences, just as they have for two centuries.
Something is different, but it isn't the UUA. What has happened since the merger is a realignment of the political parties. At the time of the merger, it was possible for Unitarians and Universalists to be for peace, for civil rights and for the elimination of poverty and be enthusiastic Republicans. But over the last five decades the Republican Party has become an ideological party, and the party of the Religious Right. The values that religious liberalism had championed over the last two centuries are now being directly challenged and liberalism experiences itself in retreat. This change in the political landscape has led many Unitarian Universalists to identity the values of religious liberalism with the Democratic Party, which in my view is a mistake.
More immediately, when John Buehrens was President of the UUA, the President of the United States was William Clinton, and the UUA was critical of the policies of that administration. Bill Sinkford was elected President soon after the Supreme Count installed George Bush in the White House and the UUA has been critical of the Bush administration. Religious critique unfolds in the historical context in which a particular religious people find themselves - Isaiah and Amos were critical of particular kings and particular policies.
I first encountered Bill Sinkford when he was President of LRY in the late 1960s, and I have had many conversations with him over the last ten years. He is devoted to Unitarian Universalism, and nothing he has said or done could warrant such a charge. On the contrary his statements indicate that he is grounded in our heritage of religious liberalism, and that his pastoral statements have been consistently based on our articulated values. I have differed with him on occasion, but our differences were based on our estimate of the possibilities, not on values.
Given the values (direction) and the momentum (the dynamic power of our liberal heritage) it was inevitable that Unitarian Universalism would emerge as religious movement in opposition to the political direction of Right. Our ship was on this course long before Bill Sinkford was elected President.
Last Thursday, George W. Bush declared "''there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting or price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud."
The "ethics of looting" during a catastrophe will provide many a good topic for sermons for months to come. If you were without food and water for three days would you resupply yourself from Ma's convenience store? from WalMart? If one and not the other why discriminate? We learn that New Orleans police whose homes were underwater, who were out contact with their families, and whose police station was destroyed by the storm making a Super-pharmacy into their staging area and eating the food of the shelves. Were they looters? Their authority came from necessity, and was made on the spot. They applied for no warrant. Emergencies give all us liberties not delegated by constitutions.
I am not advocating a situational ethic, I argue that human beings share a morality that gives us standards of judgement, but that we make judgments about particular choices based on the concrete situation. But in every disaster there are those who take advantage, those who loot television sets, designer clothing, alcoholic beverages, drugs are criminals along with all those who engage in "price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud."
Criminals must be prosecuted, including those who loot the people at the gasoline pumps. I agree with Derrick Z. Jackson who wrote in Friday's Boston Globe that in the midst of this national crisis:
"big oil looted the nation. The pumps instantly shot past $3 a gallon, with $4 a gallon well in sight. In a thinly disguised attempt to act as if it cared about the people wading in the water, Chevron has pledged $5 million to relief efforts. Exxon-Mobil and Shell have pledged $2 million apiece. British Petroleum and Citgo have pledged $1 million each.
This is nothing next to their wealth. Of the world's seven most profitable corporations, four are Exxon-Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and Chevron. Exxon-Mobil is the world's most profitable company, making $25.3 billion last year. It and the other three corporations had combined profits last year of $72.8 billion. Exxon-Mobil is also the world's most valuable company, with a market value, according to Forbes magazine, of $405 billion. The combined market value of Exxon-Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and Chevron is nearly $1 trillion.
And that was last year. A month ago, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and Conoco-Phillips announced record second-quarter profits of $7.6 billion, $3.7 billion, and $3.1 billion, respectively. Royal Dutch Shell's quarterly profits of $5.2 billion were up by 34 percent over the same period last year. Other well-known companies like Sunoco also had record second-quarter earnings.
If Exxon-Mobil were to maintain its current pace of profits, it would cross the $30 billion barrier for 2005. The company's chief financial officer, Henry Hubble, bragged in classic corporatese, ''Our disciplined project management and operating practices deliver the benefits of strong industry conditions to our shareholders."
Those disciplined operating practices are hardly confined to the oil fields. Everyone knows that Bush does not really mean what he says about price-gouging at the pump, since he just gave energy companies the bulk of $14.5 billion in tax breaks in the new energy bill. Surprise, surprise. In Bush's two elections, oil and gas companies gave Republicans 79 percent of their $61.5 million in campaign contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
If Bush really meant what he said, he would call for a freeze or cap on gasoline prices, especially in the regions affected most dramatically by Katrina. He would challenge big oil to come up with a much more meaningful contribution to relief efforts.
If Bush meant what he said! Well long time ago Woody Guthrie sang:
Yes, as through this world I've wandered۬I've seen lots of funny men;۬Some will rob you with a six-gun,۬And some with a fountain pen.
Funny men with power. Funny men with connections. Funny men with an agenda.
We see unfolding in our nation reported to the people by a variety of media an important religious, moral and ethical lesson. There is a difference between the politics of domination and the ethics of mutuality. The corporate power elite sees the people of the United States as consumers. Their politicians are charged with keeping order. Their media are charged with portraying a picture of smart elites who benevolently rule happy contented consumers. But sometimes the world is turned upside down by a crisis, and we see even through the corporate media ordinary people coping with disaster in the face of bureaucrats, criminals and the grass roots of our nation responds with solidarity and compassion. Despite the attempts to portray New Orleans as a city that had descended into anarchy, needing a "strong hand," we the people instead choose empathy and compassion. Mutuality happens in the face of greed, corruption and political conspiracies. Unitarian Universalists can learn a significant lesson from the crisis, the principles of our faith community are based on an ethic of equality, mutuality and interdependence. Oftentimes, we celebrate those principles in the abstract, but in this crisis we can see how they apply on a mass scale. And we can choose to be people who live those values, or passive consumers in a corporate state who come to church to be comforted, entertained and "intellectually stimulated."
Our Unitarian Universalist religious movement arose in the context of the American revolution, and the ideal of a democratic republic founded on principles of equality and the common good was integral to the Unitarian and Universalist message. Taking responsibility for society, and holding political authorities accountable for their conduct has been and continues to be central to our ethical response to the world.
We make the distinction between partisan politics, and liberal religious ethical response to the world. Partisan politics seeks to take advantage of "issues" to advance the interests of politicians, partisans are defensive about their own conduct, and criticize their opponents with an interest in replacing them in the halls of power. Religious liberals witness their values in the world as an act of love and without regard to seeking the advantages of office.
When we review the conduct of political leadership during the crisis unfolding on the Gulf Coast, the basis for our judgments must be our Unitarian Universalist values, we must hold the political leadership accountable for how they responded in light of those values.
