From Your Minister
Podcast: Download (Duration: 6:38 — 6.1MB)
Subscribe: More
I grew up in a deeply political UU family. From the earliest time I can remember, we talked about politics and religion at the dinner table. I don’t know if my parents did this to counteract the influences which were coming at us from our conservative Baptist neighborhood, or if it was simply what they liked to talk about, but my three siblings and I were all weaned on political discourse.
By the time we were adolescents, my siblings and I had done things like make lobby visits on issues we cared about, campaign for chosen candidates, put unpopular bumper stickers on our bikes, argue with our schoolmates during recess about the issues of the day and write letters to the newspaper. It has been surprising to learn, especially as an adult, how rare this experience was. Many of my friends have told me that they never thought about politics, and that their parents never talked about the subject.
The small UU fellowship in West Virginia where I spent my elementary school years in the 1960s was awash in the political issues of the day, mostly connected to civil rights. It was, after all, Adlai Stevenson who helped my parents find Unitarian Universalism. Stevenson, who ran for U.S. President in 1952 and 1956, shared that he was a Unitarian. My parents had never heard of Unitarianism, but they decided if Stevenson, whom they loved, was a Unitarian they wanted to check it out. The story goes that my mother went to church in Houston, Texas in 1956, while my father stayed home with the three of us kids, aged baby to five. When my mom got home, she said, “Church was fine, but coffee hour was great! I have found our people!” They spent the rest of their life as UUs, though not as Texans.
I think about how it must have felt for them to find their people in those days of the McCarthy hearings, living in a very conservative place where they had just moved for my father’s first job. To find a community that was open-minded and progressive, to meet other people who had similar values and commitments to fairness and democracy. And I think about all the people now who could benefit similarly, who are bereft in a world gone increasingly authoritarian, who are lonely for human contact in a world that is increasingly driven by technology, who are longing for a place to reconnect with fundamental decency and kindness. This is one reason why I am so committed to sharing Unitarian Universalism—because people need spiritual homes in hard times!
For me, politics and religion have always been inseparable, using the definition of politics which folks like the late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone espoused:
Our politics are our deepest form of expression: they mirror our past experiences and reflect our dreams and aspirations for the future.
But that connection of religion and politics is complicated. In the US today, politics have increasingly become equated with partisanship, with politicians seeming to dream of and aspire to nothing more than re-election. That kind of politics has no place in spiritual communities—our faith is not on the ballot.
I spent 10 years living in Washington DC and directing the UUA’s justice work there. We worked in interfaith coalitions for bills that supported our faith commitments to justice and equality and democracy. I can also say that we never worked on a bill that we felt 100% good about. Every single one of them was problematic in one way or another. That, I think, is what partisan politics is about—profound compromise, and 51% of the vote.
I think that getting the necessary percentage of the vote, in the United States at least, has been part of the divisive place to which we have gotten—that all of the major cities and even the larger towns are much more progressive than the rural areas. Political parties in the US significantly wrote off rural areas because we can achieve 51% of the vote without them. No outreach, no education, no campaign efforts to speak of. I wish progressive folks spent more time reaching out to rural areas, where (again, in the US) white nationalists and other hate groups have been actively recruiting for decades.
I get why political parties use limited resources to win elections. That’s their goal. Don’t get me wrong; winning an election is no small thing! But faith, unlike partisan politics, is about clear and uncompromising values, and including all of the people. People of faith have a different charge around spreading our values than political parties do. Whether our chosen candidates in the elections have won or lost, our charge is to keep reaching out with values which are more clear, consistent and sharp than what is possible to pass in the legislature. It’s up to us, not the politicians, to be clear about our values and to insert them into public discourse.
My siblings and I raised our own kids the way we were raised—to see the value in serving the common good, to work for a better world. This next generation lives in three countries now, and the form the work takes varies from person to person and place to place. But the values I was raised with continue on in my family, and I remain grateful for my early grounding in connecting up spiritual beliefs with work for justice, and for Unitarian Universalism’s commitment to a democratic and fair world.
- From Your Minister - July 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - June 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - May 1, 2020
