thelivelytradition

Beyond Congregations -- What's a Religious Movement?

2012-01-30T13:13:00.001-05:00

When some people hear that President Morales wants us to think of ourselves as "a religious movement," they get anxious. It sounds like the UUA will become even more boundary-less and intentionally less organized.

As I understand it, the UUA will never be a "religious movement". After all, it is a legally incorporated non-profit organization with all the appropriate IRS status designations. It has a Board and everything. These are not the signs of a "movement". Was the "Great Awakening" ever incorporated?

Liberal Religion is a movement among the people. It is a spontaneous mass -movement of resignation from most forms of "organized religion" as people adopt as their religious views these propositions:

religious traditions are cultural responses to the basic human condition,
religious truth claims are unverifiable,
the goal of the religious life is ethical behavior
an ethical approach to life includes religious pluralism.

The Liberal Religious movement is very diverse, very unorganized, and holds a wide variety of opinions about all spiritual and religious questions. It seems to be at least one third of the population of the United States.

Unitarian Universalism is an institution that operates within the Liberal Religious movement, one of many such institutions. When we go "beyond congregations" we are seeking to find additional ways to engage those people who are already on the move, religiously and spiritually.

Instead of being less focused and less organized, Unitarian Universalism will have to become more clear, more focused and more intentional about how to engage people who are religiously liberal, but religiously inactive. We will also have to be more supple, more invention and more improvisational as we work with specific people in specific situations.

Beyond Congregations and modern UU History

2012-01-30T10:30:00.000-05:00

I divide the history of Unitarian Universalism (since merger) into 3 periods. See my paper in response to Kim Beach at the James Luther Adams Foundation in 2011.

Most of our assumptions about Unitarian Universalism come from the longest period -- 1968-2008 -- the period in which conservatism in all forms was aggressive and hegemonic while liberalism in all forms was defensive. It was a wilderness period.

In our wilderness period, two responses arose: One was to move to the Left politically. The other was to stand on "religious community" as our core meaning and purpose. UU's did not feel able to aggressively challenge conservative theology in the public square. Instead they turned to the long strand of congregationalism as being their essential meaning. "Congregations" and "covenant" defined us. These terms were applied to all sorts of congregations -- from those that sat in pews to those that sat in circles. But in all circumstances, our gospel tended to be reduced to "everyone needs to be in a religious community" and "our religious community welcomes everybody."

Now, in a third period of UU history, when we see again that our religious views would be welcomed by a sizable minority of people, we see that our focus on "religious community" is too narrow. We will end up waiting for people to come to us, rather than meeting them where they are.

President Peter Morales is right in saying that we need to develop ways of connecting to people who are not going to join our present congregations. And I think that most UU leaders accept that proposition, although the mechanisms are still undefined.

But it is foreign to us, given our assumptions of our wilderness period, to think about touching people's lives in ways other than joining an organization of some type, or becoming part of a community.

We will, instead, be touching people's lives first through a message now. We will be bringing them a point of view, a consistent way of looking at themselves, others and the world that we live in.

So the question for us now is not "what new forms of organizations should UU's seek to build?" but "what do we want to say to people?" How do we want people to think of us? What should they think about how we want them to live?

Our Message and Beyond Congregations

2012-01-30T09:52:00.000-05:00

If Unitarian Universalism is called to engage people in settings other than congregational life, then our message becomes all the more important.

I have posted a big chunk of my sermon from yesterday because I am trying to define our top level message as it would be heard by people who are not familiar with us. What is it that every person should know about what Unitarian Universalism wants them to do with their lives?

Our Good News

2012-01-30T09:45:00.002-05:00

The heart of my sermon on January 29th.

Religious traditions are, first of all, messages to the people of the world. Is the message that we are sending into the world good news to the people who hear it? Is it helpful to them? Does it speak to their condition?

We are on an errand into a world unknown to us, and all we can carry is our message.

Our message comes down to three affirmations and challenges:

The first is "self-possession. You are an inherently worthy person, you have a right to be here, you are welcome in the Universe -- that’s the affirmation -- what’s the challenge? You have to think for yourself, be responsible for how you use this good gift of life.

How many people need, desperately need, to hear this message?

Almost everyone...

all those who suffer discrimination, stereotyping and racism, the poor and the "uncultured", the LGTQ people, the immigrants, all those of diminished social status..

And beyond all social diminishments are the personal shames and humiliations of your personal experience your family life, your social life at a young age, even high school. There are people out there, no, there are people in here, who have had all the outward advantages in life and still feel worthless and unlovable.

Liberal Religion’s message is an unflinching affirmation of each person’s worth and dignity.

It is not the Calvinist message that you are, by definition, an unworthy sinner, offensive to God.

It is also not the hyper-individualist message that you alone are the only one responsible for the conditions of your life -- that all your suffering must be your own fault.

You are a worthy person; you have a right to take control of your life and to be a moral agent.

And the second affirmation is that not only are you a worthy being, so are all the other people around you. God loves all of them, too.

And so the challenge is for you to learn to take an empathetic, compassionate, loving attitude toward them. To become open-minded and open-hearted. You will run into people all the time who are outside of your necessarily limited understanding of the way the world works. You are going to be stretched all the time to try to understand another point of view. Every one of us can point to examples in our own lives when our minds were opened. What seemed completely unacceptable became acceptable. Remember when you first met a transgender person?

The third affirmation and challenge that Liberal Religion makes is that “no, you are not crazy; human society is unfair.”

I think that this is new: in the old days of classical liberalism, the belief was that human society started out as fair and just, but unfortunately, some bad things happened since then. That’s the thinking behind the whole social contract -- One day, a group of men who were equals to each other got together and decided to have a society. Everybody had their rights, and their responsibilities and some people were given power for the good of everybody else.

Since then, there’s been some bad behavior and if we just correct those problems, human society will return to be a well-run, socially stable, friendly and fair place to live. Kind of like the hobbits at the beginning of the Lord of Rings. Or the small towns portrayed in modern country music. I think most people have some version of this fantasy, and it is a fantasy. A previous time when human society worked and was just. I hear it about the church. It is hard to hear it when someone challenges our particular version of Eden. That the good old days were only good for some.

Of course, the illusion of the good old days is actually oppressive to us as well. It channels our sense of power into negative and judgmental ways, asking who is at fault? Who ruined paradise? Instead of seeing ourselves as powerful and powerfully moving toward justice; it only validates our prejudices and narrowness.

So, there is an affirmation and a challenge in this third part of the message -- yes, human society is unjust AND you can do something about it, through your own power and the power of your solidarity - empathy - compassion for others. We are potentially moving toward a better world.

These are the core messages of the liberal church, of the liberal religious movement, of Unitarian Universalism. They are messages which seem almost second nature to us -- they sound familiar. Some of the time, we actually believe them and live them out, but often we don’t.

Who needs our message? We do. And just about everyone else.

So our message is needed by people of every age, and every class and every ethnicity and every sexuality and every gender expression and every nationality and every profession. Not every wants to hear it, that’s OK. We may not be able to communicate across all the differences to everyone, but that’s OK, too.

Let me quote Walt Whitman now:

This is the meal equally set, this the meal for natural hunger,

It is for the wicked as well as the righteous, I make appointments with all.

I will not have a single person slighted or left away.

This is our message, our good news, our gospel:

You are a worthy soul; stand cool and composed against every condition.

Around you are other worthy souls, as worthy as you, extend to them your open heart. Before you lies a world that needs to be made more just. You can do it.

These are simple statements, but they are not shallow statements.

There is a long tradition that has led us to these beliefs.

At heart, our beliefs are a very particular distillation of the Christian tradition, a kind of simplified and syncretic Christian humanism slash transcendentalism. It has a history of heroes and heretics, preachers and teachers, prophets and poets. A person could study it for a lifetime, just to fully understand it.

But no one has to understand the software that makes an iPod work. All that matters to most people is that it is simple and clean, beautiful, easy to use and easy to learn. It makes their lives better. It brings them joy and beauty.

(Turn on iPhone and hold it to the mic. Music playing)

The same should be true of liberal religion -- is our message simple, clean and beautiful, easy to use and easy to learn? because it will make people’s lives better.

Musings on Morales 3 Beyond Congregations

2012-01-28T14:45:00.000-05:00

Maybe if we stop trying to make our congregations all things to all people, they can get better at being some thing to some people.

Let a hundred flowers bloom.

Beyond Congregations 2

2012-01-28T09:44:00.002-05:00

The link to the Morales article under discussion: Beyond Congregations

President Peter is right, of course. Lots more people identify themselves as UU than are members of our congregations. Only a third of Baby Boomers are active in a church, about half of the same measure among the generation before them. Participation falls off a cliff in the generations younger than the Boomers. New forms of organization are going to be required; our present congregations will have to be our base camps for explorations into the wider world.

This would be a dire situation if Liberal Religion did not have a meaning and a message that can help lots of people grow into the people that they want to be. But we do.

In a world where most people are defined by others, either through discrimination and stereotyping, or through aggressive acculturation, Unitarian Universalism and Liberal Religion calls people to self-definition and self-determination. We also call people to open-mindedness, which I think is a spiritual aspiration for a large number of people.

We have the message; there are numerous methods for developing these attributes. The modality we offer -- religious community in a congregation -- no longer works.

Beyond Congregations Thoughts -- #1

2012-01-27T15:03:00.000-05:00

The first question that everyone should ask when the President of the UUA writes something for us all to consider is: for whom and to whom is he speaking?

Some people like to talk about 'The UUA' as if it were a single, monolithic body. Not true anymore. Remember that the Moderator of UUA endorsed a different candidate for the Presidency of the UUA than our current President. Moderator Courter endorsed Laurel Hallman. Laurel Hallman was more favorable to "policy governance" than Peter Morales.

I am told that the staff and the board are not always on the same page right now.

The Board of the UUA (and Gini Courter) has been quite clear that they are trying to make themselves more accountable to the congregations. That was the impetus behind The Great Disaffiliation Campaign of a few years ago, when the Independent Affiliate Organization were weaned from official status.

Now, we have President Morales calling for an increased focus on non-congregational forms of Unitarian Universalism. That's what the independent affiliates were.

Does the UUA Board share the analysis that the growth of Unitarian Universalism will include lots of non-congregational organizations? I don't know. Does anyone?

I'm Back

2012-01-27T14:49:00.001-05:00

Been away -- some computer problems, some pressing assignments.
But there are lots of things to talk about --
I promise more posts and shorter posts.

What is it about? Thoughts on Peter Boullata's excellent blogpost.

2012-01-02T12:53:00.003-05:00

My friend and colleague Peter Boullata has written the most "liked" and "shared" blogpost of end of 2011.

http://peterboullata.com/2011/12/29/the-liberal-church-finding-its-mission-its-not-about-you/.

He has a struck a chord with many of UU ministers. With great passion, Peter articulates the frustrations and disappointments that many of us feel about the denomination and the churches for which we labor. Bookmark it and then print it out on archival-quality, non-acid paper. Put the paper in the shoebox you have marked for the Smithsonian. It will do quite well as a historical document of this moment in the story of liberal religion in the USA. As Eliot's Journey Magi asks, "Had we come all that way for a birth, or for a death?"

He has provoked me.

I see three strategic approaches to overcoming current UU malaise: institutionalism, missionalism and evangelism. Naturally, they overlap.

Institutionalism is dominant. It says that the way for UUism to grow and thrive is to strengthen the institutions of the faith, especially the congregations. Strengthening the institution is everything from "growth through better welcoming of the visitor" to "policy governance" to learning how to engage "adaptive change". It's also changing our congregational culture to be more inclusive and providing better faith formation opportunities. It means strengthening our congregations where they are, increasing their capacity in some way or another.

There are traditionalist understandings of the institutionalist tendency: The Free Church movement, for example, saw ministerial authority, the centrality of worship, theism and political detachment as keys to institutional strength. Most UU Christians espouse a form of Institutionalism in which they think that our institutions would grow stronger if they only made a deeper engagement with our Christian heritage. The more mainstream institutionalism is more about interfaith worship, shared ministry, behavioral covenants and multi-generational worship. But they are variations on the same theme: UUism will only grow and thrive if we do what it takes to strengthen the congregation as an institution.

The second trend is Missionalism. The missionalists (missionaries?) say that our problem is that we are too focused on our institutional health and vitality. What matters is living out our purposes. The mainstream missionalists urge us to re-orient all of our institutional decisions around our congregational mission, as soon as we figure it out.

A more radical missionalism says that we need to get out of the churches and into the community in smaller units that combine service, worship and community in smaller and more particular community settings. Live our faith at the grass roots.

Another form of missionalism is the interest in non-congregational settings for community ministry. Ministers with marginalized identities look to a growth in a missional UUism as an alternative to the steep pyramid of the Darwinian parish ministry.

These missionalists call our prevailing church culture "churchism" and say that it is dying. They remind us that the church is not a building and an institution, and the work of the church is not institutional maintenance. It has become self-focused. To them, the UU's are even more crass, saying, in effect, "we don't care what you think or believe, as long as your willing to give the church money, take your turn on the shared duties and don't disrupt the community." Rev. Ron Robinson in Turley, OK is practicing this kind of radical missionalism.

Peter voices many of the critiques of Unitarian Universalism that the missionalists make. The notion that our present institutions have become self-serving and self-satisfied bodies unable to see beyond their own needs is a missionalist argument.

He writes: " We have institutionalized narcissism. Here was a person that was not involved in a Unitarian Universalist church, and yet knew something about us. As an outsider, the message he received about what we stand for is: It’s about whatever you want it to be about. It’s all about you."

But Peter ends up not making a missionalist argument, even though he talks about the liberal church finding its mission.

I am skeptical about Unitarian Universalism ever becoming the sort of missional religious movement that some of my colleagues and friends are imagining. A group of like-minded individuals doing community service together with no theology, no discerned sense of vocation, is not a faith community; it’s the Rotary Club.

This is a line that has deep resonance with many traditional institutionalists, but is more content-rich than they have built.

Inasmuch as Unitarian Universalist communities continue to neglect discernment, theology, discipline, spiritual practice, faith formation, vocation and engagement with our historic testimonies and tradition, we will never be a missional religious movement.

Peter believes, if I understand him right, that common theological practices are the pre-condition for developing missional congregations.

But I wonder if he is advocating a program of raising the theological strength of our existing congregations (an updated version of the traditional UU Christian institutionalist program) or an outward looking evangelical strategy.

What I argue is this:

Our Mission is more important than our Institutions and our Mission is Evangelism.

By Evangelism, I do not mean spreading Unitarian Universalism, or growing our congregations. Evangelism is not an old-fashioned word for growth strategies. Our goal is to be evangelical, not sectarian.

Our mission is to spread Liberal Religion. There are many other forms of Liberal Religion: many of the mainline churches, many varieties of Judaism, most forms of Western Buddhism, and many of the unchurched. Unitarian Universalism is a particular form of Liberal Religion that has arisen out of liberal Protestantism and moved in the 20th century toward creating open-ended, interfaith worshipping communities.

Evangelism is spreading a message, sharing good news, entering the public square to contest the foundational ideas that shape the social order.

The world is not at a point of postmodern stability -- where all sorts of ideas co-exist and will so indefinitely. We are in an unstable world in which religious fundamentalism, religious liberalism, and fiendish globalist consumerist anomie all compete for the minds of every person. It is an ideological, philosophical and theological struggle about how we think about ourselves, each other, the planet we live on and the Universe we live in. There will be winners and losers in this ongoing struggle; the quality of the lives our children and grandchildren will live depend on its outcome.

Our goal is to persuade people of the basic viewpoints of liberal religion and consolidate them as people who can enact those virtues of liberal religion in their social and personal lives. These viewpoints and virtues are good news that will make their lives happier and healthier and the world a better place. Defining those viewpoints and virtues are the work of a preaching life.

Tihs is the external dimension of what the tasks that Peter outlines:

.... discernment, theology, discipline, spiritual practice, faith formation, vocation and engagement with our historic testimonies and tradition.

2011-12-18T23:42:00.000-05:00

Elz Curtiss writes in a comment on a post in Beauty Tips for Ministers (part of an extended multi-sided discourse on Almy's introduction of a clerical shirt in the hello yellow of the Standing on the Side of Love Campaign.)

It is my contention that today’s Unitarian Universalst Association has adopted demonstrations as a sacramental faith-revival tool, such as The Lord’s Supper used to be. Getting arrested is our new adult Baptismal ritual. There is no question that many UU Facebook threads brook no compromise on many political issues. This raises questions about our openness on political and cultural issues. Do we really want to be as politically narrow as the Religious Right tries to be? Many of those congregations, by the way, are reconsidering whether that is the best way to serve their God and members, as people leave when their politics soften or change.

I believe that she means for us to be shocked into recognition by her assertion that some religious liberals see the demonstration as equivalent to adult baptism.

I have been shocked into sufficient recognition to wonder if there is a problem here. Maybe one's first demonstration is an adult baptism, and if so, is that theologically unsound?

It is said of the early Christian communities that "as they prayed, so they came to believe". They prayed to Jesus as God before they had a theology of the Trinity. They believed that Jesus died for our sins before they had a theory of the Atonement.

Of modern religious liberals it might be said that "as we say whereas, so do we resolve." As we proclaim, so do we believe. As we demonstrate, so will we believe.

In other words, we analyze social conditions first; we issue statements and make resolutions first; we take action first. And then, we reflect theologically on the position that we have found ourselves to have taken. Often times, there is a deeper theological significance to what we have said than we ever knew.

We are still unpacking of the "inherent worth and dignity of every person" and the "interdependent web of existence." It turns out there are important and unresolved theological issues lurking in each phrase.

The declaration of our intention to become an "anti-racist, anti-oppressive, multicultural' religious movement, likewise, has some deep theological implications.

What does it mean to declare oneself against all forms of oppression? What is oppression? There are many instances of oppression, but what is it as a general thing? I think that by declaring ourselves as against oppression in general, we make it a general thing.

I think that we are coming to the hypothesis that oppression is a general feature of all forms of social organization. It varies in form and in severity, but human social organization seems to be rooted in and manifesting all sorts of oppression.

This is a break from pre-existing liberal social theory which seems to assume that oppression is a particular aberration from the norm, a particular historical devolution from a pre-existing time when people were free.

No, the norm, we are beginning to see, is oppression. The forms of oppression change; arrangements that seemed normal for centuries are revealed to be oppressive. It even appears that the oppressed and the oppressors can change places. Nonetheless, it is becoming more clear that to live as a human being is to live in a social order that is oppressive. Oppressive means that the burdens of human life (disease, isolation, exhaustion) are distributed unevenly among people as a result of social power.

Questions arise: is this God's will? Is this a fundamental aspect of the human character? Is this unchangeable? Can we stop it? There is much to discuss. All of the wisdom on the world's religious traditions are resources to this discernment. Our traditions of religious liberalism seem to say that the oppressive social order is not God's will, is not immutable, and is something to oppose.

So, it seems reasonable to me that a religious movement that recognizes social oppression as omnipresent yet unnecessary would invite people into political activation. One's first political demonstration is a baptism into a different way of looking at the world and a different intention for living in it.

If one believes that the social order is fundamentally fair, although some people may have some particular grievances, then political activity is not essential to the life of a body of faith. Diversity should reign. But if we are moving toward a theological consensus that the social order is unmistakably oppressive and that a faithful life is anti-oppressive then our covenant must move in that direction.

What to do about the "1%"

2011-12-01T23:51:00.001-05:00

Remember, the 1% is political poetry. There is nothing inherently wrong with making more than some arbitrarily chosen number of dollars. There will always be a 1%.

The problem with our system is that too much of our national wealth is being invested by the financial markets: Wall Street. Wall Street only knows how to do one thing: invest capital in order to produce the maximum short term profit. It very efficiently moves money around to put money in the hands of enterprises which will make the most money right now.

What if Goldman Sachs announced a mutual fund that would invest in the creation of mass transit. It would promise to spend whatever money it took to build a first class mass transit system. It would not get any profits for decades if ever. I don't know about you; I'm not putting my 401k in that fund.

The history of socialism and capitalism has shown that you cannot replace financial markets with government planners and still get efficient capital utilization.

So what do you do the financial markets?

1. Regulate them, so they are transparent and fair.
2. You tax the incomes of the people who operate them. So much money flows through Wall Street that even microscopic fees generate huge personal incomes.
3. You impose a transaction tax on the market -- every other kind of business is taxed in some way -- the financial markets should be too.
4. Through taxation, you reduce the amount of money which is invested through the financial markets. Government spending is another form of investment and can be used to invest in the things that capital markets cannot: projects and enterprises that produce public goods which are not profitable. Public goods raise the living standards of everyone. Transportation and communication infrastructure, medical research, even weapons production, while not immediately profitable to the government, create businesses and jobs for profitable companies.

Basically, to improve the standard of living of everyone, we need to (1) reduce military spending, (2) increase taxes on the wealthy (3) invest through the government in the creation of public goods and (4) regulate financial markets so that they are transparent and fair.

The 1% is Political Poetry

2011-11-28T00:09:00.001-05:00

The 1% is a piece of political poetry. It is not a scientific measurement, to be taken literally. It conveys succinctly and powerfully the extent to which the few rule the many.

Class is not about income. Class is not about whether you have an income, a profession, a job or a benefit. Class is not about culture. Class is not about wealth. A "Class" is a historically formed group of people who have a particular relationship to economic order.

There is a group of people whose relationship to the economic order is that they operate and control the capital markets. They own the large investment banks, the stock brokerages, the trading companies. Every other person and business and institution in the country is dependent on their economic activity: for credit, for capital investment, to hold their money. Through the Federal Reserve Board, they make the rules that determine whether that spunky little credit union you moved your money to will prosper or fail. They cannot be boycotted.

They have enormous power, and because they have enormous power, they are accumulating enormous wealth. They are not powerful because they are wealthy. They are wealthy because they have power.

The power that they have is such that virtually no investment can take place that they do not see as profitable to them, including the fiscal budget of the government itself. Lower taxes on the wealthy means more money for them to control. Money paid in taxes is money whose use is controlled by others.

In order to have the world we want, the financial and political power of this small class of people has to be sharply reduced. We need to be able to invest in things that they not see as worthy of investment: education, environment, public works, health for citizens, mass transit and so much more.

A 99 Percent Consciousness

2011-11-26T10:08:00.001-05:00

We all have to work on developing a 99 Percent Consciousness, which will be hard.

We see the start of it when Occupiers relate to the Police as people in the 99%. The police are ordinary people who have done what they needed to do to make their way in this society. Their best instincts and motivations have been co-opted to serve a system that is not benefitting them.

All but a tiny handful of the people you know are in the 99%. A 99 Percent consciousness relates to them with an open heart and with sympathy for what they have done and are doing to make their way under a system that is not working for them.

The 99 Percent includes most of the people who disagree with you; most of the people whose taste and cultural style disturb or amuse you; all of the people you instinctively look down on; all of the people you have 'risen above' or 'left behind.'

It approaching others with empathy, curiosity and solidarity. It is trying to find the way that you can step over your judgments and see them as allies. We must see them as allies, because we need to be allies, if we are ever to live in the world we want.

We need to think more like Walt Whitman, giving voice to adhesion, the love of all for all.

Yes, in one sense, we need to approach 100% of the people with the same open-hearted delight. That is the socio-spiritual virtue we ought develop. But you can't get to 100% without going through 99%. And the material reality is such that in order to make a better life for everyone in the 99%, we will need to sharply reduce the political power of the 1%.

Black Friday

2011-11-25T10:14:00.001-05:00

"Black Friday" is a challenge to one's spirit, isn't it?

As we emerge from our feast-induced slumber, all enumerations of our blessings flee from our minds, but one: we have might have an unmaxed out credit card somewhere. Off to the mall! Start the Christmas shopping now!

It's a challenge to keep up the gratitude, that sense of well-being in the world, that family and friends and love are enough, that we felt on Thanksgiving.

Black Friday is now big news. Thanksgiving was slow news day, so the TV news would fill the time with stories about the hopes of retailers for the Christmas season. First, came the Early Bird Sales, which soon escalated to Door Buster sales. Then the news folks started interviewing shoppers/campers in the parking lots. The sales got bigger. The crowds got bigger. And as many as enjoyed the frenzy of the shopping, there were as many at home, tut-tutting and fretting about how awful all this was. Even cheaper fun

But Events always prove my mother right, who often said, "this will go to far, and somebody is going to end up crying." Which this year, was literally true. Keeping in the spirit of the season, a woman in a Los Angeles Walmart, pepper-sprayed other shoppers to clear a path to the bargains in the electronics department. I guess she took seriously the Fox News comment that "pepper spray is a food product, essentially."

I am challenged to keep an open heart to all those whose attitudes toward shopping, consumption and holiday-making are different than my own. For some, Black Friday is fun; for some, it is practical and economical; for others, it is efficient. Shopping done, they enjoy the rest of the holidays. Who am I to judge what other people need or want?

We are encouraged in our consumer culture to judge other people by what they buy, by how they shop, and by how they consume.

OK, I try to keep an open heart, but sometimes, it is more of a challenge.

I count gratitude and empathy as some of the essential virtues of the liberal religious path. Gratitude has been said to be the source of all religious feeling. If you think about everything that had to fall into place for you to even be here, you have to be humbled and awed. Call it blessed by God, born under a good sign, or just dumb luck, you have to be grateful.

Empathy is making the effort to see yourself in other people, especially people you don't understand. It's an imaginative leap. It's not the same as knowing the truth about someone, but it stops you from distancing yourself from them. There are limits, of course. I am having trouble imagining why anybody would use pepper spray in a shopping situation.

Black Friday is the beginning of the turn toward Christmas. It is the unofficial start of Advent, the season when we allow ourselves to think that something wonderful might yet happen. It is the season when we let gratitude and empathy soften our cynical and fatalistic hardness. It may yet be that not everything will end in tears. Let us hope so. Let us just hope.

It seems normal to them

2011-11-23T11:21:00.001-05:00

Think about it -- the leaders of our universities, cities and police are baby boomers. It seems normal to them that the authorities would respond to any politically minded gathering of students with riot police. There isn't a riot going on -- no destruction of property, no harm to people, no rampaging mobs -- but it seems normal to send riot police. It seems normal when we watch it on the news.

It seems normal to the police that the proper thing to do is to draw a line in the sand and dare people to cross it. It then seems normal to the police to arrest people, pepper spray people and beat people who cross that line. There is no crime actually happening -- but it seems normal to everyone that the police would invite defiance and criminalize it.

It is shocking to watch students being pepper sprayed. But the underlying situation seemed normal to us -- students were sitting in a circle on their own campus in a place where police said that they could not sit, and so something had to be done. Why didn't the police just walk away? Students sit on the lawn all the time. That would have been a sane response. But it seems normal to everyone that the authorities would abuse the students.

It seems normal to the present generation of leaders because that is what happened to them.

The leaders of institutions of today were all participants or witnesses to the abuse of young people decades ago. Everybody then had to take a stand on that abuse: some endured it; but were forced in time to say that they deserved it; some participated in it as young people themselves; some witnessed it and were made complicit in it by not having the tools to stop it.

Abused children grow up to be abusing parents because it seems normal.

This is what is happening right now in our country. All questioning of authority is defiance; all defiance is a crime; all measures can be used to fight crime. We are living in the craziness of an abusive family, where violence is uncontrolled, but always justified.

It is time to stop it and not pass on the abuse of the past into the future. The leaders of institutions can meet non-violence with non-violence; questions with dialogue; democracy with democracy.

The Prudent People

2011-11-20T17:04:00.001-05:00

Today Iam going to put in a word for the older brother in the Prodigal Son story. You know the story, the younger son ofa wealthy father asks for his share of the inheritance before his father hasdied. His father gives it to himand the younger son takes off for a far country, I figure California, and runsthrough the entire fortune on wine, women and song and ends up working as thejunior assistant deputy intern pig slopper on a pig farm, which for a Jewishboy, is not a good career move. So, he finally decides that he would rather admit defeat and go backhome. The hired hands on hisfather’s farm live better than he is and so he heads home.

When hegets home, his father sees him coming from far away, and orders his servants toprepare a huge celebration for his returning son.

Here isthe biblical text of what comes next: This story is in the 15^th chapter of Luke.

“Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came nearthe house, he heard music and dancing. 26 So hecalled one of the servants and asked him what was going on. 27 ‘Yourbrother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calfbecause he has him back safe and sound.’
28 “Theolder brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleadedwith him. 29 But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve beenslaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even ayoung goat so I could celebrate with my friends. 30 Butwhen this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comeshome, you kill the fattened calf for him!’ 31 “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, andeverything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrateand be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he waslost and is found.’”

About ayear ago, I preached a sermon in which I spoke up for the younger brother, theProdigal Son. Because there is alot to be said for taking risks, being adventurous, striking out on your ownand trying to make your own fortune. We admire people like that.

Buttoday, I want to speak up and put in a couple of good words for the OlderBrother, the crabby, uptight, judgmental, goody-two-shoes older brother.

It seemsthat there a more than a few older brothers around. I call them prudent people.

Ourcountry has been through a credit bubble – lots of money was to be made inlending money and as a result too much money was lent to people. For awhile, it seemed that there was very little risk involved in lendingmoney. Now, lots of people arestuck with loans they cannot pay, and lots of financial institutions carryloans that they cannot collect. The creditors want to be paid back evenif it drives the rest of the country into bankruptcy. People are rebelling. I am over-simplifying, of course.

Butthere is a group of people who throughout the credit bubble resisted thetemptation to borrow much money. They borrowed less, saved more, andconsumed less. They werecounter-cultural; in a culture that pushed credit and consumption, they wentwithout, or went with brand X, the local college, the used car, smaller house,the driving vacation. They were prudent. They were responsible.

Prudence is imagining yourself looking back at this moment and saying,“well, I shouldn’t have done that.” These prudent people looked ahead into thefuture and looked back to choose a less risky course for their lives. They werepersonally responsible and everything that has happened has reaffirmed thewisdom of that course in life.

Thedramatic downturn in the economy in 2008 and 2009 has put the question ofeconomic inequality onto the national agenda. Sustained joblessness and recession has exposed the extentto which most people have been depending on debt and credit for theirlifestyle.

It’s allcoming out now. Not only is theincome and wealth gap between the rich and the poor very wide, the working classand the middle class owe a lot of money as well.

Now,people are revealing the amount of their indebtedness and the very real waysthat their debts restrict their futures. the prudent ones are resentful.

Manypeople feel victimized by the financial system, seduced by easy credit andsuckered into debts they cannot pay.

All ofthis talk is making some of those who have been prudent very angry.

The ideathat those who are deep in debt are "victims" of a system rubs themthe wrong way. The idea that they, the prudent ones, might somedayindirectly absorb the cost of relieving some other’s people’s debt angers them.

Financialprudence has been, to them, a moral question, a question of character. The sense of doing the right thing hasbeen one of the compensations for the temporary pleasures of consumption. Other people got plasma TV’s;prudent people got pride in their sense of personal responsibility.

To thosewho have been prudent, it seems that the only just thing to do is to let thosewho were imprudent suffer the consequences. If someone borrowed more thanthey could afford for a house, then they should face foreclosure. Ifsomeone borrowed too much money for a education for a career unlikely togenerate the income to pay back the loan, perhaps they should go bankrupt. If banks lent money unwisely, then the bank should fail. If thebank's losses outrun the coverage of the FDIC, then the depositors andshareholders should have to eat the losses.

Theethic of personal responsibility is based on this cause and effect, crime andpunishment reasoning. If a personmakes an unwise or irresponsible decision, then there will be negativeconsequences and that person should suffer them. To rescue them from that consequence is to create a moralhazard – an actual incentive to be irresponsible.

It isthe logic behind the original restrictions on abortion. The logic was if women did not face the consequenceof unwanted pregnancies, then they had no incentive to avoid sexual activity. It is the logic behind thatrecent incident in which it appeared that the audience at a candidates’ debatethought that an otherwise healthy person who chose not to buy health insuranceshould be allowed to die if suddenly very sick. If there is no consequence to being irresponsible,then there is no reason to be responsible.

Weassume that this is the point of view of the older brother: if the fattenedcalf is slaughtered for the prodigal son, then there no reason why anybodyshould stay at home.

But Iwant you to hear the story again, because it reveals something else going on aswell.

“The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his fatherwent out and pleaded with him. 29 But he answered hisfather, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyedyour orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate withmy friends. 30 But when this son of yours who has squandered your property withprostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’

What theolder brother says is filled with anger and resentment to the father. “I have slaved for you all theseyears. I have followed your everyorder.”

And theolder brother resents the fact that he has not been recognized and acknowledgedfor his years of obedience. “Younever gave me so much as a young goat for a party for me and my friends”

Wow! I think that this is a very insightfultouch in this story. I think thatwhat irks a lot of people is not that the guilty sometimes seem to get awaywith their sins, but that we are not adequately rewarded for doing the rightthing. If God just spoke tome with an “attaboy – I like the way that you gave it your all at work thisweek.” Or a young goat. Or a tasty tofu casserole.

Theolder brother has submitted to the discipline of the prevailing economic order,which was feudal and agricultural. The prevailing economic order is “Work like a dog for your father andthen get everything when he dies.” That will keep you on the straight and narrow.

There isanger here, and resentment, and envy. Envy for the love expressed from the father to the prodigal son, andperhaps even envy for his brother who had a great adventure with wine, womenand song at least for a while.

So theprudent people, the ones who avoided ruinous debt and managed to keep theirheads above water deserve an attaboy, a pat on the back. In many ways, they were swimmingupstream for these last decades. They have a right to what they are feeling at this point in our history.

Butstill, as much as they did well swimming upstream, we have to ask why thecurrent was strong against them. Why was there so much force behind easy credit and borrowing money? It was not just because people wantedeasy credit.

As weponder the moral implications of individual’s behavior in the economy, weshould understand how the economy works and the role of personal debt in it.

TheAmerican alternative to the European welfare state has been consumer creditsociety.

Oneexample: in Norway, collegeeducation is Quote Free Unquote. It’s not free, it’s paid for by taxes. The individual student does not pay for collegeeducation. In the United States,college education is not paid for by taxes, but is paid for by thestudent. And since most studentscannot afford it, they borrow the money to pay for it. We don’t have free education,we have a student loan system. Consumer credit is the alternative to the welfare state.

Anotherexample: In most developedcountries, health care is heavily subsidized by tax monies. Here some is, for elders and forpoor people and everybody else depends on health insurance from employers. Since the cost is very high, insurancedoesn’t pay for it all, and the unpaid portion is put on the patients’ creditcard. Consumer credit shoresup the gaps.

Anotherexample: we have invested verylittle in mass transit, hence almost everyone needs a car. Since most people could not pay for acar in cash, most people borrow the money to buy a car. Nowadays, most young people cannot evenafford the downpayment on a car, so they lease one, another form of consumercredit.

Indeed,as the wages and salaries of most working class and middle class people havestagnated over the last 30-40 years, it has been the explosion of consumercredit that has allowed consumer spending to continue. Our economy is based on ever-expandingconsumer credit.

Our mostprofitable companies, the big financial institutions, trade in consumer creditto great benefit. It is telling tonote that in the banking world, those prudent people who only use a credit cardfor convenience, who pay off their whole balance every month, are called“deadbeats,” since they add nothing to the bank’s bottom line.

Thursday,three days ago was the two month birthday of Occupy Wall Street. In these two months, I have beenlearning much about our economy and the role that the financial industry playsin it. It has been an educationalperiod for us all, and it will, it seems continue. We’re in a learning period right now; we have been therebefore. Ten years ago, most of uscouldn’t have told the difference between Iraq and Iran, but we learned becausewe had to learn.

I thinkwhat we are learning is that the economy of this country works for the benefitof the financial companies, Wall Street, in the vernacular. It is a system that gains much of itswealth from consumer debt and other forms of debt. How well any of us manage our own debt does not make adifference in the end, except to ourselves and our families. I believe that any improvement of ourlife together will only come by reducing the political power of these financialinstitutions, and in that, all of us, the wise and the unwise, the prudent andimprudent, the prodigal children and the older siblings all have a commoninterest.

We arecalled to the virtues of humility and empathy: to see our successes andfailures in this economy as not merely the result of our personal qualities: tosee the common humanity beneath both success and failure, and to put aside thepride, envy, shame and resentment that stand between us.

"What Time Is It? Questions from James Luther Adams to Unitarian Universalists of Today."

2011-11-11T11:54:00.001-05:00

I was honored to be invited by Rev. George Kimmich Beach to respond to his lecture at the 16th Annual conference of the James Luther Adams Foundation. His topic was "What is Past is Prologue: James Luther Adams and Unitarian Universalism." Dr. Michael Hogue, of Meadville-Lombard Theological School also responded to his essay. I understand that all of these works will be gathered up and published at some point. But in the meantime, here is my response, not as it was given, and not as it was planned, but as I now would have liked to have delivered it.

If there is anything that I takefrom James Luther Adams, it is the necessity of a lively historicalawareness. Not only the knowledgeof previous history, but also an awareness of this present moment as theproduct of that history. And more,this present moment is also a valve moment; a moment through which the past enters into the future. How do we, standing here, tonight,understand the historical currents that have brought us to here and what arethe possibilities present in this moment to change its course? Adams calls upon us to “take timeseriously” – to ask “what time is it, right now?”

There are three eras of Unitarianand Unitarian Universalist history present here. One is the era of James Luther Adams, a man who was ayoung man in the 1930’s and at the heights of his analytical and theologicalpowers in the 50’s and 60’s. Much of this era was before merger and some of it immediately aftermerger. It was an era inwhich Unitarianism went from being a religion whose political views, on thewhole at the level of the rank and file, was good-government ModerateRepublicanism – and during that era, Unitarian Universalism committed itself tothe burgeoning Civil Rights movement and the movement for integration. And eventually, it wrestled with theradicalization of that movement.

During that period of time,especially during the 60’s, progressivism was growing and ascendant and heldthe moral high ground in the culture. I remember those days when I was a child in my Unitarian Church inYoungstown, Ohio.

But 1968 and 1969 were a turningpoint for Unitarian Universalism. Not only because of our internal trauma of the black empowermentcontroversy, but because of the election of Richard Nixon as President. Richard Nixon won by naming andmobilizing a broad cultural resentment against progressivism andliberalism. It was everythingabout people like us and what we stood for that identified as the people’senemy: our permissiveness, our skepticism; our internationalism; our nascentbreak with patriarchy; our sexual liberalism; our flirtations withmind-altering drugs; our cultural radicalism. After Nixon won in 1968, there followed 12 years of intense political,cultural and religious struggle between a defensive liberalism and anaggressive conservatism. In 1980,the election of Reagan confirmed what was already clear everywhere; liberalismin all of its forms had been culturally defeated.

Understand that please: in 1961,the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalist took place in an atmospherein which great hopes were attached to a new religion for a new time. But there was only 7 or 8 years inwhich the cultural zeitgeist matched our mood and ambitions.

Just seven or eight years.

For 40 years since then, religiousliberalism and liberal religion have been wandering in the desert. We have been operating in aculture in which cultural, political and religious conservatism have beenaggressive and dominant.

For most of us in this room, thishas been our experience –to be religious leaders in a religious movement thatfeels like it is in exile, that feels like a saving remnant rather than avanguard, where our churches feel like refuges rather than like launching pads.

For my entire life, UnitarianUniversalism has been struggling with itself to maintain hope, to understandits mission, to generate real fervor, and to not get stuck in endless circulardebates about what we are doing wrong.

For my entire adult life, UnitarianUniversalists have been obsessed with the question: “What’s wrong with us? There must be something wrong with usthat we are not as successful as our rivals. What’s wrong with us?”

We survived; we changed a lot overtime. It would be a greathistorical project to catalogue the changes in Unitarian Universalism from 1968to 2008: how did Liberal Religion adapt and development during a long period ofcultural conservatism and hostility to liberalism?

That has been the second period ofour modern history and many of us are in that generation: the Desertpeople: UU’s of the exile.

The tide started turning in 2008,as marked by the election of President Obama. (Of course, I don’t believe that Presidents have the actualpower to set the cultural tone, but their campaign themes and election showwhat is going on below the surface.) This man, who went to UU Sunday schools in his childhood, was elected asthe result of a tremendous surge of rank and file activity and financialcommitment.

And we are now in another period ofintense political struggle, like 1968 to 1980, but now the forces of liberalismare resurgent and the conservatism is on the defensive.

And this year, The Occupy movementhas put issues of economic class on the agenda for the first time since beforeWorld War 2.

We are literally in a third periodof our modern UU history now, and no one is of this period. No adult has ever grown up in a period in which we couldassume that very large numbers of our fellow citizens share our basicworldview.

So here we are, in the openingyears of a new historical period. It may be the long conservative captivity of the culture is coming to anend.

The question before ustonight is how can a deeperunderstanding of the thought of James Luther Adams be used to guide the flow oftime through this room tonight into a different and better future?

Fortunately for us, Kim Beach hasdistilled Adams’ thought into three overriding subjects and then distinguishedthree crucial thoughts for each those overriding subjects, which then I willruthlessly strip of all nuance and subtlety and reduce to 9 questions offer upas guides to our thinking. I am a preacher and I have to put the cookies down low enough for the people to reach them.

The three overriding topics:

(1) Religion in relation to thehuman condition

(2) society in relation to thehuman community

(3) history in relation to humanfulfillment.

Beach attaches three key conceptsto each topic.

To the first, (Religion in relationto the human condition), Beach reads Adams as focusing on the affections,volition and conversion.

To the second (society in relationto the human community) Beach reads Adams as focusing on vocation,association and covenant.

And in regards to the third(history in relation to human fulfillment), Beach sees Adams concerned with sacredtradition, eschatology and Christology.

So, let me get at the same topicswith these nine questions.

1. (Affections) What do we love? Or to be more clear , where, when, howare we most in love, most at the intersection of our intimate being and theultimate dimension? There seems tobe among us such a deep hunger for the embrace of deep community, supportive,accepting, loving. Phrases likethe beloved community have such power among us, there is something there of ouraffections, of the being that we love being. Rev. Nate Walker of First UU Philadelphia described hisvision of us as being the kind of people who, when we enter into a situation,especially a troubled, disturbed situation, everyone sighs and says “O Good,the UU’s are here.” Itwas a vision of a kind of us being a particular kind of being.

2. (Volition) What do we really want? There is a difference between what we love and what we will– to what end do we exercise our will – who is the being that we try tobe.

3. (Conversion) What are ready to give up? What is demonic inthe exercise of our will? Whereare we on the wrong path, what we want that is not worthy?

These three religiousquestions: how religion relates toour human condition have been our preoccupation within Unitarian Universalismfor these long decades and took on a morbid urgency in this exile period. We are not sure that our will matcheswhat we love, or we are afraid that it does, but that it is demonic.

When we ask the perennial questionas to whether “we walk the talk” or discuss the conflict around “loving theworld vs. changing the world” or the ponder the choice between “intimatecommunity vs. missional community:” these questions are about the relationshipbetween what we love and what we will. We have to remember that we have struggled with those questions in atime when we feel the culture is hostile and when the question of “What iswrong with us?” has been uppermost in our thoughts. They all must discerned anew in this time.

4. (Vocation) What are we called to do? Our personal vocation which arises outof the interplay of our will and our most intimate/ultimate being. We hear the question of vocation in theangst about whether our people have a consumerist attitude toward the church. Vocation asks “what is a UU’s missionin life?” And when joke thatthere’s no way to become a more serious UU except to go to seminary. That’s a clue to the lack of clarityabout vocation in Unitarian Universalism.

5. (Association) Who are our comrades? “Associations” is an antique word forsocial networks.

Adams envisions a world in whichpeople form “voluntary associations” which act in coalition with each other topromote the social good. Acongregation would be a voluntary association in a coalition with neighborhoodorganizations and other civic organizations. That is not the way that it is anymore.

Society is now an interwovennetwork of networks. Facebookmakes this very clear. You go to afellow congregants’s page and you see that they have 200 friends. You have only 25 friends incommon. You can see that thecongregation is one network connected dozens, indeed hundreds of other networks.

I serve a congregation of UnitarianUniversalists. We have a buildingand a membership and officers and a staff. But we are also mixed online and offline network of people,each of whom is part of other networks. The church I serve has 350 members and about the same number of facebookfans and these two groups are only partially the same people. Some of those non-member fans are faraway and go to other UU churches and some are not UU at all.

Some of these associations arevoluntary and some are not. We arein an association with the world as human beings, and with our country ascitizens, with others with whom we define ourselves, or others define for us,as sharing an identity.

What does a voluntary associationlook like in this new age? The multiplicity of associations leadsto questions of covenant: in what way are we committed to others in the networkof connections we find ourselves.

6. (Covenant) Howshall we be with our comrades?

The last three questions are aroundthe subjects that Beach has called sacred tradition, eschatology andChristology.

I would ask contemporary Unitarian Universalism,these three questions:

7. (Sacred Tradition) What is the story we are enacting? What are the full dimensions of that story?

Unitarian Universalism has, for themost part, dropped out of the grand story of Christianity: the creation, fall and redemption ofthe Universe and all its people through God’s grace. For more than one reason, we are cautious about identifyingourselves with a national story, or even a national people’s story from below.

We Unitarian Universalists have beenseeing ourselves as enacting the story of a small and ambitious faith’ssurvival, through our desperate efforts to heal ourselves of whatever is wrongwith us.

Our story has been our struggle todefine ourselves in a world that wants to trivialize and diminish us as sappyheaded fools.

The story we tell of ourselveshelps us to overcome the shame and humiliation of being a liberal in a worldthat thinks it knows better.

As a result, the story we have beentelling ourselves has been anxious and brittle and defensive and most of all, sectarian. We make ourselves the heroes ofour own story – we have trouble seeing ourselves now in this new era as notmarked with our yellow tee-shirts. The 99% movement has been about seeing how much we all have in common;the yellow tee-shirt is about how we are different. Sometimes we are busy being Capital U UnitarianUniversalists that we have trouble being small-u universalists.

8. (Eschatology) The overriding question is “What time is it?” What time is it in our story? How does this story we are a part of end? I believe that we are at the beginning of a new third period of UU history -- one in which Unitarian Universalist congregations and churches are nodal points in a vast network of networks coming together to move our culture in a more compassionate, just and inclusive direction. It is a hopeful story, a joyous adventure, a story that might be the best years of our lives.

9. (Christology) To me, the question of Christology is this? Is it possible that Godwould be active in human history? Is it possible that Yahweh would part the Red Sea to save God’speople? Is it possible that Godwould be incarnated in a Jewish carpenter and die on a cross, and thus provewhich side of history God is on. Is it possible that God would make Himself known in the holds ofslaveships, to light there freedom’s fuse?

How is the divine at work in thiswork we do?

I make up my benediction everyweek; it is a chance to finally, in the midst of the dust and heat of mypreaching, say what I had been trying to say for 20 minutes and often I come tothese words, some of which are mine and some of which I have taken from mymentors and models: FrankSchulman, Ruppert Lovely, Carl Scovel, Kim Beach and James Luther Adams. I stand in the well of the sanctuary and say somethinglike this:

“There is a power at work in theUniverse, a great good intention at the heart of Creation, a creative, sustainingand transforming power, that will carry you in every action you take forjustice, for community, and for love. You can depend on that power; you can rely on that power; you can trustthat power with your heart and hopes, for all your life and with all yourlove. Be not afraid; and Go now inpeace.”

Occupied ! Sermon of 10/23/11

2011-10-24T09:35:00.001-04:00

Occupied!

Delivered10/23/11

First UnitarianChurch of Worcester, MA

The book ofLeviticus was written, scholars think, about 2500 years ago. It was part of a great movement offormalizing the religion of the Hebrews, establishing rules and procedures andlaws to govern all aspects of life. And as we have heard, they called for a Jubilee year every 50 years, atime when all the debts accumulated, all the service indentures, indeed all theland sales of the previous half century would be reversed. It is not clear how this wasimplemented if ever. I bring it upnot because I think that we are supposed to do this, but because it shows thateven 2500 years ago, justice minded people were trying to figure out ways toclear debts in an orderly fashion.

As the newspapertoday shows, this is still a problem, or a problem again. The world is awash with debts thatthere is little hope can be repaid. From whole countries like Greece to individuals that you know who areunderwater in their mortgages or encumbered with student debt at the beginningof their career, or even unpaid utility bills that have mounted up.

As the newsletterblurb for this sermon shows, I have been preaching about the imbalances andinjustices of the US economy for some time now. Two years ago I talked about debt – the explosion of baddebts throughout the economy. LastApril, I talked about the incredible inequality in income and wealth that haddeveloped in the country.

The two arerelated.

The mostprofitable activity in our economy is has become the capital market, the buyingand selling credit and debt and equities. The accelerating economic inequalityin the country has been result of the dominance of financial capital – the bigfortunes are in what is called the financial services companies. Of course, this kind of money has itsown way of exerting political power, and the financial sector wanted to be freeof regulations and restrictions and soon enough the politicians complied.

The result was acredit bubble – lots of loans made that were unwise, and they bundled and sold,to the point that no one really knew who in the end held those loans. So no one could trust anyone withfurther credit. We entered intothis recession, which is a downturn in economic activity arising from a creditcrunch.

Unemploymentskyrocketed and has stayed very high, and now the economy is dragged downbecause fewer people have the ability to buy things. It was a very rapid downward spiral and a very slowrecovery.

Wealth and incomeinequality increases as conditions get worse. Not only are the wealthy much more wealthy than we are, butapparently we owe them a lot more money, too.

The people havebeen very restless, looking for a way to challenge the status quo. The people are looking for the movementto carry their aspirations – the movement that has the combination of the rightdemands, the right form of organization, the right cultural style, the rightstrategy.

I think that boththe Tea Party and the Occupy Movement, or as it sometimes called the 99%movement are ongoing proposals for that popular movement. Look at them as experiments inpopulism, each with its own analysis and set of demands and strategy.

I have beenactive in supporting the Occupy movement – especially with a group of UUministers who have been conducting weekly Sunday evening vesper services forand with the Occupy Boston site at Dewey Square in Boston. I have also been by the Lake Parkencampment in Worcester and have contributed money for supplies in bothlocations. I urge any of you whoare sympathetic to it and curious to go and meet these mostly youngpeople. Step over the barrier ofyour shyness and your habits of quietude and domesticity and get involved.

If you don’tagree with them, or have a different analysis of what is wrong, then by allmeans, find a way to express yourself. I am not trying to persuade you. I am trying to energize you.

But stepping backfor a minute, what I really want to talk about today is this: what does liberal religion ask of us intimes like these? In times ofeconomic turmoil…. In times when economic Sometimes the historic moment takesaway the choice to be on the sidelines and uninvolved.

Now, you, by now,know what I have to say. I sayevery week that you will be happier and healthier and a blessing to the peoplearound you if you live as a spiritual person, with a liberal spirituality. And we think that a spiritual person ishonest and humble. To be aspiritual person, to have a spiritual family, you need to be grateful andreverent. And you need to haveempathy for others, and to be open to the people who are different and to newideas, and to be self-possessed. You need to know who you are and be able to be different from otherswith confidence and still be friends.

Why do we thinkthat those values are what gives a person a healthy spirituality? Because they work; they may not makeyou rich or powerful, but they will make you happier and healthier and ablessing to those around you. Youknow I don’t much care why you believe that these are the essential virtues ofa spiritual life – you can believe in the Bible, or Buddha, or angels, or in apersonal message from God, or from reading Star Trek, Star Wars, the Lord ofThe Rings, or Twilight, or Harry Potter. Honesty, humility, gratitude, reverence, empathy, openness and self-possession,or some similar list, will work.

The spiritualpath in liberal religion is learning, practicing how to be that kind of personand raising your children to that kind of person.

There are allkinds of ways: you can expose yourself to new situations and to new people; youcan try to educate yourself; you can engage in introspection and reflection,even therapy. You can meditate to practice staying in the present moment. I think that it helps to come to churchevery week, just to remind yourself again of what you are trying to do withyour life. And there are all kindsof ways to express those values and virtues.

And everysituation you come into, in your personal life, and in the life of yoursociety, every historical moment gives you the opportunity to develop thosevirtues. The spirit is a muscleand the work that it does is choose. And just like a muscle, it gets stronger every time you make it work.

Our presentmoment in history is a gym for our spiritual muscles. We are faced with choices every day, every time we read thenewspaper, every time we form an opinion about what is going on.

We have toexercise our honesty muscle. I amnot so worried about what we say to others, though that is important. Right now, are you looking at thepresent situation honestly? Arefacing reality? Or are you pretending that reality is something different andbetter than it is?

In April lastyear, I talked about some surveys that researchers did on how Americans thoughtabout the wealth distribution in the United States. Most of us hold wildly inaccurate understandings ofwealth. If you ask people how theythink income and wealth are distributed, they imagine that the United States isfar more egalitarian than it actually is. In fact, they think that the United States is more egalitarian thanSweden actually is. This is a timefor learning, and research and truth. It is time to choose an honest encounter with the truth.

Because we are,for the most part, people who come from families that have worked reasonablyhard and have done reasonably well, we like to think that that is the way thecountry works for everyone. Isthat true? Or would we just liketo think it’s true? The world isoutside your door; go take a look at it !

We need to exerciseour humility. Humility and honestyare deeply related. We have to seeother people clearly and to do so we have to reveal ourselves clearly. If it seems like the American Dream isworking out well for everybody around you – they are working hard and gettingahead and have kept the credit cards under control and have a reasonablemortgage and are saving for their retirement right on schedule – you shouldremember that a bunch of the people around you are hiding what is reallyhappening in their lives. They aretoo ashamed to reveal the truth. (Really, if it is really true that everybody around is doing well, youmight want to join a more diverse country club.) The opposite of humility is shame. Humility exposes, so there is honesty. Shame hides and puts up a false front.

We are talkingabout money here. Our economic culture that is very moralistic about debt andself-reliance. Do you have morethan you deserve? Are you gettingwhat you deserve. Do you deserveyour pay? If you are poor, is itbecause with your lousy attitude, it’s all you deserve. We are more moralisticabout debt and insolvency than we are about sex. Really, think about it.

I say that I amsupporting the Occupy Movement, but that is not exactly true. I think occupying parks and making apermanent demonstration site is a OK, but like all tactics, it will outlive itsusefulness. What reallyattracts me is the frame of the movement of the 99%. That my friends and allies are 99% of the population. That I have a common cause with 99% ofthe population.

Such a frame is acall to exercise the spiritual muscle of empathy and solidarity. Is that really true? How does that change the way that Ilook at people? The policeman? Thefelon? The drug addict? The welfare recipient? The professor? The panhandler? The homeless guy? The doctor and the nurse? The bank teller?

On the one hand,I am a Universalist, and I believe that every person, even the fattest of thefat cat banker, is a child of God and is equally beloved by God and that we allshare the same human fate, but I do believe that there are competing economicinterests in our society. Thinkingof it as 99 to 1 stretches me in ways that make me more empathetic and morecommitted to welfare of people around me.

Karl Barth saidthat the preacher should mount the pulpit with the Bible in one hand and thedaily newspaper in the other, and that he should interpret the newspaperthrough the lens of the Bible. Barth believed that the Bible was the Word of God; it would have beennice for God to leave us a clear instruction manual for life, but I do notbelieve that He did. I do believethat the great religious traditions of the world, including ours, the traditionof Liberal Religion, call us to live according to values higher than profit orloss, higher than paying taxes or getting a refund, higher thanself-sufficiency or dependency. Our tradition calls for us to confront the world depicted in our dailynewspaper as people of Good Spirit, honest, humble and whole-heartedly joinedwith our brothers and sisters.

Power is In the Street

2011-09-28T12:01:00.001-04:00

More political power lies in the street than is ever acknowledged by the media, or by politicians. This is the context in which we should be seeing the Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Boston and Occupy Washington.

By "the street", I mean people turning out with their bodies to make a political statement in a public place. They don't have to be "ordinary" people, in the sense that they were previously not politically active to be very effective.

People turning out in the public square have had a great effect on our politics for the last twenty years.

What?

Weren't the days of the big demonstrations over in the 60's?

Some recent history:

1. 1994: The Clinton Administration planned a bus tour to rally uninsured people to support the health care reform bill he had submitted. The bus tour was to start in Seattle. By the second stop, GOP activists had turned out in the street to meet the tour in opposition to what they called Hillarycare. Their opposition was so fierce that the bus tour was abandoned. (What would have happened if more people had turned in support of health care reform?)

2. In 2000, the GOP turned out people to oppose the Dade County recount in the Bush-Gore battle. They were fierce enough to stall the recount, eventually running out the clock so that the Supreme Court could deliver the election to Bush. (what would have happened if the Democrats had been as willing to mobilize people in the streets instead of relying solely on lawyers. What if Democrats had followed the lead of Jesse Jackson and Florida's African American leaders and pursued the missing overvotes in GOP counties with large African American populations.

3. In 2009, the Health Care battles again. The GOP and the Tea Party turned out people for the Congressional Town Halls to oppose Health Care Reform. The narrative shifted and Democrats on Capitol Hill started getting cautious and the final passage was delayed of a weakened bill. The Town Hall mobilizations set the narrative that culminated in the 2010 mid-term elections. The Town Hall mobilizations gave reality to the Tea Party.

Not all history is on the other side:

1. Cindy Sheehan camped outside of George Bush's pseudo-ranch and wanted to know why her son died in Iraq -- why did we invade Iraq?. I count the end of the Bush administration from that moment.

2. Madison, Wisconsin 2011. Need I say more? People occupying the Capitol broke the narrative of the Tea Party and began to create another story: working class people fighting back against GOP plans for austerity.

What is the main narrative right now in our politics? The story in the news media is the story of the GOP trying to escape the extreme demands of the Tea Party and nominate someone who might be able to beat Obama. The President proposes a jobs bill and Congress stonewalls him, but the news media is entirely focused on the ever growing collection of oddballs that might be persuaded to run for the GOP nomination.

Those that Occupy tell a different story: the 99% are standing up. The real issue that the political class will have to deal with is that people are mad, not about deficits and spending and "illegal" immigrants and evolution and vaccines against HPV, but at foreclosures, and service cutbacks, and lowered wages, and declining benefits, and massive unemployment. They are furious at the further abandonment of the poor and the impoverishment of the middle class. They are mad because the political elite believes that the poor have too much money while the rich have too little. They are enraged that the elite believes the ordinary people feel "entitled" to too much security while the wealthy are beset with crippling "uncertainty." They are angry at Wall Street, the finance capitalists who rule this country, channel investments toward companies that eliminate jobs and destroy small businesses for paper profits.

The only place that this new story is being told, the only place it can be told, is in the street. And when it is told, it will change our political discourse. It will have power.

Justice GA

2011-09-25T23:26:00.001-04:00

Reports from those planning the 2012 Justice GA in Phoenix are positive. It seems that planning groups are meeting productively, resolving differences, avoiding errors and producing a good plan.

This is a testament to their interpersonal skills and wisdom, something I have grown to expect from almost all UU leaders at the Association level. People work well together, hear each other and make decisions with sensitivity and wisdom.

Our collective decision making process is not so good. From what I can tell the decision to go to change the regular Phoenix GA to a new-style Justice GA was not made from a clear strategic vision. Some felt bound by financial interests to go to Phoenix as we normally would have. Some felt we should boycott Phoenix. A compromise was reached that did not have any particular content and about which many have been skeptical. The chances of failure have been pointed out numerous times.

But groups of leaders are in the process of making it work. Who knows it may even be very important, in the end. It may even be transformative of our faith and of the entire political climate around immigration.

I would rather have a bad strategy but leaders with great interpersonal skills than a great strategy and leaders with lousy interpersonal skills.

Class Talk vs Political Post Modernism

2011-09-23T09:33:00.000-04:00

Our current political discourse is dominated by a kind of "political post modernism" which cannot evaluate the truth of anything, just report that "some say that..."

Is there global climate change? Some say "yes"; others say "no". Who can tell?

Will cutting back federal spending revive the economy? The House GOP says "yes"; every major economist says "no". Who can tell?

It IS hard to tell. Climate change deniers and House Republicans have a wealth of facts, data and anecdotes that support their position. The argument can be endless and always inconclusive and intimidating for those who are not similarly equipped.

But Class Talk does start to get at a truth behind all this seemingly multiple truths. It asks "who benefits?" "Who is paying for this research and this advocacy?"

Who benefits from minimizing climate change? Well, the big oil companies for a start. Who benefits from lower capital gains tax rate? Well, the biggest beneficiaries are the people who make most of their money as capital gains -- finance capital firms, wealthy investors.

Oil companies and hedge fund managers have a perfect right to advocate for government policies that benefit them, even at the expense of other groups. So do teachers, autoworkers, and poor people, as well. And everyone has the perfect right to argue that other people share their interest.

Wealthy investors can argue that if you lower our taxes, after we get done pimping our lifestyle, and then making capital investments to eliminate as many jobs as possible, we might get around to creating a few more jobs. But is that in your interest?

Big oil can argue that it's not only better for them, but for all of us, to drill for oil now while it is cheap than to leave it in the ground for later, when it will be even more valuable. Let's eat the goose now! Do you want global warming and roast goose now? Is that your best interests?

Each of us can make our own choices about where our self-interest lies and with whom we share interests, who are our political allies and who is working against our interests.

The reason why the right rails against "class warfare" is because they can't survive the political consequences of people honestly evaluating their own interests in politics. There are too many of us and not enough of them.

Class Talk Is Honest Talk

2011-09-20T16:08:00.000-04:00

"Class" talk would be an improvement in the country's political life.
Right now, everybody talks as though we all agree on the end goals, when we don't, in fact. Everybody wants "to get the economy moving again." The phrase is meaningless. Actually, it has so many different meanings, it might as well be meaningless. Does it mean getting housing prices up? Does it mean reducing the government deficit? Does it mean lowering the unemployment rate? Does it mean increasing lending by banks? Or does it mean some impossible combination, like improving banks' balance sheets while lowering housing prices?

We live in a very unequal society: the inequalities of wealth and income are very real. The differences of power in the society are very real. The differences of role are very real. People who hire people have a different interest than people who are looking for work. The people who own a mortgage on an overvalued house have a very different interest than the person living in it.

Instead of hiding beyond vague generalizations, like "getting the economy moving again", let's have people actually say what they want. Wealthy people want to keep more of their money by paying less taxes. Middle class and poor people want the security of a pension and a health care when they are no longer working. Poor people want help buying food. Unemployed people want jobs. People in Louisiana and Texas often want the oil industry to be very successful. Some of these desires are in conflict and that is why we have a political process, legislatures and elections.

Let's have people advocate for the governmental policies that they think are good for them and good for others.

Class talk is honest talk and honest talk is good for the culture and country. A democratic society can handle it.

Progressives don't see Obama clearly because of our racial blind spots.

2011-08-10T14:12:00.000-04:00

The predominately white progressive intelligentsia don't see Obama clearly because of our racial blind spot. We don't see the role of race in how he seems to understand himself and how other perceive him.

First of all, we think that he understands himself as one of us. A progressive activist, heir to the radical and New Left movements most of us were raised in. He is not; I think that he understands himself (and certainly his real base understands him) as the first African American President. We're thinking Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. We should be thinking about Harold Washington, the first African American mayor of Chicago. Washington was elected and immediately faced a solid wall of opposition from most white aldermen in the city. Washington understood his role as breaking down that wall of opposition and assembling a governing majority, which he finally did after his re-election. Unfortunately, he died shortly thereafter. By the way, one of Washington's political strategists was David Axelrod.

How does Obama break the iron unity of the GOP opposition to assemble a governing majority in the US Congress?

If we progressives were not blinded by our own assumption that our history is the only history, we might see how Obama may be seeing his situation.

White progressives often think that African American elected officials are politically naive. We will far more credit to Cornel West, who has never been elected to anything, than to an elected state senator, or even the President of the United States. We think that Obama does not understand the nature of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell or Eric Cantor, as though he has not sat across the table from them. He doesn't understand how mean they are, we think.

Obama acts entirely within the tradition of mainstream African American political strategy and tactics. The epitome of that tradition was the non-violence of the Civil Rights Movement, but goes back much further in time. It recognizes the inequality of power between whites and blacks. Number one: maintain your dignity. Number two: call your adversaries to the highest principles they hold. Number three: Seize the moral high ground and Number four: Win by winning over your adversaries, by revealing the contradiction between their own ideals and their actions. It is one way that a oppressed people struggle.

Obama has taken a seat at the negotiating table and said "There is no reason why we cannot work out solutions to our problems by acting like responsible adults. That is what people expect us to do and that is why we have entered into public service." That is the moral high ground.

Honestly, I have been reminded more than once in the last few months of those brave college students sitting in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, back in the day. Obama sits at that table, like they did at the counter. Boehner and McConnell and Cantor clown around, mugging for the camera, competing to ritually humiliate Obama, to dump ketchup on his head.

I don't think those students got their sandwiches the first day, but they won in the end.

Obama is winning. Democrats are uniting behind him, although some white progressives think that they could do the job better. Independents are flocking to him. Even some Republicans are getting disgusted with their Washington leaders. Obama is not telling us about lack of seriousness of the Congressional GOP; he is showing us the vivid contrast between what we expect of our leaders and their behavior. The last two and half years have been a revelation of the essential conflicts in our society and politics.

If white progressives understood much about the politics of the African American struggle in the United States, we would see Obama in the context of that struggle and understand him better. And you don't have to be African American to know something about the history of the African American struggle. The books and the testimony is there. It's not all freedom songs. But you have to be convinced that it is something that can teach you something you don't already know.

Negative Mimetic Desire and Negotiating

2011-08-02T07:48:00.000-04:00

All these high-stakes negotiating crises in Washington DC seem to be polarizing rather than unifying -- both for the people in the negotiations and for us, the observers of the spectacle.

I think that it is because they are exercises in Negative Mimetic Desire.

Mimetic Desire is a term I got from Rene Girard and refers to the pattern of wanting what other people want. To go further, in most situations most of us do not know what we want until we observe other people wanting it. We imitate other people's desires.

Negative mimetic desire is wanting what some particular other people reject, because they reject it.

In the very complicated world of public policy and federal government financing, most of us do not have a clue about the merits of one proposal over another. We depend on signals from opinion leaders we trust that this proposal is good and that one is bad. We end up wanting as non-negotiable what the others have said they cannot accept.

During the health care debate, the public option became a non-negotiable symbol, when most of us had not heard of it before. The Individual Mandate was a GOP policy preference up until the point that it became a crucial part of the Health Care bill that Obama wanted. What Obama wants must be bad = negative mimetic desire. The clearest example was Joe Lieberman's quick flip-flop on the proposal to let people over 55 buy into Medicare. At first he liked it because it was an alternative to the Public Option (which was to be opposed because the left wanted it), but within a week, he moved to oppose the 55-Medicare buy-in, because as Lieberman stated explicitly, the proposal was making too many liberals happy.

Of course, in the legislative process leaders signal one set of priorities in public and then proceed to compromise them in negotiations. As a result, followers are confused and feel betrayed. Impatience with legislation grows.

It used to be that Congress passed individual authorization and appropriation bills, for each part of the government. Then, they were consolidated into a single budget resolutions. Now there are these deal last minute deals under the deadline of either government shutdown or default. The deals get bigger and the negotiations get more symbolic and abstract and the public gets more and more polarized as one set after another of supposedly non-negotiable positions get bandied about. Everything becomes winning and losing. Eventually the leaders compromise, but the rest of us don't.

Appreciating the Unitarian Universalist Theological Method

2011-07-26T11:26:00.000-04:00

"Solidarity, Grandiosity, Reflection, Discovery"

I admit that ever since I came back to this, the religious home of my childhood, in 1989, I have been cranky about UU Theology. After all, how deep can an agnostic theology go? It seemed often to be a mishmash of feel-good generalizations, psychobabble and anodyne exhortations, seasoned with the spice of leftwing cant. It resisted making any substantive link with Liberal Christian Theology, from which it has half-emerged, and so it floated free.

I have come to appreciate our methods more, now. I am not being ironic, or sarcastic, or setting you up for a punchline. This is for real, not an extended improvisational Robin Williams riff. I will goof around a little on the way to my serious conclusions.

Step One: Solidarity.

Ever have the feeling that much of our theologizing is rationalizations for our already taken political and social views? You're not crazy to think so, because that is what much of it is. I am saying that is a feature and not a bug.

We move through the world, much like everyone else does, responding to the events and people we encounter, in real life and in the news and media. Based on our experiences, our learnings, we see ourselves in solidarity with some people and not with others. That's OK; the world is a divided place and we cannot be on all sides of every conflict. This human act of seeing ourselves as being allied with others is the beginning of our theologizing.

Step Two: Grandiosity.

OK, I am being a bit ironic with this, but there is a way that we inflate our preferences into great and glittering generalizations. Our first principle is one example: it began as a broad anti-discrimination statement, a rhetorical inflation of that statement that we welcomed everyone regardless of race, color, creed, national origin etc. etc. etc. Such statement were common in the 1950's and 1960's when Unitarianism and Universalism merged in the midst of the Civil Rights struggle. Our mainstream was trying to express our sense of solidarity with the victims of discrimination and prejudice. Through a long process, what emerged was a statement about the inherent worth and dignity of every person. It was a bit grandiose, but in a good way.

Without grandiosity, young high school athletes see playing tennis as a way to build good habits which will give them a good fitness routine when they are middle-aged desk jockeys. With grandiosity, they play tennis because someday they will win at Wimbledon. Many people lose their natural adolescent grandiosity as they mature, and it is a tragedy.

Our solidarity with environmentalism became a grandiose statement about respecting the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part.

Our commitment to continuing the struggle for racial justice became a broad statement declaring ourselves as not only non-racist, but also anti-racist and further, anti-oppression, which is becoming the greatest athlete of all times in every sport.

3. Step Three: Reflection.

The gap between our grandiose formulations of our sentiments and the practical realities we live in becomes the creative tension the drives our theologizing. Our grandiosity caused us to articulate a theory of inherent worth and dignity which has led us to a radical humanism. I look at our solidarity with transgender people and wonder if we would have gotten there if we had not gone beyond solidarity with the victims of discrimination based on factors over which the victim has no control. Starting from the point of view that everyone has worth and dignity right now, as they are, accelerated the process.

Our theologizing now seems to center on these three things:
a. what does inherent worth and dignity mean? How does it relate to moral and ethical distinctions between good and evil? What is the nature of humanity? Where do evil actions come from? What is the relationship between our own inherent worth and dignity and the injustices we participate in and the privileges we enjoy?

b. what does it mean to live in an interdependent web of life, where we are a part of the cause of everything we see and where we are conditioned by everything else? How can we be moral and ethical when we have no place to stand to make a judgement? How can we talk about God when there is no transcendent anymore -- nothing that is the unmoved mover? There is nothing outside of the web?

c. Is oppression a part of human nature? Or is it an accident of history which can be overcome? Is everyone a victim of oppression? If so, how can it be oppression and not just the fact that life can be hard at times?

4. Step Four: Discovery

We end up in new places as a result of these reflections; we develop new ethical and moral demands. I look at the movement toward ethical eating that seems to be developing among younger UU's. To me it looks like a replay of some of the arguments between the hippies and the radicals of 1970-1975. I chose the hamburgers and politics then. But, I also realize that something new and different is going on -- that gestures of solidarity with the poor and with animals is taking some of us to new places.

Conclusion: I think that Unitarian Universalist theology has the great strength of pragmatism; it arises out of the real world and our experiences in it. It moves from practice to theory and back again in a cycle of learning and knowledge. It focuses us not on metaphysics (what is the nature of reality: a philosophical dead end for religion) but on ethics and morality. It asks us to speak to humanity about the real choices we face together.

Yes, the great theological traditions of all the world's religions are still there. But our job is not to determine exactly how we fit in with them, how to harmonize our truths with theirs. Our job is struggle with how to live, act, celebrate and suffer, and finally die in this, the only world we have right now.

Liberal Religion's Answer to Oslo

2011-07-25T12:20:00.000-04:00

Multi-culturalism in inevitable. The process of globalization will lead to a blurring of religious and cultural differences; there are both melting pots and mosaics in our future. Liberal Religion thinks that this a good thing; we welcome it as a frequently liberating process. The future is secular governments, pluralistic culture, religious diversity, free religious organizations and the rights of private conscience and we think that it will be great.

There are people in the world who fear the future and some who will try to violently derail it. While they pose a very real and concrete danger to the future of liberal society, they are fighting a losing battle. But history tells us people trying to stop progress can be unspeakably cruel and violent. We recognize this danger. We call upon the state to keep a watchful eye on reactionary and racist groups and to vigorously enforce the law.

We call upon all people to be vigilant against any form of racism, national chauvinism and cultural reaction. Each of us must make clear our intention to live in a peaceful, multicultural world as a positive good. Racists assume that the silent majority is with them; Liberal religion should lead the way in making clear that this assumption is not true.

We have a right to defend ourselves.

We are not afraid of the future. We believe that the human impulses toward solidarity, friendship, curiosity, and cultural adaption will continue to shape our future together, judy as they have in the past. We are one humanity growing into consciousness of ourselves as one.

(To be clear: when I refer to "Liberal Religion", I am referring to a broad group of people. Unitarian Universalists are but one type of LIberal Religion. I include in this most mainline Protestants, many Catholics, many Jews, some Muslims, lots of the unchurched, many adherents of Western Buddhism and many others.)

The Hot Mess

2011-07-13T10:10:00.000-04:00

I think Scott Wells named it first: 2012 Justice GA in Phoenix was going to be a Hot Mess. Hot because it is Arizona and a Mess because it is where UU earnestness, idealism, entitlement and impracticality will meet in a glorious disorganized failure under the unforgiving sun. Instead of Selma with Sand, it will be Altamont.

It's always useful to remember that the future hasn't happened yet.

Rev. Nate Walker of Philadelphia said in a sermon that one of the roles of the church, including the liberal church was "to set the moral agenda." He said this in a sermon about vegetarianism that I found, ummm, challenging, but his point applies.

By going to Phoenix, we are trying to rewrite the nation's moral agenda.

Immigration has been viewed by most as a labor policy issue, or a budgetary issue, or national integrity issue. Do immigrants, documented or undocumented, distort the labor market in the US, "take our jobs"? Are immigrants attracted by more generous social services and stress our state budgets? Can a great nation survive if it cannot control its own border?

None of these concerns are not real.

UU's are trying to rewrite the nation's moral agenda to say that the border and immigration belong on it. It is a moral problem that our economy depends on and uses a class of workers who are set apart, have fewer rights, and fewer opportunities, many of whom are classified as "illegal" people. It is a moral outrage that most Americans accept this as a matter of course, just the way it is. Just as it was a matter of course that the cotton we used everyday was grown by impoverished sharecroppers who worked under a legal system that was stacked against them.

UU's are trying to write onto the nation's moral agenda that racism is at work here. Not just prejudice against Latino-a's, but an economic system that assumes that the Anglo immigrants will be dominant and the Latino-a-and indigenous peoples will be subordinate to them.

The fact that these assumptions are based on race is demonstrated whenever we have to be reminded that some Hispanic people have deeper roots in Arizona than the recent migrants from Michigan. We assume a color-coding of legal and economic status.

UU's come to these issues from an anti-racist perspective. It is not labor solidarity that takes us to Arizona. Nor is it ethnic solidarity. We are mostly white and not often permanently in the low-skill, low-wage labor pool. But as a religious movement, UU's have been learning about racism, and are beginning to see it at work. And there are millions of people just like us around the country, and for the most part, they do not see the issues of immigration and the border as important moral issues. They are opposed to racism in general, but do not see the racism at the heart of these issues. That's our struggle too; we are teaching and learning among ourselves. But many of those millions look to UU's for a signal about what is morally significant and what is not. It matters that we say that this should be on our society's moral agenda.

Now whether we can pull this off, through our board/staff/GA/GAPC structure is another story. It could turn out to be a "hot mess", but usually most things turn out to be less awful and less wonderful as one fears and hopes. But my argument is that it is very much worth trying.

Sermonating and Social Media

2011-07-10T11:50:00.000-04:00

Phillip Lund, Cynthia Landrum, Scott Wells and Dan Harper have been discussing sermons and social media. Their general consensus is that the 20 minute sermon encased in the church worship service puts the message in a form-factor that is both obsolete and too individual in its creation.

I disagree that there is a problem with the individual creation of the sermon. Sermons are not really individually created -- ministers have their circle of people that they use for coming up with and testing ideas that go into the sermon. Whether people do that over the dinner table, at a meeting, at a coffee shop or on social media of some sort doesn't change the fact that in the end a good sermon comes from many people but no good sermon is written by committee.

Now, the other point, the terrible mismatch with the way that we now expect to receive information and the customary church service, I think deserves some deep consideration.

In social media, content rules. Somebody has to keep putting new stuff out there for everyone else to react to. There's only so long that people will want to check up on what everyone else had for lunch.

Sermons are the principle form of content being produced by the church. Every week, hundreds of UU's and thousands of other ministers, produce a big hunk of content which presents their religious point of view on Life. Lots of that content is wise, perceptive, funny, challenging, meaningful and informative. Most of it exists as sound heard by a couple of hundred people at the most.

That experience of the sermon in worship should not be discounted. There is something about being in the same room with a compelling speaker that is unique and irreplaceable. Despite all our other sources of comedic information people still want to go hear a stand-up comedian perform. "Live" still works.

But those live performances of sermons do not travel well. Most of them never get out of the room that they are in. Yet that content could travel in the streams of social media, but not in the same form as it now exists.

I like Ted talks. I think if preachers packaged their sermon content like a Ted talk, many of them would travel in social media. That means that they have to have (1) clear labeling of content in the title (2) short digestible length (3) high production values and (4) focus on the message vs focus on church or denominational advertising. I think of the videos produced by the "it gets better' campaign -- simple direct messages to a particular audience.

I think that our ministers are fully capable of crafty such messages, but most lack the skills, equipment and time to turn their sermons into inspirational - It Gets Better- Ted talks. Most are not equipped or ready to turn their sermons into a straight video recording of their sermon in their robe and pulpit now.

What we need is body that can advise and consult on technical matters, invite participation by gifted ministers, help them produce the content in suitable form, edit it and put together the final package. If it could produce one a week that would be freely available to share through social media, it would be a good thing. I would bet that the best ones would go around the world and to places where we never go.

I am confident that the people we have participating in social media will be able to use such content in ways that build their networks, stimulate conversation and connections, and support our building based congregations and new forms of community.

Call to Worship for Christmas Eve

2009-12-24T23:37:00.002-05:00

Time to turn off the cell phones. Time to put the pagers on stun. It’s even time to put a piece of duct tape on the face of your watch. It’s Christmas Eve and time is standing still for a moment.

It is the time, maybe the only time of the year, when here and now drift away and we fall under the spell of story-time.

Tonight we are both here, AND on a lonely hillside outside of Bethlehem.

Tonight, we are with each other, friends and family, returning students and relatives from far away, AND we are also with the Magi, on a journey and such a hard time for journey.

Tonight we listen to our choir, AND we listen to choirs of angels, a whole heavenly host of angels we have heard on high.

Tonight, like every night, is new, a never happening before moment in onrushing time, AND yet, we have been here before, done this before, told this story before, and heard it before.

There is way that the story we tell tonight is always happening: birth and death and taxes, weary travelers with no place to stay, babies born, sudden signs of grace and glory and surprising generosity.

The past and the present are closely woven tonight, and we sense the presence of our own eternal selves, our souls perhaps, with our everyday selves tonight.

And when, at this evening’s end, we pass a visible sign of grace, the light of a candle, from hand to hand, we will see, the radiance and beauty of one another, as seen through the eyes of a timeless love.

Come, it is Christmas Eve, let us worship together.

Keeping the X in Xmas

2009-12-23T11:13:00.000-05:00

Are we to be Wise Ones, with our eyes fixed on the star in the inky night sky, always looking up, each riding on our own camel, swaying under the starry sky?

Or are we to be shepherds, a band of what were surely brothers, who come and go out of the Nativity story as a group?

The story reminds us of the two dimensions of religion – the vertical dimension that links each one of us with what is above us – what some call our Higher Power, God. And the other dimension is the horizontal – the relationships between people, the community.

The horizontal and the vertical.

Christmas is both vertical and horizontal. On the one hand, we are to look up and see Jesus coming down from heaven and entering into the life of the Earth. We are to look up and see the angels gathering to sing, and we are to look up and see the star as it leads to the stable the Christ child lays.

On the other hand, Christmas is horizontal – the gathering of friends and family – over the river and through the woods we go – horizontally out from our homes and hearths to meet one another. It is to see one another again, to break bread together and gather around and sing some songs together.

Christmas has been an uneasy combination of the Christian high holy day of Christ’s birth (the vertical dimension) and the old pagan village Winter festival (the horizontal dimension.)

We call the vertical “the religious” and the horizontal “the secular” and when the religious folks say that we need to remember the true meaning of the season and keep Christ in Christmas, it is because they feel that the vertical dimension of the holiday is getting shorted.

When it comes to Hanukah, those whose tastes run toward the vertical, the religious stories, weave a tale about light in the darkness and faith in God, trying to reconcile these two very different holidays together. Such talk always seems a little forced to me. I do not think that the vertical ladder of meaning between Christmas and Hanukah reach from the same place and go to the same place. These holidays come together in the horizontal. If this is a season of fun and festival, let us leave no one out, and whether it is latkes or Christmas cookies, let’s all have another, and just be glad that we are friends.

Let us keep the X in Xmas: the extra cookies, the exceptional frivolity, the extraordinary festiveness, the exquisite music, the exotic foods from faraway places, the extravagant gifts, the excitement, the expectations, the exorbitant and the exuberant, the expensive, the expansive and all the other forms of excess that makes this season ours. Let us keep the X in Xmas. Let us keep the horizontal dimension.

There is a religious point to all of this. The story of the Nativity is this: according to the Christian story, when God chose to make his presence known on the earth, he did not come as stone tablet, nor as a scroll in the temple, nor as a dictated manuscript. God came to earth not as an idea, or a principle, or a truth to be chiseled in stone. God came not as an article of faith, or a point of doctrine to be disputed and analyzed. God came as a person, as a baby, as a child, as a man. And what do you do with a person? You relate to him or her? You talk with, and walk with, and touch and console, and hold hands with, and laugh with, and cry with, and be with. With. With. With. With. With.

On Christmas we celebrate the moment that God got horizontal with us.

A Blue Dog with a Blue Nose

2009-09-30T17:35:00.000-04:00

OK, I am able to comprehend that Kent Conrad, the only Unitarian Universalist serving in the US Senate, differs from me on the question of the public option in the health care reform debate. It is not a matter of faith, after all.

But why on earth does a Unitarian Universalist vote $50 million for abstinence-only sexuality education programs in an amendment proposed by Orrin Hatch (R-Mormon)? This really creeps me out. I thought that it was a matter of faith to us that we told our kids the truth and gave them real information.

UUMA Politics -- 1000+ members & 3 hour annual business meeting

2009-09-15T18:13:00.000-04:00

The UUMA is an organization of over 1000 people, with an volunteer board. The organization meets for business once in a year in a business meeting that lasts a couple of hours in a hotel ballroom. The members of the organization pay it fitful attention for 362 days a year.

The Exec is going to make proposals for how to go forward on a range of issues. They are going to publish them, and few people are going to read them. But organizational democracy depends on people reading them and preparing their response.

The Exec this year did so for a dues increase and hiring an Executive Director.

When the organization gets to the business meeting, the proposals are pretty well set; there will be no opportunity for extended discussion and devising new proposals on the fly. Really, there are only two alternatives available if you don't like the proposal presented by the Exec. (1) Urge a "No" vote -- and have your arguments ready (2) Be ready with some amendments or substitutes that you try to pass. Those could include delaying implementation, restricting implementation, and calling for further clarification on certain parts until more study has been done.

If you just think that the proposal is half-baked, and needs more consideration, voting "no" sends it back for more work.

Preparing a strategy for influencing the decision of a 1000 member organization operating in a 2-3 hour business meeting is not "bringing boxing gloves"; it is appropriate self-differentiation and self-assertion.

The Exec's proposal for a dues increase and an Executive Director passed. Some people registered their disagreement but did not have strategy and tactics ready to be effective in the situation of decision-making process of the organization. (It seemed to me that those opposed had the tactics appropriate to a small group decision making process -- they announced that they had concerns about the proposal and were opposed to it and they assumed that the process would be extended long enough for the whole group to explore their concerns and devise a compromise.) Predictably, they lost, for which they blame the UUMA Exec for a bad process.

Since then, the Exec has hired an ED. There are questions about the process of that choice, but was it contrary to the instructions given by the organization through the proposal that passed? I don't know; that's a good question. Someone could look into that. But the next point of decision will be the next business meeting. Members of the organization can give further instruction to the Exec on how to move from an Acting ED to a permanent ED at the next business meeting, if they come prepared to do so. In the meantime, figuring out how to tell whether the ED is doing a good job or not is much more important.

The UUMA is going to grow into a larger and larger organization. It will have subgroups with different interests, and maybe even competing interests and concerns. Counting on an Exec is move us along by somehow reconciling and balancing all these interests and concerns through their goodwill and pastoral skills is childish and dependent.

And after having our congregants project that kind of parental authority onto us all year ("please take care of me, I am not happy with the way the church is going and feel sad and lonely.") it is perhaps tempting to do the same to the UUMA Exec.

But democracy in an organization requires work and preparation, not only from the leadership but from the rank and file.

End of Life Issues

2009-08-11T07:59:00.003-04:00

End of Life issues have become politically hot again. Last time, it was Terri Schiavo's sad case. This time it is Section 1322 of one of the Health Care Reform bills that permits doctors to bill Medicare once every five years for a consultation with a patient on end of life issues, including living wills, durable powers of attorney, dnr orders etc. Much of this discussion is outright lies and opportunism, willfully leaping from that relatively prosaic issue to the issues of assisted suicide and euthanasia.

But there is a religious dimension to these discussions. Some Pentecostalists believe that to discuss end of life issues at all is to deny the power of God to work a miracle and heal even the most mortally ill person. And, according to their faith, God does not arbitrarily heal some and allow most to die, but is guided by the purity of the faith of those praying for the miracle. To entertain the slightest doubt that God can and will save your loved one from death demonstrates the lack of faith that condemns your loved one to death. For the believer who prays by the bed of a loved one approaching death, you still can hope for a full complete and miraculous recovery IF you are successful in pushing out of your mind any thought that death is inevitable, or is a welcome relief to suffering, or even the working of God's will.

Within such a faith construct, to have a matter-of-fact discussion of end of life issues is to renounce a vital element of one's faith.

I was confronted with faith while working as a hospital chaplain in Dallas, Texas, among both African American and Anglo Protestants. Less so among Roman Catholics.

What struck me though was how things changed once the patient died. "Thy will be done." As much as believers fervently prayed for a miracle before death, they accepted that God had not chosen to save their loved one at the moment of death. "Thy Will Be Done." "God wanted her more than we did." etc.

Such a faith stance is not held by every Pentecostalist, of course. Who knows how many? But I think enough do that any discussion of end of life issues will always strike a nerve, and generate a reaction, which can be picked up on by opportunistic organizers.

People are entitled to their religious views; they just cannot expect that the state will institutionalize their views.

Going Away

2009-07-17T12:13:00.002-04:00

I am heading out of country for a couple of weeks. I will not be accepting comments on this blog starting tonight until I come back. I may post a little, but probably not, and certainly not about UUA politics.

Factions Create Democracy

2009-07-17T11:16:00.002-04:00

I have called for the creation of continuing groups of UU's to recruit candidates for District offices and Board Trustees: factions. I think that they are what we need to increase democracy in the UUA. I think that they are a better way than focusing our democratic energy into highly symbolic campaigns for the UUA President and Spokesmodel.

Factions create policy alternatives, through a process of competition with others and criticism of existing decisions. Policy alternatives create choices and choices create interest.

Factions orient voters to the overall situation. What I hear is that most UU's think that there are really just two factions: the insiders and the outsiders, and you can't tell one from the other. Actually, I would suspect that there are several groupings of people who have different priorities for the UUA. It would help everyone participate if we were to know who saw each other as allies, and rivals. Most of us use party affiliation as a tool for figuring who's who and what's what in politics. Once you get beyond a small town in which everyone knows each other, people need to know the teams before they can connect to the politics of a community.

Factions create independent non-official voices. Right now, almost all of the media content about Unitarian Universalism comes from official sources. People like blogs because they are independent voices from observers' points of view. But blogs are individual and personal and are not instruments for getting enough power to make something happen. If there is anyone out there who thinks that I make sense, what are you going to do to make what we agree on happen? Nominate me for UUA office? Not a good idea.

Many people are repelled by the state of party politics in the USA, and would wonder why we would want that in the UUA. I have not a shred of fear that UU's would rapidly form themselves into two factions that engage in that level of conflict. My guess is that for every person that aligned with a faction, there would as many that aligned with none and as many who joined them all. Remember we are the religious home of people who seriously describe

themselves as Humanist-Christian-Pagans, Rational Mystics, Christian Atheists and Eco-Feminist Buddhist Jews. Over identification with a group is not our problem. Factions would operate less like gangs, and more like think-tanks.

I think a good model is the religiously identified UU groups. They represent points of view, create material, enrich our theological discussions and make it possible to have panel presentations. They have not gone to war with each other.

Factions break down the insider-outsider dichotomy. I don't think that there is an inner club that is motivated by their particular self-interest. (There was one at one time, when Unitarianism was a Boston Yankee institution, but those days are gone.) There are, of course, insiders, in that there is a group of people who are experienced and knowledgeable about the institutions at the core of UUism. And there are outsiders, people who have not been interested in the past and are just getting involved. And yes, race and class and ethnicity work to keep people who want to be insiders (and some who have been around long enough to be insiders) on the outside, which we work on. But a faction, united around a common goal, is an alliance between some insiders and some outsiders.

My argument for a Single Candidate Search Process

2009-07-17T09:48:00.002-04:00

The proposal now floating around for reforming the UUA Presidential election process is for a Presidential Search Committee to put forward, after deliberation, at least two candidates for the UUA Presidency. Then the campaign begins.

I argue for a single candidate, chosen by the Search committee.

Why is one better than two?

1. The problem in the process is that campaign -- time and expense. Having two official nominees does not solve that problem. That problem will be solved to some extent by online and electronic communication.

2. The necessities of the campaign itself limits who can run. Prospects must be in a place in their career that they can devote that amount of time and energy. Others have identified who is in that pool: ministers in multi-staff churches, national staff, the retired and the independently wealthy. A more subtle inhibitor is also at work: the risk. A candidate in a multi-staff church, the national staff person essentially risks their present position for the Presidency. You can't always go back to your old job if you lose.

3. Two candidate races create and exaggerate polarities. Growth vs. Depth, for example. As if, those two are somehow in contradiction to each other. It's unfortunate when two self-selected candidates and their supporters draw these kind of contrasts, but a Presidential Search Committee who has to choose two candidates will be consciously shaping these contradictions, giving them life. I am troubled by this. I don't want the Presidential Search Committee to decide what the most important unresolved issues are; I would rather they choose the best person, on balance, for the job.

Gini Courter on the Election Process

2009-07-17T08:23:00.002-04:00

On Election-L email list, there has been a discussion about the present method of electing the President and other officers of the UUA. Gini Courter weighed in with this statement, that I am reproducing here.

Friends -

A number of people who've posted recently assert that the current method of selecting the UUA President or Moderator "isn't broken" so it doesn't need to be fixed. The list of people who know that the current process IS broken includes Bill Sinkford, Peter Morales, and Laurel Hallman. I agree with them, and with the two candidates for Moderator in 2001 who were also critical of the current process. As far as I know, no one who has run opposed for President or Moderator in the past thirty years thinks the current nomination-campaign-election process is just, equitable, or compassionate, or that it truly reflects our values. (Perhaps some candidate fully affirmed the current process, but if so, they weren't vocal about it during the campaign.)

The people who have run for President and Moderator think we should be willing to consider the possibility that our election process is too long, too grueling, too costly, and/or too disconnected from congregational life and leadership. We should consider whether the barriers to candidacy might be inappropriately high, or in some cases, just inappropriate. We should discuss whether a more transparent nomination process would be more inclusive and more in keeping with our values than our current highly opaque nomination methods.

We might even wonder why we require candidates for President and Moderator to raise tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to campaign to serve our Association. I don't know this year's finances, but in 2001, both Moderator candidates and one of the two Presidential candidates ended their campaigns with outstanding debts that they had to cover personally.

At the April Board meeting, your UUA Trustees made a commitment to Bill, Peter, and Laurel that they would bring a set of amendments to the election process to GA in 2010. The draft amendments offered by the Board describe one possibility; the amendments were published in this year's GA agenda so that congregations could begin discussing them now and provide feedback for a final version that needs to be ready by mid-January 2010. The trustees would love to hear our congregations' best thinking on this. I know some trustees are on this list, but you can also contact them directly. You'll find your trustees' email addresses on this page: http://www.uua.org/aboutus/governance/boardtrustees/19052.shtml

Can't have it both ways.

2009-07-16T08:32:00.003-04:00

On the one hand, it is widely agreed that the Unitarian Universalist Association has not, in its 40 years of existence, lived up to the potential of liberal religion in this country. We believe that there are at least a million people out there whose religious views are in sympathy with ours, but as a collective body, we cannot manage to put a welcoming, inspiring, inviting, culturally appropriate center of liberal religion into their path. We are an underperforming organization.

On the other hand, efforts to actually change one or more feature of the organization runs into a solid wall of "if it's not broke, don't fix it!". Our governance is fine the way it is. (But our inability to perform well stems from our governance !) The main definitional statement of who we are is fine the way it is (it has not communicated effectively for sustained growth for 15 years now !).

This dichotomy (we are great; everything we do is the very best that we can do vs. we are small, failing, repelling people as fast as we are attracting them, demographically isolated.) is a sign of defensiveness and anxiety.

We need to change what we are doing if we want a different result. And we need a different result because we are not fulfilling what we know that we are capable of. And that means being open to different ideas about how to do things. Really, suggesting a different way of electing our President on a blog is not quite taking an axe to the foundations of our faith.

More Democracy

2009-07-16T08:20:00.005-04:00

To increase participation in elections, and help clarify the choices before the electorate, the UUA Board ought to recognize groups whose purpose is to recruit and support candidates for District offices and boards, and for the Board of Trustees.

People who wish to influence the UUA as a whole should have the opportunity to organize themselves, promote their views, and become part of the official leadership of the Association. Yes, we need factions and parties.

Another Process for the President

2009-07-15T00:30:00.003-04:00

Let's elect the next President the same way that we call ministers in our congregations.

1. Elect a Search Committee that is broadly representative of all of Unitarian Universalism.

2. Give them lots of time to work, and consult with people in all areas of the UUA.

3. Let them interview prospective Presidents, looking for the one that seems to match what most people seem to want in the next leader.

4. Let them make a recommendation.

5. Let the people affirm their recommendation through a supermajority.

The result of that type of process in our congregations is that we usually end up with a leader who enjoys broad support in the congregation. The process of ministerial transition increases the unity and sense of common purpose in the congregation, rather than dividing it.

Our present election process exaggerates our differences. Whoever wins starts out with a sizable minority of UU's regretting the way it turned out, and skeptical of the new President's efforts.

If you imagined a congregation choosing their next minister the way that the UUA chooses its next President, most congregations would splinter.

We do need a way for people who are frustrated with our present course to be able to act through the democratic process to change it. For example, a person who thinks that we should do less social action, but more evangelism, should have a way to change the priorities of the denomination. They should be able to run candidates who have those priorities and make a case to other voters.

I think that should be what happens when we elect our Board Trustees. Those elections should be the place where individuals and groups put forward candidates that promise to the move the UUA in one direction or another. Those elections are closer to home and offer more chances for lots of participation. They should be more political and competitive, and as a result more interesting.

Under policy governance, the Board is where the vision and the direction of the organization is set. The Board should be where specific and competing points of views are reconciled through decision and compromise. The President becomes less of visionary, and more of a person who can spark the staff and volunteers to fulfill our common goals.

Frank talk 3

2009-07-11T10:46:00.004-04:00

KJR in the comments offers this analysis of power in the UUAoC:

I think the President and staff set UUA priorities --- with the main limitation being finding donors willing to fund the priorities.

The obvious question that comes to mind is "where does that leave the Board?" And the second question that comes up is "What about congregations?"

And the third question: "When you say congregations, are you talking about the ministers of congregations, or the laity?"

All these questions circle around the most important misalignment in the way that things work. On the one hand are the ministers of the larger congregations, who one could say are the most successful UU religious leaders among us. On a day-by-day basis, they lead the institutions in which a large proportion of UU's experience UUism and they are successfully meeting people's religious needs. The affairs of the association, however, are a part-time concern of these leaders. And frequently, to the laity in the larger churches, the association and the district are not as interesting or involving as the local parish.

On the other hand is the staff. UUA affairs are their daily work, and they are in regular contact with many lay people and ministers across the country, the UUA activists who attend district conferences and GA, and serve on various task forces and committees of the Association. They are viewed as the leaders of the UUA. Their career path does not necessarily lead them through larger congregations.

I think that there is a consensus that the staff needs more direction. Someone else needs to set the priorities and direction. Morales believes that the solution is for the President to be a better manager and administrator. I am not sure of what happened, but this seems to be what he took away from his experience on the national staff.

Hallman and Courter both believed that the problem was not management but governance and the solution was to strengthen the Board of Trustees in relationship to the President. Courter's emphasizes the Board as serving the congregations. Hallman based her campaign among the ministers of the larger congregations. But both saw developing a countervailing center of authority in the Association to the President and Staff.

In my never humble opinion, I agree that the Board represents the best vehicle to bring the concerns of the congregation into a position of power in the Association. But neither the election process of the President, nor the election process of the Board seem to work to represent genuine congregational (and ministerial) concerns very well.

I have two questions now.

1. What are the best practices of denominational affairs committees, especially in larger churches? How do we overcome the tendency of larger church congregation to be uninterested in UUA affairs?

2. What are the relationships between UUA Trustees from the Districts and the District UUMA chapter? Does it matter if the Trustee is a minister?

Frank Talk 2

2009-07-09T22:34:00.002-04:00

Philocrites in the comments offers the kind of concrete analysis of the powers that are at play within the UUAoC.

I am looking for some frank talk because I see that two stories out there about how the UUAoC is governed. One is the story that says that there is some shadowy group of others who actually run things while the story-teller is not powerful. The other is a Kum-Ba-Yah theory that emphasizes that everyone involved, no matter their position in the structure and their thinking, is a good person trying their very best and deserves our emotional support.

Somewhere in between there is a concrete analysis over who has power over what and why, and who wants some of that power to achieve different purposes and ends.

I would like some frank talk about some of these issues:

1. who controls our public presentation of ourselves as a national religious body? Ministers are frequently not on board with the themes and contents of our advertising campaigns, which pretty much guarantees that they will not coordinated with what people are hearing in the pews. The "standing on the side of love" is better -- how did that come about?

2. who sets the priorities for our growth strategy? I think that one murky issue in the last campaign was the Pathways experiment, which revealed all sorts of rivalries and resentments among churches over money -- national level investment in growth.

Who's got some other issues that need some frank talk and real analysis?

"We Can Become the Religion for Our Time"

2009-07-09T10:17:00.002-04:00

I don't think that the Dalai Lama talks like that about his mission in the world.

I think Unitarian Universalism is honest and authentic. I think that it has changed my life, made me happier and made me a better person. I recommend it to everyone.

But its value, and its mission, is not dependent on its success, or even its relevance to the overall culture.

Frank Talk

2009-07-09T10:04:00.002-04:00

I have teed off on the Kum-Ba-Ya Campaign as part of a general atmosphere which discourages frank talk within the Association about the Association.

For example: I had a brief talk with Gini Courter in one of those GA parties about a history of competing theories about UUA governance. There's a "Weak President/Strong Board" approach and a "Strong President/Weak Board" approach.

Who knew?

Just as an exercise in beginning to map out the politics of the UUA, do the following:

1. Rank the following groups in terms of their political power in the UUAoC. The Board of Trustees, The Moderator, The UUA President, the Staff, The UUMA Exec, The Senior Ministers of the Largest Churches, the Ministers of Mid-size and Small Churches, The regular GA attendees, the body of ARAOM activists, the District Boards, The Large Donors.

2. What do you think each of the groups named above want for the UUA, beyond finding the unicorns of growth, abundance and relevance?

3. Who are you? What do you want?

Hissy Fits

2009-07-09T08:56:00.002-04:00

We all remember the time that Move-On ran an ad directed at General David Petraeus asking him to not "betray us" when he testified to Congress about the surge in Iraq. The GOP disingenuously interpreted that as an accusation of the General as being a potential traitor to the country. Oh, the hue and cry that went up, and the Democrats in Congress who were trying to stop war funding disavowed and condemned the antiwar group as being beyond the limits of decent Americans.

Some commentators, especially Digby at Hullabaloo, called the GOP response a "hissy fit." Manufacturing outrage at deliberately misinterpreted comments to change the subject of debate.

I think that what I call the Candidates Covenant for a Kum-ba-Ya Campaign provided the cover and context for a whole bunch of hissy fits, from the Morales campaign. People will want examples, and frankly, it is too tiresome to get down into the weeds of the particularities (which is the point of the tactic -- to bog debate down into these kind of detailed reconstructions of the precise wording of this or that statement.), so I will just ask you to recognize the tactic when you see it.

The UUA Election

2009-07-08T08:24:00.004-04:00

Nobody knows what the UUA President is supposed to do, so nobody knows how to choose a candidate for UUA President. I think that this was the small little fault at the heart of the recent election process.

A bigger problem, in my eyes, was that the wrong candidate won, but that's just me, and I'll get over it.

The biggest problem of all is the big wet blanket of sweetie-goo that smothered the life out of the campaign and cut off any process of real debate and challenge to the underlying logic of each campaign. It was a Kum-Ba-Yah campaign. As far as I could tell, the rules were that all speech about the campaign had to start from the presumption that each candidate was equally wonderful (and thus, essentially the same), and that one could state a preference only in terms of your own personal preference, based on which one inspired you more, but without making any real comparison.

You have wonder about the level of anxiety in an organization which tries to keep conflict and differences of opinion so safely contained and walled off.

I'm Back!

2009-07-08T08:16:00.003-04:00

I never have time to blog during the church year, so I blog in the summer. Beats going to the beach or having fun.

I am overflowing with opinions right now, on such subjects as the UUA Presidential election and all, so let's get this party started.

Further on Communion

2007-10-07T23:12:00.000-04:00

I included Levertov poem in the UUCF communion (previous post) for a reason: because it speaks to the skeptic in all of us who questions the morality of God who allows the innocent to suffer etc.

I think that this is an important question for many UU's. The poem is about the necessity of confronting the reality of suffering before it can be moved beyond, or redeemed. For over 10 years, I have reading and re-reading this poem because it shows, but does not explain, the redemption of suffering without explaining it.

The reality of the world is that there is much unjust suffering, some at the hands of human beings and some at the hands of fate.

Somehow, that suffering can, in some situations, be redeemed: creating compassion in others, gratitude. Witness the many nurses who deal with death and suffering all the time, but become even more compassionate as a result, and not more callous, which might well be a more probable result. The fact is that some suffering is redeemed -- Mandela comes out of prison not seeking vengeance -- people forgive their parents' shortcomings and even cruelty and are better parents to their children. Why does this happen some of the time and not all of the time? There is no adequate explanation for it, but that is the reality we are dealing with.

The communion story is one that says that God is present in the redemption of suffering.

I don't think (nor do I think I have ever preached) that God is in the suffering.
I don't think (not do I think I have ever preached) that believing that God is present in the redemption of suffering causes more suffering; that would be like thinking that ambulances cause heart attacks and life-threatening accidents.

Denise Levertov's Poem about Thomas

2007-10-06T08:59:00.000-04:00

There has been some discussion on blogs and email lists about this poem that I read at the UUCF communion service in Portland, OR this spring. Much has been said about its content and tone. Read it for yourself.

Denise Levertov

St. Thomas Didymus

In the hot street at noon I saw him
a small man
gray but vivid, standing forth
beyond the crowd's buzzing
holding in desperate grip his shaking
teethgnashing son,

and thought him my brother.

I heard him cry out, weeping and speak
those words,
Lord, I believe, help thou
mine unbelief,

and knew him
my twin:

a man whose entire being
had knotted itself
into the one tightdrawn question,
Why,
why has this child lost his childhood in suffering,
why is this child who will soon be a man
tormented, torn, twisted?
Why is he cruelly punished
who has done nothing except be born?

The twin of my birth
was not so close
as that man I heard
say what my heart
sighed with each beat, my breath silently
cried in and out,
in and out.

After the healing,
he, with his wondering
newly peaceful boy, receded;
no one
dwells on the gratitude, the astonished joy,
the swift
acceptance and forgetting.
I did not follow
to see their changed lives.
What I retained
was the flash of kinship.
Despite
all that I witnessed,
his question remained
my question, throbbed like a stealthy cancer,
known
only to doctor and patient. To others
I seemed well enough.

So it was
that after Golgotha
my spirit in secret
lurched in the same convulsed writhings
that tore that child
before he was healed.
And after the empty tomb
when they told me that He lived, had spoken to Magdalen,
told me
that though He had passed through the door like a ghost
He had breathed on them
the breath of a living man --
even then
when hope tried with a flutter of wings
to lift me --
still, alone with myself,
my heavy cry was the same: Lord
I believe,
help thou mine unbelief.

I needed
blood to tell me the truth,
the touch
of blood. Even
my sight of the dark crust of it
round the nailholes
didn't thrust its meaning all the way through
to that manifold knot in me
that willed to possess all knowledge,
refusing to loosen
unless that insistence won
the battle I fought with life

But when my hand
led by His hand's firm clasp
entered the unhealed wound,
my fingers encountering
rib-bone and pulsing heat,
what I felt was not
scalding pain, shame for my
obstinate need,
but light, light streaming
into me, over me, filling the room
as I had lived till then
in a cold cave, and now
coming forth for the first time,
the knot that bound me unravelling,
I witnessed
all things quicken to color, to form,
my question
not answered but given
its part
in a vast unfolding design lit
by a risen sun.

Democrats Debate

2007-07-24T17:31:00.000-04:00

Watching the Democrats debate last night, two thoughts:

1. the reasons why the YouTube format worked, and I think it did, is not because the candidates cannot dodge the questions raised by ordinary people, while they can snow the professional media better. The reason is that ordinary people, even internet savvy geeks, ASK BETTER QUESTIONS than our shallow media personalities. People ask about actual issues; media types ask about candidates reactions to premises created by shallow media stories.

If CNN/NBC/Fox/ABC/etc. ask the questions, they come up with questions like this: "Senator Edwards, given the stories about your haircut costing $400, how will you overcome the perception that your concern about poverty is only a campaign ploy?"

Actual people might ask something like: "Hey how about some help down here?"

Anderson Cooper always kept trying to bring the candidates back to the question asked. Anderson should butt out, once in a while. The idea that the news departments of the networks somehow have the authority to referee the dialogue between candidates and voters is laughable.
Second thought:

Seems like there is a weird mismatch between candidate's positioning on Iraq and strategies for ending the war. It's a mismatch between past, present and future.

Obama Barack wants everybody to know that he opposed the war before Hilary Clinton. I have said this before and will say it again. What Hilary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards thought about the war in 2003 and 2003 was completely irrelevant. The President had a solid majority in both houses of Congress and was planning to do to war. If Hilary had immolated herself on the Senate floor in protest, it would not have stopped him. So Obama was right back then, so what?

Right now, Obama and Hilary are in an identical spot on the strategy for ending the war, along with Dodd and Biden. Continue to vote for funding for now, while pushing other measures that will, it is hoped, bring in enough GOP votes to pass a binding timetable for withdrawal. They know that the GOP is just hoping for someone to blame the disaster of Iraq on, and to be able to pose that as stabbing the troops in the back is their best hope. The Senators are not willing to walk into that trap, but insist that some of the GOP come with them.

Kucinich and Gravel argue that Congress should just vote to cut off funds. It appears that Edwards is in a similar place, though I can't tell. Of course, they are being brave about votes that they don't have to take.

In some ways, the antiwar left candidates (K,G and maybe E) are really aiming at developing a mass movement outside the election cycle to force the Capitol Hill Democrats to have the courage to cut off the funds. Their strategy is aimed at this summer and fall, and not at the primary elections in the winter, and certainly not at winning in Fall 08.

Richardson and Biden try to distinguish themselves by having a different plan for 2009 and beyond, but like the difference between Obama and Hilary in 2003, who cares?

My own opinion on how to use one's vote and political support to bring about an end to the war is this: start talking up Ron Paul, and send him a few bucks. I think that it is a good idea for you, although I can't quite get myself to do it. Right now, Bush is able to keep enough Republicans on Capitol Hill in line with him, because it doesn't appear that the Republican base is splitting away on the war. Ron Paul is the Eugene McCarthy of 08 -- all he has to do is better than expected anywhere -- even in fundraising and home page hits -- and he sends a shiver of panic down the spine of that Republican Congress Rat who realizes that the Bush administration is a ship that it is quite possible to go down with.

The Parallel Argument Fallacy

2007-07-18T22:44:00.000-04:00

It is occasionally argued that since some of the arguments against legal recognition of polyamory sound like some of the arguments raised against same-sex marriage, and since same-sex marriage is OK, then polyamory must be OK, as well.

The arguments that were used by the GOP to argue for the impeachment of President Clinton sound like many of the arguments used today by Democrats for the impeachment of President George W. Bush. Does that mean that Bush and Clinton are the same?

Extending equal marriage rights to same-sex couples is not the same thing as extending marriage rights to groups of three or more. They are, at least, different enough to require some careful analysis and consideration.

Toward a Theology of Marriage -- Equality

2007-07-18T08:09:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to deal with important stuff without being boring. So I am going to be much more pithy in my comments.

By nature, people are small group animals, kind of like apes. By nature, alpha males dominate the sexual system, with unlimited sexual access to females and subordinate males fight their way up the pecking order.

But people developed culture, long after our instinctual nature was set. Marriage is part of human culture and marriage system try to control, channel and direct our instincts to avoid conflict and increase chances for children's survival.

In the world of culture, ideas about marriage grow and evolve. Older systems make the old instincts of male power and dominance official; but newer systems, for a whole host of cultural reasons, move toward gender equality, mutuality and reciprocity in marriage. Old systems are systems of male ownership of women; new systems are mutual obligations.

I think that monogamy arose first as a way to limit the effects of competition among males for women (instead of the alpha male having access to all the women for the brief moment that he was king of the hill, pair-bonding was developing -- almost everybody had a sexual partner -- more sex, less fighting, with the added, but unplanned bonus, of greater genetic diversity.) But in more modern times, monogamy serves the interest of women by providing a more stable source of support for periods of pregnancy and infancy. Now, the push for monogamy is linked clearly with gender equality in those parts of the world where polygamy is culturally sanctioned.

Among heterosexuals in the West, the cultural debate is between "Promise Keepers" who want continued male dominance of the marriage and the "Equal Partners" who look toward gender equality as the underlying paradigm of the marriage.

As that strand of the Western religious tradition that is most committed to the radical equality of all souls before God, liberal religion knows where it stands in that cultural debate. We have a theological commitment, I think, to marriage as a set of mutual obligations between equal partners.

So, if you have been following these arguments about the theology of marriage I have been making, you see that I am proposing, so far:

1. marriage is not a natural act for humans, but a cultural construction which channels and directs our instincts toward socially beneficially ends.
2. The first principle we uphold is commitment, life long commitment between marriage partners. It is this principle that led to liberal religion's support of same-sex marriage.
3. The second principle is equality between marriage partners and turning away from our instincts toward male dominance.

My next post in this series will further develop my point about equality, specifically the fact that in the post-industrial West, the paradigm of domination and subordination has floated free of gender, to appear in many forms in all sorts of relationships.

Why It Matters to Unitarian Universalism

2007-07-13T18:00:00.000-04:00

Unitarian Universalist ministers, I think we can say, led the way among clergy, toward equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians. It is something that we can be proud of. We took the lead on that because of the experience of our own gay and lesbian colleagues and congregants.

I believe that this leadership gives Unitarian Universalist ministers and congregations some moral and social authority on the question of love and marriage. In some ways, we have more authority on this question than any other question. That authority is the result of our ability to see into the essence of the question of equal marriage rights and see what was most important and true: that the desire of gay men and lesbians to form permanent, faithful, lifelong bonds was as worthy and commendable as the same desires among heterosexuals, and that it was a simple matter of fairness to extend ALL of the SAME rights to gays and lesbians. We were not alone, of course, among religious leaders to see this, and we did not move in exact unison, but no other denomination was so committed, so early and with as close to unanimity.

We need to be aware of our authority on marriage as we approach the question of multi-partnered marriages. It matters to other people what we think.

Having gained some authority on love and marriage, it is inevitable that we will be the objects of other people who want to use our authority to advance their own purposes. If we accede to the passive-aggressive demands of the polyamorists, we will have given away whatever authority we have gained -- we will have been shown to more concerned about avoiding a certain kind of criticism than in thinking through the issue for ourselves.

Background to a Theology of Marriage

2007-07-13T14:20:00.000-04:00

I think that it was in Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" that I first ran across the idea that humanity had thousands of years of existence before there was much culture, in which people acted according to their genetic code, or instincts. What we are "hard-wired" to be. He summarized what I am sure is a mixed lot of anthropological theories to the point that we, probably, functioned as a small group animal with some variation of what we see in other small group animals.

I have taken this insight as the starting point of the anthropology upon which I based my theology. Rather than starting from the position that human beings are essentially good, or human beings are essentially evil, I try to start from the point that human beings are essentially small group animals, with all the virtues and vices of small group animals. What seems to us to be best about human beings: cooperation, altruism, self-sacrifice, capacity for love, compassion are all the emotional qualities that exist within the small band. What we see as human cruelty is what is often the qualities we show to the outsiders of our small band: violence, suspicion, intolerance, murder, predatory rape.

Human beings also show a persistent tendency to create ever more complex systems and structures to avoid deadly conflict. My guess is that the development of marriage was for the purpose of avoiding the endless conflict between males for social dominance and sexual access to females. (Why am I suddenly thinking back to high school days now? But, I digress.) That it also made patriarchical inheritence of surplus wealth possible is an added bonus, h/t to Frederich Engels.

So the creation of systems to avoid conflict has created a larger and larger human community and culture, which is in conflict with our hard-wired small group loyalty. Hence most of our moral issues pit some form of "widening the circle" against some from of "smaller group loyalty".
Our biological evolution was driven by survival and brought us so far. Human beings, on a biological basis have not changed significantly in tens of thousands of years. Our cultural evolution is driven by the desire to accumulate surplus wealth and to avoid conflict, and moves very quickly. Culturally, we are very different than we were 100 years ago, much less 5000 years ago.

Religion, Philosophy and spirituality are the venues in which humanity tries to consciously grasp the meaning of our common evolution and to shape the cultural evolution that is occurring today. It is bigger than science, since it deals with the meanings we draw from reality and the moral conclusions that we draw about our actual nature, and the possibilities that humanity sees for itself.

Toward a Theology of Marriage

2007-07-12T17:48:00.000-04:00

These are more notes toward a theology of marriage.

People are not naturally monogamous. In the state of nature, before culture, we lived as herd or pack animals with a sexual system similar to apes, chimps, horses, dogs etc. Alpha males, alpha females, subordinate males and females, unequal sexual access.

With the rise of culture and religion, people developed more ordered sexual systems, including marriages of all types. Religion is also a product of the same development and, among other purposes, provides a moral and ethical authority for the new sexual systems.

The fact that we are, by nature, one way, and have chosen, by culture, to live another way is the source of our divided selves – temptation, sin, etc.

Marriage systems keep changing to fit the needs of the culture, while retaining a moral aspect – however the marriage and sexual system changes, humanity cannot go back to the state of nature regarding sexuality, hence there will remain a moral component to thinking about sexual relationships and activities.

We live in a time of tremendous cultural upheaval – the changes in global economy, post industrialism, global urbanization etc. etc. means that much is up for grabs. This is creating a moment of creative crisis for sexual relationships and marriages as we step into uncharted territory. There is more freedom about life arrangements than ever before, and hence more potential healthy and unhealthy consequences.

The downside of the present moment is seen in a wide variety of social ills. The upside is seen in a wide variety of good things happening. It would take lifetime to list them and sort them out.

Our religious perspective, the Living Tradition of liberal Religion, has one overarching direction: the replacement of a religious and cultural systems that are based on external authority and cultural conformity with religious and cultural systems based on internal sources of authority and conscious covenant making between people. To counter the natural chaos, should people rely on coercion, or on covenants? We are heirs to a tradition that consistently reinterprets the Western religious heritage as culminating in personal freedom and covenantal community formation.

I also see signs of a return to a technologically facilitated state of nature, in which no commitments must be kept. On an individual basis, the moral self-discipline to keep commitments of sexual fidelity is constantly challenged. It feels natural and liberating to act upon all of one’s sexual desires and fantasies.

As tempting as it might be, a return to a state of nature of uncommitted sexuality would be a nightmare. The highest human potential, what we seem intended to be, is the result of the process of enculturation. Love, solidarity, empathy, compassion all grow in the cultural space created by our agreements to not just live together, but to live together in arrangements that we learn, remember, teach, pass on and make into tradition.

Because we are liberals, we take a critical view of traditions and are willing to experiment and revise them in an evolutionary process of cultural development.

We are not just “on the side of love.” We are on the side of covenanted and committed love, because we know that uncommitted love does not reach its full depth and meaning.

Our theology of marriage is that we are in favor of it, because it is the current cultural form of covenanted love. We are in favor of it for not only heterosexuals, but also gays and lesbians. My critique of our weddings is that we focus, often too much on love, and not enough on commitment. People fall "in love" all the time; we honor when they move from attraction and affection to lifelong commitment, because we know that attraction and affection are not enough to last a lifetime. More perfect love comes in the aftermath of disappointment and the temptation to quit.

When it comes to extending marriage rights to more than groups of two people, we say “no” at this time. While much of the rhetoric about polyamory is full of the language of commitment and fidelity, we are not sure at all that the small polyamory movement represents a step forward to wider forms of covenanted love, or whether it represents a step back toward the state of nature from which humanity came. The crux of the problem to me is that Polyamorists seem to claim that some people are, by nature, “poly people”, and hence, unable to make successful monogamous commitments. But, my understanding is that all of us are naturally “poly people” in that by nature, we are not monogamous. If that is true, than polyamory becomes a rationale for eroding the cultural commitment to monogamy, not just for a few, but eventually for everybody. Time will tell on where multi-partnered relationships will lead. The social and culture environment in the USA these days permits almost any sort of social experimentation.

Final theological note: I am a Christian with a modern and scientific outlook. When we look at that moment in prehistory when humanity began to create arrangements that were not instinctual, but learned and taught, one might say that it was an intervention by God, that created humanity.

One could also say that humanity projected onto the empty sky a deity who directed their activities to add weight to the traditions being created. Either way, the religious traditions have provided the moral authority behind the human culture that we create. As such, they have played reactionary and revolutionary roles at different points of history. Those religious traditions speak to the most vexing areas where we have to guard against following our instincts back to the state of nature: sexuality, money, wealth, power and violence. Christianity is a vast system which explains this contradiction in our natures, and more importantly, offers deep insight about how to live with the inevitability of failures and shortcomings, of sin.

This is How You Say No

2007-07-10T23:12:00.001-04:00

When the issue of Multi-partnered Relationships first surfaced among the UU's, there was a high level of consternation among the ministers I know and talk with. Somebody, probably more than one somebody, said, "the problem is that we don't know how to say 'no'." This is an observation that I have heard more than once, and about more than one issue.

The reason why I have been devoting as much time and energy to a discussion of multi-partnered relationships has been to publicly engage in the practice of saying 'no' to a group of people who are trying to set our agenda for us. The liberal tolerance of the many, combined with the fervent advocacy of a few, would result in the tail wagging the dog.

A friend comments " You are awfully brave to be banging your head against this particular brick wall, LT. And during your vacation, too!"

One, I am not on vacation, since I my arrangement is that I work in the summer.

Two, this is not a brick wall. I concede that I will probably not change the mind of one of the persons who have been advocating for polyamory. I would not expect that; after all, they have already been pushing for something that is not popular for a while. Why would my disapproval have any real effect on their thinking?

I am really trying to speak to, by presuming to speak for, the many UU's who are concerned that our religious movement will be led, almost against our will, into taking a position on a matter of public policy and social ministry that we don't agree with.

I think that the debate and discussion here has gone long enough to reveal what is at stake with the polyamorists and the reasoning at work.

On the side of the polyamorists, they argue that (1) they exist; (2) they enunciate a fully developed set of ethical principles that are attractive; (3) they suffer from some amount of social disapproval, even in our UU congregations; and (4) they think that UU's should be more welcoming to them.

They do not explicitly ask that UUs adopt a public position affirming their agreements as equivalent to marriages, but that is their what they believe. From here, it is hard to tell what is strategic caution on their part and what is truly the result of not having thought the matter to its logical conclusions.

But once our efforts to make our congregations welcoming to multiple partnered relationships leads us to say that those arrangements ought to be viewed as socially equivalent to 2 person marriages, all the rest of the journey to advocacy of their equal marriage rights is a matter of timing and circumstance. We will pass from the pastoral to territory of public ministry and social policy very quickly.

Whenever a group comes to us and seeks to engage our commitment to a particular position of public policy, we should have the integrity to insist that that request be made explicitly, and we should consider it explicitly. That the UUPA does not ask us to call for equal marriage rights for 3+ person weddings does not mean that we should not consider whether what they do ask to do will lead us to that place.

One of the ways that we have to learn how to say "No" is that we have to learn to be upfront and explicit about social policy implications of the steps that we are being asked to take, even if the issues are presented as pastoral. We have to guard that boundary ourselves, extending ourselves pastorally wherever people look to us in that role, but being clear about when it passes into another realm.

When people ask us to take a stand on social policy, the burden of proof is on them. They need to convince us that the social policy that they advocate is warranted (it addresses a real problem in the world), necessary (that the problem at hand cannot be solved by lesser or more desirable means) and responsible (the proposal does not run a significant risk of creating more problems). Most of us wish that the Congress held President Bush to these standards when he proposed to invade Iraq. (And no, I am not comparing polyamory to the invasion of Iraq!)

In this discussion, many comments accuse me of being unfair in insisting that advocates present arguments for polyamory that meet those criteria, AND demonstrate how that will work in the real world, as we know it. I am accused of holding them to a higher standard than I hold the present system. That''s the breaks, and not just because this is my blog, but because they are asking me (and us) to do something that breaks with a long-standing, and yet, beleaguered social and cultural tradition.

I have specifically rejected the arguments that proceed from a best-case-scenario. I insist that we consider the effects of the legalization of multipartnered marriages as it would actually exist in the broken world that we know. If we affirm the equivalence of 3+ person marriages, then, it follows that we will eventually be legalizing polygamy in all of its forms -- Neopagan Polyamory, Mormon and Muslim Polygamy, and all the newer forms of multipartnered relationships that include gay, lesbian and bi-sexual people.

One of the ways that you say 'No' is to retain the right to make your own judgments about the implications of a position that someone wants you to take. The advocates might want to limit the implications to only that which they approve, but we are responsible for the all of effects of our decisions. The advocates of Polyamory now say that they are quite distinct from the advocates of Open Marriage in the 70's. That is their right to maintain, but we have to retain the power to judge for ourselves what will happen if 3+ relationships are affirmed as equally valid in our congregations. Will that change lead to an environment where open marriage is then also affirmed and then swinging and then a sexualized environment? We have to decide whether we think that is possible or probable -- we are not obligated to let the advocates of polyamory decide that for us.

Finally, saying "no" also includes retaining the right to say "I don't know." One poster predicted a day will come 50 years from now when my concerns will be seen as a petty obstacle to the eventual emergence of a society in which many-partnered relationships are seen as normal. I suppose I will be an object of as much contempt as we have for politicians who denounced race-mixing and feared the mongrelization of the white race in the past. This is a hard thing to imagine about oneself. I am already carrying the burden of eating meat, which I am also told will be considered outrageous a hundred years from now. And I am a trying to be a Christian, too. Talk about quaint.

But as frightening as those possibilities are for my future reputation, I don't think that we know enough to say that multi-partnered relationships are the wave of the future. If they are, it does not depend on UUism affirming them, any more that the hundreds of thousands long-term gay partnerships did. I have been watching for signs that M-PR's are a growing trend that brings health and stability to families and communities -- that they are, indeed, the new thing that will arise to address the epidemic of broken marriages, fatherless children, abandoned single mothers, and sexual acting out that are the symptoms of the crisis of marriage in our culture. If they do appear to be that new thing, then I will change my mind. Those who know me personally know that I am willing to recognize when I am wrong. But I have not seen that yet.

And so I have to say "I don't know" and in the absence of knowing, I think that it is proper to say that we oppose giving up the struggle to challenge people to make commitments of love and fidelity to one person, and to face down the myriad temptations to betray those commitments, and to let deeper love flower in the space and time created by those commitments.

And finally learning how to say no means that you accept the inevitable result that some people will think that you are bigoted, prejudiced, ultra-conservative, the same as Pat Robertson, or James Dobson. They will make historical analogies in which you are compared to some really awful persons in history. This is hard to take, because the great sin in UU circles is to "be on the wrong side of history." But we always face that possibility. It would mean that one could see everything all at once to never make that error, and that is reserved to God. We can only use all of our faculties to do what we are given to see to do.

Just in Case you Miss the Point

2007-07-10T19:09:00.000-04:00

Trivium condescends and plunges to the depths of my soul.

Sorry, I learned a long time ago that if I wanted to have a serious relationship to anything difficult: race, sex, class, sexual orientation issues, marriage issues, or with anyone different than myself, I would have to conquer my fear of being called a bigot.

That didn't take long

2007-07-10T17:34:00.001-04:00

In a recent post, I compared the best-case-scenario argument that some Multi-Partnered Relationship advocates make to the argument that the kind of argument that anti-gun control advocates make when they say that lots of people should carry guns, but they should all be well-versed in gun safety and law-abiding.

Of course, now someone is claiming that I have compared the sweet and healing love of poly relationships to loaded guns, weapons of destruction.

I am comparing the kinds of arguments being made, not the substance of the arguments, as a careful reader will readily see.

There are none so prone to see offense in the comments of others as those whose argument depends on being seen as a victim. It is an essential feature of the passive-aggressive stance that the MPR advocates are taking relative to the Unitarian Universalist movement. Prove to us that you are not bigoted and prejudiced against us! And the only way to prove that is to agree to our central claim, which we have not otherwise proven, that multi-partnered relationships are morally equivalent to two person monogamy.

Don't Bring that Bogus Game into My House

2007-07-10T00:17:00.000-04:00

Having read over the many contributions and comments on Multi-Partnered Relationships that have come in, I want to repeat this.

I am not persuaded at all by arguments that work from a best case scenario. I am especially not persuaded by a personal testimonial which leads to a best case scenario to a conclusion that there could be no social danger from abandoning our cultural standard of monogamous fidelity in marriage. To me the argument is like this:

We keep loaded guns in every room of the house where we also run our day care center. However, we have all taken numerous gun safety courses and have instructed our children in gun safety practices. We are also Quakers and don't believe in violence and never get angry with each other over anything. We have lived our lives with loaded guns in the playrooms for years and have never had a problem. We think that it should be OK for anyone who wants to keep loaded guns in the nursery, because it has worked so well for us.

If you tell me that X number of children die from accidental gunshot wounds every year, then all I can say is that you are not talking about a situation that has any relevance to me, because we have all had gun safety courses and are Quakers. If you say that X number of spouses shoot each other with guns that they have around the house because a certain son-of-a-bitch never picked up his socks, then I don't see the relevance of that story to me because we are Quakers and we don't wear socks anyway.

Since we are good people, what we do is good, and therefore those same actions will be good no matter who does them. The same actions that result in undesirable results are not really the same actions, since they must have been done by bad people.

The argument that Multi-partnered relationships would decrease adultery because everyone who wants to have sex with more than one person would get themselves into a covenanted, faithful arrangement where all their needs would be met -- likewise a bogus argument that is based on a idealized premise.

SICKO and a health care reform Primer.

2007-07-09T22:29:00.000-04:00

I saw Michael Moore's SICKO last night and it is good movie, well worth seeing.

I had the good fortune to work for a Benefits Consulting company during the early 90's when Health Care Reform was proposed by the Clintons. Not only did the company prepare daily briefings for our employer clients about all of the aspects of the health care reform process and the politics of it, they made these available on our PROFS internal email system for any associate who wanted to read them. So, even though I was a low level manager of computer operators, I had the opportunity to read these daily briefings. For months, I was hooked on them, partly because I am a political junkie and wonk, but because my job did not fully challenge my intellect.

There will be a lot of discussion about health care reform after SICKO.

Some things to know and remember.

There are basically four sectors of the Health Care Industry: The Insurance Companies (Moore's target), the Providers (Doctors and Hospitals), the Government (which pays for much health care through Medicare and Medicaid) and the Drug Companies.

You can tell the power relationships between these four sectors by looking at their comparable profitability. One of ways that the government generated a surplus in the 90's was that they reduced Medicare and Medicaid payments to Providers. Not surprisingly, many of the Providers had very thin margins during this period.

Insurance Companies and Providers fight every day over money. They deploy teams of progammers to code programs to look for reasons in bills to deny payment, or to prepare bills that have every "i" dotted and "t" crossed to make them undeniable. As much as Moore tees off against the Insurance companies, before the Insurance companies came along, the Providers and Doctors ruled and profited. When Medicare was first established, and the government basically paid for anything billed, the providers gorged on free government money. There are still billions of dollars being falsely billed to the government by providers for Medicare and Medicaid.

The Clinton plan was to use the Insurance Companies as a check against the Providers, much as the current system does. The difference was that their plan would have made it possible for individual consumers to have a much wider choice of insurance companies to enroll in, and to set standards that each insurance company had to meet -- no disqualification for pre-existing conditions etc. The thought was the that the if any insurance company was too stingy with benefits, they would lose enrollees to less stingy plans. Not surprisingly, the leading opponents of the Clinton plan were the smaller insurance companies who realized that they could not compete against the largest companies for individuals. They had carved out a profitable niche offering crummy insurance plans to small employers at cut-rates who gave them to employees on a take it or leave it basis. (One of those companies, Golden Rule Insurance Company of Indianopolis, devised a high deductible plan at a low cost, which they said would be the basis of a Health Savings Account. They sold this plan to the Republican Party as the panacea of all health care problems with an unprecedented wave of campaign contributions. If Moore's movie sparks a renewed debate on health care reform, expect to hear "Health Savings Accounts" touted by your local lovable conservative Republican as the great alternative. They are not.)

The Drug Companies are the most profitable sector right now and are essentially unchecked. Eventually, the Democrats will enable the Government to negotiate prices for the Medicare drug benefits, which will shift money from the drug companies to the government.

Right now, providers are chafing under the domination of the Insurance companies. They will be supportive of a single payer system, but will not want an British style system where they work for the government.

There are three or four options of Health Care Reform.

The first is universal health care insurance. They figure out a way to get the 40-50 million people the same crummy insurance that SICKO documents.

The second is a Clinton type system, where they establish a competitive system which should correct the abuses of the insurance companies.

The third is a single payer system, which would essentially put everyone on Medicare. The govenment pays for it all. It puts the Health insurance companies out of business, which requires a determined political will of tidal wave proportions. They will not go quietly. The other problem is controlling costs -- do you let the providers just bill for anything they want?

The fourth is truly socialized medicine, with a government health service. Not only do you put the health insurance companies out of business, you also get the medical community to limit their potential earnings dramatically. It would probably take air power and sustained counterinsurgency campaigns to wipe out the last remaining hold out cosmetic surgeons in Beverly Hills.

Maybe, SICKO will start a real discussion toward fixing this. The one thing that has always stopped health care reform in the past has been that there has not been a mass movement of people demanding a better health care system. If during the Clinton era, there had been marches and demonstrations of the uninsured demanding insurance, it might have ended differently. Moore gives a human face to those who suffer with the current system, and when we/they stand up, the world will change.

What makes a Person a Poly Person?

2007-07-09T21:52:00.000-04:00

Many marriages in recent decades have ended because one partner or the other acknowledged that they were, by nature, gay or lesbian. Often part of the process that led to that acknowledgment was sexual activities that violated the marriage vows of sexual fidelity. As a general rule, many consider these vow breaking acts to be less of a betrayal than heterosexual adultery, because it is understood that the marriage vows were in some way less than fully binding because they contradicted one of the party's basic nature. We now presume that gay or lesbian sexuality is part of someone's nature, whatever that is. One can't be expected to keep a vow that contradicts one's basic nature.

Many of the arguments that the affirmation of multi-partnered relationships is warranted, necessary and socially beneficial include the notion that some people are "poly people" and that to expect a "poly person" to uphold monogamous marriage vows is like asking a gay person to uphold monogamy with an opposite sex partner; it can be done, but only at great cost and difficulty.

Floating the meme that some people are naturally "poly people" into the culture sets loose a ready-made excuse for all sorts of adultery. My mother asks "What if every person caught in adultery can point to the fact that they is coming to grips with his/her essential poly nature, and hence this affair, while regrettable, is as understandable as Jake and Ennis' fishing trips on Brokeback Mountain?"

It matters whether this "poly" sexuality is a real thing, just as it matters that our scientific understanding of gay and lesbian sexuality points to a real difference. Yet, is there any real scientific evidence that "poly" sexuality is real?

My suspicion is that human beings are neither monogamous or polygamous by nature, but are so, by culture. Certainly, by nature, humans beings are capable of, and desire, sexual relations with many different people. Cultural rules and standards say that some desires can be appropriately acted upon, and others cannot.

In the absence of any real evidence of natural difference, we can only conclude that people who are "poly" are proposing a different set of cultural rules that govern our sexual behavior. To make that argument that they are compelled to a different set of rules because they are, by some nature, different, is a deception, first of themselves and then of others. Cultural rules based on that kind of deception, and false understanding of human beings, will fail and cause more harm than any good they might do.

And the immediate harm will be setting up another reason why it is somehow acceptable to violate one's vows of fidelity in marriage. In a culture already awash in infidelity, suspicions, jealousy, controlling abuse, and the abandonment of single mothers and children by fathers, creating specious justifications for adultery is socially irresponsible.

In defense of my mother

2007-07-08T16:21:00.000-04:00

I have been away from my computer for 24 hours, but am working through the comments about multi-partnered relationships, and will post on the arguments that I think merit further discussion soon.

But before I begin on that, let me clarify my comment that I think of my mother's advice on "what if everybody did it?" to this question.

I follow this logical path.

Assuming that I have been discussing Chris, Pat and Lou who are members of my church and in a multi-partnered relationship, and beyond saying that they seem like nice people who are performing no harmful acts and good manners suggest that we not make a lot of judgments about things not our business, but go on to say, "Multi-partnered relationships are, in general, just as good as two person relationships."

To me, and permit me to think like a minister now, it follows that if Chris, Pat and Lou want to perform an unofficial "wedding" or "Union" ceremony, then I should perform it. And I am aware that when I perform an unofficial ceremony that looks like a wedding, I am making a public statement that I believe that the relationship in question should be, as a matter of public policy, able to receive marriage rights. I think that everyone understood that every same sex ceremony of union service is a symbolic call for equal marriage rights.

If you believe that multi-partnered relationships should be given equal marriage rights as two-person marriages, then it doesn't mean that you get to pick the composition and terms of those marriages beyond the minimal age restrictions we know place. My mothers question in my mind on this is "What if any group of three people want to get married?"

It means that the laws against polygamy must be abolished. How can UU triads be given marriage rights and not Mormans and Muslims? It means that marriages in which new and younger women are brought into the marriage on a serial basis, with the oldest wife's consent, must be legalized. It means that no standard that we would like to think of being essential -- careful negotiation, mutuality, egalitarianism, gender equality -- can be applied, unless we have the means to apply them equally to all marriages. It means, to be snarky, that we are in favor of multi-partnered relationships having equal marriage rights even if the people involved have never been in an OWL class.

Once I make the statement that multi-partnered relationships are in theory morally equivalent to 2 person relationships, I step beyond the pastoral (where my care for people does not presume approval of what they are doing in every aspect of their lives) into public ministry, where I am advocating public policy, where what I advocate will be operative not in some ideal world, but the world in which we actually live, with the human beings we actually see around us.

I have exactly the same problem with "assisted suicide". You say to me, "why can't it be legal for a member of my congregation -- well-educated, moral, loving, conscientious -- help his terribly suffering father take the pills that will end his life with dignity?" You offer a best case scenario. My mother asks "what if everybody could do that?" In this world, where we live, society does not protect elders from physical abuse and neglect in private homes and nursing homes around the country. And you want to give out the right to give fatal overdoses to their parents on an equal basis to all adult children of elderly parents? It is not enough to say that we give those rights only to people who follow the letter of the law about where and when and what conditions. We have laws against physical abuse and neglect of elders now -- we just can't enforce them, even in nursing homes which are publicy regulated, much less in private homes.

We live in a world where domestic violence, the coercion of women, the rape of underage female children by family members, sexual abuse of all types are occurring -- most of it stemming from the sense of entitlement given to husbands and fathers.

When you ask me as a minister to say, because it will make Chris and Pat and Lou, feel really welcomed and affirmed, that Multi-partnered relationships are just as socially beneficial and useful and moral as two person marriages, this is where I have to go in my thinking.

Starting a Discussion about Multi-partner relationships

2007-07-07T08:56:00.001-04:00

Voicing the suspicion that the Independent Affiliate disaffiliation has actually been an institutional and administrative dodge to the question of polyamory and the UUPA has, as could be expected, kicked off a discussion of the same subject on this blog. So be it.

Some of where I am coming from.

1. Monogamy has been the norm in this culture for a long time. It is a restraint in that it does not come easily to everyone. It chafes. It calls for self-discipline.
2. Other cultures practice various forms of polygamy, and that is usually to the detriment of women. How this works out in the new global culture coming is anyone's guess.
3. There has been, also, a bohemian rebellion against monogamy among the more privileged sets for quite a while under a variety of names: free love, open marriage, and now "polyamory". Polyamory is a neologism -- a new and made up word which carries within itself a loaded message. Who is against more and many loves? The question is not how many people we love, but how we structure our relationships.

In my view, those who advocate Multi-Partnered Relationships are proposing a significant change in the way that our culture has understood the bonds and covenants that make families. Changes in those norms have occurred in the recent past: the widespread acceptance of divorce, the widespread acceptance of pre-marital sex, the still-unfolding movement to legally recognize two-person same-sex relationships as legally and morally equivalent to heterosexual unions. So, a further change is being proposed.

Should Unitarian Universalism support and advocate for this far-reaching change in the cultural mores of the society who looks to us for guidance about these matters? And we do have some cultural authority on these matters of sexuality. We have shown to have a pretty good grasp of what is not only good for individuals, but also healthy for the society, in these areas over the last half century, with one exception. Our experiments with "open marriage" in the 60's-70's proved to be not prophetic of a liberated future, but an exercise in self-indulgence.

I believe that those who propose changing our collective position on two-person marriage bear the burden of proof that such a change is warranted, necessary, and socially responsible. One of my tests is a question that my mother used to ask me when she objected to some aspect of my behavior, "What if everybody did that?" It is that test which separates the self-indulgent from the socially responsible policies.

The advocates of multi-partnered relationships within the UUA have taken a passive-aggressive stance toward the association, its churches and especially its ministers. Rather than trying to demonstrate that the widespread, and eventual, legal recognition of multi-partnered relationships is warranted, necessary and socially responsible, they have asked UU's to prove that they are not prejudiced, ignorant and backward by advocating for them. Their most specific request, when you get right down to it, is that UU ministers protect them from the potential disapproval of other congregants. Nothing stops multi-partnered folks from joining our congregation -- I have never heard of them being denounced or condemned by any church body or official or minister -- nothing stops them from being as open as they wish about their relationships -- except that they are fearful that many of their fellow congregants would disapprove.

They have adopted the stance that the potential disapproval of their fellow congregants is a prejudice against them, similar to homophobia, or racism. But there is no convincing evidence offered that being in a multi-partnered relationship is anything other than a choice that they have made. Republicans, gun-owners, and drivers of Hummers also claim to be victims of prejudice in UU congregation, but having to live with the fact that some people will disagree with the choices you have made does not constitute prejudice.

The shaky claim to being the victim of prejudice is the defining characteristic of a passive-aggressive stance toward others, because it shifts the burden of resolving the difference to the other party. Prove to me that you are not prejudiced against me.

Read the comments on the blog post where this has arisen and see that almost every pro-polyamory posting starts with an accusation of prejudice, immaturity, ignorance, suspicion and uptightness. Round two starts with the concern that failing to respond properly to the suggestion that one is prejudiced shows one's defensiveness and anger. To which I say, "Don't play that game in my house."

I invite comments that seek to demonstrate that the widespread and eventual legal recognition of multi-partnered relationships is warranted (solves a real problem), necessary (no other path will correct existing problems) and socially responsible (will increase the stability of families for the benefit of children, women and the social order.)

Guest Posting from Robert Jordan Ross

2007-07-07T07:25:00.000-04:00

A report from a meeting held at GA which indicates Meadville Lombard's plans for the future in the new and unsettled field of Unitarian Universalist Theological Education. I pass it along as a way to provide a forum for discussion about that subject. My thoughts and approach in a separate post.

Power, centralized? [Written 23 June, A.D. 2007]

I was a guest today at perhaps the best development presentation I have
have ever witnessed. The leaders of Meadville Lombard Theological School
(MLTS) held a breakfast presentation at the Doubletree Hotel in
Portland, Ore. Although it was at 7:00 a.m., a large banquet hall was
nearly filled. The program began on time, with excellent singing, clear
words of welcome, a good invocation and a step-by-step message of the
school's planned future. Interspersed video presentations gave life to
it all and the morning closed with a request for pledges that left most
of us wanting to sign the family farm away to them.

All this was one event at the General Assembly (GA) of the Unitarian
Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA). Most such conventions
are occasions by many groups for fund raising. The morale is high, the
sense of being strong is present with perhaps five thousand four hundred
people attending, and there's an exhilaration in the air, a confidence
in our future.

Listening carefully is important. Subtexts of messages are as important
in some cases as the primary words themselves. Here are some of the
things I think I heard at the breakfast presentation:

1) The goal of our liberal religion is to be a primary and effective
political influence worldwide. [This is similar to the statements in the
newly begun The Time is Now campaign being run by the UUA.] Through our
understanding of religious and cultural diversity and our training in
working with this melange, we will be able to influence the directions
that humans as a whole take, moving them into adopting ways consistent
with our collective take on justice and equity in human relations.

2) Thomas Starr King School for the Ministry (SKSM) in Berkeley Calif.
was invited to discuss ways of 'cooperation' with Meadville. They have
chosen, for now, not to pursue that further. MLTS wishes them well and
is surging forward. There may be no SKSM in three decades if MLTS
succeeds in becoming, as I believe I heard said, The Center for
theological training and development for the UUA. Harvard Divinity
School, as a University school, is outside this realm of parochial
training,

3) A Chicago Alderman is dealing with MLTS with regard to making
'available' a larger piece of land than the school now has. MLTS would
move from the center of the University to a location south of The Midway
at the edge of the black community. This would serve to increase MLTS's
knowledge of and skill at dealing with diverse peoples.

4) Much money will be needed, perhaps some $30,000,000, to meet these
goals. More than a million has been pledged or given thus far.

Beyond what I think I heard, there are implications of this that are
interesting, I think that some of these might be:

a) The now 39 year old pattern of encouraging all new theological
students, from UU schools and from a diverse range of schools to get on
the track for coming into our ministry may be sidetracked. The older
pre-1968 pattern, of shepherding and supporting just those going to
'our' schools and asking the others to apply for fellowship when they're
ready to graduate might be re-introduced. The development of a well
regulated training center would encourage consistent education.
Diversity, especially Christian theological education, might be sharply
reduced.

b) The ethos of the New Theological Center and the UUA might be more in
line with one another. The core interests would perhaps be less the
congregations, and more the overarching purpose of what is increasingly
being referred to as "our movement".

c) MLTS cooperation with the City of Chicago might be seen as being in
conflict with our opposition to faith based initiatives.

d) The perhaps $600,000 annually available through the UUA for
theological development, which goes now, and is planned to go in the
future as well, to students from different locations, might be
concentrated for study at MLTS and continue this way, with none of the
70% attending Christian or University schools benefiting appreciably
from it.

Overall, one is reminded that power is the enemy of diversity in so many
instances. [Democrats tend usually to be united in their national goals,
Republicans usually at odds with one another. Democrats are better at
controlling diversity.] From a UU Christian standpoint, this might not
have too erosive an effect on UU Christian ministry and theology, since
the preferences at MLTS and SKSM have long been pointed away from that
direction. But the concentration of attention and effort on a single
emerging school could make graduates of Union, Claremont, Andover-Newton
(currently this school has our largest UU student body) and other
schools feel more like step-children than 'joint heirs with Christ of
the Kingdom'.

N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, England, is fond of saying that realizing
and using our freedom are the two greatest gifts of a life lived in
Christ. So how can we ensure that we can help MLTS and SKSM, our
ministerial candidates and our churches without compromising our liberty
-- and our fairness.

Heretics long ago, but now, not so much

2007-07-06T11:13:00.000-04:00

Is Unitarian Universalism heretical in any real sense today?

Unitarianism and Universalism were originally defined by "heretical" doctrines: anti-trinitarianism and universal salvation. And during the 19th century especially, the disputes between the heretical Unitarians and the heretical Universalists against the orthodox were potent and real issues.

But one of the consequences of modernism is that almost all of Christianity has made the move that Tillich made in that Christian doctrines are now understood to be not as actual descriptions of physical and historical realities, but as a set of metaphors which are interpreted as describing the existential realities of human life. Almost all Christians understand almost all doctrines as subject to existential and psychological reinterpretation.

The liberal and mainline Protestant churches are quite open about what they are doing. And even among the Barthian proclamationists, there lurks the same remove from actual reality. The differences between the liberal Christian and the fundamentalist Christian is that the Liberal says, "Let us live as we though believe that these doctrines are true" and the Fundementalist, "Let us speak, think and act so convincingly that we believe that these doctrines are true, that we ourselves and others forget that they are not."

Back to Unitarian Universalism: if all doctrine is being existentially and pyschologically reinterpreted in a creative, current process, does our supposed differences with Christian orthodoxy matter anymore?

For example, suppose one were to reinterpret the divinity of Jesus as a metaphor for the divinity of all humanity -- it is a quite modern and liberal statement to say that "all are children of God". Does that "all" include Jesus of Nazareth? Is it our position that all men are the sons of God, except Jesus of Nazareth?

Or, to work the other side of the street: If we reinterpret salvation as coming into a healed relationship with God and others and the self, in this world, in this history, does it make any sense to say that "all are saved?" Obviously, there are many people who will not come into that healing? If we make our own heavens and hells, then it is pretty obvious that it is not true that there is "no hell."

What I am saying is that in the current theological climate, any aspect of doctrine, or any Biblical truth, can be and will be creatively reinterpreted to speak to any aspect of our shared existential realities. Almost every sort of Christian preacher does so routinely. UU's, to the extent that they deal with Christian, Jewish or biblical themes, do not do so much differently. We are not, in practice, very heretical, or more precisely, our old heresies matter less than we think they do.

It would be subject for another post, but I think that much of the Christian world also agrees with us that all world religions are cultural productions of particular cultural circumstances, and that no religion is more true than the others. We differ from others in that we are more willing to modify our liturgy and worship practices to reflect this reality.

The most obvious theory about the IA mystery and what it means

2007-07-05T22:52:00.000-04:00

One thing that Gini said at the meeting was that the UUA board did not want to have to ride herd on 60+ IA's, and so it would be a good thing if there was a Council of Theologically based Organizations to handle its own membership requirements. In other words, the proposed Council could decide who was in and who was out.

A long time ago, a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons, and I had a good laugh about starting a UU affiliate of Devil Worshippers, complete with our story of exclusion and oppression by mainstream religion, to satirize what we saw as the UU inability to set any sort of boundaries. (We even had a name, "the LUUciferians"). We abandoned the plan because we were afraid that no one would get the joke. (And we hadn't been through the MFC yet.)

Well, apparently, the Council of Theologically Based Organizations will be the body to guard the door against the LUUciferians.

Now, the recurring suspicion is that all of this is the Board's response to the UU's for Polyamory Awareness. (They can disband, they have met their goal in that all of us are aware of Polyamory, even though we are now pretending that it does not enter our thoughts or considerations at all. And that it certainly has nothing to do with whole question.)

Oh, another clue! Gini said at our meeting, to answer the critique that this was a sudden thing, that the board had been working on the new IA policy ever since the Long Beach Convention. The Long Beach convention was the height of our collective Polyamorous Awareness. Much hand wringing.

OK, let's just stipulate, for the sake of argument, what all the cynics say: that the IA mystery is really quite simple. It is the way to set up a structural block to having to say "yes" to an application from UU's for Polyamory Awareness.

There is no evidence which contradicts that theory.

But consider the implications of it being true.

It means that our elected leadership is not being honest with us.

It means that the elected leadership is finessing and not confronting an issue that is right before us -- an issue that is not only significant for Unitarian Universalism institutionally, but is actually right below the surface of our culture. The issue arises out of the cultural redefinition of marriage that our congregations have been closely associated with for years, long before same sex marriage was ever an issue. UU ministers did lots of marriages for people who could not remarry in the Roman Catholic Church after a divorce; our acceptance of divorced people as not "less than" is a longstanding tradition.

We have been in the conversation about marriage for a long time. And we should think about whether the recognition of polyamorous relationships is good ministry. And I think that we have the moral authority to address that question in way that can lead the culture.

But our UUA board apparently prefers to not address the issue. And so a whole tissue of evasions, false flags, misapplied principles, bureaucratic and administrative doublespeak and other forms of timorous gumwaddery is packed into the already ponderous machinery of our internal discourse.

We deserve better than that. Religious movements grow and prosper through the process of continuous self-definition in the rapidly changing cultural environment in which they find themselves. If they can discern properly what is essential and permanent to themselves and what is transitory, they can lead others. That is what the culture is calling for from us: what are the essential purposes of marriage, of covenants between persons, for children and for the stability of the social order? If we don't have something to say, who does? And if we are divided and disunited on what to say in this moment, wouldn't you rather have that discussion than go to interminable meetings of the Council of Hyphenated UU's and their role in the Lowest Common Denomination?

The Independent Affiliate mystery deepens

2007-07-05T22:21:00.000-04:00

Along with a couple of other leaders of the UUCF, I went to a networking discussion convened by Gini Courter, UUA Moderator, about the Independent Affiliate question. Also at the meeting were leaders of the UU Buddhist Fellowship, one or more the Humanist organization, a leader of CUUPS, a leader of UU for Jewish Awareness, some from the Psi Symposium and a leader of the newish Mystics group.

While the Board was not meeting to vote on most of our IA statuses, it was pretty clearly telegraphed that they would be denied. And it was made abundantly clear that the meeting did not have the purpose of discussing, defending, justifying, or explaining those pending decisions of the Board. In fact, Gini Courter made it clear that given the demands on her time at GA, just convening this meeting was a powerful act of generosity and graciousness.

I like Gini Courter and think that she is doing a good job. Sometimes doing so requires a significantly greater degree of intentionality than other times, but I do my best.

So, without that discussion, clues as to the actual real motivation behind the decision to cull the herd of IA's were not thick on the ground.

Gini's strong suggestion was that we in that room ought to join ourselves into an umbrella organization and apply as that body as an IA. (Various names for such a group have been suggested by wags and visionaries since: my suggestion was that it would be called, "the amalgamated organization of hyphenated, and therefore, not real, UU's" Excessively snarky, I suppose. Another person, much wiser, suggested calling ourselves "The Council of the Sources" which has some real merit.) Gini seemed to think that this organization of organizations could play a positive role in providing some of the content for lay theological education.

But why cull the herd of IA's if that is the goal? The UUA could fund and encourage IA's developing materials for lay theological education in the current situation if they want to.

Another point was made that many of the IA's do the same kind of work, and so could benefit from consolidation in that it would reduce duplication of effort. A parallel was drawn between the many IA's devoted to political or social causes, which could benefit from "making connections between contradictions" as we used to say, back in the day. But providing specifically Jewish, or Humanist, or Pagan or Christian content is not an interchangeable function, done by the interchangeable people.

And why does the Board care if IA's are duplicating efforts between themselves and not being maximally efficient with our resources? Don't they have enough to do managing the UUA itself?

These supposed benefits of consolidating the theologically based IA's into one body may or may not be true, but I think that it is clear that they are not the Board's underlying motive, which has still not been explained.

The UUCF will survive and thrive no matter what its official status is. I raise this issue, and raise it again and again, because of the lack of honesty and transparency that surrounds this issue. It is a mystery, and there should not be this kind of mystery at all.

It really happened

2007-06-15T23:58:00.000-04:00

So, I am presiding over a religious service at GA this year. And my lovely and faithful co-officient is a well-known blogger famous for her savvy advice about fashion, beauty and the importance of making the small sacrifice of looking like a religious leader.
So I mention that we will be robing for this event, inasmuch as it is a religious service. She says, in that little voice "Do I have to?" Sigh. Another Sigh. O, I guess so."
I swear it really happened. If I hadn't summoned a semi-stern look, but told her that a stole, a mu-mu and some crocs would have been OK, I think that she would have gone for it.
The meaning that I draw from this tale is: we all struggle with temptation, even those who lead.

Mercy Mercy Mercy.

Don't try this at home

2007-06-13T07:41:00.000-04:00

Michael O'Hare, at a site I like to read "The Reality Based Community" hits the perfect level of sarcasm in this post about today's political/media climate.

Once upon a time, people made their own music in their living rooms with friends, or went out in the park to throw a ball around. The music they made required a lot of practicing and was still never really good; no-one I knew could play any ball game as well as even a middle-rank NFL player. Now, thank God, we have a few certified specialist experts making wonderful music for our iPods, and playing superb ball for us all to watch, and we can do it alone, which saves no end of taking care of other people's feelings. How could anyone want the art, or sports, of a great nation to be mostly made ineptly, by anyone and everyone, taking a lot of time that could be spent on the job? Surely it's better for all of us to leave this kind of thing to the few stars who are better than we could ever be. Kids used to have to make their own stuff with blocks, and pretend a rag doll was crying, laughing, talking, etc., but now every kid can have brightly colored, really complicated electronic toys that each do one amazing thing as soon as the batteries are put in, toys that are made by real professional designers and engineers instead of clueless six-year-olds. How are kids supposed to know when a doll should cry? With today's toys, they don't have to.
In politics, opinions and judgments made by amateurs, looking with untrained eyes at actual phenomena, are as bad as the home-made piano-playing we used to suffer. Why would we do this when we have famous and (usually) attractive people to do that for us? A few paid professional conservatives and liberals can give their tribes really good opinions, cunningly packaged in quick witty hits with super production values. It's just truculent and wilful to want to read a book, or watch a debate, when real pros have already done that so much better than we can, and are happy to give us really excellent opinions and judgments. Why would anyone want to hear views about the surge, or Social Security, from some friend who's not at all famous, badly lit, unrehearsed, with home-made makeup - or none! - and with some random office or restaurant background and dirty dishes on the table?

Phil is perceptive again but what is next?

2007-06-08T08:27:00.000-04:00

Philocrites puts a name to the long standing "parties" in UU politics: the "denominationalists" and the "congregationalists." These have been evident to me ever since I came back into Unitarian Universalism in 1989, after a 20 year absence. But this understanding of the competing groups is an elaboration and outgrowth of older contradictions.
I rejoice in the apparent victory of the "congregationalists". I think that it is super that the Board, the officers and the staff now remember that the role of the association is to serve the congregations. I have been pleased to see that the Commission on Social Witness process gives much, much, much more weight to the participation of congregations in developing our public stances and public ministry.
What comes next? Two things: one is looking beneath the rhetoric to where the power actually goes as processes change. The second is understanding how "congregationalism" means empowering the lay leaders of congregations in the national sphere vs. developing the leadership in the national sphere of the ministers of successful congregations. The rhetoric of "congregationalism" could and does mean both and either.

One meaning of the Independent Affiliate mystery

2007-06-07T17:15:00.000-04:00

Henceforth, all things, great and small, done in the world of official Unitarian Universalism will be done in the name of the "congregations." Just as every time the Secretary of State goes to a Mideastern capital, they do so "to advance the peace process", so will all decisions be done to "serve the congregations."

The disaffiliation of Independent Affiliates is between the UU Board and the Independent Affiliates. The concrete resource in contention comes down to the presumptive program slot that an IA has at the General Assembly. Just below the surface is the ability of an organization to claim some sort of official relationship with the UUA simply by mailing in a few words and a hundred bucks. The Board realized that was an invitation to potential embarrassment, a wise perception.

But I cannot see for the life of me how the congregation I serve has a dog in that fight.

Congregational Power has been on the banner of most of the people who have been critical of the path of the Unitarian Universalist Association since shortly after merger. This loyal opposition was centered primarily in Christian/Theist churches and many were aggrieved by the fact that they were humiliated by the fact that the founding documents of the UUA gave only the most grudging and stingy affirmation to our Christian background and the worship traditions of some of our churches.

After it became clear that the defense of Christian/Theist theology on the national level was a dead issue through the 60's - 80's, many of this traditionalist caucus took up the theme of "congregational polity" as defining their movement. It had many meanings.

It defended the local church and its worship tradition, which is where Christian/Theist theology endured.

It meant the local church did not have to go along with everything that came out of 25 Beacon Street, whether it was demands for funding, chalice logos, whatever new hymnal was coming out.

It was a powerful rhetorical brake on what was seen as the politicization of the Unitarian Universalist movement at the national level, asking whether the positions of the Washington office were actually representative of the congregations' concerns.

Over time, it became the overarching theme of a traditionalist caucus within Unitarian Universalism. It had a powerful history, was understandable by one and all.

Within the last 5 years or so, it has won the day. I think that such a circumstance came about because of the successive Free Church Conferences, the publication of Rev. Alice Blair Wesley's enormously persuasive Minns Lecture on congregational polity, the presidency of William Sinkford and the elevation of Gini Courter to Moderator. (I think that the pre-Sinkford anti-racism effort showed the limits of trying to change Unitarian Universalism by the national staff organizing to "train" the congregations; these events were part of the change, too.)

The result is that a rhetorical unity has been reached that "serving the congregations " is the highest level value of National Unitarian Universalism. And this is good, but it raises a lot of questions.

Alice Blair Wesley's argument was that first the AUA, and then, the UUA was and is organized, in fact, as a non-profit corporation, governed by its board. It is not really an association of congregations and the General Assembly is not truly a representative body of the congregations doing the work of the association. It appears to be, but it is not.

So, what happens when the Board and the National officers and staff adopt the language of working always on behalf of the congregations? The temptation will be that it will become an all-purpose slogan, and a language that justifies anything and everything.

I think that IA controversy indicates that we have reached just such a point. The language about engaging congregations seems to be so vague and elastic that it cannot point to a real meaning in anyone's head.

Evaluating IA's on the value that they provide congregations would be quite easy. Just say that in order to get affiliate status, an organization would have to turn in letters of recommendation from 5-10 congregational boards, with a check for hundred dollars from each board. You would find out real soon which have relationships with congregations and which ones don't. Tinker with the details all you want, but the Board went another way. A statement is being asked for, and the Board will decide on whether Party A is serving the needs of Party B. Who has the power in that situation? Party B? I don't think so.

Language that defines discourse has power. It has the power to clarify and it has the power to obscure. When it is obscuring the reality of what is going on, then people have to ask deeper questions, and the first one to start with is "what is at stake here?" and "where is the power going?"

Serving Congregations?

2007-06-07T12:54:00.000-04:00

Well now, it seems that just everyone buys this new mantra that the purpose of the UUA is to 'serve congregations' and therefore, it makes perfect sense for the Independent Affiliates to show that they 'model interdependence by engaging congregations' or some such pile-up of verbified nouns and nounified verbs that pass as UU-speak. Everyone is buying the basic stated premise of the "Massacre of the Independents."

OK, I am being a bit strident, but I am feeling so ironic that it is causing narcissism in that all compasses point to me.

My point: organizations are complex environments and an interdependent web in which each part and parcel may have many roles and results. Precipitious change in the environment can throw the whole balance of nature out of whack.

So what role do the IA's play in the overall environment of the UUA?

1. They are intellectual centers. Congregations are not intellectual centers in which new ideas are developed, and old traditions reclaimed and revived. Congregations are united around their worship and tend to gravitate toward their own center. A GA in which there were unlimited congregationally developed workshops would have 500 sessions on how to grow and 500 sessions on how to avoid unnecessary theological controversy. IA's are portals in which new ideas, new perspectives and new associations come into our association. The former would document hopes and failures; the latter successes.

2. IA's play a role in developing the next generation of ministerial leaders. It's an entry point for seminarians who follow their interest into an IA, and then meet ministers already in fellowship. IA's give new ministers an opportunity to be involved in developing programs and presentations at GA.

3. IA's are content providers to the association -- turning out papers, position papers, pamphlets, programs, curriculums etc. Some of them are useful to congregations and some are not.

Who was it who first drew the distinction between foxes and hedgehogs. Maybe Isaiah Berlin? Anyway: hedgehogs know one thing -- the hedge that they live under -- and they know it very well. Foxes, on the other hand, know lots of things because they travel far and wide.

The whole "everything for the congregations" raises the banner of "All Power to the Hedgehogs." But we need foxes too. Bloggers, Independent Affiliates, the seminaries are all foxy people and organizations that bring in the new, cross-pollinate, spread ideas around, and keep things fresh.

I am afraid that the board is damaging our ecosystem by this large scale purge of our IA's.

BTW, I think that the focus on "congregations" and "congregational polity" -- which I have always been a fan of -- mis-states the central problem in Unitarian Universalism -- so almost anything can be done in its name. But that is for another post.

Henry Louis Gates' Bag Party

2007-05-31T10:48:00.000-04:00

Jfield comments on how recent the use of the brown bag as a measuring rod has been, saying that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. experienced it in the Ivy League.

Here is Gates describing the incident on Book Notes, in an interview with Brian Lamb.

When I was at Yale, for example -- I went there in '69 and...

LAMB: Undergraduate?

GATES: Undergraduate.

LAMB: Studying what, by the way?

GATES: American history, though I took a lot of Afro-Am courses on the side, but I was a history major. I remember the first year I was there -- the first month I was there, we had this special meeting of the Black Student Alliance to talk to the black men -- young black men from New Orleans, some of whom were very light complected. And they wanted to have something called a bag party. So, you know, what's a bag party? They wanted to put this paper bag over the door and anyone who was darker than the paper bag couldn't get into the party. So, you know, I looked at them -- I was secretary of the Black Student Alliance -- everyone from the North and everyone who had any kind of sense and was not from New Orleans said, "We've never heard of a such a thing. You guys can't do this. I mean, this is some sort of antiquated, sick relic of the past. I mean, you can't do that."

And that practice stopped, and then I later found out through black history classes that that sort of thing had been going on in New Orleans for a very long time. The point is that you can internalize your own oppression. You can take on the forms of sickness, through which oppressors try to control you, whether you're a woman or a gay person or a person of color. And our job, in part, as academics is to fight against those sort of tendencies within those respective groups. That's not sufficient reason -- I mean, reasons of self-esteem are not sufficient reasons to justify the existence of, say, women's studies or gay studies or African-American studies in the academy by any means. But that is an aftereffect of the kind of work that we do in the academy if you're in, say, ethnic studies.

Jfield says "that's good enough for me."

Good enough for what?

No one doubted the information -- what was questioned was whether the information called for the consequences that were stated as having happened in the original Mummert sermon: that SKSM would change the name of the brown bag lunch to something else, and the unmistakable implication that this was what good people ought to do.

Now, it appears that the consequence was stated inaccurately -- that nobody took this that seriously because they still use brown bags and go to brown bag lunches throughout the GTU.

So what happened? It's all quite unclear. Under critical questioning initiated by Peacebang, who gets reviled in the process, the thing becomes misty and vague. But the surviving message is that "don't ever question the important work that the SKSM is doing."

Brown Bags

2007-05-31T08:50:00.000-04:00

Ok, I will get into this one as well.
For those who stepped out briefly: here is the backstory.

Melissa Mummert, in a sermon reprinted in Quest, describes Starr King School for the Ministry's decision to cease using the phrase "brown bag lunch".

Peacebang comments on this, and not in a supportive way.

Much commenting ensues. Most of it is a defense of SKSM's curriculum's focus on anti-oppression.

My interest was piqued by the blog entry of the Left Coast Unitarian.

Key paragraph:

For me the actual matter of dispute is fairly simple. If a person of color, especially an elder, suggests that a particular term is not the most inviting way to title or describe a gathering, I will take them at their word absent a good deal of evidence.

On a very small scale, herein lies the weakness of much of the anti-racism and anti-oppression work that has been done among Unitarian Universalists in the 21st century. This paragraph describes an asymmetrical relationship and a lack of mutual critical accountability. It goes far beyond the small things -- titles of gatherings -- but extends to highest levels of analysis.

Read over Melissa Mummert's sermon again, which describes in detail, how she learned that the phrase "brown bag lunch" was unacceptable at SKSM. It was just announced. She was silent, but did not understand. Someone else cautiously raised the question as to why this change was necessary, and Mummert internally cheered. A brief explanation was given, and that was sufficient to end the discussion.

Why? There are so many questions unanswered here, which require a critical spirit to raise. Just from my knowledge of history:

My understanding is that the brown bag test was a means of enforcing color lines within the African American community in New Orleans in the early part of the 20th century. Was it used by whites as well? (Whites in the South did not distinguish between light-skinned and darker African Americans when it came to segregation.)
Is this practice in the current memory of African Americans, or is it a recovered historical fact?
Was the phrase "brown Bag lunch" itself used as a code to describe who was and who was not welcome at lunch?
Are brown paper bags themselves objects that are avoided in African American communities because of their role in the racial history of the US.
What attitude should white people take toward color prejudice in the African American community?
What does knowledge of this piece of US racial history require of us? So what? Does it follow that we ought to not use the phrase "brown bag lunch"? Should we not use brown bags at all?

In order to raise these questions, which could conceivably require more research and reflection, one has to be able to hold as a possible answer: this fact about brown bags is interesting, but essentially unimportant. But in an intellectual environment where the value of information is determined by who provides it, such criticism is not welcome. The only question really allowed, is "Please, I don't understand and it troubles me, explain some more, so I can be reunited with you."

Such an attitude, as so briefly summarized by the Left Coast Unitarian, leads first, to intellectual laziness, secondly, to relationships of domination and subordination and finally to the abuse of power.

What the Left Coast Unitarian describes is, in compressed form, is a theory of the sociology of knowledge, an essential piece of the whole construct of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, as developed by Lenin, Stalin and Mao. It has a history, and has been put into practice, and the consequences have been made clear. It is a theory of knowledge that does not advance understanding and greater knowledge, but subordinates knowledge to the acquisition and maintenance of power.

When I talk about this, I am not talking about far away places and times gone by. The attitude toward knowledge, criticism and mutual moral accountability that the Left Coast Unitarian describes explains why our Unitarian Universalist movement has been studying racism and oppression for about a decade now, and is less sophisticated in its understanding of it than people were in 1975.

A final self-advertisement. Click on my longer paper "Anti-Racism Decoded" in the right column for a much longer analysis of anti-racism in the UUA, as I saw it at the time of the Nashville GA in what? 2000?

The hidden cause

2007-05-30T09:17:00.000-04:00

It is my belief that the hidden cause of the anxiety-provoking weakness of the UUA is simple. We are a religious organization that marginalizes and disempowers its religious professionals in the leadership of its affairs, especially its most successful ministers.

We hold our annual convention at the time of the year when our ministers are least ready to exert any leadership.
This year we are inviting our congregational leaders to come and learn together at UU University, at a time which competes with minister's meetings.
Our national leaders understand that national leadership positions are not possible for successful parish ministers.
We think that communicating with the larger culture is "marketing" and we hire marketing consultants to do it. Communicating to the larger culture is "sharing our gospel" and it is a religious/theological/evangelical task. Did Jesus hire a marketing consultant to come up with "The Kingdom of God is at Hand."?
Much of the conflict over "congregational polity" is, in my opinion, a shadow conflict between the national staff and the parish ministers.

No wonder that we are "The Lowest Common Denomination." (snark)

My suspicion is that the culling of the IA herd is an attempt to minimize the distractions that keep the association from doing the work that it needs to do to fashion the liberal religious message and ministry to this culture at this time. But that work is first and foremost the work of our parish ministers, who have to preach such a message every week. Empowering them to do that work of clarifying our message and ministry at the association level is the necessary step.

It does not follow

2007-05-30T09:10:00.001-04:00

that "congregational polity" means that trans-congregational organizations, memberships and networks are somehow illegitimate.

Whatever you think, the way that information flows and the kinds of connections that people can make means that Unitarian Universalism, like all movements, parties, denominations, and organizations will exist in an open network of many-to-many connections. UU's from across the county and across the world will form connections around special interests, shared identities and common causes. That toothpaste is already out of the tube.

More on the IA Mystery --Going a Little Deeper

2007-05-30T08:42:00.000-04:00

Unitarian Universalism is an organizationally anxious denomination.

We know that we are not growing fast enough to keep up with the population.
It is hard for us to articulate what we feel are our shared message, mission and goals.
We feel weak in the overall religious environment of the country.
We are diverse in our understanding of what we are and are doing, enough so that when we look around at other UU's, we often feel that we are not sure that we belong. It is easy to imagine that the whole thing could go in a direction where we would no longer feel comfortable.

In sum, most of us want Unitarian Universalism to be stronger, more organized, more powerful and more united, and more capable. At the same time, we see other UU's as potential threats and rivals and obstacles.

I would love it if Unitarian Universalism grew more bigger and more powerful and more organized, IF it still includes me, and the kind of church I serve. If on the other hand, it grows more powerful and strong, but is composed of congregations, theologies and social stances that don't include me, then I am a bit more skeptical.

The Independent Affiliates are the "identified patient" in this anxious system right now.

For a start, the IA's include almost every kind of group.

When person X says that they think that the IA's need to be culled, they are thinking "Good, let's get rid of those theological caucuses like CUUPS and the UUCF and the UUBF, who are preventing us from uniting theologically."
Person Y is in complete agreement with culling the herd, but is thinking "Great, let's get rid of the weird cause groups: the Polyamorists, the Ethical Animal Crowd, and everybody who creeps me out and stands between me and the bookstore in the exhibition hall."
Person Z is thinking, "Get rid of them all, they are distorting GA and keeping it from being a representative body of congregational leaders."

We should understand that no one is stopping us from doing what we need to do, and that culling the herd of Independent Affiliates is not going to strengthen our congregational role in association decision making, nor bring about the discussion that creates greater theological clarity among us, nor strengthen our sense of mission. The IA's are at worst a small distraction to those tasks, if we let ourselves be distracted, but could be important assets in that work.

Why the Independent Affiliate Mystery matters

2007-05-30T08:17:00.000-04:00

So, the UUA board rejects the applications for a bunch of Independent Affiliates?

Weren't there too many of them anyway?
Aren't they an "organizational irregularity" in "An Association of Congregations" anyway?
Aren't some of them just kind of support groups?
Aren't others just political pressure groups that have as their purpose to lobby for certain political stances by the Association?
How many have more than token memberships?
Aren't they part of the problem of GA -- that bazaar of the bizarre that our substitute for a serious meeting where the work of the association can be carried out by representatives of our congregations?
And aren't some of those IA's responsible for our fracturing into hyphenated-UU's and actually prevent the kind of clarifying and unifying theological discussion which we need?

Independent Affiliates have been part of the organizational ecology of the UUA for many years now. They are trans-congregational memberships and networks, and this single form has become a catch-all form for almost any sort of grouping.

Somewhere, there is an analysis of what kinds of groups serve our larger purposes and fill a needed niche in the ecology, and which ones don't. Or is there such an analysis? So the first reason that it matters is that there needs to be some accountability and transparency about the real reasons why things like this happen.

I get the sense that the real reasons are hidden behind a veil of UU-speak. When the rule says that an organization needs to "model interdependence through engagement with our member congregations" that somebody somewhere has a pretty specific idea of what that means, and who is and who is not doing it. I think that we all have the right to know.

The Independent Affiliate Mystery

2007-05-30T07:17:00.000-04:00

At its most recent meeting, the UUA Board rejected the applications of 15 of the 17 organizations who were re-applying for Independent Affiliate Status. I have read elsewhere that the board voted as follows. I have not been able to find the minutes online -- I suppose that they are still in process.

Approved:

Council of Unitarian Universalists Camps and Conferences
Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry.

IA status was denied to the following groups:

Disaffiliated:

Unitarian Universalist Men’s Network
Unitarian Sunday School Society
Collegium
Faithful Fools Street Ministry
Lambda Ministers Guild
New Massachusetts Universalist Convention
Project Harvest Hope
The Unitarian Universalist Psi Symposium
Unitarian Universalist Retired Ministers and Partners Association
Unitarian Universalists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
District Presidents’ Association
Council on Church Staff Finances
Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice
Unitarian Universalist Peace Fellowship
Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans

The rules that spell out what is required for Independent Affiliate Status are here:

Rule 3.8.1. Application for Independent Affiliate Status.

Each applicant for independent affiliate status shall submit with its application:

an attested copy of its charter, and, unless it is included in the charter, an attested copy of its purposes, objectives, and bylaws;
the number of members or member groups in the organization;
a list of the principal officers with their personal mail addresses, congregation membership or congregation where settled if the officer is a fellowshipped minister serving a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and the principal mail address of the organization;
the contribution contemplated by rule 3.8.9;
a financial statement showing income and expenses for the latest fiscal year preceding the date of filing and showing assets, liabilities and net worth as of the end of such fiscal year;
the dates upon which its governing board met during the twelve months immediately preceding the date of filing;
any yearly reports of its governing body and its principal officers sent to members during the twelve months immediately preceding the date of filing;
evidence of whether it enjoys tax exempt status:
1. under Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code of 1954;
2. as a registered charity as provided for in the Income Tax Act (Canada); or
3. under the laws of the country governing the applicant's tax status;
if the applicant does not enjoy tax exempt status, the reason or reasons it does not;
a statement outlining how its purpose, mission and structure models interdependence through engagement with our member congregations, coordination or collaboration of effort and resources; and a statement outlining how the organization supports the transformation of institutions and our world to be aligned with those values expressed in our Principles; and
any other information which the Board of Trustees of the Association shall require.

The letter sent out in April, 2007 inviting the applications for this board meeting is here.

The letter does not spell out the meaning of point "J" in the new rules.

Summing Up: The official document trail does not provide any real insight into the reasons and purposes for sudden disaffiliation of 15 of 17 applications for IA status. So, why? What purpose is being served? What was the precipitating event?

If you have any additional information, please leave it in the comments.

Testing What You Would Do

2007-05-24T07:10:00.000-04:00

How bad a thing would you do, if it were to save something really good? Apparently, this is the dominant discourse in public moral theology these days. Is it OK for Jack Bauer to torture people on '24'? Do US Muslims think that suicide bomb attacks against civilians are justifiable? US soldiers and marines in Iraq have been recently quizzed on whether they think that abuse of civilians is OK. A wag recently commented that the Republican Presidential candidates are uniting around the position that they would relish the opportunity to send to Gitmo and torture illegal alien women until they give up the names of their abortion providers.

It is the Abraham and Isaac story again -- if you say that you will obey God, would you then murder your own son, if you thought that God commands it? It is a line of questioning that probes for the exact spot where two values which are normally seen as complementary become contradictory. After all, in most circumstances, protecting one's children and serving God are not seen as competing goods. The resulting moral inquiry is conducted by constructing speculative hypothetical situations, trying to uncover the ultimate value.

Most people are pragmatists when it comes to morality. They know that there are few moral absolutes so clear that it is impossible to imagine violating it for a greater good. Thou shalt not steal, but what about a man stealing bread for his hungry children? Thou shalt not kill, but what about shooting a guy who has opened fire in a schoolyard? So polls will, I would think, exeggarate the number of people who will not rule out really awful actions, simply because they resist absolute rules. Pragmatic people keep all options on the table.

In order for pragmatism to work, one has to delve deeply into the concrete reality of every situation. One commentator on one of the blogs writes that he would torture and kill a three year old child to save the country. But that is not the question anyone faces. Now, people are being asked to look the other way when three year old children are damaged because a desperate, politically unpopular President with a history of poor judgement has determined that such damage to three year old children is an acceptable cost to saving his reputation and his party's chances in the next election cycle.

An Obvious Point, but needs to be said

2007-05-22T15:49:00.000-04:00

UU's should encourage tithing.

UU leaders, ministers, staff, and lay, all agree that it is crucial to build "a culture of generosity" among Unitarian Universalists if we are ever going to do any of the things to which we aspire. In fact, it is the one thing that we agree on. Everyone from the flattest of the flat earth Humanists, to the most crusty nostalgic Christian, to the grooviest New Age hipster, to the UU comrade fresh from the barricades, all decry our legendary cheapness.

So why doesn't someone start thinking about how to encourage and recognize those who tithe? After all, we have national programs designed to encourage all sorts of other good behaviors, and to recognize those who are good examples. One gets all sorts of ribbons to wear on one's name badge, and one's congregation can be listed in lists in the UU World for all sorts of good things. One can even have little icons next to your congregations link if you are welcoming, or accessible. So, we are not afraid to make distinctions. So why are individual tithing not encouraged or recognized. Why isn't anybody thinking about this.

OK, I will.

1. We should define a suitable level of tithing. I think that the formula of 10% of income going to charity, and half of that going to the local church, and other UU institutions and organizations is a good measure. I think tithing should be definable by looking at the relationships between certain numbered lines on one's income tax return.

2. There should be national definition of tithing and national emphasis on tithing. So, it is not just old Rev. So and So trying to get a raise.

3. And there should be some way that tithers can be, at their own voluntary choice, be recognized as tithers. ANd we ought to encourage people to seek that recognition. Every person who tithes publicly helps set a new higher expectation for others.

When I consider my own congregation -- I think that the main effect of having tithing recognized as a general category -- even if no one was actually identified as a tither -- would be to turn our thoughts away from the "angels" as being the financial backbone of the church to the tithers.

We have people who I suspect are tithers in my congregation. I am close, but not yet. But I know that our largest givers are not anywhere close to being tithers -- they are just very wealthy people. We, of course, do not do anything to honor these large givers and do not recognize them, but just talk about them all the time, either in gratitude or envious resentment. We would be healthier if the financial contribution that was the projected ideal was the tither -- who might not be wealthy, but was just generous. The message of tithing is that anyone can do it; the message of angels is that only a tiny few can do it, and they better not expect anything in return.

l

One's theology of religions is central

2007-05-15T15:24:00.000-04:00

The Band-Boy scores again with this comment:

I think the first piece of literature — whether it be a position paper, a pamphlet or webpage — I think any new Christian church needs to get down is its understanding of and relationship with non-Christians.

To which I would add, this is also true of Unitarian Universalist congregations. UU congregations actually seem to have 2 or 3 (maybe more) observably different understandings of other religions, including Christianity. For the most part, these theological positions do not even have names, nor even much theological reasoning behind them.

There is a strong strain of old-school supersecessionist Humanism: as modern science burns away all superstition, all religions will eventually be purified into a single ethical humanism.

There is a strong strain of supersecessionist syncretic Unitarian Universalism: all religions will eventually be replaced by a single religion that combines all the best of others into one new world religion.

There is a thought that Unitarian Universalism is a Skeptical Liberal Protestantism that looks world-wide for certain kinds of textual inspiration.

Etc.

But I agree with Boy in the Bands that nailing this down is one of first tasks of self-definition of any religious body in this here world.

For a Healthier Unitarian Universalism

2007-05-12T09:42:00.000-04:00

The Band-Boy asks:

what would it take for Unitarian Universalism to be healthier, so that would could meet some realistic goals for improving the material and spiritual estate of this corner of liberal religiousity? If we’re going to fight, it might as be for something epic. If we’re going to struggle, it should be more than topping up the endowments.

He also says

So how are we to be healthier? One sign of bad health is that, as an Association, we seem incapable of holding more than one model of anything at one time, or for very long. In a great arc, some great cause sweeps the landscape, obliterates other options, the failings appear, and it is discarded. The Fellowship Movement is one example. I think the Big Plant church start — a late-adopted darling from the 1970s — is already showing sign of strain. I wouldn’t get too attached to the Carver Model.

My thoughts: (1) give up "terminal uniqueness", (2) one way to get better is to stop assuming that you're sick (3) promote excellence in worship (4) let ministers be religious leaders again.

(1) UUism is just one survival strategy for liberal, cultural Protestantism as it confronted an increasingly secular society. Other people chose other strategies. We are better positioned to respond to the increase of personal spirituality as a replacement for organized religion. But nobody has the whole problem figured out -- we will rise and fall with others.

(2) Our internal story is that UUism should be huge (after all, "so many people are UU's without knowing it".) so our question is "what is wrong with us that we are not what we think we should be?" Focus on failure and ignore what we do well.

(3) Each of our churches and congregations has "a worship tradition" which includes such things as content boundaries, formality, musical taste, congregational participation level, production values etc Some worship traditions are very strong and serve their congregation well and are a real service to the larger community. Some are weak, promote anxiety and conflict in the congregation, exclude the larger community and are exercises in organizational self-promotion. If there is any "one big thing" we should be focusing on, it is strengthening the worship tradition of each local church/congregation/society.

(4) A religious movement should be led by its religious leaders. We should learn how to recognize excellence among our ministers and allow ourselves to be influenced by that excellence. The role of bloggers? Excellence in ministry tends to be focused on the local church primarily -- hedgehogs. Bloggers are foxes, and help break down the isolation of local churches, and carry the news back and forth, and recognize excellence at work and raise questions, and argue about things that are too much for a sermon.

Losing 2008 in 2007

2007-03-19T23:20:00.000-04:00

According to Hines Sight, we are supposed to be bowled over by the Obama Barack ad which rips off the old Apple ad wherein Big Brother's video image is smashed before the eyes of a mass of beaten down and chained prisoners, by a bright young thing in a jogging suit. Big Brother brought down using one of those Olympic style hammers, which don't look like hammers at all.
Anyway, the Obama ad has Hillary Clinton up their droning on like Big Brother. How hip and how cool is that?
Problem is that it is a right wing talking point that Hillary Clinton is a potential authoritarian menace -- a liberal fascist. It became a favorite right wing talking point after Hillary supposedly tried to take over the entire Health Care Industry by providing a plan for universal health insurance while making every element of the health care industry happy.
So, Obama thinks that Hillary is a authoritarian threat.
If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, then Obama Barack has reinforced the narrative that will be used against the Party's nominee. Gee Thanks.
If Barack Obama is the nominee, why should anyone believe him when he says the Guiliani/Romney/McCain each plan to continue the Bush progress toward unconstitutional and undemocratic authoritarianism? He has trivialized the most telling argument against continued GOP rule. He has reduced a constitutional crisis to the level of a brand war over hipness.
Supposedly, it is an independent expenditure, but really, the ad ends with the official website.
Senator Obama should pull the ad down.

Politics in Church

2007-03-02T18:24:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post reported a study that showed that the political polarization of the country was very pronounced. There is not much of a politically centrist portion of the population. I don't doubt it.
People who because of rules, regulations or custom, are supposed to talk or write about current events in a non-partisan way are put into a very difficult position by this polarization. One such group are the elite pundit corps of columnists and commentators, who are supposed to be neutral and objective. Apparently, their strategy for dealing with this situation is to pine for the good old days of bi-partisanship and dream about a John McCain-Joe Leiberman Unity Government.
Another group professionally disadvantaged by the collapse of the middle are ministers. The issues are too grave to not talk about them. The old "plague on both their houses" doesn't hold water any more, because one party wages illegal wars, tortures people and claims unprecedented executive power and the other one doesn't live like Fransciscan Monks and occasionally swears in public.
The middle is not a reasonable position anymore. The folks in the middle of the road are the ones who have not been paying attention very much and are simply adverse to having an opinion. And there are very few of them left.
Ministers have to move from being non-partisan and above the fray to a place where they speak their minds on current events and still try to maintain right relations with people who disagree with them.
It means not going for cheap shots, being very serious, being as factual as possible in the presentation of one's evidence, and setting a goal of being able to summarize the position of those with whom you disagree in terms that they would recognize their own position. It means keeping a good humor and not getting tribal about loyality. It means being very transparent about one's own thinking and the murky areas of it. It means talking about current events to raise important issues and not to rally the troops.

Forming the Firing Squad in a Circle

2007-03-01T08:07:00.000-05:00

As usual, liberals, both at the rank and file level and at the level of commentators and bloggers, are busy writing stories about the Democrats in Congress that work to the benefit of the GOP. The explosion of blogs now means that everyone can get in one what used to be the Washington elite media's exclusive terrain -- telling people how weak, ineffectual and incompetent the Democratic party is.
The House passed a non-binding resolution disapproving of the escalation of the war. Only 15 Republicans voted for the resolution and 2 Democrats voted against it. Despite the cratering of public support for the war, the GOP held together very well in the House. There had been some predictions of as many as 40-60 GOP defections. Only 15.
In the Senate, the same non-binding resolution was filibustered. The cloture motion got 57 votes -- a much higher percentage of GOP Senators defected from the President as in House. The story however, was that the President's Party had prevailed, because they had prevented the resolution from coming to the floor.
I bring this story up because it indicates the actual state of power relationships in the Congress, an understanding of which is a necessary precondition to the evaluation of strategy and tactics.
Put simply, the Democrats in the Senate are in a weak position. Their majority depends on Lieberman. They are well short of the 60 votes needed to get something, anything to the floor.
They have two options: one is propose a wide variety of bills, repeals of bills, and resolutions which will be filibustered and kept from the floor. Every incident of which will be portrayed as a Bush victory.
The second is to try to find some measure that gets past the 60 votes mark and present Bush with a escalating clash of institutional powers, which will result in exposing the constitutional crisis already created by Bush's executive branch power grab.
The Democrats in the Senate are objectively in a weak position. But instead of explaining how it is going to take crafty and persistent legislative strategizing to gather the power to effectively challange Bush, writers supposedly sympathetic to Democrats assail them for being weak. Apparently the only way to show strength is to take a series of positions which repeatedly lose.
End Result: Everyone in the world knows, and even most Democratic partisans say so, that the Democratic Party is too weak to govern.
Who benefits?

Democrats Need to Follow the 11th Commandment

2007-02-20T10:01:00.000-05:00

Although it first arose in his 1966 run for Governor of California, Ronald Reagan's espousal of the 11th Commandment ("Thou Shalt not speak ill of other Republicans") really entered the national politics of the Republican party in 1976. Interestingly enough, since then the GOP has had a very successful run in political power. One of their strengths has been their unity.
Democrats, not so much. Democrats vilify each other in primary campaigns in which they spend as much time and energy attacking each other as Republican office holders they are trying to replace. The primary season is when the Democrats write the negative ads about Democrats that the GOP will use in the general election.
Compare: Republicans keeping their unity and directing their fire on Democrats leading to increasing political power and the ability to shape public debate. Democrats fractious and disunited, criticizing each other remorsely leading to decreasing political power and an inability to shape public debate. Maybe, just maybe, Democrats might want to rethink this.
Consider the huge debate about whether Senator Clinton has sufficiently 'apologized' for her vote in 2002 for the authorization of military force act. (She says that if we knew then what we know now, there never would have been a vote.) For all the clobbering of her vote then, what is forgotten is that George W. Bush had misled the country about the intelligence, and the Republican majority of the Congress was united behind Bush's policy, and that the United States was going to go to war with Iraq, even if Mrs. Clinton had immolated herself on the Senate floor in protest. Was her vote unwise? Yes. Was it decisive? No. Do Democrats need to focus our energy on building the narrative that Democratic politicians are politically calculating and inauthentic? No.

Puppy Pictures

2007-02-17T09:57:00.000-05:00

OK, isn't she the best?

More on the Troops

2007-02-17T09:09:00.000-05:00

Under the present arrangement, the Executive has too much leeway in commiting the armed forces into battle. The War Powers Act, still disputed, was an attempt to rectify that imbalance. The Bush-Cheney Administration has actually tried to increase the power of the Executive.

But the power of the President to intervene around the world with the US military has rested in part on the political immaturity of the public. No one disputes the power of the President to respond to emergency situations without seeking prior approval. But Presidents have also known that once the troops are committed, the opposition can be cowed into silence with the demand to "support the troops." In practical terms, the freedom of action of the President to use the world's strongest military for an interventionist imperial policy has been dependent on the public susceptibility to emotional manipulation.

That era is coming to an end.

The Bush administration is delegitimizing all of the mechanisms by which the government would get consent for imperial interventions around the world. It used to be that people would say things like, "Well, they have access to secret information that we don't have, so we should assume that they know what they are doing." Now, people are beginning to understand that it is entirely possible that there is no such secret information, and that "intelligence gets fixed to match the policy."

When this long tragic saga is over, we will see that Bush's Presidency, through its overreach, helped bring the Imperial Presidency and the era of US hegemony as the world's only hyper-power to an end.

Shameful

2007-02-17T08:31:00.000-05:00

I spent far too much time watching the House debate on the Resolution disapproving of the Bush escalation of the war. I admit that after a certain point in the debate, I muted the set during the GOP speakers. I think that the GOP had written only one speech which they shared among themselves. They also recycled their speakers as well as their talking points. Until the very end of the debate, I did not a Democratic speaker repeat, but I think I saw the same GOP speakers over and over again.

But what was shameful is that the GOP, the party of the President, would not defend the policy that the President is implementing, and which has led to such dire results. At no time did they offer a concise explanation of what the situation was in Iraq, and how their policy was going to affect that situation, and why that policy was better than any alternatives.

Instead, they hid behind the troops, the people that they have placed in harm's way, for reasons that they will no longer declare or defend. The troops will be discouraged, they say, if we evaluate the policies for which they are facing fire. What could be more discouraging than to be asked to risk great danger for policies that your leaders no longer sincerely believe in themselves.?

Shameful.

Serious Political Commentary for Serious Times

2007-01-22T16:58:00.000-05:00

Many liberal political commentators have noted the ability of the conservative movement to raise questions of authenticity about liberal candidates. No one is more hip to this than Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler, which is repetitive and tiresome and absolutely correct. Grounded in his experience in the 2000 Gore campaign, Somerby details how political coverage is converted into a simple narrative (he calls it novelized), in which candidates are reduced to a few personality traits which are repeated ad infinitum. Invariably, the personal traits of liberal candidates that are identified with liberals are inauthenticity, dishonesty, hypocrisy, shrill moralism and overbearingness. Republicans are given the personality attributes of authenticity, manliness, honesty, directness, and sincerity. By the end of the campaign, Democrats are seen as icky. It explains why Democratic candidates who lose, even those who win like Al Gore, as seen as contemptible and ridiculous, and an embarassment after the election.

What does this have to do with ministry?

Ministers frequently feel under the obligation to be non-partisan in many of their political comments, especially as they move out of their more private conversations into those which are more public. Now, there are three sorts of non-partisan stances. One is that you never say anything about politics. Second is that you say only good things about all parties and all candidates and all potential candidates. The third is that you adopt a cynical critical view that disparages all candidates and parties enough to deflect any criticism that you are an open advocate of one or the other. This is most ministers' strategy, I think.

So the commentary goes like this: "Boy that Bush is a War Criminal, isn't he? But how about that Hillary? What a cold fish, calculating opportunist? She's like John Kerry -- first she was for the war and now she's against it. And I am so glad the Republicans lost the majority on the House, but if I see Nancy Pelosi in an Armani suit and pearls talking about raising the minimum wage, I just gotta laugh out loud." Republicans are sincere, but wrong, and Democrats are just laughable losers. This type of non-serious discourse is acceptable under the prevailing rules of the game, but it completely reinforces a partisan frame, a Republican frame. In a world where policy differences are not always easy to discern and judge, many people choose to vote on the basis of sincerity, honesty and authenticity.

Democrats have better senses of humor than Republicans. I have no empirical evidence of that, but I believe it to be true. We are able to absorb a joke made about one of the foibles of a liberal candidate than Republican is about a conservative. We will laugh when Jon Stewart or Jay Leno makes fun of a Democrat, especially if they point out an insincerity. That is not a two-way street, and maybe it is a sign of mental health, but it is doing the work of the conservatives. Does Rush Limbaugh make fun of John McCain?

Soulless exurbs and Evangelical Megachurches

2007-01-20T10:48:00.000-05:00

Check out this story by Chris Hedges which makes some interesting connections between social conditions and their consequences in terms of church.

Antiwar Demonstration

2007-01-13T11:39:00.000-05:00

OK, so I go to the Antiwar demonstration at the Boston Common, as I said I would in a previous post.

You have to understand that I have very mixed feelings about the Left, and am generally allergic to it, even though my opinions are quite liberal by anyone's standards.

Fausto has a good report on it, complete with pictures of our prophetic witness.

He asks the questions of why antiwar demonstration are so small and feeble when so many people are opposed to the escalation of the war.

Why should they be big?

The antiwar demonstrations are the political tactics of the extra-parliamentary left, or the non-electoral or third party left. The reason why the antiwar demonstrations of the Vietnam were so strong was because there were active and organized Socialist and communist organizations that were instrumental in organizing the demonstrations and were being fed by those demonstrations. The roles of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party were crucial during the Vietnam era. Now, those parties are small and in disarray and there is not the organizational muscle to sustain them.

(I think that one of the odd things about church life is that because of our understanding of tax laws, churches and ministers are forced toward the extra-parliamentary movements. They appear to be non-partisan, when they are actually the main tactic of another set of political parties.)

Almost all of the speakers who spoke yesterday eventually fell to this refrain: "We cannot rely on the Democrats to end this war." Well, in fact, we are, either through Congress, or in 2008 by electing a Democratic president. Do antiwar demonstrations further that strategy?

The critical political question of the next year is this: Can the Democratic members of the House and Senate trust the antiwar sentiment of the American people? Any move to cut off the funds for the war will be criticized as "endangering the troops." And you can be sure that there will be heart-rending television stories to match that meme. Will general public opinion be persuaded by that critique, or have people become sophisticated enough to see through that as partisan manipulation?

If it is not political suicide to use the power of the purse to force an end to an active war, then the balance of power between the President and the Congress will have been altered, and restored. The Imperial Presidency rests on the twin pillars that the President has the power to commit troops without a declaration of war (now with an authorization resolution that is sold to Congress as a necessary step to make diplomacy work) and that the Congress will too afraid to cut off funds when troops are in harm's way.

Boston Common 4 PM

2007-01-10T23:45:00.000-05:00

I hear that it is where one can register one's disagreement with the President regarding Iraq. I think that I will drop by.