From the Fringes to the Center?

Davidson Loehr

December 10, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

These are remarks in response to the book The Cultural Creatives: How Fifty Million People Are Changing the World by Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson. The good news is that a thirteen-year study of American society shows a huge and growing number of people – between 25 and 50 million whose guiding values sound a lot like the basic values of most people who happen to attend UU churches – who could be the next “silent majority” with the numbers and the creative power to change the direction of our society. The bad news is that, for decades, Unitarians have developed – some would say, “reveled in” – an identity at the fringes of American society. The power offered in this new group – which has not been self-identified yet – lies near the center, as a part of the larger society, rather than apart from it, as cultural liberals have so often been. Is this a challenge, and a calling, which we can, should, or even must meet?

PUPPET SHOW: “The Lone Ranger and the Posse”

STORY: The show begins with the Lone Ranger opposed to The Posse (four puppets). It’s a point of both pride and identity with the Long Ranger that there’s only one Lone Ranger, while The Posse is (just) a group, a herd. But then a second Lone Ranger appears, and then two more. They are all still clear that they are “The Looooooone Ranger,” but as there become two and four of them, they’re confused, and look at the other “Lone Rangers.” Finally, after four of them appear and they look at each other, they begin to move together, until finally it is clear, from their unison movement, that the Lone Rangers have become The Posse. (There needs to be some hat or mask or something that is easy to slip on a hand puppet and identifies them as Lone Rangers.)

NARRATOR: This is the story of the Lone Ranger

Lone Ranger puppet appears and cries, “I’m the Looooooooone Ranger!”

NARRATOR: – and The Posse.

Four puppets appear, moving together, like they’re riding horses. They go to the left (up and down together), then turn and go back to the right, then disappear.

NARRATOR: The Posse always had some friends with them –

The four puppets appear again, quickly go in formation to the left, then back to the right, then disappear.

NARRATOR: – the Lone Ranger was always alone.

Lone Ranger appears and cries, “I”m the Looooooooooone Ranger! The heck with The Posse!” Lone Ranger stays in sight during next line, and turns toward the Narrator’s voice during the following line:

NARRATOR: And sometimes, it was pretty lonely.

Lone Ranger: “I’m the Looonely Ranger!”

NARRATOR: But not The Posse-

The Posse appears and starts going together to the left as the Narrator continues.

NARRATOR: They were never lonely.

The Posse turns and goes back to the right, then disappears.

NARRATOR: But one day, something very unexpected happened. First, the Lone Ranger appeared –

Lone Ranger: “I’m the Looooooooone Ranger! The heck with The Posse!”

NARRATOR: – and then, out of nowhere, a second Lone Ranger appeared!

Second Lone Ranger appears on the right side: “I’m the Looooooone Ranger! The heck with The Posse!”

First Lone Ranger suddenly turns at the sound of the second Lone Ranger. The second Lone Ranger moves across stage, over to the first, and snuggles up against the first Lone Ranger. As the Lone Rangers are moving together, the Narrator continues:

NARRATOR: And just as they were getting used to there being two Lone Rang-ers –

Two more Lone Rangers appear on the right side of the stage.

NARRATOR: two more Lone Rangers appeared!

Two new Lone Rangers: “We’re the Loooooooone Rangers! The heck with The Posse!”

First two Lone Rangers, from the left side: “We’re the Loooooooone Rangers! The heck with The Posse!”

This is when the most important movement happens. The two sets of Lone Rangers sort of begin moving (maybe kind of up and down, like horseback rid-ers) and begin moving towards each other. Once all four are together, they are kind of moving independently, but begin moving more and more in synchronized movement – their movement needs to show the audience that they are becom-ing The Posse.

NARRATOR: But in spite of all their yelling, something had happened, and the Lone Rangers – all four of them – hadn’t even noticed it! Have you? Have you seen what’s happened?

The four Lone Rangers, who have been moving from the left side to the right side together like synchronized horseback riders, separate – two going to each side – then reach down behind the screen and bring up a big sign between them that says

“THE END”

SERMON: From the Fringes to the Center?

Something revolutionary has begun being born in the past forty years, and it’s arriving almost unnoticed. It is the birth of a new worldview, a fundamentally new way of understanding ourselves and our world. It is dramatically different from the two American worldviews which preceded it. I think it signals a cultural revolution already in progress, and still nearly invisible.

I want to talk with you this morning about three fundamentally different worldviews. One has been with us for centuries, one has been part of us for about the last 150 years. And the third one is really just about thirty years old – still a baby.

What is a “worldview”? What does that word mean? Your worldview is the content of everything you believe is real – God, the economy, technology, the planet, being moral or smart, conformist or rebellious. It includes your view of how things work, how you should work and play, your relationships with others, everything you value. (The Cultural Creatives, p. 17) Most of us change our worldview only once in a lifetime, if at all, because it changes virtually everything in our consciousness. (pp. 17-18)

That’s also why it is useful to group people by their worldviews. If you understand a person’s worldview, you can understand a lot about them. You’ll have a good idea how they will vote on a wide variety of issues, what kind of heroes and heroines they are likely to have, what kind of a life they admire, and what they think America and the world should be like.

I’m trying to do several things this morning. I may be biting off more than I can chew. I am reflecting on a very provocative book called The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth Anderson [New York: Harmony Books, 2000]). I’m also trying to back off from the book far enough to find some very broad and clear patterns, and I’m trying to present these patterns in a way that will feel relevant to your lives. Finally, I’m trying to make this into a sermon, rather than just a book review. Only a fool would try to do this in thirty minutes. Let’s begin.

The three worldviews: Traditional, Modern, and Creative.

Traditionalists

The first, and oldest, American worldview might as well be called Traditionalism, because that’s what it sounds and feels like. Traditional Americans feel that the best American values were represented by images like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed or Doris Day. They look to global figures like Mother Theresa, Billy Graham, or Pope John Paul II as people of the right kind of moral values. Their hope for America is that it might, somehow, rediscover a romanticized, idealized version of the small-town and rural America of a hundred years ago, when life was simpler and people were, they believe, more responsible and moral. They love Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura, though him more than her.

They hate feminism. They hate the idea and fact of gay or lesbian rights. People are supposed to know their place. Men are supposed to be men and manly, women are supposed to be nurses, teachers, wives and mothers. Sex and passion of all kinds must be kept under control in all areas. Life isn’t complex if we’ll all just follow the rules. All the guidance you need to live by is contained in the Bible. And if people read their bibles more the world would be a much better place. Preserving civil liberties is nowhere near as important as restricting immoral or unpatriotic behavior. (pp. 31-32).

One quarter of American adults fall into this general category, about 48 million people. Those with strong religious feelings tend to be Catholics, Mormons, fundamentalists or evangelical Protestants. Many are African American or Hispanic American. About 70% of these Traditional people are religious conservatives who oppose abortion. They oppose it, however, for two main reasons that are seldom acknowledged. First, because it’s too much inappropriate independence for women. And second, because a woman’s right to an abortion is felt as a symbol of a whole immoral order that rejects the rule of men, the church, and “the way things are supposed to be.” But this group isn’t mainly about politics. It’s about beliefs, ways of living, a sense of the world’s order and their place in it.

You know these traditional-minded people. They’re in your family, as they are in mine and everyone else’s. Some of them love you dearly, as you love them, even though your beliefs drive each other crazy. We might think of them as “The Posse” – that big group that all moves together – but they’re really not. They were more numerous and powerful 150 years ago. But they have become the “moral minority,” and have no chance of being the vision of the future unless the country takes a turn toward fascism, which seems unlikely.

Modernists

The second worldview that has defined our society developed during the 19th century, and most of the 20th century. This worldview can be called the Modernism, and Modernists make up about half of the population. They believe that science, technology, and capitalism are the secrets of America’s success and the best hope of humanity.

Since they’re half the population, we all know lots of them, and know them well. We’re really living in their world. They value Success – and seem to spell it with a capital “S” – and making or having plenty of money, whether they actually have it or not. Bill Gates is the richest of them, and they think we should be in awe of rich people. They know that science, not religion, is really the answer to most of the questions we have. “Spirituality” is kind of a flaky concept. Our bodies are pretty much like machines, not temples. They don’t relate to John Wayne as much as they relate to Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, or Madonna. It’s not being traditional, obedient and moral that matters as much as being smart, aggressive and rich. These are the people who believe, and sometimes live, the American Dream. When Ronald Reagan was asked what he thought was the greatest thing about America, he said it’s a country where you can get rich. Half the population thinks that’s pretty solid.

You can see the Modernist worldview everywhere. Read Time magazine, the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes or USA Today, and you’ll be soaked in the official worldview of the Moderns. You know these people too, they’re part of us, they still run the country.

But see what a different world they live in than the Traditionalists! Science counts for more than religion. Being smart, independent and successful are more important than being faithful or moral. And religious notions like “the meek shall inherit the earth” or the poor will “get their reward in heaven” just seem foolish to them.

For most of us, society seems to be a battle between these two groups, the Traditionalists and Modernists. This is the battle between science and religion, or pro-life versus pro-choice. Jimmy Stewart or Jimmy Carter served proudly in the armed forces when they were called to, as Traditionalists should. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did not, and avoiding the draft was seen as the smart thing to do. They really are two different worlds, two fundamentally different ways of understand what is good and right.

Creatives

But since about 1970, a new worldview has emerged. If the first worldview, the one from 150 to 200 years ago, is Traditional, and if the second one – the one soaked in science, technology, and the American Way – is Modern, the new worldview might be called Creative. It’s more concerned with trying to heal and mend, trying to become whole people in a whole world, than with taking sides. That’s very different!

Now: how to persuade you there is a new worldview and that you are probably up to your eyeballs in it? It’s kind of like trying to explain “water” to fish. Let me ask you about a dozen questions, and just mentally see how many you would answer Yes to. And as we’re going through them, feel how fundamentally different they sound than anything in the Traditionalist or Modernist world-views:

1. Do you love nature, and are you deeply concerned about protecting it?

2. Are things like global warming, the destruction of the rain forests, overpopulation, ecological irresponsibility and the widespread exploitation of people in poorer countries important to you, and would you like to see us take action to act more responsibly in these areas?

3. Would you be willing to pay a little more in taxes, or for your consumer goods, if you knew the money would go to clean up the environment and stop global warming?

4. Do you give a lot of importance to developing and maintaining your personal relationships?

5. Do you think it’s important to try and help other people develop their unique gifts?

6. Do you believe in equality for women at work, and more women leaders in business and politics?

7. Are concerns about violence and the abuse of women and children around the world important to you?

8. Do you think our politics and government spending should put more emphasis on children’s education and well-being, on rebuilding our neighborhoods and communities, and on creating an ecologically sustainable future?

9. Are you unhappy with both the left and the right in politics, and do you wish we could find a new way that’s not just in the “mushy middle”?

10. Would you like to be involved in creating a new and better way of life in our country?

11. Are you uncomfortable with all the emphasis in our culture on success and “making it,” on getting and spending, on wealth and luxury goods? Do you feel that it all misses the most important things in life?

12. Do you like people and places that are exotic and foreign, and like experiencing and learning about other ways of life? (p. xiv)

Now: how many people, what percent of the American adult population, do you think shares those values? Maybe two percent? Five percent? Those are the answers that researchers get when they ask this question. Very few, maybe five percent, maybe not that many. We’re the Lone Rangers, not The Posse.

But no, it’s about 26% of the adult American population who share those values. Since the 1960s, about fifty million people have changed, or been born into, this new worldview.

These figures don’t sound believable. When researchers began publishing them, a lot of Europeans didn’t even believe them. Three years ago, officials in the European Union decided to do a survey in each of their fifteen countries. In the fall of 1997, they found an even higher percentage – and between 80 and 90 million people — in their own cultures who had, almost unnoticed, somehow changed to (or been born into) a worldview that embraced all the values in those questions I just asked.

A very important piece of this new way of looking at the world is that it is a vision that is beginning to appeal to, and that works in, business. Where political liberals have spent decades bashing business in the name of ecological and other concerns, business leaders are beginning to discover that, ideology aside, it simply makes better business and earns more money to be ecologically responsible, to hire the best people available, and to create healthy and respectful working situations. I’ll tell you just one business story.

Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, Inc., the largest commercial carpet firm in the world, read a book several years ago called The Ecology of Commerce and he had a kind of conversion experience. He turned his company, with manufacturing sites spread across four continents, into a business that not merely recycled its waste materials but returned to the Earth more than they took out. His people (in 110 countries) are reimagining and redesigning everything they do. And it pays. In the first five years, they invested $25 million in waste reduction and saved $122 million. By 1998, Ray Anderson was giving more than 100 speeches a year to business and environmental groups around the world. He wants to create “the next industrial revolution.” (11) Other large multinational companies – like Electrolux and Mitsubishi Electronics – have also begun changing their philosophy and their ways of doing business – again, not so much out of a notion of ideological purity as out of the simple and powerful realization that it makes more money to work smart.

We know where this new worldview came from. Its origins were in the civil rights movement, the movements for women’s rights, gay rights, the environmental movements and the anti-war movements of the 1950s – 1970s.

But while these different ways of thinking about nature, women, sexual identities, animals and the rest each began in a separate movement, they have now coalesced into this new Creative worldview. If you meet with the activists at Rainforest Action Network in San Francisco, for example, you’ll hear about more than rain forests. You’ll also hear them talk about feminism, gay liberation, so-cial justice, organic foods, spirituality, and people of the third world. All these issues are in the air they breathe. They’re imagining a whole new culture that’s trying to heal what has been divided and broken for so long. (p. 166) That’s the Creative worldview.

To Traditionalists, all of this just sounds like a weird bunch of people. They see the 1960s and 1970s as the birth of the Age of Narcissism and the loss of our moral center as a society. There is a lot of narcissistic personal behavior around to support the idea. But a better case can be made that we are actually far more morally aware and responsible today than we were forty years ago. I gave you a list of questions with which nearly all of you identified. Now here’s another list that we don’t think about often enough. It is a list of moral attitudes and behaviors that were normative forty years ago, but are nearly impossible to defend today:

White supremacy.

Discrimination against women in the legal system, colleges and the work-place.

Creating a hair-trigger risk of nuclear war, in which the amazing phrase “mutually assured destruction” was the main military strategy, ignoring the fact that it would kill billions of people or even all life on Earth in a nuclear winter.

The McCarthy-era suppression of civil liberties in the name of anti-Communism.

Expecting people to stay in stultifying, dead-end, or harmful jobs in the name of security or loyalty.

Expecting people to stay in stultifying, dead, or harmful marriages in the name of security or loyalty.

Expecting people to stay in churches and religions that are stultifying, dead, and lacking in spirit. Just this morning I saw a bumper sticker coming from this sort of feeling. It said “If going to church makes you a Christian, does going to the garage make you a car?”

Treating our souls, or psyches, as steeped in Original Sin, or as a sewer of unconscious drives, rather than being full of positive human potential. What an amazing revolution the “human potential movement” was, to define us as basically healthy rather than basically evil!

Gay and lesbian bashing.

Routine mistreatment of animals in research laboratories.

And subjects like drunkenness, old age, ethnicity, race or gender as the butt of comedians’ jokes.

All of these attitudes have deep moral dimensions. And in all these ways and many others, we are far more mature and responsible today than we were fifty years ago in the days of “Ozzie and Harriet.” Furthermore, the Lone Rangers from all these movements have now become the new Posse. There are more “Cultural Creatives” today than there ever were in the Moral Majority!

It is a huge movement, with far greater intellectual, political and economic power than it has yet realized – primarily, I think, because it isn’t aware of itself. For example: In 1998 and 1999, the top-selling movie video, The Lion King, was advertised and promoted everywhere. You couldn’t turn on the TV or go to a fast-food place without seeing posters, cups and gadgets promoting that block-buster movie. But it wasn’t the top-selling video of the time. The Lion King was outsold by an instructional video for yoga, which sold more than a million copies. In fact, among Amazon.com’s ten top-selling videotapes for those two years were two other yoga videotapes as well. (p. 328)

So what does all this mean? For one thing, it means that if you hunger for a deep change in your life that moves you in the direction of less stress, more health, lower consumption, more spirituality, more respect for the earth and the diversity within and among the species that inhabit her, you are not alone!

It’s funny, how new world views are born. During the Industrial Revolution, the image of the machine became the central image of Modernism: it still is. Our new worldview also has a powerful guiding image. And just as the picture of the machine wasn’t possible before the 19th century, so our new picture wasn’t possible until the late 1960s. Interestingly, both the picture and its power were almost prophetically predicted over twenty years earlier. In 1946, astronomer Fred Hoyle said that when the first picture of the Earth taken from space was shown, it would change the world. (p. 303)

The photos of earth taken from the moon are powerful signs of a new consciousness, a new picture of our interdependence, our interrelationships, a world without borders that is an organic whole. Those photographs of the blue-green earth floating in space are the baby pictures of a new worldview. Our first baby pictures.

As we approach the Christmas season, it’s a good time to think of things like baby pictures. Christmas is about the birth of something hopeful and lifegiving, something that might even save the world. We’re not the Lone Rangers any more. There are about fifty million of us; we’re The Posse. Extending the Christmas story metaphor, I wonder: What if we are the infant in this new manger? What if our mission is indeed to save the world, and our most sacred task is to get about the business of discovering, together, how to do it?