A Prophetic Liberal Religion

Chris Jimmerson

February 26, 2011

Both the Unitarians and the Universalists have a long history of prophetic ministry – speaking truth in the public square and, perhaps more importantly, taking action on social issues. From Michael Servetus espousing an early Unitarianism in the 16th century through the Prophetic Sisterhood of the late 19th and early 20th century, to the Unitarian Universalists (UUs) publishing the Pentagon Papers in the mid-20th century, UUs, though not always unified, have a long tradition of being at the forefront of social change and carrying our values into the world. Will we continue that tradition into the 21st Century and beyond?

How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change a light bulb?

We’re not sure. The Lighting Technologies Study Team of the Clean Energy Options Working Group of the Green Our World Starting Here and Now Task Force of the Facilities and Grounds Committee hasn’t issued its report and recommendations yet.

You may have heard other variations on this or similar jokes, all on the theme that we UUs can sometimes seem to talk, study, argue, debate, disagree, discuss and “400 plus pages written report” things to death.

It’s not that doing our due diligence, making sure we understand the issues or working through our differing viewpoints isn’t a necessary part of it; it’s just that we (and pretty much all liberal religious groups) have been accused of getting so caught up in our mental gymnastics that we never actually end up doing much about whatever the issues might be. Those 400 plus pages can end up in a file somewhere.

But that’s certainly not always true and it never has been. Even before the merger of the Universalists and the Unitarians, the Us and the Us had often acted as prophetic liberal religions. As our Unitarian Universalist training curricula A People so Bold says it, prophetic religion is “religion that is on the cutting edge, reading the signs of its times, creating a just and loving community in its midst, and advocating passionately for a better world”.

In 16th century Europe, even the very idea of believing in a Unitary God was prophetic and could get you branded a heretic and burned at the stake. And don’t even try for universal salvation! They’d have just added more dry wood to the fire.

In America, early Unitarians and Universalists were among the first to work for improved education, provide charity for the poor, ordain female clergy, call for emancipation and work for women’s suffrage.

Later, after the merger in 1961, this prophetic spirit would continue, with UU participation in environmental issues and in the fight for racial justice, sexuality and gender equality, political and religious freedom.

To be sure, our efforts historically have never been perfect or unified – at no point have either of our Us ever managed to be in complete agreement about anything. However, there is little doubt that overall we have a history of being at the forefront of social issues.

Any yet, as I mentioned earlier, liberal religion can run the risk, sometimes, of intellectualizing more than engaging the core issues. Due at least in part to our roots in the Enlightenment, we tend to focus on the individual as rational and self-determining rather than place our “being” within our connections to others and the web of existence. We see the INDIVIDUAL bigots, the individual abusers, the individual classists and so on, but we don’t as often see the underlying societal structures that perpetuate the oppressive behavior. We focus on the individual victims and not entire cultures, races, classes and other groups that are being systematically subjected to injustice.

For example, let me share some questions I have been asking myself. In the past few years, how often have I given canned goods or the like to the food pantry or the homeless shelter but done little to speak out against the social conditions that force people to live on the streets and go hungry in the first place? I wonder — how many of us recycle, conserve and work to reduce our own environmental impact, yet remain largely silent as our government subsidizes businesses that do far more damage?

How often have we written checks or volunteered for the non-profit clinic, the shelter for battered women, the halfway house for recovering addicts or any other of a number of non-profit groups and then returned to the security of our own homes and lives without having to really consider –what is creating the need for these service agencies to begin with?

Now, I am going to pause for a moment of liberal religious guilt. OK, that’s long enough — because these acts of care and service really are vital and needed and wonderful and necessary and a part of creating the world we seek as UUs. But I believe there is another arena of action required if we hope to really make change. And that’s where living our prophetic religious tradition comes back in.

Will we really be “a people so bold”?

Will we volunteer at the immigrant assistance non-profit AND rally against the economic imperialism that is so often at the root of migration in the first place? Will we join forces with oppressed groups and their organizations to demand and work for change? Will we proclaim our liberal religious principles in the public square? We will do so even if it raises questions about our own middleclass privilege?

The President of our religious movement got himself arrested protesting an unjust immigration law in Arizona. Personally, I say, “more of that!” I believe there has never been a time that so cried out for us to assume the mantle of prophetic religion with renewed vigor and purpose.

Because we are losing our democracy.

Because we are killing our planet.

Before you diagnose me with “hyperbolic propensity syndrome”, allow me just a few minutes to explain why I do not think these are overly dramatic statements. Since the economic crash of 2008, economics professor Edward N. Wolf’s ongoing research revealed that wealth inequality in the United has actually increased even more sharply. The top 1% of wealth owners in the U.S. hold about 40% of all of our wealth; the top quintile hold almost 90%

Other research has found that wealth inequality is highly correlated with power inequality and political corruption. Further, such wealth inequality and corruption form an escalating cycle that threatens the viability of democratic government – wealth inequality begets corruption begets greater inequality begets greater corruption and on and on and on, until only the illusion of democracy remains.

In the U.S., fewer and fewer people own greater and greater percentages of corporate stocks, and corporations are amassing greater and greater power. After the recent Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited spending by corporations and other groups outside the political parties, spending by these groups totaled 135.3 million dollars in the 2010 elections – outside conservative groups spent 119.6 million, while outside liberal groups and unions spent 15.7 million.

Conservative politicians did somewhat better than did liberals, you might recall.

In reaction, democratic groups plan to try to match outside spending by conservatives in 2012. To do so, they too will rely on corporate wealth. By mid-February of this year, the presidential candidates and their Superpacs had already spent in excess of 69.6 million dollars. A recent study found that 30 of our largest companies now spend more on lobbying than they pay in federal taxes.

Wealth inequality begets corruption begets greater inequality. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Listen to what a Republican congressional staffer, who recently retired in disgust after almost 30 years has to say. Republican operative, Mike Lofgren states, quote — “Both parties are rotten – how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money?… Both parties are captives to corporate loot.” End quote.

We are losing our democracy. Democracy is a core element of our religious principles — all that we as UUs value.

More and more, we face an Orwellian political system that promotes and affirms the inherent worth and dignity of the few over the many. We cannot hope for justice, equity and compassion if we allow our democratic process to be subverted in this way. There can be no peace, no liberty, no justice when such vast inequality is allowed to exist and increase.

But this unrestrained economic disparity of power is potentially even more destructive, even more threatening.

In their fascinating and sobering book, Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, editors Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson bring together essays written by people from throughout the world. With wisdom and expertise that varies from the scientific to the spiritual, they make a compelling case that any sense of ethics requires our immediate action on global climate change. They also paint a terrifying picture regarding the consequences of failing to act, such as:

Already, 40,000 people per week die of hunger-related illness worldwide. As global temperatures continue to rise, this is likely to get worse. 33 million acres of Canadian forest have died because it no longer gets cold enough in winter to kill the beetle that is killing the trees.

High-altitude glaciers that provide much of the drinking water in Asia, Latin America and the American West are disappearing. The U.S. Park Service estimates that by the year 2020, there will no longer be any glaciers in Glacier National Park.

The Great Barrier Reef may well be lifeless within two decades. Fifty percent of the world’s animals are in decline. One quarter of mammals face potential extinction, including elephants, humpback whales, gorillas, tigers and polar bears.

We have effectively ended the Holocene era of our planet, into which human civilization arose and during which countless life forms evolved and flourished. We have replaced it with an era of human-caused extinctions.

There is already no chance that we will leave to future generations, our children and grandchildren, a world as rich with life and possibility as the one we inherited.

We are quickly finding out that our 7th principle, that we affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, goes much deeper and is much more sacred than we may have known – that our free and responsible search for truth and meaning can only exist within and through that web, not separately — not purely as individuals, but instead in communion with one another and with all that exists on this beautiful blue planet and beyond.

So, what more can we do? How do we sustain ourselves and have hope when the scientific predictions seem so huge, so overwhelming.

We can begin by realizing that the things I’ve mentioned that we are already doing are vital and must continue. The services and social action programs Unitarian Universalists are providing, both here in the U.S. and internationally are needed and wonderful. The actions of our congregations, as well as individual people within those congregations, to do what we can to conserve and protect our ecosystem are admirable. They are making a great difference in our world.

Today though, our world asks even more of us. Embracing again our movement as prophetic religion asks that we go even deeper — that we recognize that the corporatist undermining of western democracies and the escalating destruction of our planet’s sustainability are interrelated – that we name this malfeasance publicly and join with others to fight it. We must reaffirm the wisdom our UU sage, James Luther Adams, taught us about the “power of organization and the organization of power”.

Today, commercial, industrial and agricultural giants are producing more greenhouse emissions than all of the ecological conservation efforts of individual citizens combined can offset.

Today, industries so large that they are beyond our dissent, more powerful than most governments, are making decisions that will have tremendous effects on whether and what life survives on our planet in the future.

To have any meaningful influence will require that we engage with other religious groups and with secular and public policy organizations in ways that may have been uncomfortable to us in recent times. It will require that we engage with our more conservative friends in difficult but imaginative and necessary conversations. It will require that we find ways of harnessing the creativity and power of collective voices, making those voices heard, amplifying their strength.

I believe that we must walk a careful line, upholding the separation of church and state, yet realizing that our religious principles will be lived or not in the political arena.

As Sulak Sivaraska, cofounder of the International Association of Engaged Buddhists writes, “Politics without spirituality or ethics is blind. Spirituality without politics is simply inconsequential.”

Our Unitarian Universalist principles are calling us to the consequential. Our community’s values and mission compel us to act together out of compassion, out of love for one another and that sacred web of existence, with the courage to risk potential failure, despite the loss and the irreparable damage we witness. Climate change provides our greatest test so far of that compassion — of that love. It requires a people so bold.

Against all odds, we must still act. We must act to place love and community above market values and profit. We must proclaim our Unitarian Universalist beliefs beyond our church walls. We must act as if those values and principles — indeed the future of humanity and the beautiful world we inherited — depend upon it.

Because they do.

How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change the world?

Every single last one of us, along with the many others who might join an invitation to reclaim paradise before it is lost, if only we were to engage with them. If only we were to be so bold.

May we be so. May we be that prophetic religion for our time.

Amen.