Challenges and Opportunities for a Future Church

 a service presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on October 13, 2024

Opening Words

The opening words are from the surgeon general’s report 
“Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Social Isolation”.

"Even when they couldn’t put their finger on the word ‘lonely,’ 
time and time again, 
people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, 
from every corner of the country, 
would tell me, ‘I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,’ or ‘if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice’.

"[Social isolation] is associated with 
a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, 
dementia, stroke, depression, 
anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected 
is similar to that caused by 
smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that 
associated with obesity and physical inactivity."

Reading

A little over a year ago, Perry Bacon, 
a 42-year-old Black political reporter for the Washington Post, 
published a very different kind of article, 
one about his personal religious journey, 
and his longing for what he called
 “a church of the Nones”, i.e., 
a church that doesn’t require believing any specific dogma. The article is long enough to be a sermon on its own, 
so I’ll summarize.

Bacon grew up as the son of an assistant pastor 
and continued participating in Christian churches 
through his 20s and early 30s. Despite his theological doubts about Christianity, 
he stayed faithful because 
he believed in the values his churches promoted.

“I didn’t leave church for any one reason,” he writes. But partly it was politics. “I couldn’t ignore how the word ‘Christian’ 
was becoming a synonym for 
rabidly pro-Trump White people 
who argued that his and their meanness and intolerance 
were in some ways required to defend our faith.”

A final straw came when Bacon discovered 
that although his church allowed gays and lesbians to participate in church activities, 
his gay friend was barred 
from even the most minor leadership roles. By 2020, Bacon was church-shopping, 
and dissatisfied with what he was finding. When the pandemic cut off his search 
by closing most churches, he felt relieved.

He found he didn’t want to raise his daughter 
in a church whose doctrines and worldview he didn’t believe. “What has kept me away is having a child. If I were childless, 
I think I would join a church to be a part of its community, 
and I would ignore the theological elements I’m not sure about. But my 3-year-old is getting more inquisitive every day.”

He knows about Unitarian Universalism, but “Unitarian churches I have attended 
had overwhelmingly White and elderly congregations 
and lacked the wide range of activities for adults and kids 
found at the Christian congregations that I was a part of.”

He’s thought about starting his own church, 
as his uncle did for other reasons a generation before, 
or recruiting like-minded friends to join a UU church together 
to “make it younger and more racially diverse. But I’ve not followed through on any of these options.”

Instead, he has drifted into other forms of weekly community: 
his neighborhood’s farmers’ market 
and a happy hour for local journalists. Those activities allow him to meet people, 
but he still senses a “church-sized hole” in his life, 
and in the larger society as well.

“Kids need places to learn values such as forgiveness. Young adults need places to meet a potential spouse. Adults with children need places to meet with other parents. Retirees need places to build new relationships, 
as their friends and spouses pass away. Our society needs places that integrate people 
across class and racial lines. Newly woke Americans need places 
to get practical, weekly advice 
about how to live out the inclusive, anti-racist values 
they committed to during the Trump years.

“There are lots of organizations trying to address those needs. But strong churches could address them all. It’s strange to me that America, 
particularly its left-leaning cohort, 
is abandoning this institution, 
as opposed to reinventing it to align with our 2023 values.”

Talk

You may be familiar with the classic distinction 
between the fox and the hedgehog. The fox, the adage says, knows many things, 
but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Ordinarily, I give hedgehog talks: I’m building towards one central point, 
and I want to hold your attention until I get there.

This is a fox talk: There are a number of ideas 
that may send your thoughts down a side track, 
and that’s OK. I’ll try to call you back near the end. This talk is also different 
in that I don’t really answer anything. Instead, I want to lay out a paradox I’ve been thinking about, 
to see if I can get you thinking about it too. The paradox has to do with 
the future of churches generally in America, 
and of Unitarian Universalist churches in particular.

On the one hand, 
this ought to be a time 
of unprecedented opportunity for churches. As Perry Bacon noted in the reading: Churches offer precisely the kind of community and connection 
that America is lacking as a society, 
and that many individuals say they are yearning for. And yet, while some churches are doing well, 
nationwide the institution is in decline: Churches are closing, 
church membership is dropping, 
and the percentage of the population 
that says religion is personally important to them 
has been falling for decades.

If you listen to why people are leaving their churches, 
or never showed any interest in church to begin with, 
a lot of those reasons don’t seem like 
they should apply to Unitarian churches. We aren’t bound to ancient dogmas about sexuality and gender. We aren’t in conflict with science. We don’t consign people to hell 
if they think or live differently than we do. We focus our attention on the issues of life today, 
and discuss them in terms that are meaningful today, 
rather than try to shoehorn our moral intuitions 
into elaborate interpretations of scriptures written thousands of years ago.

And yet, all those people 
who need what a church can offer, 
but can’t seem to find one they can live with — most of them don’t find us either. Maybe they never hear about us. But even if they do, 
even if they show up to check us out, 
many of them run into barriers to entry 
that we may not even see and certainly never intended to put there.

So that’s the paradox: There are crying needs in today’s society, 
and there are institutions 
that seem perfectly designed to fill those needs. And yet it’s not happening. What’s going on? What can we do about it?

Let me back up and support some of those claims I just made. In America today 
there is a cluster of needs 
that different professions see from different angles, 
and have been reporting on for decades.

In the opening words, 
you heard the surgeon general 
diagnose the medical problem of social isolation.

Sociologists see something similar from their own perspective. As far back as 
Robert Putnam’s turn-of-the-millennium book Bowling Alone 
they’ve  been reporting a decline in what they call “social capital”. Community organizations of all sorts, 
from bowling teams to labor unions to churches, 
have been losing significance, 
and the result is a less cohesive society. People are less trusting. Communities that need to act together 
have a harder time reaching consensus, 
largely because it has become easier for us to demonize each other. 

A bowling team may not seem like it knits society together, 
but something about relying on 
an immigrant, a lesbian, or a Republican 
to pick up your spare 
helps you appreciate what wonderful people they can be. 

Francis Moore Lappe' wrote: 
“A culture of democracy can be defined as one that builds trust.” Sadly, the same logic works in the other direction: A culture that has trouble building trust 
will also have trouble preserving its democracy.

Psychologists talk about how hard it can be 
to establish a unified or coherent identity in a world where you may have a thousand Facebook friends, 
but no one who sees your whole life. Back in 1991, 
well before the Internet as we currently know it, Kenneth Gergen wrote a book called The Saturated Self. In it, he described 
the stress caused by modern communications technologies, 
which give us easy access to far more communities 
than we can effectively participate in. Each community has its own ideals, 
and its own vision of how a good person lives. Beset with all these conflicting goals, 
the postmodern individual feels perpetually inadequate.

Fast-forward 33 years, 
and individuals have become more and more atomized. It’s no longer just that you’re 
one person at home and another at work. Your work persona itself may have become narrower and have shallower relationships. When you meet primarily over Zoom, 
you no longer share coffee breaks with your colleagues 
or get a beer together on your way home.

Online communities are even more fragmenting: One community knows your political views, 
another your hobbies, 
and a third your taste in books or movies. Another group of acquaintances knows you 
only through your dating profile, 
which may not be entirely accurate. So does anyone really know you? And if not, who are you anyway?

If we were social planners, 
looking at all these phenomena together, 
we might be tempted to design some completely new institution: one that holds regular face-to-face events 
that don’t require an invitation. People could show up alone, 
or with their full household. Come regularly or only once in a while. At these gatherings, 
people might do simple things together 
— maybe sing songs or listen to music or a short talk.  These communal events could conclude 
with a chance to chat over coffee and cookies.

Our new institution 
would be even better if it encouraged you to show up as your whole self, 
and not just as some narrowly focused set of interests or beliefs or attitudes. And better still if it fulfilled all those needs 
Perry Bacon listed, and helped you teach your children values 
that run deeper than making money or getting famous 
or buying the latest products? 

Wouldn’t it be great if there were such a thing? Somebody should invent it.

And yet … In their book Beyond Doubt: the secularization of society 
sociologists Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman and Ryan Cragun say that “somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 churches 
close down every year”. In 1998, 62% of Americans answering a survey 
said that religion was very important to them. In 2023, only 39% did.

And it’s not that people don’t know churches are out there. The Christian pastors who authored The Great Dechurching 
estimate that 40 million Americans 
used to attend church at least once a month 
and now go less than once a year. The study they commissioned found that 
“no theological tradition, age group, ethnicity, political affiliation, 
education level, geographic location, or income bracket” 
has been immune to this trend.

The Great Dechurching goes into some detail 
about why people are leaving churches 
— again, from a survey, 
and not just reflecting the authors’ possibly biased intuitions.

Some reasons are specific to particular denominations. The Catholic Church’s clergy sexual abuse scandals 
disillusioned a lot of members. Young people have been leaving Evangelical churches 
for largely political reasons, 
as Perry Bacon described: They can’t reconcile the message of Christian love and compassion 
with the harsh and often hateful positions 
their churches take in the culture wars, or understand how loving Jesus can lead to voting for Trump.

We may not feel that those issues apply to us, 
but there is a more general lesson: Members begin to fall away 
when they sense hypocrisy in their churches, 
when what the church teaches doesn’t match 
what the church does 
or how members are treated.

One challenge many churches face 
has become known as the Rise of the Nones: The percentage of the population 
reporting their religious affiliation as None 
has grown from 6% in 1991 to almost 30% in 2022.

Many churches don’t know what to do with that trend. The whole point of a Baptist or Catholic church 
is to gather up all the Baptists or Catholics in a town, 
not to socialize seekers who balk at reciting a creed.

UUs, though, tend to see the rise of the Nones 
as an opportunity rather than a problem: "Not sure what you believe? Believe something you can’t put a label on? Welcome! You’ll fit right in."

But Nones present a challenge for us too. We know what to do with Nones like Perry Bacon: 
people who were raised in another faith, got disillusioned, 
and now report a church-sized hole in their lives. Lots of us got here that way: I used to be Lutheran. My wife used to be Catholic. That kind of journey is familiar to us.

But as more and more parents leave 
the churches they were born in, 
more and more children are growing up without a church. As adults, those children may discover 
exactly the same needs in their lives as Perry Bacon, 
but to them it won’t look like a church-sized hole. To them, church is an old-timey thing Gramma and Grandpa did, 
not a plausible solution to their own social isolation.

So lifelong Nones won’t walk in our door church-shopping. Someone will need to meet them where they are
 and communicate to them 
that church is a reasonable thing to do. We’re not used to making that case.

And even if they do walk in the door, 
even if they join, they may be slow to grasp how all this works. Not just the when-to-stand-up and when-to-sit-down 
of the Sunday service, but the constant give-and-take 
of being in community with a diverse group of people.

UU minister Kimberley DeBus put it this way in her blog: “Understanding what it means to be a member, 
to be in covenant, 
to support the common endeavor. That means things like supporting a decision 
[that was] fairly and honestly made, 
even if it wasn’t your preference. It means looking to the future and trusting those with vision, 
even if it wasn’t your vision. It means teaching others and helping them along 
even as you were helped along when you first arrived. It means doing the work to support the congregation 
- helping out, taking on leadership roles, 
being engaged with each other.”

Most UU churches aren’t set up to be an adult’s first church. When adults walk into their first church, 
everything seems to happen by magic. It takes a while to understand 
that nothing happens unless someone does it, 
and nothing is paid for unless someone contributes. If you express a need and it isn’t instantly satisfied, 
that doesn’t necessarily mean people don’t like you 
or don’t want you to feel welcome. No one is born knowing this stuff. More and more, we will have to teach it.

And then there’s the problem that Bacon himself exemplifies: People like him aren’t joining our churches 
because people like him aren’t joining our churches. Many, many UU churches have a bootstrapping problem 
— racially, generationally, 
and across divides we may not even be aware of. Waiting for Perry Bacon to show up 
and bring his community with him 
is probably not a viable outreach strategy 
— but I’m not sure what is. 

And if he did show up with a cohort of friends -- 
younger, darker, 
hoping to change the church to better serve their needs -- 
what then? Would we see them as an opportunity, or as a threat? We come here now because we’re happy now. And new members, 
especially members different from us, 
might change things. How will we preserve what we need 
without sending away
 people whose needs are different?

And then, there’s the challenge churches always face, 
whether they’re growing or shrinking: How do we make the cost/benefit balance work? How do we reach out to more people 
without burning out the people who are already here?

Having raised the cost/benefit issue, 
I have to mention a challenging question 
Christian writer Jake Meador posed in The Atlantic: In our busy 21st-century lives, 
we may think we need a church 
that asks less of us. But what if what we really need 
a church that asks more of us, 
one that calls us to transform our busy life
 rather than just squeeze church into it? 

“Contemporary America,” he writes, 
“simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment 
as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy 
for forms of community 
that don’t contribute to one’s professional life. Workism reigns in America, 
and because of it, community in America, 
religious community included, 
is a math problem that doesn’t add up."

He continues: “The problem in front of us 
is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society 
that doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans 
have adopted a way of life 
that has left us lonely, anxious, 
and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.”

I know how exhausting church responsibilities can be, 
so I don’t want to press the ask-more idea too hard. But think about it. Chew on it for a while.

So I’ve described a lot of challenges, 
but not all churches are failing. I only stop by a couple times a year, 
but everything I’ve seen at this church lately looks encouraging. My own church in Massachusetts 
recently came out the other side of a rough patch: Our minister of 31 years retired just as Covid was hitting. A lot of members decided this was a good time 
to take an extended vacation from church, 
and we wondered if they would ever come back. But our search committee did a good job of finding a new minister, 
and the congregation seems to be on the upswing again.

[Here I have edited out a couple of stories about churches I know that are struggling, for fear the churches are a little too recognizable.] One of my friends ministered to another UU church 
a little over an hour from Boston. I spoke there a few times. They have a lovely sanctuary 
that decades ago would hold hundreds, but they can’t afford to heat it in the winter, 
so we met in a side room with a couple dozen chairs.

In short, the future could go either way. Having invoked Emerson, 
I have to pass on one of my favorite Emerson quotes: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, 
if we but know what to do with it.”

So why am I bringing this up today? What am I hoping you take away from this talk? (This is that point where you might come back from your side track.)

I’m sure I’m not the first person to say 
it would be good if this church grew. I’m not the first person to try to sell you the vision 
of a congregation that becomes more racially diverse, 
and that renews itself by pulling in a new generation of young families. The UUA is full of consultants who will tell you that. 

But even if we agree with that vision,
 too often we repeat those statements
in the same tone of voice we use when we talk about cleaning out our garages or starting an exercise program. Of course it would be nice, 
but where are we going to find the time and energy to do it?

What I’m trying to do today 
is throw another coin on the motivation side of the scale: We don’t need to do this just for ourselves. In fact, our individual motives sometimes pull the other way: If my friends are here already, 
how much bigger does the church need to be? But growing Unitarian Universalist churches, 
and changing them so that they’re better equipped to grow, 
is something we need to do for the world. The world needs the kind of institutions we could build.

Many years ago, 
my church held a brainstorming afternoon 
to compose a new mission statement. The goal was to have a concise answer to the question: 
“What are we trying to do here?” 
so that every proposed project 
could be judged by how well it helped us do that thing.

I drew a complete blank that afternoon, 
and contributed almost nothing. The mission statement we came up with 
was one of those multi-subordinate-clause paragraphs 
that was all very well-intentioned. But I don’t remember it 
and I never hear anyone quote it.

A few months later I was out for a walk 
when what I should have proposed popped into my head: Becoming the people the world needs.

That’s what we ought to be doing. The world needs thoughtful, committed, compassionate, truth-seeking people. Right now, we may not always be those people. But we aspire to become them, 
and we come together as a community 
to help each other work on that aspiration.

Lately, though, I’ve been realizing that 
“becoming the people the world needs” 
isn’t quite good enough, because it only covers our individual growth. I think we also need to care about 
building the institution the world needs.

And so that’s the question I’d like to leave you with: Right here, right now, 
what church-resembling institution does Quincy need? And how could this church move 
in the direction of becoming that institution?

Closing words

The closing words are by William Wordsworth: 
“What we have loved, Others will love; and we will teach them how.”

Maintaining a Healthier Relationship with the News

 presented at First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts
August 11, 2024

As most of you probably know, I write a weekly news and politics blog called The Weekly Sift. I’ve been doing it for more than 20 years.

And all that time, people have been telling me the same thing: “I could never do that. Following the news is just too depressing.”

While some people say that in a matter-of-fact way, UUs typically say it in a tone of self-criticism. Because Unitarian Universalism is a this-world religion, we feel like we ought stay informed about this world. But too often we end up bouncing back and forth between obsessive anxiety and depression when we do follow the news, and guilt when we don’t. So many, many UUs have an unsatisfying relationship with the news.

That’s what I want to talk about today: How could you relate to the news in a healthier, more positive way?

I want to start with a couple of simple suggestions. Then I’ll look back to a bad period in my own recent relationship with the news and draw some conclusions from it. And finally I’ll close with some general observations 
on what I think of as the “spirituality” of the news.

First the simple stuff. The reason the Sift comes out weekly is that I believe most Americans consume news at the wrong pace. The 24/7 news cycle tempts us into frequent, shallow interactions with the news rather than fewer, deeper ones. So in the course of a week you may spend an hour on some particular topic or event, but probably you’ve just processed the same five minutes 12 times. You’ve heard the same facts, felt the same emotions, and thought the same thoughts over and over again.

For example, think about watching coverage of a mass shooting. In the first five minutes you’ll learn where it was, an estimate — possibly wrong — of how many people were killed or injured, and whether the shooter is dead, in custody, or still at large.

At that point, you know all the information that is publicly available, and there may not be anything more for several days. If you want, you can keep watching the continuous coverage for three more hours. But you won’t learn anything new?

That pattern is more common than you probably think. Surprisingly often, you’d be better off following a story week by week rather than minute by minute.

My second simple suggestion is to be wary of speculation. It’s a rare day when the news networks actually uncover 
24 hours worth of information. So they pad their schedules with panels of “experts” who try to guess what will happen next. Very few of these pundits predict the future all that well, but they fill the time.

Sometimes, speculating about what’s going to happen next is fun. That’s why we do it in our personal conversations. Do you think the Red Sox will make the playoffs? Will that couple get married eventually? How is the final season of Stranger Things going to wrap things up?

We have those speculative conversations because we enjoy them. And so, if you enjoy watching TV talking heads speculate, feel free. There’s no harm in it.

But it also has no value. So if you’re not enjoying it, if it’s making you tense or agitated, you can walk away and do something else.

So those are my two simple pieces of advice: Consume news at a slower pace that allows you to think about it 
rather than just react to it. And walk away from speculation that you aren’t enjoying.


Now let’s go a little deeper. Often mistakes have a lot to teach us, so I thought I’d tell you about a recent time when I mismanaged my own relationship with the news.

Back in February, as you may remember, Special Counsel Robert Hur released his report on Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents. He found no justification for pressing charges, but along the way he made gratuitous comments about President Biden’s mental competence. Biden responded with an angry press conference that made things worse. As he was leaving the room, he answered an unscripted question about Gaza, and said “Mexico” when he obviously meant “Egypt”.

That started a media frenzy similar to the one this summer that led to Biden dropping out of the race. That next week, 
the Annenberg School for Communication counted 26 unique articles about Biden’s age in the New York Times alone. And only one of them pointed out that Trump might also have an age problem. So for an entire week, 
Biden’s age blotted out all other considerations: his administration’s accomplishments, January 6th, and even Trump’s criminal indictments and plans for authoritarian government. None of that was worth discussing, because Biden was old.And I thought: “This is it. We’re going to replace democracy with authoritarianism because one man said ‘Mexico’ instead of ‘Egypt’.”
 
And that’s when the bottom fell out of my mood. I felt it physically, as if I were carrying a weight around. The effect lasted for several days. I would seem to be coming out of it, but then something would remind me and I’d sink back down again.

And I don’t think it was just me. In Paul Krugman’s subsequent column he seemed to be carrying a similar weight: “I am,” he wrote, “for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.”

OK. At this point we could go down at least two long sidetracks and never find our way back, like Biden’s actual mental competence, exactly how bad a second Trump term would be, and stuff like that. But talk to me about that some other time.

Right now, I’m more interested in that experience, that sudden mood collapse touched off by something in the news. If you’ve ever felt something like it, you know that the triggering information doesn’t have to relate to politics or elections. It could be about climate change or the Supreme Court or what corporate capitalism is doing to our culture or whatever else you happen to worry about.

One minute, you’re sailing along calmly, thinking, “Yeah, there are problems, but we’ll probably be OK.” And then you hear or see something. Maybe it’s a big thing, like the Dobbs decision or the October 7 attacks. But it doesn’t have to be. Maybe you hear about a heat wave in Asia. Or see police fighting with protesters. Or maybe a personal friend, somebody you’ve always respected, surprises you by repeating some hateful talking point about trans people or immigrants.

And in an instant the bottom falls out. That guarded confidence you felt a minute ago is gone, and suddenly all you can think is: “We’re doomed. We’re on a track to some unthinkable dystopia, and nothing I do makes any difference. People don’t understand, and I can’t explain it to them, because I can’t figure out what they were thinking to begin with.”

I experienced this as depression and despair, but I know other people for whom it manifests as anger: How can so many people be so gullible or self-centered or short-sighted?

We don’t usually talk about these experiences, because it feels like confessing a weakness, or like a virus we don’t want to pass on. If I’m panicking inside, I don’t want to tell you about it, because I don’t want you to panic too.

But I think we do need to talk about this, for at least two reasons. First, because when this happens to you, it’s really unpleasant. Despair is one of the most painful emotions out there, so the less time you can spend in it, the better.

And second, it’s debilitating. When that sinkhole opens up or that volcano of rage erupts, it’s hard to keep doing any of the constructive things you ordinarily do. And if you do manage to keep doing them, you probably aren’t doing them very well. I know that when I’m coming from a place of fear or anger, when I’m running away from an internal panic, I have bad judgment and find it hard to connect with people. In situations where I’d like to communicate confidently and persuasively, what tends to come through instead is my anxiety. So despair, depression, and anger 
tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies. If you and everyone like you are panicking, that can easily turn into something to panic about.

FDR famously said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. But that quote skates over the fact that fear itself can be pretty fearsome.

After I surfaced again, I started asking people if they recognize this experience and, if so, what they do about it. I’ve learned two things from those conversations: First, not a single person has told me that they don’t know what I’m talking about. And second, from the remedies they suggest, I gather that most people experience this as a passing mood, a short-term unpleasantness that they just need to get over. So I’ve heard suggestions like: Eat something. Go walk in the woods. Watch a movie. Get a big hug from somebody.

And if you have a minor case, that works. Treat yourself like a malfunctioning device: Unplug yourself, wait a little while, and then plug yourself back in again.

But sometimes that only works for a few days, or until the next triggering event. News-induced despair or anger can be a recurring injury like a bad back or a trick knee. And if that’s the case, you need more than just a reboot, you need a strategy, a training regimen. You need to look for patterns in the outbreaks, to see what you need to strengthen and what you need to avoid.

One pattern in my life is that my blog gives me a weekly cycle. Monday mornings I put a lot of energy into getting the posts out, and that puts me in a vulnerable state Monday evenings and into Tuesday. So I’ve learned not to expect much of myself until Wednesday. Another thing I don’t do is double up Sunday services and Monday blogs. So you may have noticed that I’ve cancelled tomorrow’s Weekly Sift. I just don’t have the stamina to do both.

But I was doing all that in February, and it still wasn’t enough. And that got me looking at these sorts of crashes more deeply: What causes them? Is there some kind of mental hygiene that can prevent them?

Now, it’s tempting to say that the News itself is the cause, that the bad state of the World is making us feel this way. And if that’s true, then the only permanent solution is to stop paying attention altogether, or stop caring. That’s what Jackson Browne is wrestling with in the song. [Earlier in the service, we had listened to Jackson Browne’s song “Doctor, My Eyes”.] Maybe I should have closed my eyes rather than leaving them open for so long.

As you can imagine, I don’t want to go there. If we all do that, then the American experiment in self-government really is over, no matter who wins our elections. And if we stop paying attention to anything beyond our own private lives, our own loved ones and our own circle of friends, then our UU values become empty. Are people starving in Gaza? Is the planet going to be unlivable for future generations? Too bad for them. I’ve got my own problems.

So I was highly motivated to take a closer look at my February collapse and see what I could learn from it.

Think about the list of symptoms I experienced and that I’ve heard other people report: — paralyzing fear, despair, depression, and annihilating anger. To me, those are all symptoms of broken denial. You keep telling yourself that some unpleasant thing can’t happen, and then you get reminded that it can. So you get angry or depressed or fall into despair.

That tracks with my experience in February. I had been telling myself, and telling my readers, that the American people are basically sensible, and they’ll rise to the challenge of this election. Every voter starts paying attention on their own schedule, so at any given moment they might tell a pollster all kinds of things. But come November, 
most voters will look around, figure things out, and do the right thing.

But then for a week in February, nothing mattered but Biden’s age. And I was forced to admit: Maybe not.

Once you accept the diagnosis that the root problem is denial, it becomes important to understand what exactly you’ve been denying. This can be tricky, because the demons of Depression will do their best to fool you about it. Denial typically involves telling yourself that good things are going to happen, so Depression will try to convince you that the way to fix your mistake is to tell yourself that bad things are going to happen: Democracy is over. Climate change is going to destroy civilization. Rational thought can never compete with religious extremism. Humanity will never make any progress on poverty or war or bigotry. In short, we’re all doomed.

I went through that phase, as I imagine many of you have at one time or another.

But this kind of negative thinking is just the mirror image of the positive thinking that got me in trouble to begin with. Because my true mistake, the conclusion that needed replacing, wasn’t that the election was going to have a happy outcome. My true mistake was telling myself that I knew what was going to happen. Jumping from “I know things are going to turn out well” to “I know things are going to turn out badly” doesn’t undo that denial, it maintains it.

Because here’s the scary, humbling, but true thought that I was actually denying: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can guess. I can speculate. I can argue that one outcome is more likely than another. But when you come down to it, I just don’t know.

I don’t know who’s going to win the election. I don’t know if Trump will ever face justice. I don’t know how bad climate change will get before we turn it around, or if we even will turn it around. I don’t know what future wars we might find ourselves fighting. I don’t know what new plagues are out there. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out 
how to offer everyone a chance at a good life. I don’t know how long it will take the arc of the Universe to bend towards justice, or if it even wants to bend that way. Pick any problem or issue you care about, and I can’t promise you anything. Because I just don’t know.

And that, I think, is the essence of a problem we all face: How do we keep going, keep striving, keep doing whatever we can to give humanity its best chance to thrive — without falsely promising ourselves that whatever we’re doing is certain to work?

The answer to that question, I believe, is that we need to have a deeper appreciation of the difference between Optimism and Hope,And learn to practice Hope. We often use those two words interchangeably, but they’re actually quite different.

Optimism, like Pessimism, is a belief about the future: It will go well or it will go badly. But Hope is an attitude towards the Present. Hope says that striving is worthwhile. It doesn’t promise an outcome. It just says that trying is better than not trying. The future will always be uncertain, but Hope is what allows us to accept that uncertainty and keep going.

UUs ought to be good at this, because our religion has never offered us certainty. Unitarian Universalism doesn’t postulate a God who promises happy endings. It doesn’t guarantee us a place in Heaven or assure us that we’ll all meet again after death. Unitarian Universalism just says that living a good life is better than living a bad life. Focus on that, and have hope.

I think that’s an important lesson to remember right now, because in recent weeks the news cycle has turned again.
Biden dropping out of the race ended several weeks of what (from my point of view) was a really bad news cycle. And now, suddenly, we’re in a very good news cycle. People like me are excited again and polls are shifting. All the momentum is what I consider good momentum.

So it’s tempting to start buying into Optimism again, to tell myself that everything’s going to be fine, that on election night I’ll have the pleasure of watching good people win and bad people lose. And that may happen, but I don’t want to get attached to it. I don’t want to start the whole manic/depressive cycle going again. The mental hygiene I’m trying to live by is Hope, not Optimism. I want to strive for good things without ever losing sight of the possibility that they may not happen.

I recommend that attitude not just for this election, but for all other political issues, and for challenges in your personal life as well: Don’t spend a lot of time in the future, living in positive or negative scenarios that may never occur. Just keep striving for the best outcome you can reasonably imagine, and then let things happen as they will.

We don’t get to choose the future, but we do get to choose our own actions.  

Choose well.

Hope, Denial, and Healthy Relationship with the News

a service presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on May 5, 2024

Opening Words

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
and the slow parade of fears 
(without crying).
Now I want to understand.

I have done all that I could 

to see the evil and the good 
(without hiding)
You must help me if you can.

Doctor, my eyes tell me what is wrong.
Was I unwise 
to leave them open for so long?

- Jackson Browne

Reading

In addition to its plot and characters, the novel All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren is one of the greatest storehouses of metaphors in American literature. Here’s one relevant to today’s topic:

It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second.

While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little foetus you carry around inside yourself.

The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know too. But the clammy, sad little foetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing.

Sermon

I’m taking a bit of a risk this morning.

Whenever I write a talk, I try to keep certain balances in mind. To me, those balances define what it means for a talk to be a Unitarian sermon rather than an academic lecture or a political speech or some other kind of sermon.

One of those balances is between the personal and the universal. I think a Unitarian sermon needs to be personal. It shouldn’t just be a collection of abstract notions I think you’ll find interesting. The topic should mean something to me and figure in my life. But on the other hand, a Unitarian sermon shouldn’t just be personal.  It shouldn’t be idiosyncratic. My experiences and struggles should illustrate some larger, more universal point, because this isn’t therapy and you didn’t come here to listen to my problems.

Today, though, I’m talking about an experience that I know is personal, but I’m only guessing about its universality. I think maybe something similar happens to a lot of you also, but we tend not to talk about things like this, so I don’t really know.

The experience is an intense spiraling downward that gets triggered not by anything in my personal life, but from my interaction with the news. I hear about something in the outside world, the public world that we all share, and then the walls come tumbling down.

Let me tell you the last time this happened to me. The trigger — which, looking back, seems kind of trivial, but these things usually do after a few months — was the Hur report. Maybe you remember: Robert Hur was the special counsel tasked with investigating President Biden’s unauthorized retention of classified documents, an investigation that in some ways paralleled the one that led to former President Trump’s Florida indictment. The bottom line of that investigation, from my partisan perspective, was positive: Hur found nothing that would justify pressing charges. As an official matter, the case was closed.

But along the way, he took a swipe at Biden’s mental competence, describing the president as “an elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age”. Biden responded with an angry press conference that made things worse. As he was leaving the room, he answered an unscripted question about Gaza, and said “Mexico” when he obviously meant “Egypt”.

And then the media frenzy was on. According to the CSS Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication: During the next week the New York Times alone published 26 unique articles about Biden’s age, only one of which pointed out that age might also be a problem for Trump. For a week, Biden’s age blotted out all other considerations: It mattered more than anything his administration had accomplished, more than Trump’s plans for authoritarian government, and even more than January 6th. Nothing else was worth discussing, because Biden is old.

And I thought, “My God, we’re doomed. We’re going to lose our democracy because one man said Mexico instead of Egypt.”

And that’s when the bottom fell out of my mood. The effect lasted for several days. I would seem to be coming out of it, but then something would remind me and I’d sink back down again.

In Paul Krugman’s subsequent column he didn’t talk explicitly about his emotions, but I imagined he was having a similar experience: “I am,” he wrote, “for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.”

OK. From here I could go into a long rant about the importance of this election, or how the media is covering it, or why in spite of everything I’m still hopeful about November. But that’s not where I want to go.

No, what I want to talk about is that experience, that sudden mood collapse touched off by something in the news. The something doesn’t have to relate to politics or elections. It could be about climate change or the Supreme Court or what corporate capitalism is doing to our culture or whatever else you happen to worry about.

One minute, you’re sailing along calmly, thinking, “Yeah, there are problems, but we’ll be OK.” And then you hear or see something. Maybe it’s a big thing, like the Dobbs decision or the October 7 attacks. But it doesn’t have to be. Maybe you hear about a heat wave in Asia. Or see police fighting with protesters. Or maybe somebody you know, somebody you thought knew better, surprises you by repeating some hateful political talking point about trans people or immigrants.

And in an instant the bottom falls out. That guarded confidence you felt a minute ago is gone, and suddenly all you can think is: “We’re doomed. We’re on a track to some unthinkable dystopia, and nothing I do makes any difference. People don’t understand, and I can’t explain it to them, because I can’t even imagine what they were thinking to begin with.”

I experience this as depression and despair, but I know other people for whom it manifests as anger: How can so many people be so stupid or self-centered or short-sighted?

We don’t usually talk about these experiences, because it feels like confessing a weakness, or like a virus we don’t want to pass on. If I’m panicking inside, I don’t want to tell you about it, because I don’t want you to panic too. But I think we do need to talk about this, for at least two reasons. First, because when this happens to you, it’s really unpleasant. Despair is one of the most painful emotions out there, so the less time you can spend in it, the better.

And second, it’s debilitating. When that sinkhole opens up or that volcano of rage erupts, it’s hard to keep doing any of the constructive things you ordinarily do. And if you do manage to keep doing them, you probably aren’t doing them very well. I know that when I’m coming from a place of fear or anger, when I’m running away from an internal panic, I have bad judgment and find it hard to connect with people. In situations where I’d like to communicate confidently and persuasively, what tends to come through instead is my anxiety and fear. So despair, depression, and anger tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies. If you and everyone like you are panicking, that in itself can be something to panic about.

Ever since February I’ve been wandering around asking people if they recognize this experience and, if so, what they do about it. I’ve learned two things from those conversations: First, not a single person has told me that they don’t know what I’m talking about. And second, from the remedies they suggest, I gather that most people experience this as a passing mood, a short-term unpleasantness that they just need to get over.  So I’ve heard suggestions like: Eat something. Get a good night’s sleep. Go walk in the woods. Watch a movie. Get a big hug from somebody. Snuggle with a pet.

In essence, these remedies treat a poor mental state like a malfunctioning device. You don’t need to understand exactly what went wrong. Just unplug it and then plug it in again. Reboot, and hope the problem goes away. Most of the time, it does.

But sometimes it doesn’t. Or it goes away for a day or a week, and then the whole pattern repeats itself: You hear that the bird flu might lead to another pandemic, read about another species going extinct, hear somebody else confidently proclaim their racism or sexism, and the roller coaster takes another dive.

At this point, you need more than just a distracting hobby or a comfort animal. You need a strategy.

The beginning of strategy is noticing patterns. One pattern I’ve noticed in my life is a weekly cycle. I post my political blog on Monday mornings. And even though I’ve been assembling it all week, Monday morning usually requires about six hours of intense concentration. In particular, it’s emotional concentration, because I test each sentence for all the ways it could be misunderstood, and all the unintentional insults I might be dealing out to readers who come to this topic with life experiences different from mine. By Monday afternoon my empathy is exhausted, including my empathy for myself. So Monday evenings are difficult for me, and I’m highly vulnerable to these kinds of collapses.

I’ve tried a number of remedies, but the one that works best is simple acceptance: This is what Monday evening feels like. Notice it, accept it, don’t make it worse, but also don’t take it too seriously. I get through Monday, try not to expect much out of myself on Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning I’m almost always fine.

In the Carlos Castenada books, Don Juan talks about stalking your dysfunctions the way that a hunter stalks prey. In this case, you may need to stalk your fear, despair, anger, or other negativity. Find out where it hangs out, where it comes from, where it goes, and plan your strategy accordingly.

But sometimes even that doesn’t work. And at this point, you might wonder whether you’re in the territory of that old vaudeville joke: A guy walks in to his doctor’s office and says “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” And the doctor responds: “Don’t do that.”

Does it hurt when you pay attention to the news? Don’t do that. Stop looking. Stop caring about elections or the planet or global injustice or anything beyond what you need to get through your day. That’s the question Jackson Browne was wrestling with in the opening words: I’ve been living with my eyes open. Was that a mistake?

Now, for me, not paying attention to the news would mean shutting down my blog, which has become a major part of my identity. But even without that consideration, I also think it would betray my Unitarian values.

As Unitarians, I don’t believe we’re supposed to be fat and happy. I think we’re supposed to be active, well-informed citizens. I think we’re supposed to be involved in the give-and-take of democracy. And even to lead those discussions to the extent that we’re able. As a religious movement, we take seriously Thomas Jefferson’s warning: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”

But that said, sometimes you do need to step back and let the world manage without you for a week or two. We all, I think, have inside us that sad little fetus Robert Penn Warren was talking about, the one that wants to stay warm in its not knowing. Once in a while, we need to show ourselves some compassion and take a little time to comfort that fetus.

And sometimes the negative pattern you’ve stalked to its lair is obsessiveness. So you need to ration your attention and set up circuit breakers to keep yourself from going down a rabbit hole. More than one person has told me that they need to enforce a rigorous bedtime to keep themselves from doomscrolling their news feeds far into the night. You can make those kinds of adjustments without permanently turning your back on the world.

I want to devote the rest of my time this morning to thinking about prevention. Short of ignoring the world’s problems, is there some regular practice, some mental hygiene, some healthy relationship to the news, that can prevent these sorts of mood collapses?

I think there is. But to understand it, we need a more precise diagnosis of the problem.

If you look at the kinds of responses I’ve mentioned — paralyzing fear, despair, depression, and annihilating anger — I think they’re all symptoms of broken denial. You keep telling yourself that some unpleasant thing can’t happen, and then you get reminded that it can. So you get angry or depressed or fall into despair.

That’s what happened to me in February. I had been telling myself, and telling my readers, that the American people are basically sensible, and they’ll rise to this challenge. Every voter starts paying attention on their own schedule, so at any given moment they might tell a pollster all kinds of things. But come November, most voters will look around, figure things out, and do the right thing.

But then for a week in February, nothing mattered but Biden’s age. And I was forced to admit: Maybe not.

So if the root problem is denial, then the obvious solution is to live without denial. But that’s a lot easier said than done. Perfect perception of reality is not given to human beings. We all piece together our worldviews from a few facts, some reasonable deductions, a little hearsay, a few wild guesses, and maybe a bit of wishful thinking. No matter how hard you work on your picture of reality, the world is going to continue to surprise you.

And figuring out how to respond to those surprises gets tricky. Take my response to the Hur report. That mood crash should have told me that I had been in denial about something. But what exactly? What was the belief that events had exposed as dysfunctional? And what was the right belief to replace it with? It’s really easy to get this wrong, and many people do.

Here’s one way I could have thought it through: What got me in trouble, what got exposed as denial, was my belief that the American people are going to do the right thing in November.

So maybe the correct view, the thing I need to admit to myself, is that the American people are going to do the wrong thing. The Republic is doomed. We’re going to vote to end democracy once and for all. That’s just how it is.

I see people do this all the time: If my positive belief is denial, then the exactly opposite negative belief must be true. Climate change is going to destroy civilization. Rational thought can never compete with religious extremism. Humanity will never make any progress on poverty or war or bigotry. We’re all doomed.

I say I could have thought it through that way, but it’s actually worse than that: I did. For several days I tormented myself with those kinds of negative thoughts.

But eventually I realized that this kind of thinking was just the flip side of the same denial. Because my true mistake, the conclusion that needed replacing, wasn’t that the election will have a happy outcome. My true mistake was telling myself that I know what’s going to happen. Jumping from “I know things are going to turn out well” to “I know things are going to turn out badly” wasn’t undoing my denial, it was maintaining it.

Because here’s the scary, humbling, but true thought that I was actually denying: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can guess. I can speculate. I can argue that one outcome is more likely than another. But when you come down to it, I just don’t know.

I don’t know who’s going to win the election. I don’t know if Trump will ever face justice. I don’t know how bad climate change will get before we turn it around, or if we even will turn it around. I don’t know what future wars we might find ourselves fighting. I don’t know what new plagues are out there. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out how to organize humanity to offer everyone a chance at a good life. I don’t know how long it will take the arc of the Universe to bend towards justice, or if it’s even bending that way at all. Pick any problem or issue you care about, and I can’t promise you anything. Because I just don’t know.

And that, I think, is the essence of the problem we all face: How do we keep going, keep striving, keep doing whatever we can to give humanity its best chance to thrive — without falsely promising ourselves that whatever we’re doing is certain to work?

My best response to that question is actually in one of my previous talks, the one I gave during the Covid lockdown, when we were meeting over Zoom with the congregation in La Crosse. Remember? I talked about hope.

My hope at the time was that if you remembered anything from that talk, it would be this: Hope is neither optimism nor pessimism. Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future, but hope is an attitude towards the present. Hope says that striving is worthwhile. It doesn’t promise you an outcome. It just says that trying is better than not trying.

So in conclusion, that’s the mental hygiene I’ve been trying to live by these last few months, and that I recommend: Cultivate your capacity for hope, and regularly exercise your ability to live and function in the presence of uncertainty.

Whether we’re talking about the election, climate change, some other public issue, or even some challenge in your personal life, try to avoid both optimism and pessimism. Try to avoid either promising yourself a positive outcome or getting lost in some negative scenario. Just keep striving for the best outcome you can reasonably imagine, and then let things happen as they will.

We don’t get to choose the future, but we do get to choose our own actions.  

Choose well.

Closing Words

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance. -- Benjamin Franklin