Dignitarianism: Treat Everybody Well

One of the things that always amazes me when I read American history is that we've never had a major movement to treat everybody well. It's always been way too easy for the Powers That Be to turn one oppressed group against another.

In the 19th century, for example, women's rights and anti-slavery groups were sometimes allied and sometimes opposed. Each tended to think that associating with the other would muddy their issue rather than sharpen it. (When the proposed 15th Amendment gave the vote to black men, but not to women of any race, Susan B. Anthony spoke out against it. On the other side, Fredrick Douglass opposed revising the text to include women, for fear the thing would never get passed.) Veterans of the union organizing movements of the early 20th century often fought against the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century. And today, some civil rights veterans express resentment when their rhetoric is adopted by advocates of gay rights.

Imagine if we'd had a consistent centuries-old movement to treat everybody well, one that built concepts and rhetoric that applied to every oppressed group.

I didn't realize until today that treat-everybody-well has a name: dignitarianism. Its opposite is rankism, the belief that some people inherently deserve more respect than others, or that having an advantage in one social setting (like outranking somebody at work) makes you a superior person overall.

Robert Fuller and Pamela Gerloff have an article in the current UU World promoting dignitarianism. I have to admit that at first glance it seems a little abstract and thin, and that I get an instinctive that-would-be-nice-but reaction. But I'll bet abolitionism and feminism sounded that way at the beginning too.

What Do UUs Need To Go Deeper?

In addition to whatever else is going on in this post, it's a good place for you to comment on my recent UU World column That Elusive 'More'.

If you didn't chase the link, here's what you need to know from it: Half of this year's Association Sunday money is going to fund projects in Lay Theological Education. I'm on the task force that is figuring out what to do with the money.

Now, on a purely superficial level the task force knows exactly what it's going to do: We're going to look at proposals from a variety of UU organizations -- churches, districts, seminaries, etc. -- and give some grants. But there's also a discussion that needs to happen, and it would be great to get as many voices involved in it as possible. Namely: What should the programs we fund be trying to accomplish?

Getting a little more specific, we're looking at this situation: Imagine someone who has already taken the first steps into Unitarian Universalism, belongs to a congregation, and may even be a leader there -- committee member, RE teacher, and so forth. S/he listens to sermons, goes to discussions, takes the occasional adult RE class ... and wants something deeper.

Now, several things might happen at this point. Sometimes we lose people here; they find another faith community with a better-defined spiritual path. Some people go exactly the opposite direction; they decide that the way to go deeper as a UU is to go to divinity school and maybe even become a minister. Some augment their UUism by taking some other kind of training; Buddhist meditation, pagan ritual, Christian prayer group, etc. Some just stay vaguely dissatisfied. Some find what they're looking for in UUism through an idiosyncratic path. (My own idiosyncratic path is what my column is about.)

Ideally, what would come out of the projects that get funded by our task force is a different set of options for such people. Something more intense than, say, your typical adult RE class or one-day district workshop, but not requiring the kind of drop-everything-else commitment that divinity school represents.

So what I'd really like to hear -- either in comments here or on your own blogs or at the task force blog -- is your reaction to this image of an individual UU at a plateau. (I guess I've mixed up and down in my metaphors. If you're at a plateau you need to go higher, not deeper. But you get the idea.) Somebody who is happy with their UUism as far as it goes, but who wishes it went further.

Have you ever been in such a place? Did you start growing again? If so, how? If not, do you have a sense of what is missing? Do you look at some other faith community and say, "Damn! Why can't we do that?" If you've seen other people at this point, what do you think they need?

If you want to tell your story, but don't want it exposed to the whole Internet, send me an email at the task force address: uulaytheology@gmail.com

A Unitarian Christmas

As I've been learning UU history, one of the surprises has been how much Unitarians contributed to the traditions of Christmas in America. Unitarians wrote "Jingle Bells" and "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear". A Unitarian brought the decorated-Christmas-tree tradition to New England. And then there's Charles Dickens, who was so impressed with Channing and Emerson during his American tour that he went home and joined a Unitarian church there.

My December online column for UU World promotes the view that this is more than just a collection of did-you-know items. Christmas got substantially re-imagined in the 19th century, and Unitarians were right in the middle of it. What had been a sectarian birthday-of-the-Christian-savior (with some pagan holdover traditions) became a holiday about universal values like peace, compassion, and renewing the connection to family and friends. And not until then did Christmas really take off as a holiday, surpassing Easter to become "the most wonderful time of the year."

Dickens' A Christmas Carol is an obvious big factor here, but also look at Edmund Sears' "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear". The interesting question is: What came upon a midnight clear? Not the birth of Jesus, but the song of the angels: "Peace on the Earth, good will to men." That's a universal message, not a sectarian Christian message.

The lesson I draw from all this is that UUs shouldn't be shy about celebrating Christmas. It's our holiday as much as anybody else's; we did a lot to make it what it is.

I wanted to put these ideas across in some cute, non-preachy package, so I wrote the column as a tongue-in-cheek present-day Christmas Carol, where a UU learns the true meaning of a Unitarian Christmas. (My favorite character in this is Marley, a humanist who is clearly embarrassed to be a ghost. In Dickens it's Scrooge who is in denial about Marley's ghostliness, but in my version it's Marley.)

Anyway, UU World's site doesn't have a comment feature, so feel free to leave comments here.

How Can You Stand Not Knowing?

I did a sermon of this title on November 23 at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois and then again on December 7 at First Church Unitarian Universalist in Athol, Massachusetts. I was going to put the full text here on the blog, but the Quincy web site does such a good-looking presentation that I might as well just link to it. They also have a podcast version, which I think is the first time I've been podcast (or podcasted or whatever the past tense is).

While I was preparing the sermon, friends would ask me what it was about. I consistently stumbled over the explanation. I referred to it as "my afterlife sermon", which set up the expectation that I was going to give my theory of the afterlife. That's not what it's about -- which is good, since I doubt that such a sermon would be all that meaningful or transformative, either for me or for the people who heard it.

Instead, "How Can You Stand Not Knowing?" explores why an I-don't-know position on the afterlife is so hard to sell as a genuine religious alternative. In general, even people who aren't sure what's going to happen when they die aren't all that eager to join a church that isn't sure either. Why is that? What are they expecting from religion that they don't think a church can deliver without a clear vision of the afterlife?

I start in the readings with two wildly contrasting views:

• MacBeth's. Here the denial of an afterlife leads to the nihilistic conclusion that "Life ... is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
• Forrest Church's. Church is a well-known UU minister who has terminal cancer. He doesn't claim to know what will happen when he dies, and yet he is facing death with an enviable serenity. The reading is from his talk "Love and Death" to the UU General Assembly in June. (In the sermon I also briefly mention another UU who died well without referencing a vision of the afterlife: Randy Pausch, whose "Last Lecture" has been seen by millions.)
  

The main point I make in the sermon is that a person's vision of the afterlife ripples backwards through his or her vision of life. The unreflective, it-goes-without-saying way of life in America today is based on a traditional Heaven-and-Hell vision of the afterlife. If you just drop that afterlife vision and don't change your approach to life, you're going to run into problems, as MacBeth does. But Church can have a more positive approach to death because he has been living with a different view of life.

The bulk of the sermon, then, is spent listing all the things that a Heaven-and-Hell view does for a believer, and describing how an agnostic vision of life has to be different if it's going to achieve comparable results. The key image here is the contrast between a worldview that is supported by guywires attached to Heaven, versus one supported by a foundation dug into the Earth.

Hope you like it. Love to hear your comments.

My Pagan Side Comes Out

Monday my latest column, Assembly of a Lesser God, appeared on the UU World web site. It's about the intentional construction of god-forms, which comes from my pagan/magickal background. That's a side I haven't shown in UU World before, and I'll be interested to see (1) if anybody notices, and (2) what kind of reactions it draws.

I intentionally did the column with a light touch, starting out by talking about Rita the goddess of urban parking. That will allow people to laugh the whole thing off if they need to. But there's a serious idea in there, sort of a post-humanist approach to worship.

The conclusion I've drawn over the years is that evolution, for whatever reason, has made us a believing, worshiping species. And whether we approve of that decision or not, we're stuck working with the mind we have. Belief and worship are powerful tools for organizing thought and behavior. If others get control of those tools, they can make us dance like puppets. But if we're careful, we can learn to pull our own strings.

It's not like I invented this idea. (It's pretty orthodox chaos magick, actually.) But it's not nearly as well-known in UU circles as I think it ought to be. And I suppose it's controversial that there could be a "post-humanist" approach to anything -- an approach that reclaims religion not by ignoring humanist thought, but by using it.

Anyway, I post this here as an attempt to get some more direct, immediate feedback than I can get through UU World. React away.

How I Spent General Assembly

I was on the team that covered GA for the UUA web site. Here are all my links:

GAdding About: My GA journal

And I covered these talks:

A Ministry of Love in Fearful Times -- Forrest Church, Rob Eller Isaacs, and Sarah Lammert. The says it pretty well. We live in a culture of fear, and the ruling party exploits that fear for its own advantage. How should we strike a balance that will let us face the real dangers without letting ourselves be manipulated?

Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow -- Forrest Church. This one is definitely worth your time. Church has terminal cancer and says he is expected to live "months". It's rare to be able to watch a religious leader talk frankly about his own death, and rarer still when that leader deals squarely with the uncertainty of it all. Church isn't telling himself he's going to a better world. He's just going.

Valuing ALL Families -- an Interfaith Community Witness -- multiple presenters. This is a rally across from the Fort Lauderdale City Hall. We're supporting the rights of two types of families usually ignored: families of same-sex couples and families of undocumented immigrants. Both have a particularly hard time in Florida.

Starr King School's President's Lecture -- Eboo Patel and William Sinkford. Patel is the author of Acts of Faith and the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core. He has a Muslim/UU dialog with UUA President William Sinkford and some young UU activists. Patel's method has to do with people telling each other their stories, and so I learned something I never knew about Bill Sinkford: His parents were passing for white when he was born, and he didn't find out he was black until he was 7. My article isn't up on the web yet; I'll update later. It's Event #4045.

A Faith for the Few? Class and Unitarian Universalism -- Mark Harris. Event 5014; another one where my article isn't up yet.


In addition to the stuff I covered and wrote about, I went to the Ware Lecture by Van Jones. Jones is a great speaker; the video is worth watching. (Sinkford does an introduction and then Jones comes on at 4:15.)

Here I Am in Fort Lauderdale

Once again I'm blogging for the UUA web site during the UU General Assembly, which is in the oppressively humid locale of Fort Lauderdale this year.

You can keep up with my adventures here.