Standing on the Side of Love
by Rev. Colin Bossen, October4, 2009
Last November many of us celebrated the election of the first Black President of the United States. At the time I reflected that "Obama's electoral victory represents a major defeat for white supremacists." While my words from last year remain true it is also true that since Obama's election the far right has increased in strength. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog group that monitors hate crimes and hate groups, far right militia groups are growing at the fastest rate in more than ten years. Hate crimes are on the rise. Since April we have witnessed the murder of an abortion doctor, two African immigrants and several law enforcement officers at the hands of people connected with racist right wing groups.
At the same time the rhetoric of hate and fear is growing in the mainstream and can be witnessed on television, the internet and talk radio. Public officials such as U.S. Representative Michelle Bachmann and Texas Governor Rick Perry are making statements like "a revolution every now and then is a good thing." Meanwhile, Fox News host Glenn Beck has been quoted as saying "There will be parts of the country that will rise up" and actor and political activist Chuck Norris has asked "How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough?...will history need to record a second American Revolution?"
That the mood among some Americans is ugly has been witnessed by a portion of the placards at the recent tea party protests. One mass produced sign features pictures of the President as an African witch doctor--complete with a bone through his nose and face paint. Many handwritten signs declare Obama to be something other than a U.S. citizen or an Islamic extremist.
Other disturbing stories also speak of brazen racism. Memorable among them was an incident that took place outside of one the President's town hall meetings in August. A protester was recorded as shouting, "We don't need illegals. Send 'em back with a bullet in the head."
I suspect that these vile sentiments are one of the reasons why our Unitarian Universalist Association decided this past summer to launch a new public advocacy campaign entitled "Standing on the Side of Love." The purpose of the campaign is to promote "respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person." Key to the campaign is the belief "that no one should be dehumanized through acts of exclusion, oppression, or violence because of their identities." Identities include race, sexual orientation, legal status, age, gender or anything else that helps define who someone is.
Next week the campaign will attempt its first major organizing initiative by trying to bring Unitarian Universalists from across the country to Washington, DC to take part in a massive march for marriage equality. While few from this congregation will be present we will be represented by the President of our Association and, I suspect, thousands of lay people and dozens of clergy.
Standing on the Side of Love will hopefully serve as a reminder of what we religious liberals can accomplish when we work together. The purpose of our Association Sunday each year is similar, it is to remind us of the network of mutuality of which we are a part. Each of our congregations is stronger when we reach out and cooperate with other Unitarian Universalist communities and our wider Association.
The benefits we receive from our Association are both pragmatic and spiritual. On the pragmatic side we gain from the wise consul of people like Stewardship consultants Frankie Price-Sterns and Mark Ewert who, through their workshops, have helped this congregation bring its identity and vision into focus. We receive much from our district staff who work hard to provide training resources and conferences such as the upcoming Leadership in a Multicultural World. Nathan and I are grateful for the support of our colleagues in our surrounding Unitarian Universalist communities. Our relationships with them help ensure that we never feel isolated, lonely or disconnected in our work with this beloved congregation. I have found that being connected to a larger movement means always having someone to call when you need advice.
But these pragmatic benefits are really only secondary to the spiritual benefits we receive as being part of larger religious movement. Our tradition reminds us that just to be alive on this great green Earth is gift and urges us, in the words of Joy Atkinson, to "recall in gratitude / all that has given us birth." This includes not just other humans, but the stars, this precious planet, water, the soil and all that sustains us.
During times of trial our connection to other Unitarian Universalist congregations and our shared tradition can serve as an inspiration. They also provides us a resource for innovation and growth. That one congregation is successful in building a strong multicultural community, nurturing young families or offering a prophetic voice for social justice suggests that all congregation have these potentials.
The Standing on the Side of Love campaign is clearly rooted in these spiritual resources. The campaign's vision comes from our Unitarian Universalist heritage. The Universalist Church of America proclaimed itself to be, in the words of one 19th century minister, "the church of God's love unlimited" and preached a vision of radical inclusion. Early Universalists believed that in the end all people would be united with God for God did not punish human failings with an eternity of torment inn the afterlife. Over the years this belief has transmuted itself into the first principle of our Association "respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person."
The Universalist vision of God's radical love was matched by the Unitarian's affirmation of the potential goodness of each human being. This vision led William Ellery Channing to proclaim that each person had the possibility within them to grow in their "likeness to God."
This faith in humanity and redemptive power of love run deep. As many of you know, for the past year I have been writing an adult religious education curriculum for the Unitarian Universalist Association on our movements social justice history. Each episode in our history I have studied has impressed me with the resources that our liberal faith offers us in justice work.
Over the years our ranks have been filled with those who like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued for women's suffrage. They have included those like John Haynes Holmes--one of the founders of the NAACP--who fought or even, in the cases of James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo gave their lives, for full civil rights for African Americans; those like Roger Baldwin and Stephen Fritchman who maintained the right to free speech and free religion in the face of government oppression; and peace activist and Nobel Laureates Emily Greene Blach, Jane Addams and Linus Pauling who continue to call us to work for a world free from the horrors of violence. Today it is should not be a surprise that many Unitarian Universalists are choosing to stand on the side of love and fight for full civil equality for members of the GLBT community.
It may seem like the easy and obvious choice to stand on the side of love. For many of us the issue of marriage equality and the extension of full human rights to members of the GLBT community may seem indisputable. But Unitarian Universalists have not always been united on the most ethical course of action. And what seems right in the present moment does not always appear to be so in hindsight. Even as we engage in the present struggles and proclaim ourselves to be standing on the side of love we would do well to remember the words of Unitarian Universalist ethicist Sharon Welch who writes, "I and every person, movement, group, and institution that I trust can be deeply, profoundly, tragically wrong. Not only can we be wrong in minor ways, but our best ideals can be used to justify cruelty and violence."
One of the best illustrations of this comes from Unitarian responses to slavery in the antebellum period. We like to uplift the great abolitionists like Theodore Parker or Lydia Maria Child who came from our midst. But their views were far from universal. Often they found that they held the minority opinion among their co-religionists. As the scholar Douglas Stange writes, "the Unitarian denomination should be ashamed of its antislavery conduct as a religious body." But, he continues, "it should be justly proud of the men and women who as individuals chose love of freedom over thoughts of expediency. The brilliance of their example makes the patterns of antislavery attitudes framed by the Unitarian denomination beautiful to behold."
The end of the great Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing's career matches Stange's assessment. Channing was the minister of the Federal Street Church, at the time most prominent Unitarian congregation in Boston. He was considered to be the spokesperson for our movement and his 1819 sermon "Unitarian Christianity" described much of liberal theology for the 19th century.
Early in his life Channing became convinced that slavery was morally wrong. Yet for many years he kept silent, fearful of alienating his congregation and tarnishing his reputation. Channing did not like the tactics and rhetoric of the militant abolitionists and did not want to be associated with them.
After several years of waffling Channing's friend Samuel J. May and congregant Lydia Maria Child convinced him that he should speak his conscience. He began to publish a number of tracts on the subject but, still fearful of alienating the wealthy members of his congregation, refrained from preaching on it.
Matters came to a head when one of Channing's friends, the abolitionist Unitarian minister Charles Follen died in a shipwreck. The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and Channing requested the use of the Federal Street Church for Follen's funeral. The Standing Committee--the congregation's Board--said no. In defiance Channing preached a memorial for Follen during a Sunday service. The Standing Committee was not amused. They did not formally ask Channing to resign but he only preached one more sermon from his pulpit before his death a few years later.
Channing's example was not lost on his successor Ezra Stiles Gannett. Like Channing Gannett was for much of his life a major spokesperson for the Unitarian movement. He served as the first Secretary of the American Unitarian Association and was one of the organization's founders. At a time when radical Unitarian ministers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker were beginning to make a break with the Christian tradition Gannett became a voice for Unitarian orthodoxy, understood as an allegiance to Unitarianism's Christian roots.
Gannett and the more theologically liberal Parker clashed publicly over theology but their most substantively disagreements may have been over the issue of slavery, particularly the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. The law stated that escaped slaves must be returned to slavery in the South. Parker called for non-compliance with the law. In a sermon he preached immediately after the passage of the law he said "it is the natural duty of citizens to rescue every fugitive slave from the hands of the marshal who essays to return him to bondage; to do it peaceably if they can, forcibly if they must, but by all means to do it."
Gannett supported the Fugitive Slave Law. He felt it necessary to prevent the Southern states from leaving the Union. Perhaps more importantly many of the officials charged with enforcing the law were members of his congregation. According to Samuel J. May, Gannett had stated that "he should feel it to be his duty to turn away from his door a fugitive slave,--unfed, unaided in any way, rather than set at naught the law of the land."
Parker publicly took Gannett to task for his support of the rendition of Thomas Sims. Sims had escaped from slavery in Georgia and lived in Boston. He was kidnapped on the streets of Boston by policemen in April of 1851 and returned to the South. Unitarians from Gannett's congregation played a role in Sim's kidnapping.
In a public address to mark the year anniversary of Sims's adduction, Parker accused his fellow ministers of celebrating "the sacrament of kidnapping." Shortly beforehand, at a ministerial meeting, Parker had lambasted Gannett for "calling on his church members to kidnap mine." At the same time Parker claimed, "I have in my church...fugitive slaves. They are the crown of my apostleship, the seal of my ministry." He told his fellow ministers, probably hoping that they would pass the message along to their congregants, that he would use violence to prevent the seizure of other fugitive slaves.
I tell these stories to remind us that our history of social justice is not merely a matter of liberal triumphalism. The people we lift us as heroes and icons were often outcast and on the margins in their own days. Just because we can largely unite to stand on the side of love on one issue does not mean we will be able to do so on all issues. Sometimes people on both sides of an issue claim to be motivated by the same forces of love and justice. Religious communities are not always inherently justice seeking and different communities have different notions of justice. As Sharon Welch reminds us "religious experience...[the] construals of the divine or divinities or spirituality [does not] inevitably and reliably...[lead] to ethical action."
This is true even for Unitarian Universalists. Sometimes people who hold the same religious values can see things very differently. Several years ago a group of political conservatives formed the American Unitarian Conference because they felt that our Association was too politically liberal. They felt what that many Unitarian Universalists described as moral issues were actually political ones.
I recently had a conversation with a longtime Unitarian Universalist--not a member of this congregation--who told me she was afraid that the emphasis we often place on GLBT equality was making our religious communities less welcoming to "normal families." In a prior congregation I served another longtime Unitarian Universalist told me he was afraid that we were becoming "a gay church." I do not doubt these people's sincerity or commitment to our liberal faith. I suspect that more than anything they simply need to be educated. Their concerns come from a place of scarcity, there is only so much to go around and letting more members of the GLBT community into our ranks will mean that there will be less space for others.
Scarcity is almost always the thing that in the end prevents people from truly standing on the side of love. White supremacists are often motivated by a belief that if other racial groups are given their fair due then whites will lose out. More than a century ago people like Ezra Stiles Gannett appear to have chosen their course of action partially because of a fear that the love of their community was not large enough to support dissident views.
Fear, scarcity and injustice can be overcome when we realize what real love looks like. Real love, as our Universalist ancestors taught, is connected to a vision of radical inclusion and abundance. There is enough to go around. At the same time we are secure in ourselves. We need not fear the other. As Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker write, "Love is capable of detachment as well as empathy, differentiation as well as union..." This understanding of love allows us to struggle for the rights of others because we know that the freer they are the freer we will be.
This type of love is caught in the sentiments of our poet from earlier Vahan Tekeyan:
"And let every treasure
go to every man. Let every garden
gate be open. But let no flower be crushed.
No single branch fall."
May we find the love to our every gate but crush not a single flower, a love wide enough for all yet secure enough for each, within each of our hearts. And finding that love may we draw our circle wide enough to May it be so.
Amen.