"Re-Imagining Liberal Religious Values"

The Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
March 16, 2008
Northern Hills Fellowship

Reading: What America Needs in 2008, excerpt
Network of Spiritual Progressives

“…What counts in this culture is what can be counted, measured, and used to increase our material well-being… This deep assumption, which is present … in almost every aspect of our lives, has led to the triumph of greed, materialism, and selfishness. This me-firstism plays out in our lives in destructive and painful ways…

We have lost our ability to value each other and the natural world as embodiments of the sacred, or, in secular terms, as inherently valuable and worthy. Instead we learn to see others, at best, in terms of how they can help us get ahead, and at worst, as competitors
for everything from jobs to love to space on the overcrowded freeways. The price of material success, it seems, is a certain amount of alienation from others and from nature. Then, when that material success proves ultimately unsatisfying, we lack an alternate frame
of meaning for our lives.

The speed at which we feel we need to live, coupled with a materialist worldview, flattens our experience of the world. The media intensifies this with reality shows that glory in participants’ backbiting and ruthless pursuit of their own interests. Elections are covered as a horse race in which we learn …about who is leading in the polls or who has pulled what dirty trick on whom. Evening news shows flatten life further with scripted banter between the anchor-people, which reflects an inner deadness that we are supposed to accept as “real.”

Phoniness surrounds us and presents itself as the only reality. Those who wish for joy, celebration of the grandeur of the universe, loving connections with others, and a community of meaning and purpose often feel driven to the margins. Many people feel they
have to keep to themselves how alienated they feel under our current political and social systems. It is no coincidence that depression, numbness, loneliness, and anxiety are rampant. We are suffering from a society-wide repression of what might be called the life force, God-energy, or Spirit.
To address this deep spiritual crisis, we need … to talk and act from a commitment to love, caring, kindness, compassion, generosity, environmental sanity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe.

[We] should encourage the recognition that there is enough, that we can afford to share, and that slowing down and acting from love, gratitude, awe, and wonder is actually more satisfying than the frenetic material consumption that is destroying our environment. We need [to inspire people with] that sensibility, and with the recognition that our own well-being depends on the well being of everyone else on the planet and of the health of the planet itself…”

Sermon

As your called minister, my resume is a matter of public record. I have told you my background - my formative years were spent in the Boy Scouts, the military and the Christian Church. For much of my life, I tried my best to live by the conservative religious values I learned in my youth in the Southern Baptist Church. I knew what I was supposed to do according to those values. I believed I could get ahead in life if I stayed close enough to the prescribed path. Through strength of character, hard work and perseverance I would be a success. And, when I didn’t always live up to the ideals, it was a huge relief to think Jesus cared for me and allowed for the forgiveness of my sins. For a long time, I kept thinking, if I did the right things, the things prescribed for ambitious white men, I should be a success in life.

Today, when I visit or talk with my family, I go right back into that belief system. Some of my family are still very involved with the Southern Baptist Church and view life through its concept of family. As you also know, I have strayed from the values of my youth. I am different from my sisters and brothers in some obvious ways:

I have moved and lived in several different cities; they have stayed in or near the place we grew up. Similarly I encouraged my daughter to go out and see the world before she settled down; my siblings have mostly wanted their children to stay closer to home. There are other differences, and I often wonder where they come from. I very much want us to get along and have good relationships, but it is clear our opinions on life diverge a lot of the time. I’m sure they think I’m weird. Fortunately, they look over that and love me anyway.

In order to relate to my family and friends better, I found it helpful to look at the basis for the religiously conservative world view. I often hear criticism from religious liberals that religious conservatives aren’t rational, but that is not what I found. Theirs is a remarkably logical and consistent set of assumptions about the order of nature and of the place of humanity in it. It contains a view of social reality which can feel very supportive to those who make it their way of life. For example, religious conservatives believe children are supposed to honor their father and mother and to adopt their values. When grown, they are to strengthen the multigenerational family network by marrying, having children and staying close to home. What parent doesn’t want to remain close to their children? I can tell you, it is really nice to live near my daughter and son-in-law and to see our grandchildren often.

Religious conservatives see the world as created by God and stewardship of it given to Man. In this world view, relationships should conform to a linear patriarchal structure with God at the top followed in order by a strict father, then mother, and child. The family values which grow out of this ideal include parents who love their children by building their character. Parents give their children strength to face the world with courage and self reliance. For those able to follow this orderly system with vigor, success in a competitive society will surely follow. And we see many examples of such individuals in sports, politics and entertainment – those who have made it to the top by doggedly pursuing their goals, honing their skills and promoting themselves until they come out on top. We admire their grit and honor their triumphs.
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Now there is a lot to be said for religious values that strengthen families and support individuals to be happy and successful in life. I dare say there is not a person in this room who hasn’t wanted to be loved and supported by strong, caring parents. But what I learned through hard experience is the conservative religious belief system doesn’t always work for me or for many others. When I was first married, I didn’t know how to balance being a strong father with my desire to honor my wife’s desire to fulfill her potential and have her own career. We had a rocky time of it. I wanted to support her, and care for our children, but I was never sure what the father’s role was supposed to be. My father’s example of bullying his wife and children often came back to haunt me. In the years since my first marriage ended, I have come to believe even more that “in the liberation of women lies my own liberation.”

I still struggle to overcome some of the ideas that are deeply embedded in my psyche but which no longer work for me. When I hear James Dobson, founder of the conservative Christian empire called Focus on the Family, “proclaim that the man is the head of the woman, I fear for many fragile and growing souls.” I have come to see the dictate that a woman should subjugate herself to the will of a man disgraceful, but Dobson and other powerful religious conservatives have come very close to establishing the Patriarchal Family as a model for our entire nation. When Pat Robertson uses the power of his pulpit to make sure vital sex education information is withheld from children and to oppose reproductive freedom for women, he continues the bondage of women imposed by the church throughout history. Because there is no prescribed way to deviate from their family system, the Christian Right has established an ideological position on same-sex marriage that oppresses an entire class of human beings. Even though their values work for many and therefore may to them seem harmless to others, I believe they “contribute to the continuation of hell on earth for many weak and struggling [people].” It’s not just me who has had to deal with a dysfunctional background. “We have all known hate and prejudice. We know we are not above it, but our presence in a Unitarian Universalist church is testimony to our struggle to overcome it.” We sorely need the voices of liberal religion to counter the repression of our society by the religious conservatives.
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Fortunately, the Dobsons and Robertsons don’t have a monopoly on religious values. In the 2004 presidential election, they reveled in being called “Values voters,” but they were not alone in voting in accordance with their religious values. I vote my values, too. Mine just weren’t the ones the exit pollsters asked about. Maybe the pollsters were tricked into framing their questions to fit into the religious conservative world view, and that can surely be a trap. But, even if the pollsters and pundits had asked, I wonder if we religious liberals would have been able to frame the questions in a way that would convey our values. I am convinced our inclusive values, ideals and principles can liberate the oppressed and create a more wholesome future for us and our children. We just need to be able to articulate them better.

This inability to say what we value seems to be a common problem amongst Unitarian Universalists. Many of us came to Unitarian Universalism having left another religion, and maybe we were reluctant to invest ourselves too deeply in religion again. Other UUs just never were very religious. We like the idea that in a UU church, no one is going to make us repeat a creed or do anything else we don’t believe in. Some go so far as to say that religion itself is to be avoided, but I think that’s throwing the baby out with the bath water. By the way, did you know that admonition comes from the medieval practice of having the Patriarch be first to use the family bathtub followed in rank order by the other members of the family? They often only had one tubful of water so that by the time the baby got washed, the water was pretty murky. Thus the warning. Even Patriarchal family rules have changed somewhat over time, thank goodness.
Pardon my attempt to make light about our inability to express what UUism stands for. However, that too is a common UU behavior; we tend to joke about our lack of clarity. We sometimes tell jokes as a way to cover anxiety, but I think we joke mostly as a way to ask others to accept us. If people laugh, if they get the joke, they must be like us. It’s OK that we do that. It makes us feel part of a unique community, but I think we need something more than a common understanding that we are different from others. Just like all human beings, we need a spiritual center. If we left another church, we still need what ever it was we were looking for when we rejected that other religion. Denise Levertov’s poem, Intrusion describes how our unmet needs can come back to haunt us even when we have worked to change our world view:

“After I had cut off my hands
and grown new ones
something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.
After my plucked out eyes
had withered, and new ones grown
something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.”

Wherever we are in our spiritual journey, we all need to know and be able to say from where comes our sustenance. It is normal to feel confusion for awhile when you first come into a liberal church, but to remain in a state of confusion invites despair.
Liberal religion offers many paths away from despair. It appeals to us because its process is improvisational. It honors our journey to this point and asks us to decide where we want to go to next. Its way of thinking and being is generous and open, creative and unrestricted in its use of the best of all the world’s resources. However, there are times when we get a little stuck trying to improvise our way through problems. At times, we need a little help from a friend. Liberal religion invites us to come into community voluntarily so we can grow in relationship with others. It is community, not creed that brings us here. Helping each other is what a church community is supposed to do, and I think the people of Northern Hills Fellowship are pretty good at that.
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Improvisation requires even more personal creativity when two or more people engage in it; the people who come here are often on very different paths. As my first UU minister Jack Young put it, “We come together here, bringing into the community a wide range of individual truths... Whatever form [those truths] take, we worship together the “Good” as we each perceive it, bearing in mind that the word “God” is a form of the word “Good.” So we worship many Goods, many Gods.” He have different theologies, different religious points of view, but we are all trying to accomplish the same things. If we want our wonderful, open ended journey to go where we want it to, we need to agree on what we are trying to accomplish together. In order to say it in the plainest way I can, I would say what we are trying to accomplish together is: the individual search for meaning and nurturing each other in community. These are my two core liberal religious values.

Our UU principles are a reflection of these two values, and they give rise to many beneficial practices. For example, our values support a responsible, nurturing parent model for families in place of the patriarchal model. Parents who follow the nurturing model love their children and stay close to them as they develop. They know their children well and empathize with their plight as they grow. Parents help their children find success and happiness by developing their potential and by remaining open to whatever directions their children may take. These parents want their children to have resources to face the world – self-respect, inquisitiveness, creativity, and a social conscience to name a few. In UU religious education, we teach children how to learn, we encourage questioning, and we promote cooperation and service to the community through an understanding of the interdependence of all people.
Our society also needs these liberal religious values. We want our children to go out into a culture that nurtures them in the same ways we try to do at home and church, one that accepts them for the wonderful human beings they are. We want this for everyone, really. A liberal religious world view assumes people are basically good, and that we have an innate potential for empathy. An America acting on our values would be a place “where people care about each other, not just themselves, and act responsibly with effectiveness for each other.”

George Lakoff, in his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, lays out a vision of a society built on what he calls progressive values but which come straight out of our liberal religious values. In this ideal society, we would promote “protection, fulfillment in life, and fairness: When you care about someone, you want them to be protected from harm, you want their dreams to come true, and you want them to be treated fairly. We would work for “freedom, opportunity and prosperity: There is no fulfillment without freedom, no freedom without opportunity, and no opportunity without prosperity. We would honor community, service and cooperation: Children are shaped by their communities. Responsibility requires serving and helping to shape your community. That requires cooperation.”
Now these are ideas we can believe in. In order to move them from being just ideals to being realities in our world we have to practice them at home, here in church, and in our communities. When you talk with your family and friends don’t, hem and haw; stand up for your values. In the upcoming election, take your values into the voting booth with you. We need people who will help build a society which recognizes individual autonomy and freedom of thought, and which recognizes interdependence requires mutual cooperation. It is our responsibility to co-create the world we want.
So might this be.

Sweetser, Terry. “More Than Seven Watching,” a sermon delivered Oct. 6, 1985, 8.
Sweetser, 7.
Sweetser, 8.
Young, Jack. “The Nature of the Liberal Church/Community,” sermon delivered at The Unitarian Universalist Church of Chattanooga, 199?, 4.
Lakoff, George. don’t think of an elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, Chelsea Green Publishing (White River Junction, VT: 2004) 90.
Lakoff, 90.