democracy – Page 2 – Dan Harper

Global Problems, Local Actions

Readings

The first reading is from an essay titled “The Evolution of My Social Concern” by James Luther Adams. Adams was a Unitarian Universalist minister and professor at Harvard. In the 1930s, he studied in Germany where he experienced the rise of Naziism. In a 1977 essay, he reflected on those experiences:

“The German universities, supposedly independent entities, had been fairly easily Nazified…. Hitler has also liquidated the trade unions…. The Masons were forbidden to hold meetings. Repeatedly, I heard anti-Nazis say, If only 1,000 of us in the late twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler. I noticed the stubborn resistance of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I observed also the lack of religious pluralism in a country that had no significant Nonconformist movement in the Christian churches. Gradually I came to the conviction that a decisive institution of the viable democratic society is the voluntary association as a medium for the assumption of civic responsibility.”

[Essay dated 1977, reprinted in Voluntary Associations: Socio-cultural Analyses and Theological Interpretation, ed. J. Ronald Engel (Chicago: Exploration Press of the Chicago Theological Seminary, 1986).]

The second reading is from “You Are Responsible,” in the book Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principle and Practices by Peter Drucker.

“Self-development is very deeply meshed in with the mission of the nonprofit organization, with commitment and belief that the work done in this church or this school matters. You cannot allow the lack of resources, of money, of people, and of time (always the scarcest) to overwhelm you…. Paying serious attention to self-development — your own and that of everyone in the nonprofit organization — is not a luxury. Most people don’t continue to work for a nonprofit organization if they don’t share, at least in part, the vision of the organization. Volunteers, particularly, who don’t get a great deal out of working for the organization aren’t going to be around very long. They don’t get a check, so they have to get even more out of the organization’s work. In fact, you don’t want people who stay on with the organization just because that’s what they’ve always done but who don’t believe in the organization any more. … You want constructive discontent. That may mean that many of the best volunteers or paid staff come home exhausted after a big meeting, complaining loudly about how stupid everybody is and how they don’t do the things that are obvious — and then if someone asks why they stay on respond, ‘But it’s so important!’

“The key to building an organization with such a spirit is organizing the work so everyone feels essential to a goal they believe in.”

Sermon: Global Problems, Local Actions

James Luther Adams, probably the greatest Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century, spent most of his brilliant career studying voluntary associations. A voluntary association is a group of people who have freely joined together, with no profit motive, to pursue a shared goal or interest.

The stereotype of the theologian is someone who writes unreadable books on how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin. Thus it might seem odd for a theologian to study something practical like voluntary associations. But that’s where James Luther Adams’s brilliance comes in. He realized that here in the United States, the primary location for religion was in local congregations, which were voluntary associations.

Another of Adams’s great insights was that one of the first things authoritarian governments do is to weaken, destroy, or take over all voluntary associations. Adams came to this realization during the 1930s while he was studying in Nazi Germany. One of the first things the Nazis did when they got into power was to take control of voluntary associations. The Nazis abolished many groups, from the trade unions to the Masons. They got rid of any youth movements such as Scouting that were already in existence, and instead imposed their own Nazi youth movements. They took over the churches, and ran the churches as a part of the Nazi state. Obviously, then, voluntary associations are crucial to a functioning democracy, and a critical bulwark against the authoritarian governments that would abolish them.

By combining these two insights, Adams helped us understand that here in the United States, religious congregations help support democracy. In fact, religious congregations are more important than some other voluntary associations, because congregations are groups that aspire to make a better society. The local soccer club is a voluntary association, but it has no aspirations beyond providing soccer games for its members. There are many such groups which exist primarily for the pleasure of their members. By contrast, a religious congregation is a voluntary association which exists not just for the pleasure of its members, but which also has higher goals: a vision of the earth made fair and all her people one.

When Adams returned from studying in Germany, he confronted an unpleasant realization about himself. Everyone in a democracy has a role in supporting that democracy. But after living for a time in an authoritarian state, Adams felt that he wasn’t doing enough to support democracy. In a 1966 essay titled “The Indispensable Discipline of Social Responsibility,” Adams wrote:

“…I had to confront a rather embarrassing question. I had to ask myself, ‘What in your typical behavior as an American citizen have you done that would help to prevent the rise of authoritarian government in your own country? What disciplines of democracy (except voting) have you habitually undertaken with other people which could serve in any way to directly affect public policy?’ More bluntly stated: I asked myself, ‘What precisely is the difference between you and a political idiot?’”

His answer, of course, was to increase his participation in voluntary associations. He participated in a number of racial integration movements in the 1940s and 1950s. He was active for many years with the American Civil Liberties Union. He participated in a number of professional associations. And he was always active in his local Unitarian Universalist congregation. He not only studied voluntary associations, he lived voluntary associations.

Adams died in 1994. Six years later, in the year 2000, the sociologist Robert Putnam published a book titled “Bowling Alone” in which he detailed how Americans were less and less involved in voluntary associations. That trend has continued to the present day: we Americans no longer join bowling leagues, we have stopped attending religious services, we don’t belong to the Masons or the Order of the Eastern Star. Putnam concluded that the two primary reasons for Americans’ decreasing involvement in voluntary associations were electronic entertainment — primarily television in those days — and generational change.

A quarter of a century later, the decline in voluntary associations seems to be continuing. In 2019, researchers at the University of Maryland wrote a report titled “A Less Charitable Nation” in which they said: “Immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, the volunteer rate surged to a peak level and stayed there for three straight years. After this record high in volunteering, the national rate of American volunteering declined and continued to slide throughout the decade from 2004 to 2015….” (1)

In my limited observation, this trend may have grown more pronounced during the pandemic, as people stayed safely at home with their electronic entertainment. Nor has the end of lockdown done much to change lure us Americans back into the public sphere. We continue to prefer staying at home with our electronic entertainment.

Not surprisingly, this trend of staying at home — this trend of becoming disengaged from face-to-face groups and voluntary associations — has been accompanied by a surge in loneliness, depression, and anxiety disorders. The evolutionary development of human beings did not include an adaptation to sit at home in relative isolation while staring at screens. This epidemic of loneliness and depression has become the major spiritual crisis of our time. I’ll say more about this spiritual crisis in a moment.

Also not surprising: this is combined with an increase in demagoguery across the political spectrum. Civic engagement through voluntary associations remains a critical part of democracy. As we Americans spend more and more time with electronic entertainment, and less and less time in face-to-face groups and voluntary associations, we’re actually weakening our democracy. Indeed, it feels like we’re facing a major crisis in our democracy.

These two crises — the spiritual crisis of loneliness, and the democratic crisis of demagoguery — both have at least some roots in the American withdrawal from voluntary associations. Robert Putnam called it “electronic entertainment,” and today we might call it “screen time,” but it amounts to the same thing. We all do a lot of staring at screens. And it appears that all that staring at screens isn’t very good for us, and it isn’t very good for democracy.

I say this as someone who has spent a good part of his life happily staring at screens. Since the days of Usenet, back in the 1990s, I’ve lived way too much of my life online, and enjoyed almost all of it. But this summer I started noticing how much time I spent staring at screens. I didn’t count time at work, since I have to use email and videoconferencing for my job. But I realized I might spend 8 hours a day, outside of work time, staring at a screen. As a spiritual experiment, I decided to reduce my screen time by (say) twenty-five percent, and see what happened.

Not surprisingly, I found I had more time to do other things, like taking walks, or engaging in face-to-face activities, or practicing the ‘ukulele (and I was pleasantly surprised at how much better my ‘ukulele playing got). But the real surprise was on the spiritual side of things. I felt better. Cutting twenty-five percent of my screen time meant cutting out almost every social media outlet. I stopped reading Facebook and the like. I stopped doomscrolling through the endless clickbait bad-news stories that dominate online news sites. The result was that I felt happier and more hopeful. To put it spiritually, with less screen time, I was no longer bogged down in minutiae and details. This seemed to strengthen my connection with something larger than myself.

And here’s another thing I noticed: now that I’m not obsessively tracking every last detail of the presidential election, I can pay more attention to local issues. We have quite an array of local issues that need attention paid to them. The local issues on the South Shore include food insecurity, housing insecurity, an epidemic of mental illness, and maybe even a decline in good governance in our local governments.

These local problems sometimes get put to one side when we spend most of our time worrying about the clash between the two national presidential candidates. This is coupled with a tendency to believe that if only our political candidate wins the presidential election, all our local problems will be solved.

This brings me to the famous saying, “Think globally and act locally.” This saying is often attributed to the biologist René Dubos, but people were saying similar things long before Dubos said it in 1977. I’d argue that Jesus of Nazareth lived out that saying in everything he did: he always considered the big picture, up to and including God; but at the same time he was always focused on the needs and concerns of the individual people immediately in front of him. We could say the same of the Buddha and other great spiritual thinkers.

I’d also argue that this is exactly what our congregation has been doing for the past three centuries. We consider the big picture, up to and including whatever each of us call the universal. But we also focus on the needs and concerns of the people in this congregation, and the people in our immediate community. We continue to do that today. We take care of each other, as best we can. We address food insecurity in the wider community by maintaining a drop box for the Cohasset Food Pantry. We’re in the process of addressing housing insecurity here in Cohasset, as some of us work to establish a community fund that can help people with short term needs, such as meeting a sudden rent increase. We address the epidemic of mental illness in children and teens by supporting the families who come here, and by providing religious education programs that nurture our children and teens and build their social-emotional skills.

We also serve as a crucial training ground for democracy, and the skills associated with democracy. Democracy — especially local democracy — needs people who can speak in public, and we provide opportunities to practice that skill. Democracy requires an understanding of how to work with others towards common goals, even when you disagree, and we provide opportunities to practice that skill. Democracy needs people who see the big picture but who can focus on the immediate needs of the people right in front of them, and we all practice that skill here in our congregation.

I also believe that a functioning democracy needs people who are spiritually grounded. By “spiritually grounded,” I mean people who think deeply about the human condition, people who consider who they are in relation to the universe and to universal values, people who ponder how to make the world a better place. Spiritually grounded people are also people who have a community where they can feel grounded, such that they don’t sink into despair or disperse their energies in unwonted optimism.

This turns out to be one of the key functions of a good congregation. The brilliant management theorist Peter Drucker said that nonprofits can make everyone feel in the organization feel essential to a shared goal they all believe in. Drucker gives a perfect example of how that can play out, which we heard in the second reading: “That may mean that many of the best volunteers or paid staff come home exhausted after a big meeting, complaining loudly about how stupid everybody is and how they don’t do the things that are obvious — and then if someone asks why they stay on, respond, ‘But it’s so important!’” The strength of a shared vision carries us through the inevitable frustrations of working together with fallible human beings who have come together in an imperfect community.

We tend to feel most spiritually grounded when we find ourselves working together with others towards a shared vision for a better world. This is the greatest of spiritual practices: to come together in community to shape a better world. May we each contribute to this great spiritual project in whatever way we can; and in so doing may we each find ourselves spiritually grounded.

Note:

(1) “A Less Charitable Nation: The Decline of Volunteering and Giving in the United States,” Nathan Dietz, Senior Researcher, Do Good Institute, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Robert T. Grimm, Jr., Levenson Family Chair in Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland

Freddie Green and Spiritual Leadership

For the reading this morning, we heard a poem [“Inward Music” by Everett Hoagland, 2014] that retold a story that happened to a fellow named Tom Stites. Tom Stites is a journalist, now retired, who served on the editorial staffs of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Kansas City Times. At the end of his career, Stites served as the president of The Banyan Project, a nonprofit devoted to starting new news outlets in so-called news deserts. Stites has described himself as a journalist who has “a passion for strengthening journalism, democracy and justice.”

Stites started his career editing a small magazine called “Jazz” that was (not surprisingly) devoted to coverage of jazz. So Tom Stites’s career path led from jazz, to strengthening democracy. You might keep that in mind while I talk with you about what Stites thought about Freddie Green, about the leadership style of jazz guitarist Freddie Green, and how Freddie Green might serve as a model for leadership in our currently polarized democracy.

Freddie Green played in Count Basie’s big band for fifty years, from 1937 until Green’s death in 1987. Count Basie’s big band was one of the most important jazz ensembles in the world through the mid-twentieth century. To better tell you about Freddie Green’s leadership style, let me describe what Count Basie’s big band looked like.

Let’s take for a representative example an online video of Basie’s big band performing the tune “Corner Pocket” in Stockholm in 1962. At stage right, Basie himself sat behind his concert grand piano, which was about eight feet long. The bassist, playing an upright bass, stood in curve of the piano, and the drummer sat on an elevated platform behind the bassist and to his left. Then to the drummer’s left sat the horn players: four trumpets in the back, another trumpet and two trombones in the middle rank, and then five saxophones — alto, tenor, and baritone — along the front. When a horn player took a solo, he would step out front and center and stand in the spotlight while he played.

And right in the middle of everything sat Freddie Green — right in front of the drummer and next to the middle rank of horns. He sat there playing his big acoustic archtop guitar, occasionally glancing at Count Basie at the piano. It’s hard to hear Green’s playing on this video, but given where he sat, every other band member would have been able to hear him.

As I sat there watching this online video, I asked myself, who kept this ensemble together? Who kept the rhythm going? Who transmitted the subtle harmonic shifts to everyone else? Count Basie, the ostensible band leader, sat at his piano at stage right. But the speed of sound is relatively slow, so if you’re way over on stage right, the musicians playing way over on stage left would have sounded as though they’re playing about a quarter of a beat behind you; which makes it hard to keep everyone in time. Nor did Basie do what many band leaders do, and conduct with his hands or a baton — his hands were busy on the piano.

Here’s what I think happened: Count Basie was playing the piano, setting the tempo, and sketching out the basic harmony. The drummer echoed Basie’s rhythm, mostly on his high hats (those little double cymbals that drummers operate with a foot pedal). The bass player rooted the most important notes of the harmony. But it was Freddie Green, sitting right there in the middle, who really picked up both the rhythm and harmony from Count Basie and communicates it to the dozen or so horn players. Count Basie was the band leader, but Freddie Green, sitting in the center, was the one who everyone together, was the one whom they called the heartbeat of the band.

Jazz is one of the most democratic of all musical forms. Theoretically, anyone in a jazz band can take a solo; thus there is equal opportunity for everyone in the band, depending solely on their individual abilities and talents. But unlike other guitarists of the swing era — Charlie Christian, for example — Freddie Green almost never took a solo. He found a different role for himself, the musically satisfying role of ensuring that all the other players stayed together. This is the other way in which jazz is one of the most democratic of musical forms — anyone can take a solo, yet at the same time musicians can choose to devote themselves solely to supporting the whole ensemble. Jazz balances individual achievement with the needs of the whole, coming down neither on the side of hyper-individualism nor faceless collectivism. This balance is exactly what we hope for in a democracy.

So far, I’ve mostly been talking about the mechanics of jazz, and by analogy about the mechanics of democracy. Now let me speak with you about the spiritual dimension to all of this.

In this morning’s reading, the poet has his fictional narrator ask himself, “What [or] who guides my riffs on the / arrangements life plays out for me? How do I harmonize with / my own Higher Power?” Part of the poet’s answer lies in the title to the poem, “Inward Music.” You can think of this inward music as a literal phenomenon, or as a metaphor for something else. But it is this inward music, which we may not consciously hear, but which keeps us in time and in tune with a greater purpose. It is this inward music that connects us with something larger and better than our individual selves.

The Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau famously wrote: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Thoreau wrote this passage in 1854, a decade before the Civil War, at a time when our democracy was facing perhaps the greatest threat to democracy we have yet faced, when we as a country faced up to the immorality of race-based chattel slavery. Although Thoreau’s image of the different drummer is often interpreted today to support a philosophy of hyper-individualism, in fact Thoreau was saying that in his time too many people did not listen to the inward music that comes from something larger than ourselves. Too many people in Thoreau’s day allowed chattel slavery to continue. By so doing they ignored the call of humanity, of ethics, of a love greater than individual gain. That is, the supporters of slavery listened to their own desire for personal gain, rather than an inward music which demanded an end to slavery.

This brings us back to the problem of leadership. It is dangerous to allow leadership to remain solely in the hands of the soloists who stand in the spotlight. If the only leaders are those soloists, we can get into trouble if they stop listening to the inward music, and instead start playing solely out of a desire for personal achievement, for personal recognition. The soloists may be the most prominent leaders in a big band, but it’s the musicians like Freddie Green who keep the band going through the changes in the soloists.

You can see where I’m going with this. Think about American democracy today as being a little like Count Basie’s big band. American democracy does in fact need the kind of leaders who can serve as soloists, using their unique talents to inspire and move the rest of us. But American democracy also need many more leaders who keep us working in harmony with each other. That is, we need leaders who help remind us of the inward music that holds everything together. Right now, American democracy has plenty of people who want to be soloists. There are many in our current crop of politicians who want to be soloists. They want to be the person who gets out in front of the rest of the band, with the spotlight shining on them, while they show off their chops. It’s not just politicians, it’s also a great many ordinary people who want to be the one who has the spotlight shining on them. We have plenty of soloists; now e need the leaders who will keep us all together.

Freddie Green’s leadership role in Count Basie’s band can serve as an analogy for other human institutions. Groups of humans do seem to need a few people as visible leaders, the people out in the spotlight. Just as important are those people who keep everything going without stepping out into the spotlight. Just so, Freddie Green connected the members of Count Basie’s band together, first by listening to those around him. The first step is always listening. Then based on what he heard, Green helped everyone else stay together by spinning out rhythms and harmonies the others could easily follow. The soloists are important, but it’s the rhythm section that really keeps the band together.

Why is it that in today’s American society we have so many soloists, and so few people in the rhythm section? Perhaps we of the American public are at fault. We, the American public, pay most attention to the handful of leaders, especially the most prominent elected leaders — the U.S. president, Supreme Court justices, congresspeople, and so on. But the president is only person, and as such can only do so much; far more important than the person of the president are cabinet members, aides, researchers, advisors, diplomats, civil servants, bureaucrats, and others who serve in the executive branch. Many of these people continue from one administration to the next, which is actually a good thing. Not only would it be too disruptive to bring in hundreds of new civil servants every four to eight years, but if we did so the rule of law and the stability of the country would be at risk.

Celebrity culture and social media have trained us to see the few people who live in the spotlight. We admire Taylor Swift, but ignore the other musicians she plays with, ignore the fashion designers and producers and technicians who make her performances possible. We forget that the person in the spotlight is merely one miniscule part of a vast interconnected web of humanity.

Yet it seems to have always been like this. The medieval Persian poet Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi took notice of this same phenomenon. In ghazal 1195, Rumi wrote about how we humans forget to listen to the inward music. A popular translation of this ghazal puts it this way: “We rarely hear the inward music, / but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless” [Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi, p. 106] But I prefer a more literal translation, which goes like this: “In every heart there is a different note and rhythm, all stamping feet outwardly, the musicians hidden like a secret.” [trans. A.J. Arberry, Mystical Poems of Rumi, p. 168] We are all individuals, yes. We all have our own notes and rhythms. And it is the “musicians hidden like a secret” who keep us connected. They may be hidden in plain sight, but it is those hidden musicians who tie us all together, we maintain our essential interconnection. Those hidden musicians — whatever Rumi means by that — they are the cosmic version of Freddie Green. Just as Freddie Green was the heartbeat of Count Basie’s band, those cosmic musicians are the heartbeat of humanity. From that musical heartbeat arises the concert of all being.

We have to listen to that which transcends our individual selves; listen to that music which is larger than our limited individual beings. We can hear this universal music inwardly, not through our ears, but through our souls, whatever we might mean by the words “souls.” And whatever we might mean by “universal music.” Perhaps it would be better to say that we hear this vast connective power, not as music, not through our physical ears, but as something we sense with our intuition. We can somehow feel it when we are moving in rhythm with that which is larger than our selves. And then when we are not moving in that cosmic rhythm, life feels discordant and unpleasant.

Like the young Tom Stites in the reading, maybe we could criticize the cosmic band leader for failing to sufficiently amplify the cosmic rhythm guitarist. Because it is actually quite difficult to listen to the cosmic musicians who are supposed to keep us in harmony and in rhythm. We are constantly distracted by the demands of daily life. This is the struggle our leaders face. They are supposed to stay in harmony with the universe, but how can you listen for that inward music when you are distracted by all the day-to-day tasks that simply must get done? This is true of all of us. How can we stay in harmony with the universe, when we are constantly distracted by the demands of our jobs, our families, our volunteer responsibilities, all the endless tasks that somehow seem to fill our days, leaving little time to listen?

Yet we must try. We must remind ourselves constantly that there is something larger than our individual lives. We can remain part of the universal wholeness, if we would but listen: listen to the heartbeat of humanity; listen to one another.

Screen grab from a video showing musicians performing. — Screen grab from a 1965 BBC television show, “Show of the Week,” featuring Count Basie and his orchestra. Freddie Green is seated at left, playing his big archtop guitar.

Who Deserves Our Love?

Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. Once again this week, more than the usual number of typos and errors, but I didn’t have time to correct them — sorry!

Readings

The first reading was June Jordan’s poem “Alla Tha’s All Right, but”

The second reading was June Jordan’s poem “A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

The final reading was from Jordan’s introduction to her book of poems titled “Passion.”

In the poetry of the New World, you meet with a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life, an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge and unity… and a deliberate balancing … of sensory report with moral exhortation.

Sermon: “Who Deserves Our Love?”

The English language has some distinct limitations. For example, we only have one word for “love.” Contrast this with ancient Greek, which has half a dozen words that can be translated by the one English word “love.” This creates some problems for us English speakers, because we’re the inheritors of the Western intellectual tradition which extends back to ancient Greece. When you’re speaking English and you hear the word “love,” you have to automatically do some internal translation.

When this person says “love,” do they mean erotic or romantic love? Do they mean the love that can exist between good friends? What about the love that exists between parents and children, which is different than the love that exists between good friends, because where friends are more or less equal, there’s an imbalance of power between parent and child — at least there is when the child is young. Then there’s love of oneself, which is a virtue when it’s tied to ordinary self respect, but is a vice when it becomes self-obsession.

Finally, there’s a kind of selfless love, the kind of love where you continue to love even when you get nothing out of it. The early Christians picked up on this last kind of love — the ancient Greek name for it is “agape” — and integrated it into their conception of God, and their formulation of the Golden Rule. The story of the Good Samaritan is a story of agape-type love.

As English speakers, we have all these different kinds of love sort of mushed together into the one word. This can cause a certain amount of confusion. But I think it’s also useful for people like Unitarian Universalists, who spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how we can be the best people possible. We also spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to get through the day to day challenges that life throws at us, things like the death of people we love, or betrayals by people we thought we loved, and so on. Life rarely breaks down into neat, tidy categories. So I find it helpful to know that love doesn’t necessarily break down into neat tidy categories either.

And this brings me to the book of poetry that June Jordan published way back in 1980. The title of the book is “Passion.” The poems in the book cover a wide range. There are poems about passionate erotic and romantic love, as we heard in the first reading — and here I should point out that June Jordan was part of the LGBTQ+ community, so when she’s talking about passionate erotic and romantic love, she’s not restricting that love to opposite sex attraction. June Jordan also has a couple of poems in that book that are about rape. These particular poems are pretty graphic, and I find them very difficult to read — I’m giving you fair warning, in case you decide to pick up this book and read through it. But these poems are included for a reason. Jordan wants us to understand how for her as a woman, passionate erotic love can also become something twisted.

There are also poems about relationships between equals, the love of friendship between equals. That’s what we heard in the second reading, the poem titled “A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades.” I’ll read you the last few lines of the poem again:

Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant
or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight
or are you gay?
And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind

I love this poem because I’ve had this sort of thing happen to me in my own friendships. And I’ve done this to others. We humans tend to put each other into boxes. We put people into boxes based on skin color, age, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, political party…. Let me pause here and focus on political party, because that’s where people are putting other people into boxes a lot right now. And it’s pretty ugly. I hear Republicans talking about “Sleepy Joe” Biden, and I hear Democrats talking about “Dementia Donald” Trump. There’s no love lost here — there’s no love present here, none at all, just rank stereotyping and sometimes naked hatred.

This is what we humans do. We strive for love. We want to create a world where all people are loved equally. But when reality confronts us with other people who are doing things which we find distasteful or reprehensible or misguided, we can switch from universal love to individual hatred pretty quickly.

I feel like this has become a spiritual crisis in our country. There is a lot of demonization going on all around us. Going back to June Jordan’s poem, we all find ourselves saying unpleasant things about other people — that other people are too racist or too anti-racist, that other people are too much of a nationalist, that other people are too stupid, or too angry, or too idealistic. This kind of thing tips over into demonization very quickly. We demonize people, imagining them as demons rather than humans, when we feel those other people are too angry, or too old, or too different. To which June Jordan replies — “Hey! it’s not about my mind.” She’s right. Demonization is always about the mind of the person who does the demonizing. I’ve done my share of demonizing recently, mostly aimed at politicians and public figures with whom I don’t agree, and that demonizing that I do is more about me than about the person at whom I direct it. When I demonize someone, it damages me, and it damages our public discourse.

We need to find a way out of this — a way out of these demonizing behaviors that dominate our public discourse right now. To do so, I’m going to go back to one of our great spiritual resources, our Universalist tradition.

The early Universalists were Christians, of course, and not all of us now are Christians. But those early Universalists got at some universal truths through their liberal Christian tradition. One of those truths is encapsulated in the phrase, “God is love.” If you’re a Christian, this phrase might focus you on the Christian God. From that perspective, this phrase defines God as being all about love. If you’re not a Christian, though, this phrase can still make sense. Here in the West, the term “God” serves as a philosophical placeholder for the object of our ultimate concern. So this phrase need not be taken literally. It can be understood quite simply as saying that love is our ultimate concern.

The old Universalists wanted everyone to see the truth of that phrase, “God is love.” They understood that if God is love, there can be no such thing as eternal damnation, because love must eventually overpower hatred and evil. Instead, hell is something that happens here on earth, during our lifetimes, when we forget that love is supposed to be our ultimate concern. In particular, hell can arise here on earth when one group of people demonizes another group of people. Of course it feels hellish to be on the receiving end of the hatred that comes with racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ageism, and so on. But hell also arises in the hearts of those who demonize others. When we demonize others we throw ourselves into hell, into a place where hatred is more important than human connection.

So the old Universalists wanted us to get ourselves out of any hell that is here and now. They wanted everyone to truly feel in their bones that love is the most powerful force in the universe. They wanted to build their religious communities centered on love. The early Universalist Hosea Ballou put it like this: “If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, and if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good.”

Over the next century or so, the Universalists pulled back from that early trust in the power of love. The power of evil seemed so strong that they returned to the old idea that there must be some kind of punishment after death. They decided that God would in fact condemn some people to hell, it just wouldn’t be forever. In other words, they decided that God might be love, but that God’s love had limits to it.

But in my view, they weren’t really thinking about God, they were thinking about themselves. They weren’t asking: Who deserves God’s love? Or to put it in non-theistic terms: Who deserves to be included in our ultimate concern? Instead, they were asking: Who deserves my love? IThey were saying: ’m not so concerned with ultimate concerns, I’m narrowly concerned with whom do I love? And whom do I not love? Even: whom do I hate?

Now remember the different meanings that the word “love” has in the English language. Of course we limit our romantic love to our romantic partners. Of course we limit parent-child love to our own families. Of course we limit the kind of love that exists in friendships to our friends. But there is also that larger love, that unconditional love, which extends to all of humanity.

It takes a truly great person to be able to extend universal unconditional love to all persons. Martin Luther King, Jr., was able to extend a universal unconditional love even to the White racists who beat him and jailed him and reviled him, the people who hated him and did everything they could to keep him in the little box they constructed for him. When I say he extended a universal love to the White racists, I don’t mean that he wanted to become best friends with them. I don’t mean that he liked them. I don’t even mean that he loved them personally. What he did was to see that even those White racists had an inherent worthiness, they had an inherent human dignity. From within his progressive Christian world view, he saw that God loved those White racists, and he respected that universal love.

By doing this, Martin Luther King, Jr., set an example for the rest of the world. In fact, he changed the world. His understanding of universal love changed the world. It might not have seemed like it at the time, but his unconditional love for all humanity, expressed through nonviolent action, changed even those White racists permanently.

Universal love is a real spiritual challenges right now. I don’t know about you, but I’m not as good a person as Martin Luther King, Jr. I find it quite difficult to turn the other cheek. Yet when I think about it, it’s pretty clear that responding to hatred and demonization with more hatred and demonization is probably just going to make things worse. I’m not as good as Martin Luther King, Jr., so I’m not sure that I can rise to the level of feeling that universal love.

What I can do — what all of us can do — is to do a little less demonizing. Asking ourselves to stop demonizing certain very public figures, such as the leading politicians of the other political party, is probably too much to ask. If you’re a member of one political party, you don’t have to love politicians in the other political party. Start small. Start with people you know here on the South Shore who are of a different political persuasion than you. When we see people who are different from us face to face, we can disagree with them, but we can also try to remember that they, too, are deserving of universal love.

This is going to be difficult in this election year — and this is an election cycle that promises to be especially rancorous. But here’s what I’ve found. Every time I manage to stop myself from demonizing some political figure, I feel a tiny sense of relief. I feel better about myself, too; I like myself better. I find that I’m also just a little bit nicer to my spouse. It’s not a huge effect, but I can notice the difference. I’m a little bit happier, I’m a little more at peace with myself and with the world.

Perhaps this is part of what Martin Luther King, Jr., was trying to tell us with his theory of nonviolent action. Real change begins within our hearts and minds, and then spreads outwards to affect others.