abortion – Dan Harper

Today’s Abortion Debates

Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make corrections.

Readings

The first reading was from the poem “Parliament Hill Fields” by Sylvia Plath:

On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.
Faceless and pale as china
The round sky goes on minding its business.
Your absence is inconspicuous;
Nobody can tell what I lack.

Gulls have threaded the river’s mud bed back
To this crest of grass. Inland, they argue,
Settling and stirring like blown paper
Or the hands of an invalid. The wan
Sun manages to strike such tin glints

From the linked ponds that my eyes wince
And brim; the city melts like sugar….
Southward, over Kentish Town, an ashen smudge
Swaddles roof and tree.
It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank.
I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all.
Already your doll grip lets go….

The second reading was by Joy Harjo, from her book Poet Warrior:

Poet Warrior gave birth to two children
And acquired more children along the way
Through association, marriage, and love.
Those children gave birth to children
There were more and more story bringers
In her world.
They became her fiercest teachers
Of how there is no end to love
And of how it plants itself
Deeper than earth
Or sky.

Sermon: Today’s Abortion Debates

This morning I propose to speak with you about abortion, but don’t worry — I’m not going to tell you what to think. We Unitarian Universalists are somewhat notorious because we insist on thinking for ourselves. You think for yourself, I think for myself, and neither you nor I is going to tell the other what to believe. The result of this, not surprisingly, is that we Unitarian Universalists sometimes have the reputation for wanting to argue all the time.

We Unitarian Universalists are also somewhat notorious for our skepticism. If someone tells us that something is true, we’re not willing to accept their word for it. We want to know why. We tend towards skepticism because we know that individual humans are prone to make mistakes. Just because one person says something is true doesn’t make it true. That person could be wrong. We want to double check what they say.

To make matters worse for me personally, I was also trained as a philosopher. While I’m not a very good philosopher, I know enough to know that there are rarely simple answers to anything. Martin Heidegger used the image of the search for truth as being like “Holzwege,” those little paths in the woods where if you follow them, they might lead to a clearing where you can see the sky, or they might peter out and go nowhere. Heidegger was a very problematic philosopher, but this image provides a good way to think about truth.

I’d add in an insight from the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: it takes a community of inquirers to search for truth. No one person arrives at the truth alone. So when it comes to the topic of this sermon, and the question of what we should do, i t’s going to be up to all of us — argumentative, skeptical Unitarian Universalists that we are — to to try to find provisional answers for the abortion debate.

If there are any answers. Which there may not be.

OK, now that we know that I can’t provide firm answers, let’s think through some terminology. When we speak of abortions here in the United States, we often hear the phrase “a woman’s right to control her own body.” This simple phrase carries a couple of assumptions that may tend to obscure a little of the complexity of the real world.

First, although the great majority of persons who have abortions are women, that is not entirely true. Human biology is more complex than a simple binary between male and female. There are intersex people who can get pregnant, yet who were assigned a male gender at birth, people whom everyone thinks of as male. There are transgender people who have transitioned to male, but who can still get pregnant. What I’m saying tends to be controversial, and I don’t recommend bringing these points up in ordinary political discussions with friends and neighbors. But when you hear “a woman’s right to control her own body,” you might want to add a mental footnote to yourself, where you include the possibility of intersex and transgender people getting pregnant.

The other problematic word in this phrase is the word “right.” This is problematic here in the United States because of our peculiar understanding of rights. First, we understand “rights” as a zero-sum game. For example, if there is a right to carry firearms, that right is cancels out any hypothetical rights that might limit it. To put this another way: in the United States, we have either/or rights: if I have a right, it cancels out any contradictory rights, regardless of the actual complexities of real life. Second, our U.S. legal system provides a fairly narrow range of rights. Although the Declaration of Independence talks about the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we do not have the right to several things that are usually considered essential to life. For example, we do not have the right to shelter; nor do we have the right to food. We Americans are used to this state of affairs — we’re used to rights being a zero-sum game, we’re used to having a narrow range of rights — but it’s a good idea for us to remember that there are other ways to have rights.

It’s fine for us to keep on using the terms and phrasing with which we’re all familiar. But being good Unitarian Universalists, it’s also good for us to remain skeptical of the very terms of the abortion debate here in the United States.

This brings me to a question that we Americans tend to either avoid, or over-sensationalize. And that’s the question of the emotional side of abortion. The pro-life folks tend to over-sensationalize the emotional question, while the pro-choice folks tend to skirt around the issue. So let’s take the middle ground, and neither over-sensationalize, nor skirt this question. When we do so, we discover there is no one single emotional response to abortion. Let me be more specific.

Most of us probably know at least one person who has had an abortion. The older you get, the more of these stories you’re likely to hear. I’m not going to give any of the specifics of the stories I personally have heard — those stories were told to me in confidence, and I’m going to keep those confidences — but I can anonymize what I’ve heard and talk in generalities.

For some people, having an abortion results in complex feelings of sadness. Unfortunately, the pro-choice folks make these feelings of sadness sound one-dimensional, like something from a cheap greeting card. The people I’ve listened to have quite complicated feelings. That’s why I included the first reading, the poem by Sylvia Plath about a miscarriage, to serve as a stand-in for some of those very complicated feelings of sadness that some women experience after an abortion. One line of the poem says, “Your absence is inconspicuous; Nobody can tell what I lack….” Some women experience this feeling of absence, a feeling that’s difficult or impossible to communicate to others. This, by the way, is why I get so annoyed when the pro-choice folks over-sensationalize those feelings. But I’m not going to tell you what those feelings are. I just know those feelings are there, and we should neither ignore them, nor trivialize them, nor over-emphasize them.

For other people, having an abortion does not result in feelings of sadness, or in much feeling at all. I’ve listened to some people who have had abortions, who are very matter-of-fact about the whole thing: they once had an abortion, it wasn’t a big deal, now they are going to move on with life. Nor should we assume this is a better or worse reaction to having an abortion. Each person’s individual situation is going to be unique, and in any case each person will react a little differently.

Emotional reactions to abortion can be complicated by another factor. Some non-white women, and some poor and working class women, do not feel very trusting towards the medical establishment. These people may have a great relation with individual health care workers. But the medical establishment as a whole does not have a great track record in the United States for providing fair and equitable health care for non-white or poor women — or for transgender people, for that matter. (Or for homeless people of any gender; even I, with my limited contact with unhoused people, can tell you that from personal experience.) Thus, while the pro-choice folks may talk about abortion access as something that’s absolutely good, this may not be a convincing argument to people who have little trust in the medical establishment as a whole.

And abortions can bring up other emotions as well. I haven’t mentioned the emotions that come up when someone realizes they may need or want an abortion. Nor have I mentioned the emotions that may arise in partners, parents, or other family members, emotions which can swirl around the person having the abortion. Without going into all these details, remember that abortion may give rise to a wide range of emotions, or it may give rise to little or no emotion. I’ll say it again: real life is more complex than our usual political debates allow for.

Now that we’ve thought a bit about the emotional side of things, I’d like to consider the somewhat strange legal environment around abortion in the United States.

I’ve already mentioned that here in the United States, rights are a zero-sum game. If I have a right that conflicts with your right, only one of those rights will be recognized in the U.S. legal system. In 2021, professor Jamal Greene, a renowned legal scholar at Columbia Law School, wrote a book that on this topic; his book is aptly titled “How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart.” Greene devoted a chapter of the book to the question of abortion rights. In a fascinating comparison, he looked at the legal status of abortion in the United States, and the legal status of abortion in Germany. (Note that Greene wrote his book before the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ruled there is no right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution.) Greene pointed out that while abortion in Germany was technically illegal, practically speaking people could get an abortion without being prosecuted. More importantly, when there were legal challenges to abortion, the courts decided each case based on the facts of the case; that is, the German courts did not try to hand down an abstract ruling establishing a universal right to something, but instead ruled on the specifics of the case at hand. They based their rulings on real life, not on abstract rights. Greene contrasted that with the American system, where the courts tend to focus on the abstractions while ignoring what’s going on in real life.

In Germany, according to Jamal Greene, neither side “won” the battle over abortion. Abortion remains illegal, which makes the pro-choice folks unhappy. Abortions are practically available to those who need and want them, so the pro-life folks remain unhappy. Under German law, abortion is not a zero-sum game. Greene found that the German approach allowed the two sides in the abortion debate to actually talk with one another, identify common goals, and work towards them. Instead of causing polarization, in Germany both sides have been able to cooperate in supporting prenatal care, and in providing benefits to new mothers (such as extended maternal leave and child care) that support the health of children. By contrast, here in the United States, our emphasis on abstract rights is tearing us apart.

Once again, we can see how the American debates about abortion tend to oversimplify matters, and tend to push us towards polarization. With that in mind, I’d like to consider briefly three more issues relating to abortion.

Number one: perceptions around abortion have changed over time. Back in the 1970s, many Evangelical Protestant Christians in the United States supported the legal right to abortion. The Roman Catholic Church did not decree that abortion was wrong until the 19th century. Nor have all political liberals always supported the legal right to abortion. Attitudes towards abortion have changed over time, and continue to change. Thus if anyone, pro-life or pro-choice, tries to argue that their position on abortion is somehow timeless, has always been “true,” we should be exceedingly skeptical.

Number two: medical science and technology continue to raise questions that bear on abortion. One obvious example: we are now able to determine if a fetus is severely disabled and won’t survive long after birth; how does that scientific advance affect decisions about abortion? Less obviously: how has the so-called medicalization of pregnancy and birth changed how medical professionals influence decisions around abortion? (1) That is, the medicalization of pregnancy and birth can sometimes take away the agency of the person who is pregnant, with implications for abortion. In another example, when we apply the insights of statistics and epidemiology to pregnancy and birth, we find that Black women are four times as likely to die in childbirth than White women, and poor women are three times as likely to die in childbirth. (2) This raises challenging questions about the relative value of human life.

Number three: as religious people ourselves, we should consider the wide range of religious views on abortion. There are Christians who hold that life begins at conception, and there are Christians who hold that life begins only when the fetus is viable outside the womb. There are Buddhists who believe that having an abortion makes one guilty of murder, and there are Buddhists who believe that abortion is allowable. From what I can find out, every religious group has people with diverse views on abortion. In our increasingly multicultural society, we cannot ignore the diversity of views people hold on abortion. And we must remember that regardless of what some people try to tell us, there is no final religious answer.

By now I hope I’ve shown that the abortion question, like all ethical questions, is complex. We human beings would prefer it if ethical questions were easy to answer, but they never are.

This reminds me of a course I took in college called “Ethics and the Professions.” I hoped to get firm answers to ethical issues. I wanted to be able to quote philosophical authorities that would either prove or disprove a point. Instead, the professor presented us with real-life ethical questions; we had to argue several different positions for each ethical question. I remember one case study he presented. At that time, there were more people needing kidney dialysis than there were kidney dialysis machines. If we were on the ethics board of a hospital, the professor asked, how would we decide which people got to use a kidney dialysis machine? That is, how would we decide which people got to live, and which people got to die? Although I hated this class, I finally came to realize that the professor was trying to teach us that in real life, ethical questions should be answered, not as abstract philosophical questions, but on a case-by-case basis.

This approach coincides neatly with the Unitarian Universalist approach. We Unitarian Universalists do not have a creed or a dogma; we do not have ready-made abstract rules we have to follow. Instead, we try to acknowledge the complexity of real life. We know that all human beings are fallible (even we ourselves are fallible), and that the way to get to the truth is by an extended and concerted group effort. All this means we are skeptical of anyone who claims to have the one true answer.

This turns out to be our religious position on abortion. We do our best not to oversimplify a complex ethical question. We don’t limit ourselves to abstract discussions. We do not have the one true final answer. We consider the actual lived experience of real people. We listen to the real stories of real people and do our best to make wise choices and wise decisions.

And when we stop to think about it, our religious position is actually based on love. The poet Joy Harjo says love “plants itself / Deeper than earth / Or sky.” Love takes our ethical questions beyond cold abstractions to the warmth of actual human beings. In that spirit, we hope that love will guide all our ethical deliberations.

Notes

Story sources: Daoist teachings translated from the Book of Liehzi, Book II “The Yellow Emperor,” trans. Lionel Giles, 1912. Supporting source: Alchemists, Mediums, and Magicians: Stories of Taoist Mystics, trans. and ed. Thomas Cleary, p. 8 n. 29.

(1) For a broad summary of medicalization, see: Wieteke van Dijk, Marjan J. Meinders, Marit A.C. Tanke, Gert P. Westert, and Patrick P.T. Jeurissen, “Medicalization Defined in Empirical Contexts – A Scoping Review,” International Journal of Health Policy Management, 2020 Aug; 9(8): 327–334; pub. online 2019 Dec 21. doi: 10.15171/ijhpm.2019.101 ; accessed via https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7500387/

(2) In the United Kingdom, according to Sheikh, Jameela, John Allotey, Tania Kew, Borja M Fernández-Félix, Javier Zamora, Asma Khalil, Shakila Thangaratinam, et al, 2022, “Effects of Race and Ethnicity on Perinatal Outcomes in High-Income and Upper-Middle-Income Countries: An Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis of 2 198 655 Pregnancies”, The Lancet, 400(10368): 2049–62 — quoted in Quill R Kukla, Teresa Baron, Katherine Wayne, “Pregnancy, Birth, and Medicine,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revision dated 17 May 2024 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-pregnancy/, accessed 12 October 2024.

Is It Religion? (part 2) — Christian Nationalism

Readings

The first reading is an excerpt from a poem written in 2007 by Margaret Atwood:

The Last Rational Man
in the reign of Caligula

The last rational man takes his old seat in the senate.
He’s not sure why he’s still here.
He must be on some list or other.
Last year there were many more like him,
but they’ve been picked off one by one.
He bathes daily, and practises slow breathing
and the doctrines of Stoicism.
Lose your calm, he reminds himself,
and you will lose everything.
Nevertheless he’s getting tired.
The effort of saying nothing is wearing him down….

The second reading is from The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart. In this excerpt, the author has just attended a meeting of the Family Research Council, a Christian nationalist group, with Rev. Chris Liles, a Bible-believing Southern Baptist preacher. As they leave the meeting, Rev. Chris begins speaking:

“‘It’s ten degrees hotter than normal, and these people don’t believe in climate science,’ he grumbles. Then his words start tumbling out like a waterfall.

“‘Do we not owe people more than simply reducing “pro-life” to one issue?’ he says. ‘I mean, no one wants babies to die. No one is “pro-abortion.” That is a false dichotomy. Do we not owe people more than to force them into one box or another? As much as abortion is a pro-life issue, so is affordable health care, access to contraceptives, and real, comprehensive sex education. Minimum wage. Fighting poverty. These should all be part of the “pro-life” conversation.’

“Chris falls into silence for a few minutes, then speaks again.

“‘And shouldn’t we show compassion to people regardless of how they identify? They, too, are made in God’s image. We find in Scripture the imperative to love our neighbors and care for the least of these. That is by far one of the clearest messages we receive.’

“I feel bad for Chris [says Katherine Stewart]; he seems dismayed by the event precisely because the Bible is his greatest source of comfort and moral direction….. Stopping at a red light, Chris picks up his Bible and turns to the Old Testament book of Amos.

“‘Here, for instance, in chapter five, the prophet says, “You, Israel, you were supposed to take care of the poor and you’re not doing it,”’ Chris says. ‘“You’re using power and wealth to tilt the system in your favor.” For society to be just, it was necessary for everyone to be seen as equal.’ He falls silent for a few moments. ‘Sometimes,’ he adds, ‘it’s almost like people are reading a different Bible. That’s the trick with Scripture. You can make the Bible say just about anything you want it to.’”…

Sermon: Is It Religion? (part 2) — Christian Nationalism

So. Is Christian Nationalism a religion, or not?

Probably everyone in this room wants to believe that Christian nationalism is NOT a religion. We want to be able to say that Christian Nationalism cannot be a religion because it so clearly violates the teachings of the Hebrew Bible. We want to be able to say that Christian Nationalism cannot be a religion because it so clearly violates the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. How can a movement that treats poor people as less than human be considered Christian? How can a movement that demonizes immigrants be part of the (to use their term) “Judeo-Christian tradition”? We would much prefer to say that Christian Nationalism is not a religion, but a political movement that uses religion as a cover.

As much as I’d like to say that Christian Nationalism is just politics, I believe it is in fact a religion. Mind you, it is a very different religion from ours. Christian Nationalism is the kind of religion that relies on unquestioning acceptance of authority. Christian Nationalism values hierarchy and submission over individual conscience. Christian Nationalism does not welcome dissent, nor is it tolerant of other worldviews. When we list all these attributes, Christian Nationalism looks very much like one of those creepy cults we used to hear so much about — the cults that suck people in and modify their way of thinking so that converts cut ties to the rest of society. And like some of the worst of those creepy cults, the Christian Nationalists want to remake society in their image.

Let’s not begin by calling it a creepy cult, though. At the end of the last century, scholars who study religions mostly stopped using the term “cult.” When you begin studying a religious movement by calling it a “cult,” that terminology tends to stop you from thinking clearly. When you call something a “cult,” you have already made a strong judgement about it, and often you feel like you don’t have to think any further about what it is you’re studying. Christian Nationalism may be a cult, but calling it a cult isn’t going to help us address the threat it poses to our democracy. Instead, we’ll use the appropriate term from religious studies and call it a New Religious Movement.

Once we call Christian Nationalism as a New Religious Movement, we begin to think more clearly about it. First, we realize that it’s not all that new. In its current incarnation, its roots go back to the middle of the last century. A decade after the Civil Rights Act extended full rights to Black Americans, the Internal Revenue Service began threatening to take away the tax exempt status of Bob Jones University, an all-White college that was committed to segregation as a religious principle. The conservative Christians who ran Bob Jones University got together with other White conservative Christians and began to come up with strategies to maintain what they saw as their religious right to segregation. Journalist Katherine Stewart tells what happened to these conservative Christians:

“…They had a problem…. Building a new [political] movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. ‘Stop the tax on segregation’ just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that [they] envisioned. They needed an issue with a more acceptable appeal. What message would bring the movement together?… School prayer worked for some, but it tended to alienate the Catholics, who remembered…that for many years public schools had allowed only for Protestant prayers…. Bashing communists was fine, but even the Rockefeller Republicans could do that. Taking on ‘women’s liberation’ was attractive, but the Equal Rights Amendment was already going down in flames. At last they landed upon the one surprising [issue] that would supply the key to the political puzzle of the age: ‘abortion.’”

So writes journalist Katherine Stewart.

In other words, the core religious belief of these White conservative Christians was that White people should not be forced to mix with non-White people. They felt that U.S. society was changing such that they were unable to practice their religion properly. They felt there was another competing religious point of view that had come to dominate the United States, threatening their very existence. Those White conservative Christians called that other religious point of view as “secular humanism,” choosing what was to them the most pejorative term possible.

But the true opponent of these conservative Christians was not secular humanism. The true opponent was actually a broad coalition of religious groups, including mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics, liberal Jews, and a smattering of other religious groups like the Unitarian Universalists. Back then, most presidents, senators, congressional representatives, and Federal judges belonged to one of the religious groups in this broad coalition. While this coalition of religious moderates and religious liberals included both political liberals and political conservatives, on the whole they mostly agreed that racial segregation was an evil that must be ended.

The White conservative Christians who wanted to keep their schools and universities segregated did not want to fight the battle of re-segregating society. So they used the abortion issue as a political strategy to build support. And they took the battle beyond the political realm, into local congregations, where they helped their supporters turn abortion into a key theological question.

I’d say it was at this point where they became a New Religious Movement. Their earlier focus on racial segregation was nothing new, for segregation was part of American religion from the beginning. (Even our own First Parish was segregated during its first hundred years — African Americans and Native Americans were not allowed to sit on the main floor of our Meeting House, they had to sit in the gallery.) But to put such a strong emphasis on abortion — that was new. And, as we heard in the second reading, they emphasized abortion to the exclusion of other issues that formerly had been important to most American Christians — things like helping the poor, showing compassion to others, and recognizing that all persons were created in God’s image.

This emphasis on abortion was a radical reworking of American religion. Prior to the 1970s, about the only religious group to explicitly ban abortion was the Roman Catholics — and the Catholic ban on abortion only dates to 1869. Even considering the Catholics, abortion simply wasn’t an important religious issue for most Americans. When religious Americans thought about social issues, they were most likely to focus on things like poverty, hunger, and so on. So it was a dramatic change when, in the space of just a few years, abortion became a central issue in American religious life.

Since the 1970s, those conservative White Christians added other issues to abortion, such as opposition to LGBTQ rights and opposition to feminism. At last they came up with this notion that the United States should become a Christian nation (by which they seem to actually mean a White Christian nation). So now we have a name for this New Religious Movement — we can call them the Christian Nationalists, and indeed some of them have begun to use this very name to describe themselves. Just remember that they started out as a segregationist group, so a more accurate name for this New Religious Movement might be White Christian Nationalists. But for now, we’ll stick to the name they seem to prefer, and we’ll call this New Religious Movement the Christian Nationalists.

Now, some New Religious Movements have no interest in seeking out money and power; I think of the Neo-Pagans, whose groups mostly seem to operate on a shoestring. Most other New Religious Movements have other priorities besides money and power. So, for example, many scholars consider the Unitarian Universalism and the Reform Jews to be New Religious Movements, and when I look at myself and my friend the Reform rabbi, we don’t spend much time seeking out money and power. So most New Religious Movements aren’t concerned with money and power. But a small minority of New Religious Movements make money and power one of their top priorities. One example is Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (sometimes called the “Moonies”) which has been in the news recently because it obtained unprecedented access to the halls of power in Japan. That’s the goal of the Christian Nationalists — like the Moonies, they want to obtain unprecedented access to the halls of power here in the United States.

As you can see, we have learned quite a lot by thinking of the Christian Nationalists as a New Religious Movement.

First, we have gotten some clarity about their core religious beliefs. They were founded to maintain racial segregation, to keep Black people out of their all-White institutions; while that original purpose is somewhat hidden today, that remains one of their core beliefs. We can also see that they believe a rigid hierarchy — most obviously the hierarchy of White people over Black people, but also the hierarchy of men over women, the hierarchy of heterosexual people over homosexual people, and so on. Because they believe in a rigid hierarchy, their support of democracy is going to be limited. They claim to be Christian, but as we heard in the second reading, people like Pastor Chris say that Christian Nationalists interpret the Bible very differently from more conventional Christians.

Coupled with these core religious beliefs, we learned that they are extremely effective at organizing. In the political realm, they have begun to wield unprecedented power. In the religious realm, they have used wedge issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights to cause schisms in moderate religions like the United Methodist Church, and they have used this power to effectively immobilizing their primary religious opponents. They have even managed to fragment American Catholicism by converting several key bishops to their cause, bishops who have become emboldened enough to openly defy Pope Francis.

Their organizational effectiveness extends to the individual level. They’re very good at spreading their religious message. They still mostly hide their core religious belief of racial segregation, and instead focus attention on issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights. At this level, they prefer to organize using diffuse networks; scholars call this strategy “network Christianity.” This clever organizational strategy allows them to have their people infiltrate other religious groups, without having to found new local congregations.

Thinking of the Christian Nationalists as a New Religious Movement helps us to take them more seriously. I hear people talking about Christian Nationalists using terms like “crazy whackos” and “nut jobs” and “idiots.” These are inaccurate terms. The Christian Nationalists are smart, sane, and well organized. They’re quietly spreading their religion everywhere, and indeed they’re here on the South Shore. They’re here, and they’re not going to go away any time soon.

So how do we take back America from the Christian Nationalists? This is not a time for Stoicism; this is not a time to say nothing and to do nothing; this is a time to actively engage with other people. Remember that a core religious belief of Christian Nationalists is hierarchy. They are inherently anti-democratic. So one of the most important things we can do is to strengthen democracy.

We can strengthen democracy by participating in democracy, and in democratic institutions. It may be more comfortable to sit at home and play video games, or watch NetFlix, or whatever you prefer — but we have to get out of the house and do things like attend meetings of local government bodies; volunteer at democratically-run nonprofits; and so on. When it comes to our online lives, we have to do more than post cute cat pictures or engage in flame wars with political opponents — we can build up our own networks to spread our own messages of inclusion and love.

We already do this here at First Parish. We use democracy to run this congregation, and this congregation is a great place to learn how to do democracy, a great place to teach kids how to do democracy. In addition to running our congregation by democratic principles, we serve as a clearing house for information about democracy: we tell each other about what’s going on in our local governments, we raise up social issues that need to be addressed. We’re also quite good at building face-to-face networks, an essential skill for keeping democracy strong. And we’re not bad at building our online network to spread our messages of inclusion and love — and with that in mind, thank you to all of you who “like” the First Parish Facebook and Instagram posts, helping spread our message.

The nice thing about all these efforts is that they feel good when you do them. We’re not just fighting the Christian Nationalist power grab. Doing democracy here at First Parish feels good. Building face-to-face networks feels good. Building positive online networks to spread positive messages feels good. And once we manage to restore manage to democracy to health once again — once we help it recover from diseases like Christian Nationalism — we just keep on doing democracy, which means we can keep on feeling good.