From Darrel's Desk Archive

Could a Unitarian Universalist be Elected President?

I am a big baseball fan, even following games in spring training. But I don’t think I’d follow them if they began the day after the last game of the season. The prelude to the real thing would be just too long.

Which is why I haven’t been paying much attention to this extended sparring of presidential hopefuls.

I did happen to catch a bit of a Democratic Party "debate" a few weeks ago. They were asking the candidates about their prayer lives! Did anyone else find this a sad commentary on our current civic life? I found this appalling, in far worse taste than asking candidates about their undergarments, which was asked several times when the other Clinton was running.

Worse, every candidate answered using his or her best approximation of piety! Oh, how I longed to hear anyone say, "My attitude and practice regarding prayer is as personal and deeply held as any value I hold. Therefore I will keep it private, which is where it belongs in an American public political forum."

"If elected, I promise to uphold the constitution, which guarantees that no religion shall be held superior to any other, and indeed, there be no religious test for office, and that no citizen shall be held in higher or lower esteem in the eyes of government based on one’s practice, or non-practice, of religion. My administration will return to a traditional American value that has been sadly, tragically missing: tolerance."

Could a Unitarian Universalist be elected President today? Adlai Stevenson received the Democratic nomination twice, of course. Even given the average UU's liberalism, I believe the greater stumbling block would be explaining his or her "religion." What, you haven’t been born again? You believe there is room for many religions, not only in the world, but in the same congregation! You believe atheists and agnostics can be moral? Male and female, gay and straight, are equal? You have no sin, no hell, no damnation? You don’t believe your religion is the one true faith?

You think Mitt Romey has trouble explaining why he doesn’t have three wives, or Rudy Giuliani has trouble explaining why he did have three, just imagine a Unitarian Universalist trying to explain, well, anything. UU doesn’t fit well into a sound bite, current national advertising attempts notwithstanding. With a fair number of the electorate insisting on a president with a child's grasp of salvation, and even the relatively reasonable candidates pandering to them, I don’t think a UU could be elected today. Which is sad for the UUA, and sadder for the USA.

November 2007

"Dancing Baptists"

Billy Peterson is a birthright member of the First Universalist Church of Sampson County in Clinton, North Carolina, where I was ordained and served the first four years of my ministry. He has a carefully written letter by his great-grandfather, dating from the 1880’s, resigning his membership in the local Baptist Church.

The issue, it seems, was fiddle playing. That is, the Baptists didn’t like Mr. Peterson to play his fiddle, especially not for dancing. His resignation quotes copiously from the Old Testament about David and Solomon playing something that wasn’t too different from a fiddle, states that the "joyful noises" recommended to be made to the Almighty seems to him rather like fiddle playing. He became a founding member of the Universalist Church. I can attest that the Universalist congregation did indeed rejoice in fiddle playing, guitar playing, banjo picking and various other ways to accompany the many dances they hosted.

Winnifred Chestnutt, who was well into his 90s when I was there, summed it up best. "There wouldn’t be any Universalists around here," he told me, "If the Baptists had just let us dance."

So, sometimes, when people ask me about Universalists, I say that they are "dancing Baptists."

When the Zen master D. T. Suzuki fist visited America, he was asked what was the theology of the Buddhists. He said, "I don’t think Buddhists have what you call theology, as I understand this word."

"Well, what do you have?" he was asked.

"We dance."

It is often said, sometimes even by Unitarian Universalists, that we suffer from a lack of theology. I’ve studied theology. I’ve known theology. From my experience, we are far better served by dancing.

Oct.2007

Bringing an Old War Home

The teenagers arrested in connection with the murder of three college students in Newark may not have been members of the Salvadoran gang, MS-13, but there is evidence that they were at the very least enamored of them. It has been reported that their MySpace pages were full of admiring gang references, though Newark Mayor Cory Booker has stressed that there is no evidence linking the murders to gang activity. The victims were, however, killed in ritual, gang-like fashion.

MS-13 has its origins in the Salvadoran Civil War. Salvadoran immigrants, coming to Los Angeles in the 1980s, banded together in response to the Mexican and other gangs already at work there. Early gang members had been members of various warring factions in that civil war, in which the United States supported a right wing military government that they had aided in coming to power, against various leftist and Marist rebels. U.S. government policy considered the rebels part of the Communist threat. Therefore, anything to defeat them was justified.

These immigrants, displaced from their nation, were experienced in violence, which tore apart their families and homes. Now, future generations have institutionalized this violence in the form of gang and other criminal activity. And so three young college students die in Newark because of a Latin American civil war twenty years ago.

This isn’t new. Frank and Jesse James, the Younger Brothers, many of the outlaw gangs of the Old West were former Confederate soldiers, or men of their next generation.

We have often heard in recent years that "We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here." What a lie. There is no "here" as opposed to "there." There is no "us" and "them." There is only one earth and only one humanity. We either support peace everywhere or we support peace nowhere. Which of our children will die in twenty years because of the violence our government is exporting now?

August 27, 2007