“Partisanship” is one of those words that can have positive or negative meanings, depending on how you use it. The dictionary defines a partisan as “a firm adherent to party, faction, cause, or person, especially one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance.” So let me say at the outset that I’m not going to recommend blind, prejudiced or unreasoning allegiance to anything. I am going to suggest that being a firm adherent to one side or the other of an issue can be the right thing to do, based on the facts of the situation and the principles we bring to it.

One of the things that got me thinking about partisanship was John Wright’s essay about inclusiveness in our March newsletter. His concern was that we may not fully practice the inclusiveness we preach: we like to say that we’re open to many different kinds of people with many different points of view, but we may actually enforce a subtle uniformity, expecting members to be, in his words, “politically liberal, non-Christian democrats.” And so we can easily offend someone who doesn’t quite fit the UU profile, someone who has the audacity to be a Christian, or a Republican, or in my case, a non-coffee-drinker.

I’m only going to talk about the political aspect of that problem today. The religious issue—the idea that we may accept non-Christians more readily than Christians or agnostics more readily than theists—deserves a talk in itself (and maybe coffee-drinking does too), but I’ll stick to politics for now.

So let’s pose the question directly: Does a Unitarian Universalist have to be a liberal Democrat? When you put it that bluntly, it’s easy to answer No. After all, the seven principles that define the core of our commitments do not include either the word “liberal,” or the word “Democrat,” at least not with a capital D. One can certainly embrace general principles like “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations” (our third principle) without endorsing the policy positions of any particular party.

Consider, for example, the Obama health care plan. I’m sure if we were to have an open discussion of that particular piece of legislation, we would hear a wide range of opinions. Some of us would like the fact that it broadens insurance coverage, while others might object to its forcing people to buy insurance, or relying so heavily on private rather than public insurance, or not doing enough to control costs.  I’m sure any of us could give examples of other political issues where the devil is in the details, and where people who share broad religious principles can easily hold diverse political views. We should expect—and we should welcome—political diversity.

However, I think there’s another side to this problem that makes it more complicated. Today’s political parties are divided not only over the details of policy, but often over broad principles as well. In fact, many observers of the American political scene have reported a widening philosophical gap between the parties in recent years. And the principles that divide the political spectrum are not always easy to distinguish from the principles that divide the religious spectrum. Or to put it more simply, religious liberalism and political liberalism connect at certain points, just as religious conservatism and political conservatism connect at certain points.

I want to illustrate this by talking about two kinds of issues: cultural issues such as abortion, where the connections between religion and politics are fairly easy to see; and economic issues such as the distribution of wealth and income, where the connections are more subtle.

Abortion

Our Unitarian Universalist principles do not tell us whether a woman should or should not have an abortion; the morality of abortion is an issue on which religious liberals could easily disagree. But the political issue is not just whether an individual woman should have an abortion, but whether the state should make the decision for her by making abortion illegal. In Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court struck down such a law, basing its ruling on essentially the same reasoning it had applied in Griswold vs. Connecticut in 1965, when the court overturned a law banning contraceptives. The majority asserted a right of privacy based primarily on the 14^th Amendment and on a series of legal precedents going back as far as 1891. They said that the state has to have some compelling reason to interfere with reproductive freedom. They granted that the state has a legitimate interest in protecting the health of mothers and insuring the survival of viable fetuses, both of which were supported by legal precedent, but neither of those interests require the state to ban all abortions, especially not those in the first trimester.

What I want to point to is the connection between the right of reproductive freedom recognized in these rulings and the principles that we hold as religious liberals. We support the “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” (principle 4) and the “right of conscience” (principle 5). In accordance with those principles, we oppose using the state to establish a religion, or legislate personal morality, or legislate answers to religious and philosophical questions such as when a fetus becomes a person. So religious liberals usually oppose the efforts by religious conservatives to overturn Roe v. Wade or to pass a constitutional amendment declaring the fetus to be a legal person (an amendment that is called for by the Republican party platform).  So here’s a case in which our Unitarian Universalist principles lead rather naturally to a partisan position on a political issue.

The distribution of wealth and income

Unlike the abortion issue, which has some obvious moral and religious aspects, the distribution of wealth and income might appear to be a purely economic and secular matter, and so liberal religion might not have anything in particular to say about it. But sociologists have argued that religion and economics are not entirely unrelated.  One of the classic works asserting a relationship is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by the early 20^th-century sociologist Max Weber. His thesis was that a certain kind of Christianity provided moral support for capitalism and actually helped capitalism develop.

Early Christianity had nothing to say about capitalism, of course, and it certainly didn’t promote the pursuit of profit or the accumulation of worldly wealth. It promoted a detachment from worldly things that was perhaps best exemplified by the monastic life, a life of hard work, voluntary poverty and sexual abstinence. Of course not all Christians lived that way, and even some of the clergy of the late Middle Ages lived lives of leisure, luxury and lust. Protestant reformers such as Luther and Calvin didn’t approve of that, but they didn’t particularly care for monasticism either; they recommended getting married and living in the world. They did approve of the kind of hard work and self-discipline that had been typical of monastic life, but they encouraged people to channel that discipline into secular activity. What has come to be called the Protestant ethic is the idea that your worldly work is your vocation—your God-given calling—and your worldly success is a sign of your moral worth. So making a lot of money can be a good thing, as long as you earn it doing useful work.

Without getting into difficult questions of cause and effect, we can observe a nice fit between the Protestant work ethic and the capitalist devotion to making money. John D. Rockefeller was the richest American around the turn of the century, and he interpreted his success within the framework of his Baptist religion:

God gave me my money. I believe the power to make money is a gift from God,  to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.

Of course, by the time Ida Tarbell got through exposing the methods by which Rockefeller made his fortune, he didn’t appear so godly, and he went down in history as one of the great robber barons. The social reformers of the day did not associate great wealth with virtue.  Here’s what Teddy Roosevelt had to say in 1895:

There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses —whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally does some deed like founding a college or endowing a church, which makes those good people who are also foolish forget his real iniquity. These men are equally careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil. There are not very many of them, but there is a very great number of men who approach more or less closely to the type, and, just in so far as they do so approach, they are curses to the country.

At the other end of the social scale, we also have more than one way of looking at the poor. The traditional Protestant ethic places the burden of responsibility on the individual to earn money by performing valued labor. If you can’t command a decent wage, then you must not be worth very much. That’s the verdict of THE MARKET, which can be so sanctified that it’s treated as the voice of God.  Economists don’t call it God; they prefer Adam Smith’s term “invisible hand,” a rose by any other name still being a rose, or in this case a rosy view of the market. But a more realistic view is that a market is a human—and therefore imperfect—decision-making process. And some people have so much more decision-making power than others that their hands are quite visible in crafting the outcome. They can inflate the value of their own labor while holding down the value of someone else’s. Corporate managers dislike labor unions because they would like the workers to keep their hands off wage decisions, and CEOs like their own pay to be set by compensation committees that have cozy relationships with management and are insulated from the concerns of workers and shareholders. Then they are free to create steep hierarchies in which the economic rewards flow primarily to the top.

One way that wage hierarchies have been maintained is through discrimination. Capitalism didn’t invent prejudice and discrimination, which are as old as tribalism, but businesses have found ways to profit from them. If you have a large number of inferior jobs you want to fill—jobs characterized by hard work, difficult working conditions, low pay, little say in how the company is run, and little prospect for advancement—you don’t want your workers to be able to go across the street and obtain better jobs. But if lots of employers are discriminating against the same category of persons, then people in that category can be forced to take what you’re willing to give them. So businesses have a long history of seeking out disadvantaged groups as sources of cheap labor, whether it’s immigrants, racial minorities, women, or most recently workers in poor countries.

A society with liberty and justice for all is not possible without a legal framework that protects markets and property, but also regulates markets so that the more powerful players cannot devalue and shortchange the less powerful players, whether they be workers in general, particular categories of workers, consumers, shareholders or small investors. The point of such a framework is not to eliminate economic differences, but to make the distribution of wealth and income as just as possible.

We may reasonably ask where religion stands on these issues of legality and justice. The answer depends on what brand of religion you have in mind. One of the reasons I’m a UU is that I see liberal religion as more committed than conservative religion to the pursuit of social justice. Conservative Christianity tends to be preoccupied with individual responsibility, individual virtue and individual salvation. It tells people to work hard, get married, have children, perform your God-given gender roles (breadwinner or homemaker) and try to get to heaven, but not to expect much improvement in society. The pursuit of social justice through social reform is rarely a high priority.  Many people were upset at the recent remarks by Glenn Beck, who said that if you hear the term “social justice” being used in your church, you should leave that church, because social justice is just a code word for communism or Nazism. (I guess I must have been absent from school the day they covered the Nazi social justice program.) Beck is being deliberately provocative, but he is expressing a traditional suspicion that people who raise social justice concerns are questioning the natural, God-given order of things. You may be familiar with the quotation from Bishop Camara of Brazil: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why are they poor, they call me a Communist.”

Liberal religion, on the other hand, has a distinguished history of raising social justice concerns, going back at least to the “Social Gospel” movement of the Progressive Era. The word “justice” appears twice in our seven principles: “Justice, equity and compassion in human relations” (principle 2) and “the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all” (principle 6).  One reason we’re in a better position to talk about social justice is that we are not strong believers in a personal salvation. When we sing “We’ll build a promised land that can be” or  “Hail the glorious golden city,” we’re not talking about heaven; we’re talking about building a more just society on earth.

We also have our fifth principle, which calls for “the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in the society at large.” A long line of political philosophers going all the way back to Plutarch in Roman times have discussed the tension between democracy and economic inequality. They have warned that if the economic elites become too powerful, they can control the political process for their own benefit, thus replacing democracy with plutocracy or oligarchy. Some modern thinkers have also warned of the opposite danger, that the masses could use their voting power to confiscate the property of the wealthy, thus destroying the capitalist incentive to make money, but American culture has rarely provided much support for that kind of radical socialism. Today most Americans agree that the main threat to democracy is coming from the elites rather than from the masses. Over 70% agree with the statement that “government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” Forty years ago, fewer than one-third felt that way. Today a growing number of social critics fear that social inequality is increasing, the middle class is becoming smaller and weaker, and democracy is under stress. If so, religious organizations in which the commitment to democracy remains strong may need to stand up and take sides.

Political Parties

With that background, I’d like to come back to the issue of political party: Must religious liberals be Democrats?

I would still like the answer to be No; I would like to live in a world where religious liberals are at home in either of our major parties.  And I think that for much of our history as a nation, that was the case. Surely a religious liberal could easily be a Republican when it was the party of Lincoln, who was a religious freethinker and an opponent of slavery, the biggest injustice of his day. And a religious liberal could easily be a Republican when it was the party of Teddy Roosevelt, who represented many middle-class reformers who feared that the great fortunes of the Gilded Age were undermining democracy.  But in the recent era, especially since the 1970s and 80s, the Republican party seems to have turned its back on much of that heritage and gone a long way to alienate religious liberals.

It has done that in two main ways. First, by forming a strong alliance with the religious right. That was a pretty big change, considering how few Republicans there were in the southern Bible Belt before the 1960s. But white southerners left the Democratic party in large numbers when that party embraced the civil rights movement during the Kennedy and Johnson years. Republicans then adopted the so-called “southern strategy” of consciously reaching out to southern social conservatives. They opposed affirmative action programs to facilitate minority hiring, declared themselves the party of “family values,” called for the reversal of Roe v. Wade, and helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment for women. (The ERA is a fascinating case by the way, because it was originally introduced by Republicans in the 1920s and was part of every Republican platform from the 1940s to the 1970s. But after it passed Congress in 1972 and was sent to the states for ratification, Republicans joined the mostly southern and Christian conservative backlash against it.)

The second way the Republican party has alienated religious liberals is by adopting a very hostile stance toward government itself, expressed most memorably in President Reagan’s declaration that government is not the solution;  government is the problem.  For a long time Republicans had stood for limited government, fiscally conservative government, clean and lean and efficient government. But now they became more extreme in their hostility to taxation, their hostility to economic regulation, and their hostility to the very idea that democratic government can solve problems and create a more just society. They have done their best to take all of the anger that people have about their economic condition and direct it against government itself. That’s a rather curious way to go about building a democratic nation.

Since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, Republicans have had a lot of success in cutting taxes and deregulating economic activity. The story of the Reagan and Bush tax cuts is well known. I’ll just mention that the plan announced by House Republicans this week would not only make all the Bush tax cuts permanent, but it would add still another reduction for higher-income taxpayers, lowering the top income tax bracket from 35% to 25%. That would be the lowest tax rate on the wealthy since the 1920s; the current 35% rate is already one of the lowest rates on the wealthy in our history. Taxes on dividends and capital gains, 2/3 of which go to the richest 1% of taxpayers, have been cut to 15%, and the Republicans want to get rid of estate taxes altogether. The United States learned during World War II and the Cold War that we couldn’t have the world’s most expensive military establishment without high taxes on somebody; nevertheless, the Reagan and Bush administrations pushed for tax cuts and large increases in military spending at the same time. That’s the main reason for the recent deficit. The Wall Street bailouts and the stimulus package have made it worse, but those are temporary measures to combat recession.

As for economic deregulation, the biggest effects on inequality have been in the areas of executive compensation, enforcement of collective bargaining rights of workers, and the activities of the growing financial services industry. In some cases, old regulations have been repealed, such as the rules that separated banking from speculative investing. In other cases, efforts to meet new regulatory needs have been blocked, such as the need to regulate the emerging derivatives market. As a result, bankers and financial managers have found it easier to make huge fortunes by making extremely risky investments with other people’s money, often by misleading people about the risks involved. They have been able to rig the system so that gains go disproportionately to them, while losses go disproportionately to others, including the taxpayers who have to bail out the firms that are “too big to fail.”

The principal beneficiaries of these economic policies have been the richest 1% of the population. Since the Reagan election of 1980, their inflation-adjusted after-tax income has more than tripled. Other segments of the population have seen only small gains, and many would have made no gains at all if the number of workers per family hadn’t gone up.

In their recent book Winner Take All Politics, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson make a strong case that the political policy changes of the last forty years are the main reason for the spike in income and wealth at the top. It is not an inevitable consequence of a high-tech society or a global economy. It is primarily an American phenomenon resulting from American government policies. And an underlying cause of the change is a power shift in which corporations have dramatically increased their lobbying and political spending, while at the same time the countervailing power of unions has declined. Public opinion hasn’t changed as much as most people think, but what has changed is whose opinion counts. One of the studies cited by Hacker and Pierson compared what people say they want government to do with what government actually does. When the researchers divided the electorate by income, they found that only the preferences of the wealthy were a good predictor of actual legislation. Knowing what the middle class or the poor wanted was of little help in predicting actual outcomes. That is a remarkable finding in a supposedly democratic society.

In all fairness, we must acknowledge that this state of affairs is only possible because both political parties have become more receptive to the anti-tax and anti-regulatory agenda. The Republicans embraced that cause with ideological fervor, and were rewarded with massive campaign contributions from the people who stood to benefit. That put the Democrats in the position of having to go along in order to remain economically competitive. Many of us are now disenchanted with both parties, but unless a viable third party emerges, a majority of religious liberals will probably favor Democrats for the time being. It hasn’t always been that way, and it may not remain that way for very long, but that’s the way it is now.

Responsibilities of a political majority

So let’s suppose we have a UU congregation consisting largely of liberal Democrats. What are the responsibilities of that political majority?

I think we have to balance two different kinds of responsibility. The first is to treat everyone in accordance with our principles, especially our respect for “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” (principle 1). Surely it’s a violation of that principle to prejudge someone based on a political party label. For one thing, not all individual Republicans are happy about the direction their party has been going. The next Republican who walks in the door could be a reformer like Teddy Roosevelt, or a moderate like Dwight Eisenhower, who accepted previous social reforms such as collective bargaining and had harsh words for reactionaries who wanted to turn back the clock. We should make clear to the moderates that our quarrel is not with them, but with the radical Republicans who currently control their party. Where we do have serious disagreements with our Republican friends, we should be able to discuss them with civility and mutual respect.

However, I believe we have to balance that responsibility with a second one, which is the responsibility to stand up for what we believe in and engage in social criticism if we think the country is moving away from the principles we hold. And so I reject the idea that we can avoid political partisanship altogether, or that we should keep our partisan views to ourselves lest we make someone uncomfortable. I want us to be a loving, welcoming community, and I’d like to see us grow, but not at the expense of our convictions. I don’t want us to become a nice, friendly, big happy family that stands for nothing, a private club that enjoys getting together but has nothing to say about the most challenging issues of our times. If the religious left is silent, then the religious right can have things all their way, and those folks are not very shy about proclaiming their point of view.

I’ve always found that the hardest part of any talk to write is the opening paragraph and the closing paragraph. In this case, I’m going to take my ending from our chalice lighting words that are displayed on our wall. As long as we are guided by the light of truth, we Unitarian Universalists have something to contribute to the great debates about our country’s future. Our challenge is to love one another while also being true to ourselves, to affirm both the warmth of community and the fire of commitment.