Let's Occupy Our UU Tradition

I haven't been blogging for a while, but I've been thinking a lot. I've been thinking about the Occupy movement that's now 2+ months old and which has spread like wildfire to cities and towns around the world.

And I've been thinking about the role of the Liberal Church in our times. And I've been thinking about Chris Hedges' writings about the death of the liberal class, which includes the Liberal Church.

I've been glad that many Unitarian Universalists have stepped up and stood up in support of and in solidarity with the Occupy movement. But nevertheless, I've been reflecting on ways in which over the last 30 years or more we've gotten distracted from our mission...or caved to the culture of consumerism...or something...or all of the above.

Decades ago, James Luther Adams wrote about two kinds of liberalism: "progressive liberalism" and "laissez faire liberalism," which is "closely bound up with the narrow interests of the middle class, and also with its dogma of political nonintervention in the economic sphere.”

Yikes. I'm afraid the latter is the path we took, even though he warned us against it. I'm afraid we forsook the progressive liberalism, the path more true to our heritage, which was concerned with "liberation from tyranny” and “demanded a more responsible society – a political intervention on behalf of the disinherited.”

In Adams' words:

“[Progressive] liberalism…has been the chief critic of the idolatries of creedalism, of church and political authoritarianism, of nationalistic, racial, or sexual chauvinism; but [laissez faire liberalism]…has generated a new idolatry, the idolatry of ‘possessive individualism.’ This possessive individualism has served as a smokescreen, an ideology, concealing or protecting a new authoritarianism of corporate economic power. This idolatry in the name of individualism and the ‘free market’ eschews responsibility for the social consequences of economic power – it has become virtually unaccountable to the general public. Accordingly, it rejects responsibility of the character of a society that requires, or at least comfortably tolerates, the built-in poverty of almost one-third of the populace (not to speak of the poverty of the underdeveloped countries.)”


We cannot get around it, my liberal religious friends. This drastic inequality between the rich and the poor, the concentration of immense wealth in the hands of a very few, this rise of the corporate state...they happened on our watch. Even though prophetic voices within our tradition warned us against them.  We did not pay attention. We fell asleep at the switch.

It's time to wake up.

It's time to occupy our UU tradition once again.
It's time to remember and to heed these words of Frederick May Eliot, who once said,

“Liberty always requires stouthearted, vigilant defenders. Tyranny is forever alert, watching for new devices by which to steal into the central citadels of freedom and capture them, not by external assault but by reliance upon the indifference and forgetfulness of their defenders."

It is time - well past time - to resume the defense of liberty.