Doing Justice

Fred Seidl

June 1, 2008

This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine

This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine

Shine for peace and justice, I'm gonna let it shine

Shine for peace and justice, I'm gonna let it shine

Shine for peace and justice, I'm gonna let it shine

Shine for peace and justice, I'm gonna let it shine

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine....

I was drawn to this faith close to 50 years ago because it did something: yes there was a lot of armchair philosophy, we needed to be mindful about what we were doing, but Unitarian Universalists did something. And they did it without my being required to pretend that I believed things I didn't. That first "ban the bomb" rally on the Peace Bridge connecting the United States and Canada taught me that here was a spiritual home I could come to, a place where the light of peace and justice could shine. In the years gone since, I have come to realize that social action for social justice is deep in our fiber as Unitarian Universalists and represents our best tradition, within our congregations and within our nation and the world.

The Living Tradition:

The framing of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights was very heavily influenced by Unitarians. Three of the first five presidents of the United States were Unitarians (counting Thomas Jefferson, who was a "small-u' Unitarian). It has been said that the Bill of Rights is as close as Unitarian Universalists come to a creedal statement.

Unitarians and Universalists have been actively supporting justice for working people for close to 200 years. As early as 1838, William Ellery Channing, one of the chief architects of Unitarianism, added his substantial public support to the "Workingman's Associations" that were forbears to our present day labor unions.

Theodore Parker speaking out about economic exploitation, and was keenly supportive of the work and vision of Brook Farm, an intentional community founded by Unitarian ministers. Brook Farm was involved in the workingman's movement and abolished all work and pay inequality.

Parker, an active and courageous abolitionist, had in his congregation, Louisa May Alcott (author, abolitionist and feminist), Wm Lloyd Garrison (radical abolitionist, editor of the abolitionist magazine "The Liberator," and among the founders of the Anti-Slavery Society), Julia Ward Howe (abolitionist, social activist and author of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (primary author of the "Statement of Sentiments" to emerge from the Seneca Falls, NY conference on women's rights and suffrage of 1948. Can you imagine a powerhouse like that all in one congregation?

Unitarians and Universalists were very active in the anti-slavery movements from participation in the Underground Railroad, to secret support for John Brown, to Robert Shaw, a white Unitarian, leading African-American volunteer troupes into battle at Ft. Wagner in the Civil War and losing his own life. Remember the film “Glory?” Col. Shaw was our guy.

James Luther Adams, a leading UU social ethicist, who, at one time, was arrested by the Gestapo for his work with anti-Nazi German clergy, noted that worker's grievances in a strike were getting no press coverage. He called for a public airing from his pulpit that led to both press coverage and a settlement. The mill's owners and managers, as well as workers were members of his church. Not one of the members objected. That says something about the free pulpit.

Adams, who died in 1994, is perhaps the most cited social ethicist UU clergy. His approach was to engage with groups and associations to effect change: ACLU for 14 years as chair for the Committee on Church and State of the Mass. Chapter, founding a group called the Fellowship for Racial and Economic Equality. He took his lumps: getting arrested by the Gestapo, an all-night vigil in Chicago at a housing project that excluding blacks, representing race-relations organizations before the Red Cross (ending racial segregation of blood), getting Billings Hospital of the University of Chicago desegregated. Adams message: in the struggle for social justice the prize will be "won not without dust and heat."

When Martin Luther King, Jr. called American clergy to Selma, AL in 1965, over 200 Unitarian Universalist clergy and many other UUs as well showed up. The Rev. James Reeb lost his life, beaten to death by segregationists. A UU layperson, Viola Gregg Liuzzo was murdered by Klansmen as she drove to Montgomery to pick up marchers.

Our church in Jackson, Mississippi has no windows, it is bricked in. It was a staging location for civil rights marches and needed protection from those who would hurl bombs through glass windows.

Our list of activists goes on: Susan B Anthony, Clarence Darrow, Dorthea Dix, Josephine Shaw Lowell (Col Robert Shaw's sister and a founding mother of social work), Henry David Thoreau, Whitney Young, Albert Scheitzer, and Pete Seeger, for 65 years of human rights activism, and for making it now possible to swim in the Hudson River.

Our thinking about how we do justice has been impacted significantly by Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement, King's opposition to the Viet Nam war and focus on economic justice toward the end of his life. We owe a great deal to King for bringing Non-violent direct action to America, and demonstrating its effectiveness. Though not a UU, because he felt that he could not launch a national civil rights movement from a UU platform, Martin and Coretta Scott King were frequent visitors to UU churches in Boston when he was a theology student there.

And entire congregations participated in the Sanctuary movement for war resisters during the Viet Nam War, and in both the first refugee sanctuary movement and now the new sanctuary movement. And we have Green congregations and nuclear free ones as well.

A great tradition, a living tradition

One walked with nature, one walked with god

They all walked for you and me

Seems they understood the nature of things

They saw further than we can see

They all spoke for justice, they all spoke for peace

They spoke for the refugee, Devoting their lives they worked for the day

When mankind would be set free...

We have institutionalized social justice work at the national and international levels - the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. Two of the Service Committee's founders, Martha and Witsell Sharp, he a UU minister, she a social worker, have been honored by US Senate and Israel's Righteous Among the Nations, only the second and third Americans so recognized, for their rescue efforts and successes during the holocaust. You will recall the Service Committee work on eliminating torture, stopping the genocide in Darfur, current efforts in wage justice, and other projects as well.

The UUSC and UUA are doing a workshop on training activists at General Assembly the 26 and 28 of this month - in Ft. Lauderdale. And it's free!

Responsibilities for advocacy and witness are spread throughout the UUA but get their major push and lobbying support from the division of Advocacy and Witness. Advocacy and Witness' prime responsibility is to "take Unitarian Universalist values out into the wider world, by inserting Unitarian Universalist perspectives into public debates on the matters of the day through media advocacy, through working in partnerships with other religious and secular organizations who share UU perspectives and through empowering local congregations to do the same." I need here to also mention the Unitarian Universalist Women's Federation, the Beacon Press (heroic for their publishing the Pentagon Papers over President Nixon's intimidating objections) and the Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community. Being UU means to be engaged in justice work.

As Advocacy and Witness at the UUA would say, the living tradition comes from Unitarian Universalist values. What are these values?

We say "We covenant to affirm and promote." Here we not only agree as a community to principles, we agree, or promise to act upon them.

Our first principle is "The inherent worth and dignity of every person." This alone gives rise to so many justice issues: UU minister Aaron McEmrys says that inherent worth and dignity is a meaningless phrase "unless that person has the ability to live their day to day lives accordingly... (to know that) to be worthy of respect when they are treated with respect." When people have no say on the job, have to struggle from week to week and are deprived of basics such as habitable quarters (12 to 15 workers in a 10 x 30 trailer), and medical care, it is not difficult to understand why workers can come to feel themselves reduced below "worth and dignity." And for some, it has been forced labor, peonage, and modern-day slavery.

Some of you may know that I act as liaison between the UUA and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The conditions I just described are very much in evidence in Immokalee and along the routes of agricultural workers. The UUA's Holdeen India project has roots in the same principle.

We have a principle that states that Justice, equity and compassion (should pertain) in human relations. And another that states "the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large."

Our seven principles, like our living tradition, under gird our justice work. I can imagine seven sermons, one for each of our principles and the social justice implications that emerge.

These principles come together in a trend that is occurring among our congregations and among thousands of congregations nationwide: Congregation Based Community Organizing. What's that, you ask?

Congregation Based Community Organizing is about building relationships and partners with folks from other congregations, across social class barriers and racial, and religious lines, working together fully utilizing the talents and experiences of it's members, to identify community issues, carry out the necessary research, develop a strategy to address the issue, and to implement that strategy. It is interfaith organizing.

Why "organizing," and how does that differ from "advocacy?" Perhaps oversimplified, advocacy is stating your case publicly, and if your case stems from a faith conviction, as do ours, advocacy becomes "witness." When UU A President Bill Sinkford makes a speech on the steps of the Sudanese embassy in Washington about the genocide in Darfur (and gets arrested), when our Rev. Abhi gathers local clergy to state publicly that Susan Stanton has a right to be who she is and should not lose her position as City Manager of Largo for undergoing gender reassignment, when our social justice committee and members of our congregation carry signs for peace on the corner of Nursery and Belcher, when we hang "Save Darfur' or "Unitarian Universalists of Clearwater say Torture is a Moral Issue" signs on our building, when we hang a sign saying "Civil Marriage is a Civil right" on our building in Boston, facing the Massachusetts state capital building, we are bearing witness to our faith and our values. I think we do this particularly well. We are putting legs on faith.

A few years ago, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee initiated a program to support regional, mostly state-wide advocacy. At my last count, 17 states have organized UU legislative ministries. Florida is one of them. The most well-developed of these ministries is the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry-California.

Obviously, the California UU Legislative Ministry is celebrating the state's Supreme Court decision on marriage equality and it has had several victories, teaming with other groups, both religious and secular, to improve the availability of health care by not only working the legislature, but training congregational teams, UU Advocates for Health Care, who will then provide information resources for any number of local organizations.

The UULM-Florida has targeted legislation concerning the homeless and global warming issues, and is working with the Fairness for All Families coalition for the defeat of Amendment #2, "The Marriage Amendment," on November's ballot. Advocacy and Witness.

I have been taken up short on a couple of occasions over the last few years by conversations I have had with various people. I serve on an interfaith panel which is attempting to coordinate social justice efforts of people of faith at the national level. One of it's members, placed high in the United Methodist hierarchy remarked that before the invasion of Iraq, the head of his denomination secured a meeting with the President of the United States, a member of a United Methodist congregation, to plead restraint. He told the president that he had just come from a United Methodist family retreat in Michigan and that he had talked with several mothers and wives of soldiers who were worried sick about their children and husbands. The President said simply, "How's the fishing in Michigan?" Witness was obviously not enough to move the president. One might wonder what kind of on-the-ground organization it might take to get a better response.

A few years back I had a conversation with a member of the Florida House of Representatives. I was lobbying him to override the Governor's objection to accepting $14 million of federal child welfare training money. I had organized ten department heads in Florida universities, and they ten presidents, and the Children's Home Society. We were talking about lobbyists and lobbying and he said to me "when these guys (lobbyists) come and talk to me, I know there's nobody behind them."

For many, not all, but many problems we face, advocacy is necessary, but advocacy alone is not sufficient to make the desired changes happen. While there is power in advocacy, there is more power in organizing.

Community organizers say that there are two sources of power: organized money and organized people. Believing that power corrupts our attempt to come together in a rational, reasonable way, some UUs shy away. To quote Dr. King, "There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly...the problem is that concept of power and love are usually seen as opposites, but power without love is reckless and abusive. Love without power is sentimental and anemic."

Civil rights, labor, community, congregational and political organizers believe that the power generated by organized people can cause changes to occur that will not occur by advocacy alone.

Over 100 UU congregations around the country currently participate in congregation based community organizations. There is one in Pinellas County, FAST: Faith and Action for Service Together, made up of 30 congregations and in its relatively short life can claim results. These include advances in education, transportation and affordable housing for moderate-income families across Pinellas County.

Our social justice committee will be looking onto community organizing opportunities during the coming year. FAST is one of them and there are several other options, including starting our own. Three weeks from now, at General Assembly, the UU Funding Program will announce "A Special Matching Fund for Congregation-Based Community Organizing Grants" ($80,000). This is a declaration that the UUFP looks fondly upon community organizing as a meaningful endeavor for UU congregations, and is willing to support it even more than it already has done.

So we have reviewed several approaches to doing justice. In none of this, do I not wish to leave the slightest impression that directly providing goods and services to those in need is not an important and noble undertaking. The work we do at Kashi Hills, our continuing relationship with the Farm Workers ministry, our support of Religious Community Services, the financial support we provide in our split-the-plate-offerings - these are the many ways we put our values out there - working. These many acts do much to mitigate the effects of unjust and discriminatory systems. And in our advocacy and witness we become the conscience of the community as well as a force for change. And when we organize, we increase our effectiveness many fold.

I would like to close with a song from Jim Hawkins, that I started earlier, in honor of our tradition and principles: The Chanings, the Parkers, the Stantons, the Anthonys, the Reebs, the Liuzzos, the Holmses, The Sharps, The Shaws, The Emersons, the Thoreaus, the Adamses, the Seegers and all those UU activists who who accept the challenge of Unitarian Universalism...to affirm and promote our principles.

Whose gonna fill their shoes, friends

Whose gonna fill their shoes?

Will it be me or will it be you

Tell me now what can we do?

If the people will lead then the leaders must follow

This is something we can do

Uniting to cease all oppression and woe

Everyone can fill their shoes.