All Our Hopes And Dreams

October 31, 2004

Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter, D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH

Sermon

We seem to have gotten ourselves into the mother of all elections.

Already it has been a long, hard slog. But that is what democracy is. Democracy is not the easier, softer path. It is get out and talk with your neighbor, research issues, and know when to not listen as much as when to listen. Democracy is hard work. In the words of the great bard of democracy, Walt Whitman:

We have frequently printed the word Democracy, yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which stills sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.

Democracy is a lot of work, work in many ways yet to be done. This morning I want to offer for your consideration the thought that what is important this election is not so much whether Republican or Democrat wins, how ever significant that may be. What is of overriding importance is whether democracy wins. If our hopes and dreams are to have any meaning, democracy must win.

What does it mean for democracy to win? Recall the words of Lincoln in our Responsive Reading: “...the effort of some to shift their share of the burden onto the shoulders of others is the great, durable curse...” of humanity. If democracy is to be real, if it is the great hope of humanity, you cannot expect others to do your share of the work.

And you haven’t! I have been so impressed with how many of you have labored so hard in the vineyard of democracy. Over the past months I have talked with many of you of your hopes and dreams. There are so many simple, quiet stories abut your efforts for democracy.

Some of you have had conversations in your family about the candidates and issues. That has not been easy for all of you. Perhaps some of your family talks are open and easy about different concerns and hopes. But there is one family member who has all the truth, and will not rest until you have it as well. Democracy is not easy.

Some of you have worked, as I have, on phone banks. Most phones calls seems to end up just leaving a voice mail message. Then a live voice answers. Excitement, a real human being! As soon as you identify why you are calling they curse you and slam the phone down. The next person you call, also disagrees, but engages you in a valid conversation, inviting you to consider their point of view, as you have asked them to consider yours. Democracy is not easy.

Perhaps you have posted signs on your lawn and they have been taken down. Democracy isn’t easy.

Perhaps you have spent hours, days, weeks, going from door to door in your neighborhood or town, talking with your fellow citizens. Some have taken the signs you offer and others slam the door. Democracy is not easy.

Here at St, John’s we have perhaps pushed the envelope at times, in our interest to balance respect for diversity and free expression. And democracy has not always been easy.

Several times I have talked with active church members who have been discouraged with their labors on behalf of democracy. I have sought to encourage them, reinvigorate them. In one way or another, I have suggested, to quote Danilo Dolci,

It is senseless to speak of optimism or pessimism,. The only important thing to remember is that if one works well in a potato field, the potatoes will grow. If one works well among people, they will grow. That’s reality. The rest is smoke.

Democracy is working among the people. Democracy is not easy.

One of our fellow church members I have talked with is Kathy Laufman. Kathy has a long time interest in gay rights, especially among youth. It was a delight to see her in the ad for the repeal of the antiquated Article XII of the City Charter. The Christian Coalition has been trying to get its special spin on gay rights to work. It is the Christian Coalition which tries to convince people that equal rights are special rights. Since when was the right of lesbians to work any different from any one else’s right to work. Since when were gays’ right to live in this city any different from any body else’s right to live in Cincinnati?

I was happily surprised when this congregation voted unanimously to support the YES ON 3 campaign to repeal the divisive city charter article. As we consider democracy, it seems to me reasonable to ask, if gay people’s right to work can be denied, cannot their right to vote be denied? If you recall all the extreme rhetoric during the early stages of the AIDS epidemic about GLBTs, it is not unreasonable to suggest that if a list of gays were available, their votes might be challenged at their polling place.

For democracy to win, you must vote. For democracy to win, everybody should vote. As it says in the Constitution, “We the people...” “We the people...” The preamble then challenges us to continue to establish a more perfect union. And now, we know our union is far form perfect. And it will be as long as people are prevented from voting because of prejudice and racism.

There is concern here in Ohio about how many African Americans will be able to vote. For months questions have been raised in Florida. Apparently a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation, in which state troopers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando in a bizarre hunt for evidence of election fraud, has been conducted.’ [Bob Herbert, NYT, August 20, 2004)

Does Jim Crow’s shadow still darken the land? The possibility of blacks voting in America began to achieve some reality with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [LINK] Quite recently, Michigan State Representative, John Pappageorge spoke of a need to “suppress the Detroit vote.” [LINK]

Native Americans have only been able to vote since 1924. Yet there is still concern that members of Native Nations maybe denied the right to vote. But one illustration, A federal judge ruled recently that the state of South Dakota violated the voting rights of Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation and the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. The state packed voters on the reservations into one district. The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of tribal members, sued and said Indian voters should be spread across two districts. U.S. District Judge Karen Schreier agreed. She said the state's redistricting plan "impermissibly dilutes the Indian vote."

What are we to make out of calls for freedom, for democracy combined with the denial of the vote to significant minorities such as African American and Native nations?

For some time, people have been talking about racism, white supremacy. Racism and white supremacy have their roots in something we have been hearing about lately: imperialism. Any form of imperialism, domination of others, requires a sense of superiority.

A curious fact of the history of democracy is that democracy has always gone hand in hand with imperialism. We see it in the classic cases of Athens and Rome. We see it with the British Empire. Democracy and imperialism seem to have cohabited with one another, even if most of the time with a wink, wink, nod, nod.

We need not look far for this truth in our history. Talk of American empire is not new to our time. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the “empire of liberty.” And we need search no further for corroboration than the Declaration of Independence. Among Jefferson’s complaints against King George, was he prevented the colonialists from settling in Indian lands. This resulted from the so-called French and Indian War, after which the Line of 1763, along the Alleghenies, recognized all lands west as Indian territory. In the Declaration, Jefferson spoke not of Indians, but of savages.

President Jefferson designed and Andrew Jackson finalized, the removal of all native peoples west of the Mississippi. The beginning of the plan called for establishing a military force, the original purpose of the U.S. Army, to defeat the Shawnee and Miami in the old Northwest. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who taught at Miami University, writes;

It was here--in the Ohio Valley, the "old Northwest"--that the U.S. military was formed, in five decades of unrelenting war, of annihilation unto unconditional surrender. It was here that U.S. imperialism was born and its ideology fixed, and that U.S. nationalism was defined, inseparable from imperialism. [LINK]

Cincinnati, Fort Washington, was established as the military center to begin Indian removal. The statue of the Roman farmer-dictator Cincinnatus along the City water front, is a statue to the ambivalence of democracy and imperialism that marks the founding of our republic. The statue shows him returning the insignia of rule to the citizens of the Rome. What is ambivalent about that statue, is whether the city took back the insignia. Are we willing to take them back today?

I bring up the subject of imperialism because it is a deep theological, spiritual concern, far transcending any ideology which may attempt to rationalize it. Much of what passes as Christianity in our day is not much more than an antiquated imperial ideology. Christianity became the imperial ideology of Rome with the Emperor Constantine way back in the fourth century AD.

Soon thereafter St. Augustine gave intellectual, theological coherence to this imperial form of Christianity. Central to imperial Christianity was a low opinion of human nature, Augustine’s doctrine of “original sin.” St. Paul is often credited with this perversion, but it was Augustine who constructed the doctrine.

Let’s step back a moment to consider Augustine’s political theology. As the doctrine of original sin was foundational, it allowed Augustine to make a bifurcation in the hope and fears of humanity.

This bifurcation he called the City of God versus the City of Man. Humanity was so corrupt that it was only in the City of God , Augustine alleged, that Christian values applied. Men were evil in the City of Man. And tragically, a Christian ruler was not only not bound to govern according to the teachings of Jesus. Augustine would have thought such a ruler a bad ruler.

This raises its ugly head regarding torture. St. Augustine wrote the wise and godly ruler:

... thinks it no wickedness that innocent witnesses are tortured ... or that the accused are put to the torture, so that they are often overcome with anguish, and though innocent, make false confessions regarding themselves, and are punished: ... These numerous and important evils he does not consider sins for the wise judge does these things not with the intention of doing harm.... (Drury, TERROR AND CIVILIZATION, p 47)

It would be simplistic to suggest original sin leads to torture. They are part and parcel of a single view of human nature, a disrespect of human nature, a step towards supremacy.

I want to jump back now to the most tragic century of human history, the 20th, to further unfold the relationship between a low opinion of human nature and torture, and thus imperialism Jean Amery, a Belgian resistant was arrested in Brussel in 1943 for distributing tracts in German urging soldiers of the Nazi occupation to desert. He was tortured by the SS in a Belgian jail in 1943, before being shipped to Auschwitz. Amery’s hands were bound behind his back and he was suspended from a hook from the ceiling until his arms were pulled out of their sockets. While this was happening, his captors beat him with a whip, seeking information

Amery survived but in his account twenty four years later, he tells us that a tortured man stays tortured. Indeed Amery argued that what was worst than the memory of the pain was the moral shock of seeing other human beings reducing him to a carcass of meat. His capacity for any social trust destroyed, he eventually committed suicide as did his fellow Auschwitz inmate, Primo Levi. [Ignatieff, pages 142f]

This experience which Amery relates, of the moral shock of seeing your fellow human beings reducing you to a carcass, it is from this crevasse of human existence that spirituality seeks to emerge. I hope that no one of us have suffered for weeks such disrespect, but at moments each of us have feared that we are of no consequence. If you have been raped or held at gun point, such moments are embedded in you.

This experience is internal to the meaning of being an African American. Some years ago the black poet Amira Baraka (aka LeRoy Jones b. 1934), one time poet laureate of New Jersey, wrote a few lines in similar language as Amery:

SNAKE EYES

That force is lost
which shaped me, spent
in its image, battered, an old brown thing
swept off the streets
where it sucked its gentle living.
And what is meat
to do, that is driven to its end
by words? The frailest gestures
grown like skirts around breathing.
We take
unholy risks to prove
we are what we cannot be. For instance,

I am not even crazy.

I hope you understand my remarks are not merely political, but also spiritual. I do not believe that you can shake a rug and out comes politics here and religion there. The rug you shake to drive them apart is your soul, your immortal struggle for existence. Your every hope and dream for yourself and your children. At times we sense at our very quick that we are risk. I would suggest to you that we are at risk, but mere meat without words to honor us, if we do not do all we can for democracy.

As liberals in religion, we hold a high opinion of human nature. Our Unitarian forbears saw this in the human ability to reason, to tell right from wrong. Our Universalist forbears saw this high opinion in the Devine love which is so broad and great that none can escape its embrace. That none can escape this universal love means that we are democracy friendly. We reject such low opinions of human nature as revealed in crass teachings about original sin, racism and white supremacy. We resonate to the old song, vox populi, vox dei: the voice of the people is the voice of god.

And we need to remember that our faith makes the same demands on us after we vote as before. Democracy wins only if every day we make democracy our practice. We must take the short view some times. At other times, we take the long view. This next day or two, we may focus just on the next day, the next hour. But let us not forget the long vew, the wisdom that Langston Hughes tells us that African Americans have learned through centuries of pain and grief. African Americans, Hughes tells us, speak of rivers:

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I build my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The man who was tortured in a Nazi prison, Jean Amery, argued that the question of torture was not accidental to a society’s identity, but the very essence of its view. It was a low view of human nature. Your participation in the electoral process is a political act. Keep in mind also that participation in the electoral process is also an affirmation of a high view of human nature. Then you may view your participation as also a spiritual practice. A celebration of being human thrown in the face of all threats and fears that mutter against us.

However important it may be to you whether democrat or republican wins, let us hope and pray that the true winner will be, as it says in those good, old words, “We the people..”