Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Briarcliff, Croton, and Ossining

The Liberal

Given by James Covington on October 17th, 2004

Hi. My name is Jim and I’m a liberal! The Liberal! Has ever a word, or politician by that name, been as maligned, defiled and vilified as in recent years? Even some liberals are reluctant to name themselves as such. Instead they call themselves progressives.

What a shame! And how do we Unitarian Universalists, unabashedly theologically liberal and often known as politically liberal, respond to such aggressive assailing of a word that historically so defines us?

Henry Whitney Bellows who once filled the All Souls pulpit in Manhattan in the mid-nineteen century and who set the path to the founding of the American Red Cross, once said: “the founders, sustainers, propagandists of civil and religious liberty, should of course be liberals; that is, believers in liberty, lovers of liberty, devisers of liberal things—men of open views, high hopes, strong faith, broad charity. . .”

From these and other similar sentiments about liberty by women and men through the ages came to be laid the cornerstone of Unitarian Universalism as written into the principles of our Association and printed on the back cover of the program each Sunday.

Bellows was an evangelical liberal. Evangelical and liberal are not antonyms by the way. Each embodies the good news, not the bad news of hell-fire and damnation, where women who have abortions are criminals, the wage of homosexuality is AIDS, and the homeless somehow deserve to be.

Despite the prevailing notion that liberalism is both antipatriotic and antireligious, it is neither. It has been suggested that God herself is the most famous liberal of all. Poetically speaking, God has a bleeding heart that never stops. By broad definition, every good mother and father is a liberal. And the same can be said of our nation’s founders and prophets. By defaming liberalism, right-wing Christians and self-styled patriots are unwitting traitors to the three things they claim to hold most dear: God, family, and the United States of America.

When the Carnegie Foundation asked Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal to do a study of America, he concluded that “America has had gifted conservative statesmen and national leaders….But with few exceptions, only the liberals have gone down in history as national heroes.” Small wonder, for as the dictionary reminds us, liberal means free: worthy of a free person (as opposed to servile); free in bestowing; bountiful, generous, open-hearted; free from narrow prejudice; open-minded, candid; free from bigotry or unreasonable prejudice in favor of traditional opinions or established institutions; open to the reception of new idea or proposals of reform; and, of political opinions.

Liberal means open-hearted, open-minded, and openhanded. This single word embraces the aspiration, both religious and political, of our forebears: freedom from bondage; freedom for opportunity; and freedom with responsibility, especially toward our neighbor, whose rights and security are just as precious as our own.

I fully recognize that many people, who reject the liberal label, including any number of good conservatives, may possess most, perhaps even all of the above “liberal’ qualities.
But when I speak of liberalism, I am thinking not only of personal attributes, but of public policy. For instance, Ronal Reagan was a generous, kind-hearted man, but in spirit and application the social policies he sponsored as president were neither. When he saw a hungry family featured on CBS news, he called Dan Rather to find out who they were so that the government could help them out. When Speaker Tip O’Neill told him of a single mother with five children who couldn’t feed her family on the reduced food-stamp allotment, President Reagan asked his assistant to get right on the case. Each of these personal acts is a liberal gesture; neither led to a public act establishing a more liberal policy.

Liberalism is an attitude. The chief characteristics of that attitude are human sympathy, receptivity to change, and a scientific willingness to follow reason rather than any fixed idea.

So why is liberalism in such disrepute these days? I will invite your response to that question later, including and perhaps especially the more conservative minded people among us. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that most Americans feel battered by the unfolding of recent history, and hunger for simpler times. After Vietnam, the King and two Kennedy assassinations, moral turbulence and ferment over civil rights, women’s right, and gay rights, many Americans long for something simpler, a Norman Rockwell portrait on the cover of a magazine. Conservative seized on this longing. They promise a return to the dog by the hearth, its master dozing in a recliner, his wife in the kitchen. They promise flags flying in the Public Square, and Americans proud again of their country.

I don’t know what might have happened if liberals such as John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, Jr. had lived, but I do know this. Whatever their private flaws each of them offered the American people hope and a vision for the future. Today that hope and vision almost exclusively come from the religious and political right, not from reformers who wish to create a more just society but from critics appalled by the consequence of social diversity. That is one reason for the demise of liberalism.

Another has to do with semantics. The word liberal is a symbol. As with all symbols, we invest it with meanings that correspond to our experience. Depending on one’s perspective, liberalism can represent generosity of spirit, an ethical approach to religion, freedom of speech and press, laissez-faire capitalism, fuzzy-headedness, spinelessness, welfare statism.

Somewhere along the way, the word, “liberal”, fell from fashion. It became the “L word,” a word too tainted to be spoken aloud save in negative political advertisements and by attacks on politicians from Massachusetts.

One might think of the demise of liberalism as a murder-suicide with only one victim, for many of the wounds were self-inflected. Lord Acton once said “every institution perishes by an excess of its own first principle.”

Take tolerance, a liberal virtue of ever there was one. It is a noble virtue, but not always. In certain contexts to tolerate means to abide with repugnance. Yet some things are so repugnant that common decency demands that we condemn them. When the rights of criminals are more vigorously protected than those of their victims, or when freedom of speech extends to racial, religious or sexual defamation, liberalism becomes an easy target,. In such instances, the open mind can be lampooned as an empty, unprincipled mind. When civil libertarians cannot draw a boundary line between license and liberty, those who lack sufficient respect for freedom of speech have a field day.

The same holds when generosity—the open heart and open hand—spills into profligacy. This is only half of the story, however. If liberalism fell from grace due to the excess of some liberals, it also was pushed, a victim of adventitious right-wing rhetoric.

In the last decade we entered an era of tumultuous change. The world is shrinking; lines are shifting; comfortable boundaries are breaking down. Yet there will be no new world order without a new world ethic, an ethic of interdependence based on cooperation, not just competition, win/win not win/ lose, ethic in which the good is not what one possess but what one shares.

Here the liberal spirit, both religious and political, meets entrenched and growing resistance. For instance, since bunkers are fashionable in uncertain times, throughout the world religious fundamentalism has new appeal, as does anything that promises a refuge from contemporary reality. So does the idolatry of nationalism. In each case, the accompanying rhetoric, playing on people’s fears—of the other, the outsider, the stranger, the infidel, the evil one—is enormously effective, but the consequences are devastating. Becoming victims of our own fears, we can eventually lose our soul.

So where do we go from here? I have sometimes hesitated to call myself a liberal, because I admit, the pejorative adjectives “knee jerk” and “bleeding heart” have had their effect on me. And while we are a liberal religious movement, there are political and economic conservatives among us. But I am really not ashamed to be a liberal. The word liberal comes from the Latin “liberalis,” pertaining to a free person, one marked by generosity, altruism, bounteousness, openhandedness; broad minded, open minded, favorable to changes and reforms tending in the direction of democracy. That hardly seems sinful. And so to that extent I am an unrepentant liberal.

I have, however learned something of the shortcoming of liberalism as a political philosophy with its overly-optimistic view. My concept of human nature has been chastised by history—particularly since the events of September 11. My natural optimism about human ability to change the world has been disciplined.

I have learned that the world is much more ambiguous than I had thought. Issues that once were black and white and quite clear have become muddied. On civil rights and Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, I thought the issues were clear, and I could embrace the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement and women’s movement and gay rights movement, with enthusiasm. But the events of the last three years underscore the incredible complexity of reality. I despair of those left or right who claim to have virtue on their side alone. If the answer is blowing in the wind, then that wind keeps changing direction, velocity and temperature. Political humility has come at considerable cost.

I believe now, one of the keys to the future of liberalism rests in its ability to see human nature for what it is. Human beings are able to commit horrible acts of deceit, tyranny, homicide and genocide against others. It’s happening right now in Sudan, Myanmar, Palestine, Iraq—to name only a few such places.

But human beings are also capable of transformation. The heart of liberalism is freedom, the freedom to be, the freedom to think, the freedom to care. The world is enormously complex and unstable today. As a liberal I remain steadfast committed to seeing the world as one. I consider this principle to be liberalism’s greatest challenge today. Regardless of the awful atrocities being committed by both Western and Arab states, we must insist on working together. The terrorist and suicidal atrocities being committed in Iraq and Israel and Palestine and other Arab countries, horrible and unacceptable as they are, must eventually be seen as symptoms of despair, poverty and helplessness in a changing world that threatens the cultural identities of millions of people.

Eventually I believe the religions of the world must lead the way toward draining the swamps of human misery. It remains a requirement of our liberal faith that we care for the world we live in and work for its healing. We need to work toward building greater human understandings between Muslims and Christians and Jews; between Arab and western nations. This is in fact the aim of the newly formed Committee on Middle East Initiative here in the Fellowship.

The basis for this attitude has blueprints in the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Liberty Bell and the Statue of Liberty. Nonetheless, the natural human tendency, honed over generations by the utility of tribalism, remains resistant to pluralism. Here we struggle with a new reality, for pluralism is emerging as the one essential ingredient for functional community in a global village. As Benjamin Franklin said—and never has it been truer—either we all hang together, or we will all hang separately. We even put it on our money. The American motto is: out of many, one. Now there is a liberal idea! And on this motto alone, this liberal is ready to preach and serve.