7/1/12
You will probably never see an
American flag displayed in a UU church, although you will see one in most other
churches. Does that mean UUs aren’t patriotic?
As we prepare ourselves for the
unfettered and largely unexamined display of patriotism known as “Fourth of
July” , it make be good to arm ourselves with some wisdom.
Writing in 1932, Reinhold Niebuhr
said, in Moral Man and Immoral Society:
“There is an
ethical paradox in patriotism which defies all but the most astute … analysis.
Patriotism transmutes individual
unselfishness into national egoism. Loyalty to the nation…. becomes the
vehicle of all the altruistic impulses
and expresses itself with such fervor that the critical attitude of the individual toward the nation is completely
destroyed…. Thus the unselfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of
nations…. What lies beyond the nation, the community of mankind, is too vague
to inspire devotion.” (91)
Let’s unpack
this.
First, “the
critical attitude of the individual toward the nation” is essential. Why?
The very
document we celebrate says so! From Howard Zinn:
The American Declaration of
Independence… clearly understood (the) difference between government and
citizen. It says that the purpose of government is to secure certain rights for
its citizens – life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. But
governments may not fulfill these purposes and so, “whenever any form of
government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new
government.” (12)
Zinn writes:
In the United States today, The
Declaration of Independence hangs on classroom walls but foreign policy follows
Machiavelli.
What he
means by that is that what is often used as a justification for actions that
interfere with life, liberty and happiness, i.e. war, the prison industrial
complex, all of the machinations of corporate greed, forced deportations of
undocumented immigrants, etc, is a call for realism and against idealism. In
fact liberals and progressives who do try to live out the true patriotism of
protest and questioning the government are called “idealistic” more than
anything else.
But, writes
Zinn prophetically: Realism is seductive
because once you have accepted the reasonable notion that you should base your
actions on reality, you are too often
led to accept, without much questioning, someone else’s version of what that
reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be skeptical of
someone else’s description of reality. (11)
Enter
liberal religion, specifically
Unitarian Universalism. In our American iteration, we were born from the
sentiments of those who, like William Ellery Channing, understood that idealism
blended with reason was the basis for a new religious impulse: “I have felt..
that a new reverence for (man) was essential to the cause of social reform.
There can be no true peace.. any farther than men come to understand their
affinity with and relation to God and the infinite purposes for which he gave
them life… none of us can conceive the new courtesy and sweetness, the mutual
kindness, deference and sympathy, the life and efforts for social melioration
which are to spring up as man shall penetrate beneath the body to the spirit
and shall learn what the lowest man is.”
For Channing, this was not just talk, as he gave up the most prestigious
pulpit in Boston to support the cause of abolitionism.
But
Unitarianism, blended now with Universalism, which should enhance its spiritual
basis even further, has in many cases thrown the “spirit” part out (the baby with bathwater),
allowed realism and “reason” to bully and squeeze out all notions of depth and
breadth and spirit and soul and heart, so that, in way too many of our groups
and gatherings there is a deadness. We can’t pray. We can’t say certain things.
We have to be politically correct. We have lost our sense of humor and our
sense of perspective. But perhaps worst of all, we have lost our core, what
Niebuhr calls the altruistic impulse or individual unselfishness. Not
entirely,but to a frightening degree.
Niebuhr
writes in his other theological masterwork, Children
of Light and the Children of Darkness: “ ‘Tolerance is the virtue of a
people who do not believe anything’” (130).
He was
quoting Gilbert Chesterton, but his point is that what he called modern
secularism is dangerous because it provides no religious impulse for humility
and no defense against fanaticisms. Tolerance for all forms of “religion” without
question is what he calls a bourgeois indifference which will lead to nihilism.
I fear for Unitarian Universalism, not our historic faith but its manifestation
in the culture, on these grounds. The grounds of creeping moral relativism.
Niebuhr
wrote in the same book,
The preservation of a democratic
society requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove.
The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness
but remain free from their malice. They must know the power of self-interest in
human society without giving it moral justification. They must have this wisdom
in order that they may beguile, deflect, harness, and restrain self-interest,
individual and collective, for the sake of community.
This is an
astounding quote which lends itself to volumes of interpretation. Suffice it to
say that we, the liberals, are in Niebuhr’s view, the Children of “Light.” It
is both our indifference and our neglect that endanger the future as much as do
the self-will and ill-will of the Children of “Darkness.”
Zinn mentions
one of our own, Henry David Thoreau, who has been a beacon to so many of us,
and who was for Zinn an exemplar when he was arrested for civil disobedience.
In talking about patriotism, Zinn reminds readers that we must never confuse
our obligation to fellow humans, which is real (Channing), with any presumed
obligation to a government, which is artificial.
“If
patriotism were defined not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive
worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one’s country, one’s fellow
citizens (all over the world), as
loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would
require us to disobey our government when it violated these principles.” ( Zinn,
119)
