Hello, my name is Ann Hair, and I will be presenting the program this morning.
The song “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” that we sang is about the warship, Constitution, better known as “Old Ironsides”, which dates back to 1797 in the days when there were only 15 stars and fifteen stripes on our flag. She was one of six heavy frigates commissioned by the young US government to protect merchant shipping during the quazi war with France and also to fight the Barbary pirates. She is the oldest commissioned naval vessel afloat. The words of the song give us an idea of the pride Americans felt from the beginning in our ability to “make tyranny tremble.” We’ll come back to her later because this morning I will be presenting some ideas about what we seem to value as a nation these days, and how a liberal religion might reflect on the current state of the union.
First Reading:
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
Second Reading:
Our Second reading is the Five Smooth Stones Prayer. This prayer is based upon James Luther Adams’ essay “Guiding Principles for a Free Faith” in On Becoming Human Religiously.
Part 1:
This stone embodies our living tradition,
We always learning new truths,
we are always growing in knowledge,
and revelation is never sealed.
Part 2:
This stone embodies that we are a free people,
gathering in free will to join in a spiritual journey.
Part 3:
This stone embodies our call to create a just and loving world,
to work to abolish oppression in all its forms.
Part 4:
This stone embodies this acknowledgement;
that good things do not just happen,
but instead that we work to make those things happen.
Part 5:
This stone embodies our knowledge that there are spiritual and human resources “for the achievement of meaningful change, [which] justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.
Sermon: Liberal Religion and Patriotism, What are the new Core Values for America?
I read several sermons on Unitarian Universalism and politics, and I read a very interesting article in the UU World and thought I might blend the ideas into one presentation. I remind you that this is a free pulpit. I get to say what I think. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, though. I am not anti military. Our nephew is one of the youngest Lt. Colonels currently serving in the Air Force and currently is the executive officer of a squadron of C130’s which are trained to do rescue work. I am concerned about those serving in harm’s way today such as Hazel’s daughter who works in danger zones to keep our country safe. My husband is a veteran whose first job out of college was in the field of atomic weapons. But I think both liberals and conservatives need to consider the ideas I will present.
Let us begin by hearing from Dennis J. Daniel in his sermon “A Politics of Respect”.
He says,
“First, I want to look at the question of whether liberal religion, specifically Unitarian Universalist (UU) religion, has lost its center and its power to transform individuals. Certainly on the surface one could say that we have opened the doors so wide and set the barriers so low that anyone could find a home here without having to undergo any kind of conversion experience. All you have to do is sign the book. No tests are required, and no challenges are posed.”
“What is more, many people who find their way to us have the experience of finally having discovered something they had long been looking for. They come here and feel that this is indeed the home they have searched for. Rather than requiring a conversion experience or manipulating them into one, we affirm our new members in being who they are. This is a place of comfort, freedom, and permission.
“But becoming a Unitarian Universalist just begins when a person signs the membership book. Typically a person who becomes enmeshed in our community undergoes a slow process of integrating our values, and learning what they mean as we live them, rather than as we read them off the page of a book. The result, after many months or even years, is a person who might aptly be described as a deep UU. A deep UU is someone who has tested himself or herself by striving to live up to the idea of the worth and dignity of every human being in all walks of life.
“A deep UU is a person who has struggled to discover the complex interconnections that enfold and encumber every person and every nation on this planet. A deep UU has learned the law of reciprocity: that, if they are to have any meaning, the freedoms we claim for ourselves must be extended to all; that any criticism we would level against others must start with reflection on our own role in the controversy under discussion; that the right to be critical must be bought with personal involvement.
“Eventually a deep UU moves beyond defending the cause of the day and develops a deep awareness of social ills as well as social strengths. A deep UU gets to the point of no longer being able to remain silent. Integrity, conscience, and compassion all demand personal participation in the political process, as beneficiary, as witness, as speaker for a vision, as worker for change. And through that involvement, a deep UU gains backbone, dedication and courage. This is where I think soul enters into politics.”
In the UU World, in an article entitled “Democracy and Empire” by Rev. Dr. Paul Rasor at Virginia Wesleyan College, Dr. Rasor says that thoughtful observers on both political sides have started to notice that our country’s impulse toward imperialism has been on the rise. The events of 9/11 have sped up this impulse. And historians on the left and the right note that this empire building comes at the expense of our democracy.
“Historian Andrew Bacevich, a retired career military officer and a Republican, claims that ‘American democracy in our time has suffered notable decay’ and that the American proclivity for global power projection threatens ‘the destruction of what most Americans profess to hold dear’. Philosopher Cornel West, a progressive, points to ‘a deeply troubling deterioration of democratic powers in America today’.
“As religious liberals who support democratic values and cooperative uses of power, how can we help nurture a weakened democratic spirit and push back against the forces of empire?”
American empire involves “external and internal projections of power. External projections would be U.S. military presence, global economic power, and the ever present influence of our culture abroad.” I do not doubt this influence. In the hotel we were at in Marseille recently, the background music was all American pop music.
“Internal power projection involves concentrating economic and political power in the hands of fewer and fewer people”. It also involves “the blending of government with corporations” which gives them huge influences over public policy. “These internal projections are the ones most responsible for undermining our democracy.”
How does our empire work? Externally, we influence other societies through different kinds of pressure and intervention. Internally, existing political and legal structures are manipulated in ways that appear to support them, but actually subvert them.
We have a set of “core values” as a country which allows these things to happen. Our core values are “aggressive militarism and free-market fundamentalism”. To see how they work, Dr. Rasor suggests we look at them as theologies.
We have a “theology of violence”. We are disposed to use violence, externally through our military, and internally on each other through our permissive gun laws, laws such as the Stand Your Ground law, laisse faire response to bullying in schools, etc. This is where we go back to Old Ironsides . Do you remember the words “From the halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli” in the Marine’s Hymn? Tradition dates it to 1847 around the time of the Mexican War when an unknown poet of the Corps set words to a melody from an old French opera. The song speaks of military interventions all over the world, particularly in Mexico, by which we claimed most of the Southwest and in Tripoli, in what is now Libya where the Barbary pirates were based, using the frigate Constitution. We have been using our military to claim territory and to keep order in the world for our benefit almost since our beginning as a country.
The dogma of violence is not the preserve of conservatives alone. Two months after he was inaugurated, Barack Obama committed to maintaining “our military dominance” and to “have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world.”
This is not cheap. We spend more on defense than all the others nations in the world. And this includes our allies! No one seriously argues that we need this much military power for actual defense against credible threats, but since World War II as Eisenhower predicted, we take for granted that we need to be in a perpetual state of readiness for war.
Now, we are changing the very nature of the wars we wage by three things: one, an all volunteer armed force in which only 1% of our population bears the actual brunt of warfare and the resulting physical and psychological damages, which has enabled the rest of us to go about business as usual almost as if there was no war at all, two, the use of drones to kill people who end up on our government hit list without concern about what country they are in, and, finally, the use of cyber warfare effected by loosing computer viruses which can disable machinery, for example, the centrifuges which enrich uranium in Iran. This is done stealthily and up until recently, our government has not acknowledged participation in such things. And what we do to others in war, will eventually be done to us.
Since 9/11 the way we wage war has had so little impact on the majority of US citizens that we were told by our President, George W. Bush in his address to Congress on September 20, 2001, that we were to live our lives, hug our children, uphold our values, participate in the economy and pray for the victims. To quote George Packer in the New Yorker Magazine’s September 12, 2011 issue which was a sort of ten year retrospective on the implications of what happened on 9/11, in an article called “Coming Apart”, “Never was the mismatch between the idea of the war and the war itself more apparent. Everything had changed, Bush announced, but not to worry—nothing would change.”
Theologies always include a soteriology or a doctrine about salvation or deliverance. In the theology of violence, violence itself brings salvation. Think about any Western you can remember or the Die Hard movies, video games, or maybe Star Trek or Star Wars…In every case there is ‘bad’ violence symbolizing evil, which must overcome using ‘good’ violence. It is so ingrained that we don’t even think about what it means.
In politics, the military becomes the chosen instrument of our salvation. “The theology of violence gives divine sanction to military power used in the service of national/imperial policies. In other words, war is not just about what we do, it is about who we are.”
I felt this way when I visited Hiroshima. Dave and I were the only Caucasians in the memorial building at the time. There were pictures of the Enola Gay flying in to drop the bomb. There were pictures of the negative imprints of bodies left on buildings the people were standing by when they were vaporized. I was feeling pretty defensive. I remember thinking, “You don’t have any pictures of Pearl Harbor here. You started something and we finished it. You shouldn’t have messed with us.” ….Since then, I have met some Japanese people and heard stories about how bad it was in Japan during the war, and I have read a little more history, and I think our government knew that Japan was losing the war by the time the bombs were dropped. We had bombed their rail centers, including our sister city of Hanamaki. Their navy was nearly defunct. They were so desperate they were sending kamikaze at us.