Sermons: "Voting as a Spiritual Practice

I have neglected posting my sermons so I'm catching up today. This was a sermon before Election day

Voting As A Spiritual Practice:

What’s at Stake this Election Year

© Rev. Susan Karlson

September 30, 2012

Unitarian Church of Staten Island

          Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame once wrote:

“I am a liberal and liberalism is the politics of kindness.  Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.”

          Well, Keillor certainly expresses the beauty and virtue of the liberal perspective.   It’s certainly a part of what Unitarian Universalists uphold—community spirit, tolerance, learning, freedom, all of the above.  Voting is a part of being spiritual—putting our conscience and our principles into practice.

          That old saying, “politics and religion don’t mix” conjures up images of vinegar and water. “Politics and religion do mix”.  They dissolve like sugar in water.

The fifth Unitarian Universalist principle reinforces this connection—to heed our conscience, to give each person a voice and a vote.  Voting through a democratic process is central to how this church functions as a community whenever we vote to call a minister, to elect officers, Board members and the Nominating Committee.

          We make moral decisions fairly quickly through our intuition according to Jonathan Haidt’s research in The Righteous Mind—Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Once our minds are made up, we may use our reason to justify the decisions we’ve already made. 

Religious liberals are often bullish on autonomy and individual expression, what Haidt calls an “ethic of autonomy” (location # 1873-1931).  Our 19^th century Transcendentalist forebears like Emerson and Thoreau encouraged listening for the beat of a drummer within, that was like that of no other person.  Even in a country that values free speech so highly, Unitarian Universalists value it even more.  And sometimes expressing that rugged individualism gets us in trouble when we try to build a “Religious community” linked to others who don’t place as high a premium on individual freedoms.

We in the West so often neglect the two other Ethics that Haidt describes—the Ethic of Community and the Ethic of Divinity.  The Ethic of Community affirms that we are “members of larger entities such as families, team, armies, companies, tribes, and nations”.  (location 1883).  Western culture, particularly in the United States, emphasizes freedom of speech and independent expression above the spirit of community.  Many other cultures and nations take the opposite tack.

          And in other places and religions, the Ethic of Divinity is treasured above all else.  It is the understanding, as Haidt says, that “people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels in which a divine soul has been implanted.”  From this ethic, people are children of God whose bodies are temples and whose actions can uphold the sacred order of things or degrade it (location 1891).  

A public issue that emerged last month concerned the film, Innocence of Muslims.  Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, stated that the United States government had nothing to do with the release of the film and that the government absolutely rejects its message and content.  She spoke of religious tolerance as part of the bedrock essential to this country.  Then she explained how free speech was another basic right in this country and that we could not keep that video off the internet though we deplore it.  She then spoke about the intolerable violence and killings in Egypt and Libya. 

Jeremy Waldron appeared on Brian Lehrer’s show and talked about how religious tolerance and freedom of speech are both First Amendment freedoms and how Clinton addressed them both—the need to speak up when something goes against the grain of religious tolerance and acceptance of people’s intrinsic worth and the coveted  Freedom of Speech and expression. 

Waldron’s book, The Harm in Hate Speech, is not about censorship or controlling people’s hateful thoughts but it does tell about other countries that do have laws restricting hate speech through visible permanent or semi-permanent publications inciting people to violence against particular racial, religious or minority groups.   Waldron writes in connection to racial publications or announcements, “The question is about the direct targets of the abuse.  Can their lives be led, can their children be brought up, can their hopes be maintained and their worst fears dispelled, in a social environment polluted by these materials?  Those are the concerns that need to be answered when we defend the use of the First Amendment to strike down laws prohibiting the publication of racial hatred.”(p. 33, The Harm in Hate Speech by Jeremy Waldron).

Though we may shun talking about politics and religion, they are joined together in how people vote and their ethical decision making.  We make political choices derived from our ethical world view.  And our ethics and sense of conscience are infused with our religious perspectives. 

          Some people may think that Voting cannot possibly be a spiritual value or action.   We can’t even legally talk about it in a church or religious institution.  Though religions can’t endorse a particular candidate, rate candidates on issues, let candidates use our resources unless we make them available to all candidates or make campaign contributions, there are a number of things that churches like ours can do. 

Voting is critical but this year it seems that more is at stake.  There are a number of voter identification laws that disproportionately impact people of color and other minorities.   Statistics show that 25% of African Americans, 20% of Asian Americans, 19% of Latino Americans, !8% of citizens between the ages of 18 and 24 and 15% of citizens with an annual income lower than 35,000 do not have government issued identification cards and 34 states have introduced legislation requiring them.  Four states cut back on early voting which severely restricts many working class voters’ ability to get to the polls.  The practice of deleting minorities from the voting rolls continues in Florida.

The Unitarian Universalist common read book this year is The New Jim Crow.  Some of us heard the author, Michelle Alexander, speak at General Assembly telling how mass incarceration of young men of color is disenfranchising even more people of color than the Jim Crow laws and practices.  Incarcerating young Black and Latino men effectively eliminates their ability to vote, get housing assistance, Food Stamps and often a job, making it likely that they will reoffend just to survive. 

Because of all of the ways that people are being disenfranchised, a number of community organizations, clergy and religious groups like Make the Road NY, El Centro del Inmigrante, Project Hospitality, St. Philip’s Baptist Church, the Staten Island Clergy Leadership and the Arab American Association of New York in Brooklyn are joining together to form Verrazano Civic Engagement Table to register people to vote and actually get out the vote to support the issues that most affect people from Bay Ridge to Port Richmond.  This represents another step in linking voting as a spiritual practice.

During General Assembly, a number of us took a training class to help with the naturalization process for people who wished to become citizens.  Our hope was that they then would vote as new citizens.  I still hope that we can do more with that training here locally.

So what’s at stake this election year?  Voter suppression, platforms that will seriously impact health care, the safety net for Medicare and Medicaid, public education, unemployment, the war in Afghanistan and our relationships with countries around the globe.  It’s important to get out the vote every year but during this Chalice Year, let us affirm the Unitarian Universalist fifth principle to participate in the democratic process and light the fire of commitment.  May we practice what Garrison Keillor called the “politics of kindness.,,  tolerance, …community spirit,” (Keillor,  quoted in “The Righteous Mind—Why Good People are divided by Politics and Religion”)…and become the angels, teachers, judges, philosophers, enforcers and guardians of our better nature.  So may it be.