January 28, 2024

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command.

What is a prophet? Someone who speaks on behalf of God. Not just someone who says they speak on behalf of God, but someone appointed by God. And the difference matters, as we heard this morning:

Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable.

How will we know who speaks on behalf of God? Good question. And what will happen to those who pretend to speak on behalf of God?

But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak–that prophet shall die.

So, this role of prophet is important and perilous. And it requires at least two things. Two things to make you into a prophet. One, you need to be chosen to speak on God’s behalf. And, you need to have an audience that believes that you are a prophet.

Obviously, being chosen is the more important quality. But having an audience is important as well. What good is it to speak on behalf of God if you do not tell anyone about it? If you keep God’s words all to yourself. So having an audience is important for someone who is a prophet. Which leads to a different question: if you have an audience of people who believe that you are a prophet, does that make you into a prophet?

This Sunday’s sermon is based on the topic that was snowed out a few weeks ago. I thought it was too important to let go of, so it bumped a different topic that I can take up another time. What is this high priority subject? Political polarization.

Ask the average person on the street about the political state of our country and you will likely hear something negative about our political environment. According to one survey by Pew Research, sixty-five (65) percent of Americans when asked how they feel about politics said that they often felt exhausted. Anyone out there feeling a little exhausted?

Fifty-five (55) percent said they often felt angry, while 56 percent said they rarely feel hopeful. When asked to describe the current state of American politics, many people used adjectives like divisive, corrupt, messy, and bad.

And a large majority of Americans, 78 percent, feel that the important issues facing our country are being ignored. That would suggest wide scale agreement among Americans. But what exactly are those issues that are being ignored?

Well, that is where polarization comes into play. When you ask someone what are the important issues facing our country, you will get differing answers. Using more survey data, among Democrats, eighty-one (81) percent of those asked said gun violence was a very big problem in the United States, while only 38 percent of Republicans said gun violence was a big problem. Pew Research used the phrase “very big problem,” so I am just copying them.

On the question of illegal immigration, seventy (70) percent of Republicans said it was a very big problem, while only 25 percent of Democrats agreed. Climate change was a very big problem for 64 percent of Democrat and only 14 percent of Republicans. And to cap off the numbers section of the sermon, fifty-five (55) percent of Democrats thinks racism is a very big problem for our country while only 14 percent of Republicans thought so.

When the majority of Americans say that we are not addressing important questions facing our nation, this is not a sign of wide agreement because they do not share the same social priorities, the same “To Do” list. In fact, this stark disagreement over the importance of various issues stands at the heart of the concern that we are politically polarized.

Now, time for a story.

About twenty years ago, I was very involved in Massachusetts politics. I attended state party conventions, I went to the caucuses, and I served on our local town political committee. Which party was that? Most in the congregation know because I have mentioned it, but I will give you a different piece of information that will help you almost perfectly guess which party I have been a member of since high school. I am a Unitarian.

And the vast majority of Unitarians are self-reported Democrats or lean that way politically. If you do not fit that definition, please, please do not check out or sign off. This is not a sermon in which I tell you to vote one way or another–actually, not even close. I will get deeper into the issues and into some nuances because we as a nation need a heaping helping of nuance. I mention this demographic factoid about Unitarians for a not immediately obvious, but eventually important reason, that I will return to later.

I was a Democrat and I worked on various political campaigns, my own and those of others. I lost one election and then won twice. Now, I have little to do with politics. Why? Disenchantment.

Twenty years ago, I noticed that some people in the state party were looking to use the party’s state platform of issues to give out report cards to elected officials. They would go through the person’s political positions and voting record and assess a score.

The thought process was that officials needed to be accountable for how they voted and which positions they took. And the state platform was the yardstick people were to use to make those assessments. At that time, the Massachusetts Democratic State Platform was over 10,000 words long. Which was far too long to me, but not nearly as long as some wanted. At the time, there were sections on trade with Burma, a nuclear free zone in the state, and proclamations about world peace. Those are not bad ideas, but I thought they did not belong in Massachusetts’ party platform when we had absolutely no ability to address them.

So, I rewrote it. And I cut it down from 10,000 words to 150. Why did I cut it down so much? Because I had no idea what it meant to be a B minus Democrat or an 80 percent Democrat or whatever report card system was going to be used.

For example, I personally knew lifelong Democrats who also happened to be lifelong Catholics. People who supported everything Democrats stood for, but they could not agree on that topic. Personally, I was a pro-business Democrat who was often accused of sounding too much like a Republican when I spoke about the economy. So, I changed things. I wanted the party platform to focus on key questions facing our state, like healthcare, the environment, equality and the like.

And my effort was rejected by the State Party Committee. During a hearing, the chair actually opened my presentation up to cross-examination from the public. I was peppered with questions as to how I could ignore the plight of world peace or why I would soften their exacting language about abortion. I responded that Massachusetts cannot make peace in the world. And that not every Democrat is pro-choice. Again, the effort failed. By the way, the chair of the committee was later convicted in a bribery scandal and served three years in prison. Go figure.

After that meeting, a group of people followed me out the door. They wanted copies of everything I had prepared and they wanted to try to continue working toward changes. These were people I would describe as lunch bucket Democrats: union organizers, Irish and Italian Catholics, and others. They wanted to build more room into the party and into its conversations.

Here we are twenty years later.

This is not just an old war story but an illustration of what political polarization involves. There used to be greater divergence of opinion within American political parties. It was not oxymoronic to speak about a pro-choice Republican or a pro-life Democrat.

But if today you heard someone’s position on the question of abortion or immigration or climate change, you could with near perfect accuracy predict their political party. That is a huge change.

Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency. George Bush, Senior signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. And Bill Clinton made major and, one might say aggressive, cuts in various entitlement programs. But things change.

Our political system strongly discourages deviation from ever tightening political identities. You need to make it through a primary system that generally attracts the most loyal and true-blue members of the party, making Democrats more and more liberal and Republicans more and more conservative. The old logic was that the candidates would modulate their messages in the general election, but that does not seem to be the case these days as people tend to one up themselves on the ends of the political spectrum. In essence, that report card system I was worried about years ago has come into effect in both parties.

But surely that dynamic has nothing to do with the authoritarian shift that seems to be happening in one of our political parties. Surely, we can agree that one side occupies the moral high ground on protecting our American way of life. And yet presidential candidates are winning or losing by the same close margins since the first Obama victory, with a few points here and there changing. The rhetoric has changed but the results are the same.

Years ago, during the Reagan Administration, the term Reaganomics was coined. In its simplest description, Reaganomics was about trickle-down economic theory. If you allow those operating the economy, like corporations and the wealthy, to act more freely, the increased economic activity will eventually increase the prosperity of all Americans. Get rid of regulations, lower taxes, and cut government spending and everyone would be better off.

Many people credit these policies with ending the high inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s. But it also did little to increase the effective take home wages of the typical American worker. Bear in mind that unions were also greatly weakened in this timeframe. So, a common objection by liberals against conservatives is that trickle-down economics was self-serving and promoted income inequality. And I personally agree with that assessment, for what that’s worth.

Now if that is the case, one might then try to predict how working-class voters responded. Massive majorities for liberals? No, those prognostications did not play out. Over 60 percent of White men who did not attend college now vote for the party of Reagan. Over the years, I have heard this described as voting against your economic self-interest. Shouldn’t they be voting like we think they should be voting, which is like how we are voting?

This is the point when our assumptions about polarization become problematic.

There are reasons not to trust trickle-down economics. But that does not mean that you can instead put your trust in trickle-down government. Yes, trickle-down government. If capitalism does not help you, that is a problem but not a surprise. How should you react when the government does not help you? Or if you feel that the government is not helping you?

Public assistance programs are generally geared toward children and the elderly. There is “Transitional Assistance to Families with Dependent Children” and “Emergency Aid to the Elderly, Disabled, and Children.” If you need financial assistance, those are the primary sources available in Massachusetts. Notice who is not mentioned? Men. Non-elderly men. Bill Clinton’s reforms, by the way, led to a massive decline in recipients of federally funded welfare.

There are other programs to help the disabled and to get people health insurance, but this is not a concern about proper case management. It is about the perception that the government does not help someone. It does not help me. In fact, it hurts me more by helping all those other people by taking away my money in the form of taxes.

This may seem like a short-sighted attitude. Eventually someone will be elderly, one hopes. Eventually someone might be disabled, though one hopes not. But that existing sentiment about taxes does not necessarily change. Why? Because it requires someone to reevaluate themselves into the category of being elderly or disabled. And which of us is in a hurry to make that judgement?

This leads to another polarizing issue, immigration. Conservatives tend to look at immigration as a cause for alarm. How can we not control access to our country? How can we not police our borders? For some, this is an old economic argument, basically that they are coming to take our jobs. That is the same thing people said when the Irish came and then the Polish and then the Italians. They’re still saying it for Central Americans and West Africans.

But there is another issue that bothers people, the lack of order. There should be an orderly system with people getting in line and doing things by the book. There needs to be rules.

Conservatives tend to look at the world with a desire for order. Liberals tend to look at the world with a desire for fairness. That does not mean these are mutually exclusive attitudes, but they are potentially competing senses of the highest good. So, ask yourselves, which of these is truly good?

Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable.

Religious outlook also plays into this conversation about polarization. For example, Evangelical Christians strongly oppose access to abortion. It is an absolute, overriding issue for many of them. And there is little room for compromise on the subject.

But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak–that prophet shall die.

Before I mentioned Unitarians are often Democrats or lean Democratic. There are obvious reasons for this. Unitarians tend to be socially liberal.

They care about climate change. They want greater gun control. They advocate for more humane and expansive immigration policies. And they are generally strongly supportive of access to birth control and abortion services. I think that is a fairly accurate assessment, though I am sure some might disagree and some may hold more nuanced views. Again, we need to embrace nuance.

Now, if I were to ask anyone of you what your views were on one of those issues, what do you think I should say as a minister of this church, of this storied and august religious institution, if someone held a differing opinion?

There’s the door? Thanks but no thanks?

There are more polite ways of achieving that same result. But should that be the result? Is it in any way proper for me as the minister to say such things or even to think that way? And, of course, if it is a problem for me to speak or think that way, is it proper for anyone in this religious community to do so?

I will be talking about climate change in a few weeks, but what about someone who does not believe that human activity is primarily responsible for the climate changes we are seeing and suffering. Do they belong here? Do they belong in a religious community that expressly does not have a fixed religious creed?

You could argue that the facts state otherwise. That science states otherwise. And I completely agree with that logic and will be talking about that in a few weekends. But my preaching on a topic does not mean you all must go away believing every word of it. I am not that persuasive. I am not a prophet sent by God. I am simply one man trying to understand this crazy world of ours.

What about gun control? Again, I support controlling access to guns and making sure the gun violence we have seen over the past decade is halted. That weapons of war do not get onto the streets of our cities. But I know there are people who disagree with me. And I know there are people in our country who rely upon guns in ways I never had to. I have never needed to hunt to make ends meet. I do not live in a dangerous place or with a sense of personal danger on the streets. I have never used guns as a social activity, a common practice in many areas of the country, including dear old New England. These are law abiding folks being looked at as if they were not law abiding because of what less law abiding people have done—not entirely fair.

And then there is immigration. No one benefits from the messed-up system that we have. And many of our policies are ethically and ethnically questionable. We should not be restricting access to the U.S. because of one’s country of origin or any racial prejudices. But there are real world reasons to want better immigration control. By the way, Unitarians are the second most highly educated religious group in the United States. And, not coincidentally, most Unitarians do not have in the back of their mind a sincere worry that someone is going to take away their job.

One of the reasons political polarization is so challenging is that there are real differences in the ways people approach certain questions. And yet, I do not think political differences are the basis for controlling access to this building, to this religious community. I think we can engage in a hard but necessary spiritual practice: to appreciate that one’s political views are not the only ones possible. And that there is more to the relationships in religious community than political unanimity. So, no, no one is required to believe or to vote any particular way.

Again, there needs to be more nuance in the world. More curiosity for the stories of those who do not always agree with us but who might have reasons for how they think and what they believe. The very least we can do is to take the time to listen.

Now, a careful listener may have noticed that I did not talk much about two significant political questions: race and LGBTQ issues. Those are again areas of significant polarization about identity politics between the political parties. I have spoken about both topics at length and will continue to do so.

I do not think I should be able to bar the doors against someone who does not believe in climate change or opposes gun control. And I do not think anyone should be able to bar the doors to anyone because of their race or their ethnicity, because of who the love or how the identify themselves. We are in the process of trying to become a Welcoming Congregation, which expressly seeks to make this a community that not only welcomes LGBTQ folks but makes this a hospitable and caring environment for them. I would make the same observation about people of color, people regardless of their race or place of origin.

All are welcome into the door. And while we are here, while we are a part of this community, we need to act towards each other in certain ways. That means to be welcoming and not to do things which are not welcoming. We need not believe alike to be here, but we must love these precious neighbors as ourselves. We may not have a set creed that we follow, but I think I can hopefully say that we are all here at First Church to follow Jesus.

Amen