Talking about the 'L-word'
by Christopher L. Walton
At the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City, which I began
attending as a college student in 1991, the Rev. Tom Goldsmith invited
me and three other young adults to join him in a discussion one Sunday
about our so-called “Generation X.” We apparently displayed inadequate
admiration for the social revolutions of the 1960s—events that shaped
the world we were born into—because one older member of the congregation
asked, “Don't you believe in the sixties?” One of my friends on the panel
replied, “We saw how they turned out.”
It was an illuminating, uncomfortable moment for me. In 1990, during
the lead-up to the first Gulf War, I had been active in the local antiwar
movement. In December, when the group decided to call for the immediate
total withdrawal of the U.S. from the Middle East, a position that seemed
reckless to me, I dropped out. But the truth was that I also resented
the nostalgia for the culture and politics of the anti–Vietnam War protests.
In my congregation, there were differences of opinion about the Gulf
War, but I doubt that many of us saw a meaningful distinction between
our liberal religion, our social liberalism, and our political affiliation.
Being a liberal of any sort in a religiously
and politically conservative society like Utah is a lonely business,
so we found little reason to grow introspective about our worldview.
We were happy to embrace the “L-word.” But my friend's answer in our
Generation X discussion revealed a gap: She thought of herself as a liberal,
too, but not in the way of Unitarian Universalists who lived through
the 1960s. Which aspects of liberalism properly belong to Unitarian
Universalism? How much must we “believe in the sixties”?
Late nineteenth-century Unitarians believed in “the Progress of Mankind
onward and upward forever”—the inexorable liberalization of the world.
But history didn't go the way they expected. By the 1940s, war, totalitarianism,
and economic calamity clearly showed that other trends were on the rise,
too, leading the Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams to announce: “Liberalism
is dead. Long live liberalism!” You might say that Adams asked the religious
liberals of his day, “How much must we believe in the 1880s?”
One could take a philosophical approach, weighing different ideas against
each other to see which are more truly liberal. Liberty or equality?
Democracy or minority rights? Adams cautioned that any ideal turns
all too quickly into ideology—as a theologian, he called it idolatry—but
few of us arrive at our political opinions by way of philosophy.
George Packer, a writer for the New Yorker and Mother
Jones, writes
in his memoir Blood of the Liberals: “Everyone is born into
a given historical constellation of ideas, formulations, alternatives,
and for most people they become the four walls of available thought.” He
explores the constellation of ideas we recognize as modern liberalism
by recounting three crises in his family history. His mother's father,
George Huddleston, was a populist Democratic congressman from Birmingham,
Alabama,
from 1915 to 1935 . Mentally of the nineteenth century, Huddleston could
not square his Jeffersonian ideals and commitment to “common people” with
the emergence of big government; he entered Congress as a Southern progressive,
but left twenty years later calling himself a “hidebound conservative.”
George Packer's father, Stanford law professor Herbert Packer, was the
son of Jewish immigrants, but Herbert never discussed his parents, ethnicity,
or religious heritage. He was “a procedural, civil-libertarian, John
Stuart Mill, Adlai Stevenson, Eugene McCarthy liberal.” As provost at
Stanford during the student revolutions of the late sixties, Professor
Packer was also the target of radical students' outrage. In 1969, at
the age of 43, he suffered a stroke that ended his career. George was
8 . Three years later his father committed suicide. Blood
of the Liberals is a son's attempt to understand a personal and generational tragedy.
In the final third of the book, Packer describes his attempts in the
1980s and ' 90s to find the stirrings of a new, popular liberalism. “By
the time I entered adolescence, liberalism seemed able to thrive only
in the rarefied world of college campuses and eccentric city precincts,” he
writes. He joined the Peace Corps and the Democratic Socialists. He even
checked out the Promise Keepers. “I did not want to accept Christ as
my savior,” he explains, “but I wanted to be part of a great mass of
men of every color, from every corner of the country, joined together
in a flicker of community.” He came away disappointed. By the end of
the book, finished just before George W. Bush became president, he wonders, “What
if the great causes lie in the past?”
Throughout his memoir, Packer focuses on the tension between the rise
of an elite caste with its own interests and values—the intellectuals,
bureaucrats, and experts who dominate modern institutions, and who incidentally
make up the social world from which almost every Unitarian Universalist
congregation draws its members—and the popular movements, sometimes progressive
and sometimes reactionary, that drive American democracy. Although
he never mentions Unitarian Universalism, Packer's portrayal of the liberal
middle class of the fifties and sixties gave me more insight into the
worldview of mid-century liberal religion than anything I've read. Modern
Unitarian Universalism was, like Packer, “born into a given historical
constellation of ideas”—and as that constellation of ideas has been eclipsed
in much of our public life, we have sometimes grown doctrinaire and defensive
in our political thinking even as we proclaim the tolerance and diversity
of our theology. Perhaps we would be served by thinking through
the “specialized notions” of liberalism we take for granted. Perhaps
it is time for us to ask each other: Which aspects of liberalism really
do belong to Unitarian Universalism?
Since September 11, 2001, Packer has written extensively on the prospect
for citizen reengagement in an age of terrorism. The new anthology he edited,
The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas
in America and the World (Perennial 2003 ; $13.95 ), argues that “citizens
of a democracy need to know what they're fighting for, and to believe in
it,” but he sees
Bush's approach as dangerous and distorted. The book attempts to chart
a liberal path between “Cheney and Chomsky,” as American Prospect editor
Michael Tomasky puts it in his essay on foreign policy. Although hardly
unified in its argument, the book is a helpful model of self-critical
liberal thought.
Christopher L. Walton is senior editor
of UU World.
: 54-55
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