Successful social change movements build strong and wide coalitions. In building coalitions it’s important to define our goal as narrowly as possible so we don’t end up excluding potential allies based on disagreement over an issue not actually relevant to our shared goal.
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We’ve been looking at the big three questions of spirituality this year, the questions of identity, meaning, and purpose: “Who am I?” “Why does it matter?” And “What should I do?”
As we focus now to the question of purpose, we begin to ask what should be our work in the world? What should we do?
In pursuit of the goals that we named when we talked about where people find meaning in life: in pursuit of wisdom, or joy, or beauty, of whatever… what should I do? What should I do that would bring more of what I seek into my life?
Or in terms of the spiritual question of identity, once we know who we truly are, what should I do so that my authentic self has the opportunity to express itself and flourish? What should I do with my life?
And when we lift those goals beyond the personal to the universal, we can ask, in a world that needs more wisdom, more joy, more beauty, what should I do? How could I contribute my life toward the achievement of the universal goals? If we think of those goals as ultimates or as “divine aims”, how do we position our lives in alignment with the direction that the divine movement wants to go?
Or, if we think about identity not as personal identity but as communal identity, the question becomes, “Now that we know who we are, what should we do, together.” What is the purpose of this community? What is the mission of this church?
The question of mission is a big and important question. It’s also one of the core questions of a church in an interim period. What do you want to do? You need a leader to help you do, what? Potential ministers will want to know so they can know whether the work you want to do is work they want to do with you.
We will get to a more in-depth look at mission later on, but just let me say briefly that asking what is “the” mission of the church is the wrong question, because churches are formed to do many things. We aren’t a non-profit organization gathered around one particular issue. People come to church for many things, to do many things. Even in our current church’s mission statement we name more than one thing:
An inclusive religious community – that’s work unto itself
That inspires personal and spiritual growth
To care for one another
To strive for social justice
for a healthy environment
and for a peaceful world.
It’s appropriate for a church to have an expansive mission statement. The mission of a church should be plural, not singular.
But this truth about churches raises an interesting question. We have six named goals in our church’s mission statement. Or seven, if you count personal and spiritual growth as two separate things. We are gathered to do many things, for many people.
But what if a person wants to work with us on five of those goals but isn’t particularly interested in the other one or two? Would they still be welcome in our community?
What if, for instance, the goal of personal growth was meaningful to you, but “spiritual” growth sounds like mumbo-jumbo to you and frankly you could do without the God talk and the prayer, and so on?
Or what if, more drastically, someone was really fired up about one of our goals, but thought we were entirely mis-guided about one of the others and wanted just the opposite?
Hoping for a healthy environment or a peaceful world are pretty universal goals. But imagine a community that had a collection of more controversial goals as their mission statement: specific policy positions around many diverse controversial issues: guns, immigration, abortion, sexual orientation and gender identity, policing, healthcare, racial equity, fossil fuels, free speech, the place of religion in society and so on… What kind of community could you make if every member had to sign off on every one of the dozen or so position statements of that organization? How many people could you gather, completely like-minded about every one of those issues? And how many people who could be valuable allies around some of those issues, would you lose, because they disagreed about something else?
What I want to do in this series of sermons about the spiritual question of “purpose” between now and the end of the church year in June, is talk not about specific issues we might want to work on, but rather the question of how we work. How do we make effective social change? Whatever the issue, what are the strategies that lead to success?
I started two weeks ago by talking about the importance of community. I told some stories from my childhood and young adult years working with the AIDS Project Los Angeles about how making social connections with neighbors and friends and colleagues led to successful political action. I mentioned, two weeks ago, the kind of person called a “connector” as the writer Malcolm Gladwell calls them. These are the people who seem to know everybody and are extremely valuable in forming broad communities. What we know about Connectors is not that they have more friends than other people, but that they have many more “weak ties” in the language of sociologist Mark Granovetter. And weak ties make a difference.
Here’s a few paragraphs from an article in the New York Times from May 6, 2019 by Allie Volpe, titled, “Why You Need a Network of Low-Stakes, Casual Friendships”
When I was laid off in 2015, I told people about it the way any good millennial would: By tweeting it. My hope was that someone on the fringes of my social sphere would point me to potential opportunities.
To my surprise, the gambit worked.
Shortly after my public plea for employment, a friend of a friend sent me a Facebook message alerting me to an opening in her department. Three rounds of interviews later, this acquaintance was my boss. (She’s now one of my closest friends).
Think of the parents you see in the drop-off line at school. Your favorite bartender. The other dog owners at the park. The sociologist Mark Granovetter calls these low-stakes relationships “weak ties.” Not only can these connections affect our job prospects, they also can have a positive impact on our well-being by helping us feel more connected to other social groups, according to Dr. Granovetter’s research. Other studies have shown weak ties can offer recommendations (I found my accountant via a weak tie) and empower us to be more empathetic. We’re likely to feel less lonely, too, research shows.
A 2014 study found that the more weak ties a person has (neighbors, a barista at the neighborhood coffee shop or fellow members in a spin class), the happier they feel. Maintaining this network of acquaintances also contributes to one’s sense of belonging to a community, researchers found.
Instead of considering these minor brushes of socialization throwaway interactions, cultivating low-stakes relationships can pay dividends.
How many of those weak ties people you encounter are going to agree with you about every issue you care about? The barista may agree with you about climate change, but not gun regulation. The friend at the dog park may disagree about immigration policy but agree with you about a woman’s right to choose. Maybe you disagree with the woman next to you at spin class about school choice, but you could work together on affordable housing. Maybe a person’s religious beliefs cause them to disapprove of same-sex marriage, but you could still work together on supporting a local food bank.
So the strategy that I want to offer today, when organizing a community for social change work, is to be laser-focused on the issue you really want to work on and then invite into your coalition everybody who wants to work on that issue, laying aside for the moment, whether they agree or disagree with you about other issues. Don’t lose allies on the issue you’re working on, just because that person may not be an ally on some other issue that isn’t the work at hand.
In Unitarian Universalism, we gather all of the social change issues we care about under the label, “social justice.” The word justice appears twice in our Unitarian Universalist seven principles. It’s the only value that does appear twice. We affirm and promote: “Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations,” and “The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.”
Justice is encountered in personal relationships in the second principle. Justice emerges in the context of world community in the sixth principle. The key to both those principles of justice is relationships. The key to making any kind of effective social change is first through building community.
That’s why I started this series on strategies for effective social change by talking about making broad community. Change never happens until you build community and the way to build a large and politically powerful coalition is to stay very focused on the particular issue at hand, and then to invite everybody who agrees with you about that one issue to join your movement, even if you disagree with them about practically everything else.
I learned this lesson when I worked at the AIDS Project Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s. Here’s that story of how staying narrowly-focused enabled creating a broad coalition that succeeded in making significant social change, in this case the Americans with Disabilities Act signed by George H. W. Bush in 1990.
In the 1980s, persons with HIV were routinely discriminated against in housing and employment. HIV positive persons were denied medical care, hospital beds, dental services. Emergency workers would refuse to touch HIV-positive persons. Families of persons who died from AIDS often struggled to find a mortuary that would attend to the body. All of this not from any rational fear of infection, but from simple discrimination.
Folks I worked with at the AIDS Project Los Angeles, worked to convince the Federal Government to recognize that persons with a chronic illness, such as HIV/AIDS, were disabled in a way, and just as deserving of protection against disability-based discrimination as were persons with physical and mental and other forms of disability.
Prior to the 1970s, the obstacles to full participation in society faced by disabled persons were considered to be inherent in the disability itself. In the early 1970s, following the examples of the Black civil rights and women’s and gay rights movements, persons with disabilities argued that the obstacles faced by disabled persons were not due to the disabled person’s condition, but due to society’s biases.
In other words, it’s not my being in a wheelchair that prevents me from leaving the house, it’s the fact that public spaces can only be accessed by stairs and that every street corner has a curb, and that busses have no room for my chair, and that if I was out all day I wouldn’t be able to find a bathroom I could use. Those are the issues that prevent me from living fully in our society, not my disability.
Prior to the 1970s, our culture dealt with persons with disabilities by removing them from society. We created special institutions, or simply abandoned folks to limited lives. Starting in the 1970s we switched the conversation to ask, “How could public spaces be altered to accommodate people with disabilities?” In other words, we recognized that this was a discrimination problem, not a disability problem. And the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act put that new thinking into Federal law.
But to get that law passed required bringing together all of those people with all of those various disabilities and building a coalition around our single struggle. It meant the HIV/AIDS advocates had to convince other folks that chronic illness was also a disability that should be included. It meant we had to avoid prioritizing some disabilities as more deserving of protection than others. It meant that when gays and lesbians showed up to the table that folks who thought it was perfectly acceptable to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation would be willing to look past that issue and welcome us as allies in working against disability discrimination. And it meant that gays and lesbians had to be able to keep our focus on the common goal of disability protection and not lose allies in that fight because they disagreed with us elsewhere.
In other words, we were able to make significant social change, because we stayed narrowly-focused on the issue of disability discrimination, and then welcomed in everyone who had a stake in that issue, regardless of what we all felt about other issues.
Too often, today, I see activist organizations operating under extensive purity tests where every potential partner must be screened on a host of important but unrelated issues before they are allowed to work on the issue at hand. What’s your position on Palestine? What’s your position on policing? What’s your position on trans-inclusion?
I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post last year when the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade was coming down. This was written by Lis Smith, a Democratic communications strategist who was at the helm of Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign. In the context of abortion rights, she talks about the problem of alienating allies by policing our language rather than keeping our eyes on the prize. She wrote:
“Last week, the House Pro-Choice Caucus released a memo denouncing common-sense terminology such as “choice” and “safe, legal, and rare” as “harmful,” and urging members of Congress to instead swap in language such as “decision” and “safe, legal, and accessible.” At this moment, {Ms. Smith writes] with fundamental rights under attack, changing commonly understood labels that tens of millions of Americans identify with, such as “pro-choice,” would be like trying to rename the Titanic — as it sinks.
Most Americans don’t walk around every day calling themselves “pro-decision,” nor do they lament that abortions are too rare. Anyone who supports a woman’s right to choose should be welcomed with open arms into the movement to protect it — regardless of what terminology they use. But when we engage in unintelligible activist-speak, we not only confuse people who share our views, but we also have the potential to alienate them.”
This is the mistake I don’t want us to make, because the issues are too big and too important to lose because of some other disagreement not actually on the table.
As Unitarian Universalists, we cherish the words of the 16th-century, Transylvanian Unitarian Bishop, Francis David who wrote, “We need not think alike to love alike.”
David’s words open up space for those of us who care about common things to work together even if our thoughts are different. As long as we work toward the same goal, what difference does it make if you do the work inspired by one belief or value, and I do the work inspired by a different belief or value? The same practice that enables a Unitarian Universalist church to contain multiple theological beliefs within one community of shared values, ought to allow us to work beside people who may not share our thoughts on all things but are willing to share our work in this one thing.
As the eighteenth-century Universalist Hosea Ballou says, “If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good. Let us endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace.”
A “unity of the spirit” means peacefully working together toward our shared goal. It means coalitions come together peacefully because they seek common purpose. And perhaps, once that work is done, the coalition may come apart and the members resort themselves to work on other goals. A group who had been allies on a recent project, maybe aren’t with us on the next issue. A person who had worked against us on a previous issue, now finds themselves on our side on this new issue, and we welcome them.
This is the Universalist theology at its most fundamental. No one is damned eternally. No one is permanently outcast. Everyone is a piece of the singular divine order. Everyone will find their way to salvation. God will leave no one out and constantly seeks the enticement that will draw the most far-flung sinner back to community.
We should strive to do the same.