The title of the get out the vote initiative of the UUA called, “UU the Vote” makes me wonder what it would take to actually make voting in our country, and other aspects of our democratic process, reflect UU principles? Which is to say, what if our democracy was actually democratic?
Today we are in the middle of a series of sermons looking at the Seven Principles of our UU faith, as they appear in the current Article II of our UUA bylaws. Our principle for today is the fifth principle, “The right of conscience and the use of the Democratic Process within our congregations and in society at large.”
I am also using this sermon series to advance the fifth of the five tasks of interim ministry.
These five tasks are the work that congregations are asked to do as they move through an interim period between ministries.
Those five tasks begin with looking at the history of the congregation to lift up any patterns or habits that might need to be confronted before we fall again into an old error. We did some of that work last fall. Next we look at issues of leadership, asking the question of what do we want from our professional leaders, and our lay-leaders, and how do we hold them accountable. We did that last fall as well. In the winter months we looked at the tasks of mission and vision, asking, what is this congregation here to do, and where do we want to go.
We haven’t finished that work, but I hope we’ve made good preparation in getting us started thinking about those issues. It will now be the task of the recently named Search Committee, to help us arrive at more specific answers to those four questions of history, leadership, mission, and vision as they prepare the materials that describe us to the ministers we hope will apply.
The fifth task of an interim time is to notice that the congregation is not alone, that we are connected to other organizations that help us do our work and that can support us in times of need. These partners include other UU congregations in the area, interfaith congregations in the area, the UUA regional and national staff, and other non-profit organizations in our area doing work on issues that we care about.
Today, as we talk about the UU value of democracy, named in our fifth principle, I want to lift up the UUA initiative that our congregation has been involved in over the last few years, the initiative titled UU the Vote.
Like all non-profit, tax-exempt organizations, our church and the UUA, are disallowed from engaging in partisan politics. We may not endorse a particular candidate running for any political office, nor support one political party over another generally.
We also may not devote more than five percent of our church budget, including staff time advocating on political issues of any kind.
But there is no restriction on a church expressing positions on social issues. Of course a church is allowed to take a principled stance on issues such as housing, climate change, women’s rights, and so on. It wouldn’t be against the law for a minister to tell the congregation how they should vote on an ballot initiative, though not on candidates, though I wouldn’t do that.
So the UU the vote initiative, isn’t about helping particular candidates get elected, but simply about advancing our UU values in the world, including the value of democracy.
Our congregation has participated in letter writing campaigns reminding people who live in certain targeted swing states of the importance of voting. We didn’t tell them how to vote, just encouraged them to exercise their right to vote. Other aspects of the UU the Vote initiative include voter registration, education on the issues, get-out-the-vote drives, like our letter-writing campaign, and protecting voter rights.
I’m proud of our involvement in the UU the Vote initiative and I hope that our congregation will continue to be involved in the future.
But in thinking about the name of the initiative, UU the Vote, I began to wonder what it would look like if we actually did UU the Vote? What if that title were actually the mission of the initiative, and what if we actually succeeded? What would it look like, if the Vote, were UU’d?
Now I don’t mean, what if only Unitarian Universalists voted. The goal of UU the Vote is to expand the vote. The goal is to get more people to vote. When we wrote letters to people in Texas, and Georgia, and North Carolina, we didn’t know whether the person was likely to vote blue or red, only that they were a registered voter who hadn’t voted in the last election, and we hoped they would now.
Why would we want to do that? Why would we want to encourage a voter who might vote against our interests to go to the poll? Wouldn’t we be better off if the folks who vote against us stayed home? Wouldn’t it be better if the ignorant, and the bigoted, and the backward, and the mean, and the wrong-headed, conspiracy-theory blinded, xenophobic, hypocritical, selfish, and just plain stupid, Americans didn’t vote?
No. It wouldn’t be better.
It wouldn’t be better because those people wouldn’t go away after the election. They’d still be here. And their not voting is not going to make them any less bigoted, or ignorant about the issues, or open their eyes to the absurdity of the conspiracy-theory they’ve been following.
Whether they voted, or not, or particularly if they had been prevented from voting in some way, those folks would still be with us, still in the populace, still living in our neighborhoods, still caring about the parks and the roads, their children mixing with ours in the schools, still experiencing the same hardships in life that we do and wanting to fix the problems.
Silencing their voices, our hoping certain people would shut up voluntarily, or ignoring them when they do speak, doesn’t make them go away. They are part of our society. Part of our community. Part of the demos.
The democratic system is founded on the liberal principle that the truth is best found among the collective wisdom of all the persons who wish to contribute their voice to the good of the whole. Each of us knows a piece of the truth from our experience. We share our opinions, and back them up with evidence. We debate and we discuss. And sometimes when a decision has to be made, we take a vote. And then we go back to sharing opinions, backing up with evidence, debating and discussing, in an iterative process that slowly, frustratingly slowly, gets us closer to the truth, and to a better society for all.
Now notice, just to be clear, I said that each person has a piece of the truth. I did not say that each person has their own truth, that’s the post-modernist view that leads to anarchy, not democracy. And no one person has the whole truth, that’s authoritarianism. In a democracy we hold there is one truth, but not found in a person, or a holy book, nor even in a class of people, or “people like us”. The truth is found somewhere in the midst of all of us. It is the job of all of us not to retreat into our own separate corners, or sides, or exclude difficult people from participating in the process, but to work together to build up the truth amongst us all.
That’s democracy.
And because democracy is a UU value, to UU the vote, would mean creating and maintaining a process where all persons are invited to participate equally in finding our shared truth. And when that process of shared government is broken, as in many ways our democracy is today, to UU the Vote means repairing the brokenness.
In many ways, our democratic system in the US is broken.
UU the Vote speaks directly to the issue of voter suppression, where laws are designed to make it harder for some people to vote to protect the power of the folks who are already in office.
Gerrymandering does the same thing, drawing district lines so politicians can choose their voters rather than the other way around.
Some anti-democratic policies are built into our US Constitution. As the Founding Fathers worked to create a system where the majority rules but the minority is protected, they created several systems that give out-sized power to some fortunately placed people. That the Senate has equal representation by state means Wyoming with its half a million residents gets the same two votes that California gets with its 39 million residents. The filibuster, which is not in the constitution, currently allows 41 Republican Senators, potentially representing less than one quarter of the US population to block almost all legislation.
That we don’t elect Presidents by popular vote but through the Electoral College has resulted in four President’s taking the oval office with fewer than half the votes. George W. Bush received about half a million fewer votes than Al Gore in 2000. Donald Trump received nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hilary Clinton in 2016. That the President gets to nominate Supreme Court Justices means that five of the nine current Supreme Court justices were appointed by Presidents who lost the popular vote: Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett.
You can’t claim that our democracy is broken using these examples of our system working just as it was designed in our Constitution, although the result is anti-democratic. But our democracy is broken in other ways.
Consider the rise of partisan news media. Consider the ease of creating and publishing mis-information, often with the deliberate intent to deceive. Consider the exorbitant amount of money it costs to run a political campaign. Consider the rise of political based violence, including the intimidation of death threats and the actual shooting of Rep. Scott Scalise, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Consider the frequency with which candidates for office foment distrust in our elections, sometimes after they’ve lost, sometimes even after they’ve won.
We think of democracy as a self-regulating system. Democracy is a system of checks and balances. Democracy is a system for holding a free and fair election. There are rules for how a candidate gets nominated, or how many signatures are required to place a proposition on the ballot. There are laws for how laws get made. And if a law is unconstitutional there’s a legal process to challenge the law in court. If we just follow the rules, we’ll muddle through to a workable democratic government and a free society where people can order their own lives toward their own happiness.
But as we saw most clearly during Donald Trump’s presidency, we aren’t just a democracy of laws; we are a democracy of social norms. It’s impossible to write laws for every circumstance. We ask the Supreme Court to interpret laws to cover situations that were unimaginable when they were written. A functioning democracy depends not on a comprehensive system of laws, but on a healthy system of social norms that we all follow voluntarily, just because we want to, and without ever imaging someone wouldn’t want to follow them. It took Trump to point out our failing and show just how broken our social system has become.
The Washington Post (“The Abnormal President” by David Montgomery, Nov. 10, 2020) published a list just after Trump lost the 2020 election of 20 norms that he violated while in office. Among them: personally profiting from official business; not releasing his tax returns; interfering in justice department investigations; insulting our allies, attacking judges, politicizing the military.
I haven’t even listed 10 yet, and the Post article has 20. And this was before the he tried to overturn the election.
The solution isn’t to write more laws. Yes, we should write good laws, but what Trump’s norm breaking presidency should make us realize, is that the health of our democracy doesn’t rest on a support of carefully written laws, but on the health of our society. Our democracy rests on the demos, on the people. Our democracy rests on the assumption, hopefully still true, that our US demos wants a democracy for ourselves.
The gravest threat to our democracy is not that we don’t have strong enough laws in place, to protect voter rights, and insure free and fair elections and counter partisan gerrymandering, and so on; the gravest threat is that so many of us have lost so much trust in each other: that we no longer trust a democratic system that depends on letting all people speak.
To UU the Vote, doesn’t mean only UUs should vote, or everyone should vote our way, but rather, we should work, as people who count democracy as one of our core values, to remake our society in line with the liberal principles that define our faith.
If we no longer believe that the best way forward as a country, for all of us, is found somewhere amidst the voices of all of us, then we have turned away from democracy.
If we think we would be better off if half the country just stayed home on election day, then we have turned away from democracy.
The gravest threat to our democracy is not electing the wrong person to the presidency, but in seeing that the folks who voted that person into office are wrong, and are so wrong, that there is no need to listen to them, to be curious about them, to seek to understand them. No possibility of living with them, so we’ll all move to Canada or Mexico. No need to honor or respect them. No possibility that at least some of them might be persuaded to change their minds and hearts if we treated them as persons of worth and dignity. No possibility that they might be suffering under some real injustice, that they are seeking equity for themselves not oppression for others, that we should feel compassion for them. No need to remember that in a responsible search for truth and meaning we need the voices of those who disagree with us, lest we fall into the illiberal mistake of thinking that we’ve already got all the truth on our side.
The mistake of thinking that there are “sides” at all if our goal is truly a world community of peace, liberty, and justice for all, no sides at all if we truly respect an interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
You see where I’m going here.
The answer to the current difficulty of upholding our UU fifth principle, lies in better upholding the other six.
If we were to UU the Vote, we would see that the answer to our democratic problems is not in fixing the democratic process (the language of our fifth principle) but in fixing our demos.
When we elected a President who so shamelessly and without consequences broke social norms, it should tell us that the social compact that undergirds our democracy was already broken. Thus, while it certainly matters who we vote for in the coming Presidential election, whoever wins it is the ill health of our demos that needs our attention: our distrust of each other, our lack of respect, our loss of civility. The way we care, or don’t care about each other. The way we value, or don’t value each other. The way we’re willing to write off half of our fellow citizens. The way we talk about each other, I mean both sides, dismissing others as ignorant, or deluded, or haters, or evil. When we exclude people from public spaces, or shout down dissenting voices, we are not defending democracy but creating authoritarianism, which is no better if it comes from the left than the right.
Our democracy needs healing because our demos needs healing.
The way we heal our democracy is by healing our demos. And the means of healing is right there in our seven principles. Seeing all people, right and left, red and blue, and across every other divide, as persons of worth and dignity. Seeking relationships of justice, equity, and compassion. Acceptance of one another, while we encourage growth in ourselves as well as others. A free and responsible search for truth, which means gathering all the pieces of truth from all persons of good will. A determination to build bridges, resist taking sides, banish “us and them”, but striving for a broad community stretching across the nation, even to all the world, and even to an interdependent web of all existence.