The Goal of World Community

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Story for All Ages

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For two and a half years back in the early ’90s, I lived in central Massachusetts. I was serving as Interim Minister of a small community church. I had the use of a lovely 1843 parsonage there and I took the occasion to buy (as advertised, I think it was, in the Second-to-Last Whole Earth Catalogue) a whole-earth flag. A flag, that is, with an image of the earth seen from outer space. As the parsonage was right on the village green with a prominent flagpole the whole set-up was perfect. After leaving New England in 1993, however, the flag had remained in storage until a couple of weeks after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks nineteen years ago; my twenty-one-year-old daughter came home from the University of New Mexico and declared her intention to hang it out front. My then-wife and I looked at each other for a second and gulped! But then we went, sure, let’s hang it up, where it remained for many months. I was nervous at first and comforted by the courage of my family members’ convictions. Plus, having it out there re-minded me what I believe in. And what makes sense to me religiously.

And politically, too, for that matter. In the years since September 11, 2001 the spirit of our Sixth Principle has not been heard from much. Our country, naturally enough, went through a surge of patriotism. This is by no means a bad thing. I love America. And I agree with the late William Sloan Coffin, Yale University Chaplain during the late ‘60s and later Minister of the Riverside Church in New York City when Coffin said, “Love of country is a wonderful thing. But why should love stop at the border?” The Sixth Unitarian Universalist Principle challenges us to love across borders, to uphold the other principles we believe in for everyone. The world over.

Western religion—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—all begin with the well-known stories found in the Book of Genesis. Reading these tales, and the subsequent scriptural elaboration of centuries, one sees how the ancient Hebrews’ idea of YHWH, their One God, grew and enlarged. How, what had been for Abraham little more than a family or clan god, evolved into a tribal god. And from that, over still more time, into a universal god. How the prophets, up to and including Jesus, expressed (or is it revealed?) a recipe for living harmoniously with that universal God. A God so non-provincial that (as Jesus poetically described it) she causes the rain to fall upon the rich and the poor alike, and brings sunshine to the both the just and the unjust. Such is one way to study the Old and New Testaments (and the Koran): as Western Civilization’s progressive and ever-deepening understanding of what it means to be radical monotheists, to worship the so-called Living God of Abraham, the Patriarchs, the Prophets, Jesus, and Mohammed. In other words, one way to understand the Bible, the Koran and these other world scriptures is as a record of growing human self-awareness of our sacred connections to one another—and to the natural world all around. Clearly, our Unitarian and Universalist forebears thought this way. Our forebears all the way back to ancient Israel thought this way.

It inspired them to strive to establish, here on earth communities of faith and good will, where justice and peace prevail. Indeed, this hope—the messianic hope for a new and harmonious order—was at the heart of Hebrew prophecy and central to Christian efforts over the centuries to establish “thy Kingdom come … on earth, as it is in heaven.” It inspired the pilgrims’ efforts to found on these shores “a new Zion.” Moreover, such hope inspired those who drafted our country’s democratic institutions, and somewhat paradoxically, pervades the mythic background informing the American Dream.

Within Unitarian Universalist tradition, the Sixth Principle specifically incorporates the messianic hope, if not the language, of earlier covenants from our UU past. As, for instance, the “Five Points of Unitarianism” preached by the progressive James Freeman Clarke in the late 19th Century, the final one being belief in “human progress onward and upward forever.” Or the 1935 Washington Declaration (Universalist) which affirmed “… the power of men of good will and sacrificial spirit to overcome all evil, and progressively to establish the kingdom of God.”

It was in this hopeful spirit that the renowned humanist Kenneth Patton, in the late 40s, announced himself as a world citizen. When I was a RE student at the Shaker Heights, Ohio Unitarian Church in the 50s and 60s, there was a church-wide effort to sign members up as World Federalists—a program to promote the concept of world citizenship. Sadly, the movement has had little effect; as Chalmers Johnson the late University of California author of several books on empires and imperial overreach wrote: “American foreign policy is not and really never has been focused on supporting and upholding the United Nations. Rather, American foreign policy has been based on domination.” Prior to Donald Trump it was customary for Americans to boast that our country exports democracy all over the world. I love democracy and I love America, but as a student of history, I feel compelled to point out that mostly US foreign policy has had more to do with imperialism.

Take, for instance, Liberia and the Philippines: America’s foremost “colonies”—I think it is fair to call them that—in Africa and Asia. We became engaged in Liberia before the Civil War, naming its biggest cities and organizing its government. Its national currency is the U.S. dollar. Given these long and close ties, one would expect Liberia to be doing well. In fact, Liberia is one of the most impoverished and dangerous places on earth: 20 years of civil war, followed by thirteen years of a fragile peace-perpetually-slipping-back-into-war has left the country in economic ruin and overrun with weapons. Corruption is rife, unemployment and illiteracy endemic. Were it not for the small battalion of U.N. peacekeepers, anarchy would quickly reign.

The situation in the Philippines under strongman President Rodrigo Duterte isn’t good either. Before the Spanish-American War when we conquered it, the island of Negros could feed the entire Philippine archipelago. Today, after twelve decades of democratic education, the island is entirely owned by a dozen families who produce sixty per cent of the sugar exported from the Philippines. The children of those who chop the sugar cane starve because their families have no land to grow their own vegetables.

“Sadly,” wrote former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, “most Americans don’t have an opinion about foreign policy. Worse than that, when they do think about it, it’s in terms of the demonization of enemies and the exaltation of our capacity for violence.” [August 2001, Sun magazine] And former Attorney General Clark is right; it was all but impossible to discuss military spending in this country even before 9/11. President Trump’s military budget has gone up every year.

Consider: The US currently has fourteen commissioned Trident nuclear submarines, which are first strike weapons. Anyone of those submarines can take out 192 cities, hitting each with a nuclear warhead thirty times as powerful as the bomb that incinerated Hiroshima. This is all from one submarine, and we have fourteen of them. In the words of the former Attorney General, “Our foreign policy is based on the use of our military might as an enforcer, exactly as Teddy Roosevelt implied when he said that we should “speak softly and carry a big stick.” What does that mean? It means: “Do what I say, or I’ll smash your head in. I won’t make a lot of noise about it; I’ll just do it.”

For those who actually believe in the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all, our task is clear: retaking democratic control of our beloved country’s foreign policy. This is a tall order, especially considering the renewed nationalism and near-blind martial “patriotism” infusing the major media. Instead of putting our country’s resources into what the President refers to as “never ending wars” and propping up corrupt regimes like those of Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, we (indeed people all over the world) need to empower the United Nations. But the United States generally under funds and delegitimizes the UN.

A few years ago, I helped design and run a “Cinema and the Spirit” movie video adult RE series. We opened with Genghis Blues, a delightful documentary about the ease and openness with which people from the tiny central Asian country of Tuva embraced a group of Americans who came visiting. I was struck by how naturally and joyfully these ancient people and their American guests got along. Why shouldn’t they? The people of Tuva are not much different from the people of Liberia, or of the Philippines, Afghanistan, or Washington State: they want peace, tranquility, food, clothing and shelter. They want a safe place to live. They want to have decent jobs, at a living wage to enjoy their music, and celebrations—and to enjoy the company of one another. But in order to get these things we—the people of the world—are going to have to mobilize politically. And, as I said before, it is not going to be easy. It’s hard enough devising strategies for democratizing America, but to take that one step further and successfully influence global policies—that’s not going to be easy at all. As the late author and social critic Arthur Koestler observed shortly before his death, “The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums.” Indeed, just since the end of World War II, there have been over 200 separate wars. America’s War on Terrorism is just one of many. One of our other UU Principles, the fifth, espouses the use of the democratic process throughout society. This is laudable, but also lamentable given the situation we have in our country today, where the cost of running for office has become so exorbitant that only the wealthy, or their surrogates, can be elected. Another, related problem is the fact that 95% of everything Americans see, read and hear comes through the editorial offices of six huge news and entertainment conglomerates. [G.E. / Viacom / Disney / Time-Warner / Murdock / CBS] These conglomerates all but completely dominate the dissemination of news. They are not interested in nuance. They are interested in ratings. And they have been beating the war drums steadily throughout our lives.

I don’t really have a problem with martial cries; Lord knows we have heard them in the past as Arthur Koestler made clear. What I do have a problem with is the lack of other voices to balance the war cries. Because we all know, they are out there. Nevertheless, there is no alternative voice on mass media. There is an alternative voice, but for the time being—and perhaps until the major media are no longer owned by so small and so martial a crowd—we, not Jane Pauley, Tucker Carlson, or Lester Holt, are the alternative voice. We—and other people of faith and conscience—are the only alternative to mass media. The mass media says, “terrorists are evil.” Former President George W. Bush regularly referred to Osama bin Laden as “the evil one”; President Obama, following suite, had the evil one rubbed out. However, we Unitarian Universalists say something different; or at least I do. Yes, bin Laden was a criminal maniac, but he was not the apotheosis of evil, any more than Rodrigo Duterte is, or for that matter, Mike Pompeo. “If it were all so simple,” wrote the late Nobel prizewinning writer and Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn…

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

In the language of Universalism, everyone has some of the divine as well as the capacity for evil within them. The history of our UU faith has been a history of coming to terms with that fact—and of learning how to live graciously, creatively, and safely together. As a community. From tribal community to regional communities to a national community. And now (have we but the courage and chutzpah and acumen to pull it off) into an international community.

The image of airliners crashing into the World Trade Center may be the first crystallizing new image of the 21st Century. The two central images of the 20th Century were, first, the nuclear mushroom cloud, and second, pictures of the whole earth taken by our country’s Apollo astronauts. All three of these powerful images have changed—and continue to change—our collective global consciousness. We Unitarian Universalists are not the only people who want to turn this situation around. Recent uprisings in Honk Kong, Ukraine, Bolivia, and elsewhere have made it clear: billions of people around the world want to turn this thing around—people of every faith. People don’t usually like war; it’s the armament manufacturers and professional soldiers who do. Many other thoughtful people, however, including some in positions of influence and importance, want peace. Real peace. Consider the words of President John Kennedy spoken on June 10, 1963:

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

One thing we know, as President Kennedy went on to elaborate in the same speech, is that recognizing and making strong the apparatus of world community is part of the solution to our global dilemma. Another thing we know, in the words of American lunar astronaut Edgar Mitchell, is that we are all in this together. In outer space one “develop[s] an instant global consciousness,” writes Mitchell,

a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

Instead of a “war” on “terrorism,” it seems to me that our Sixth UU Principle calls us to work for and support another way: a way of recognizing the World Trade Center and Paris attacks of 2015 and ‘16 as criminal acts. And demanding that terrorist perpetrators be brought to justice under international law and tribunals. Doing so, of course, explicitly affirms the rights and prerogatives of the United Nations, its proper role in the world and our country’s proper allegiance to its international mandate.

Here in America, Unitarian Universalists have been among the strongest UN supporters from its very beginning. Indeed, the UU-UN Office was one of the first of its kind established—to link Unitarian Universalists from across the continent to the work and efforts of the United Nations. UUs and others of like heart and mind. Again, President Kennedy:

[W]e seek to strengthen the United Nations, to help solve its financial problems, to make it a more effective instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system—a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and the small, and of creating the conditions under which arms can finally be abolished.

Even speaking up for such things in shadow of renewed nationalism and heavy-duty jingoism can be scary. Yet, it seems to me, this is exactly where our tradition is most helpful—by re-minding us that despite the apparent unpopularity of views like these (according to the major media) those who hold them are far from alone. Quite the contrary, they are among billions the world over, and of a long line of souls stretching back through the Founding Fathers and the Pilgrims, and the Renaissance thinkers, all the way back to antiquity. People who see patriotism as love of democracy not love of domination; who see religion as practicing justice, equity and compassion, not denouncing heretics; and who long for the reign of international cooperation, not one of increasingly ruthless imperialism. I close as I began—with a second reading by the late Reverend A. Powell Davies of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC.

I am an American, and I believe in my country…. I believe in the great principles upon which my country was founded, principles that declare that all people everywhere are created free and equal and are endowed by their Creator with the universal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I believe that my country must exert itself to live up to the standard of these great principles and must do this more in the future than has ever been done in the past.

But I also believe that such principles, whenever they are sincerely loved and worthily put into practice, will cause Americans to join hands with people of good will throughout the world. For these, indeed, are universal principles. They came to America, not only from Washington and Jefferson, but… from many others of all nations and races in all parts of the earth. True Americans should therefore be true internationalists, and if they believe, also, in a religion of good works combined with freedom of belief, as Unitarians do, they must respect humanity universally and do everything they can to bring about a better, happier world.

May it be so. Salaam. Shalom. Blessings… and Amen.