Who's Afraid of Freedom and Tolerance?

UU World: The Magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Fall 2005 by Muder, Doug

A look at the competing worldviews of fundamentalists and religious liberals.

LIKE MOST RELIGIOUS LIBERALS, WE Unitarian Universalises imagine ourselves to be nice people. It is those in the Christian Right, we believe, who want to force their moral code on everyone else and use public resources to proselytize for their faith. We, on the other hand, believe in tolerance, free choice, and letting people be what they have to be. What's so scary about that? If the rank-and-file of organizations like Focus on the Family or the Christian Coalition feel threatened by us, we think, it can only be because they have been duped by their unscrupulous leaders.

Not necessarily. True, preachers of the Christian Right have said a lot of unfair things about liberals, both religious and political. But conservative Christian fears have not been created ex nihilo. As overstated as those fears may at times become, they have a basis, and we would do well to understand it.

Such a call for understanding, I realize, will sound to some like an invitation to surrender. Won't opponents see our empathy as a sign of weakness and be encouraged to make even bigger demands on us? If they make no comparable effort to understand and accommodate us, won't we be drawn into one-sided compromises that slide gradually towards capitulation? In the face of a hard and uncompromising opponent, we seem to have no choice other than to become hard and uncompromising too. Only one strategy seems to make sense: Give them hell.

But liberal religious traditions recognize understanding as a source of strength, not a sign of weakness. "Give them not hell," advised Universalist pioneer John Murray, "but hope and courage." What if he was on to something? If our traditions of wisdom, empathy, and respect are simply baggage in this struggle, then we are at a significant disadvantage. We must find a way to use these tools and not just lug them around until our situation improves.

Many books have been written recently about the Christian Right. One that does a particularly good job of getting inside the movement's worldview, particularly that of its working-class members, is Spirit and Flesh: Life Inside a Fundamentalist Baptist Church by James M. AuIt Jr., which I reviewed in the May/June 2005 issue of UU World. AuIt, like George Lakoff and several other authors, locates the heart of the Christian Right worldview in its overall vision of family life-not just in the positions it takes on a handful of specific "family values" issues like abortion or same-sex marriage.

Fundamentalists themselves would claim that the Bible is the center of their worldview, but scriptural support for their more controversial positions is often scant and open to alternate interpretations. Ault notes that members of the pseudonymous Shawmut River Baptist Church "generally held such views before they were 'saved' and became bornagain Christians. Their pro-family conservatism could not be explained, then, by doctrines or practices found in any particular religion." Instead, AuIt attributes Shawmut River's conservatism to a "villagelike" web of multigenerational family ties very different from what he observed among his academic acquaintances.

Though a life of mutual dependence within a family circle was commonplace among members of Shawmut River and other new-right activists I met, it was foreign to people I knew in academia and the New Left, as well as to other educated professionals I knew. Most of us were prepared, from the moment we left home for college, to leave family dependencies behind and learn to live as self-governing individuals. This left us free to move from one city to another for graduate education or for those specialized jobs for which our training qualified us. In the process, we learned to piece together a meaningful life with new friends and colleagues alongside old ones. Our material security did not rest on a stream of daily reciprocities within a family-based circle of people known in common, but rather on the progression of professional careers, with steadily increasing salaries and ample benefits to cover whatever exigencies life would bring.

Shawmut River's extended-family system was based on its shared belief in congenital obligations, in a society in which "relationships were seen and acted on as given rather than chosen." A child, in this view, is born into a network of mutual obligations and depends for its survival on the fulfillment of those obligations. As it grows, the child takes an ever more active role in upholding that network. At no point in the process is the individual in a position to stand outside the network and choose whether or not its obligations apply to him or her. The only choice the individual has is whether to fulfill his/her obligations or to renege on them. This is what fundamentalists mean when they say that moral values are "absolute" rather than "relative."

By contrast, the liberal worldview puts a much greater emphasis on commitments undertaken by choice, rather than obligations imposed from birth. Naturally, this is a difference of degree rather than kind. Unitarian Universalists have obligations and Baptists make choices, but choice plays a far greater role in the liberal worldview than in the conservative. Choice is entirely a good thing in the liberal worldview, whereas it is ambiguous to the Christian Right.