Who's Afraid of Freedom and Tolerance?

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

Our Message of Hope

IN ONE SENSE, FUNDAMENTALISTS HAVE every right to fear and resent religious liberals. By adjusting to the breakdown of the obligation system, we speed its collapse. Every person who defects from the regime of timeless roles and obligations makes life more difficult for those who fry to keep it going. From their point of view, freedom is a kind of plague we carry. While our commitment-based families may be immune to its ravages, the effect on others is not always benign.

But (as the Billy Joel song puts it) we didn't start this fire. The medieval extended family-rooted in a particular place with inherited, inflexible roles-has been slowly coming apart since the advent of modern capitalism with its desire for ever-larger markets and a mobile work force. In the global village, we can no longer pretend that our norms and standards are universal. Careers used to be passed down from father to son, and the role of housewife barely changed over centuries. But today's professionals have to retrain every decade or two, and we baby boomers cannot ask our mothers how to keep children safe on the Internet. Unless we want to try to freeze history, today's individuals must have the freedom to renegotiate their roles.

It is a trying time, and the anger of the Christian Right is understandable. "Whenever an old order dies," writes the liberal Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, "anger is always loosed upon the whole society."

But though we must defend ourselves against the misdirected rage of the Christian Right, we lose if we simply oppose our anger to theirs.To give them hell is to fight the battle on their turf, not ours. Instead, we can offer a message of hope for which they have no answer. We know that the system of timeless templates and universal obligations is coming apart-but we have come out the other side of that tunnel, and there is light here:

* We can hold families together without insisting that everyone make the same choices we do.

* We can teach children to find a committed life full of meaning while leaving them the freedom to confront a future beyond our imagination.

* We can carry forward the traditional values of justice and compassion.

* We can accept and learn from other belief systems without refighting the Crusades or the Thirty Years'War.

Civilization, in short, need not fall. And we need not victimize the poor, the powerless, or the unpopular in order to prop it up.

Ault tells the following fascinating anecdote about a rural community in South Carolina where the traditional family was so unthreatened that "land changed hands largely outside the marketplace, through family ties":

Members of the Southern Baptist church in this community had so little comprehension of the conflicts then raging between liberals and conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention that they had to have a special representative sent out from the convention to explain it to them. Where mutual dependence among kin is not threatened, new-right enthusiasms might not only hold little interest but even be incomprehensible.