Who's Afraid of Freedom and Tolerance?

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

In spite of their political success and vast worldly power, fundamentalists and allied evangelicals feel increasingly helpless to prop up the obligation model of family or the worldview based on it. This helplessness leads them to lash out against people who fit poorly into the old templates-against "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way-all of them who have tried to secularize America" that Jerry Falwell blamed for 9/11. (Falwell later apologized.)

It is tempting, human, and (to an extent) inevitable for religious liberals to respond with our own feelings of persecution, helplessness, and anger. But in doing so, we fall into the vicious cycle of polarization: Our anger feeds their sense of persecution just as theirs feeds ours.

We have a way out of this cycle: a message of hope that the Right cannot match. Our way of life works in this new world and does not demand that we roll history back. We need to broadcast this Liberal Good News loud and clear.

But in order to communicate our message, we need to understand the anger and helplessness of the Christian Right, so that we can cut through the static that jams our signal. We need to explain why we want freedom and choice. We need to talk about the committed life and how committed liberals escape the superficiality and nihilism that the Right fears and assumes we represent.

We need, in short, to reclaim one of Christianity's best ideas and hardest practices: We need to love our enemies and to bless with hope those who curse us with anger. Such love and such blessing would not be a signal of weakness or an overture to surrender, but rather a portent that we had found the true power of our religious heritage. Armed with that power, we can win these culture wars. Without it, we may not deserve to.

In his first cover story for the magazine, Doug Muder asks what scares fundamentalists fo much about liberal family values (page 24). He is a member of First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts.