Struggling to “Speak the Truth in Love” in Election Season: Pluralistic Ethics & Political Polarization

Last updated on: May 9, 2016 at 8:56 pm by Carl Gregg

Struggling to “Speak the Truth in Love” in Election Season: Pluralistic Ethics & Political Polarization 2016-05-09T20:56:27-04:00 Carl Gregg

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Over the past few decades, many studies have shown a growing political polarization in our country. This widening gap between the right and the left has made finding a middle ground increasingly difficult. So in this presidential election season in which our collective awareness of political polarization is heightened, I would like to reflect on negotiating between divergent perspectives.

There was, for example, a front page headline last week in my hometown paper that read, “Transgender teen says he and his mother were removed from Cruz event.” How do we as a society adjudicate between one person’s “freedom” to choose the bathroom that feels right to them and another person’s (perhaps uninformed) fear about gender-neutral bathrooms? I’ve used quite a few gender-neutral bathrooms over the years, and I can report that it turns out they are just bathrooms!

In reflecting on these issues, I appreciated a story from The Rev. Dr. Amy Butler, the minister at Riverside Church in New York City. On a recent flight returning from Europe, Amy found herself in the midst of a conflict around differing interpretations of religious freedom and individual liberty. As she approached the seat listed on her ticket, she noticed that all around her empty seat were men identically dressed, seemingly part of an orthodox religious group. It turns out that she guessed correctly. As soon as she sat down, the man beside her pressed the flight attendant button and said that Amy would need to be moved to another seat: “his religious freedom, he said, was [being] violated….as his religion does not allow him to sit next to a woman who is not his wife.”

Amy confesses, “I had so many thoughts in that moment.” She did not give up her seat, but the conflict also just beginning. There were other perceived violations of religious freedom around airline food not passing theological muster as well as the men feeling religiously prohibited from interacting with female flight attendants. She writes, “The end result was a noisy, contentious, and anxiety-ridden eight hours.”

So how do we move forward? Is there an unresolvable impasse between a woman’s freedom to sit in her assigned seat and a religiously orthodox man’s conviction that the God of his understanding forbids him to sit next to a woman who is not his wife? How do we solve the dilemma of one person’s perceived religious freedom to sell wedding cakes only to opposite-gender couples or another person’s desired religious liberty to maintain “traditional gender roles” in bathrooms?

Religious liberty is about the freedom to choose your own religion without coercion by the government, religious leaders, or the larger community. But that individual freedom does not extend to unduly controlling other people. When I read about conflicts over religious liberty, I sometimes think that we have lost perspective about what serious religious persecution looks like—such as during the Inquisition when individuals were forced to be part of a state-sponsored religion under threat or imprisonment or death.

Freedom of religion does not give individuals or groups power to impose their religion on others. I respect (though disagree) if the God of your understanding tells you to not use contraception, but that does not give you the right to block your employees’s access to birth control. The First Amendment has both a Free Exercise clause and an Establishment clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So while you do have freedom of religion, your individual freedom of religion does not include the right to establish your religion over others; that would be one step too far. As our Unitarian forebear and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841 – 1935) said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” Or, as Rev. Amy said in reflecting on her airplane encounter, “Religious freedom is just that: freedom. Note that we don’t call it ‘religious comfort.’” When we forget this insight, claims about religious liberty too often end up masking what in reality is an attempt to force an individual or group’s sexism, racism, or homophobia on the larger society.

To be clear, in a free society, individuals can freely choose sexist, racist, or homophobic beliefs; however, a commitment to individual liberty requires limits on how individuals interact with one another. As The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me.” And I do not mean to be flippant when I say next that simply keeping us from killing one another—and then allowing us to live freely amidst one another in all our diversity is a tremendous catalyst for progress.

As Dr. King said later in that same speech:

One of the tragedies of our whole struggle is…monologue, rather than dialogue, and I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.

This dynamic remains true today. So many people have become less sexist not by abstract argument, but through a relationship with their daughter, mother, spouse, or other loved one who was being discriminated against. Likewise, the struggle for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender justice has been advanced much less by reasoned arguments (although those have been important too) than by people experiencing loved ones coming out of the closet—and seeing that LGBT folk are not a “them” but part of “us.”

Even in the face of our increasingly polarized country, there is a broader trend of expanding concentric circles of who is included as a fully enfranchised and represented member of “We the People.” Almost 60 years ago, when then-Senator John F. Kennedy was running for president, he had to give a major speech to convince the U.S. public that a Roman Catholic could be president without being unduly influenced by the pope. Today, to use another branch of government as an indication of how far our culture has shifted, there are five Catholic members of the Supreme Court, three Jewish members, and no Protestants. Similarly, as Stephen Prothero has written about in his excellent new book Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose Elections): The Battles That Define America from Jefferson’s Heresies to Gay Marriage, despite major persecution against Mormons in our nation’s history, in the last presidential election cycle, “white evangelicals voted for [Governor Mitt] Romney in even greater numbers than they had voted for George W. Bush four years earlier. Romney may have lost, but Mormons won” (137).

When I was young and my worldview was formed almost exclusively from a Southern Baptist perspective, I would have been happy to learn that all six billion people on Earth had become Southern Baptists overnight. But as I grew older, I began to meet increasing numbers of non-Southern Baptists who were kind, well-adjusted, smart, funny, competent human beings. When your roommate is a Roman Catholic, your best friend is an atheist, and your favorite professor is a Buddhist, it is increasingly difficult to maintain with integrity the position that any one belief system is the only or best way of being in the world. This conviction does not make me a relativist. (I don’t believe that simply anything is permissible.). But I am a pluralist, who believes there is more than one legitimate, healthy way of being in the world. So in this presidential election session, be passionate about your convictions, but also be mindful of the difference between “brutal honesty” and “speaking the truth (as you see it) in love.”

The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg is a trained spiritual director, a D.Min. graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, and the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland. Follow him on Facebook (facebook.com/carlgregg) and Twitter (@carlgregg).

Learn more about Unitarian Universalism: http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles

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