Sermon: Building & Blocking – Rev. Eric Banner

I want to start this morning with a story I cannot fully confirm. I know only one detail of it, and the rest is speculation on my part. But, it is speculation based on recently revealed facts, and decades of history. So let me start with the detail I am sure of.

Like many of you, in addition to my Facebook profile, the Instagram account I made to keep up with my teenager years ago, and all the rest of it, I have a LinkedIn account. Why, I can’t exactly say, except that it was “the thing to do” if you are a professional. So, I get notifications from time to time about that LinkedIn account, and a couple of weeks ago I received one of the regular updates about who had been looking at my profile. And right there, in the subject line in my inbox it said that someone from the United States Department of Justice had been looking at me.

To be clear, I have not been looking for a new job, and most certainly not with a Justice Department that has been converted into a lawfare organization that targets people for their dissenting opinions. We have been working to hire a new staff person, but none of our applicants had a background with the Justice Department. So, I don’t know why I have been the subject of a search by someone at that agency, but I do know that just a few months ago we found out that our sister church in Minneapolis had been the target of an undercover intelligence gathering operation involving Department of Homeland Security agents targeting churches, labor unions, libraries, schools and more, with clandestine law enforcement agents secretly attending a meeting of their climate justice group as they hosted a presentation on how to respond to the immigration enforcement surge that was happening in their city.

Are we being targeted right now? I don’t know. I may never know. But what I do know is that it is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes to engage secret police forces in efforts to instill in their populace a kind of self-censorship, a fear that at any moment someone might be listening in with unknown consequences, in efforts to coerce compliance with an unaccountable authority that is less interested in freedom or civil rights than they are in retaining power in the face of popular opposition. And Unitarian Universalists have been targeted before.

The Rev. Stephen Fritchman was under ongoing surveilance for 30 years by the FBI, as a suspected communist. While he grew the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles to over a thousand members in the late 40s and early 50s, he was also instrumental in having the church publicly adopt a policy of welcome to people of every race and national origin. He preached against American & Soviet imperialism. He was an active part of civil liberties defense, and served with the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born. He led a multiyear campaign to defeat a law that denied tax-exempt status to people and organizations that didn’t sign a loyalty oath.

For his activism he was denied his US passport to attend the 100th anniversary of the Melbourne Unitarian Church in Australia. He was asked to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was accused of having secret alliances and membership in the American Communist Party. By 1977 when he was able to file a Freedom of Information Act request, he received copies of 767 pages of materials the FBI had gathered on him.

But I want you to hear what he said to that House committee so many years ago –

“As a liberal American citizen, I serve in many organizations with whose purposes of service to mankind I approve. My religion, ‘love of God and service to man,’ means participation as an individual in many causes assisting our American tradition of democratic advance.”

I share that story with you this morning because I think it is important to remember that the work of democracy is not the work of a day or a season, but it is the work of our lives and whole lifetimes. Susan B Anthony, a member of the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, New York, was tried and convicted of the crime of voting as a woman in 1872, and died in 1906 at the age of 86 without ever being able to legally vote in a federal election. Her colleagues in the work, ministers like the Universalist Olympia Brown and the congregationalist and then later Unitarian Antionette Brown Blackwell were among the very few early women’s suffrage leaders who were actually able to vote in the 1920 presidential election. In fact, Blackwell was the only surviving participant in the 1850 Women’s Rights Convention to see the passage of the 19th amendment extending the right to vote to white women.

These are hard stories. Scary stories in some cases. Stories of government overreach and intimidation that, for many of us, feel all too close to home in a week in which a sitting United States Representative had her home searched after years of a presidential adminstration calling for her to be removed from the country that she has called her own since the age of 17. All too close to home when it has become necessary for our Unitarian Universalist Association to put out a statement just weeks ago that ended with these words

“Rooted in our powerful history of religious witness for just action and faithful dissent, we declare that Unitarian Universalists must stake our faith tradition today on the urgent call to act for liberation in our country, and condemn the anti-democratic forces of authoritarianism. Such a call encompasses civil disobedience, noncompliance and direct actions of protest, as it has in the past, while preserving our commitments to human dignity and democratic society. This commitment is essential to sustain with integrity our UU religious values of justice, equity, interdependence and pluralism, and our Constitutional rights and freedoms.”

Right now, many of us have ballots in our hands. Ballots that represent one part of that basic American promise that the government works for the people, and not the other way around. The basic premise that we are better off not when there are strongmen in positions of power forever and ever, but servents who come, and go, with the will of the people who elect them to public office. The basic value that holds that each and every person should have a voice in the matters that affect them most, and that we should never live in fear that our views will lead to jail cells or gulags.

But I want to return to our reading this morning, from one of the most important and influential legal minds in our nation, Justice Sotomayor. That reading is from her autobiography, "My Beautiful World,” and in it she points to the ways in which the preservation of, and advancement of, both our democracy and our commitment to human dignity, are dependent, not ultimately on who can marshall the loudest voices at their rallies, but on who can convince their friends, their family, their neighbors, their co-workers, their fellow church goers, their fellow citizens, of the views that they hold.

“Quiet pragmatism,” she wrote, “lacks the romance of vocal militancy. But I felt myself more a mediator than a crusader. My strengths were reasoning, crafting compromises, finding the good and the good faith on both sides of an argument, and using that to build a bridge. Always, my first question was, what's the goal? And then, who must be persuaded if it is to be accomplished? A respectful dialogue with one's opponent almost invariably goes further than a harangue outside his or her window. If you want to change someone's mind, you must understand what need shapes his or her opinion. To prevail, you must first listen--that eternal lesson of Forensics Club!”

The risks are real, but all too often we find ourselves engaged in only half of the work of democracy. Earlier this year the board members of Together Colorado were engaged in a shared reading of a piece by Scott Nakagawa, titled simply “What is meant by ‘Block and Build’?” In it he said this –

“Block is the work of stopping the authoritarian project from completing its consolidation. It is the federal lawsuits against unlawful executive orders. The mass mobilizations on March 28 and the ones to come. The economic boycotts. The faith-based civil disobedience… The Substack essays, the podcasts, the truthful, defiant journalism, and the institutional defense of universities and the press. Block is what most people picture when they picture pro-democracy work right now. It’s loud, it’s visible, it’s urgent, and it is essential.”

But then he went on, saying -

“Build is the work of constructing the institutional, economic, civic, and analytical infrastructure that a democracy actually requires to function, and that the country, in significant respects, has never fully had. Distributed economic power instead of oligarchic concentration. Civil rights enforcement architecture as the operating system of pluralism. Mass-membership civic institutions in the places they have been hollowed out. A multi-racial governing coalition with positive content rather than only negation. Workers’ power. Public institutions adequate to the public’s needs. Build is what most people don’t picture when they picture pro-democracy work because it is slower, less visible, and not catalytic in the way block is. It doesn’t produce viral news stories or popular memes.”

But building is the essential work that sustains the treasure of our self governance. A movement that focuses only on blocking will always be fighting the hydras heads that come back after the previous ones have been cut off with the strength of Heracles. The forces of autocracy are always present. But, so too, are the forces of democratic engagement, if we let them be part of our work, not just when ballots are in our hands, but when we build the world we dream about.

The risk of blocking as the only strategy in our toolkit is not just that it leaves us only reacting to the efforts of others, it is that it leaves the question of what we will build to those who show up, and, in so many ways serve their own interests.

Back in 1966 the Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams wrote one of his many essays on voluntary associations, things like churches, and civil liberties organizations, and so much more. I was re-reading it this week, and reminded that he warned of the risks to all of us ensconced in an idea a far earlier thinker, the German/Italian sociologist Robert Michels – the iron rule of oligarchy.

The rule contends that in any organization, and any country, the “eager beavers can take advantage of the indolence of the average member. By this means they gain control of the organization…”

In Adams day he found examples in many places, including a then recent study of the “centralized bureaucracy of the American Medical Association. They found a goodly number of physicians who said that they felt that the AMA, through its policies, was damaging the image of the physician in the United States.” When physicians were asked why they didn’t do something to address the matter they said things like “I trained to be a doctor, and I want to practice medicine. In order to break the bureaucracy of the AMA, I and many of my colleagues would have to spend much more time than we can afford.”

It's a sense of how things are that I think that many of us can relate to. Be it in our neighborhoods, or towns, or professional associations, or in our nation, it is all too often the case that groups hold outsized power, because they do not just show up to vote once every two, or four, years, they send lobbyists and build campaigns. And yes, they exist on the left and on the right.

It’s why I work with Together Colorado, whose mission has been, for a very long time, putting human dignity at the center of public life in our state. Because our values must show up, too, rather than leaving the playing field empty for regressive, fundamentalist interpretations of this shared American experience. The meaning of this American experience is always open to interpretation, and revision, and as a person whose ancestors came as colonists, whose ancestors raised arms not to be British, whose family fought for the Union in the civil war, who have been here for a very long time, I believe it is the job of those who have already come through the door to hold it for the ones who come behind, not slam it shut behind those who already got theirs, and want to keep it solely for themselves. At the Board meeting for Together Colorado just over a week ago we were already laying the groundwork for legislative efforts for next spring, because our democracies are made by the people who show up, lest the iron rule of oligarchy come to bear its bitter fruit once more. It takes blocking and building, neither one is enough on its own.

For now, my encouragement to all of us is to find the place and the way in our lives to fight back not just against the facists or the oligarchs, important though that work is, but to take the wisdom of Justice Sotomayor, and to ask the questions of what our goals are, what world we want to live in, and then to think about who must be persuaded, and how we can reach them. Too often, in too many places, too many of us think that being right is enough, but in a world where all of us live in our shared spaces and our own subjective realities, it will never be enough to just be right, we must build the connections that will sustain us when the injustice department comes knocking on our door, that will support us when the investigators build their files on us, that will see us through the hard times, and help us build, not just block what comes our way.

This is what makes possible a country where human dignity is for everyone, not just some special ones. This is what makes possible a country where breathing clean air and drinking clean water are not available only to the ones who can buy it at the store, but to everyone who journeys outside or turns on their faucet. This is what makes possible a nation where every child gets an education that will serve them their whole lives long, and raises children who will serve the greater good with what they learn along the way. This is what makes possible a nation where our law enforcement community walks the streets not with a warrior ethos looking always for enemies to be subdued, but with the deep understanding of what it means to protect and serve. This is what makes possible a nation in which your health care does not depend upon which state you live in. This is what makes possible the kinship of all people, and the assurance that, as, that great Republican President Abraham Lincoln once said, “that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

May you find your part in this community of fellow travelers, while keeping open the channels of connection and communication that let us persuade and accomplish all that we hope for, while never letting those longing to be oligarchs over and upon us think they are the only ones who can build the world they dream about. We can, too.

May we make it so, and Amen.

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister