2023 Berry Street Essay: The Reverend Cecilia Kingman

Note: This is the full version of my text. Due to the late start and the fact that I wanted everyone to be able to hear our respondents, I skipped some pieces near the end. Below are the full remarks I intended to give. Please forgive any typos or formatting oddities -this was an evolving document right up to the end. In faith,  Rev. Cecilia Kingman

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Thank you so much for the honor of giving this address. It is a humbling experience to be asked-there are so many people who would have brought a powerful word to us. I’m honored to follow in this tradition. 

My subject today is fascism. This automatically means that I will be talking about systemic harm and trauma, which has unequally targeted us. Some of us have endured the effects more heavily than others. It matters that we take that seriously.

I want to thank my respondents, Elizabeth Stevens and CB Beal. You will see that in addition to me being white, my two respondents are white as well. Between us, we also hold identities that are marginalized in our culture, including class, disability, and gender. But we are all racialized as white, and that matters. 

There is a reason for this choice of mine. In this country, the impacts of fascism and authoritarianism have historically fallen most heavily upon our Indigenous and Black siblings and our other siblings of color. Far too often, we white Unitarian Universalists have asked our siblings of color to come before us and perform suffering for our consumption. I am unwilling to participate in that kind of harm. Instead, today rather than ask for more labor, we are going to resource those most historically impacted by systems of oppression.

I have requested an extension of the caucus spaces for our colleagues who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color, as well as the caucus spaces for our Trans and Disabled colleagues. These spaces will remain open for an additional half-hour after this talk. I recognize that for those among us who exist in the intersections of all of these categories, this, as always, leaves you with a choice. I trust you will gather as you need. 

For those of you who are Black, Indigenous, or of color, your caucus can decide if it would be useful for me to come be with you or not. 

Also, I invite everyone to do what you need to do during this address to care for yourself. Talking about how authoritarian figures control people can be activating for many of us. Those of us who have traditionally been targets of authoritarian violence, survivors of family trauma or systemic violence, and frankly, anyone may find it activating because this is simply an upsetting subject.

So I remind you of what you know. I explicitly invite everyone here to get up and stretch or pace a bit, leave the room, or put earbuds in. Press your feet into the ground, do box breathing, change your seat, get a chaplain, or text your partner. Or my favorite-look at photos on my phone that bring me peace. 

Obviously, you don’t need my permission to take care of yourself, but I want to be clear that this year part of the Berry Street Essay is an *expectation* that people will move their bodies and be free. I want you to experience freedom while I am talking about authoritarianism and fascism.  Agree?

I knew immediately when the committee asked me to give this address that fascism would be my subject. As my family and friends-and, honestly, anyone who’s ever talked to me for more than five minutes would tell you, this is always my subject. Since I was a child, I have been trying to understand the roots of authoritarianism and other inappropriate uses of power. As a survivor of childhood abuse I am compelled to understand why people with power cause harm to others, and to understand the tactics they use. 

Before I go on, I want to name the experiences and the teachers and mentors who have given me such a deep understanding of my topic. 

First, I want to name my own moment of what liberation theologians call conscientization. I was raised in a moderately conservative Baptist family, and I’m the descendent of many generations of colonizers and settlers. My moment of awakening to systems of oppression did not arrive until I was 18, when one of my parents was arrested and then convicted of felony embezzlement. My exposure to the carceral system began tearing away the conservative ideologies in which I was raised. Every time I visited my imprisoned parent, I looked straight into the mouth of the beast. And it became quickly clear to me that my privilege as a white girl had cloaked certain realities.

Just when the structures that seemed to hold up the world turned out to be monstrosities, I found the teachings of liberation theology. I also found my way through the doors of First Unitarian Church of Portland, Oregon. These two strands-Christian liberation theology and our liberating faith became and have been the bedrock of my theology for thirty years. 

While in seminary, I began focusing my studies on the church’s response to authoritarianism, with the most generous guides and teachers along the way. I attended Starr King during the years of Rebecca Parker’s presidency, and I was so fortunate to have her as my advisor as well as my professor. I became close friends with the late Laszlo Kiss, Laci, a Unitarian minister who had grown up under the communist dictatorship in Romania, and his wife Matilda, and that relationship led to more than twenty years of friendship and work with the Unitarians of Romania and Hungary. I worked alongside our colleagues David Keyes and Rob Eller-Isaacs, both of whom died in the past year. Together we witnessed firsthand the aftermath of Communism and hopes for democracy, then the subsequent betrayals of neo-liberalism and capitalism, and then the return of nationalism and authoritarianism in Eastern Europe. 

I want to honor my colleagues in Romania who continue to teach me, in particular my dear friends Gyerő Dávid, formerly the Deputy Bishop of the Hungarian Unitarian Church, and Koppandi Botond and Kovacs Sándor, both professors at the Protestant Theological Seminary in Kolozsvár. I am deeply grateful for their willingness to share with me their knowledge and their personal experience of living under authoritarian regimes.

Finally, I want to lift up the teachers whom I call beloved-my family. I am the parent and step-parent of young people who are queer, non-binary, transgender, Jewish, and South Asian. I also share a home with my sister, who is disabled. These people teach me every day what it means to insist on one’s own humanity and to do so with a fierce joy. They educate me, call me out, and make me laugh. My children have pushed me, as an aging Gen Xer, to perceive things in new ways. They are part of my conscientization. And yes, my youngest two are the reason I love My Little Pony and always will, even though they’ve outgrown our brightly colored friends. Thank you, my loves.

But the diversity of my family is not me. As a scholar and minister who is racialized as white, I need to be transparent about my family history, which overlaps with the history of our faith tradition. 

I come from many generations of white settlers and colonizers. Three of my four grandparents were descended from some of the earliest English settlers-those who arrived here on the Mayflower. At least two of my grandparents had ancestors who enslaved other human beings here in North America. This is simply a fact, and it must be named.

This history of my family was taught to me as part of the glorified lies we are all told about our nation’s founding. And these ancestors of mine are also our religious ancestors, the forebears of our faith tradition. It is simply a fact, and it must be named.

I have a personal connection to the project of violent conquest, genocide, and displacement.  My family didn’t use those words, but that was the truth beneath the simple story. The covering up, over generations, of these brutalities does not mean that they have no impact. 

To be white in this country and to have lived here for more than one generation is to be a generational participant in massive historical violence and to have been enrolled in maintaining the mythologies that perpetuate that violence even to today. 

White children are forcefully and sometimes forcibly enrolled in the project of whiteness. White children are required to cut off parts of themselves in order to maintain societal and familial approval. Just as people assigned male or female as children are taught to behave in certain ways, so are white children taught to act in ways that distinguish those who are deemed white from those who are deemed not white. 

Thus, some children are taught the myth of their own separateness and superiority. When–not if, but when–children fail to comply with those gendered or racialized expectations, they experience, at minimum, the removal of approval and connection. This is deeply traumatic to young children. And so they–we–learn to cut off parts of ourselves to stay connected and receive the benefits of being within the circle of privilege. To do this, we cut off our compassion, our sense of kinship with other people, and our emotional responses.

Cutting off parts of ourselves to survive, which we all have likely done, injures the soul. 

For those of us who are white, being taught to overlook the atrocities done by our ancestors and the continued oppression and land theft being done by our people–especially when we are told that this oppression and theft is done to secure our own future–this is deeply injurious. 

This turning away from truth is demanded of children long before a child can be considered complicit. But even when young, most of us do have, deep down, an awareness that something isn’t right, that we are being lied to, that we are being enrolled in, and then ultimately choosing to participate in, a system of violent oppression. This awareness causes a particular form of moral injury that white people, especially white men, have been passing down generation after generation. And it is absolutely against the rules of whiteness to discuss the psychic wounds of learning to be an oppressor. 

Friends, this moral injury makes fertile ground for fascism. The belief in one’s own special place, combined with the traumatic indoctrination into that belief, the immoral deal one must make to trade parts of oneself for a myth of superiority–this injury creates a psychological and moral framework that makes one vulnerable to fascist ideologies. 

I want to be clear–white people’s moral injury and generational trauma are not comparable to the horrific violence directed at Indigenous and Black people–but white people white people must dig into our own generational trauma to understand the current situation. White nationalism gets its hooks into white people because of this unacknowledged, unhealed white trauma. Telling the truth and healing that trauma are crucial to the project of resisting fascism. 

This afternoon I want to focus on recognizing and countering fascism without and within our faith. 

Fascism without seems pretty obvious. We all know that we are in a moment of grave danger. If anyone is left wondering how bad it is–it’s very, very bad. It’s alarmingly easy however for us to grow acclimated and numb, unless we pay rigorous attention to the strategies and timelines used by fascists.

We are also seeing a rise in fascist thinking within our own faith community. Not necessarily the political ideologies we associate with fascism but the style of thinking.

Please understand that I do not say this lightly. 

Unitarian Universalism is currently in a moment of major theological transformation and institutional reform. This transition is causing a backlash within our congregations and among some colleagues. We are moving away from individualism to communitarian values, from white supremacy culture to truly radical liberation, from a concentration of power among historically privileged groups, and towards a new form of power sharing. Some are responding to these shifts with anxiety and conflict. Some who are being asked to give up the primacy of their privilege and power are responding with tactics drawn from fascist politics.

It’s not surprising-the Protestant tradition in North America, the tradition in which we are rooted, has been utterly complicit in the project of fascism and white supremacy. Our faith tradition is rooted in historic hierarchies, the very hierarchies that fascists seek to protect and restore. We have a lot of work to do to dig out the roots of this evil.

It is my hope this afternoon to give us some tools to equip us to recognize fascist tactics when they arise around us and also within us–within our churches and within ourselves. I want to offer a hermeneutic which will help us in the work ahead. 

Let’s start by defining the term fascism. The standard definition of fascism is ​​a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of both the nation and the single, powerful leader over the individual citizen.

I’m going to complexify that a bit by using the work of Jason Stanley, who is the author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Stanley is a professor and scholar of philosophy and propaganda at Yale. He describes fascism as an ideology but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a political method. Not all who use fascist tactics are ideologically fascist. We recognize fascists less by their beliefs than by their methods.

I’m going to share Stanley’s overview of the 10 tactics of political fascism. In full transparency, what I’m sharing with you now is taken directly from Stanley’s work, at times word for word from a video lecture he gave titled “The Ten Tactics of Fascism” which is available on Youtube. I highly recommend watching this video, even more than once. 

TEN TACTICS: 

Stanley opens by explaining that these ten tactics are bundled–that they can’t be isolated from each other. 

1. The first tactic is A Mythic Past. Fascists always present the idea that there was once a glorious past. In politics, this is presented in the idea that we were once a great nation. Notice the past tense. And when we were great, the dominant racial group ruled over others. But now that’s been taken away–not lost by our own actions, but taken away by some group designated as “other.” Jason Stanley says: “Fascists are always telling a story about a glorious past that’s been lost, and they tap into this nostalgia. So when you fight back against fascism, you’ve got one hand tied behind your back, because the truth is messy and complex and the mythical story is always clear and compelling and entertaining. It’s hard to undercut that with facts.”
2. The second tactic is Propaganda: All social movements and all politics use propaganda to persuade. Fascist propaganda, however,  makes a distinction between friends and enemies; it casts “the other” as a threat and presents the idea that these “others” are fundamentally opposed to the nation. 
3. Tactic number three is Anti-intellectualism. Authoritarianism presents a cult of the leader. In a fascist system, the leader and only the leader sets the rules about what is true or false. So we see the takeover of the country’s media, schools, and cultural institutions to enforce what the leader says is true. Institutions that teach multiple perspectives on history always threaten the leader. Expertise is also always a threat to the leader. Science is a threat to the leader. If intellectuals are telling the truth, they are a threat. So, anti-racism, critical race theory? Definitely a threat. 
4. This brings us directly to tactic number four, the creation of a form of Unreality. The scholar Timothy Snyder talks about this a lot–the destruction of notions of reality. Authoritarians undermine what we know to be true and convince the population that a) everyone is lying and b) the lies don’t matter. In political terms, the center of democracy is truth. You cannot function as a democratic citizen if you are being lied to. Jason Stanley says: “If you are going to rip the heart out of democracy, you get people used to lies.”
5. The fifth tactic of fascism is Hierarchy. Hierarchy is absolutely central to fascism. It is the big lie at the center of things. White supremacy, male supremacy, abled supremacy- these lies assign people superiority and the privileges and benefits that go with that superiority. 
6. Hierarchy goes right into Victimhood Once you have convinced people that they are justifiably higher in the hierarchy, then you can convince them that they are victims of equality. Fascists tell people that equality is victimizing them by making them lose their rightful place or power. Stanley says: “The goal is to make [people] feel like victims, to make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing they’ve lost has been taken from them by a specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation.” According to Ejeris Dixon, writing in Truthout, “Fascists believe that democracy has failed them and allowed the majority […] to be tyrannized by communities that have no right to power. Therefore, fascists seek to eliminate both democratic processes and marginalized communities to return to an often fictitious and glorified past where their power reigned unchecked.” 
7. The seventh tactic of fascism is Law and Order. Under fascism, the definition of law-abiding means loyalty to the dominant group. Members of the dominant group, by their very nature, are considered law-abiding. Marginalized groups are seen by their very nature as not being law-abiding, and Law and Order has nothing to do with justice or equality. Law and Order structures who is legitimate and who is not. And Law and Order will ultimately be enforced by violence. The fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat reminds us that “the essence of fascism is violence.”
8. Tactic number eight is Sexual Anxiety. In every case, across different cultural and historical settings, the fascist leader will always say, “Your women and children are under threat. You need a strong man to protect your families.” Fascists make conservatives overwhelmingly terrified of transgender rights and gay, lesbian, and bisexual people and their families. According to fascists, these targeted groups are not simply trying to peacefully live their own lives, they are trying to destroy the majority’s life, and they are coming for the majority’s children.
9. Stanley calls the 9th tactic of fascism “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Fascist movements typically rest on an urban/rural divide, and fascists use a toxic trope of the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In this trope, pure, hardworking, real members of the nation live in rural areas, where they work hard with their hands. But when politicians talk about inner city voters or ‘urban’ voters, we all know what they mean–Black  and queer folks, immigrants, Jews, and other people that fascists seek to control or eliminate.
10. The tenth tactic is what Stanley, a child of Holocaust survivors, calls ‘Arbeit Macht Frei,” Work shall make you free. These words were hung over the gate at Auschwitz. Fascists create an idea that minorities, immigrants and others are lazy; that these groups need to be taught a work ethic. The mechanism they use is forced labor–whether it’s prison labor or work requirements for benefits, the targeted groups must provide free labor as a supposed moral education. According to fascists, labor unions are supposedly run by communists who are trying to make things easier for these lazy people. College students who protest conservative speakers are described as lazy spoiled kids who need to get real jobs. The thing is, the end game in this calculation is evil. Valuing people by how hard they work means that the elderly, disabled, and even children can become disposable. The Nazis murdered these groups first, because they believed that those who could not work had no value. Is it any wonder that we are now seeing the repeal of child labor laws, in this time of rising fascism?

That’s Stanley’s 10 Tactics of Fascism. 

Now, it’s not that each one of these makes a politician or political movement fascist, but when these elements are present in number, and especially when people are told that they are under an existential threat from the created “other”, then that’s fascism. 

It is plain that in the United States we are in the midst of an orchestrated takeover by fascist political groups. The legislative attacks of the last few months and the civil violence, where domestic extremists act to create fear in targeted groups, are all on the rise. Remember-fascism is inherently violent and it begins with these seemingly random actors. But those domestic terrorists are part of the overall plan. Fascist politicians use stochastic terrorism, in which leaders use hate speech to incite seemingly random violence, because a terrified population is more easily controlled. And a terrified population will look for scapegoats. 

It’s vital to understand that we are past the point of voting the fascists out. We have entered an era of violent civil conflict. Voter organizing is no longer a fully sufficient strategy and we can’t keep careening from one election cycle to another. We must work in coalitions to shape a multi-year plan for keeping these fascist politics in check. The ideas of fascism have been activated in a time of great anxiety about global immigration patterns, technological changes, demographic trends, and about climate disaster and wars for resources. Amidst all this anxiety, people look for simple answers, and fascist politicians supply those answers all too readily. Usually by scapegoating.  Voting is important but our immediate moral obligation is to help people out of the path of direct harm. I’ll come back to that.

I want us to look more closely at this idea though of the glorious past, and introduce the work of Roger Griffin, Professor of Modern History at Oxford Brookes University. Griffin defines fascism as a political ideology whose mythic core is a palingenetic form of populist ultra nationalism. Palingenesis is the concept of rebirth or re-creation, from the Greek palin meaning again and genesis meaning birth. The defining characteristic of palingenetic fascism is what Griffin describes as “the prevalence of the rebirth myth being projected onto the nation, of an obsession with degeneration and regeneration as socio-historical realities.”

In this mythology, the nation has become degenerate because it has fallen away from certain hierarchies, particularly racial or gender hierarchies, and the only way to restore the nation to greatness is to undergo a regeneration, a rebirth-a reclamation of those hierarchies. 

The goal is always the same: the maintenance of power in the hands of a dictator or a group of people, through the use of control and enforced conformity. 

For those of you who have been wondering when I would get to the My Little Pony part of this lecture, we’re here. My Little Pony is a kids’ show, but the version of the show that aired from 2010 to 2019 is morally complex and frequently quite subversive.

 The story takes place in a fantasy world populated by adorable, brightly colored ponies, unicorns, and Pegasus who have names like Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and such. They live in a deeply feminist, matriarchal society in which the highest value is friendship. 

This friendship is a pretty radical kind, and it includes the value of celebrating each pony for their unique self-expression. Each pony has something that is special just to them. These are skills like being a good baker, traits like being very, very kind, or it might be someone’s incredible sense of style. These unique qualities are represented visually on each pony by something called a “cutie mark” which is a symbol on the ponies’ upper flank. The pony baker has a cupcake, the stylish pony has three diamonds, etc. 

The plot lines center around a central group of seven ponies, and their various adventures. Often these adventures are the ordinary problems of friendship-things like what happens when you feel envious, or what to do when one of your friends is sad. But there are also episodes with more serious topics. One of my favorites is a two part episode about, I kid you not, totalitarianism. 

The band of pony friends visits a distant town of ponies where something seems very, very off. Everyone smiles all the time, and the leader is just a little too cheerful. There appears to be no conflict in this town. Most strange is that none of these ponies has a unique cutie mark. Instead, each pony’s mark has been replaced by a dull grey equals sign. 

The intrepid band of friends investigates things and discovers that the leader has tricked the town’s citizens into giving up their cutie marks. This then severs them from their unique qualities. The leader has weakened the citizens so that she can control them, which she does by brainwashing the ponies into believing that uniqueness is a dangerous quality that brings conflict and trouble to the community. 

But of course, the leader of all the ponies has only pretended to give up her cutie mark and her unique qualities. She’s covered her mark with makeup, a fact that our group of intrepid friends discovers. But before the friends can expose her hypocrisy, they are captured, forced to give up their own cutie marks, and imprisoned in a house where they undergo hours of reeducation blasting from a loudspeaker. Yes, this is a kids show. We are going to watch a clip now that begins at this point in the story. 

Conformity and control are the opposite of freedom. Fascists enforce conformity and control because for fascists to remain in power they must limit all true expressions of human freedom. Freedom overthrows hierarchies, and without hierarchies there is no way to retain the power fascists seek. 

My friends, there is a specific reason why we are seeing a focused attack on trans rights at this moment. It’s because under fascism, difference cannot be allowed to flourish, because difference is a form of freedom, and freedom of human expression must be suppressed. Fascists attempt to keep everyone within the narrow roles prescribed to us, and will punish or eliminate anyone who deviates. It is crucial to understand this: attacks on trans folks are an intentional opening salvo and first target of this round of fascist organizing. 

In addition to hating any kind of free self-expression, fascists also always, always try out their tactics on the most vulnerable group. They believe, often rightly, that other people will not act to protect the most vulnerable, especially when they identify a difference that is misunderstood or even generally reviled. Right now, fascists are gauging the public’s response. But they will not stop with our trans siblings-and the impact falls most heavily on our trans siblings who are also Black, indigenous, people of color, poor, and/ or /disabled. Fascists will see what the public allows, and will move to control increasingly broader categories: queer people, immigrants, people of color, indigenous folks, women, in great broad swaths. They intend to make all of us conform. Remember that law and order means conforming to the hierarchies-or be eliminated. 

It may feel like everything is chaotic and that we are struggling on many different fronts, but in actuality it is all connected. And that sense of chaos is also a tactic-fascists want us overwhelmed and exhausted. And everything fascists do has a point-each front is another tactic to take and keep power. 

Here are some other things that are/were tactics: The lack of covid response was a tactic. It wasn’t ineffectiveness on the part of the Trump administration-it was a deliberate tactic to create chaos and then capitalize upon people’s fear and frustration. And it helped undermine concepts of expertise and scientific reality. 

The attack on the Capitol, threats against governors, defunding of institutions like schools, hospitals, even the potholes in our roads–they are all tactics to convince us that our society is in a state of decay and chaos and, most importantly, that there is someone to blame for all this.  

Remember the phrase that went around during the previous administration: “The cruelty is the point”? That phrase is not quite accurate. Cruelty is not the point, it is a tactic. It is designed to overwhelm us and make us afraid. 

Perhaps most sickening is this: gun violence is a tactic. Violence and particularly mass shootings serve a purpose, to terrorize the population and make us more fearful and thus more eager for an authoritarian leader who can protect us. This is the real reason that extremist Republicans do not want to do anything about gun violence. These shootings-yes, including school shootings-are a cynical, horrible, evil tactic.

It helps me to think of fascism as a hydra.

In Greek mythology Hercules was tasked with killing the Hydra, a multi-headed snake creature. The Hydra seemed impossible to kill, because every time you cut off one head it was replaced by two more. Ultimately Hercules killed the beast by getting help from his nephew to cut off the Hydra’s main head. This is another opportunity to remind ourselves that the myth of the rugged individualist, the lone hero, is a useless myth. 

A hydra is a “multifarious evil that cannot be overcome by a single effort.” We have to fight on all fronts, while remembering that these heads all grow out of one body. Our coalitions must oppose the fascist desire to control anyone and everyone in order to take and retain power. 

Now remember, those who use fascist political tactics do not themselves have to have a fascist ideology. This is very important, and it’s different from how the word fascist has been used in popular culture. However, sometimes fascist ideology itself is a political tactic. When it is used by those in power, it enthralls increasing numbers of people into true believers. People who might not have been enthralled become moved to protect what they think is their rightful place in the hierarchy. 

Fascist thinking is contagious. Like Covid, it’s not a bacterial infection that can be dispensed with simple antibiotics. My experience with long Covid makes a great metaphor here. Like Covid, fascism is a disease that remains in the body after the acute stage passes. It’s still there, changing your cells, causing seemingly unrelated illness and disease. Jason Stanley warns that fascism is a permanent temptation of humankind, and that we must be continually vigilant against its resurgence. 

Our historic faith is not immune to these fascist trends, here and elsewhere. Some of us have raised concerns about the close ties between our siblings in faith in Eastern Europe with the authoritarian government of Victor Orban of Hungary. I believe we are right to be concerned about this situation. And I also know we have our own rising reactionary strain within North American Unitarian Universalism. In the interest of both time and an appropriate dose of humility, I’ll keep this essay focused upon our challenges here in the United States. 

We must acknowledge the close ties between our faith’s history and our country’s political history. We often tell the story of our faith as one of victimization. We were the heretics that other Christians tried to throw out. And while that might be true in Europe, it is not really true here. The dominant religion, the religion of those in power for most of this nation’s history, has been Mainline Protestantism. Though some identify Unitarian Universalists as post-Protestant, there can be no denying that American Unitarian Universalism arose out of Mainline Protestantism and that we are still a part of the dominant cultural landscape. And one of the primary functions of the institutions of Mainline Protestantism was to teach and maintain patriarchal white hegemony.

Mainline churches taught and enforced the norms of the ruling class and race, what we sometimes call WASP culture: suppression of conflict, fixation on sexuality, emphasis on control, including controlling bodies and emotions, and children and women. Norms involve hierarchical structures of power, discomfort with vulnerability and anything that seems ‘weak’, and of course a high emphasis on conformity. How close is this to fascism? How many fascists tactics have we said are just ‘how we do things’? 

We must keep asking ourselves: How are we protecting and preserving racial and class hegemony as a faith? How are we perpetuating hierarchies based on gender, race, physical or cognitive abilities, or other categories? These are questions we must explore collectively. We can’t dismantle what we don’t notice. 

We have this history as religious professionals, particularly those of us who are ordained, of creating additional hierarchies among ourselves. The following are status points and therefore often power points in our realm: Are you an ordained minister? Are you in a parish? Are you the senior minister or a second minister? How large is your congregation? 

And digging deeper: How much social capital and privilege do you hold in our movement simply by virtue of race, gender, class, and other identities? Do you meet our society’s standards for attractiveness? Do you need accommodations based upon a disability? Does your identity contribute to your congregation or workplace being supportive of your ministry? Is your family a structure that your people truly embrace, or does your family structure unsettle gender norms and hierarchies long upheld by the dominant culture? Do you have to spend time explaining or defending your essential identity to members of your congregation, or to your supervisor? How does this impact the effectiveness of your ministry?

Lately I have heard it said that those of us who are white, cis-gender, and particularly male are now at some kind of disadvantage in our movement, and particularly in our hiring and search systems. But if we look at who gets settled, and whose ministries receive support or are undermined, and who receives higher pay–it is simply not true that white, cis men are at a disadvantage in our search and hiring processes. 

Remember what I said earlier, that when people have been taught that they have a rightful place at the top of the hierarchy, equality feels like a threat. 

Resistance to examining white supremacy culture is attached to our locations of privilege, and those of us who bear the most privilege, white privilege, gender privilege, neurological privilege, etc., have been the most resistant. My friends, there’s a reason that the work against white supremacy in our movement came up from among our religious educators, who have long been held as second class citizens in our hierarchy of religious professionals. I want to honor the extraordinary contributions of our LREDA colleagues. I’m so glad you are here with us for this conversation, because we owe you a deep debt for your courage and your tenacity. 

If we want to understand clearly what is true or not true, we need only do a quick power analysis: Ask yourself, in your congregation or the UUA:

Who controls the resources? Who makes decisions about what gets funded? What is the race, class, gender makeup of the finance committees, the boards, the treasurers, etc.

Let’s go a little deeper: In our people, who is wealthy? Who holds assets, and who has generational wealth and privilege? What influence do these folks have as funders and donors? And If we examine how white people have retained wealth in this country over generations, and if we are deeply honest with ourselves, we must confront the fact that all along we have been playing with dirty money. 

My friends, we need to ask ourselves this: Within a Unitarian Universalist context, what do reparations look like? How can we move further into that restorative work, instead of quibbling about whether enough white people are getting high level jobs?

This narrative is aiding the current rise in reactionary thinking in our faith. Some Unitarian Universalists seem particularly drawn to the tactics we’ve been discussing earlier. It’s important that we keep alert for the places the privileged will use fascist tactics to preserve hierarchy. I ask you to think now, where in our movement have we seen people do the following:

1. Describing a glorious past-one in which our so-called Enlightenment values were the basis of our thinking.
2. A simple narrative of new victimization by those who have historically held power and privilege.
3. Attacks on trans folks and people of color, either by undermining ministries and leadership or by repeating harmful statements in online spaces where there are fewer consequences.
4. Telling and repeating lies until they seem like reality, particularly lies about this narrative of victimization.

We have theological shifts rising up, shifts toward justice and shared power. Those who have been historically excluded are rightly insisting on liberation. This threatens the old order, which is determined to retain its power. And there are some among us who are using the language of Unitarianism and liberalism to attempt to suppress the theological shifts that are welling up. 

The question is: How do we dismantle the structures of power that protect historic hierarchies? It is a terrible truth that those who would cling to power are not easily interested in their own liberation. As a recovering alcoholic, I recognize the ways power looks a lot like addiction. Indeed, I believe power and privilege are addictions, and addictions lie. 

How do we help people understand that what they thought was their own freedom wasn’t freedom, it was power? If you have been cutting off parts of yourself to survive, you are not free. If you have been cutting off parts of yourself to gain success, wealth, relationships, prestige, and yes, even if you have been simply trying to create a pocket of safety for yourself, this is NOT FREEDOM. Hello, white women and gay men, I am talking to us. 

Anything that feels like a loss of access to these means of survival is going to feel like a threat. That is an emotional reality. When we talk about white fragility or toxic masculinity, or these other ways that folks who are privileged have protected themselves from the truth, we need a trauma informed lens. If your survival, even as a very young child, depends on conforming to racial or gender norms, then anything that questions those norms may well feel like a threat to one’s own safety. 

We need to remember that liberation is costly, that it is sometimes quite painful to let go of the old worldview. It can be terrifying. Word to those of us who are white, or cis-gendered, or otherwise historically privileged-we need to ask ourselves what would our own liberation look like? Because our liberation can’t be in any way continuing to cut off parts of ourselves. 

And our liberation sure as hell doesn’t look like continuing to block the liberation of our siblings. 

To quote Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts: 

“The question is whether white folks will be willing to heal, even if that healing means a loss of status, possible reduction in wealth, and certainly the sacrifice of what they’ve always believed about themselves and their whiteness.”

I want to push us a little further on this concept of fascism within, because these thought patterns will also make their snakey way into our own heads. We are all susceptible to the ideologies-even those who oppose fascists can begin to think like them. We must engage in processes of moral reflection with one another to see where these ideas and habits are gaining hold. 

This is very heavy stuff, but I do have a strengthening word for us today. 

In My Little Pony, our brightly colored friends come up with a plan to resist the propaganda, expose the leader’s lies, and help the villagers break free of the narrative they’ve been forced to live. They run the dictator out of town and work together to get everyone’s cutie marks back, thus restoring the fullness of diversity among them. Though it’s very simple, and it only took the ponies twelve and a half minutes, they were right. To fight fascists, we have to do several things. 

First, we must insist that truth is real, that facts are facts. 

Second, we must continue to develop theologies and praxes of liberation. Watch for where liberation is rising and follow it. And I should not have to say this again, but I will: Liberation is complete. Freedom is not partial. As another of my beloved pop culture references says, “Family means no one gets left behind.”

We must also protect institutions under authoritarian attacks. However, protecting our institutions does not mean preserving old mythologies and old structures of power. Those who would send us back to some glorious age of Unitarianism, whether 1885 or 1985, are more than misguided. Their perspective is often mixed up with a desire to protect their own privilege, not to protect our faith from some made up threat. We must allow our religious tradition to continue to be transformed into a liberatory, liberation seeking faith. We must continue to dismantle hierarchies of power, we must continue to uncover and tell truths about historic harms, and we must, we must transfer leadership. I cannot say this enough.

We must follow the leadership of those who have been struggling under historic oppression-those most under attack. No one knows better how to see through the lies, how to resist, how to protect one another. Let me make this utterly clear-it is time to get in formation behind our queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, poor and disabled colleagues. Our collective survival depends upon it. This transfer of leadership is not just some kind of fairness project. It is utterly necessary because no one is better equipped to fight fascists than the very targets of fascism. 

And to be clear, when I say we need to get behind the leadership of targeted folks, I do not mean we let targeted folks do all the work and take all the risks. Sometimes getting behind someone means being in front of them, taking a greater share of the risk when asked to do so. 

Friends, people in Florida and other states are literally fleeing for their lives, for their children’s lives. Our colleagues and lay people are leaving jobs and homes right now because of fascist policies and laws. Again, we are past the point of simply telling people to get out and vote. We need to be offering up bedrooms, emptying our bank accounts, and otherwise using all our available resources to save people’s lives. Fascism moves swiftly, and it spreads like a deadly virus. We have to come together with a coordinated national response to this crisis. 

As always, we don’t have to invent responses on our own-there are already groups leading the way. If you want to organize with others, The Side With Love team and I are collaborating to offer a two part webinar this summer. 

You can register with this QR code, right now, or stay tuned for more info. Many thanks to Ashley Horan and the team for putting this together. 

My dear ones, it is very easy to feel frightened and overwhelmed in an upward cycle of fascism. There is much hard work ahead. But there is also joy and friendship and healing on this side, right here in the struggle. 

I urge you to be tenacious in your spiritual practices and community care. Let us remember all those who came before us and survived far far worse than anything we can imagine, and that we are held in the hands of a Love that abides. 

We are strong, we are glorious, we are so very beautiful and brave and we are creating pockets of resistance and liberation that will endure. We may not see the full liberation of all beings in our own lifetime. But I promise you that there are blazing moments of liberatory joy, there are glimpses of the kin-dom, all along this path. 

Beloveds, above all, keep watch for joy. 

Thank you for listening to me. I hope these words have served us well.

Responses to 2023 Berry Street Essay

Response 1 of 2 by Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Stevens (will be posted as available)

Response 2 of 2 by C.B. Beal (will be posted as available)