This page was updated 03/10/2008

Victor Gallancz, respect for personality

Writing on the first Principle of our religious movement, the inherent worth and dignity of each person, but about forty years earlier!

If I have made myself clear, it must be at once apparent that the real test of respect for personality is our attitude towards people we "don't like," towards those whom, in the narrower sense, we "don't respect", and to all whom we think of as enemies or criminals or sinners. To be concrete, the test was our attitude, during the war [he refers to World War II], to Germans, Italians, and Japanese;... To talk of Huns and Wops ... to think with pleasurable triumph of those wretched men in the dock at Nuremberg -- all this is to blaspheme against respect for personality.

PRAYER & MEDITATION: JEA

We are connected to one another, not alone those we like and admire,

But we are connected to all people by our shared humanity.

O Great Spirit of love and peace and justice,

May we open our hearts and minds.

Some folks seem to deny their humanity by actions of hate or greed.

They do not; they remain human in their failings, as we ourselves do,

Though our misdeeds are not so egregious.

May we not lose our humanity in revenge or loathing,

But rejoice in forgiveness and love of our neighbors. AMEN.

"Robbers in a Peaceful Way"

We UUs have the well-deserved reputation for being an individualistic religion. Individuals and congregations always emphasized individual rights in society and the extremely personal nature of religious experience. Yet, historically, this highly individualistic approach to religion has been balanced by a strongly humanitarian view of society. The person exists in a social matrix, and lives under certain strong social obligations.

We might say that society is nothing less than the individual writ large—humanity itself. What is true for the individual is true for all persons. This is a dramatically larger way of understanding social life than the smaller family, clan, tribe, or nation. Those older expressions of society, examples of rural and village life, were the largest gatherings of humanity most people experienced on an intimate scale until a few generations ago. Modern life is larger now; society is urban and world-scale.

Early nineteenth century Boston-area Unitarian ministers were among the first theologians articulating the new reality of cities, world trade, and industrial economy. For William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, and others, society embraced all humanity; it was not limited to one's tribal, ethnic, national, or religious ties. This is the most important social and religious change in the modern world: we are no longer separated by tribal and ethnic loyalties; rather we are united by our shared humanity. (Many conservative "family values" are nothing but the pre-industrial, pre-technological society of religious and political authority—control is the goal.) Modern society requires tolerance and pluralism as the basis of both civil life and individual identity. The modern individual bears to society all the obligations and duties once owed only to family, clan, tribe, ethnic group, or religion.

1. humanistic individualism

Channing, Parker, and others developed the core of our heritage: moral individualism within society (a humanistic individualism, not an atomistic individualism). For them, humane social values and beliefs bring individuals into full participation in society; this is not the object of economic, social, or political movements, but reflect religious values. Religion is charged with of supporting and encouraging humane social values in their members.

Only that religion recognizing the unalienable rights of all humanity, as personified in each and every person,—Gollancz's "respect for personality"—can defend those rights from the inevitable dogmatism and prejudice that accompany any and all particular political parties, creeds, or social movements. Religious individualism contains at its core a sense of social obligation to all humanity, not solely to the individual person.

Theodore Parker, for example, said that individuals are fully human only in the wider social setting, beginning with the congregation:

This echoed Channing's view two decades earlier that in society we are educated and find our happiness. Today we might put it this way: individual rights and human rights are one and the same. Rather than a religion of personal salvation, both these Unitarian giants preached human development through the individual's relationships with other people, all society.

Both ministers followed the Jewish call to justice in social relationships, shown by concern for "the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger." This describes the individual's and society's ethical concerns in the economy, for example. Although their congregations were wealthy, they could be blunt. Parker, for instance, demanded that religious values, such as respect for others, be expressed in all aspects of society, even the marketplace:

My topic this morning is morality in our economic lives. How do we relate to those who are poor: with inadequate housing, jobs, education, hygiene, or self-confidence? Do we respect "the inherent dignity and worth of all individuals," or do we believe the poor and downcast have lost, along with their dignity, their right to respect?

2. An example

When federal troops landed in Little Rock, my family were glued to our new television set. The "Brown vs. Board of Education" decision meant that Little Rock schools were to be integrated. When President Eisenhower sent troops to protect African American children, my education received one of its moral exclamation points. It was not the federal troops nor television cameras capturing the raw emotions of shouting whites. It was the growing unease of my parents, a typical Southern family, unsure about integration and wary of change. Yet those pictures of young mothers (my parents’ age) spitting on black children forever changed their attitudes. My parents said, directly, that not matter what my brother and I believe, we are never to treat anyone the way those black children were treated by whites. Our family beliefs were confronted by our family's deeply religious values: religion won.

3. Sociology as foundation of prophetic/practical ethics

The great sociologists Max Weber and Emile Durkheim knew of Channing's and, especially, Parker's analyses of society. Parker was notorious for including lengthy statistics in his sermons—in a time when statistics were considerably harder to come by. But then he had roughly two hours of rapt attention from his congregation—I barely have an hour and a half!

In a sermon on Matthew 18:14, referring to Jesus' concern for those he called the "little ones," Parker described two kinds of poor: (1) those poor by nature (disadvantaged by birth, with mental and/or physical handicaps) and (2) those poor by condition (disadvantaged by circumstances, prevailing social and economic conditions or their own actions).

Parker makes the important point that those poor by condition "are often so hedged about with difficulties, so neglected, that they cannot change their condition."(124) He labels the "pick yourselves up by your own bootstraps" theory as psychologically simplistic: some people are just too damaged to improve their own condition. Are we to ignore their plight, simply because they cannot help themselves? Moreover, individuals and families pass on their poverty to their children since they are relatively powerless to change their own condition. Their number increases as does the population without the intervention of concerned and ethically active citizens. He said, "This class becomes perpetuated; a class of [men=people] mainly abandoned by the Christian."

Inability to help themselves distinguishes the poor by condition from others, and it is precisely this weakness that demands our attention and concern. Because it is not solely an economic problem, no economic solution will be sufficient—no solution. (In a few weeks I will speak about benevolence and charity, and how we manage these efforts without supporting bad habits.) Issues at this level of life concern not only structural changes in the economy but also justice, the proper sphere of religious action, that is, work on the very foundations of society. The ability to affect one's own life is that freedom at the center of religious concern for others. Parker put it this way.

4. Today’s economic woes

We have wars in the Middle East which we are fighting with the most sophisticated weapons in history—we even have "smart" bombs! Yet the poor have "to fight the great battle of life… with feeble arms." This is the evil that haunts our economic life. We channel a creative, productive economy toward war, and often a needless militarism, not self-defense, while we ignore help for the poor and needy. Many needy and poor people are worthy, and even those unworthy by their own efforts do not yet deserve to be ignored and denigrated in our passion for power and wealth.

The past week’s news focused on the woeful state of the American economy. Conservative economic forces in our nation elected a President who has driven the country to the brink of despair with his war expenses and his economic favoritism. The nation suffers from an almost claustrophobic focus on gaining personal wealth, while far too many people ignore the ancient truth that all a nation’s citizens must share a common fate in good times, or they will share a common fate in bad times.

The economic disparity between the richest 1% of Americans and the poorest 25% has risen dramatically in the past twenty years (since Ronald Reagan was elected President), with a brief period when this trend slowed—but did not cease. Perhaps the most egregious example is health care for children. Congress’s failure to pass increased health insurance coverage for our children was not a result of a failing economy. It was clearly a decision on the part of the President and his followers to ignore the terrible state of health care among our children. Health care is a minor expense when the cost of the wars are considered. This is a cold case of priorities and concerns—the President is clearly not concerned with the health of all our children.

We are not the nation in the world with the highest level of infant survival. Sweden wins that honor; but we are not among the top five. We are wealthy enough as a nation to do much better, but apparently we do not want to; we lack the will or the moral discipline,. We do not value children’s lives as highly as we do our own economic success. This is a failure of values, a religious failure, not simply a political disaster.

The problem with our wars and our economic priorities are not political or social, they are moral. We are increasingly a nation comfortable with ignoring the plight of the dispossessed while bending our time and energy toward increasing wealth and comfort. Our moral priorities are selfish, and we do not care for and are not concerned with our fellow citizens, much less the stranger at our gates. This is a great moral failure, and we must not stand aside and allow our nation to descend further into this pit of degeneracy. We may disagree on the tactics and government programs that best care for our poor and needy citizens, but we must do something—now!

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