Exerpt from Democracy In America by Alexis de Tocqueville

(ed. Richard D. Heffner; New York: The New American Library, Inc., pp.117-118)

[de Tocqueville's book was first published in 1835, and his prose retains the quaint tendency of that era to overlook the presence of women in the human family – I ask your indulgence with this defect of the text, for he intended to convey a message very relevant to us.]

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. ... In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion: within these barriers, an author may write what he pleases; but woe to him if he goes beyond them. ... Before publishing his opinions, he imagined that he held them in common with others; but no sooner has he declared them, than he is loudly censured by his opponents, whilst those who think like him, without having the courage to speak out, abandon him in silence. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.

Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn. Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression: the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind, as the will which it is intended to coerce. [When] the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul ... the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it, and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says, “You shall think as I do, or you shall die”; but he says, “You are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow-citizens, if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn you, if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow-creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.”

Exerpt from The Healing Imagination, by Ann and Barry Ulanov

(1991: Paulist Press, pp. 133-4, 136) adapted

Imagination provides the primary space for our inner life. If we cannot use it to house all of the psyche, the shadowy bad as well as the unmistakably good, the bitter transformation will occur and we will make our contribution to the world's evils – social, political, whatever. Imprisonment in our rigid defenses will force us to look for a form of government to imprison even more of us in its totalitarian embrace. Our unhappiness in our own bodies will make us want to visit a matching misery upon other people's bodies, instilling even in our own children fear of and contempt for instinctual life. Our own ill health makes us envy others' good health. Our lack of love makes us want to spoil their loving relationships. Suffering from the loss of freedom to depression or anxiety, we seek to destroy others' freedom. The life of the spirit, and especially prayer, where we can unburden our agony, may keep us from infecting our neighbors, or if we are healthy enough, will allow us to carry the guilt the inequities of the world too often entail, and make something positive of it. ...

Much political strife issues from mistaking a partial, one-island view for the whole and insisting that everyone else must adopt it too. Imagination reminds us that we have only bits of the truth at our disposal and at best can bring those bits together into a mosaic of a partial good, but never the perfect good or the whole truth. To accept the gap between our occluded vision and the full truth energizes political action while at the same time reminding us that any action can only be partly effective. We need to exercise our imaginations before labor comes to a halt, before mines cave in, before hostages are taken, before terrorists strike. We must imagine our way into other persons' shoes and try to see what the problem and its possible solutions look like to them, and equally where we and they may be tempted to precipitous action. Imagination may even return us to the true nature of religion and the church.

A church community is formed by consciousness of God coming down into our midst. It conforms ... to symbols of transcendence, not to ... utilitarian purposes. ... Its defining function is [worship]. Worship is everything and nothing; its goodness is good for nothing. We choose to enter a [larger] reality, to see at some deep level that we belong to [it]. ... The [Biblical] figure of Sophia personifies the anti-utilitarian, worship-centered church. This wisdom figure, ... neither god nor goddess, evokes all our unconscious experiences of the divine. She sets up her table in the marketplace, bringing God into our midst ... Sophia is that spirit of imagination that engenders in us a creative living which is a living in God. ... She ... is what hovers over all our great gaps of understanding. She emboldens us to empty our preconceived notions of what should be, to let be the most embarrassing images that come to us, to look at them and do something with them which we can then offer to others. How else could so many men and women find the courage to get up as preachers Sunday after Sunday and speak their own thoughts about the divine to their waiting congregations? Sophia symbolizes the mysterious circling back of the graces of faith to their source. We receive its bestowal by emptying out our knowing better and by returning to others what we receive from the source [of life]. That bestowal on our part leaves us empty to receive those graces again.

SERMON: “The Shadow of Democracy”

West Shore UU Church, July 4, 1999

Well, here we all are, worshipping together on the glorious 4th! Today is the birthday of our nation, the 223rd anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. As I wrote this sermon, I looked out my study window onto West 223rd Street, an apt symbol of the holiday to me, because I think of the 4th of July as a neighborhood holiday. When I was little, we used to picnic in the back yard and watch the fireworks our neighbors set off in their back yards. Those were the days, eh? I was also reminded as I looked out that window that last year, for some reason – probably I was writing the sermon for July 5 – I watched the fireworks from there.

From my study window in Fairview Park I could actually see the downtown fireworks on the horizon! I'm glad the fireworks fall after my sermon this year, but I'm also glad to have had two chances to preach a 4th-of-July-weekend sermon. It's a rare chance to celebrate in worship the achievement of political freedom and democracy that the founding of our nation represents, and to celebrate the pivotal contributions to that achievement of two famous Unitarians, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Last year I explored the religious life of Thomas Jefferson during this hour. This morning I want to talk about democracy as a religious value.

Democracy is named in our Unitarian Universalist Statement of Principles as a thing of value to us. If you're visiting this morning and don't know about the Unitarian Universalist Statement of Principles, you can find it in the hymnal. Turn to hymn #1, then turn back one page. There in the top half of the left-hand page, you'll see the text I'm referring to. “We ... covenant to affirm and promote ... the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” Now, if you're new to the Unitarian Universalist Principles, you need to know that they do not represent a creed. They are, instead, our best collective effort to articulate our religious values as a movement. The Principles Statement was written with input from all our congregations across the United States and Canada during a three-year process in the mid-1980s. Individual Unitarian Universalists may have opinions or even disagreements with this Statement of Principles. For example, some people do object that there really ought to be a comma after the word “existence” so that the phrase “of which we are a part” is not taken as a modifier of that word. We do not want to carve out a subset of all existence, call it the existence of which we are a part, and only respect that, absolving ourselves of any responsibility to respect the parts of existence with which we do not associate. Our intent is to affirm that we are a part of all existence, that we must associate with all that exists, and respect the interdependence of all that is. So we really ought to have a comma there.

Personally, I'm not much bothered by that absent comma. But I do have my own niggling little gripe with the way our Principles Statement refers to democracy. It says we affirm and promote “the use of the democratic process.” In my experience, there's no such thing as “the democratic process.” Instead, there's a variety of democratic processes, each able to facilitate democratic decision-making in a slightly different way. To speak of “the democratic process” raises the spectre in my mind of the tyranny of the majority. “This is the democratic process. Everybody knows that. What do you mean, there might be another way to decide an issue?” // Do you see my point? When we hear the phrase, “the democratic process,” each of us might imagine something a little different. And in my experience – in fact, we do. “Let's do it this way – it's democratic.” “But that's unfair!” Ring any bells?

As my selection from de Tocqueville illustrates, democracy – like anything else – has a shadow side; deTocqueville pointed out that tyranny can operate within a democratic system. Democracy does not guarantee fairness, or right relationship between people. Within a democratic system, we still have to work at those things. As Ann and Barry Ulanov put it, “We need to exercise our imaginations ... imagine our way into other persons' shoes and try to see what the problem and its possible solutions look like to them ... and equally [we must imagine] where we and they may be tempted [in]to precipitous action.” Rather than act rashly out of fear or hurt, and manipulate a democratic system or process in order to have our own way or to hurt other people, we need to take time to deliberate and to imagine. We need to look at and take account of the shadow side of our actions or wishes, so that democracy remains a vehicle for right relations between us and not a bludgeon for our mutual injury or destruction. //

So, what are these democratic processes I'm talking about? Well, the first and most obvious one is voting. Indeed, many people think that democracy means voting, that voting is “the democratic process.” Voting usually presumes that everyone who will be affected by the decision has a vote, and that everyone who votes is competent and is fully informed about the issue to be voted on – through some mechanism such as discussion, debate, public notice, or whatever. Also, that one person gets one vote, and votes her or his own conscience. And that each voter is alive. Now in a church we don't usually have to weed out the graveyard vote, or judge anyone's competence to vote, or worry about coercion or such flagrant abuses as “vote early and often.” Voting members of the church are usually able to join in face-to-face discussions, to ask questions, even to offer alternative proposals to vote on.

Most of the time, voting works well for us in the church. It gives structure to our deliberations and provides rules for our proceedings. But it requires no less imagination and attention to make it work. I remember a period of time in my home congregation on Long Island where, in congregational meetings, it became very popular to “call the question.” It was our custom to hold congregational meetings after the Sunday service – because everyone was already there, and since nobody would want to hang around all afternoon, the meeting would stay task-focused. For a couple of years there, we wasted a lot of time in congregational meetings voting down motions to “call the question.” A motion to “call the question,” of course, is a motion to stop discussion and immediately vote on the proposal at issue. I don't know how all that “calling the question” got started or who started it, but I know how our leadership addressed it. We pointed out again and again – every time someone made a motion to “call the question” – that a motion to “call the question” is a motion to stop discussion, and that discussion is often worth having, and that if you wanted the discussion to continue you should vote against the motion to “call the question.” We made the excuse as leaders that we needed to explain procedures to make sure everyone understood, but our intention was to endorse the value of discussion as a tool for fairness and right relationship, and to suggest indirectly – and accurately – that most of the motions to “call the question” that we'd been experiencing were in fact attempts to stop discussion in order to keep the meeting short. Those “calling the question” again and again were motivated not by consideration of others or of the best interests of the congregation's institutions, but by their own selfish wishes.

Another type of democratic process – that we often use voting to establish – is representation. Representation is where we delegate decision-making, more or less, to our chosen or accepted leaders. I say “more or less,” because elsewhere in his discussion of the tyranny of the majority, de Tocqueville laments how little discretion most Congressmen had in his day. “The Americans,” he wrote, “determined that the members of the legislature should be elected by the people directly, and for a very brief term, in order to subject them, not only to the general convictions, but even to the daily passions, of their constituents. ... [I]t frequently happens that the voters, in electing a delegate, point out a certain line of conduct to him, and impose upon him certain positive obligations which he is pledged to fulfill. With the exception of the tumult, this comes to the same thing as if the majority itself held its deliberations in the market-place.” On a scale from more to less, that would be less! For representation to work well, we need to show faith and trust in our chosen delegates and leaders. We need to allow them to lead. A friend of mine back on Long Island used to refer to this as “good followership.” After all, the whole point of representation is to get the decision-making out of the market-place, out of everybody's day-to-day affairs. It is, in effect, to automate democracy through the invention of well-crafted democratic institutions. An institution or organizational structure is a machine, after all. It has no motor and needs no oil, at least not literally, but it is a labor-saving device. That's the point of representation. And just as we need to have enough ability to trust the washing machine to wash the clothes without opening the lid and inspecting its progress every other minute, so we need to have enough ability to trust our representative leaders and institutions. We need to be good followers, let go of some control, so that the mechanisms of democracy can do their work.

The danger in automation, of course, is apathy. “Well, we have all these democratic institutions, they must be working. I don't need to be involved.” But would you leave your iron plugged in all day? Would you leave your clothes in the washer all week? Machines need to be tended. So does democracy. We cannot afford to be uninvolved with either.

A third type of democratic process is consensus. Unlike voting, consensus depends upon discussion to achieve a decision. Unlike voting, there can be no mechanism for stopping discussion except silent assent to an imperfect decision. Consensus, more than any other democratic process, rests upon the self-discipline of its participants. Whereas a voting process can be used as a means to stop discussion, a consensus process can be used as a means to stop action. All you have to do is say something contrary, and decision and action are prevented in one blow. It speaks volumes that only the Quakers have been able to make consensus work for them in any adequate way. It truly requires a kind of individual spiritual discipline.

Often, in lieu of the time-consuming process of consensus-building, we use another type of democratic process – that we don't often think of as a democratic process at all, but fundamentally it is. I'm talking about tradition. Tradition is democratic in the sense that it is developed and shaped by the community, though for the most part in no formal or deliberative way. Tradition sort of grows up, organically, out of the experience and spirit of the community. It sticks around because it represents a memory or a feeling of community or of communal identity, and is democratic in the sense that it is accepted by the majority. Like representation, it is a way of automating our relations with one another. Instead of delegating to leaders, we delegate to the dead or to our former selves. We delegate everything: discussion today defers to yesterday's decision; we need not consult anyone or ask for a decision, because the decision was made long ago and we are simply carrying it out. If we didn't, we'd catch flack for it! What shall we sing at our Christmas Eve service? Why, “Silent Night,” of course! What shall we have for dinner on Thanksgiving? Why, turkey, of course! What shall we do on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend? Why, we'll wear T-shirts and do the water communion, what else? Traditions are important because they symbolize our communal identity and our bonds with one another; they carry our common memory and hold us in a familiar, comfortable embrace. That is, the good ones do. But some traditions – like carrying a particular item in the operating budget “because we always do,” never mind that nobody ever uses the money – are worth examining and even dropping altogether. Tradition, like representation, is a machine which needs tending. And if it does not carry meaning and memory for us, then it is less than a machine. It is junk. Put it on the curb.

Still another form of democratic process is group reflective practice. This is the democratic process we use, for example, in evaluating the ministries of our church. We set goals, then we take actions according to our best judgment; afterward we reflect on the process and outcomes of our actions, and we make decisions about what we would do the same and what we would do differently in order to meet our goals. Periodically we reflect on the goals we set for ourselves, and decide whether we've met them and should set new ones, or need to reformulate them or set additional goals for the future. For group reflective practice to work well, we need to give ourselves permission to do two things: to make mistakes, and to fail. The virtues of group reflective practice are that action does not have to be preceded by discussion – we can just try something and see if it works, trusting the motives of those who take the risk to act. Discussion is ongoing, reflective and evaluative, taking place in formal and informal settings. Decisions can be better-informed by more input from more people, or they can be amended as they're carried out. Feedback, discussion, reflection, evaluation, and action all occur at once, in interlocking cycles of creativity and accountability. In many ways, group reflective practice offers cures for the ills of voting, representation, consensus and tradition. It proceeds without formal votes, it demands the trust that representation requires, it combines action with the deliberative process of consensus, and it tinkers with and evaluates traditions. But it also has its shadow side. The trust it grants to risk-takers can be abused by those who believe “it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.” The risks taken in trying out an action can be inappropriate, such as risking trampling on others' feelings or needs. The reflection and evaluation in group reflective practice can suffer from insufficient or chaotic communication. It can also be sabotaged as easily as in the other democratic processes I've mentioned: action can be used as a means to “call the question” or to pre-empt group evaluation and decision; apathy can set in when we leave it to others to take risks and innovate; if no one wants to take the risks, then group reflective practice can get as bogged down in inaction as the consensus method, or old patterns are continued without real reflection and evaluation, as with accepted traditions. In many ways, this democratic process demands more of us, because it is not by nature mechanical, but organic. It is not systematic and orderly, but messy and creative. It's riskier and can evoke more discomfort in us. Which means, as Ann and Barry Ulanov point out, that it demands our attention and imagination.

For the Ulanovs, that is the same as saying, it requires us to pray. Prayer, as they see it, is a focusing of attention on things that distress us, and a use of imagination that allows us “to unburden our agony” and feel that we do not bear it alone. And indeed, we do not bear it alone, or we need not. That is the purpose of our church, after all – that is our great covenant, to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another. Ideally, prayer – or meditation, reflection, visualization, whatever works for you – helps us to carry our pain and transform it into something positive, something helpful to each other. And ideally, our practice of prayer or meditation helps us to engage and tend the democratic processes we use toward fulfilling our promise to dwell in peace, seek truth in love, and help one another. The effectiveness and justice of our democratic processes and institutions depend upon our faithfulness to these promises, and to values and principles we share. We can turn to our Unitarian Universalist Statement of Principles for guidance in our prayers and in our conduct with one another. A democratic process that is working well takes into account the worth and dignity of everyone involved. It helps us to embody justice, equity and compassion in our relations with one another. It rests upon our acceptance of one another, and the good will we show in encouraging one another's spiritual growth. It helps us seek truth and meaning in a free and responsible way. And if we get all this right – if our democratic processes embody and facilitate those values – then we have created some of the building blocks of a world community with peace and liberty and justice for everyone, a world community that can claim its interdependence with all that is and all that can be, with the brokenness and the promise, the forgiveness and the recommitment that this world is and holds in potential, that we are or may be or may transcend.

Attention, imagination, trust and faith. May we cleave to these in the private meditations of our minds and hearts, in the conduct of our relationships with one another, and in minding the democratic processes and institutions by which we live our free faith and work for a better world. And may no one fall into the shadows, but always into the light of love. So may it be. Amen.