I will be preaching at the Unitarian Church of Marlborough and Hudson in Hudson, MA on November 6, 2016. I am excited to be in a pulpit the Sunday before the election.

I found this gem by Covington Hall today while reading through the old IWW newspaper The Lumberjack. It’s from the January 9, 1913 edition:

The politician is my shepherd, I shall not want anything during any campaign. He leadeth me into the saloon for my vote’s sake. He filleth my pocket with good cigars; my cup of beer runneth over. He inquireth concerning my family, even unto the fourth generation. Yea, though I walk through the mud and rain to vote for him, and shout myself hoarse when he is elected, yet straightway he forgeteth me. Although I meet him in his own house he knoweth me not. Surely, the wool has been pulled over mine eyes all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of a chump forever.

A few years ago I included a piece titled “It Takes More Than Direct Action” in the column I used to edit for the Industrial Worker called “Workers Power.” The good folks who edit Solidaridad, the Spanish language blog of the Industrial Workers of the World, have seen fit to publish a translation of it: “Se necesita más que la acción directa.” It’s the first text of mine that’s been translated into another language, which is kind of fun. The piece, incidentally, started as the charge to the congregation at the ordination of Julia Hamilton; think of it as evidence of the long arm of liberation theology.

I will be preaching at the First Unitarian Church of Worcester on November 27, 2016. 

I am presenting a paper today, June 9, at the How Class Works conference at the State University of New York Stony Brook titled “To Grow Our Souls: Grace Lee Boggs’s Conceptions of Class.” The paper will hopefully soon be turned into a journal article. In the meantime, here’s the description I submitted to the conference organizers:

I examine how the philosopher and social activist Grace Lee Boggs conceived of class. Through a careful reading of published writings, private correspondence, and organizational records I argue that over the course of her long career Bogg’s shifting understanding of the nature of class drew from her experiences as highly educated Asian American woman in industrial and then post-industrial Detroit, her involvement in Marxist-Leninist organizations, her studies of Hegelianism, and her engagement with post-colonial and decolonial movements throughout the globe. Towards the end of her life Boggs came to understand the struggle for social change to be primarily a spiritual rather than class struggle.

Born in 1915, Boggs was a founder of the Johnson-Forest Tendency of the Workers Party, a grouping that included C. L. R. James. She spent more than eight decades involved in radical politics, along the way meeting with a diversity of activists that included autoworkers, black power organizers, environmentalists and proponents of liberation theology. A study of her life and activism underscores the contingent fate of class based politics in the United States and how an enduring core commitment to economic justice shifted while the world evolved. 

Last month at the annual conference of the French Association of American Studies I met people from the Yale’s Cultural Studies Laboratory. Its official title is the Working Group on Globalization and Culture. It is run by Michael Denning. The lab is modeled after the now defunct Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, where Denning did a master’s degree. As a collaboration between senior faculty and graduate students, its pedagogy and research methodology are quite different from what I have encountered at Harvard or elsewhere in my education. During one of the conference sessions and in casual conversations participants were eager to share what they were doing and how they were doing it. Here is my reconstruction of the how.

The lab has about nine graduate student members and one consistent faculty member, Denning, though other faculty participate from year-to-year. The lab is by application only and its members meet together once a week, sometimes in small groups and sometimes as a whole, throughout the academic year. It is multi-disciplinary and the members I met included doctoral candidates in American Studies, literature, political philosophy, and history. In the past there have been law students as well.

At the beginning of the academic year the lab collectively selects a common research question. This process takes about six weeks and anyone can suggest a topic. Apparently, Denning stays out of the selection of the topic unless the graduate students can’t reach agreement.

Once the topic is selected lab members create a reading list which they then move through in their small groups. Around the same time they also select an empirical case study that relates to the group’s overall research question. This provides the group with opportunties to try out different theoretical discourses on varying empirical case studies in pursuit of answers to a common research question.

Denning then leverages a speaking engagement he gets to conference into an opportunity for the group to collectively present their work. At the French Association of American Studies the group offered it research findings in two panels of five students each. The presentations were tailored to build off each other, moving from the more abstract to the more concrete. Denning presented at one of them as a member of the group and then contributed to the conversation that followed the presentation. The panels were moderated by a graduate student member of the group.

As both a pedagogy and a methodology this lab approach rubs against the individualization of expertise that is rampant in the humanities. It challenges the idea individual should be responsible for a multi-disciplinarily approach. Instead, each member brings their own disciplinary perspective and shares it with the group. It also fosters a sense of collegiality and collaboration that it is rare in the academy. Overall, it is a way of generating knowledge that I wish was shared more widely. I think it could be deployed, in a modified form, in a community setting or amongst clergy as well. 

I spent much of last week in Toulouse, France at the annual conference of the French Association of American Studies. I was there to present a synopsis of my dissertation and participate in the graduate student seminar that proceeded the conference proper. Along the way I learned a bit about the differences between American and French approaches to American Studies. Most of these stem, I suspect, from a combination of cultural difference and the size of American Studies in France. There were about 100 people at the conference and are, I was told, about 500 people who belong to the association. In contrast, the American Studies Association has several thousand members. 

Not surprisingly, the most substantive difference between American Studies in France and American Studies in the United States is that French American Studies functions like something of a province of the latter. The two keynote speakers, Michael Denning and Shelly Jackson, at the conference were both American academics. When people made appeals to the authority of other scholars those scholars were primarily American. I was at one session where a paper’s author was told that if he wanted his work to be taken seriously he had to substantively engage with the work of James Kloppenberg.

In contrast, I got through the entire conference almost without hearing anyone make mention of the French academics who are the rage in America. The only time Michelle Foucault came up was during a conversation I had with a student from Yale. I did not hear any discussions of Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Bourdieu. I find this somewhat shocking. I cannot imagine spending three days at an academic conference in the humanities, of whatever discipline, in the United States and not hearing at least one paper referencing one of them.

American Studies in France is also organized differently than in the United States. The French divide pretty much all topics into two large categories: literature and civilization. Literature focuses on, well, literature. Civilization seems to include everything else: religious studies, history, cultural studies, etc.

I found myself in the civilization section of graduate students. I was surprised at the difference between my presentation and the presentations of the other graduate students. I followed the narrative form, leading with an anecdote and then laying out my major claims in an exegesis of the anecdote. I concluded by suggesting the kinds of contributions I think my dissertation is going to make. All of the French students presented papers that followed the same form. They began by stating their hypothesis. They then provided a brief discussion of their methodology. This was followed by a very specific literature review: I am engaging with x and y texts, which my work improves upon in the manner of z. Following the literature review was articulation of the project’s chapter structure and a brief conclusion.

Over the next week or so I will be posting some further reflections on my trip to France. I hope to include a piece on Yale’s Working Group on Globalization and Culture, who participated in the conference as a group, and something on French anarchism. I might also summarize what I learned about contemporary social movements in France and the conflict over French labor law.

as preached at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Medford, May 30, 2016

A few weeks ago I gave a talk at Starr King School for the Ministry on the challenges facing Unitarian Universalism. Starr King is, as you know, one of the two explicitly Unitarian Universalist seminaries in the United States. Located in Berkley, California, it is a center for training both future ministers and social justice activists. Over the last few decades it has been at the forefront of theological education by serving as a multi-religious training ground. In addition to training Unitarian Universalists, it has a commitment to training liberal Islamic religious leaders.

Since, I am a both a historian and a theologian I opened my talk at Starr King with nod to the past as a way of setting us on the path to the future. I gave them the same reading we just had, Mark Belletini’s “Reading for the Day.” Belletini is a Starr King graduate and he has been a transformative figure for liberal religion. He was the first openly gay man called to a Unitarian Universalist congregation. He is grounded in a multi-religious practice. Raised a Catholic, he has been profoundly influenced by Jewish liturgy and Islamic poetry. He channels the sacred through the fine arts and the human art of connection. He is devoted to teaching and cultivating the Unitarian Universalist tradition. It is a tradition which, in the words of Marilyn Sewell, teaches “that heaven and hell are not found in any kind of afterlife, but simply in the life we create on this earth.”

Mark retired this past year. In many ways, his forty year ministry has been a testament to why Unitarian Universalism was able to grow steadily over the last several decades. For the majority of the later half of the twentieth-century we have been at the forefront of proclaiming that our religious communities are open to everyone. For a long time we were one of the few places where people who not heterosexual could bring their whole selves to worship. At a time of rising interest in religions other than Christianity, we have since the middle of the nineteenth century affirmed that there are multiple paths to the divine.

Today, Unitarian Universalism is at a turning point. While we grew in numbers steadily between 1980 and 2012 for the last few years our membership growth has either been stagnant or slightly declining. What I am going to do this morning is lay out three interrelated challenges that liberal religious communities face in the twenty-first century. I am going to interweave these challenges with autobiographical illustrations and some cursory reflections on how we might meet those challenges.

Before I continue let me say that each of these challenges takes place within the framework of what we could call the great challenge. The great challenge is the question of whether or not we as a society and a human species will be able to manage the ecological catastrophe that we have created. This catastrophe emerges from our economic system of racialized capitalism. In racialized capitalism, the wealth of the world has been built off a dual exploitation. The raw resources of the planet–magnificent forests of pin straight pine and whale large redwoods, pitch coal, or tarry oil–are combined with the exploitation of primarily brown and black bodies to form the basis of mostly white wealth. To confront the great challenge of our rising ecological catastrophe we will have to confront the system that has created it. This means, as Unitarian Universalist theologian Rebecca Parker would have it, that we have to learn to live after the apocalypse. There are great catastrophes behind us and there may be great ones ahead of us. We need to learn with the present resources at hand, as Parker says, we need to engage in “salvage work, recognizing the resources that sustain and restore life.” All this, however, is something of another sermon. So, rather than focusing on the great challenge this morning, let us instead focus on some particular challenges that face our faith.

As an introduction to each challenge, a verse from Mark’s poem: “You are alive, here and now. / Love boldly and always tell the truth.”

I love to dance. I mean I love to dance. I grew up in the Rust Belt in the 1990s sneaking out of the house late at night to hustle off to warehouse parties in Detroit or Chicago. Anyone know what I am talking about? The kind of parties where the DJs played too loud house music, techno, soul… In desolate abandoned factories where everything was somehow rendered with impossible beauty I learned a passable New York liquid and a decent Detroit Jit. In those crumbling old buildings the constant throb of the bass, the unsteady footwork of the crowd, and the sheer press of multitudinous human bodies all combined into a palpable beloved community. There’s a poem called “Ode to the Dancer” that captures a little of this:

Break-dancin’ thru the impossible to eat.
The fruits of labor never tasted so sweet.
We, had the Buddhist monks challenge the
Egyptians to B-Boy battles
and had Gandhi tagging up graffiti in the
bathroom walls of the club.
Where he left messages to
The dancers and the DJ’s
To tell the people that
“You may be black, you may be white,
you may be Jew, or Jenti, but it never
Made a difference in our house!”

Those early experiences dancing in clubs and at illegal rave parties across the desolate deindustrializing landscape offer two important lessons. We live at a moment where the modes of religiosity are ever increasing. I have had religious experiences at all night warehouse parties where the music is interlaced with gospel vocals, appeals to the universal spirit, and reminders that “we are souls clapping for the souls;” at storefront yoga studios; at a meditation retreat. And, yes, I have had them on Sunday morning at church when the preacher offers the right combination of words, when the choir sings an unexpected anthem, when there is a pause between one breath and the next. What about you? Where have you had deep experiences of connection?

We might call those deep experiences of connection, in an intentional echo of Martin King, experiences of the beloved community. The beloved community can erupt anywhere. You might find it here, on Sunday morning, in this beautiful sanctuary, just past the mid-point of spring. It is that glimpse of the world as it should be. Rob Hardies, senior minister of All Souls, Unitarian, in Washington, DC, describes the beloved community this way. It is “the human family, reconciled and whole… where the divisions that separate us in our daily lives come tumbling down.” Marilyn Sewell casts its felt experience “as a moment outside time… no longer constrained by fears that us back, keep us small, keep our God small.”

We live in a period of ever increasing modes of religiosity. The beloved community can erupt anywhere. These two observations present the first challenge that liberal religious communities face in the twenty-first century. Traditional religious institutions have to re-imagine themselves to remain culturally relevant. We all know this. For those who care about congregational life, the statistics are grim. Sunday morning worship attendance is shrinking. Churches are closing. Seminaries are closing.

In the coming years, Unitarian Universalists will increasingly have to figure out how to offer guidance, inspiration, and prophetic vision to a society where there is no reigning religious norm. We will have ground our efforts to understand and transcend the great challenge in a desire to teach and explore both emerging forms of religious expression and long established ones.

“Your heart beats now, / not tomorrow or yesterday. / Love the gift of your life and do no harm.”

I left the Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland to return to academia in the autumn of 2012. Since then I have been doing pulpit supply throughout New England. New England is the historical heartland of American Unitarian Universalism and my itinerant wanderings throughout the region have made me feel, at times, like an old-fashioned circuit rider. In the last years, I have led worship at the some of the largest Unitarian Universalist congregations and some of the smallest. Some of the smallest congregations in our tradition are quite small. This is a recent phenomenon for many of them.

Last year, I was invited to preach at a historic Universalist congregation in the center of a small Massachusetts city. Two centuries ago, the congregation had been served by Hosea Ballou, one the founders of American Universalism. During Ballou’s ministry, the congregation had numbered as many as a couple of thousand. The sanctuary was huge–walls with white paint, wooden pews with glistening varnish, a balcony that wrapped around the edges of the room and sat at least three hundred, a gigantic old fashioned New England pulpit that was way up there–just beautiful. It could easily accommodate fifteen hundred hardy souls. Anyone want to guess how many people were there on my Sunday morning? Anyone? Less than ten. That number includes me, my son, and my parents who were visiting from out of town.

The presence of only ten people in that cavernous sanctuary did not make the gathered congregation’s needs any less real. The struggles and aspirations of the community are present no matter how large or small the group. No matter how big or small the congregation we have bring ourselves fully to whatever religious community we enter. This instant we have together is all we have. We must make the most of it and remember that the beloved the community, that sense of the spark of the divine within each, can erupt at any moment.

No matter the size of the congregation, it can serve as an important voice for justice in its community. I was reminded of this recently when I led worship at another tiny little New England congregation in an old mill town. They asked me ahead of time what I planned to preach on. I told them the lasting impact of global white supremacy. It is a topic on which I preach frequently. It was notable enough in that town that the congregation made the local newspaper. Two full paragraphs. Page three. When Sunday morning came round the sanctuary was the fullest it had been in a long while. Afterwards, several people came up and told me that it was the first time they had heard white supremacy denounced from a historically white pulpit.

There is a truth that I am grasping for here. Even if some of our liberal religious institutions are declining they can still make an impact. In this country, movements for social transformation have always had a religious component. Re-imaging liberal religion for the twenty-first century means recognizing that it needs to continue serve the people well, no matter how few or how many. Whatever the size of a congregation we must remember that it can be a space for collective liberation. In some sense this just means remembering the truth of that well-worn quote by Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

“Life is struggle and loss, and also / tenderness and joy. / Live all of your life, not just part of it.”

I come from a long line of troublemakers, political malcontents, social agitators and religious dissidents. My grandparents, on my Mom’s side, have a connection to the Amana colonies, a Christian socialist community in Iowa. Many people on my father’s side are or were secular Jewish socialists. I was raised on stories of family members who fled this country or that to avoid fighting in another bloody capitalist war.

It is should not be a surprise that I have devoted a considerable portion of my life to the project of collective liberation. This has taken me to a number places that most people who have my privileged class background do not normally end up. Over the years, I have helped organize an independent union of bike couriers and a wildcat strike that involved over twenty thousand workers. I have gone to jail for civil disobedience and spent about seven years working with indigenous communities, including the Zapatistas, in Mexico.

It is one of the lessons that I learned from the Zapatistas that I want to lift up to you this morning. The Zapatistas, you might remember, originated as a guerilla movement in Southern Mexico. It January 1994 they seized control of about one third of the state of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. A movement of indigenous Mayan peasants, among them I found remarkable resonances with the Unitarian and Universalist theological traditions. Consider these words from Commandante Ester, a Zapatista leader, describing her community’s decision making process. She said, that her community tried to make decisions “without losing what makes each individual different, [in doing so] unity is maintained, and, with it, the possibility of advancing by mutual agreement.” That sounds a fair bit like the approach to community life found in our congregations.

Indeed, one of most remarkable things that I witnessed in Chiapas was the processes of community decision making. I visited a village where there was a discussion on whether or not to renounce Catholicism in favor of non-Christian indigenous religion. For several days, from morning until late into the evening, all of the community members stood around a basketball court and debated the theological merits of Catholicism and of their Mayan religion. Which did they believe was the true? Which would guide their community best in the project of collective liberation?

On other occasions, I had conversations with Zapatista educators about their educational model. They told me that its goal was to enable people to become more fully human. That sounds an awful lot like Sophia Lyon Fahs writing that the goal of religious education is “to become one’s true self.”

We have to recognize that our theological tradition has a power that extends far beyond the white and professionally classed enclaves that have been liberal religions historic strongholds. The challenge, remember I promised I was going to get to a challenge, is that for liberal religion to grow in the twenty-first century those of us who are white have to recognize our theological solidarity with a host of communities of color that articulate theologies similar to our own. This means cracking open Unitarian Universalist culture in its stuck places. This means confronting the culture of whiteness that prevents many amongst us from seeing kinds of Unitarian and universalist theologies outside of our congregations. It means expanding our conception of our religious tradition and, in doing so, meeting the challenges we collectively face in the twenty-first century.

Rising modes of religious expression; shrinking institutions; and opening ourselves to Unitarianism and Universalism outside of our historic congregations. These challenges, within the broader context of the great challenge, are some we face. Let us collectively continue upon the path of re-imagining liberal religion and liberal theology for the twenty-first century. In doing so, let us have the faith that our efforts will serve all of humanity.

And remember that every single human word is
finally and divinely cradled in the strong and secure
arms of Silence.

Amen and Blessed Be.

The comedian W. Kamau Bell’s United Shades of America premiered on CNN this past weekend. The show’s first episode focuses on the contemporary Ku Klux Klan. A portion of my dissertation is on the 1920s Klan. I decided to watch the show to get a better sense of the Ku Klux Klan of today. I am glad I did. Overall, I found the program to be informative and, often ironically, funny.

One of the most entertaining moments in the show comes when Bell offers direction to Thomas Robb as he films his video program “This is the Klan.” The black media professional instructs the white amateur on how he might better communicate to his audience. In doing so Bell disproves the whole premise of white supremacy, that people with “white” skin are somehow innately superior to people of color. If there was any truth to that superiority Robb would have been the one offering instructions.

The Klan the Bell portrays in his show shares significant continuities with the Klan of the 1920s. Like its predecessor, it is a white supremacist Protestant Christian organization. Robb and many of the other Klan leaders that Bell encounters are Protestant clergy. The words used at the cross burning Bell witnesses are words of Christian ritual.

Bell’s piece would have been even more compelling if he had highlighted not only the continuities but also the dissimilarities between the epochs of the Klan. This would have meant offering a more nuanced historical background to the Klan. Bell assumes that his viewers know the movement’s history and that the Klan has exclusively targeted black people. This glossing over of history represents a missed opportunity.

There have been three separate Ku Klux Klan movements. The Klan of 2015 is a different organization, or rather set of organizations, than the Klan of 1871 or 1920. Its members have different concerns than their earlier brethren. By examining those different concerns Bell could have demonstrated how white supremacy has changed, and how it has remained constant, over the course of the last 150 years. In doing so, he could have made a statement about our current political moment.

The first Klan was the Reconstruction-era Klan. It was founded in late 1865 or early 1866 by former Confederate soldiers. Under the leadership of the detestable Nathan Bedford Forrest, it terrorized and assassinated black and white radical Republicans and former Union soliders in an effort to reassert white supremacy in the South. It was suppressed by the Grant administration and rendered largely irrelevant by the betrayal of Reconstruction by Northern whites in the mid-1870s. After the 1874 mid-term elections white supremacists in the South no longer needed masks to kill black and white radicals. (For more on the first Klan see my recent lecture at Harvard).

The second Klan was founded in 1915 in Atlanta, Georgia. Its founder, the execrable William Joseph Simmons, was inspired by the W. B. Griffith’s white supremacist fantasy Birth of a Nation. This second Klan grew slowly at first and took until about 1924 to reach its peak. At its height it could claim five million members and held significant political power in nine states.* This Klan lasted until late 1940s by which time it only had a few thousand members.

The second Klan was distinct from the first in three important ways. First, it was as anti-immigrant organization. While the Klansmen (and Klanswomen) of the 1920s certainly terrorized blacks they were mostly concerned with the threat that European immigrants posed to “Anglo-Saxon civilization.”** They feared that “our government would be overrun with undesirables, and instead of being a Nation of the people, by the people, and for the people, become a veritable melting pot for the scum of the earth.”

Second, it was both an anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic organization. One of the primary objections that Klan members had to immigrants was that the undermined the place of Protestantism within the culture of the United States. They supported things likes women’s suffrage and universal public education because they saw them as strategies to both counter the influence of the foreign born within politics and force assimilation.

Third, the second Klan was a national, not sectional, organization. Its leaders claimed they had several hundred thousand members in states like Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Oregon. These claims are believable in that the Klan exhibited significant public strength in these states either through large rallies or the election of public officials who openly supported the Klan.

The third Klan, the Klan that Bell encounters in his show, is more similar to the first Klan than the second in that it is primarily an anti-black and Southern movement. The first Klan owed its origin to white supremacist opposition to Reconstruction. The third Klan began as a white supremacist reaction to the civil rights movement.

If Bell had spent even a couple of minutes tending to the second Klan something would have become clear to his viewers. Its rhetoric is similar to that of the presumptive Republic Party nominee, Donald Trump. Like Trump, Klansmen of the 1920s painted immigrants are fundamentally threatening the nation. Compare this 1924 statement from the Grand Dragon of South Carolina to some of Trump’s utterances:

“The immigrants who come to this country form communities by themselves and congregate in the great cities. Paupers, diseased and criminals predominate among those who land upon American soil. They have a very low standard of morals, they are unable to speak our language and a great majority of them are unable to read and write their own language. They come from countries where they have been accustomed to a lower standard of wages and living and therefore, compete with American labor which is already overcrowded.”

Or contrast this statement about Catholics from Hiram Evans, the second Imperial Wizard of the Klan, to Trump’s words on Muslims:

“In Protestant America we must have time to teach these alien peoples the fundamental principles of human liberty before we permit further masses of ignorant, superstitious, religious devotees to come within our borders.”

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. As the Washington Post and other news outlets have documented his father, Fred Trump, might have been affiliated with the Klan. He has appears to have been arrested at a Klan rally during a time, 1927, when the Klan could hundreds of thousands of white Protestant men as members. It would not have been unusual for the elder Trump to have been a Klan member. A number of prominent Protestant white men at the time either were members or openly sympathetic to the Klan.

Whether or not Fred Trump was ever a member of the Klan is probably beside the point. Far more relevant is that by briefly discussing the second Klan Bell could have shown through his documentary how the ideas of that incarnation of the white supremacist Protestant terrorist organization are at the center, and not the margins, of contemporary American political discourse.

*For membership numbers see Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), xi. The states where the Klan held significant political power were Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Texas (see David Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, third edition (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 80, 59, 200, 127, 72, 162, 57). I define a state in which the Klan held significant power as a state in which either a Governor or a Senator openly affiliated with the Klan was elected or a state in which the election of a Governor or a Senator was due to the mobilization of the Klan. Chalmers claims that Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, and Indiana were the states where the Klan held its greatest political strength.

**All quotes are drawn from my dissertation research. If you’d like the precise citation feel free to contact me.

On Tuesday I announced that I was accepting preaching invitations for June, September and beyond. I have received three. I’ll be preaching in Needham, MA (August 28), Rockport, MA (October 9), and Andover, MA (March 26, 2017). I still have plenty of availability in the coming months. It is also exciting that my calendar is starting to fill-up.