We opened today's service with Pete Seeger's rendition of an old union song, "Which Side Are You On". The song perfectly captures one way to organize and motivate people to try to change the world. "You're with us or against us." "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." It's not a nuanced attitude, to be sure, but sometimes there really are good guys and bad guys. Today we have an administration in the United States that invites comparison to the bad guys of fantasy literature. You've seen the bumper stickers: "Republicans for Voldemort", or "Frodo Failed: Bush has the Ring". We want to organize and motivate ourselves to oppose evil, to change the world, but most of us are rightly suspicious of these simplistic dualistic views.
On the other hand, it's hard to fault the attitude of Florence Reece, the woman who wrote new words to an old Baptist hymn in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1931. Anyone who has seen one of my favorite movies, John Sayles' Matewan, has an idea what workers and labor organizers were up against. The coal companies were willing to hire mercenaries to beat and kill people, to pay informers within the union movement, to bring in replacement workers from outside, essentially to do anything to prevent a union from being established. Since so much of the bad guy's strategy was based on dividing the good guys, "Which Side Are You On" made sense. As the song says, "us poor folks haven't got a chance unless we organize".
Pete Seeger grew up as a "man of the left", and in the 1930's that meant being part of the Communist Party. In 1940 and 1941, he was a peace activist up until the day Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and the American left suddenly favored getting into the war. The side Pete was on was quite literally the side of the Nazis. This was of course a natural consequence of dividing the world into two sides -- the real world is never so simple and joining one side always brings the risk of unsavory companions. Pete Seeger broke with the Communist Party over fifty years ago, but what interests me about him today was a piece of world-changing he took up in 1966, which just might be more important than all of his many accomplishments as a musician and a folklorist. (Who knows what I'm talking about?)
In 1966 Pete Seeger saw that the Hudson River, where he lived, was polluted. What he did about it was to form an organization and raise money to build a hundred-foot boat, to "bring people to the river, where they could experience its beauty and be moved to preserve it". The boat, the Clearwater, sailed up and down the Hudson and various other places. Children in school groups and summer camps came on the boat, got to pull on the ropes, and learned about the river, its inhabitants, and its problems. An annual music festival, the Great Hudson River Revival, raised more money and kept the river at the center of attention. Forty years later, the Clearwater is still sailing and the Hudson is swimmable for most of its length. The United States has the Clean Water Act, and hundreds of other ship-based environmental education programs operate around the world.
I recently heard a 1995 interview with Seeger, rebroadcast on WFUV in time for the 2008 festival last month. He reminded us that in 1966 the idea was a pretty strange one. Environmentalism was not yet at the center of most activists' consciousness -- according to Wikipedia, at least, David Brower coined the phrase "think globally, act locally" three years later. It was the middle of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, and Seeger spoke of being criticized for diverting attention from those more important issues. But what he saw was that he could bring people to action more easily if the action itself was fun. The original crew of the Clearwater were other activists and folksingers, including Gordon Bok (who already knew a lot about boats) and Don McLean (who didn't). The "work" of cleaning the Hudson involved sailing a boat, showing the boat to children, performing to raise money, meeting all the people who came to see the boat, all at the same time as trying to influence legislation and all that.
One man who was probably not surprised by Seeger's success was Saul Alinsky, who had been practicing his model of community organizing since the 1930's. You've probably heard Alinsky's name lately. He was the subject of Hilary Rodham's 1969 undergraduate thesis at Wellesley College. In 1985 Barack Obama became the director of the Developing Communities Project, an Alinsky-like organization in Chicago that still exists. Markos Moulitsas, the founder of The Daily Kos and the most visible figure in the Democratic "netroots" movement, is about to publish a book crediting Alinsky's ideas for everything he has been able to build.
What is community organizing? It empowers a community to act for itself. Obama's old organization says on its website that it is institutionally based, systematically recruits and trains community leaders, organizes for multiple issues, and is collectively led. An outisde organizer can come in and start something, but if the organization is going to succeed it will quickly generate its own leaders and its own agenda. If the poor and powerless are going to be interested, the organization has to address issues of direct concern to them and it has to win some victories. The immediate goals may change with time, but the long-term goal is to create and maintain an organization that can exert real political power on behalf of the community. Finally, the work itself should be fun -- for example, if your garbage is not being picked up, you can find the official responsible for getting it picked up and move the garbage to his lawn, with the local TV cameras right behind you.
But political power means more than influencing the existing leadership -- at some point it means changing the leadership. In a democracy, that means elective politics. A disclaimer right away -- it is neither appropriate nor legally consistent with our tax-exempt status to advocate the election of a particular candidate in a sermon. I want to use the John Edwards campaign, in which I worked, and the Barack Obama campaign, in which I plan to work, as examples of people organizing to change the world. My final point, though, is going to be religious rather than political, as befits a sermon.
All right, then, let's take an anthropological look at an American political campaign. And since I want to talk about what's new about campaigning in the last few years, let's look at the campaigns of the past, like the 1990's. The organization has a clearly defined goal, to win a particular election or to do well enough to make some sort of statement. What do people actually do to make this happen? Well, the most common activity is writing checks. Campaign workers and advertising take money, lots of money. Only people with lots of money can give you lots of money, and since the law only allows you to get so much per donor, to get a million dollars you need hundreds or thousands of people who can give you hundreds or thousands each. The traditional campaign revolves around these donors. It helps a lot if the candidate is rich and has lots of rich friends, or can tap into a network of prosperous Greek-Americans or prosperous Mormons, to take two recent examples. For a thousand dollars, a donor wants to meet the candidate, so the candidate spends at least as much time with donors as with ordinary voters.
You can try to raise money from large numbers of smaller donors. Direct mail is a somewhat useful way to do this, as it's cheap to send a letter and you don't need a very high return rate for a net gain in money. Then there's "canvassing", which as all but the newest members of this society know, means systematically asking an entire population to give what they can. If you meet a door-to-door canvasser in Massachusetts, they are almost certainly looking for your money, because (except for the 2008 Democratic primary) your vote has been of almost no importance in national politics. The canvasser gets paid about 30 percent of what you give, so if you like your gift is helping to pay them to go out and raise more money. My home town of Amherst is considered particularly fertile ground for canvassers from single-issue organizations as well as from the Democratic Party.
The other major part of campaign labor is trying to identify your candidate's voters and get them to the polls. You can have a non-fundraising "canvasser" knock on their door and talk to them, or have a "phonebanker" or a machine call them on the phone. But reaching one voter at a time on foot really only works well in cities, and the phone soliciting business has made lots of people unwilling to talk to strangers and especially to machines. In the 1990's, campaigns above the local level were pretty much reduced to raising money to pay for TV ads -- not my idea of fun.
Contrast this with what I found when I decided to start working for John Edwards in the spring of 2007. I went to johnedwards.com and found instructions on how to find the nearest chapter of "OneCorps", a network of local Edwards clubs including one based in Amherst. There was a section of the web site where I could start my own political blog, and write articles that would be featured on the main site if enough readers recommended them. We could see the effect of our little contributions on the national fundraising goals, and identify with other blogging campaigners across the country. I got email about any local events, but these mostly weren't campaign events as such -- they were collecting food for Jessie's House at the local supermarket, or participating in Amherst's Earth Day event, or a local house party to watch a video from the national campaign. The idea was to build these local chapters into "cells" of people who knew each other and liked working with each other, who could raise the visibility of the campaign and finally engage in traditional volunteer campaign work as the election got closer.
Of course in the big picture, this plan didn't work -- John came a close second in Iowa, a distant third in New Hampshire, and dropped out just before the Massachusetts primary. On the local scale, the Pioneer Valley OneCorps did some things and had some fun, but never reached critical mass. The supermarket was only occasionally willing to let us collect food. The undergraduate who was supposed to host the house party forgot to be there to open his house that night, though those of us who showed up went somewhere else and had a fine time. Once the ordinary campaign offices opened up in New Hampshire, the most motivated of us headed to Keene to go door-to-door telling people about John's appearances there and starting to identify voters, and the Pioneer Valley chapter pretty much faded away. We did assemble ten or fifteen people at the Haymarket Cafe just before the Massachusetts primary, and formed a plan to do some visibilities around the valley, but then John dropped out and so did we.
We know that John's overall plan was a reasonable one, though, because with a different candidate and more money, Senator Obama has just used it to win the Democratic nomination. His local chapters famously out-organized Sen. Clinton in the caucus states, which gave him the margin of victory in delegates. He has a realistic plan to have a million total volunteers for the general election, in all fifty states. And the amount of money he has raised, much of it through very small contributions, is so great that he's elected to forego public financing in the general, even as he's been able to stay on the road rather than meeting with donors all the time. Most importantly, the Obama people are working together, savoring more than a few victories, and having fun. We'll see what happens as the campaign continues.
Now to that religious point. A Unitarian Universalist congregation is and should be something very different from a political campaign. But there are some similarities -- both have to raise money and leverage the work of a small professional staff to accomplish things with volunteer labor, for example. Both have to unite people of different backgrounds and agendas for a common purpose. The congregation is perhaps more similar to one of Alinsky's community organizations, in that there is a potential tension between what the organization is and what it does. The Obama campaign by definition is an organization that exists to try to elect Obama president -- the Obama movement might turn out to be something different. A neighborhood organization does things like lobby for better trash pickup, but its long-term purpose is to "empower its community" -- to build a structure that can continue acting in the future.
I read earlier from Rev. Robert Latham's book on transition in Unitarian Universalist congregations. He and other observers of congregations have concluded that they differ primarily by size, where size is best measured by weekly attendance (adults plus children in religious education). A small congregation of fifty acts like a family (that's essentially what we have here during the summer). A larger one of 100 they call "Pastoral" -- it generally revolves around the minister and the major players among the laypeople generally know each other personally. We are now, they say, of the size to be a "Program" congregation, which of necessity contains more than one "cell" of people who know each other personally. Running a program congregation like a pastoral congregation, they say, simply doesn't work and leads to stagnation and decline.
As you may know, I was elected to the Board of Trustees of this congregation a couple of months ago, and I've begun to see how this overall analysis is taken into account as the Board operates. For one thing, the Board has altered its overall role just as Latham recommends. In a smaller congregation, the Board makes all the decisions, large and small. We now have an Executive team (the minister, treasurer, and the past, present, and future presidents) for short-term decisions and a Program Council for the nuts and bolts of administering all the other committees and councils that do the congregation's work. The Board, then, is left to decide the overall budget and other long-term policies.
There are two big long-term tasks the Board has set for the congregation in the coming year. The first and most obvious one is the search for a permanent minister. We have a search committee that will survey the congregation, go through the available candidates, and pick one for "candidating week" in the spring where the rest of us will meet the candidate and vote whether to call them as our minister. The second task is the subject of a congregational retreat to be held in November, and that is to produce a mission statement for the congregation.
"Mission statement". My first reaction to the term is that it's just management-school jargon -- I'm reminded of the Mormon business author Stephen Covey, who recommends that every family have a mission statement. Do we need one? A mission statement would be redundant for the Obama campaign, because it's an organization to do only one thing, elect Senator Obama as president. But my Hampshire Shakespeare Company has one, which makes some sense because we do a lot of different things -- we put on plays in the summer, we help high schools put on plays, we run camps for kids, all toward the single goal of performing and promoting theatre in general and Shakespeare in particular. We in this Society also do a lot of different things -- do we know what common purpose they are directed towards?
Latham argues that whether or not we have a mission statement, we need to have a mission in order to unite the different cells toward the community rather than toward their individual concerns. As Unitarian Universalists, with a variety of theological beliefs, we can't rely on the defining purpose that theology gives other congregations. We have no consensus on what God may or may not have commanded us to do, and few of us if any believe that we must help individuals reach eternal life by bringing them to Christ. We do have an agreed set of principles, but evangelizing to convert others to accept them is just not part of our makeup.
Latham takes it for granted that the "religious mission" ought to be "to transform the world". At various points in his book he characterizes a congregation without such a mission as "a nice social club for liberals". Is a nice social club a bad thing? Karen Bellavance-Grace spoke here two weeks ago about one important thing the members of even a nice social club can do -- we can be there for each other in times of trial. There's a long tradition within Christianity of communities that set out to model the life in Christ among themselves, and perhaps transform the world by example. By functioning as a community on principles of free theological inquiry and the inherent worth and dignity of every person, we model those principles for others and show them that such a thing is possible. Is that our mission?
Many members of this society are active, as professionals or volunteers, in other organizations that most of us would recognize as undertaking the work of transforming the world. When they come here on Sunday the rest of us reaffirm what they do, giving them a kind of support that helps them keep doing it, holding up their example to inspire others, and maybe even allowing them to network. Is that our mission?
One measure of a mission is to look at where the members of the group currently spend their time and energy. We hold religious services every Sunday. We hold religious education classes every Sunday, except in the summer. We operate a youth group. We have adult religious education classes. We make pastoral visits to members in need. We have social events, often intended to raise money to support the other activities. We have a social justice group that currently has education and action campaigns on environmental sustainability and the living wage. And I've probably forgotten some other important activities as well. Are these things our mission?
The Interim Journey Team ran an exercise this spring where we read the "mission statements" of our two precursor congregations, which are written on plaques on the walls back there, and then came up with suggestions for a new plaque. With some editing to account for the intervening centuries, a lot of people found those old statements very attractive. Have we had a mission all along?
I don't have a mission statement for us right now myself, and my own answer would be only a small part of something that should come out of the congregation. But let me ask you to consider seriously the notion of a "religious mission to transform the world". I believe that political action should be based on moral principles, and that moral principles demand political action. My moral principles come out of my upbringing as a Unitarian Universalist and from what I've learned and experienced in UU congregations as an adult. When Al Gore speaks about stewardship of the earth, or John Edwards speaks about the moral imperative to end poverty, their principles are my principles even though they are Baptists and I'm a UU and we would disagree on a whole lot of other religious matters. We can't and shouldn't engage in electoral politics as a congregation, but we can and should speak and act as a congregation for, to take two examples, the stewardship of the earth and the moral imperative to end poverty. I think we can empower our UU community to speak and act the way Alinsky empowered his communities if we can choose our actions wisely, make sure we win some victories, and make sure that we have fun. Being who we are is one way to change the world. But acting to change the world has a place in our mission as well.
Last modified 7 July 2008