February 25, 2024: Class Consciousness and Class Action -- Rev. Charlotte Lehman

Introduction

        Classism is an intersecting oppression along with race, gender and sexual orientation.  In 2017, the UUA’s Commission on Appraisal published Class Action: The Struggle with Class in Unitarian Universalism calling on UUs to "get real" about privilege and access by exploring class, classism and economic inequality in our thinking, our actions and our congregations.  Addressing classism helps us to build a more inclusive community.  Let’s create justice, not walls!

            The Reverend Charlotte Lehmann is the minister of the Bull Run Unitarian Universalist congregation in Manassas VA, serving there since 2018.  Addressing the issues of social and environmental justice are part of Reverend Charlotte’s ministry.

            Reverend Charlotte is a life-long Unitarian Universalist but responded to a call to ministry as a second career.  In addition to theological training, Reverend Charlotte holds a Master of Science degree in Geological Sciences.  Most of Reverend Charlotte's geological career involved work as a research associate in academic settings with a focus on global climate change.

            Geology and spirituality are twin passions that for Reverend Charlotte are intertwined.

Message for All Ages

          REV. LEHMAN:  Our story this morning is called, "Is There Really a Human Race?" and it's by Jaimie Lee Curtis -- yes, that Jamie Lee Curtis -- illustrated by Laura Cornell.

          "Is there really a human race?  Is it going on now, all over the place?  When did it start?  Who said ready, set, go?"  And there are people who are racing all through the park here.  "Did it start on my birthday?  I must know.  Do I warm up and stretch?  Do I practice and train?  Do I get my own coach?  Do I get my own lane?  Do I race in the snow?  Do I race in a twister?  Am I racing my friends?  Am I racing my sister?  If the race is a relay, is Dad on my team, and his dad and his dad?  You know what I mean."  All the way back.

          "Is the race like a loop or an obstacle course?  Am I a jockey?  Or am I a horse?  Is there pushing and shoving to get to the lead?  If the race is unfair, will I succeed?  Do some of us win?  Do some of us lose?  Is winning or losing something I choose?  Why am I racing?  What am I winning?  Does all of my running keep the world spinning?"

          And these are all people who are standing on bases that say things like, "Closest to Heaven", "No Chin at All", or "Biggest Overbite", "Most Flexible", "Biggest Hair Without Product".

          CONGREGATION:  (Laughter)

          REV. LEHMAN:  "Biggest Teacher's Pet", "Most Matching", "Most Judgment", and more.

          "If I get off track when I take the wrong turn, do I make my way back from mistakes?  Do I learn?"  This is a big maze with people in all different places.  "Is it a sprint?  A dash to the end?  Am I aware of the time that I spend?  And why do I do it, this zillion-yard dash?  If we don't help each other, we're all going to crash.

          "Sometimes it's better not to go fast.  There are beautiful sights to be seen when you're last.  Shouldn't it be that you just try your best?  And that's more important than leading the rest.  Shouldn't it be, looking back at the end, that you judge your own race by the help that you lend?  So take what's inside you and make big, bold choices.  And for those who can't speak up for themselves, use bold voices.

          "And make friends and love well.  Bring art to this place.  And make the world better for the whole human race."  And over here on this side is an imam and a rabbi, and it says, "Do you have any twos?"  "Go fish."   And that's our story this morning.  I would invite you to sing the song that you have for the children, and the children, get ready for their time together this morning.

 

READING

          REV. LEHMAN:  The reading this morning is from Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History, by Mark W. Harris.  "We don't talk about class very much in Unitarian Universalist circles, giving far more time and energy to race.  Class is a hard subject to talk about, because many of us grew up believing that America has no class structure, or that most everyone is middle class, or that if you are poor, we are still all created equal, and you, too, can grow up to be President of the United States.

          "We sometimes say we are all getting richer, or that everyone has an equal chance to succeed.  Yet in many ways, class is the most important predictor of what kind of opportunities someone will have in life.  We are stratified financially, socially, and educationally, in ways predicted by class.  Unitarian Universalists say they want to work towards greater equality by creating a multicultural and multiracial faith.

          "But how do we do that, with respect to class, if our racial and cultural diversity all comes from the same socioeconomic group?  Then again, perhaps it doesn't.  We may be more diverse than we think, and accept the elite stereotype to evoke liberal guilt."

          Harris goes on to say, "In a 2009 report, then-Starr King School for the Ministry president Rebecca Parker quotes seven areas the school works towards.  One is, 'Broaden Unitarian Universalist identity to include racial and cultural expressions of Unitarian and Universalist values, countering a history of Unitarian Universalist enmeshment with white privilege and economic privilege that limits Unitarian Universalism's accessibility and hospitality to many for whom its strengths could be life-giving.'

          "This vision of a democratic, open faith for all kinds of people has long been part of our express dreams.  But we have never been able to make this vision manifest.  Margaret Fuller, a leading transcendentalist, who is sometimes called America's first feminist, once wrote to her Unitarian father, 'Your reluctance to go among strangers cannot too soon be overcome.  And the way to overcome it is not to remain at home, but to go among them and resolve to deserve and obtain the love and esteem of those who have never before known you.  With them, you have a fair opportunity to begin the world anew.'"  And thus ends our reading.

 

MESSAGE

          REV. LEHMAN:  You might note, on the cover of the order of service this morning, that Google thought this service was about something different.  It is in fact about class consciousness, not class conciseness.  Although we're pretty concise, as Unitarian Universalists, about who we are, in a way -- not.

          Class consciousness and class action.  In 2017, the Unitarian Universalist Association's Commission on Appraisal published its report, "Class Action: The Struggle with Class in Unitarian Universalism."  This report led to the creation of workshops and curricula, such as UU Class Conversations and Class Aware: Class and Classism in Congregational Life.  The latter includes a separate middle and high school youth module.

          Suzanne Zilber, the developer of the 2023 Class Aware curriculum, had published in 2016 a fifth edition -- fifth edition -- of her curriculum, entitled Class Conscious, Class and Classism in UU Life, for national use by the UUA.  Along with these, Mark Harris's 2011 book, Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History, from the introduction of which our morning's reading was excerpted, is listed in the resources of the commission's report.

          In short, some Unitarian Universalists have been thinking about this issue of classism for a long time.  As well we should.  Class and classism separate us from one another.  As the commission summarizes, "Class and its attendant classism represent an intersection of multiple cultural forces and systems of power that thwart Unitarian Universalism's vital work of building beloved community, stifling its impact and stunting its growth as a moral voice for good.

          "These cultural forces separate us from one another, dividing us into groups, both external and self-selected, that make it difficult for us to work together effectively, and to acknowledge each other's worth and dignity.  The systems of power that make up class result in dominating hierarchies, inequality, and inequitable agency, oppression, and limited access to material resources."

          Note the use of the word "intersection" in this quote.  You may have heard of Kimberle Crenshaw's term, "intersectionality", which is used to describe multiple areas of identity-related oppressions people experience.  These may include race, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth.  Class is just one way we get categorized in our society.

          University Press put out a small book called Caste: A Brief History, in 2020.  It delineates seven virulent and persistent human biases that contribute to the notion of caste.  Racism, classism, ageism, homophobia, religious intolerance, xenophobia, and sexism.  We need, however, to be very clear that caste and class are not the same thing.  According to Isabel Wilkerson, who wrote Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, in 2020, historically, caste trumps class.

          She defines caste this way.  "A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry, and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract, but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in the hierarchy, favoring the dominant caste, whose forebears designed it.  A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another, and in the assigned places."

          In her book, Wilkerson references three caste systems that have stood out in human history.  The lingering millennia-long caste system of India, the tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany, and the shape-shifting, unspoken race-based caste pyramid in the United States.

          In addition to pointing out that caste and class are not the same thing, Wilkerson makes it clear that caste and race are also not to be used interchangeably.  She explains that, "in America, race is the primary tool and visible decoy, the frontman for caste.  Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division."

          Later in her book, Wilkerson reiterates the distinction between caste and class.  "It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class, a term to which it is often compared.  Class is an altogether separate measure of one's standing in society, marked by a level of education, income and occupation, as well as the attendant characteristics, such as accent, taste, and manners, that flow from socioeconomic status.  If you can act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste."  If you can act your way out of it, it is class, not caste.  Caste is immutable.

          So you may now be asking, what then is class?  What is classism?  These are fair questions.  Even with a definition such as that classism is discrimination of people based on their social class, it is about social inequality.  In the days of old, which is often how people think about class, there were the monarchy, the nobility, the working class, and peasants or serfs.  Titles and names often pointed to a person's class.

          There's an amusing story passed down through the generations of one of my family's lineages that a long-ago Jewish relation, Shmul, of Mulower (ph.), which is part of the contemporary country of Ukraine, whose livelihood was earned by peddling wares of some kind, was stopped by a policeman on a Rakovian (ph.) street one day, and told that he needed to have a proper German name.  This was one of those eras when Germany controlled what is now Poland.  Shmul thought a moment, and came out with "Strassman", because, as he thought to himself, I'm a man, and I'm on the street.  Therefore, I am Strassman.

          I have also looked up the roots of the other name in my patrilineal line, and discovered that Lehman is a conjunction of the word for serf and the word for man, which doesn't surprise me, either, given my German and Jewish roots.  We were essentially indentured or enslaved.

          What we mean by class today in the United States is another system of four groupings, namely upper class or ruling class, middle class, working class, and the poor, which can overlap with the working class.  As Wilkerson explained, our individual class affiliation is mutable.  It can change.  We might be born poor and/or working class, but through our education and career choices, become upwardly mobile, and join the middle or even upper, owning class.  The same is true in the reverse direction, although I don't believe that we give that reality much thought.

          Do you know what the demographics of this congregation really include?  You might consider engaging in conversation with fellow members and friends here, to get a better sense of who you are.  How do you identify, in terms of class?  What is your history?

          Each of us has our own journey and experience of class.  The commissioners realized this, the commissioners of the report, as soon as they started their work on the charge they were given.  To better understand each other's frames of reference, and to aid in their group formation, they shared with each other their present and past class positions.  As a model, they included their class journeys in the report.

          I know that neither this congregation nor Unitarian Universalists as a whole are a monolithic group, and I encourage us to share our personal and familial class journeys as one of the most basic class actions we can take.  For example, because of the interlocking of race and class, it is virtually impossible to fully disentangle racism from classism in describing one's experience.  So when Blacks, indigenous and people of color share their class journeys, racism will play a role in how they experience classism, and with which class they identify.

          In the words of the commission, "Class cannot be understood independently from race.  In this manner, dismantling oppression can and must be approached holistically.  Therefore, we must examine statistics on income, education, rates of poverty, and other class indicators, and how these factors correlate with others, such as race, gender and immigration status."  That, from the commission.

          Paula Cole Jones is a Black Unitarian Universalist, who is considered one of the originators of the Eighth Principle Project.  The Eighth Principle attempts to remedy the fact that our seven principles of Unitarian Universalism do not address the issue of racism in our world.

          UU congregations around the country have been adopting the following statement as a means of addressing that lack.  "We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote journeying towards spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse, multicultural, beloved community, by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions."

          And by the way, despite the work that we are doing on Article II, it does not mean that congregations cannot still work on adopting the eighth principle.  I believe that the proposed language for Article II of the UUA's bylaws addresses this.  And again, we can still do the work.

          And the revised draft language, including the amendments approved by the general assembly delegates last June, has now been posted to the Article II study commission's webpages.  I encourage everyone to review the final proposal, and also to learn about the amendments that met the criteria for inclusion in discussion, and vote at the all-virtual 2024 general assembly, this coming June.  The revision of Article 2 does not negate the efforts, as I said, by individuals and congregations to adopt the eighth principle.

          Given Paula's work on the eighth principle, I was especially struck when I heard her say, at some point, after the Class Action report came out in 2017, that she believes that the issues of class and classism are, to her mind, more harmful than racism.  This is a Black woman leading the effort to make sure that we are addressing racism more fully, as a denomination, as congregations, and as individuals, and she believes that classism is much more harmful.

          I wonder if this is because, as Mark Harris quotes it, "In some ways, the question of class may ask us to move beyond our comfort zone, more than gender, race or sexual identity.  This is because we perceive the people who are from another class as being so different from us in value.  And as we all know, it is our values that we share, not our personal theological beliefs."

          It is a fact that the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and our individual congregations are among the least racially diverse religious groups in America.  There's no doubt of that.  According to David Wellman, author of Portraits of White Racism, the intersection of race and ethnicity with class affects our ecclesiology, how we understand our faith-based mission in the world, and how we conduct ourselves as a religious community.

          Unitarian Universalists, along with Jews, Episcopalians, and mainline Presbyterians, consistently enjoyed significantly higher levels of education, income and occupational prestige, than most of the groups below them.  We are at the top of the rankings for class.  This is a legacy of our historical Unitarian and Universalist groups, and what Mark Harris examines in his book, Elite.

          But the imprints of Unitarianism and Universalism were not exactly the same.  And this history supports the impression that Unitarianism has, in many ways, dominated over our Universalist leanings.  Harris actually starts his uncovering of classism in UU history with the development of Unitarianism in Britain.

          And it was a mixed bag.  There were different flavors of Unitarianism in the early years.  For example, there were Methodist Unitarians, led by Joseph Cook, who were of a different socioeconomic class than most Unitarians.  And I noticed, as I drove down through Southern Maryland, lots and lots of Methodist churches here.  Not so much in Northern Virginia.  The Methodists approach things a bit differently, and have a more egalitarian view.

          The Universalists, who, on the other hand, espoused a central theology or gospel of an egalitarian, classless idea of salvation, saying, it is not our individual acts that will save us, but our connection with that larger moral force, which unites the universe, always tended to be more democratic, more evangelical, and more inclusive, although it was not a lower-class faith.

          The stereotypical distinction often trotted out -- and I am just as guilty of this as others -- is that Unitarians were the Boston Brahmins, the intellectual elite, and the Universalists were middle-class professionals, farmers and businesspeople, from small towns.  It appears that this has more to do with attitudes than facts.  But that's what we're taught.

          In the contemporary context, the commission reports a few barriers to our becoming more inclusive.  These include our failure to engage in an ongoing effort to evangelize, or spread the gospel of Unitarian Universalism; a bias against Christianity, in some instances, even an outright hostility; and a failure to apply our class lens, which inhibits our ability to be anti-racist as an association, and within our congregations.

          Fortunately, ours is a faith that draws on the wisdom of many of the world's traditions and prophetic people.  We stand against economic oppression, and state our theology of class in positive terms.  Our theology of class seeks to establish systems, economic and societal, that enable and empower individuals to make their own choices, while forming trustworthy communities of equality and dignity.

          One of the sources informing that theology is the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, which stated, "The Humanists are firmly convinced that an existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate, and that a radical change in methods, controls and motives must be instituted.  A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of means of life may be possible.  The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate with the common good.  Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world."  Again, that was from the 1933 Humanist Manifesto.

          Although it seems to have become equated with Unitarian Universalism, due to some of the primary proponents in the early 20th century, religious humanism was not just for Unitarians and Universalists.  And we have certainly made use of a wide array of wisdom on sharing wealth and creating a more equitable world.

          The commission on appraisal's class action report includes, with suggestions for action on the issue of class and classism.  It begins with recommending that we become educated about class issues in our culture, and how they manifest in our congregations.  We could engage in the Class Aware curriculum by Suzanne Zilber, or the materials available from Class Action.  We need also to always be cognizant of how we are asking for, using, and giving away money, as well as budgeting for mission.

          Further, engaging in solidarity efforts, doing ministry with working class and poor UUs, and working in our global community, are all important.  At Bull Run Unitarian Universalist in Manassas, our food pantry ministry is an example of this.  Those who volunteer in the food pantry are more informed.  They have a more informed perspective on the needs of our neighbors.  Bull Run is in the center of Manassas, and as vibrant a community as it is, it is also an extremely diverse community, a community with 40 percent or more people of Hispanic and Latino heritage.  And unfortunately, most of them are working-class or poor.

          As Unitarian Universalists, we need to be ever mindful that our approaches to stewardship and fundraising recognize the diversity of classes within our congregations, and the realities of our changed economy.  Collecting accurate demographic data from our members and friends would enhance that effort.

          I would like us to move beyond what Mark Harris calls "a sense of educated cultural superiority".  I'm sure that at least some of you have experienced that, as you have moved in and among Unitarian Universalist communities.  Let us not be snobs of that ilk.  Instead, may we figure out how our universal, democratic message can be translated into a broader means of welcoming of people.  Let us strive to become levelers, creating a classless place, a safer community for seeking and service, for all people.  May it be so.  Amen.