as preached June 15, 2025 for the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
God save the Republic!
That is your line in this sermon. Try it now, wherever you, and say it with me, “God save the Republic!”
This morning, we are concluding our yearlong worship series, “Future Visions, Future Selves.” Since September we have been exploring different aspects of the future–individual, societal, and planetary. Today we close our exploration with a service devoted to the future of religion.
In some sense, it might seem like a distant subject from the events of the hour. We are again caught in a chaotic news cycle where it feels like everything is happening all at once. Horror distracts from horror. Israel’s decision to attack Iran has driven news of Gaza from the headlines. The assassination of Representative Melissa Hortman of Minnesota and her husband Mark seemingly blots out the President’s decision to send troops to the second largest city in the United States. His tragicomic military parade, with its underwhelming crowds, competes for coverage with the nationwide “No Kings” protests. Amid it all, it is even possible to forget that just Thursday federal officers removed Senator Alex Padilla of California from a room and handcuffed him when he tried to ask a question of the Homeland Security Secretary. She had just claimed that the Marines and National Guard in Los Angeles were going “to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor … this mayor have placed on this country.”
The news that the federal government–currently controlled as it is by those who used to celebrate “states’ rights”–aspires to overthrow, for that is what the word liberates means in such contexts, the elected government of Los Angeles and California has itself distracted the machinations of the Senate. They are considering their version of a budget bill. If it passes in a form resembling the budget passed by House it will cause 16 million people to lose health insurance coverage, reduce the quality of nursing home care, and terminate food assistance for 1.3 million people. People will die and children will go hungry by the wealthy benefit from generous tax cuts. These will be so significant that the supposed party of fiscal responsibility will add another $2.4 trillion to the national debt.
God save the Republic!
It is worth considering the role of our religious community in these times. Religion is changing. It is not a stable object. The meaning, the content, of religion shifts all the time.
Just consider this morning. We had to close the building on Friday when a flea infestation was discovered. Everything was fumigated yesterday with a water-soluble pesticide that is supposed to be safe within a dozen hours or so. We figured it best to keep things closed until Monday. We wanted to be sure that all the fleas were dead. We also did not want to put any of you with chemical sensitivities at risk.
So, here I am preaching to an empty sanctuary while you take in my remarks remotely or catch this as a recording. And while I am tempted to launch into an adapted version of the children’s ukulele song “My Dog Has Fleas”–“My Church Has Fleas”–the matter offers the opportunity to seriously reflect on the future of religion.
Since re-opening the campus, it has become pretty routine for more of you to join us online than in-person. In recent month, this dynamic has become even more pronounced. Last week we had near record attendance for Carol Burrus’s retirement service. Between two services, there were 225 adults in the sanctuary and a total of more than 275 on the campus. These numbers were dwarfed by the over 500 people who joined us online.
More and more engagement with religion is virtual. I got a real lesson in this a few weeks ago when Sadé and I decided to attend Lakewood Church on one of my Sunday’s off. Have you been there? If not have not, I suspect that you have at least seen Joel Osteen on YouTube.
Visiting Lakewood is quite the experience. I would describe it as more of a highly produced show than worship. It combines Christian contemporary rock, product placement, and prayers and a sermon that resembled a mixture of motivational speaking and questionable biblical commentary. It did not move my spirit. Nor did it appear to build community amongst the gathered congregation. Everyone we were seated by just sort of seemed to be doing their own thing–as they might at certain kinds of concerts or cultural events. No one spoke to us. The sanctuary itself was about two thirds empty.
But that did not matter at all, what we were really experiencing was the live broadcast of a television show. Osteen claims that more than ten million people watch him every week. I have no reason to doubt his numbers. Even if they are off by a factor of ten, by far most people who connect with his church do so in the exact manner that you are connecting with First Unitarian Universalist this morning–as individuals outside of a sanctuary.
In this version of the religious future, spirituality becomes another form of content that we consume. It is a podcast or a program that does not require us to do the difficult–though transformative work–of living together in community. Putting aside the fact that televangelists are always asking for money, it requires little of us. We can turn on the podcast or program or we can turn it off.
If you come to First Unitarian Universalist regularly in-person it is likely that someone, minister or member, will ask after you if you disappear for a while. But if you stop tuning in online the only thing we might notice is a fluctuation in our viewership numbers.
Religion, I have shared in the past, can be understood as what binds us together. The consumption of media of different kinds binds people together. One of the great challenges of our era is that the variety of media you consume radically shapes your identity and understanding of the world. Fox News binds people to a particular perception of reality. Democracy Now, Jacobin, and the New York Review of Books–my personal weaknesses–fasten me to another. Watching the first it seems that many were easily convinced that the relatively minor civil disturbances in Los Angeles last week–no one was killed, and the property damage was comparatively insignificant–was a major conflagration. Following the second, we learn that the whole thing was essentially manufactured by President and ghoul of an aide Stephen Miller.
God Save the Republic!
More than forty years ago, the philosopher Benedict Anderson released his seminal text Imagined Communities. It is a pathbreaking work that details how newspapers in the eighteenth century were used to construct modern nations. They enabled the creation of what he termed “imagined communities.” These were, and are, the conception of political identity that extends beyond the local. Prior to the mass production of print media, most people inhabited a world whose boundaries and characteristics beyond their farm, village, or city were at best hazy shimmers. Events that occurred a hundred miles away were often of little consequence. Those farther away probably resided in the vast realm of the unknown–rumors on the wind never to be truly known.
The development of the newspaper was the great disruptor. Suddenly it became possible to engage in what Anderson named an “extraordinary mass ceremony” the near simultaneous reading of the news. People in the rural villages of France, for instance, soon became aware of what was transpiring in Paris or the French colonies. Literate peasants and merchants on one side of China could learn about what was happening on the other.
This enabled people in villages and towns all over the world to imagine themselves as part of a nation in way heretofore impossible. The aspiring chef in a provincial city could seek to emulate the dishes that were described as populating the nation’s best tables. The debutante in Lyon could come to desire the most recent Parisian fashions. Reading the newspapers everyone could imagine themselves to be a citizen of France or the United States or wherever in a way that was never before possible. The stories that they encountered inspired to imagine themselves as French or American and identify with the national government even if they lived in the hinterlands.
The rise of broadcast media, the internet, and now social media has accelerated the development of imagined communities. The different perspectives found in varying portions of the media are making it easier and easier for us to imagine ourselves as part of separate communities.
The writer Marilyn Robinson offers a simplified portrait of this in a recent article. She argues that people living in the United States imagine themselves as parts of two different nations that “occupy the same terrain and govern the same populace.” She calls one nation, for ease of use, “the Red side” and the other “the Blue side.” When partisans of one imagined community win a national election, they are, she claims, “superimposed on the other for a limited period.”
This superimposition is what we are witnessing right now. Since his re-ascendance to federal office, the President has sought to dismantle or seize control of most of institutions held dear by those Robinson calls the Blue nation. Cities and universities in Blue states, portions of the federal government that have historically been opposed to a parochial visions of authoritarian power, all are targets.
Yesterday we even experienced the mobilization of the two nations in the streets. In Washington, DC, the President hosted an army march like those found in authoritarian countries. It is easy to find images of it placed alongside photographs of military parades in Nazi Germany or North Korea. The same day, in more than two thousand cities and towns throughout the United States, as many as nine million came out to declare “No Kings.”
If you are watching this service, it is far more likely that you attended a “No Kings” rally than celebrated the presidential parade. I was at the “No Kings” demonstration here in Houston yesterday. I saw some of you there and could not find others who I know attended in the crowd of more than 15,000. It was the largest march I have seen in the city. It made me feel like I was part of a larger community that was coming together to say, “enough already!” There were signs like, “the United States, no kings since 1776,” “No child of God is illegal,” and “ICE out of Houston.” These were clear statements of the values dominant in the Blue nation.
But meanwhile, in Washington, DC, God Save the Republic!
The country’s challenge is as simple as it is profound. Somehow, some way, we need to figure out how to move from ourselves as citizens of two different imagined nations with competing values to part of some sort of greater collective whole. We need to develop a new form of religion, a new understanding of what binds us together, that can serve as a bridge.
I am uncertain that this is possible. But it should be. In this era of climate catastrophe what binds us together should be clear. This year was warmer than the last. Next year will be warmer than this one. We are all children of the Earth and are all beset by ecological destruction. The human future is under threat.
Many deny this reality. It is part of the same dynamic where White grandchildren of immigrants seek to keep current generations of immigrants out of the country.
The only solution is one that seems impossible: building real community rather than virtual ones. This will be hard. But however hard it is, however difficult it is to imagine, I know that it has something to do with the vision that we at First Unitarian Universalist have for ourselves: widening love’s circle.
The first step in this is to become part of a physical community rather than just an imagined one. Do not just watching our services online. Come to First Unitarian Universalist in-person and getting to know, as Carol Burrus talked about last week, our many wonderful and inspiring members. I know that a lot of you watch our services from elsewhere–in the last couple of months I’ve communicated with people who view worship in Chicago, Portland, Maine, and Dallas. For you it means thinking about engaging in one of the Unitarian Universalist congregations where you live, even as you continue to view our videos or listen to our podcasts. First and Second Unitarian in Chicago are both fine communities. First Dallas is great. So is First Portland. But wherever you are, the path forward, the religion of the future, involves connecting with people in-person, not just online.
If a religious community is not quite right for you, and I know that these services are viewed by a lot of people who consider themselves fully secular, think about what other kinds of community you can get involved in. If you are concerned about the future of Houston the Democratic Socialists of America, the National Black United Front, Community Voices for Public Education, or just your local parent teachers’ organization are good starts. If you are concerned about your workplace, think about joining, or forming a labor union. If you are worried about your neighborhood, maybe just organize a block party or start a community gardening group.
I do not know if any of these things will be sufficient to bridge the divide between the Blue and Red nations. But I do know that they contain within the possibility of breaking imagined communities into real ones. And that possibility contains within it new forms of religion–new ways of being bound together–that might just help us move through this difficult period.
God save the Republic!
Like many Unitarian Universalists I do not have an understanding of God that is popular with a great deal of theists. When I think of God I do not think of an old White man in the sky. Nor do I think of the deities of the Hebrew Bible or Christian New Testament. Instead, I imagine the spirit, the breath, that moves through each and connects each to all. Imagine the animating spirit of life that when we gather opens us to new experiences and surprises us with new possibilities.
I felt that God on the streets of Houston yesterday. I have felt it every time I have gathered with others to imagine a more beautiful world. In the Christian New Testament there is the line, “where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them.” The truth is, and I suspect it is true for whatever nation you imagine yourself to be part of, that the unifying spirit of the divine is present whenever people gather in community.
God save the Republic!
It is only by gathering, only by seeking to come together as a community, not just online but in person as well, that we can save the Republic. The word comes from the Latin res publica. It means public affairs–more than the nation, in these times it is all that unites us humans together. Language, culture, the cities and rural communities in which we live, the beautiful planet we inhabit, all are the concern of the res publica, our public affairs.
So, I close with this, let us say together, God save the Republic. And when we say it let us mean, may the power to community, the spirit that moves through each and unites each to all, somehow become strong enough to join us together in the mutual pursuit of the res publica: the public affairs not of this imagined community or that imagined community but the public affairs of all of us. The difficult work of building a society where each person can discover, in the words of the legal scholar and Brazilian politician Robert Mangabeira Unger, “greatness.”
This is not the greatness of the high and mighty. It is “the greatness of the ordinary” person and “the discovery of light in the … world of the commonplace.” A trust in the possibility of such greatness, he notes, “is the defining faith of democracy.” It is strengthened when we move from imagined community to real community. It becomes real when we join together in pursuit of our public affairs. It is instantiated as we create the future of religion, a religion which is not imagined but one that is enfleshed in a real physical community.
So, say it with me one last time, God save the Republic!
Amen
