as preached September 7, 2025 at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
“… dissent is … a ‘traditional value,’ and in a republic founded by revolution, a … deeply … [rooted] one. … No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around … [troublemaking] remain the true duty of patriots.”
The journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote those words in the late 1980s as she reflected on what it meant to object to the religious and political reaction dominant during the Reagan regime. They are a helpful guidepost for us as throughout this program year we reflect on religious dissent, what it means to be religious dissenters, and the spiritual depth of our dissenting tradition. Make no mistake, radical, loving, rational religious dissent is a tradition. It grounds Unitarian Universalism. It provides many of us with the clarity of heart, mind, and spirit we need in the rising theocracy that is Greg Abbott’s Texas.
Theocracy, you may remember, is government by priests or religious figures. Theocrats claim to rule in the name of their gods. In a theocracy, religious rules supersede all secular ones. Theological doctrine, not community deliberation or scientific discovery, is the determining factor in the creation of the legal order.
Theocracy might seem like a harsh term for our state’s government. But in legislative session after legislative session, elected officials have made it clear that they intend for this state to impose their version of Christianity upon the rest of us. There are Texans who are dissenting from this merger of what the poet Gil Scott-Heron once called “that church with that state.” Some do so on religious grounds.
Two members of our communion, Becky Smith and her daughter, have recently been in the news for being exemplary religious dissenters. You probably know that back in March the Governor signed Senate Bill 10 into law. It requires every public-school classroom in Texas display the Ten Commandments. It is a profound violation of the separation of church and state. You might recall that principle from the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, otherwise known as the Bill of Rights. It reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting free exercise thereof.”
When Becky and her daughter heard about this, they said something to themselves like, “Hey, we are Unitarian Universalists. Our ethical code is not enshrined in the Ten Commandments. That text reflects what some people think is the basis of a moral life. Not everyone agrees. We are supposed to live in a free society, not one where Christian Nationalists get to dictate what it means to live a good life. Words like ‘manservants’ and ‘maidservants’ in the display are troubling invocations of patriarchy and misogyny. From the merger of the church with the state, we dissent!”
From the merger of the church with the state, we dissent. Can I get an Amen?
We dissent, so Becky and her daughter joined with fifteen other families and represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and allied organizations, they sued to stop the law from going into effect. A couple of weeks ago, they won!
They won; can I get a Hallelujah? Becky, can you stand for a moment so that we can recognize you? Give her a big round of applause. Becky and her daughter are a great example of what dissenting religious values–Unitarian Universalist values–look like in action. We should be proud to have them as part our congregation.
We dissent, of course Greg Abbott being the Governor of Texas and Ken Paxton being a high priest of Christian Nationalism–that is a biblical reference–state officials are already saying that they are going to implement SB10 anywhere they can. They plan to appeal the judge’s ruling.
It is still a victory for the separation of church and state. The ruling, which Becky was kind enough to share with me, is something to read. U.S. District Court Judge Fred Biery has a sense of humor. Rejecting the defense’s arguments he makes observations like “in matters of conscience [and] faith, most people are Garbo-eseque. They just want to be left alone.” He refers to this country’s long history of religious freedom with a compact narrative of how “the Pilgrims came here [after being] persecuted by the government-controlled Church of England, the French Protestant Huguenots [after being] persecuted by the French Catholic government of Louis XIV, and the European Jews [after being] persecuted by European Christian governments. And, ‘[s]o it goes.’”
And so it goes, that last line is a quote from the novelist and Unitarian Universalist Kurt Vonnegut. Becky and Vonnegut are not the only Unitarian Universalists that Judge Biery cites in his ruling. He closes it with an alternative proposal to the posting of the Ten Commandments. He suggests that “to avoid religious rancor and legal wrangling the Texas Legislature could require the posting of … All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”
The reference is to a book by the Unitarian Universalist minister Robert Fulghum. It includes such sage advice as “Share everything. Play Fair. Don’t hit people,” which Judge Biery invokes and, my personal favorite, “Take a nap every afternoon,” which he does not.
From the posting of the Ten Commandments, we dissent. From “Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you,” probably not so much.
I appreciate that Judge Biery quotes Fulghum and Vonnegut alongside Becky. Their presence in his ruling is a reminder that Becky and her daughter’s decision to join in the lawsuit places them in the larger tradition of Unitarian Universalist religious dissent.
Religious dissent, if there is one thing that contemporary Unitarian Universalists believe in it is the separation of church and state. Matters of conscience, matters of faith, we understand, should best be left to religious communities and to individuals. They should not be codified into law.
This belief in the separation of the church and state and its accompanying belief in the freedom of conscience is one of the foundations of our dissenting tradition.
In England Unitarian congregations are explicit about this. They are not part of the established Church of England. Their origins lie in their rejection of the religious authority of Bishops and monarchs, in opposition to seventeenth century British theocracy.
Over in England many Unitarian congregations trace their origins to a singular date, 1662. That is the year that something called the Great Ejection took place. It was a critical moment in religious history and the development of our tradition.
To illuminate it, a bit of British history. The Church of England was established under King Henry VIII. He rejected the authority of the Pope. He made himself the supreme governor of the church. But he kept a lot of Catholic doctrine and in ritual in place.
There it stayed for a hundred years or so. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, a group within the Church of England began to object. They were called Puritans. They thought that the maintenance of Catholic theology and practice was without scriptural warrant. They sought to purify the church from these extra biblical accretions.
For a little while they largely managed to exist inside the Church of England. But then England had a Civil War. The king lost his head. The bishops’ control of the church was abolished. For a few brief years theological innovation and diversity were tolerated. Some clergy preached sermons arguing for the humanity of Jesus, unitarianism. Others proclaimed that God loves everyone and condemns no one to everlasting damnation, universalism.
The monarchy was restored. The bishops again found themselves in power. They demanded that all clergy subscribe to their Trinitarian creeds. No more proclamations of God’s universal love on Sunday mornings. Declarations that Jesus was not the unique child of divine, but rather a person who pointed the way for everyone to uncover the divine spark within, were outlawed.
From this marriage of the church and the state, our religious ancestors said, we dissent. And so, in 1662 some 2,000 clergy were ejected from their pulpits for failing to teach the state religion.
I offer this simplified telling of a complicated history as a reminder that when you are part of a Unitarian Universalist congregation, you are part of a tradition. Now, it is a particular kind of tradition. It is a dissenting tradition, but it is a tradition, nonetheless.
“A tradition,” the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observed, “is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of … conflict.” MacIntyre identifies two kinds of conflict over the nature of a tradition, one is external, and the other is internal.
This might seem a bit abstract. So, let us shift our focus away from religion for a moment to a subject beloved by many Texans, barbecue. I am a pescatarian, I do not eat animals that crawl on the land or fly in the air. This places me outside of the barbecuing community.
Living in Texas I, nonetheless, have had a number of conversations with people–including several folks in this congregation–as to what constitutes barbecue. Some insist that it must involve beef and that if it is prepared right it has to have a dry rub and include a brisket. Others take a more capacious view. They claim that you can barbecue pork and even chicken. Or they argue that it is possible to use a wet sauce. More than a few claim that barbecue can only be made with a wood fire.
I know that someone out there is quietly invoking the word heretic to at least something that I just said. But that is the point, amongst pit masters and even casual weekender smokers there seems to be a lot of debate as to what constitutes proper barbecue, let alone what defines good barbecue.
For my part, as a Northern non-beef, non-pork, and non-chicken eater, I think that just about any kind of meat that is prepared slowly with fire and smoke can be called barbecue. So, right there, you have the dynamic. People who practice barbecue, who are part of the barbecuing tradition, arguing endlessly over what is and what is not barbecue. That is the internal debate. Then there are culinary apostates like me. We think, Alabama, Carolina, Chicago, Kansas City, Kentucky, Memphis, Central Texas, East Texas, South Texas, St. Louis, even barbacoa, possibly carne asada, it is all barbecue. So, there you see someone who is external to the barbecue tradition working to define it. I suspect that more than a few of you who do are ready to argue with me about my definition.
There is a similar dynamic the nature of our religious tradition that plays out here in Texas. People outside of Unitarian Universalism sometimes try to define our community as something other than a religious community. A little more than twenty years ago the then Texas Comptroller tried to argue that ours is not a religion. Her logic was that we do “not have one system of belief.” The Comptroller’s attorney claimed that to be a religion a community must have “a belief in God, or gods, or a higher power.” Since some Unitarian Universalists do not believe in any kind of divinity, the argument went, we are not a religion.
Fortunately, the Comptroller eventually reversed her own decision. Still, I suspect that more than a few of you have had the experience of someone who is not a Unitarian Universalist telling you that you are not religious because you are part of this community. We certainly get mail and electronic communications from time to time from people who feel that they are entitled to tell us that we are not a church or a religion.
Inside our community, and within the broader Unitarian Universalist movement, we spend a fair amount of time discussing what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. Those of you who follow the Unitarian Universalist Association–the larger religious association of which this congregation is a part–will know that just in the last couple of years there has been an extensive debate about the nature of our tradition. The association’s leadership led a process to revise Article II of its bylaws. This is the place where the Unitarian Universalist Association states its foundations.
From the mid-1980s to last year, these foundations were articulated as seven principles. Then in 2024, our General Assembly voted to substitute these principles with seven values. The principles began with statement about “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” The values place love at the center.
You can imagine that there was more than a bit of rancor about this. Some people claimed that replacing the seven principles with the seven values meant a fundamental alteration of the nature of our tradition. Others felt that the values were a better articulation of what we hold dear. I am not aware of any Unitarian Universalists, however, who agreed with those outside of our movement who believe that we are not a religion when they debated the nature of our faith. Nor am I familiar with anyone who saw the dialogue about principles versus values as an opportunity to reject a belief in the separation of church and state.
From the marriage of church and state, the posting of the Ten Commandments in school classrooms, I suspect, like Becky, we all dissent. That does not suggest we all agree upon what it means to be part of a dissenting tradition. This is partially because the boundaries of our tradition, when we do not let our external critics define us, are wide. Within our circle of “conversations and disputes” about the good life and the nature of “gender, religion, politics, and aesthetics” we include, as the theologian Emily Dumler-Winckler observes, “among others, ancient Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians,” non-European religious traditions, “modern philosophers, … gender theorists, and activists and organizers.”
All of these, and more, have something to offer us in pursuit of what Barbara Ehrenreich called the “traditional value” of dissent. It is a value that in these times we are called to invoke more-and-more. I doubt that Becky’s case will be the last time a Unitarian Universalist in Texas is part of a lawsuit objecting to the state imposition of religion. And so, in these walls, over these next ten months, and I anticipate beyond, we will seek uplift our spirits and offer each other something of the religious resources we need to thrive during these times.
We will do so mindful that we are part of a tradition, aware that when it comes to comes to religion and politics Audre Lorde was largely correct. She wrote, “there are no ideas … only new ways of making them felt.” As we tend to what it feels like to be a religious dissenter in the twenty-first century, we will find familiar debates in earlier eras. Some will argue that W. E. B. Du Bois called “abolition-democracy,” the belief that “freedom, power, and intelligence” for all is the core of our tradition. They will claim that the only way to realize such a vision is through a radical restructuring of our society and a dismantling of all hierarchies. Others will take a different view and argue that the structures of society are basically sound. The task is simply to ensure that as many people as possible are welcomed into liberal democratic societies. Some will claim that Unitarian Universalism is primarily derived from Christianity. Others will state that our tradition has been pluralistic since its inception and point to sixteenth century dialogues between Muslims, Jews, and Unitarians as formative.
Throughout it all I hope that you will feel invite to consider what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist in Texas today. Which parts of our tradition, which spiritual practices feed you? Which of our forebears are most inspiring? Which are most troubling? How do you understand our dissenting tradition? What does it mean to be a religious dissenter?
I doubt you will come to any definitive statements. I am certain that I will not. Instead, I have faith that the conversations we will have and work we do together will further shape my own, evolving, conception of Unitarian Universalism. I hope that the same is true for you. For I anticipate that by the end of these ten months exploration we will come to agree with the poet Fatimah Asghar, “Every year I manage to live on this earth / I collect more questions than answers.”
In the hopes that we might question the enduring beauty of our dissenting tradition together, I invite the congregation say Amen.
