as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, October 26, 2025
The Christian Right, in its various iterations, has long placed great emphasis on family values. Group like Focus on the Family try to portray themselves as defenders of “the God-ordained institution of the family,” which they claim is under assault.
I found myself thinking about family values last Saturday when I was in Louisville, Kentucky on vacation. While I was there, like many of you, I attended a No Kings protest.
I am not sure what experience the roughly forty of you in Houston who donned yellow t-shirts reading “Side with Love” had, but where I was there were a small number of counter protestors. They were lined up along the parade route–standing on the sidewalk or between parked cars. They were not particularly threatening. They were not openly carrying arms. They were not dressed up in battle rattle.
They were, however, very angry. One group made a particular impression. Well dressed, wearing crosses, they screamed obscenities, flipped us the bird, and shouted “We won!” over and over again.
I invite you to imagine what these people looked like. If pictured them as teenagers, college students, or even middle-aged adults you would be wrong. The entire group was composed of individuals about the same age as my parents. They were well dressed. They appeared affluent. Looking at them, in their Christian regalia, as they made rude gestures, I thought, “These are grandparents. What would their grandchildren think if they saw them right now?”
I have, of course, no idea. They might all be bereft of children. Alternatively, it could well be that their anger was rooted in the feeling that the next generation of their family has abandoned them. I have heard plenty of stories from members of our congregation and other Unitarian Universalist communities that involve ruptures between queer youth and intolerant elders. In such narratives, which I know are painfully familiar to some of you, the older generation is too stuck in their theological or cultural views to expand their understandings of family values to include relatives who are different from them. The love one generation offers another is not unconditional. It is conditional. Be like me–act heterosexual or fit within a gender binary or whatever–or I will withdraw my love, the interaction goes.
The source of the rage that I witnessed last weekend could well have been rooted in that kind of family dynamic. It might also have come from somewhere else. I do not know. All I know is that a handful of people of the general type who claim religious righteousness, people old enough to have grandchildren, were apoplectic with anger as they watched a couple of thousand people march and proclaim, No Kings.
And I wondered, as I watched them, about the values that they are passing down to the next generation. What kind of values are they lifting up at church? Whatever I might think of the Religious Right in general, they do have a point when it comes to family values.
Families and religious communities have long been two of the primary loci from which understandings of human dignity, meaning, and purpose spring. It has long been true that people join a Unitarian Universalist congregation precisely because of that dynamic. Think for a moment about what brought you here.
When I ask you why you are with us your answers often fall into two categories. Some of you tell me that you came seeking people who share some of your core values. Others say that you are with us because you are seeking a place that will support you in raising children with those values.
My parents fall into that last category. They are an interfaith couple. My father came from a Jewish household, my mother from a Protestant one. They joined a Unitarian Universalist community seeking a place where they could bring up my brother and me alongside others who shared their principles.
During the political right’s family values crusades of the 1990s, my father would sometimes implicitly invoke those principles when he objected to those who cast family values as inherently reactionary. I remember him saying, “We have family values. We have liberal family values.”
In Donald Trump’s America, in Greg Abbott’s Texas, in 2025, I need to recast that statement slightly. The Christian Right has succeeded in getting their religious values inscribed into the nation’s and the state’s laws. Today, I think we have to understand ourselves as religious dissenters. One of the key values we carry forward is freedom of thought.
Religious dissent, I have shared in the past, can best be defined as an objection to the merger of the church and the state. It rests upon on a belief that religious community must be freely chosen. No group, no tradition, has an exclusive claim to truth, the logic goes, and so no religious group should, through the mechanism of the state, be allowed to impose their values upon the rest of us.
The family values that we religious dissenters promote in our communities do not fit into rigid categories. Groups like Focus on the Family might proclaim, “God created humans in His image, intentionally and immutably male and female,” but we take a different position. Instead of asserting definitive creedal truths on the nature of the divine or humanity, we encourage people to seek for the truth that comes from their experiences and resides in their hearts.
The British Unitarian Elizabeth Birtles names some of the values she found in her dissenting religious community as a child. “Questioning, imagination, reverence for life, a non-dogmatic approach, an appreciation of poetic and prophetic language, delight in the natural world, self-discipline, and a strong sense of personal responsibility … were encouraged in me” as a young person.
I have teased my parents that despite their claim in having family values they never explicitly stated them in the same way that someone like Jerry Falwell did. Instead, they left my brother and I to figure out those values implicitly. In an essay, I once half-joked that as far as I can tell those values boil down to: love your family, treasure your friends, bring more beauty into the world, and fight fascism.
I invite you to reflect on the question: what kind of family values–what kind of values–do you think we should be passing along to the next generation during a time when we are experiencing the union of a reactionary religion with an increasingly reactionary state? How might you summarize your understanding of dissenting family values?
When I consider this question, I find the theologian Emily Dumler-Winckler to be helpful. You might turn to someone else. But I like Dumler-Winckler because she encourages me to imagine the purpose of dissenting religious communities during times of rising reaction. She has studied Unitarianism during the closing years of the eighteenth century in Britain.
It was a time, like now, when the state could not be trusted to affirm human rights. Slavery was legal. Women were effectively property of their male relatives. Freedom of thought was largely outlawed.
Looking to iconic Unitarians from that period like the pathbreaking feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Dumler-Winckler came to an interesting conclusion about how our religious forbearers sought to uplift human rights. They held justice to be “a common good.” It is not something fashioned by the state. Against those, like the contemporary Unitarian Universalist theologian William Schulz, who maintain a faith in “legislating morality,” they came to conclusion that justice is something that community members could create amongst each other.
If slavery was legal outside of the bounds of their churches then they could proclaim abolition and assist those escaping to freedom. If women were not viewed as equal under the law then they could try to uphold gender equality in their congregations. If freedom of thought was forbidden by the state sponsored religion then they could celebrate it in their pulpits and in their congregational meetings.
Today, in Texas, we continue to hold justice as a common good, as something we create and share amongst ourselves. We do so in an environment where many are opposed to the kind of family values we proclaim. In this house, we say, you are free to be who you are and love who you love so long as you are devoted bringing more beauty, more justice, into the world. This is one reason why we fly the rainbow flag over our building. We want people to know that whatever their gender, whatever their sexual orientation, they are welcome here.
I always feel good when folks from the LGBTQ community share that they are comfortable at First Unitarian Universalist. On more than one occasion someone has told me that our congregation is one of the few places where their gender is affirmed, not questioned. Offering such affirmations, encouraging people to be themselves, is one of our core values.
Such values run against those who are legislating morality in Texas right now. I need not articulate all the anti-LGBTQ legislation that the state legislature has considered since I moved here.
They also conflict with some in the Houston community. You might have noticed that we moved our rainbow flag up from the breezeway to the third floor this week. We did so because someone has been ripping it down on a regular basis. Rather than let someone censor us, we wanted to make sure that we can continue to proudly proclaim that love is love.
Love is love. Again, I invite you to consider how you might name your family values. And when I say family values, I am not necessarily just speaking of the values of your blood family. If you prefer, you can reframe the idea to address the values of your family of choice.
That is, of course, what congregations like ours become for a lot of people, families of choice. Over the years, I have seen our members and friends go to extraordinary lengths to take care of each other. Parents living far from, or estranged from, their own parents have found adoptive grandparents for their children. Elders living on their own have discovered community members who provide them far more support–driving them to appointments, helping them navigate the Byzantine corporate health care system, making them food–than many children do. Kids meet other kids in our religious exploration program to whom they become as close to as cousins. I am still good friends with several people I met in RE as a kid.
We Unitarian Universalists view character formation to be one of the primary purposes of our religious communion. There is an old saying that we believe in salvation by character. This is the challenging proposition that the good that we are is reflected in the good we do. It is also the necessary claim that being part of our congregation should make us better people.
Here I think of the importance of friendship. Our friends help us live into our values by encouraging us to act. This can take place on the scale of politics–attending a march, taking each other to the polls, speaking at City Hall, or the like. But it most often occurs on the interpersonal level because friendship is an action. It includes actions like all of the ones I named earlier that are found in families of choice. It also contains simple things like sharing a conversation, a meal, or just being together.
Often friendship is rooted in a shared celebration of beauty. Some of the strongest bonds I have formed have come through a mutual appreciation for an art form or a style of music. There is something that happens when we come together and say, “this aesthetic speaks to my soul, does it speak to your soul also?” Finding an interlocutor who has a “yes” inscribed on their heart is powerful.
When that happens, the theologians Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock observe, we often find ourselves opening to the “world as sacred space … [loving] life fiercely and, in the name of love, protect[ing] the goodness of earth’s intricate web of life.”
In times like these, when it seems like there is so much ugliness in the world, uplifting the beautiful can be a balm. But it can be more than that. Embracing our planet as a paradise, dissenting from the view that heaven is somewhere else rather than here, we find that we are “responsive to and responsible for” the ground upon which we live. “We enter fully–heart, mind, soul, and strength,” they write, “into savoring and saving paradise.”
Waking up to the world as it is, infused with ugliness, yes, but also replete with beauty, we are all called, in the words of James Baldwin to ask, “What will happen to all that beauty?”
Dissenting family values require us to nurture it as best we can, and as best we understand it. This brings me to the last point in my summary of my own family values of love your family, treasure your friends, bring more beauty into the world, and fight fascism. It is better said not by me but by Charles Sumner, the abolitionist, Unitarian, and probably best Senator in the history of this country.
Sumner enjoyed the arts, the magnificent soaring of the human spirit uncovered in poetry, prose, and painting. He said, “is beauty in art, in literature, in science, and in every triumph of intelligence, all of which I covet for my country.” This fed his spirit and gave him strength.
But what he wanted even more for the world than the art, literature, and science that he desired for the United States was he called “higher beauty.” This he named as “relieving the poor, … elevating the downtrodden, and being a succor to the oppressed.” Of it he said, there “is true grandeur in an example of justice, making the rights of all the same as our own, and beating down prejudice, like Satan, under our feet.”
This understanding of beauty, in Sumner’s day, led him to oppose slavery with every fiber of his being. In our day, it means opposing fascism, authoritarianism, fighting against all that would crush the human spirit into dust and prevent us proclaiming the birth of a more beautiful world.
Dissenting family values, I have done my best to name the values that I would pass along to the next generation: loving family, treasuring friends, doing what I can to bring more beauty into the world, and struggling against those who would prevent us all from thriving. How would you name your family values?
I close with an exercise that might help you name them. Get comfortable. Close your eyes and imagine a young person you care about. Imagine you watching that young person thirty years in the future. What does their life look like? Now, imagine that you are at that young person’s ninetieth birthday party. Imagine that you can look outside the room from a window. What do you see through the glass?
Now, imagine that young person, now a grandparent or even great-grandparent, gets up to give a toast. They are going to say something about the gratitude to they have for the gathering, for all the family and friends that they are surrounded by. But instead, they look on the wall, they see a picture of an illustrious ancestor, you. What do they say about you? What do they say about the family values–values from their family of birth or family of choice–that you have passed down to them?
After the service, in Channing Hall, at home, or with a friend, I invite you to find someone to share your vision and discuss your values. In the meantime, in the spirit of our shared values, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
