as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, February 23, 2025
This past week the President’s supporters recognized Black History Month with an event at the White House. While there, they celebrated the appointment of noted conspiracy theorist Kash Patel to the position of FBI Director. In the past, Patel has “talked about going after” the President’s enemies.
In footage leaked of the event, it appeared that he was being encouraged to do just that. In the video, a man holding a cellphone scanned the room and said, “Hold those mother suckas accountable.” In the background, someone was holding up a cut-out poster of Rev. Dr. Jamal Bryant. A voice can be heard saying, “Yeah, that’s right, yeah, Jamal, that’s right.”
The video appears to be a clear attempt to intimidate Rev. Dr. Bryant. For those that don’t know, he is the senior pastor of New Missionary Baptist Church outside of Atlanta. It is one of the largest African American churches in the country.
He has used his pulpit to forcefully criticize the President. Recently, he has called for a 40-day boycott of Target over the company’s decision to reduce its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. He called the reductions, “a spit in the face of black people.”
Such plain speaking has made him one of the leading prophetic religious voices in the country. In response to the apparent intimidation efforts he has said, “I stand firm in my commitment to speak out against this administration or any corporation that seeks to erode generations of progress among marginalized communities. … it’s our collective responsibility as citizens to hold the powerful accountable. At this critical moment, we must collectively resist any radical actions that threaten the very foundations of our democracy. Silence is not an option, and complacency is not a strategy.”
Silence is not an option. Complacency is not a strategy. Say it with me, “Silence is not an option. Complacency is not a strategy.” Can I get an Amen?
The intimidation efforts directed towards Rev. Dr. Bryant need to be understood an attack on freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the freedom of the pulpit. These freedoms are central to this country. They are enshrined in the Constitution.
More importantly, they are freedoms that we Unitarian Universalists hold sacred. In our newly adopted statement of shared values our association proclaims we “learn from one another in our free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Further, collectively we assert that “[c]ongregational freedom and the individual’s right of conscience are central to our Unitarian Universalist heritages.”
Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the freedom of the pulpit, if the President and his conspiracy addled FBI Director are successful in intimidating Rev. Dr. Bryant they will almost certainly be successful in intimidating religious leaders of lesser stature. We need to understand an effort to intimidate him as an effort to silence prophetic pulpits everywhere.
Silence is not an option. Complacency is not a strategy. Can you say it with me again? “Silence is not an option. Complacency is not a strategy.” Let’s have another Amen!
Now, our announced topic is “Exorcising the Spirit of the Confederacy.” In our remaining time together, we are going to pursue it in the following sequence. First, I am going to describe the spirit of the Confederacy and name some of the ways that it animates the present federal administration. Second, I will make the claim that our religious tradition has long been committed to casting this spirit out of the Republic. Finally, I am going to invite you to join with me in a casting out of the spirit of the Confederacy and a calling in of the abolitionist tradition.
All of this might be understood as a religious gesture somewhat foreign to most Unitarian Universalist pulpits, spiritual warfare. In some evangelical Christian communities, spiritual warfare is a practice where prayers are offered as “human confrontation with unseen forces and presences.” The scholar Abimbola Adelakun defines it as the “battle against the devil and his human agents embedded in social and spiritual spaces, and whose activities impinge on social flourishing.”
Good Unitarian Universalist that I am, I do not believe in the Devil–though sometimes I am convinced that the French poet Charles Baudelaire who wrote, “the Devil’s greatest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist!” Nonetheless, I am certain that there are human beings out there who are devoted to undermining social flourishing. The present administration seems pretty content on wrecking many of the federal institutions that have enabled whatever forms of human good we have achieved in the last decades. The new Secretary of Health seems content to bring shame upon his family name by vowing to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule that prevents measles, polio, and other diseases. Meanwhile, there is a measles outbreak here in Texas amongst the unvaccinated. Prior to his appointment, the Secretary of Health was involved in undermining vaccination in Samoa. Following his efforts there some eighty-three people died of the disease.
The President and his acolytes’ efforts to destroy USAID have already resulted in one documented death. Pe Kha Lau, a refugee living in Thailand, died after the funding freeze resulted in her oxygen supply being cut off.
The funding freeze was illegal. Funding has been ordered by the courts to be restored. It is unclear right now the extent to which that has happened. Writing of our situation, New York Times columnist M. Gessen has observed, “Admonitions to obey the law will not stop … [the President] and will not dissuade his supporters. [His] … bad ideas must be countered with good ones. His attack on the government has to be contrasted with a vision of how the system could work and should work–for the people, not for emperor-in-the-making.”
Space to cultivate good ideas is one of the reasons why the freedom of the pulpit is so threatening to the current administration. We might even consider putting forth good ideas in opposition to bad ones our own form of Unitarian Universalist spiritual warfare. In the early nineteen century, Jamaican Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and early Pan-Africanist Robert Wedderburn certainly thought that it was. He, probably not coincidentally, was one of the few ministers in our tradition to practice actual spiritual warfare. He believed, in his words, that the “task of the priest is sustain and renew the life of the community he serves” by calling for spiritual good and casting away the spiritual malignant.
Today, we do something similar when we invoke the religious vision of the Rev. Dr. Bryant and the religious vision of our own tradition. It is one in which, in the language of our Unitarian Universalist Association, “every person … has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion.” Universal human flourishing, it is a very good idea. Can I get another Amen?
It is a belief that is at the core of who we are. It lies at the root of the abolitionist tradition, which we need to conjure forth. It is opposed to the spirit of the Confederacy, which we must cast out of the Republic.
The spirit of the Confederacy, I suspect that calling for the exorcism of the spirit of the Confederacy is a risky gesture in a Texas pulpit. It might even be a risky one in a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Houston. I know that some of the folks in our community have deep roots in this state. I would not be surprised if a few of our White members had ancestors who fought for the bars and stars. To that, I can only say that we each have to relate to our forebears in our own way. And that we are challenged to decide on whether we will carry forward their culture and values or pursue different ones.
I suspect that if you are here this morning, or joining us online, you are attracted to a different set of values. The best part of the Unitarian Universalist tradition has been aligned with the spirit of abolition, not the spirit of the Confederacy.
The spirit of the Confederacy, it has long been mistaught that the Civil War was about something called States rights. This is a great untruth. The Civil War was over slavery. If you doubt this consider the fact that unlike the United States Constitution, the Confederate Constitution used both the terms “slavery” and “slaves.” It also made clear that enslaved individuals were Black–the United States Constitution refers to “Persons held to Service or Labour” which at the time included European indentured servants. Even more tellingly, some of the state Confederate constitutions made the explicit point that only White males could be full citizens. Everyone else, women, children, people of color, were to be held subservient. As one of the founders of the Confederacy put, “This Union was formed by white men, and for the protection and happiness of their race.”
The spirit of the Confederacy, then, might be understood as a vision of society that places White men–particularly wealthy White men–at the top and everyone else underneath them. It was overthrown with the Civil War. It has been trying to reassert itself ever since then.
Indeed, much of the history of this country since the Civil War can be understood as a struggle between the spirit of the Confederacy and the spirit of abolition. The victory of the Union forces put the country on the path, to however, imperfectly, however slowly, become a multiracial democracy. After Reconstruction the United States was, briefly, a true biracial democracy. Between 1870 and 1900 there were more than twenty Black men in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate.
Efforts to roll back this progress and develop the regime of Jim Crow lie at the heart of what the Black socialist and journalist William N. Colson labelled Confederate-Americanism.
He coined the term when Woodrow Wilson was President. Wilson was the first Southern-born person to occupy the office since the Civil War. While in the White House, he sought to nationalize the rising rot of Jim Crow. Following the Civil War, the federal workforce had been integrated. Wilson segregated it. In response, Colson called Wilson what he was, a Confederate-American.
During Wilson’s administration the Ku Klux Klan was resurrected. Labor unions were suppressed. Immigrants were targeted. Free speech was criminalized. His government jailed its political opponents and organized what can only be termed mass show trials. One of the most shocking instances was connected to the Camp Logan Rebellion. More than a hundred of the African American soldiers involved in it were put on three trials together. Almost were all found guilty. Thirteen of them were hung.
Central to all of this was an effort to cast multiracial democracy as a failure. An entire academic historical apparatus was erected to create what W. E. B. Du Bois labelled the “propaganda of history.” Its advocates installed themselves in the most august academic institutions in country–they were particularly established at John Hopkins and Columbia. There they set about trying to propagate the lies that African Americans were unsuited for governance because they were supposedly ignorant and wasteful.
Du Bois undermined this effort with his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America. In it, he demonstrated that the biracial democracy that emerged in the aftermath of the Civil War had been largely successful at extending rights, literacy, and even prosperity further than they had ever been extended before. In opposition to the spirit of the Confederacy, he invoked what he named abolition democracy. This was the simple idea that society should be “based on freedom, intelligence, and power for all.”
Some of its greatest advocates were connected to our Unitarian Universalist tradition. Preachers like Theodore Parker opposed slavery, organized their congregations to protect people who had escaped bondage, and used their pulpits to proclaim, “A democracy … is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.” Poets like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper cast visions of “songs for the people, / Songs for the old and young; / Songs to stir like a battle-cry / Wherever they are sung.” And elected officials like Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts–without a doubt the greatest Unitarian Universalist politician in history–authored the crucial civil rights legislation of the Reconstruction era. His insights into civil rights were so powerful that they formed the backbone of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, legislation passed over 80 years after his death. Du Bois described him as a hero, “one of the finest examples of New England culture and American courage.”
Democracy of all the people, regardless of race or gender, there can be little doubt that this abolitionist vision–so dear to the best parts of our Unitarian Universalist movement–is under assault today. The spirit of the Confederacy, embodied in the President and his neo-Confederate and Afrikaner allies, seems bent on resegregation. They have pledged to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts from within the federal government. They have fired the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff possibly because he is Black. They appear to have fired the head of the Navy because she is a woman. The Attorney General has instructed the Department of Justice to target diversity programs in the private-sector for possible “criminal investigations.” One of the President’s appointees has said the quiet part out loud and stated, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
Silence is not an option. Complacency is not a strategy. Say it with me, “Silence is not an option. Complacency is not a strategy.” What about an Amen?
The President and his supporters’ ideas are bad ones. We can put forth better, more compelling ones. These ideas cannot be based in their vision of White male leadership. They must come from the vision of a society “based on freedom, intelligence, and power for all.” That dream lies at the core of who we are as a religious tradition. It is the same dream that they are threatening to silence in the Rev. Dr. Jamal Bryant. It is one that we must proclaim loudly and clearly from our pulpit and throughout our congregation. It is a dream that I believe is inscribed on the hearts of every Unitarian Universalist, all people of good will, and clearly found in our value of “every person … has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion.”
It is this spirit of abolition democracy we need to conjure up. Just as it is the spirit of the Confederacy that we need to cast out. So, join me, now, in the act of casting out and conjuring up. It might be merely rhetorical. I am not sure I believe in spiritual warfare. But, whatever the case, it is an act that might allow us to steel our intentions, inspire our spirits, and put forth the kinds of good ideas necessary to counter the torrent of bad ones pouring out from the White House.
This will be a call and response. I will name the spirit of something that should be cast out of our society and then I will ask you to respond, “We cast out.” Then I will conjure up something we wish to see, and I will ask you to respond, “We call forth.”
The lie that the Civil War was not about slavery, we cast out.
The truth that Reconstruction briefly built a biracial democracy, we call forth.
The falsehoods contained in history books opposed to critical race theory, we cast out.
The veracity inscribed by W. E. B. DuBois about the nation’s possibility, we call forth.
The spirits of all the Confederate leaders who fought for a society devoted only to flourishing of White men, we cast out.
The spirits of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, Theodore Parker, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and so many others, we call forth.
The resegregation of society and the idea of Whites only spaces, we cast out.
The possibility of multiracial democracy, we call forth.
Inadequate housing, poor quality healthcare, unaffordable groceries, low wage jobs, we cast out.
A society where everyone has a safe place to live, affordable housing, healthy food, and all of the good things of life, we call forth.
A government opposed to the flourishing of all, we cast out.
A government committed to the flourishing of every human being, regardless of race, gender, citizenship status, or other human divisor, we call forth.
We call all these good ideas forth and proclaim the possibility that sometime, perhaps not now, perhaps sometime in the distant future, we might live in a society where their goodness has come to reign.
In that spirit, I invite you to say Amen and then join with me, after our musical meditation, in hymn devoted to the great abolitionist and advocate for multiracial democracy, John Brown. May his spirit and the spirit of his fellows inspire us.
