as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, January 18, 2026
We are beset by evil. Today, we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday and we are a country beset by evil. Minnesota is beset by evil. Texas is beset by evil. Houston is beset by evil. The United States is beset by evil.
Now, evil is a harsh word. Evil, it is something that many Unitarian Universalists are uncomfortable using. It bespeaks a neat division of the world into two categories: good and evil. It contains echoes of theologies that our tradition rejects. It suggests notions of original sin and inherent wickedness rather than original blessing and inherent dignity.
In the past, I have offered you a basic definition of evil drawn from the work of Tony Pinn. A Rice professor and a longtime friend of our congregation, Tony’s name is likely familiar to some of you. He describes evil as “[s]uffering and unmerited suffering.”
Suffering and unmerited suffering, it is a helpful definition. It allows us to name our afflictions and impairments, the natural disasters of our world and our lives, cancer and earthquakes, flus and fierce storms, as forms of inescapable natural evil. But more than describing natural evil, it enables us to name moral evil for what it is, evil.
We do harm to each other. We inflict immense suffering on our human fellows. That is moral evil. In Tony’s words it is, “oppression, injustice, inequality, and the resulting psychological and physical damage.”
Moral evil is an active choice just as moral good is an active choice. The first is rooted in treating people as things, in refusing to recognize the inherent worth and dignity of all people. The second comes from taking love as our own internal law. It calls us to alleviate, not elevate, suffering, to work for justice and build a world where all being can flourish. When evil so often seeks to break us into separate individuals, the moral clarity of love offers the possibility of restoration and renewal.
In the political world, moral evil and good come through policy choices. Ibram X. Kendi has written on the difference between racist and antiracist policies. “A racist policy,” he tells us, “is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequality between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.” Policies, he helpfully reminds us, are “written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people.”
We can extend Kendi’s definition to evil and good policies. An evil policy is one which inflicts suffering on other human beings. A good one alleviates suffering or promotes human flourishing. Good policy empowers us to live lives filled with love, to unleash our full human potential, to uncover the spark of the divine within, grow in our abilities or enjoy more of the good things of life. Evil policy does precisely the opposite.
We are beset by evil. In these times, when it seems that a constant stream of theatrical violence–an act of war on a sovereign nation, the occupation of a Northern city, the bellicose belligerency of a bully breaking with allies as he covets Greenland… In these times, when it seems that a constant stream of theatrical violence is designed to distract us from the damning diagnostics of the Epstein files–the President’s name appears innumerable times in material connected with the convicted sex offender and devoted exploiter of women, and there is more to come. In these times, we when approach Dr. King’s birthday, it is necessary to be precise about the political pestilence that afflicts us.
We are beset by evil. Political reactionaries like to acknowledge Dr. King’s enormous contributions to humanity by invoking a brief paragraph of his. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” they like to say before launching into attacks on the achievements of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, or those feeble efforts at reparations for slavery known as Affirmative Action.
Dr. King was not afraid to name such thought patterns evil. Indeed, he spoke almost often about casting down evil as he did about lifting up love. All the way back in 1956, he said, “Segregation is a glaring evil. … It regulates the segregated to the status of a thing rather than elevates … [them] to the status of a person. Segregation is nothing but slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity.”
A glaring evil, turning people into things, slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity, Dr. King had little patience for those who were mealy mouthed about evil. He once warned that the “great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.” He believed that to “ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.”
Quoting Edmund Burke’s saying, “When evil men combine, good men must unite,” he described the “pressing challenge confronting the white liberal.” He challenged those of good heart and fair skin–whether liberals or leftists–to hear words calling us to action. He wrote, “When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men conspire to preserve an unjust status quo, good men must unite to bring about the birth of a new society.”
The language is partially dated. It reflects, as James Cone observed, that Dr. King was limited in his ability to understand “sexism as a major problem connected with and as evil as racism.” But in striving to update Dr. King’s call to the midwifery of the new society we would be well advised to consider whether or not not we should change the early half of his construction.
We who would do good, we who must plan, we who must build and bind, we who must be midwives of a better world, include the full rich beautiful rainbow spectrum of human gender. But the evil men who plot, who burn and bomb, who create evil policies to spread their evil across the width and breadth of our starship Earth, well, it is not coincidental that they are overwhelmingly male. As the President’s pernicious presence in the Epstein files should remind us, the practitioners of white supremacy–the promoters of the evil of segregation that Dr. King declaimed–have always had a peculiar interest in controlling women’s bodies.
I think of this in relation to the murder of Renee Good. Shortly after she was killed by an ICE agent the President justified the shooting. He told reporters, “that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.” There can be little doubt that in his mind he imagines law enforcement to be primarily male.
Under his regime, ICE’s job, the Border Patrol’s job, is to reassert a particular kind of hierarchy. Wealthy White men like him are to be at the top. People of color, women, anyone who would resist the imposition of his unnatural order upon the world, they, we, are very disrespectful. The dessert for such disrespect, especially if we challenge the gender or racial hierarchy, includes, the President implies, death.
Death, I have shared with you in the past that I think the President’s policies might be named the politics of cruelty. Such cruelty has long been predicated on deciding who shall live and who shall die, who shall prosper and who shall suffer. Claudia Rankine’s powerful book length poem “Citizen: An American Lyric” reminds us that such politics–the segregation that Dr. King named, the slavery covered up with the niceties of complexity he spoke out against–has often been embodied in law enforcement.
“Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn’t begin the same way, each time it begins it’s the same. Flashes, a siren, the stretched-out roar,” Rankine writes. That roar stretches back to the thugs of the nineteenth century who traveled North to try and enforce the Fugitive Slave Law in cities like Boston. They sought to capture Black people who had freed themselves and force them back onto the forced labor camps we euphemistically call plantations.
Today, that roar stretches forward to the thugs of the twenty-first century who travel North and lay siege to the city of Minneapolis. They are practicing evil. They systematically harass people of color. They capture immigrants, brutalize them, and deport them, sometimes unto their death. Evil, an evil which the mayor of Minneapolis has bravely named when he has told ICE to get out of his.
Today, that roar stretches forward to the thugs of the twenty-first century who stalk the streets of Houston. As First Unitarian Universalist member Dale Story wrote in yesterday’s Chronicle, “ICE [is] terrorizing our immigrant communities.” What happened in Minneapolis could easily happen here. I suspect it is only a matter of time before ICE kills someone in our city. Texas leads the nation in the number immigrants detained. As Dale observed, Harris County Jail tops the country in ICE detainers–that is a request from immigration agents to hold a person for deportation.
Our mayor, of course, remains silent, as he remains silent on so many matters relating to justice. We need to all be joining with Dale and saying with him, “Mayor John Whitmire, the time is now to take a stand for your city and quote your colleague in Minneapolis: ICE–Get out of Houston.”
ICE–Get your evil policies, your evil practices, your evil deeds out of Houston. Mayor Whitmire stop ignoring evil. Mayor Whitmire stop acting as evil’s accomplice.
Stop acting as evil’s accomplice, Mayor Whitmire is an educated man. He graduated from the University of Houston. He passed the bar. But he appears to me to be what Dr. King called the “most dangerous criminal … the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”
Gifted with reason but with no morals, that paragraph from Dr. King that reactionaries like lift up, the one about the content of character, comes from his very particular understanding of education. Education, for Dr. King, had a “two-fold function … utility and … culture.” Utility, learning all of the technological knowledge and skills necessary to make it through an increasingly complicated capitalistic world and, in the words of an iconic Texan, successfully “put food on your family.”
Culture, learning, in Dr. King’s words, how “to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.” Culture, developing the ability to name evil and at the same time learning how to unleash an imagination radical enough that even in country beset by the evil of white supremacy we might someday be able to say with Dr. King, “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
It is precisely such a two-fold understanding of education that is being systematically dismantled here in Houston. We need education that forms moral agents, the content of character, and provides the ability to name evil. We do not need education that just creates obedient workers or, worse, places children on the school to prison pipeline.
Education in our city, and our state, is being stripped of its democratic purpose. It is being reduced to test scores, compliance, and control. No wonder that since the Houston Independent School District began to suffer from the evil that Superintendent Mike Miles is doing—which is to say the evil Commissioner Mike Morath is doing, which is to say the evil Governor Greg Abbott is doing—enrollment has plummeted.
Education is not being envisioned as integrated and equal. It is not even being imagined as separate but equal. They are trying to reconstruct it as separate but unequal. They want a majority working class school district populated by people of color in the city that does nothing to stop the invasion of what Dr. King called the “legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda” into the hearts of our children. They want suburban school districts and private schools that reassemble segregation.
In my work with State Senator Molly Cook and State Representative Lauren Ashley Simmons and the other members of the Commission on the Takeover of HISD, we have repeatedly heard chilling stories about how this effort is proceeding. Parents have shared about how the curriculum seems to being ripped apart. Children are discouraged from learning to think for themselves. One parent told us about how his child went from loving to school to hating it. It is all just, in the parent’s words, “worksheet after worksheet.” When students are done with worksheets they are “sent to a computer” where they “keep doing more worksheets.” The emphasis is not on learning reasoning skills, developing the ability to name evil and strengthen their characters, but on the kind of rote memorization that increases test scores. Students are no longer being assigned whole books in the district.
Students have told us about how the school administrations consistently disrespect teachers in front of them. When this happens the “kids … get really quiet.” One teenager told a story about how an administrator came into her classroom and started berating the teacher in front of the students. It was so bad that as soon as the administrator left the room the teacher just gathered up her things and quit. With behavior like this from district leadership it is not hard to understand why teacher turnover is at record highs. I know of kids who have been without a math teacher for almost entire year.
We are told, of course, by the Superintendent of the great successes that are being achieved under his administration. But all of the testimony we have gathered so far–and I look forward to sharing the commission’s reports with you when they are ready–speaks of disregard for the needs of children, the encouragement of violations of special education law, the dismantling of libraries, contempt for the teaching profession, and disdain for what Dr. King called the complete education.
Today, we honor Dr. King’s legacy. We must do so not only by marching–though I encourage you to join the congregation tomorrow on the streets–or remembering his words. We must do so by fearlessly naming the evil that besets our country for he would do no less if he was alive. We must do so by planning for the creation of a more beautiful world. We must learn to build and bind. We must come together and be midwives to the new society. We must demand that our public officials create policies that further the good rather than reinforce evil. We must let love, love for our community, love for truth, love for freedom, guide us. For it is love that strengthens us to plan, to build, and to bind; it is love that calls us to be the midwives of a new society.
ICE must leave Houston, just as it must leave Minneapolis. And those dismantling public education have to be stopped.
Then, and only then, will we be able to say that we have lived out Dr. King’s legacy of love and speak with him, “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say, Amen.
