There’s a fascinating discussion happening over on the Chalice Blog about the relationship between Unitarian Universalist churches and political discourse.

The disconnect in the discussion seems to be coming from the way “politics in church” is defined.

I think there’s a big difference between politics defined as telling the government what to do on specific issues, which is what CC seems to be (rightly) arguing against in church, and politics defined as examining and influencing the balance of power in our society.

I would argue that the latter, in its highest ideals, is something we should absolutely be doing in church. I don’t think it’s something we do very well in Unitarian Universalist churches, but that doesn’t mean we should just stop reaching for that ideal - the idea of the inequities of the power structure from the White House on down to the local school board is an important one to engage. Actions by politicians on all of those levels have consequences to individual citizens, and part of our justice work in our churches should be to examine those consequences from our religious viewpoint and maybe say, “Hey, look at what is happening over here because of that legislation that just passed,” or “Hey, have you thought about the effects of that particular idea on this particular group of (maybe disadvantaged) people?” every once in awhile.

Where I think we fail in these ideals is in two places. One is assuming that all UUs will come to the same conclusions from such political discourse - and that therefore, as a specific congregation or as the denomination as a whole, we shoule dictate specific policy to the government. Your typical political liberal might say, “Gee, the government should really help with this issue,” and your typical political conservative might say, “Wow, maybe less government might help solve that,” but they both might agree on the desired outcome - the desired outcome being what I think is extremely important to be discussing in religious context.

Our second failure is in demonizing the other side of the debate. We hear a lot of language in our gatherings about how “Anyone who could possibly believe that the war is a good idea/abortion should be illegal/gay marriage should be outlawed/etc etc etc is just Evil.” That’s what is happening in a lot of more traditionally conservative churches, too, from the other perspective. And that’s why the very idea of politics has become so polarizing.

There has to be a way to do it better. I think religion should inform politics (in the broad definition). I don’t think politics (in any definition) should inform religion. But there are always gray areas, and so the best we can do is to listen to each other, and to our highest ideals, and go from there. No one said it was easy.