When I was a child there was a widely honored technique of crossing your fingers behind your back to negate a promise. Did you ever do that? You could say, for instance, “I will not take the last Oreo cookie.” But “crossed fingers” reversed the meaning of what you said so that you could take the Oreo with impunity. Of course you had to be quick about it because the person hearing your promise would demand to see both your hands—out front. Children, unlike adults, ahem, have a great desire to appear to be innocent—but still get the last Oreo.

One of the lessons of maturity, of course, is that such dishonesty is a bad thing. And so we tend to imagine that a good society is one in which hypocrisy is the exception to the rule of fair dealing among adults. And much of the time that rule seems to apply. But a different kind of hypocrisy has arisen within our society. This kind of hypocrisy is widespread, seemingly intractable—and it is making all of us nuts.

On March 13, 2010 Annabel Park held the first “Coffee Party” event at a caf é in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. It was her hope to begin a movement to counteract the angry rhetoric of the Tea Party movement. The caf é was crowded—lots of people came. That pleased Annabel. What did not please Annabel was the angry rhetoric of the participants who eagerly shouted civilized comments such as, “I hate the Tea Party people.” As it was reported in Newsweek, a man claiming to represent Code-Pink, a leftist protest movement, asserted that he despised “fear based rhetoric.” Such comments were made without the authors realizing that hating “hate” speech is a form of very ironic hypocrisy.

I begin with an example of the hypocrisy of those on the left. Many of us are far more comfortable focusing upon the hypocrisy of the right. We note that the term “creation science” is itself an oxymoron—having nothing to do with science but called a “science” for the sole purpose of deception. And, of course, we have had the shining examples of Tea Party protestors angry about the socialist takeover of Medicare. I can’t wait to hear about the grave dangers of the government takeover of Congress.

Intentional caricature and angry rhetorical hoopla do have a long and colorful tradition in American life. But thankfully there were also in our past enough serious people around to make sure things got done even if accomplished with rancorous debate. Thus it is sometimes said that when our society encounters a substantial issue we engage in something called a “national debate.” Well, to be truthful, I do not believe we have had a national debate for quite some time now. What we have instead is a national heckle in which nothing is resolved and nothing can be resolved. Angry accusations and personal invective are launched over one’s own intellectual bulwark no matter one’s side in a heckle. Neither side imagines it can persuade the other so both just try to shout the opposition down. And since all that a national heckle does is make everyone feel anxious and angry even more people become convinced that invective and accusation are only all the more necessary. Such routine facile and intentional distortion is nothing but hypocritical.

In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs the Board of Education of Topeka that segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Much of the South was not the least bit pleased. Governor Faubus of Arkansas mobilized the Arkansas National Guard in 1957 to block the entry of six black students into the Little Rock High School. President Eisenhower brought in the 101 st Airborne National Guard from Kentucky and took federal control of the Arkansas National Guard from Gov. Faubus. He gave the troops orders to protect the black students’ entry into the school. Wow. That’s impressive. But the point I wish to make—could such a thing happen today? Imagine if immigration reform did pass, and there was fierce local resistance in Arizona. Could President Obama take over the Arizona National Guard or send in troops from another state, not to confront Mexicans, but Americans? Never in a million years. Such an event truly would turn into a battle, shots would be fired, people would be killed, and President Obama’s term as President would be all but over.

So let me ask you, how many of you in this room, right now, feel that our nation is heading in a positive direction? How many of you feel confident about our collective ability to solve the grave problems which we face as a nation? Or consider this: how many of you feel that your children must be guarded and shepherded with excruciating care when out in public? And these experiences of social anxiety do not include the normal stress of dealing with your personal demons and the sometimes hard things of extended family life. Few of us can avoid this abundance of stressors in our life. Clearly what all of us need is a supportive community that can overlook the inevitable missteps and mumblings into our shirts whenever our life is a bit unraveled. We normally look to our religious community to provide this kind of support.

The necessity of support is only more pronounced when society itself seems rife with crazy-making ugliness. But, and this is a major “but,” the craziness out there seeps in here, sometimes powerfully so. We would like to hide from it—but we cannot. We would like to pretend that the craziness is not in here, only out there; and that we can calmly and elegantly navigate over these rough waters. But that itself is a deception. And sadly, neither Becky nor I, nor any leader in the congregation can build a wall high enough or strong enough to keep it out. You need to know that there is a very powerful reason for this seepage.

It may not have occurred to you but the intellectual and spiritual ferment which brought the United States into being were the identical forces behind the creation of Unitarian Universalism. It is useful to recall that three of the first six Presidents of the United States espoused Unitarianism, even though there were only a handful of Unitarian churches in the United States at the time. In a very real sense our faith is the unacknowledged soul of the nation. But what this linkage between our country and our faith means is that as the country goes, so will we. That is why what will be felt out there—will also be felt in here. My question, can the reverse also be true? Can we devise a way to sustain a renewed positive congregational life that can serve us and as well be a paradigm for the community outside our doors?

For most of the past forty years our spiritual life as a congregation and nation has been dominated by an insistence upon personal freedom. It is common for people to feel that all elements in society should support what they as individuals think or feel. When people do not experience that sense of support or agreement they withdraw, or increasingly now, turn very indignant and sometimes violent. Unitarian Universalism has been in many ways on the cutting edge of this movement. We are like, “My way or the highway!” 24/7. But now we see that the Tea Party Movement is using the same kind of logic against the federal intervention in health care. “Don’t tell me what to do!” This insistence on an absolutist personal freedom led me to wonder: why it is these citizens seem to lack any sense of mutual obligation towards one another in our society; and why it is these citizens seem to lack any confidence in our government’s capacity to do the right thing? One might ask if it is even possible to talk convincingly about our having any robust sense of mutual obligation to one another?

What we have in place of an easily adopted sense of mutual obligation is a society fractured into innumerable tiny shards of readily aroused and brittle discontent. That’s not a good thing, so perhaps we imagine that we could instruct ourselves and each other to be mindful of the need for mutual obligation. But such instruction will not likely succeed. What we lack will not be supplied by better education.

What we are missing is an overarching coherent positive social narrative that identifies our obligations to each other. And I would claim that it is the demise of a coherent positive social narrative that is the cause of our discontent and gives us all permission to be a little more cranky, sometimes even much to our own surprise. That is, we once had a way of describing the essence of what it meant to live as a member of society in the United States of America. That description allowed us to bridge our manifold differences because both sides to any dispute none-the-less shared the same narrative, which sustained a baseline attitude of mutual support.

The first words of the narrative were, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union....” These words form the subject and predicate, the “who” and the intended action of those actors. The object in the narrative of our creating a more perfect union was securing the blessings of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

That traditional narrative has been replaced with some version of the following. “I, as a citizen of the United States, in order to have my perfect life, insist on the pursuit of the freedom to achieve my own happiness.” The difference between the two narratives is that the first is distinctively plural while the second is exclusively singular. And thus the second cannot serve as a true social narrative.

What caused such an alteration? This question has been the subject of innumerable books and articles but I believe the most profound suggestion for an answer has come from Daniel McKanan, our new UU Scholar in residence at Harvard University. In a recent conversation he mentioned that religious liberals have not yet quite realized that the environmental movement is essentially conservative—and not liberal. We are, he implied, put in the position of trying to square a theological circle. But this contradiction also pointed to something important about our social narrative. The narrative once had a hidden partner. And the tricky part about a hidden partner is that when it is gone, its absence is unnoticed since it was hidden in the first place. Yet if it is gone, the traditional social narrative collapses even when the obvious partner of constitutional promise remains.

You see, we did not realize that progress in perfecting the union did not simply follow from the inevitable logic of Constitutional guarantees of equality and freedom. We like to think it was moral prowess that got us this far. Certainly the need for a coherent narrative exerts some influence so that what we say comports with what we do. Thus what began as a document supporting the freedom and equality of all propertied white men was seen to be, in its exclusion of other sorts of human beings, empirically incoherent. Eventually our drive for coherence led us to translate “(white propertied) men” into “people.”

But our history suggests an additional narrative element. Progress in expanding the blessings of full citizenship to increasing classes of people depended not only upon constitutional logic but also upon the firm and liberal belief that we lived in the land of Eden, the land of unlimited resources. Living in such a place of abundance meant that those already benefitting could easily share the rewards of living in Eden. Those who did not want to extend the blessings of living in this place were just being misanthropic and greedy. Hey, we could always find more to dig, chop, drill and manufacture to handle the increased demand. And as we were energetic and ingenious it seemed to us that expanding the rewards of living in Eden could go on forever.

The blessings of abundance brought about by our living in Eden was the hidden partner in our coherent positive social narrative. So the full narrative would really read, “We the people, (who live in a land blessed with bounteous resources) can form a more perfect union, which assures the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

But what happens when the easy reliance upon bounteous resources is gone? Now we no longer believe we live in Eden, the place of unlimited abundance. The environmental movement has demonstrated that we instead live in a densely complicated web of life and that our impact on this web has made the web weaker—not stronger. And in some striking ways our impact on this web has made it less abundant—not more. We now realize that all our digging, chopping, drilling and manufacturing comes with a heretofore unglimpsed long term cost, which cost makes us nervous as we navigate our way through the poisons we have created.

It is interesting to ponder the possibility that the nail in the coffin for the happy reliance upon the sense of shared unlimited abundance was the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. The gas rationing and long lines at gas stations of that episode in our life exposed us all to our national vulnerability when it came to resource abundance.

If so, I suspect that the immediate casualty of the loss of the hidden partner of resource abundance was the Equal Rights Amendment. What had begun with such promise and fanfare in 1972, and seemed like a foregone conclusion at the outset given the power of the women’s rights movement, ended in 1982 with a whimper because insufficient states passed the Amendment and several states threatened to rescind their ratification. But there have been other casualties as the citizens of our country seemed to become angrier and angrier, more intent on habits of mutual disdain, revenge and extraordinary wealth accumulation than on the habits of expanding the blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Are we Unitarian Universalists the spiritual mirror of social life in the United States of America? Yes. We are not alone, but we have been very prominent, even if at times reluctantly so. Our numbers have always been small but our influence has always been large. Yet if it is true, and I believe it is, that as the nation goes, so will we, can the reverse also be true? That is, as we go, can so go the larger community? Well, we better hope so because if we only stay on the current course of affairs our future will be rough. Personal happiness will be pursued—with a vengeance. But true happiness will remain ever elusive because such equanimity requires a positive community. And positive community does not happen by accident. A positive community is fashioned by vibrancy of a coherent positive social narrative.

It would be churlish of me to drag us through all this trouble without at least some hint that there could be a positive outcome. Imagine if it was the case that all I said was, “We are in deep trouble, and there is nothing ahead but more trouble.” Well, wouldn’t that be just fine. In truth, if I saw nothing but trouble ahead, it would be better if I just kept my mouth shut or offered only pleasant or distracting news. But the better news? A far more positive outcome is entirely possible—and it’s not even that complicated. We do not need a degree in astrophysics nor the moral pedigree of a Mother Theresa to get it. There is a positive narrative of mutual spiritual obligation that is consistent with our long standing liberal religious dream of expanding the hope for increased well being for all people. And when we live out that faith within our life as a congregation people can see that their fears are unnecessary, that invective, even though sometimes fun, is not necessary. We all can more easily see the ties that bind us together as one people. The substance of that narrative will have to wait until I preach again two weeks from today. I hope to see you there. I’ll be there—and I will not cross my fingers behind my back.