In the Fall of 1993, I was the new minister in a Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, Maryland. A young couple came to talk with me. They described how much they liked the church, but then the woman said, “I worked in the White House on Barbara Bush’s staff. I get the impression that everyone in the church is a democrat. Can a registered Republican be a Unitarian Universalist?”
I explained that some in the congregation were registered to vote as Republicans. One of our members had served in the White House as a secretary to Henry Kissinger. I added that beyond our congregation there were Unitarian Universalists who were also Republicans. For example, in the senate that year Republican Senator William Cohen of Maine and Republican Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, both identified as Unitarian Universalists. I told her about one of my heroes, Elliot Richardson. Richardson was a Republican. He is the only individual in history to serve in four Cabinet‑level positions within the United States government. He was Nixon’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, then Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, and then Nixon’s Attorney General. Later he was President Ford’s Secretary of Commerce. In 1973, Richardson became a national hero during the Watergate Scandal when he resigned as Attorney General rather than follow President Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
In addition to being a Republican, Elliot Richardson was a life‑long member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Boston’s Back Bay, First Church Boston, established in 1630. He was part of a long tradition. During the 19th century, all Unitarians were members of Lincoln’s Republican Party. The last Unitarian elected president, William Howard Taft, was a Republican, Taft attended All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, until his death in 1930. The couple decided to stay in the church until they moved away about ten years later.
Of course, there were also many Unitarian Universalist Democrats. Unitarian churches in the 1950s became a mixture of Democrats and Republicans. Adlai Stevenson, a Unitarian from Bloomington, Illinois, ran for president as a Democrat. I was nine years old in 1960, attending a Unitarian Universalist religious education program. I remember my mother made the decision to vote for John Kennedy, while my father was leaning in the direction of voting for Richard Nixon. My father looked at Vice President Nixon’s background as a Quaker and hoped that Nixon might be less inclined to go to war.
In this UUs were not special. In the 1950s, among mainstream Protestant churches there was no relationship between church attendance and affiliation with a particular political party. Regular protestant churchgoers voted both Democrat and Republican.
This continued into the 1970s. In the election between Democratic Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford I remember a Unitarian Universalist minister saying from the pulpit on the Sunday before the election “I am going to vote for Carter.” But then he went on to say “However, if Ford wins, I will not regard it as a disaster. He appears to me to be a good man.”
After 1976 this started to change. This shift was documented in a 2008 book titled The Big Sort, Why the Clustering of Like‑minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. In 1976 only 27 percent of Americans lived in landslide counties, counties that voted either Democratic or Republican by a margin of 20 percent or more. By 2008, 48 percent of Americans lived in a landslide county. In 2020 Delaware County, Pennsylvania was a landslide county with a margin of 26 percent between the winning candidate Mr. Biden, and the losing candidate Mr. Trump. Until the 1980s, people with college degrees were evenly distributed among American cities. After 1980 Americans started to cluster based on education. College educated liberals cluster in lifestyle enclaves like Berkeley, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Delaware County Ranks Among Counties with the most college graduates in Pennsylvania, with about 40 percent of us having a bachelor or a graduate degree.
In such places liberals clustered around many activities. Church attendance decreased. Interview shows were moved from Sunday afternoon to Sunday morning, and liberals stayed home to watch. Liberals listened to National Public Radio. Today liberals are more interested in other cultures and places. Liberals are more likely to engage in individualistic activities. They subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime. Compared to conservatives, liberals are more likely to own cats.
On the other hand, conservatives cluster in places like Texas’s King County. In that county the democratic candidate in the 2016 presidential election only received 3 percent of the vote. Studies show that clusters of conservatives tend to share many lifestyle choices. They spend more time with family, they get their news from Fox, and they are more likely to own guns. They read sports magazines, and they frequently visit relatives. They believe that people should take responsibility for their lives, and they think that overwhelming force is the best way to defeat terrorists. In Conservative communities like The Villages in Florida, people are more likely to attend church. They are more likely to participate in clubs, volunteer services, and city projects. They are more supportive of traditional authority. They are more family oriented, and they express more feelings of economic vulnerability. They experience higher levels of stress. They spend more time on social activities with other people. Conservatives tend to cluster in areas where there is less population density. And compared to Liberals, Conservatives are more likely to own dogs.
This process has transformed American religion. In contrast to the 1950s, when Republicans and Democrats worship side by side, today few churches have a mix of Republicans and Democrats.
In 2020 71 percent of White Americans who say they attend religious services at least monthly voted for Trump. According to a recent survey, white evangelical Protestants believe that God created America to be a new promised land for European Christians. They view nonwhite newcomers from other countries (like President Obama whose father was from Africa and Vice President Harris whose mother was from India and whose father is from Jamaica) as a threat to American culture. I have been standing in line all my life to get my share of the American Dream, said one man. And now these newcomers are jumping ahead of me in line. Meanwhile religious liberals and the religiously unaffiliated embrace a vision for the future of America that is more inclusive.
A positive result of this polarization has been an increase in interest in politics. More people have lawn signs, and bumper stickers and contribute financially to support candidates. Voter turnout has increased. Each major political party has become more organized and effective at communicating with their bases. Churches, which were torn apart in the 1960s over fights about the morality of civil rights and Vietnam, today are more peaceful, with few fights about political issues.
On the negative side, researchers have observed that like‑minded groups not only enforce conformity, but also tend to grow more extreme. As liberals and conservatives separate, we become more zealous and distrustful of those with whom we disagree. Most important to our democracy, because of geographic clustering, we have seen two presidential elections in 2000 and again in 2016 where a candidate has won the popular vote but lost the electoral college.
All this clustering makes me think about Ants. When I was a child in the 1950s, back when there were more Republicans who were members of Unitarian Churches, my parents gave me an Ant Farm as a gift. It was a simple device, a section of sand held in place by two transparent plastic windows. It came in the mail with a tube of live ants and some ant food. We dumped the ants in the narrow slit between the two pieces of transparent plastic and they landed on the sand. The Ants dug tunnels just like it showed in the illustration on the box. Eventually, I decided to experiment. I went outside and collected more live ants from our yard and added them to the ant farm. By the next day, every ant was dead. The new ants and the old ants killed each other. For me it was a lesson in polarization.
In 1978, the Harvard expert on Ants, Edward Osborne Wilson, published a book On Human Nature. He said that out in fields, when ant colonies grow so large that there is not enough food to feed all the ants, they go to war with nearby ant colonies. The war continues until so many ants die, that there is enough food left to feed the remaining ants. Wilson suggested that like ants, human beings form colonies. For example, we are all in a colony called the United States, a sub colony called Pennsylvania, one called Media, one called the Unitarian Universalist Church and the most important sub colony for most of us, our family. Wilson said that like ants, we fight when we believe that the resources necessary for our colony’s survival are threatened. When it comes to government policies we do not ask “what is in it for me?” We ask, “What’s in it for my group, my tribe, my colony?” Justifications people give for their aggressive acts, such as religious differences or political differences are, in Wilson’s view, a veneer that covers the real reason B the perceived fear of death of the colony due to scarce resources. The word “perception” is important here. In my ant farm, I would have given all the ants enough food. There would not have been any actual scarcity. They did not need to fight each other. But the ants did not understand this.
Wilson argued that when humans believe that we have enough resources, we are more likely to speak about the inherent worth and dignity of all people on the earth. However, Wilson argued, when we believe we are running out of resources, for example when we see on nearly every street corner big electric signs showing a higher price for gas, phrases such as “the inherent worth and dignity of all people” become less important and are replaced with talk of the survival of our family and friends.
In times of perceived scarcity, we focus on supporting our tribe, our group. My retired brother‑in‑law who worked hard for many years is afraid that those who are not part of his conservative evangelical tribe, want to take away his pension. My nephew, a successful businessman is afraid that people who are not part of his conservative tribe want to tax his income and give it away to people who do not work. In times of perceived scarcity, we focus on supporting our tribe, our group. Some of us become more aggressive toward those who are not part of our tribe. One member of congress said, “This is not a collegial body anymore. It is more like gang behavior. Members walk into the chamber full of hatred.”
At the root of all our beliefs is the desire to ensure the survival of our tribe, our friends and family, and ourselves. I try to remind myself of this. When I am with people who have a different point of view from mine, I try to talk to them, not turn my back. I ask them to tell me their story ‑‑ to tell me about their work, their family, their hopes, and fears for their life. I try to affirm the worth and dignity of every person. I imagine that they hold the view they hold because they want their family their tribe to survive. I look for ways to assure them that as the President said last Wednesday evening, “At our best, America is not a zero‑sum society where for you to succeed, someone else must fail. . . America is big enough for everyone to succeed.” Like the ants in my ant farm, we are more likely to survive, if we can overcome our evolutionary programing that causes us to form tribes and fight. With planning, there are enough resources for all of us to live together.
Still, sometimes our efforts to decrease polarization will fail, because others are convinced that we threaten their survival. Nothing we do changes their perception. Sometimes the other side will act like the ants in my ant farm and just keep fighting no matter how hard I work to understand their point of view.
It is good to work for solutions that decrease polarization, but it is good to have a backup plan. When we put up a Black Lives Matter sign in front of my Florida Unitarian Universalist Church, we receive so many threats that I had the sign taken down, fearing for the safety of the staff and the congregation. In that Florida church, when I had a sermon on abortion, we paid to have armed police at the church. My Jewish friends in Florida paid to have armed police outside their synagogues every Friday night. A few days ago, Paul Pelosi called the police for help as he was brutally attacked. Part of my back‑up plan includes contributing money to political campaigns. Just in case things get bad, I also make sure that my passport and the passports of my family are current.
Still, I hope things will get better. For the past seven years about 45 percent of people have supported a cult like leader. In religion I have seen cult leaders grow in power, but then followers become disillusioned. Eventually the cult almost disappears. My hope is that someday soon this will happen in our current political situation. I hope many liberals and conservatives will recognize that our survival depends on our ability to accept our differences and work together.
In my own ministry I continue to welcome and affirming political conservatives who seek us out and wish to be part of our community. I am not suggesting that anyone compromise their beliefs. I am suggesting that I welcome and treat people who are different from me politically with respect. I am suggesting that I try to understand the point of view of others. It is harder for me to demonize a conservative, if I have a conservative as a friend. And it’s harder for a conservative to demonize me, if the conservative has me as a friend.
Over the years, I have talked with potential new members who have asked me, can a Republican be a member of the Unitarian Universalist congregation? My answer is I hope so. I explain that Unitarians have a long tradition of being Republicans going back into the 19th century. And I welcome them to be part of our religious community where we affirm the dignity of everyone.