Rev. Anthony David
May 6, 2007
As Unitarian Universalists, I think it’s no exaggeration to say that we struggle with Bible-belt culture, and you better believe it struggles with us. This was brought home to me vividly three years ago, in early 2004, when the Texas Comptroller back then, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, denied Denison Unitarian Church tax-exempt status. She did this because “it did not have one system of belief, one that centers around belief in God, or gods, or a higher power.” That’s what she said, and no wonder! From a Bible-belt perspective, that’s how you define church. Church is supposed to be a place where everybody believes in the same things, and anything else is just plain weird. It’s just weird to empower people to live inner-directed spiritual lives. It’s just weird to draw from Six Sources and not one. It’s just weird for Christians and non-Christians to worship together—theists and atheists and agnostics all together in the same room. Just really weird.
But happily, Strayhorn’s announcement triggered a media uproar, which persuaded her to rethink things. Soon enough, Denison Unitarian Church was granted tax-exempt status. And here at Pathways, there was a big sigh of relief. Some of you might not recall this, since I’m talking about a time before Pathways launched its Sunday morning services. I’m talking prehistory. And for those of us prehistorical people who were around then, we breathed a big sigh of relief, since we were right in line after Denison Unitarian Church to request tax-exempt status. We could have been denied tax-exempt status as well. It could have been us!
Talk about a close encounter with the Bible belt! And these close encounters—they come in all kinds, all flavors, all sizes. Which brings me to today’s particular focus: exploring Bible belt encounters we have in the context of our own families. When we experience the struggle up close, personal, at home. What to do when that happens. I’m talking about…
All these struggles. Ring any bells? Thus today’s sermon: “When Difficult Relatives Happen to Good People.” Although I want us to be careful about something. Let’s be careful about who gets labeled as the relative who’s difficult. Of course, we want it to be the other person! And yet, I am mindful of something that psychologist Leonard Felder says in his book from which I borrow the title of my sermon, and whose influence is everywhere here. Dr. Felder says this: “I need to warn you … that in pursuing a greater understanding and a more peaceful co-existence with family members whose religious ideas you dislike (or even detest), you will be taking a huge risk. You might risk seeing the humanity in someone whose ideas about God, morality, or spiritual practice offend you deeply. Or you might risk finding out that your own ideas for or against religion are a little bit elitist, insulting [or just plain ignorant].” That’s what Dr. Felder says.
In other words, when a relative feels difficult, the challenge is to avoid adding to the difficulty and become a difficult relative yourself! The challenge is choosing a different path than that of outrage and instant dismissal, or of reducing the other person into a straw man caricature of himself or herself. And it’s so hard. It really is. Just the other day, one of my relatives asked me, “Are you an evolutionist?” And let me tell you, as far as they were concerned, there was only one right answer! “Are you an evolutionist?” Then they went on to tell me that evolution was one big superstition. I mean, when this kind of stuff happens, it’s easy to go straight to outrage and instant dismissal. So easy.
But what if we didn’t do the easy thing? What if we did the RIGHT thing instead? Not indulging in a sense of outrage, but being open to an encounter with the honest humanity of one’s relative and to an encounter with one’s own blind spots? In the end, the other person may never change at all. There is an old Yiddish saying that goes, “If you’re waiting for your relatives to change … you should live so long.” But WE will change for the better, and this will make all the difference.
So we begin. When difficult relatives happen to good people. And we explore this in the context of a particular case study concerning two Unitarian Universalists, Susan and Bill. Susan and Bill have been married for twenty-four years and they have one child, a twenty-two-year-old son named Evan, who recently got engaged to a twenty-one-year-old woman named Claire.
Now, Susan and Bill raised their son Evan to be “accepting of all religions” and to “judge no one.” Yet when Susan and Bill came to see Dr. Leonard Felder for counseling, Bill had this to say: “We’re very worried about Evan’s upcoming marriage. His fiancée Claire is very conservative, religiously speaking. She refers to herself as a born-again Christian, and she says that she wants to raise their children with strict traditional values.” This is what Bill had to say.
Then Susan chimed in: “I’m hoping this is just a phase Claire is going through. I can’t imagine that someone who got such high SAT scores and graduated from a top college could be so old-fashioned when it comes to religion. I’m sure she’ll grow out of it—perhaps the farther away she gets from the influence of her parents, who are real Bible thumpers from Texas.”
With this, Dr. Felder paused and reflected on the fact that, in his experience, most of us have no idea that we are being judgmental or condescending towards other people with whose spiritual orientation we disagree. Dr. Felder has seen this over and over again especially with regard to people who style themselves as religiously moderate or liberal. He therefore wondered about the degree to which Susan and Bill were aware of their own judgmental attitudes. So he asked them, “Would you be willing to let Evan and Claire raise their children according to Claire’s conservative values?” And the response was this: “You know, we are both very open-minded and we would try not to interfere. But, frankly, we’d be horrified if they started to take their kids to some backwards Sunday school!” That’s what Susan and Bill said.
And here is our case study for this morning. Difficult relatives happening to good people. What’s the best way for Susan and Bill to manage their religious differences with Evan and Claire without themselves becoming the difficult relatives?
And I’ll start by suggesting some things they (and we) might avoid doing. Behaviors that won’t be helpful. One is this. Don’t let it all hang out, tell them exactly how you feel. Dr. Felder calls this the “emotional catharsis” approach and ties it to a late 60’s and early 70s fad in psychotherapy promising that if people just unloaded all their anger in one primal scream, then all would be well. But as it turns out, primal screams and verbal vomiting don’t reduce the level of anger inside us but rather stir it up even more, reinforce it, in fact encourage active bitterness and resentment.
The tell-them-off approach is just unhelpful, but so is the hold-it-all-in-and-pretend-nothing-is-wrong approach. The constipated approach. Any of you familiar with that one? Perhaps we take it because we think it represents the high road, or true enlightenment, or genuine maturity. Or perhaps we just feel that the situation is hopeless, and nothing can be done. So why say anything? Why poke the hornet’s nest? But consider this. The hold-it-all-in approach hurts your own body, given all the internal stress and strain that’s involved. This isn’t enlightenment—it’s self-martyrdom, and it’s just not necessary. And, in the end, it always fails. “I won’t say anything, I won’t say anything, I won’t say anything…” and invariably what happens is that you DO say something, you DO—and it comes out as a sniper attack, a sarcastic remark, a passive-aggressive moment. You just can’t hold it in forever. It just doesn’t work that way.
I’m talking behaviors that are unhelpful. Letting it all hang out. Holding it all in. And also this: above all this: not stepping back from one’s intense feelings so as to take a curiosity stance towards them. Not stepping back to question whether and to what degree they reflect the reality of the situation. Not unhooking ourselves from them so that we have room in which to ask, “What are you all about? What are you trying to say?”
This third unhelpful behavior I’m referring to: what it really represents is enslavement to one’s own emotions. Emotional unfreedom. It goes against everything we stand for as liberals. Liberalism means freedom. But emotional unfreedom is when you feel something, and because the feeling is so strong, you instantly take it to be equivalent to reality, you instantly start to spin out theory after theory about the other person, when ultimately it’s all about you, it’s more about you than anything else….
Which leads us to the first positive thing to do when you find yourself in the midst of the religious disagreement with a relative. Step back from your feelings. Unhook. Do some laughter yoga if you have to. Dare to do the American Bat Face, as a last resort! Ask, “What in myself is making this situation so difficult?” Says Dr. Felder, “You might be surprised to find out that the first dialogue step is not about the person who gets on your nerves but rather about your own personal hidden agenda and your innermost attitude towards your beliefs.” That’s what Dr. Felder says. Begin with yourself.
For Susan and Bill, here’s what it might look like. Susan and Bill step back from their judgmental feelings towards Claire so they can take a curiosity stance towards them, and what they discover is this. They discover a powerful though ultimately unrealistic fear. They discover that they are worried about how Claire’s sense of spirituality will be seen by others as a direct reflection on them. They are worried that people will take one look at Claire’s traditionalism and conservatism and think, “Hmmm. Looks like Susan and Bill are moving away from their Unitarian Universalism…” That’s the worry. And though it’s ultimately unfounded, can you relate? Your relative acts a certain way in public, and it’s so easy to take it personally. So easy to feel like it rubs off on everyone in the family.
This is the irrational fear that Susan and Bill discover, once they are able to step back, hold the judgmentalism at arm’s length, and take a curiosity stance towards it. And here’s something else that they discover. They realize that the very intensity of their judgmentalism is a clue that there are personal growth issues at play here. Claire is just a sign to Susan and Bill that they have questions in their lives they must face honestly and openly. Claire is only the messenger. Don’t shoot the messenger!
And so, for example, Susan and Bill face Claire’s conservatism and traditionalism, and because it reflects the religious style of a majority of people, it reminds Susan and Bill that they belong to a minority group. It takes them straight to a sense of being an ugly duckling, straight to the frustration of being misunderstood in the larger world—so much so that no less a person than the comptroller of Texas could see her way to denying that the Unitarian Universalist religion is any religion at all…. Claire is just the messenger, just the reminder. She challenges them to make peace with this.
Or consider this. Susan and Bill see Claire’s born-again commitment and fervor and enthusiasm, and there might be a secret curiosity about this or even a desire to experience something like this for themselves. But it might not be available at Susan and Bill’s church, and so their secret curiosity or desire clashes with their sense of loyalty to their church, and this clash gets expressed as exaggerated disgust towards Claire and suspicion that religious emotionality is equivalent to possessing low intelligence.
Yet a third possibility is that Susan and Bill encounter Claire’s conservative one-way approach to spirituality, and it is something they cannot possibly agree with. They can’t possibly relate to a one-way Bible-thumping spirituality, since they believe with all their hearts that there are many ways to the sacred in life. Which means that Claire challenges Susan and Bill to get honest about the fact that everything is NOT acceptable to a Unitarian Universalist and that even in its creedlessness, Unitarian Universalism has legitimate boundaries of practice and belief. To get honest about that, and to accept that. To face the fact that freedom needs boundaries and limits, and without that, you don’t have freedom. You just have chaos. You just have disempowerment. You just have confusion.
In short: Susan and Bill start with themselves, and they discover that the intensity of their feelings towards Claire is really only a sign that they have personal work to do. Fears to explore, hidden desires to acknowledge, questions to answer. They start with themselves, and it’s the first big step to being in healthy dialogue with Claire. The first big step.
Which sets us up for the next big step: seeking to understand the other’s true point of view. It means wanting to get to know the person behind the beliefs, wanting to understand what have they studied, or learned, or experienced that has led them to hold the beliefs or do the things that they do. And so one day, Susan and Bill ask Claire if they could go to church with her. Claire says sure, and here’s what Bill had to say about their experience: “I still found myself a bit reserved, but I could see that Susan was deeply moved by the sincerity of Claire’s close friends at church and the energized way they celebrate life and spirituality. Susan told me at one point in the service, ‘I wish I had grown up in a congregation that included this much closeness and aliveness.’” That’s what Bill said, and do you see what is happening here? Claire’s humanity is becoming more and more clear in all of this. Susan and Bill are stepping outside of their comfort zones and risking an honest encounter with who she is!
And Claire knows it. Common ground is spreading beneath all of them. They all know that there are some things they will not be able to agree upon. Claire will persist in arguing that the Bible is the literal word of God. Susan and Bill will persist in saying that the Bible is not that at all, and is rather the word of inspired people, to be appreciated alongside other Bibles from other lands. Both will persist in this difference, and in others. But none of it erodes the common ground beneath them: their common need for community, their common need for spiritual growth, their common need for compassion and love. That’s the common ground holding all of them up, and holding them all together.
It is exactly why Claire, in the end, is able to tell her in-laws: “I don’t think you and I will ever be in total agreement [on a variety of issues], but I will always respect the fact that your stance and my stance both come from a deeply spiritual place and that we simply have different ways of doing what we think is for the highest good. I believe it’s healthy that our kids will see us model how family members can agree to disagree lovingly.” That’s what Claire says. And here’s what she and Evan promise to do: to teach their future children, Susan and Bill’s future grandchildren, how both sides of an issue can have an ethical and compassionate basis. They promise that even when they disagree with Susan and Bill’s position on an issue, they will expose the children to both viewpoints and treat both sides with respect.
Now that’s something. It really is. And it could have been completely otherwise. Susan and Bill reacting out of their harsh judgmentalism; Claire feeling condemned and then outraged at their hypocrisy; Evan feeling pressured to choose sides between his parents and his future wife; Susan and Bill feeling powerless over their future grandchildren’s upbringing… Disaster. It could have gone this way. Both sides demonizing each other. But it didn’t. And it doesn’t have to for anyone. I know that we all have different stories and face different challenges. Bible belt encounters come in all shapes and sizes. But there is hope. There are things we can do. There is common ground to find, and to celebrate. Difficult relatives don’t have to be absolutely difficult. And we don’t have to make the problem worse. We don’t have to be ones who are being difficult! Not at all.
Leonard Felder, Ph. D. When Difficult Relatives Happen to Good People: Surviving Your Family and Keeping Your Sanity (New York: Rodale, 2003).