To Show and Affirming Flame

Rev. Douglas Taylor

11-10-24

sermon video: https://youtu.be/TotbAzq7Nh8

This week has been fraught with emotions and reactions and dawning realizations from this past Tuesday’s election. Many among us are lamenting. Many people are angry and frightened by what is presenting as a march toward fascism in our country.

In my description for today’s service I stated that W.H. Auden wrote a poem entitled “September 1, 1939.” I mention it because the last line of that poem is the title for this sermon: “To show an affirming flame.” The title of the poem, “September 1, 1939,” refers to the beginning of World War II. The poem itself is a denouncement of fascism and a call toward solidarity.

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Auden goes on to decry the madness and cruelty of the era leading to Adolf Hitler’s ascendency to power, the lies and apathy that allowed evil to gain control. Some literary critics have suggested this is Auden’s best poem, indeed called it the best poem of the 20th century. It is laced with references to the history of Democracy as a concept and the steady erosion we suffer again and again. It calls us to both rise with our individual responsibility and stay firm in our communal solidarity. The second-to-final stanza reads:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

“We must love one another or die,” he wrote. True then, and true still today. “All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.” This past election season will perhaps be best remembered for all the incredible lies.

Democracy is embedded with certain values. And there is a certain amount of overlap between those values and our Unitarian Universalist religious values. Chief among them liberty, freedom, and justice. A democracy assumes an informed citizenry, so there is an implied value of education and critical thinking. Equality and forbearance – or at least tolerance – round out the necessary values for democracy to thrive. I am hard pressed to find examples of these values in our incoming president-elect Donald Trump or in the policies and promises he has made. Instead I see crass vulgarity, posturing and bullying, deceit and lies, and divisiveness. Divisiveness is a common tool for authoritarian politics, not for democracies.

I saw a list of the early warning signs of fascism as displayed at a Holocaust Museum. I posted it on social media if you are looking for it. The list of warning signs induced: “Powerful and continuing nationalism; Disdain for human rights; Identification of enemies as a unifying cause; Supremacy of the military; Rampant sexism; Controlled mass media; Obsession with national security; Religion and government intertwined; Corporate power protected; Labor power suppressed; Disdain for intellectuals and the arts; Obsession with crime and punishment; Rampant cronyism and corruption.”

And to be clear, some of what is likely to happen over the next four years is basic policy changes that happen every time there is a change in the political party. It is stuff that I will argue against, plans that will go against my values, actions that I find objectionable but ultimately match what previous administrations have done. But then there will be things that tear apart the structures of our democracy in favor of constructing a fascist oligarchy.

There is still harm committed in the first set of policies and actions. A tragic example is Ronald Reagan’s refusal to recognize AIDS which led to a great deal of death and suffering. In making the distinction between basic party changes and fascist plans, I don’t want to minimize the harm that results from the former. I am merely lifting up the truth that as long as our democracy remains intact, there is recourse.

In her 2018 book Fascism, A Warning, Madeleine Albright had written, a Fascist “is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.”

We’ve already seen four years of a Donald Trump presidency; we don’t need to guess at what a second term might contain. The rights of queer and trans people are under threat. Immigrants and people of color are at risk. Women’s access to reproductive health care is under attack. Trump will quite likely pull all support from Ukraine and NATO, allowing Putin free reign for Russian military expansion. I can’t imagine he will do much to support the Palestinians either. He will certainly pull us out of the Paris Accords again, so our efforts to respond to the climate crisis will be stalled. And he has promised again to destroy the Affordable Care Act – an unattained goal he had last time he was in office. And his whole campaign was centered around an untenable promise of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. 

Honestly, I don’t think fascism in the United States will show up as Concentration Camps in the near future. We already have a robust prison system that will serve the same purpose. Where else would we get the labor to cover the work of undocumented immigrants once we’ve deported them. If we bother deporting them when we could just pump them into the prison system. Stock prices for private prisons jumped this past week.

But in all of that, I am well convinced that the signature play of the Trump re-election campaign has been the rampant use of misinformation, disinformation, and lies. People talk about how fascists go after the journalists, but I believe the current MAGA political right-wing has circumvented the need to silence journalists by blasting media with lies and sensational nonsense so no signal can make it through the noise.

Everyone is so numb to the lies, countless stories are emerging of people saying they voted for him but they don’t believe he will really dismantle the Affordable Care Act because they need it, or deport all the immigrants because they’re married to one, or make abortions illegal at the federal level because their mistress’s still need that access. There is a subset of the people who voted for him who know he is a liar and don’t believe him.

And I hear progressives saying “Believe him, he’s telling you the harm he is planning to cause. Believe him.” But there are so many lies. Which ones matter? Which ones should I trust. All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie. In Auden’s poem, the lie was about believing a dictator was better equipped to make decisions for you. In Auden’s poem, the lie was that an individual exists alone and would not experience the consequences of a semi-distant evil about to land on someone else. In Auden’s poem, the lie was all those people who went along with the Nazis because they thought the economic policy sounded better.

There are guardrails still in place protecting our democracy today. If we are tempting fascism, it will not drop upon us overnight. We can still pay attention; we can still resist. Part of the work is to continue to do what we’ve been doing – building relationships with people and communities doing good work in the world around us. We can keep working to support change for unhoused people in Broome County. We can keep working to feed people with Beloved Community. We can keep educating ourselves on racism and White Supremacy. We can keep supporting Planned Parenthood and other local abortion providers. We can keep advocating for queer youth and creating spaces for trans and queer people to be welcome and to be safe. And my list goes on. We are already doing a lot of what we need to be doing together, locally where it matters most, and beyond.

The final stanza of Auden’s September 1, 1939 poem says this:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

We are not yet defenseless as he saw Europe and America to be at that moment in time. We may not be far off, but we are not defenseless yet. The harm people are worried about is real and so our response must be equally real.

I am called to take the side of the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable and disempowered, and all those treated with injustice and cruelty. We are called to get in the way of systemic injustice, to stand up against tyranny, to agitate the establishment for change so that all people can heal from the wounds of our days and we can all experience more peace.

Our work remains: to build solidarity, to uphold justice, to shine our light, and love bravely in a world too full of desperate loneliness and alienation. 

I’ll close with a James Baldwin quote I was reminded of earlier this week. In his novel If Beale Street Could Talk, Baldwin wrote: “…love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.”

In a world without end

May it be so