democracy

Where Do We Go from Here?
November 8, 2026
Ithaca UU Church
Rev. Douglas Taylor

Where do we go from here? I recently learned that this past Friday was the 25^th anniversary of the acclaimed musical episode of Buffy the Vampire, “Once More with Feeling.” The climactic ensemble song is titled “Where do we go from here?” That show (and that episode in particular) was a big deal in my house when my adult children were teens. Sadly, that is not what my title was meant to reference.

No, I am taking about our current political situation through the lens of our religious values. We just had an election; our values were on display. There has been corruption and feints at fascism lately, but we have also seen courage and persistence and real heart. Educator and author, Parker Palmer once wrote that “Democracy is a nonstop experiment in the strength and weakness of our political institutions, our local communities and associations, and the human heart.” We had a break this mid-term with what was on display at the last election. There has been a change. Now what? Where do we go from here? 

Nearly 60 years ago, Rev. D. Martin Luther King published a book with this question as the title Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? This is where my title comes from. It was the second to last book he authored, the last one was a collection of his sermons published a few months after his assassination. This one, “Where do we go from here” has the memorable quote:

“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”

Following these 2026 mid-term elections, with their clarifying rebuke of the corruption rampant in our government today, I am reminded of Dr. Kings words. I am reminded of his tireless work resisting the evil of racism in our society, racism and other pressing injustices such as poverty and militarism. He understood what it was to fight for justice and goodness. As I look back on the victories of this recent election, I am reminded of his words. 

“Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting, (he wrote). If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice.”

There is a persistence needed to pursue justice. King advised us, fom 60 years ago, to not let up. It is like the story of the widow seeking justice that is in the bible. The eighteenth chapter of the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus tells The Parable of the Persistent Widow (Luke 18:2-6).

He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’”

I don’t know about you, but this small parable surprised me when first I bumped into it. It just does not seem like the kind of thing you would find in the Bible. It is just so pragmatic! “I’ll see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out.” The persistence of the people who seek justice, who accomplish reform, who make a difference, is remarkable. The persistence of those who will not sit down and wallow in pity, of those who stand up to injustice though the odds are stacked against them, of those who don’t stop after a small victory, of those who stare unjust authority in the face and say, “grant me justice against my adversary,” is remarkable indeed. The persistence of those who practice resistance is the key to accomplishing justice.

Because “evil is recalcitrant and determined” King warned us nearly 60 years ago. We need to be persistent. Not persuasive, not trying to convince them they’re wrong – persistent in our calls for justice. We have new leadership that will take office in January. Our job now is to not stop being persistent now that the voting is done.

We will not vote our way out of the mess we’ve been in. Voting is one part of the work – an important part, but only one part. And that part is done. Howard Zinn once said “Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.” The voting is done. And the deeper work has now begun.

President Trump has long displayed too many of the traits and behaviors of an abuser for us to ignore what he is doing now and what is likely to continue to happen while he is in power. The most dangerous time in an abusive relationship is when you are leaving.

Our deeper work, after the voting is done, is to remain engaged in the work of building the world we long to live in.

Let me share with you a small set of ideas that can serve as a guide for the coming months. Parker Palmer, in his book Healing the Heart of Democracy, offers five habits or attitudes that we need as a democracy. Before you pull out your notes app or a pen and paper – let me assure you, this list is going to click for you.

The five habits to heal the heart of democracy are:
An Understanding that We Are All in this Together
An Appreciation of the Value of ‘Otherness’
An Ability to Hold Tension in Life-Giving Ways
A Sense of Personal Voice and Agency
A Capacity to Create Community

I think this is an elegant list and is a fair framework for staying engaged. In short – the answer is to focus back on our deeper moral principles as a people; to lean in to the identity that was revealed in this mid-term election.

We are deeply interconnected and interdependent. This is what Palmer listed as the first of these five habits. We are all in this together. For our democratic republic to continue to function, “we” needs to really mean “we” – all of us. As my colleague Julian Jamaica Soto has said, “All of us need all of us to make it.” We can’t move forward divided. I don’t mean, we have to be conciliatory to the point of ineffective with the fascists. I mean we need to build coalitions to accomplish our goals.

Because Palmer’s second point is that while we are all in this together, we are not all the same. We are each unique, and amazingly different. And our differences are part of what makes our country beautiful. And it is true we tend to gather in like-minded groups, to create ‘us’ and ‘them’ clusters – that doesn’t need to descend into competitive acrimony of leftists fighting against those they see as less-leftist them themselves. Parker Palmer reminds us that ‘us and them’ is fine. It is when it becomes ‘us vs. them’ that we have trouble.

Well, this, of course leads right into the third habit Palmer offers: an ability to hold tension in life-giving ways. Embracing differences while still finding our unity is a tension. Promoting personal agency and working toward creative community is also a tension. America is an extended exercise in holding tension – but you know what? So is Unitarian Universalism. Yes, it’s hard, but it gets easier with practice. And it does take practice. It takes work to hold tension well.

The fourth and fifth habits in Palmer’s list are dramatically revealed in this recent election. A single vote is just that -one voice with one vote. We each cast our ballot. But the agency of one vote is lost without the context of the community. We need to be actors in the ensemble – participants in the full drama of life.  

This is an elegant set of five habits. The first two are complimentary: we are united and we are different. The last two are also a complimentary pair: We must be strong individuals and we must build strong communities. The middle one is simply the glue – we must be able to hold creative tension in life-giving ways. There is actually a lot of overlap between these habits Parker Palmer offers and our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Values.

The way forward for us as a nation is through a set of habits that we Unitarian Universalists have been practicing at for a long time. The habits of holding tension as pluralism, of promoting individual agency while also building community, of honoring our differences while focused on our unity.

We are certainly not the only religious community doing this sort of work, but it truly is our bread and butter as Unitarian Universalists. And I’m not suggesting this is therefore something easy. The way forward means we need to speak the truth about who and what has been hurt, threatened, and endangered. The way forward is not to rest on any laurels, but to instead remain persistent in our call for justice. And we must stay with each other as we figure it out together – because “all of us need all of us to make it.”

Where do we go from here? (Buffy)

And this is what we need to do: Keep faith with our messy democratic process. Keep fighting for truth and for compassion. Keep vigilant against the outbreak of violence. And stay true to the underlying principle of Unity to which we aspire as a people.

May grace and mercy go with you through the days and months ahead. We’re on a new road now; mind your step. Stay safe out there. Look after each other.

In a world without end,

May it be so.

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 20^th 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