Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
April 4, 2004
Reading 1:
from The Cultural Creatives by Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson
Like mariners of old, Cultural
Creatives have sailed beyond the familiar horizon. Their old maps are useless,
the landmarks are gone, and even the North Star is unrecognizable in the sky.
Almost always, as they depart from the Modern or Traditional culture in which
they were raised, they feel a loss of mooring as an old self begins to drop
away. On the surface, the departure can be as simple as sitting on the floor of
your living room watching television in 1968. As you stare at the screen, you
see Chicago police clubbing protesters who look a lot like you. The protesters
are screaming, “The whole world is watching!” And suddenly you are crying, and
for maybe the first time in your life, you cannot bear to sit back and watch.
The departure may be the first time you see the whole
Earth from space. Or perhaps a personal and intimate cataclysm—cancer, the
death of a child, a loss of work that you loved—suddenly catapults you far
beyond the old sense of self. One middle-aged woman explained, “Leaving the
old story behind doesn’t necessarily mean that you leave anything; sometimes
someone leaves you. Nor does it necessarily mean that anyone actually goes
anywhere, because after all is said and done, what is left—or lost—is not a
relationship or a place or even a context. What is left is a consciousness
that once felt secure, had categories to fit things into, and knew who it was.
And what replaces this sureness is not knowing. And openness. And something
unspeakably, and sometimes almost unbearably, new.”
Reading 2:
from Bobos in Paradise, by David Brooks
Comparing our own lives to
those he described in the tight communities of Chicago, Alan Ehrenhalt wrote
that we are like the fellow who sits in front of the TV constantly zapping the
remote control, that “ultimate weapon of personal choice…Too many things we do
in our lives, large and small, have come to resemble channel surfing, marked by
a numbing and seemingly endless progression from one option to the next, all
without the benefit of a chart, logistical or moral, because there are simply
too many choices and no one to help sort them out. We have nothing to insulate
ourselves against the perpetual temptation to try one more choice, rather than
to live with what is on the screen in front of us. “
The thing we are in danger of losing with our broad,
diverse lives is a sense of belonging. A person who limits himself or herself
to one community or one spouse is going to have deeper bonds to that community
or that spouse than the person who experiments throughout life. A person who
[at some point] surrenders to a single faith is going to have a deeper
commitment to that one faith than the person who zigzags through in a state of
curious agnosticism. The monk in the monastery does not lead an experimental
life, but perhaps he is able to lead a profound one.
Sermon:
According
to Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, co-authors of The Cultural Creatives,
the United States has been dominated by two types of thinking. “Heartlanders,”
also called traditionalists, represent the "traditional family values" of the
religious right. They are concerned with home, promote traditional views of the
family, and tend to be xenophobic, homophobic, and “feminist-phobic.”
Traditionalists tend to believe that their views are the truest representation
of American culture, yet they constitute a shrinking 29% of the population
(approximately 56 million people).
Moderns, on the other hand,
represent the ‘official’ culture of the United States today. They typically are
concerned with being successful in professional life, place a high value on
education, willingly uproot when seeking employment, and value material wealth.
They tend to be active in mainline congregations or civic service, come from a
myriad of economic and social backgrounds, and constitute about 47% of the
population (app. 88 million people).
As recent as 1991, a new group began
to form: Cultural Creatives. They believe that nature is sacred, care deeply
about the environment, value creativity, are sensitive to women’s issues and
diversity in its many forms. They hold experiences in life to be more important
than wealth. According to Ray and Anderson, Cultural Creatives were such a
small part of the country in the early 1980s that no one bothered to count them,
but as of 1995, they occupy a healthy 24% of the population (app. 44 million
people).
“Why is this cultural shift important?” Ray and Anderson
ask. Because we are at a crossroads in cultural development. There’s only one
problem. Cultural Creatives are largely unaware that they constitute a
significant portion of the population and so they typically are uninterested in
anything political, believing that no politician would hold their views.
David Brooks, cleverly describes the same burgeoning
population of which he and I (and I am guessing many of you) are a part, but
rather than calling us Cultural Creatives, he teases us while teasing out the
irony of the values that so many of us have synthesized in our lives. I shall
quote him at length:
The grand achievement of the educated elites in the
1990s was to create a way of living that lets you be an affluent success and
at the same time a free-spirit rebel. We have found ways to be an artist and
still qualify for stock options. In advertising and marketing campaigns we
have reconciled the anti-establishment with the corporate imperative.
Listening to management gurus who tell us to thrive on chaos and unleash our
creative potential, we’ve reconciled the spirit of imagination with the bottom
line. Turning university towns like Princeton and Palo Alto into
entrepreneurial centers, we have reconciled the highbrow with the high tax
bracket. Dressing like Bill Gates in worn chinos on his way to a stockholders’
meeting, we’ve reconciled undergraduate fashion with upper-crust occupations.
Going on eco-adventure vacations, we’ve reconciled aristocratic thrill-seeking
with social concern. Shopping at Benetton or the Body Shop, we’ve brought
together conciousness-raising with cost control.
When you are amidst the educated upscalers, you can
never be sure if you’re living in a world of hippies or stockbrokers. In
reality we have entered the hybrid world in which everybody is a little of
both. The educated elites didn’t set out to create this reconciliation. It is
the product of millions of individual efforts to have things both ways. But it
is now the dominant tone of our age. In the resolution between culture and
counterculture, it is impossible to tell who co-opted whom, because in reality
the bohemians and the bourgeois co-opted each other. They emerge from this
process as bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos.
Rarely do I read a book like Bobos in Paradise and
say, they’re talking about me, about so many religious liberals, and about most
of the folks with whom I graduated from college in 1990. Perhaps the cultural
creatives and the bourgeois bohemians are not exactly the same sub-group, but
certainly their overlap are among us here in Oak Park. And many of us Unitarian
Universalists can identify with both.
According to Ray and Anderson, Cultural Creatives tend to
be anti-institutionalists, resisting all forms of organization except perhaps
contradances and food cooperatives. Because most of us are moving independently
of one another, there is virtually no collective movement. Cultural Creatives
need a social foundation—they need institutions that can support their values,
so they do not have to create support structures for themselves over and over
again. Indeed, they are creating a phenomenal demand for resources to feed their
growing interest in consciousness and social change and their desire to follow
the motto, “Think globally, act locally.”
Ray and Anderson claim that the Cultural Creatives are a
coherent sub-culture except for an essential thing: we are missing
self-awareness as a whole people. We are like a nation that emerged overnight,
and no one is more surprised to hear about this than the Cultural Creatives
themselves. When asked, “How many Americans do you suppose have values like
yours?” Ray and Anderson report that almost always such individuals quietly
pulled in their energy and shrugged or laughed in embarrassment, as if the
answer were so obvious, it needn’t be spoken. It even happens among us Unitarian
Universalists.
I always cringe when I hear someone say that Unitarian
Universalism is a fringe religion, that it is made up of an elite few on the
margins or out of the mainstream. Sure we offer sanctuary to people who are not
traditionalist in their religious and spiritual life, but we delude ourselves if
we think there aren’t that many people like us.
We tend to be so independent that we naturally resist any
kind of formal organization and institutional authority. John Buehrens, the
former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, says that being a
leader in our denomination is like herding cats. Our growing edge as a liberal
religious faith community is learning how to effectively organize ourselves
while respecting authentic authority. For example, it makes a big difference
when a congregation trusts its elected leaders to govern, trusts its minister to
represent the congregation, and cultivates a rigorous spirituality that calls us
to clarity and action, such that we our own efforts are coordinated in similar
directions but also the congregation claims its authentic moral power in the
wider community. It is a tough but essential for people like us to learn that
freedom and choice sometimes need to take a backseat to the organization, thus
allowing the possibility of greater unity and deeper connections.
As I see it, Cultural Creatives are best served when they
are given opportunities to discern their gifts and make use of them. Here at
Unity Temple, we will be able to effectively serve ever more people and make it
possible for ever more people to make use of their gifts within both the
congregation and the wider community as we learn how to organize ourselves more
effectively. This is a primary focus of mine for the coming year.
David Brooks traces the roots of bourgeois bohemianism to
the nineteenth century transcendentalists. Unity Temple was founded by
transcendentalists, folks not unlike us who sought to foster a lifestyle that
prioritizes the individual while bringing together education with simplicity,
culture with social change, and refinement with the love of nature. The priority
of the individual is not inherently a bad thing. The problem with a religious
perspective informed by transcendentalism is the temptation to loosen the
expectations of others.
When a faith tradition makes little or no demands on its
members, then its spirituality becomes tepid. The question that tugs at me is
how committed are cultural creatives or bourgeois bohemians to their vision, how
committed are Unitarian Universalists to their ideals. My experience is that
one’s commitment is directly proportional to the depth of community and
solidarity one has cultivated among other cultural creatives. If you are a
cultural creative in isolation, it is hard to have sustained faith in your
vision. If you share in the struggle, with companions on the way, you likely
will discern and trust your power, both individually and collectively.
David Brooks puts his finger on the shadow side of cultural
creatives, when he says, “Bobos pay lip-service to the virtues of tradition,
roots, community. However, when push comes to shove, they tend to choose
personal choice over other commitments. They move out of communities when a
better job comes along. They abandon traditions and rules they find tiresome.
They divorce when their marriages become unpleasant. They leave their company
when they get bored. They fall away from their church or synagogue when it
becomes dull or unrewarding. And this is self-defeating, because at the end of
all this movement and freedom and self-exploration, they find that they have
nothing deep and lasting to hold on to.” Brooks is simply summing up the
spiritual truths found in every great religion, where your treasure is, there
your heart will be also. Or in contemporary terms, the deeper your commitments,
the deeper the meaning of your life will be.
Here in Oak Park it is challenging. We live in a community
that caters to the upper middle class. The value of maximizing freedom reigns
supreme, but there are forces that undermine sustained connections. In our
corporate world, jobs are constantly being created and taken away. As in any
educated community, there is much transition, new people constantly coming in,
and others moving away. And constant transition is the hallmark of the younger
generation.
I have lived a quintessentially Bobo life. Although I have
disdainfully resisted the technology of cell phones because I want the freedom
not being reached 24/7, the internet and computer technology made possible my
courtship with the person who is now my wife. In the last eighteen years, I have
moved residences eighteen times. My life has pinball-ed from one geographic
region to another. The pattern I started in college continued through my
employment and seminary work. I know many people in many different places but I
have no deep connections here in the Chicago area. It took me thirty-three years
to settle on one person to create a life with. Although I often talk with
friends thousands of miles away, I rarely talk with my neighbors.
If these trends continue, I will move on to another church
without ever making deep connections here. And my life will be a series of
light, ultimately inconsequential and therefore meaningless connections. But I
will have a lot of them! And that’s just it, when we Bobos maximize our freedom,
depth and meaning elude us. And so what we get in Bobo life, Brooks says, is “a
world of many options, but not a life of solid commitments, and maybe not a life
that ever offers access to the profoundest truths, deepest emotions, or highest
aspirations. Maybe in the end the problem with this attempt to reconcile freedom
with commitment, virtue with affluence, autonomy with community is not that it
leads to some catastrophic crack-up or some picturesque slide into immorality
and decadence, but rather that it leads to too many compromises and spiritual
fudges. Maybe people who try to have endless choices end up with
semi-commitments and semi-freedoms. Maybe we will end up leading a life that is
moderate but flat, our souls being colored with shades of gray, as we find
nothing heroic, nothing inspiring, nothing that brings our lives to a point.
Some days I look around and I think we have been able to achieve these
reconciliations only by making ourselves more superficial, by simply ignoring
the deeper thoughts and highest ideals that would torture us if we actually
stopped to measure ourselves according to them.”
Brooks’ name for the cultural class of which he and I are a
part, “Bobos,” serves as a teaser and a challenge. My wife informs me that in
Spanish “bobo” means “silly.”
Our growing edge is to discern what we are willing to make
sacrifices for, what is worthy of our obligation, and in what parts of our life
we are willing to give up our freedom. Like most of you, I don’t want to embrace
a way of life that is stifling. I don’t believe that we should return to an
image of the past that boasts of order, obedience and conformity. But I know our
lives can fall into meaninglessness, that it is easy to simply be silly with one
another and not ever go deeper and explore the convictions that come from our
passion. It is tempting to embrace me-ism to the extent that we deny and turn
away from grace and beauty. We need to pay attention, and even more than that
develop our capacity for sustained attention. And that is, simply my friends,
the essence of spiritual practice—developing our capacity for sustained
attention, thereby disciplining ourselves to not get constantly distracted by
what leads to self-absorption and instead committing ourselves to what will
allow us to transcend ourselves.
In my role as minister of our liberal, free church, I want
to develop my public voice on behalf of Unity Temple and our faith tradition.
This will take considerable work and patience. This will take practice and
devotion. It will take discipline. And discipline isn’t a word that either
cultural creatives or bourgeois bohemians typically like to talk about. How
about you? In your life, what calls out for your attention? What calls to you
that is greater than serving your own self? What disciplines do you need to
engage in?
David Brooks closes his book with the following:
The Bobos are a young elite, only dimly aware of
themselves as an elite and unaware as yet of their capacities. This is a class
of people who grew up with the word potential hanging around their neck, and
in many ways still, their potential is more striking than their
accomplishments. They have been trained, nurtured, and educated. They have
been freed of some old restrictions and they have forged some new bonds. They
are largely unscarred by economic depression and war. They can be silly a lot
of the time. But if they raise their sights and ask the biggest questions,
they have the ability to go down in the history as the class that led America
into another golden age.
May it be so.
Blessed be. Amen.
© Copyright 2004 Alan C.
Taylor, All Rights Reserved.
