Unconditional (Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson)

The religious right’s most damaging idea isn’t a policy. It’s a belief about human nature. White Christian Nationalism is a political movement that’s fueled by a story about how humans work: we’re born broken, our nature can’t be trusted, our worth is conditional on submission to an outside authority. Told with enough force and believed with enough fervency, that story justifies bowing down to a strongman, justifies violence against the sinner, allows people to believe dragging our neighbors out of bed at four in the morning can be considered holy.

It becomes a theory of who deserves power, who deserves mercy, and who deserves life.

Humanism tells a different story: from Thomas Paine to Frederick Douglass to Albert Einstein to Gloria Steinem, an American lineage of humanists have placed their faith in the idea that every person is equally, inherently, and unquestionably worthy of dignity and self-determination, and argued that this is the cornerstone around which we must build our lives, our communities, and our politics.

This sermon is about what happens to us – and what happens to a country – when we believe people are broken, and what happens when we believe they are worthy. It’s about how humanism has shown up as a force for good in the darkest moments of the American story – and what we can do today.