President’s Column.
Unitarian Universalist Church in Meriden
Robert Reutenauer. October 2016
A dozen members of our congregation joined a packed auditorium for the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber’s rousing oratory— “It’s a Heart Problem”— at Central CT State University on September 8. Reverend Barber’s North Carolina “Moral Monday” movement, which inspires duplication as he travels the nation, has become a force in many of our lives in a very short time. Our anti-racism ministry is key in helping us realize our mission. Angie Sw
anger leads these efforts, and has done a wonderful job making sure that we are practicing loving community, advancing justice, and nurturing spiritual growth while we are at it! Witness our church’s deep involvement in Moral Monday CT and the newly formed D.U.E. Justice group that sponsored his talk. UUCM was well represented for the National Day of Action/Moral Monday CT demonstration in Hartford on Monday, September 12.
Reverend Barber spoke at the UU General Assembly this summer and later at the Democratic National Convention. Many of us watched on live feeds or streamed later. “It’s a Heart Problem,” he repeated convincingly all summer long while calling attention to how extremists expect to remake America by defunding state government in the interest of wealthy people and corporations. They hope that curbing federal health care and unemployment benefits to millions of qualified people in the states will be accepted as necessary for a healthy business climate. Cuts in public education, deregulation of polluting industries, denial of equal protection for gay and lesbian people, skyrocketing incarceration, and suppression of voting rights of minorities are key planks of this agenda.
The recent and continuing North Carolina experience of fight back against this well funded extremism is detailed in Reverend Barber’s 2016 book The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of the New Justice Movement. The book has been a “common read” for our Anti-Racism work this summer. What we learned from the book will no doubt feature in the “Revolutionary Conversations” series led by Bishop John Selders, a close Barber ally, at UUCM this Fall.
What does a 21st century social justice coalition look like? This is the question he asks in the book and that his organizing and preaching answers. First, it must be a moral movement. “We cannot let narrow religious forces hijack our moral vocabulary,” he charges. “At the heart of all our religious traditions are truth, justice, love, mercy.”
It must be a broad and unified movement of justice loving people united in a coalition and committed to each others issues and to a strategy of “fusion” that can make real the promise of democracy. “We cannot come together to work for the common good by ignoring our deepest values…. We stand together where our values unite us and learn to respect one another where our traditions differ.” All manner of people are welcomed
— religious and secular, union members and merchants, immigrant rights activists and environmentalists, gay and straight, young and old, rich and poor, employed and unemployed, of all national origins, racial, ethnic and cultural identities. No one says it will be easy.
It takes a long time to make history. “Faith-rooted moral battles do not advance on schedules that make sense to us,” he writes partially as explanation for his title : The Third Reconstruction. The First Reconstruction followed the Civil War emancipation of four million enslaved people, new constitutional guarantees of equal protection and full citizenship rights including voting. The Second Reconstruction defines the civil rights era when federal laws (1964, 1965, 1968) were enacted to bring these const
itutional guarantees (13th, 14th, 15th) to life. One hundred years later. And we are still counting and being counted.
Resistance is our confirmation. We have enemies and they are powerful. Extremist reactionary measures and violence rolled back gains in economic and racial pr
ogress of the first two Reconstructions. Barber delights in reminding us that the the “good news” of the bible “ends not with Jesus taking Jerusalem through a popular uprising” but his execution as an enemy of the state. Two thousand years later and the world’s bequeathed from Rome and Israel measure calendar time by the date of that execution! Nonviolent civil disobedience in the face of similar dangers, he exhorts, “is a tool to demonstrate our capacity for struggle” tomorrow and over the long haul of the Third Reconstruction.
[My] Contribution to the [Return of] the Critique of Political Economy 
As long as you don’t kneel during the national anthem. Terence Crutcher