Religious Education for Social Justice

By Rev. Roberta Nelson

Editor's note: This article was originally delivered as a keynote address to the Unitarian Universalist National Workshop on Social Justice. It was published in 1984 in a two-article booklet called Religious Education and Social Action: Branches of the Same Tree . We are grateful to the authors for allowing this reprint, with a message that seems as timely now as it did then.

In a recent address, Victor Frankl said, “No one can give meaning, it must be found by oneself. Meaning is found between the ‘aha' experience and the gestalt experience. Meaning can be found when you find you are capable of coping with suffering—meaning is available in spite of suffering. We learn about meaning from people who have lived through suffering.” He went on to say, “We are doomed to failure if our goal is to find meaning in being happy. Happiness is the side effect of fulfilling the search for meaning.”

As religious people on a quest, we need to listen to Frankl's message because we could use some of his insight to measure our religious education and church programming. We strive too often to make people happy, to make people feel good. One of his messages is that “happiness (is) not worthwhile if it (is) an end in itself.” The work of meaning-making is hard. It is easy to get sidetracked from the goal when people claim boredom, dissatisfaction or unhappiness. Part of the quest for meaning for me is to put that which I value, prize and cherish into action. .

I am a born Unitarian Universalist. My childhood story has a great deal of impact on me because my parents were socially conscious. Some of the experiences I remember most clearly from my early years were the visits that were taken to important places. One of them was to the statue of Theodore Parker at the West Roxbury Unitarian Church. As a child I thought of it as insignificant until my father told me the story of Theodore Parker. As I grew older I heard over and over again the stories of men and women who made great sacrifices and were very courageous. My parents never “told” me that I should pay attention to social justice; they did it. Our dinner conversations often focused on ethical issues of the day.

As a child of eight or nine I remember wanting to take a friend to a roller skating rink and being startled when told it was not possible because she was black. I recall it as my first conscious exposure to segregation. My parents made it quite clear that they did not approve of the rule. There are numerous other stories I could tell that made clear to me the values my parents held about the dignity and worth of every person.

I am sure that all of you in this room could relate stories that would tell you something about the values your family or community held. My children tell me their stories: the months without grapes or lettuce or Nestlé's chocolate chips; the candlelight vigils, the marches; the dining room table turned into a campaign headquarters; the telephone calls and meetings; the money designated for a cause rather than a family treat. Some of their rememberings include their confusion, misunderstanding and even protest, but their recalling is now told with pride. I do not think that it is by accident that my oldest child has chosen to go into the Peace Corps. I believe that it is a natural transition from the story and vision of her religious faith as told by her parents and grandparents. I know that her sisters are searching too for ways to put their vision into action. .

As I think about our religious education programs, I am very conscious of how unaware we are of how implicit in all we do is the theme of social justice. Our philosophy of religious education has inherent in it the heritage and the roots of our religious tradition. Sometimes we don't lift them to consciousness. As a matter of fact, sometimes we probably keep them hidden. We are good at implicitness and not very good at explicitness. I think that if most of you were to read the religious education program brochures in your churches, you would discover that they have statements like:

• accept and value themselves and relate to others in a caring way;
• understand the history, traditions, beliefs of UUism;
• appreciate the beliefs, traditions, practices of other religions;
• learn what UUs value and develop their own set of values.

How many of our religious education programs also state explicitly that we are educating for action, that we are educating for risk-taking? When I think about the religious education program in my church, I am aware that the following components make explicit the value we place on issues of justice and peace:

• the biographies of UU men and women who acted out of courage and faith;
• the “Human Heritage” course where children begin to dialogue about issues of creationism and evolution;
• the Bible and its rich prophetic tradition.

Also in courses like Celebrating Our Roots and Branches , Decision Making and About Your Sexuality , there are numerous possibilities to talk about social justice.

Most of our church school teachers do not see themselves as activists and do not see the subtle kind of role they play in being able to help our children become justice seekers. We need to be more creative in our teacher training programs on this issue. I know our message is there; we need to raise it to consciousness.

Very often as Unitarian Universalists we are quick to jump on new bandwagons. My fear is that it is easy to jump off bandwagons. I urge you to think about social justice not as something out there, but as an integral part of the whole. I know for myself that when I am in community, I am stronger. So I see our young people needing to be integrated, to be included in ways that will he1p them to see that they are part of the whole.

As seekers of social justice we are going to encounter disagreement, conflict, misunderstanding. All of us—child, youth and adult—need conflict resolution skills if we are to be effective advocates. How often do we see the church school classroom as a laboratory where adults and young people can deal with difference in a creative way and learn some of the basic conflict resolution and decision making skills?

The community and the world cry out for help with issues that are crucial to a world of justice and peace. However, we must also look more closely at what is happening within our own churches and fellowships. During the past three years I have been very conscious about this because we have several young people with special needs. Our ability to integrate them into the community tells me a great deal about whether or not we are a caring community.

How do we own the implicit vision of our UU heritage? A goal of the Fairfax Unitarian Church Religious Education Committee is to integrate social justice projects consciously into all the curriculum. We do not want it to be separate from the whole. Even the projects that are shared with other groups in the church are integrated into classes and worship. We need to be aware of the messages in the books that we buy for our library. Do we sign/interpret our services for the deaf, provide assistance for the hearing impaired, have our buildings accessible to the disabled, provide a hymnbook for the blind? Simple ideas, yes. Profound ideas, yes!

Several years ago we also adopted the process from the Rochester Unitarian Church for setting our social justice agenda. We have that agenda as a focus for social justice projects in religious education, worship and cooperative ventures between committees. The overriding concern for me is to have the Social Action Committee agenda enhanced, enriched, nurtured by the WHOLE community.

This year one of our major projects was a Washington, D.C. soup kitchen sponsored by the Community for Creative Non-violence. We consciously worked with our children on that project. Our youngest children provided artwork, our sixth graders organized a clothing collection, our junior- and senior-highers spent the day cooking and serving food. As a part of our groundbreaking celebration, people were invited to bring food for the soup kitchen. The vegetables were cleaned, bagged and delivered to the kitchen Saturday evening. It was an integrating project of children, youth and adults working together.

Other projects that have been inspired by curriculum are the study of Clara Barton in The Stepping Stone Year, which led to a project for the diabetic camp, and a UUSC hunger project in one of our Growing Up Year classes.

Recently someone asked me, “How do you work with very young children?” I believe that social justice is “caught,” not “taught.” When children are involved in the excitement of a project with everyone else in the community, then they catch the spirit. That spirit is hard to kill if it is nourished. Erik Erikson said, “People who do not fear death will be able to raise children who do not fear life.” 1 We need to pay attention to that and invite the adults of our community to know the youth of our community. Adults are the models. Young people need to know what adults think, how adults feel, why adults act and why adults take the risk.

James Fowler has said, “People who do not have an excessive fear of anarchy may be able to raise children who can celebrate pluralism.” 2 These are difficult times. We live in a world that is constantly changing. We are bombarded from every direction with fear, pessimism, despair. Our young people feel and hear it. We, as adults, have something very special to offer our children—HOPE. Children cannot grow hope in a community that feels hopeless.

We all need to feel responsible, but we have an obligation not to place all the burden on our young people. I am very distressed when I hear among us “the next generation will take care of that.” The next generation is now, or we will build another generation that does not and cannot care. I also believe that, for children especially, the projects should not be overwhelming. Many of us feel overwhelmed by the world situation. With our children and adolescents, we need to be careful that we are not overwhelming them with our sense of failure and apathy. All of our projects do not need to be heroic in size. We talk globally when most of our children, who have a much smaller view of the world, need projects that are within their perspective.

It is important to acknowledge the risks that are involved. It would not be fair to tell our children that it is easy to stand up against prejudice, that it is easy to speak out for what we feel is right. They need a community of people that will help them practice. We need to ask ourselves, how many opportunities are there for us as a community to celebrate? In community I find that I am not isolated, alienated or alone. I am empowered by the energy and creativity of others.

Chris and I wrote Parents as Resident Theologians 3 out of our own experiences with our children. We are now “playing” with the idea of writing a program called “Parents as Social Justice Educators.” I think we as parents are the key. From my own experience I know that we also learn from our children. The way that we model in the family and the issues that we raise are very crucial to whether our children will feel that they can act to change the world.

I want to share a quote from an article by Dr. Thomas Groome. It has influenced the way I work in the church and the way I think about church programming. He wrote:

Could it be that in our attention to memory and reason in religious knowing we have overlooked the role of imagination? I think so! The less attention we pay to imagination in religious education the more likely we are to be left with reified religious ideas and chasm between those ideas and historical reality.

Wilder writes, “When imagination fails, doctrines become ossified, witness and proclamation wooden, doxologies and litanies empty, consolation hollow, and ethics legalistic.” Well said!

Kathleen Fischer refers to imagination as the “inner rainbow” that bridges “God and the earth, the sacred and the secular, and spans the gap between matter and spirit, linking them together.” Sharon Parks speaks of imagination as “the power of shaping into one.” For Parks, informed by Coleridge, imagination is the faculty that can hold our knowings and our doings in dialectical unity and transcend the false dichotomy between the two. Amos Wilder claims, “It is in this order of imagination ... that we find the bridge ... between theology and politics.” I would add that it is also the bridge between knowing and doing, faith and action, religion and life, knowledge and power. True education must be prophetic; surely a call to creative and courageous imagination.

Sharon Parks speaks of imagination as the power of shaping into one. That shaping into one has rekindled my thinking and vision of the church. I often see us as a fragmented church—the social activists, the religious educators, the worship people, family activities, etc.

I have this vision, a vision that would bring all the program people together where we would begin to set our agenda for the year. The social action agenda would become an integral part of the whole. The family activities and social action and religious education could join forces. The worship people would have worship services that spoke to the social agenda. At this time I am the bridge. There is more power—and more people are empowered—by bringing all of us together into one space at one time. We would enrich one another. It would create Richard Gilbert's concept of “the compleat church.”

I want all of us to go away from here with that vision of wholeness. It is in wholeness that we have power and that is what we are all about. In our quest for meaning, in our quest for richness, I urge you to be inspired by these words from Florence Earle Coates:

The soul hath need of prophet and redeemer,
Her outstretched wings against her prisoning bars.
She waits for truth, and truth is with the dreamer
Persistent as the myriad light of stars.

FOOTNOTES

1. Lawrence, Linda. “PT Conversation with James Fowler.” Psychology Today , November 1983, pp. 56–62.
2. Ibid.
3. Nelson, The Rev. Roberta and Christopher. Parents as Resident Theologians . Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1984.
4. Groome, Thomas. “Old Task, New Challenge.” In Religious Education: Education for Social Responsibility , The Religious Education Association, 1983, pp. 495–6.