Sermon delivered July 27, 2025 at the Chautauqua Institution

The topic of authoritarianism gathers us together for Week Six of the Chautauqua Institution, and we do well to invoke the wisdom of one of authoritarianism’s sharpest observers and critics: George Orwell. His novel 1984 is masterful, and then there is Animal Farm, in which the essentials of authoritarianism are laid bare so very simply and memorably, in the form of a fable. 

How many of you are familiar with Animal Farm? 

The story begins with pain. The animals of Manor Farm suffer because of the human owner’s neglect. Farmer Jones is an alcoholic. He is irresponsible. He does not care. So the animals rise up in revolt, drive Farmer Jones off the property, and rename it Animal Farm. The principles that will henceforth protect their newfound freedom and liberty are the Seven Commandments: 

• Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
• Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
• No animal shall wear clothes.
• No animal shall sleep in a bed.
• No animal shall drink alcohol.
• No animal shall kill any other animal.
• All animals are equal

But this hopeful beginning–this well-intentioned effort to create an animal-centered utopia in a world made perilous by humanity–soon begins to go sideways. The story ends with the Seven Commandments reduced to just one: 

• All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. 

As for the animals who are “more equal”–the pigs. The book’s very last sentence reads: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Under the leadership of the pig Napoleon, the revolution is betrayed. As readers, we see that clearly. But in the echo chamber that Napoleon and his cronies create, in which the rest of the poor animals are stuck, the propaganda is that the revolution has been fulfilled. Authoritarian success requires, after all, the creation of an echo chamber in which the voice of some glorified great leader reverberates; absolute loyalty is required; mistrust among loyalists seethes; open dissenters are punished; and perception of the truth is confused through distortions, distractions, and outright lies. 

Imagine if Orwell had written into his novella a scene in which animals from another farm tried to come in and intervene. The signal achievement of any echo chamber is how it operates like cult programming and primes insiders to believe that only insiders are trustworthy and outsiders can only be perverse. The poor animals in the Animal Farm echo chamber would have rejected offers of help and would have said that the outsiders are the ones needing help. 

The betrayed revolution has been fulfilled. 

I remember reading the book in 8th grade, and I hated Napoleon. But now I see that Napoleon is a part of me and a part of everyone. He represents a universal human fallibility no utopian effort can ever erase: how the longing for justice is so easily corrupted by a self-centered desire for personal recognition and respect. The philosopher Plato helps us understand. He tells us that all people possess an inner part which he calls thymos. Thymos is the part of you which needs others to see and respect your worth. It’s what sends you into grievance when others disrespect you, invalidate you, act all “holier-than-thou” towards you. When someone you respect lets you know you’re not measuring up, the thymos in you brings you into shame. 

Thymos in itself is not the problem. But under certain conditions (like narcissistic mental illness, insecurity, or a learned belief in your right to dominate), the stage is set for thymos to slide into megalothymia. Megalothymia is when you need others to recognize you as superior. Megalothymia moves you to seek power-over, rather than power-with. To the saying “All animals are equal,” it will insist “but some animals are more equal than others.” 

Achieving superiority can happen directly or by proxy. You can manipulate your way to the top like Napoleon does in Animal Farm, or you can give your unswerving loyalty to some Napoleon-like leader, feel your personal power in the completeness of your submission, and satisfy your grievances by thrilling to all the times he punishes traitors and enemies and gloats over it. 

Don’t forget the safety you feel under the shelter of the great leader’s arms. 

This is human fallibility–one of its varieties. It’s why human beings are just not good builders of utopias. In 1872, Samuel Butler wrote a novel about utopia and he called it Erewhon. That’s “nowhere” spelled backwards. Of course. 

Because we are human, not God. 

In light of this, liberalism can be seen as a Godsend. Liberalism is clear-eyed and honest about the temptations of abusing power. In his book Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, Edmund Fawcett describes this well: “Human power was implacable. It could never be relied on to behave well. Whether political, economic or social, superior power of some people over others tended inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked.” 

A sobering illustration of authoritarian illiberalism, and a liberal response, comes from my faith tradition of Unitarian Universalism. The 16th century saw both Catholic and Protestant churches engaging in authoritarian punishment of individuals deemed heretics, including excommunication and (in some cases) execution. This approach was often justified by the belief that heretical teachings harmed the religious well-being of the wider community. The essentially fear-based rationale was that if heretics were allowed to persist in their “wrong doctrines,” others could be led astray and consequently face eternal damnation.  

Logic like this underpins every authoritarian echo chamber that’s ever existed. 

Micheal Servetus was one of the victims. Despite being a Protestant reformer himself, he did not grant total loyalty to John Calvin, whose orthodox dictates were enforced by the Geneva civil authorities, and whose megalothymia was in full gear. Servetus insisted, against the party line, that God is not a Trinity but a Unity, and was therefore deemed traitorous and burned at the stake, in 1553. This spurred liberal thinkers of the time to call for tolerance. “To burn a man,” Sebastian Castellio insisted, “is not to defend a doctrine. It is to burn a man.” “Let me have the liberty of my faith as you have of yours. At the heart of religion I am one with you. It is in reality the same religion; only on certain points of interpretation I see differently from you. But however we differ in opinion, why cannot we love one another?” 

Tolerance here was meant to check abusive power, and it is a key virtue of liberal religion today. Micheal Servetus and Sebastian Castellio are spiritual ancestors of all religious communities grounded in a vision of basic human decency, reliance on reason as a source of truth, and the practice of freedom of thought and conversation. To these two ancestral names, add those of Giorgio Biandrata, Francis David, Queen Isabella, and King John Sigismund, whose combined efforts led to the Edict of Torda in 1568, which established religious toleration as the law in Transylvania–astonishing, in a time when duelling religious authoritarianisms swallowed up the rest of Europe. 

Listen to some of the language of the Edict: “In every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well. If not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve. Therefore none of the superintendents or others shall abuse the preachers, no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone… and it is not permitted that anyone should threaten anyone else by imprisonment or by removal from his post for his teaching. For faith is the gift of God…” 

That’s the Edict. Because of it, today we speak of freedom of the pulpit and freedom of the pew. I can’t think of anything more opposed to an authoritarian echo chamber. To say that “faith is the gift of God” is to say that even outsiders may have something important to add, and dissenters from within may not be traitors so much as prophets. It can also be said that, in churches where preachers are anxious about being cancelled if they don’t preach the party line, or congregants are anxious about being called out if they disagree with the preacher or with other congregants, such churches have ceased being liberal. 

We Unitarian Universalists like to say, “We need not think alike to love alike.” In our hymnbook you can find this quote from the Persian poet Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” For there is a protected place of spaciousness, curiosity, complexity, human connection, grounding, creative interchange. There, people meet not in a spirit of “holier-than-thou” but in a spirit of empathy and in a context of soul-making conversations. 

That’s the sincere hope, at least. 

That’s what our ancestors paved the way to. 

Liberalism, whether religious or secular, affirms that communities and society as a whole are better when individuals have wide scope for individual choice and expression. Emily Chamlee-Wright, President of the Institute for Humane Studies, explores this wide scope concept in a way that gives a secular interpretation to the Edict of Torda’s religious view that “faith is a gift of God.” Her more secular rendition speaks of liberal autonomy together with a resulting plurality of viewpoints and lifeways, and it is this which enables what she calls “a higher level of learning—social learning—in which civil society becomes smarter than any one of us participating within it.” 

One of my ministry colleagues used to put it in a far more folksy way: we “unstupid” each other. Together, we grow wiser than any of us could separately. 

It’s a real source of hope. Maybe utopia is impossible for human beings, but what is possible is improvement. 

However, improvement is no straight line. It is, says Emily Chamlee-Wright, a “messy emergent process in which many winding attempts based on competing notions of the good collide, change course, merge, hit dead ends, and start anew. Along the way, we will make mistakes. Many many many mistakes, including errors in judgment about what matters most in our lives. Those errors are a central feature, not a bug, of the learning process that is civil society. Liberalism is humane because it is a system that learns. But it only learns if we capable but imperfect beings have the freedom to grope our way through poorly lit terrain, make mistakes, find each other, and try again.”

We’re imperfect beings trying to find each other–that’s for sure. We each possess a piece of the puzzle, and its completion requires everyone. There’s also a lot of pain going around right now. To folks on the Left and the Right, it feels like we’re at Manor Farm, where George Orwell’s book begins, and the conditions are terrible, and we are that close to jumping into authoritarian solution-mode. 

From the Left comes the pain of a free market that seems rigged in favor of the rich, together with the declining prospects of the 99%. From the Left also comes the pain of marginalized communities who, long after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, grapple with forces of oppression that continue to grind away. These forces seem to defy the rule of law and operate like Jim Crow used to–but this Jim Crow (such as the preschool-to-prison pipeline) is new. 

From the Right, on the other hand, comes the pain of a torn social fabric in which family, faith, community, and nation are in a constant state of upheaval. True liberty, from this rightward perspective, is the freedom to fulfill the obligations that come with these crucial sources of meaning and identity. Yet folks from the Right feel like their chosen freedom is constantly being thwarted, and it’s terrible to them. 

Authoritarian solution-mode is typically all-or-nothing, black-and-white, us vs. them. That’s the mentality. The animals who transform Manor Farm into the utopian Animal Farm put it like this: 

• Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
• Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

I wonder if Cas Mudde, the Dutch political scientist, had Animal Farm in mind when he defined populism as an “ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups: ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite.’” Left-wing and right-wing populisms both practice this radical polarization of friends vs. enemies and saints vs. sinners. They differ only in identifying who gets to be one or the other. The Left will elevate marginalized social identities as pure, together with the 99%, since their victimhood grants them special access to truth; and it will call for illiberal action against the nonmarginalized or the 1% whose privilege spoils them with false consciousness. As for the Right: it will elevate nationalistic, Christian, and white identities as pure; and it will call for illiberal action against the immigrant, the non-conservative Christian, the non-Christian, the secular, and the educated, all of whom are to blame for disrupting conservative traditions and norms. 

Whether we are speaking of Left or Right, it’s the same black-or-white mentality: 

• Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
• Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

Group membership and social identity become instant markers of virtue and vice. The reality of imperfection in every human heart–the potential for megalothymia–is always about them but never us. Politics must be moral warfare, a battle of the Righteous against the Unrighteous. 

If global and local problems were easily solved, we wouldn’t be talking about dueling authoritarianisms and the liberal church and liberal society stuck in the middle. We are indeed imperfect beings trying to find each other, as Emily Chamlee-Wright says so well. We are groping our way through poorly lit terrain, making mistakes, finding each other, and trying again.

But now, listen to a voice from the Left. It comes from Sarah McBride, a freshman congresswoman from Delaware who’s the first openly trans member of Congress. “I think,” she says, “that we are in this place where we are in this fierce competition for pain. Where the left says to the right: What do you know about pain, white, straight, cis man? My pain is real as a queer, transgender person. And then the right says to the left: What do you know about pain, college-educated, cosmopolitan elite? My pain is real in a postindustrial community ravaged by the opioid crisis. We are,” she says, “in this competition for pain when there is plenty of pain to go around. And every therapist will tell you that the first step to healing is to have your pain seen and validated.”

But the pain is not seen and validated. The pain of the other is minimized or discounted. Only pain on our side matters. That’s what’s making things worse, what’s encouraging an endless back and forth cycle of retaliation between Right and Left. Sarah McBride goes on to say this about left-wing authoritarianism in particular: “We created this ‘all-on’ or ‘all-off’ mentality, that you had to be perfect on trans rights across the board, use exactly the right language, and unless you do that, you are a bigot, you’re an enemy.” She uses the term “maximalism” to describe this. Only the maximal plan is the acceptable plan. Compromise is despicable. People are expected to instantly obey, and if they don’t, they’re anathema. 

“So many of the problems that we face,” says Sarah McBride, “are rooted in the fact that hurt people hurt people.” Left-wing maximalism, which shuts down conversation and seeks to force instant change, comes from a place of real urgency and Sarah McBride knows this personally. Trans people are suffering now, trans people are dying now. “People,” she says, “have one life. And it is completely understandable that a person would feel: I have one life, and when you ask me to wait, you are asking me to watch my one life pass by without the respect and fairness that I deserve. And that is too much to ask of anyone.” Yes. And yet, look at what happens when an unready public feels forced to change as directed by leaders who come across all holier-than-thou. What happens is resentment. What happens is outright rebellion and backlash. Reasonable people who might otherwise be open to conversation and change dig in their heels. 

Offend a person’s inner thymos and that’s what’s going to happen, every time. 

Sarah McBride’s comments, by the way, come from a New York Times article from this past June, in which writer Ezra Klein is interviewing her about the current state of trans rights. What is that state? “By every objective metric,” she says, “support for trans rights is worse now than it was six or seven years ago. And that’s not isolated to just trans issues. I think if you look across issues of gender right now, you have seen a regression. Marriage equality support is actually lower now than it was a couple of years ago in a recent poll. We also see a regression around support for whether women should have the same opportunities as men compared to five, 10, 15 years ago.” Her basic argument is that Democratic Party and progressive group illiberalism isn’t helping. It’s backfiring. It’s making things worse, not better. 

The same thing could be said about current Democratic and progressive diversity initiatives. A couple days ago I read another New York Times article entitled “Inside the Rise of the Multiracial Right.” (That phrase–“the rise of the multicultural right”–does it summon your attention too, as it instantly did mine?) The article reports the results of a 15 year study by two Yale University political scientists, and these results reveal how communities of color are hurting from problems that aren’t being solved by DEI initiatives, yet Democrats and progressives are only doubling-down on DEI. That’s a big part of what’s behind the rise of the multiracial Right. Listen to one of the folks the Yale University profs interviewed: Orlando Owens, a Black pastor and social activist. He speaks of attending a meeting of Democrats and the message was: “We have to help the poor Black men and women because the white man is holding them down.” What he heard was (and I quote), “this white savior complex from white liberals.” It was extremely offensive to Pastor Owens. Condescending white paternalism.   

As you may know, the Republican party in the Presidential election of 2024 saw significantly increased support by Hispanic and Black voters, especially Black men. Asian American voters who cast ballots for Trump were up 30% compared to 2020. These are among the people who are supposed to benefit directly from DEI initiatives. Yet they jumped ship. They’re not feeling the kind of benefits they’re needing. They don’t feel truly seen and heard. 

That’s precisely the problem with echo chambers. By definition, the things that need to be seen and the voices that need to be heard are off script and decidedly not party-approved. 

Illiberalism around trans rights, racial justice, and other challenging issues is simply not working to create successful, long-term solutions.

Seeing this unfold in real time is sobering, and may it be a call for people who have adopted illiberal means in pursuit of noble visions to return to the liberal way of freedom, reason, and tolerance. 

Animal Farm just doesn’t have to be inevitable. 

We can improve. Improvement, again, is a “messy emergent process in which many winding attempts based on competing notions of the good collide, change course, merge, hit dead ends, and start anew. Along the way, we will make mistakes.”

I want to point out two specific smaller mistakes that tend to encourage the huge mistake of authoritarianism. The first of these smaller mistakes stems from yet another dimension of human frailty. It’s the tendency to be lenient with oneself or one’s side while being harshly critical of others. This is called holding double standards, or, more to the point, hypocrisy. To perceive the other side as hypocritical only strengthens the echo chamber one is in. For example, my understanding is that 94% of pro-Black Lives Matter demonstrations back in 2020 were peaceful, while 6% involved violence, clashes with police, vandalism, looting, or other destructive activity. The one I personally witnessed in Cleveland where I live was a part of that 6%, and I will never forget. Now, I am aware of some on the Left who argue that the 6% that were violent were not really violent. That that violence was somehow righteous nonviolence. Yet these very same people will decry the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol as ultraviolence and without any possible righteous justification. So, if you happen to be in a far-right authoritarian echo chamber in which “Stop the Steal” made perfect sense to you as a true American patriot, and you hear the special pleading about the 6% of BLM demonstrations which were violent (but not really), you will only feel further disgust for the opposition, and you will reach for words like “libtards” or “non-player characters” to describe them. For you perceive the double standard from the Left. You perceive hypocrisy. Why can’t they perceive it? Why can’t they own up to it, own up to the fact that they have shadows too? 

It only breaks down trust even further. 

On the other hand, if you feel you are in the presence of a straight shooter–someone who is impartial, someone who calls out their side for abuses as readily as they call out the other side’s–well, you are more likely to exit your echo chamber and have a real conversation.

All I’m doing here is trying to be a straight-shooter….

Yet another “smaller” mistake I urge us to shine a light on is when people take social media face-value. It too helps explain the leap into authoritarian mode (whether from the Left or the Right) and its imperious, perfectionistic, all-or-nothing, hard power style. To take social media face-value is to fall under the illusion that the public is generally unreasonable and impervious to persuasion. Sarah McBride speaks well to this. “There are two kinds of people on social media,” she says. “The vast majority … are doomscrollers: They just go on, and they scroll their social media. Twenty percent, maybe, are doomposters: 10 percent on the far right, 10 percent on the far left — the people who are so, so strident and angry that they’re compelled to post, and that content gets elevated. But what that has resulted in for the 80 percent who are just doomscrollers is this false perception of reality.”

However, “One of the best things about being an elected official,” she goes on to say, “is that I have to break out of that social media echo chamber — that social media extreme world — and interact with everyday people. And yes, there are real disagreements, but 80 percent of the doomscrollers or the people who aren’t even on social media are actually in a place where we can have a conversation with them.”

“People,” she says, “are hungry for an approach that doesn’t treat our fellow citizens as enemies but rather treats our fellow citizens as neighbors, even if we disagree with them — an approach that’s filled with grace. […] And when you go out into the real world — Democrats, independents and Republicans — there is a hunger for some level of grace for us to just not be so angry at one another and miserable. They want to see and know that we actually do have more in common. And therefore it gives you hope that persuasion is not only necessary but can actually still be effective.”

Who here longs for a politics of giving grace? 

Who here wants to see and know that Left and Right have more in common than it appears? 

Listen especially to the part about persuasion being necessary–persuasion and the required time it takes. Because no one with honest questions and concerns (even if they are ultimately rooted in confusion or ignorance) wants to be forced. Again and again, we are speaking of Plato’s thymos, that inner part in you which will send you into grievance when others disrespect you, invalidate you, act all “holier-than-thou” towards you. That part in you that can easily cross the line into megalothymia by proxy and you give your unswerving loyalty to some great leader, feel your personal power in the completeness of your submission, and satisfy your grievances by thrilling to all the times he punishes traitors and enemies and gloats over it. 

Megalothymia by proxy is exactly why voters can vote against their own interests. They can accept the high cost of eggs if they get to see their great leader punish the holier-than-thou. 

To feel forced offends the libertarian heart of every American. It offends everyone’s instinctive sense that they have a right to take the time needed to make sense of things for themselves. Short-term obedience only breeds long-term resentment and the ultimate failure of ideological regimes. For trans people like Sarah McBride who are suffering, she says, “It is our job to demand ‘Now!’ in the face of people who say ‘Never!’ But it’s also our job to then not reject the possibility for a better tomorrow through compromise. I truly believe,” she goes on, “that … our ability to have conversations across disagreement [must be protected]. In a pluralistic, diverse democracy, there will inevitably be people and positions that hurt us. But when you’re siloed and when you suppress [the opposition] … it breeds radicalization. Liberalism is not only the best mechanism to move forward but it is also the best mechanism to rein in the worst excesses of your opposition.”

The book Animal Farm begins with pain, but it ends with even worse pain which is the violation of individual integrity. Another way of saying this is soul loss. 

But liberalism is the promise that we can work together as people with differing backgrounds, values, and aspirations to find common solutions, and even if the way there won’t be a straight line, at least we won’t lose our souls.  

Human frailty makes utopia impossible, and we need to be cautious about how power is used, and who is elevated to lead, and how they lead. 

We can be better than authoritarianism. We are learning from this mistake. People are tired of the ugliness and retaliatory back and forth of divisive politics. People are yearning for grace-filled approaches to dealing with social problems. 

We need not think alike to love alike. 

I can love someone and I can hope for their improvement.

You can love someone even though you may be at different levels of understanding.

Liberalism is not all-or-nothing but both-and.

Higher level learning is what we’re aiming for. Being un-stupid-ed.

Society becoming smarter than any one of us participating within it, leading to the relief of pain. 

Animal Farm is not inevitable. 

Left or Right, let’s not go there. 

___________________________________________

Readings shared before the sermon

1. From “Building Resilient Organizations,” by Maurice Mitchell

Complete article: https://forgeorganizing.org/article/building-resilient-organizations/

Executives in professional social justice institutions, grassroots activists in local movements, and fiery young radicals on protest lines are all advancing urgent concerns about the internal workings of progressive spaces. The themes arising are surprisingly consistent. Many claim that our spaces are “toxic” or “problematic,” often sharing compelling and troubling personal anecdotes as evidence of this. People in leadership are finding their roles untenable, claiming it is “impossible” to execute campaigns or saying they are in organizations that are “stuck.” Individuals are pointing fingers at other individuals; battle lines are being drawn. Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces. 

Movements on the Left are driven by the same political and social contradictions we strive to overcome. We fight against racism, classism, and sexism yet battle inequity and oppression inside our movements. Although we struggle for freedom and democracy, we also suffer from tendencies toward abuse and domination. There are things we can and must do to shift movements for justice toward a powerful posture of joy and victory. Such a metamorphosis is not inevitable, but it is essential.  

More about Maurice Mitchell: https://workingfamilies.org/about-maurice-mitchell/

2. From “The Church’s Mission in a Polarizing World: Finding Spaces for Surmounting Our Divisions,” by Greg Erlandson

Complete article: https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/the-church-s-mission-in-a-polarizing-world-finding-spaces-for-surmounting-our-divisions

If there is one concern that brings most Americans together, it is their worry about how divided we are. This concern about our divisions in both church and state extends across our fault lines of red and blue, traditionalist and progressive.

The problem with talking about polarization, though, is that most often our fingers are pointed away from us. It is someone else’s problem. They are being irrational. They are living in a bubble. They are “the other” on the wrong side of history.

We use the language of combat, of disease, of life and death, all the time. This language rallies our base, convincing us through metaphor that the existence of what we value is at stake. This language makes us unwilling to compromise, unwilling to see any goodness, or any legitimacy, in those with whom we disagree. There is even a quasi-religious component, the rhetoric of a holy war. We are fighting for the soul of our nation, for our very survival.

This explains why efforts to transcend our divides carry multiple risks. On the one hand, to reach out to “the other” could result in our opponents rejecting the overture. What we see as a sincere gesture could be interpreted as a trap, a threat, or simply a fraud.

On the other hand, our own allies, those with whom we are most comfortable, may view us as “betraying the cause.” In talking to the “other side,” we could be seen as abandoning our own.