Review of Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can't Talk About], by Wilfred Reilly

Read Taboo if you want to get caught up on what gun-toting, center-right African American professors are saying about race, immigration, gender, and the alt-right. I know I wanted to get caught up. Wilfred Reilly is on the right, so he challenges our liberal views, but he’s not so far right that we can dismiss him as a crank or a hater. As liberals, we can appreciate the challenging facts and the perspectives that Reilly brings to issues even when we don’t agree with his subjective opinions or conclusions. Based my own research, Reilly gets his facts right. Thankfully, he writes informally and with a touch of humor. Reilly’s writing doesn’t drive me away the way I’m turned off by conservative writers like Heather Mac Donald, the author of The War on Cops.

With this book, Reilly enjoys a certain amount of good fortune based simply on the current nature of political discourse. By 2021, we’ve all became familiar with how bad the mainstream media are at covering contentious issues and how much worse social media are at doing so. The nation’s political rhetoric has gotten so extreme that an author like Reilly can make a splash and gain an audience just by saying things that come as surprises but that are backed up by statistics. For example, some of the rhetoric around police shootings implies that the police are intentionally and systematically targeting innocent Black men for murder, but Reilly points out that nearly all the Black men killed by police are armed. Can we liberals still pin these disparities on racism? Yes, we can, but it’s more about racism built into the structure of society than about cops shooting young men for the “crime” of being Black.

Most of the book is about how statistics reveal a more complicated and nuanced story than you are likely to see in a political meme. Differences between the white population and African American population extend far beyond skin color, so different outcomes can hardly be pinned strictly on people being treated differently from each other based on their skin. For example, younger people get killed by the police at a higher rate than older people, and the while population is significantly older than the African American population. If your goal is political mobilization, you might not value nuance, but if you want to understand where conservatives are coming from, Reilly is a big help. 

Reilly poses fair questions even if liberals don’t agree with his answers. Whereas radicals look back to 1619 for the source of today’s racial disparities, Reilly looks at the loss of fathers in the Black community starting around 1970. Contemporary sociologists have confirmed Reilly’s contention that a lack of fathers weighs on boys and young men, although they have found that it’s the proportion of fathers in the community that’s the major factor rather than a boy having a father in his own home or not [link]. As a conservative, Reilly is satisfied pointing to welfare as the reason that marriage rates dropped. As a liberal, I’d rather find an answer in the other demographic changes taking place at that time. A lot was changing in our society around 1970, and a lot has changed since then. Reilly’s statistics show that African American communities historically had a higher proportion of fathers in the home when racism was worse, so it can’t simply be “racism” that has led to this issue. Can Reilly be sure that welfare is really the culprit here? If so, he hasn’t backed up that claim by showing that other changes are not to blame. You can learn from this book, but be skeptical.

On immigration, Reilly argues from the perspective that our nation’s immigration policies should help our nation, while liberals often put the needs of would-be immigrants first. From his perspective, for example, Reilly questions birthright citizenship, which was written into our Constitution in order to address a totally different situation from the one we face today. On this topic, statistics can’t prove that we should or shouldn’t put our own nation’s needs first, but Reilly’s take on the topic at least gives us liberals a relatively reasonable conservative position to think about and argue against. He’s no friend of the alt-right, and we can’t simply dismiss his views on immigration as racist. (Obviously, of course, we can of course dismiss his views in just this way, but doing so is a missed opportunity to engage honestly with our fellow Americans who disagree with us.)

Reilly concludes by taking down the Alt-Right. This chapter doesn’t perfectly fit the theme of the book because there’s no taboo against trashing the Alt-Right, but it serves the purpose of helping us liberals remember that conservatives can disagree with us even while they also disagree with the nutters on the right. 

Are the “obvious facts” that Reilly cites really taboo? Yes and no. The “taboo” label applies only to the touchiest topics, such as police violence or gaps in outcomes between groups. They’re taboo enough that I’m not going to go into much detail with this review. Reilly pushes some hot buttons, and it’s not feasible to address them properly in this review. I can talk about birthright citizenship, but I’m not going to bring up… certain other topics.

If you’d like to get a sample of Reilly’s position, this Spiked article is a good start.

“Michael Brown: the founding myth of Black Lives Matter”

Compared to What? 

If you’re looking for a grander, more historical and global view from a perspective similar to Reilly’s, read Thomas Sowell’s Race and Culture: A Worldview. That book delivers such a strong challenge to the left’s take on inequality that I rarely recommend it. Race and Culture is from 1995, and Taboo is better for current events. 

If you’re looking for someone to use statistics to assess rhetoric in the field of gender politics, Debra Soh’s book The End of Gender is the same sort of book as Taboo, albeit from a liberal perspective. Like Reilly, Soh shocks the reader with taboo information that’s readily available but rarely sought out. 

Reilly on Twitter

I follow him on Twitter, and based on his tweets I figured I’d give his book a try. If, like me, you make a point of following people you disagree with, he’s worth a try. He’s @wil_da_beast630.

2020

violence peaks in early adulthood

Genetics and Life Outcomes

The doctor has news for a pregnant couple. Their child has a genetic and hormonal condition that has serious consequences. People of this profile are ten times as likely to kill, ten times as likely to be murdered, ten times as likely to be incarcerated, and ten times as likely to be killed by the police. Also more likely to be institutionalized, addicted, or homeless. Way more likely to be a sexual predator, even from a young age. 

The parents say that biology is not destiny, and the doctor agrees. These outcomes are the result of the interaction of biology and society. That said, it’s this society that the child will grow up in, and researchers see roughly the same pattern repeated in societies all over the globe. 

The parents ask what the odds are and what life is like for these people. The doctor says that most of them can be brought up to have quite successful lives, especially in terms of worldly success. On some occasions they lead lives of astounding achievement. Even if they avoid lives of crime, destitution, or isolation, however, their connections to their own children will probably be weaker, possibly connections to friends as well. 

Hearing the description of this profile, the parents talk it over. How would they would feel if they carried this pregnancy to term and then the child grew up to kill or rape someone? Would they be partly responsible? For my part, if my late wife and I had gotten this news, we would have had the kid. What do you think?

And have folks heard of the condition I’m describing? It’s quite common. 

It's a boy.

Group Instincts and Modern Politics

Identity without biology

tl:dr Some aspects of our identities activate in-group social instincts, and it’s easy for people to organize politically along those lines. Other aspects of our identities relate more to distinctions within the in-group or within a family structure, and it’s difficult to organize politically along such lines. 

Why is it so much easier to organize African Americans around fighting racism than it is to organize poor people around fighting poverty? Why is it easier to convince poor, white Americans that Muslims are a threat than to convince them that the rich are taking more than their share? Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King tried to unite poor whites and Blacks, but that dream died with him. Why the big difference? Maybe the difference derives from humans’ in-group and out-group instincts.  

Our tribal instincts organize our brains to respond to tribe-versus-tribe conflicts with much stronger emotions than when they respond to conflicts within the tribe. As a result, Christians and Muslims are primed for conflict, while poor people don’t find it natural to organize as a class or group. Below I’ll offer a basic take on nine aspects of identity, pointing out how some of them activate the brain’s tribal programming pretty well while others fail to do so. 

Nine Aspects of Identity

This list comes from the “ADRESSING” model of identity and oppression (see end of post).

Age

All human societies recognize age categories within the group, and these are grounded in biology. Nobody identifies as, say, a “teenager” the way people identify as “Germans” or “Catholics”. 

Tribal Politics: It’s an in-group distinction, and it has low political salience. 

Disability

Disability is a biological reality with broad social implications. Disabled people organize politically, but disability is not a source of identity the way language or religion can be. 

Tribal Politics: In-group, low politics. 

Religion

Religion uses symbolism and ritual to unite people, and before modern times it was the only way to unite different tribes or nations. It’s a breeze to re-orient religious enthusiasm and convert it into hostility toward outsiders. Today, we see hostility across religions lines all over the globe. 

Tribal Politics: Religion distinguishes between “us” and “them”, and it has high political salience.

Ethnicity

Ethnic identity traditionally determined one’s nation, language, religion, and homeland. Armenians, for example, belonged to Armenian culture, and a Navajos belonged to Navajo culture. Today, of course, everything is more complicated, as it was, for instance, in the Roman Empire. Still, even today it’s easy to get most people to identify emotionally with their ethnic groups, especially when there are conflicts with other groups. 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics.

Social Class/Culture

People commonly admire the successful people in their own “tribes.” My daughter loves Beyoncé because Beyoncé is a boss. Like chimpanzees and bonobos, humans defer to high-status individuals within the group. How easy is it for the rich to keep the poor divided by race and nationality? Way too easy. In some societies, class and ethnicity align more or less well, especially when class definitions are explicit and legally enforced. When not linked to ethnicity, class still comes with some of ethnicity’s trappings, such as distinctive dress or accents. 

Tribal Politics: In-group or between-group, middling political salience.

Sexual Orientation

Sexual desire operates on its own agenda, cutting across lines of social identity, and often at odds with a conservative religious identity. Oppression and hostility give the LGBTQ+ crowd good reason to organize politically, but “tribe-style” identities seem powerful compared to sexual orientation. 

Tribal Politics: In-group, middling politics.

Indigenous Background

This category is a special case of the more general tendency to form exclusive groups based on ethnicity and nationality (especially in the broad sense). 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics. 

National Origin

Humans are unusual among social animals in that we can tell which strangers are in our society and which are not. A nation is a level of social organization above the tribe, historically allowing tribes to work together and allowing strangers to trust each other. Traditionally, nations have been defined by shared language, religion, lifestyle, and ethnicity. Consider Armenians, Navajos, Danes, etc. Largely, the point of a nation is to get people within it to treat each other better than they treat outsiders. Nearly all Americans, for example, would say that our federal government should concern itself more with our well-being than with the well-being of Argentinians. Politically, it’s easy to get people riled up about their nation, and something like a massive terrorist attack can get even liberal intellectuals to put flag stickers in their car windows. 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics. 

Gender

Traditionally, men and woman have often had single-sex social groups, but our tribal instincts are organized to unite men and women in the tribe with each other and against the enemy rather than to unite women against men or vice versa. Gender may be an important part of one’s personal identity, but it’s not typically a political identity. In fact, filling a man’s role often means competing with other men for status, and the same goes for women.  

Tribal Politics: In-group, low politics. 

The Nonbiological ADRESSING Model

Leticia Nieto’s model of identity and oppression treats these nine aspects of identity as if they are all analogous to each other, with no real sense that humans are flesh-and-blood animals. Being Black, in this model, is essentially like being disabled. My late wife was both Black and disabled, and I can tell you that these two aspects of one’s identity are not essentially the same. In college I studied 20th century social sciences, and half of what I learned was well-meaning bogus stuff that I later had to unlearn. Nieto’s ADRESSING model fits the pattern of 20th century social science because it’s formulaic and nonbiological.

Missing Aspects of Identity

Three biologically potent aspects of identity are missing from the ADRESSING model. 

Language is a primal indicator of who is “us” and who is “them”, as people with thick accents can tell you. Little children seem to intuit identities based on language at an earlier age than identities based on race. The high political salience of language aligns with that of ethnicity, nation, and religion. Say yes to the Oxford comma, or else let’s fight!

Family is a primal source of personal identity, especially perhaps the mother-child connection. It has low political salience in general. The conflict of “young versus old” gets some traction, but that isn’t exactly a conflict between offspring and parents. 

Individual flesh-and-blood reality—the “crazy diamond” of one’s own unique phenotype—can be a major aspect of one’s personal identity, especially for those of us who diverge from the average in mental or physical terms. Political salience is low.

See Also

My review of The Human Swarm by Mark Moffett, which explains the unusual human penchant for identifying not just with clans of people we know but also with larger societies of people who are “us” even though they’re strangers.

What Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind means to me and resources for learning about it. 

Crow Scientist is Live

For years, I’ve been fascinated by crow behavior, and now I have something to show for it. It’s the free app that shows kids how to observe crows the way a scientist does, and for this project I had the pleasure of working with John & Colleen Marzluff. It was a real treat to learn about crows from the experts. We talked for the first time in May, and the app is done already, with Karen Lewis’s art and all. We need feedback from players, and we need 5-star reviews. Here’s a link to the official Crow Scientist page.

The app naturally relates to my overall goal of teaching evolution science to children. Specifically, it teaches two important lessons about natural selection. First, what allows animals to survive is their behaviors. Kids observe crows and note their behaviors on checklists. Second, animals have lots of offspring, most of which die. One checklist is for breeding season observations, including young crows ending up killed. 

Doing the heavy lifting for the app was David Marques, who also published Clades Solo. He’s a creative partner as well as the programmer, and he added a wonderful feature to the app: you can add in your own photos of the behaviors you see. I’ve started adding my own photos, and it’s silly how fun it is. Players can even submit their photos to Phosphorlearn for possible use in the app. 

Kids can also submit their crow art, which the Lead Crow Scientist will post on Instagram. That’s Colleen Marzluff. She’s passionate about kids, nature, and science. You can submit art on the Phosphorlearn page or contact Colleen directly on Instagram.

Gospel Anti-Semitism in Jesus Christ Superstar

My friend James blogged about
this live performance of JCS

The 1973 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar has an amazing soundtrack, and you can use the story to learn about anti-Semitism in the Christian gospels. First-century Christians wrote the gospels after a war between Jerusalem and Rome. The first Christians had all been Jews, but at the end of the first century there were plenty of gentile Christians as well as Jewish Christians who denounced mainstream Judaism. These early Christians compiled and promulgated the gospels in part to show everyone that it was the wicked Jews who were the enemies of Rome and not the good Christians.  

Jesus was a hillbilly exorcist and apocalyptic prophet. The Jewish leaders had him killed as a threat to public order, which he was. His story has gotten embellished and retold several times. Jesus Christ Superstar delivers a great story, mostly by playing up the conflict between Jesus and Jews: Jewish leaders, the Jewish mob, even his Jewish disciples. Each song contributes a little bit to our understanding of anti-Semitism in the gospels. 

No Talk of God then We Called You a Man. As a Jew in good standing, Jesus never claimed to be God. The fourth gospel portrays Jesus as divine, as misunderstood by the Jews, and as something of a Jew-hater.

What’s the Buzz. The song shows Jesus’ Jewish disciples to be fools. 

Strange Thing Mystifying. Christian churchmen started talking down Mary of Magdala pretty early, and her she is a woman of ill repute. It makes for good drama but, this tradition is not in the gospels. In this song, Jesus rebukes the disciples. You know, the Jewish disciples.

We Are Decided. The leaders of Jerusalem had little choice but to take out trouble-makers to prevent insurrection. They kept the peace through Jesus’ life and for decades after, until AD 66. Historians are divided over whether Jesus styled himself as the king of the Jews.

Everything’s Alright. Here’s another opportunity for Jesus to rebuke his Jewish disciples. After Jesus’ execution, Mary of Magdala might have been the first follower to have a vision of Jesus after his death, but the gospels limit her role. Did Jesus have sex with followers? Maybe, maybe not. There’s not a trace of churchmen denying the charge, so I figure it probably didn’t happen.

This Jesus Must Die. If this rock opera makes High Priest Caiaphas and the other leaders of the Temple seem wicked and creepy, that’s pretty much what the gospel authors would have wanted. 

Hosanna. Historians are split on whether Jesus really did ride into Jerusalem on a donkey. The gospels have the Jews hail Jesus as their king (“messiah”) so that when they turn on him later it comes across as particularly wicked.

Simon Zealotes. Here, Simon refers to Jesus as “Christ” (“messiah”, “anointed [king]”). Historically, Jesus didn’t claim to be the awaited king, but the story is better if it’s their own king that the Jewish leaders execute.

Poor Jerusalem. The Jewish leaders and people don’t understand at all. Jerusalem closes her eyes to the truth.

Pilate’s Dream. Historically, Pilate was a brutal ruler, assigned to rule Judea by decree because no client king could keep these locals in hand. The gospels make this villain into a complex and sympathetic figure, tormented because the Jews force him to crucify their own king, an innocent man.

The Temple. The more of a cesspit this place is, the worse the Jewish leaders look. Historians figure Jesus got crucified for causing a disturbance in the Temple, but the details are not reliable. For sure, the Temple was a source of huge wealth for the Temple leaders, and it probably featured a graven Roman eagle over the main entrance, so there are reasons that Jesus, a penniless exorcist from the sticks, might pitch a fit here. 

I Don’t Know How to Love Him. Even Mary of Magdala, the Jew who knows Jesus the best, doesn’t understand who Jesus is. 

Damned for All Time. Historians are split on whether there was a Judas, and I don’t think so. His name sounds a lot like “Jew”. Who could be so terrible as to betray Jesus? Mr Jew, that’s who! Great song, though. [EDIT: James McGrath helpfully pointed out that the name Judas doesn’t just sound like “Jew”, it was actually the common Jewish name, Judah, the biblical figure that Jews are basically named after. The Jews represent the tribe of Judah, that is, the tribe of Judas. His blog post.]

Last Supper. Boy, those Jewish disciples really are losers, aren’t they? Especially that traitor, Mr Jew.

Gethsemane. Jesus knew that he was about to pay the ultimate price, but those faithless Jews can’t even stay awake with him. 

The Arrest. Mr Jew betrays Jesus, and the disciples are obsessed with fighting. The Jewish people turn on him. 

Peter’s Denial. Historically, Peter was the most prominent Christian leader outside of Jerusalem, at least until Paul came along 20 years later. The gospel writers spent extra time cutting Peter down, such as in this scene where he denies Jesus. 

Pilate and Christ. The gospel writers wanted the Romans and everyone else to know that it was the Jews that were the problem, and Christians aren’t Jews any more. It’s the Jews that lost a war against Rome, just as God planned, and now the Christians are God’s chosen people. 

King Herod’s Song. This scene is not historical, and it’s one more example of the Jews failing to recognize their king. 

Could We Start Again Please. Mary still doesn’t understand. Historically, Jesus’ crucifixion seems to have caught his followers by surprise, and they fled back to the hinterlands of Galilee. His followers were surprised because crucifixion wasn’t part of the plan, but in the gospels they don’t understand even though it is part of the plan, and that’s worse. 

Judas’ Death. Mr Jew’s sin is unconscionable, and the Temple leaders are creepy. Great combo. 

Trial Before Pilate. Historically, it’s hard to understand why the Roman prefect would care or even notice if the local leaders wanted someone crucified as a trouble-maker. In this song, Pilate judges him innocent and tells the traitorous Jews that he’s their king. The Jews demand that he be not just flogged but crucified. 

Superstar. Historically, the disciples did not know how Jesus’ crucifixion fit into God’s plan, but Paul came along 20 years later and came up with an explanation. Is this the least anti-Semitic song in the soundtrack?

The Crucifixion. The Roman’s were expert at inflicting punishment, and crucifixion was a horrific way to go. In this song, you hear Jesus forgive the Roman soldiers that nail him in, reinforcing the theme that Christians are good Roman subjects, not like those traitorous Jews. One anti-Semitic detail that they left out was the Roman soldier recognizing the crucified Jesus as the Son of God. That gospel scene was meant to show that gentiles recognized Jesus while his own people betrayed him.

John 19:41. This verse refers to Jesus’ empty grave, a story designed to reinforce the idea that Jesus really did rise bodily from the dead. John’s gospel downgrades Peter, acknowledging him as the lead apostle only in a bonus resurrection appearance tacked on as an epilog.

Humans love stories, and stories need conflict. The gospel writers set up a conflict between Jesus and “the Jews”, and Jesus Christ Superstar takes this theme and runs with it. Great story, bad history, baked-in anti-Semitism, great vocals—quite the combo. 

[EDIT: Fixed the bit about the church tradition and Mary of Magdala, which I had gotten wrong.]

‘Bible and Music Update’: Religion professor James McGrath commented on this post.

2020

medieval weekend

Ex-Nomads’ Weekend

In his book The Gifts of the Jews, historian Thomas Cahill mentions the day of rest only in passing. If this author thinks that a weekend for laborers deserves only passing mention, perhaps he’s a man more of words than of labor, and he doesn’t fully appreciate what a gift the weekend has been down through the ages. About three thousand years ago, Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization collapsed, and the Hebrews abruptly switched from nomadic herding to sedentary farming. They had no aristocracy to despise physical labor and write the rules accordingly, and these former nomads invented for themselves a day off from “civilization”. On the day of rest, even wives, slaves, and draft animals got the day off. The other nations had laws written by their ruling classes, and they preferred that laborers labor with no weekly break. Christianity and Islam both picked up the practice of the day of rest, and they spread it wide. Modern labor unions took up the cause, and now the weekend is an expected part of secular society. 

These days, ancient Hebrews catch a lot of grief for their genocidal fantasies and other indicators of unacceptable, Bronze Age bigotry. Still, it pays to also understand what they got right.

See also: Evolutionary psychology and the Fall of Genesis

2020

We wrote these rules in 2nd person
to avoid sexist pronouns (1987)

RPGs and Gender Differences 

A friend asked me to comment on a screen cap that’s going around Twitter, so here’s the comment. The screen cap is an insensitive post I made in 2008 about women and roleplaying tropes. It appears side by side with a quote by Gary Gygax in 2002 saying that there’s no sense trying to make a game that “will attract females”. The implication seems to be that I think the same way Gygax did, but in fact his quote serves as a useful counterpoint to my own views. He thought that men and women are naturally different and didn’t want RPGs to change. I think that in order to change RPGs to make them more appealing to women we need to understand both how men and women are the same and how we’re different. RPG designers have made real progress, and happily today’s RPGs are more inviting to women and less male-oriented than they were when I joined the hobby. This social-media incident also serves as an opportunity for me to make a number of related points.

A disturbing feature of controversies like this is that they hurt the very women that the accusers are trying to help. In 2014, Nobel laureate Tim Hunt made a bad joke about women in the lab. He used an ironic voice to let his audience know that he was joking, but his words were written down and shared across the internet without tone of voice. People thought he was serious and spread the quotes to shame him. A friend of mine said that Hunt’s words had a chilling effect on women considering whether to enter STEM. OK, but the only way those words had a chilling effect was by their being spread as misinformation. In 2018, University of Washington computer-science lecturer Stuart Reges suggested a way to get more women into computer science and referenced studies showing that girls tend to do better at verbal skills than math. The opposite is true for boys. A reporter from the Seattle Times garbled this reference and accused Reges of making a false claim: that boys are better at math than girls. The reporter ignored Reges’s proposal to expose more women to computing by making a computing class mandatory, and again women got misinformation about a prominent man in STEM looking down on them. Did the reporter help more women feel good about possible careers computing? No. In the current case with me, someone is implying that I have the same disdainful attitude toward women in gaming as Gary Gygax did. The people spreading the post feel like they’re helping women, but surely it doesn’t help to make the field seem more sexist than it is. Personally, it hurts to have people talking about me, but the real damage is to the many gamers who don’t know my true history and who are tricked into thinking that the lead designer on D&D 3E was a hostile to women in gaming. 

Another disturbing thing about this post is the implication that it’s sexist to take seriously the inborn differences between boys and girls. Common sense tells us that the differences we see result from a combination of inborn differences and social learning, and the science bears this out. In my career, I’ve worked repeatedly to raise the profile of women in characters, art, pronouns, and the workplace. Do I get disqualified from being a feminist because I take seriously the inborn differences between boys and girls? I don’t think so. In fact, it seems to me that we can do a better job of advancing women’s interests if we understand how women and men are different as well as how we’re the same. If you want to hear about inborn differences, listen to parents. And if you disagree with me, does that disagreement mean that we can’t work together to make a better tomorrow? Enough with the left’s circular firing squad already. My focus is on a Blue November, and I hope you’ll join me.

The original post from 2008 was a conversation starter, and it’s being shared as if it were a conclusion. The wording was needlessly provocative, and I’m sorry to everyone I hurt with it. That was the year my wife died, and I wasn’t at my best. The post was provocative, and what it provoked was a bunch of stories from women about how they’d been excluded from roleplaying games by all-boy groups. I learned that my post had been ill-informed. Sometimes I say things that are wrong, and then I get better information that I didn’t even know I needed. It’s all part of the process. 

The other thing I’ve learned since 2008 is that I’m on the autism spectrum. That explains why people sometimes react to what I say in ways that I hadn’t predicted—because they’re neurotypical. Looking back, it was pretty ignorant for me to talk about the gender skew in gaming without referencing autistic traits (“engineer brain”) and their role in games and game styles. Over the decades, roleplaying games have become less “engineer-oriented” and more story oriented, and that’s great. 

For me the big issue is the prevalence of misinformation on social media. I’ve been taken in repeatedly by misinformation myself, I’ve heard misinformation from my friends, and well-meaning people have spread misinformation about me. It’s a mess, and I don’t know what to do about it. 

Related Posts

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Mother Love and Human Nature

Evolution Unites Us All

Family Climate Action Event

Kids made art and letters

A bunch of kids in my UU congregation decided that climate change is their biggest concern, so they contacted the climate action team, where I’m a co-chair. Together we came up with this plan for engaging several families in what we called the Family Climate Action Event. The main purpose of the program was to have the kids work together to take collective action and then to learn what more they can do. In addition, it helped families get to know each other and stay in touch during the pandemic. During the first of two zoom meetings, the families talked about environmentalism, and the kids made art and wrote letters for policy-makers. For the concluding meeting, a climate-oriented policy-maker met with the families to explain the current political scene. If intergenerational climate action is your thing, a Family Climate Action Event is easy to pull off. Here’s how it worked for us. 

First Meeting, Art and Letters

This meeting launches the project, it connects the kids’ actions to the community, and it helps families get to know each other. We had a couple climate-action folks from the congregation drop in, too. 

Welcome, Chalice Lighting, and Introductions: For Introductions, people took a minute to find something that reminded them of the interconnected web of existence and bring it back. When each family introduced themselves, they also showed their item and talked about it. 

Artwork: Got kids started on their art. The church provided blank postcards for the kids to put art on. 

Adult Fishbowl: Each adult recounted a personal experience with the environment, pollution, climate change, etc. Kids pretended they weren’t there. (5 min) 

Kids’ Fishbowl: Each kid said something about the environment. Grownups pretended they weren’t there. (5 min)

The 70s looked dire.

Speaker: I talked about my lifelong experience with environmentalism and how experiences at church have brought me to focus on collective action. The conclusion I shared is that personal behavior change is good but collective action is where the main action is. (5 min)

Letter Writing and Art: Kids started wirting letters or kept working on their art, and they chatted. The leaders provided names and addresses of policy makers that they could write to, including the policy maker they were scheduled to talk to. 

Screen Grab: Kids held up their art for a screen grab. Ideally you get an image that’s fun and safe to share. 

Closing 

Second Meeting, Policy Maker

For our Washington state congregation, we chose Rep Joe Fitzgibbon, who chairs the House Environment & Energy Committee. We arranged a half-hour block where he could meet with our families remotely. He spoke about his own passion for addressing climate change, and he answered questions prepared in advance by the families. As it turned out, he touched on some points that had come up earlier in the Art & Letters meeting, such as beef and acid rain. The families all changed their names on zoom so we could take a screen shot and not identify anyone. 

The families met for half an hour before the meeting with Joe and for half an hour afterwards. That was more than enough time, and the extra space led to a valuable converation about get out the vote efforts and the election. 

Rep Joe Fitzgibbon talked to us about his
passion for fighting climate change

Other Unitarian-themed posts: jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/search/label/Unitarian

2020

Unitarian University Church, Seattle

Virtual Church Gatherings

Last Sunday, my girlfriend and I attended a virtual church service and coffee hour. Churches across the nation are going virtual. They’re streaming sermons and music, and they’re hosting virtual meet ups. If you’re quarantined and looking for company, now would be a good time to check out local churches. Lots of people derive value and encouragement from the connection, and you might be one of them. 

It surprises lots of people that an atheist like me would recommend that people try out a church, but churches in the US are unusually practical as houses of worship go. Here, they serve as intergenerational community centers. In most other places in the world, places of worship occur in communities, ethnic groups, or nations that are predominantly one religion. As a result, the people who worship there don’t necessarily have a special relationship to each other. In the States, there are countless competing traditions, and one’s congregation represents a shared identity, turning it into a social hub of like-hearted individuals. Among liberal religious traditions, these social centers serve especially for Sunday school and political organizing. My childhood congregation was constantly working on issues like clean water, immigrant rights, and the Nestle boycott. 

Predictably, I might suggest that you consider a Unitarian Universalist congregation. An ex-girlfriend used to say that the UU tradition is “like religion, but only the good parts”. The UU congregation that I’ve attended for 20 years is a lot like the Lutheran congregation I was raised in, except that no supernatural beliefs are expected or taught. 

Every congregation is different, but in general there’s a real inclination toward science and away from physics-defying miracles. In last Sunday’s virtual service, the ministers addressed the topic of COVID-19 in a naturalistic way, with a bonus etymological reference to why the pandemic of 1918 was called “influenza”. Some UU congregations will doubtless feature relatively vague prayers for people to be safe, but none of our ministers are going to heal the disease over the Internet. We’re also not going to rely on supernatural protection to justify meeting in person. We like science, and we treat pandemics the way scientists tell us to treat them. Speakers in some congregations are bound to talk in more-or-less New-Agey terms about God, meaning, challenges, visualizations, mysterious workings, or everything happening for a reason. We don’t have a pope to tell everyone to think or say the same things, so each congregation is its own thing. 

And of course if you find value in a community where you share supernatural beliefs that I don’t share, more power to you.

If the idea of connecting to a “church” makes you choke the way it used to make me choke, you can find UU “fellowships”. These are often congregations whose founders didn’t want to call their communities “churches”. Alternatively, you can think of the church as an “assembly”, which is the word used by ancient Jews, including early Christians. 

Churches also do online activities for kids. I’ve taught church school on and off for years, and there’s good stuff there, so I would bet that UU churches will have worthwhile stuff for kids to do. When I teach church school, I don’t usually know which of the kids believe in the supernatural and which don’t. A lot of them don’t really know themselves. 

You can find my church’s online programs on their web site, and you can readily find others by searching online.

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