Michael McLaughlin: Throughout your book you trace three different “people making” projects: populist movements that offered diverging visions of who “the people” are in “we the people.” You focus on these movements in a rather narrow time frame of roughly the decade after the First World War. What is it about this time period that makes it so relevant to us today? And how do the movements you center – the Ku Klux Klan, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – both help illuminate this historical moment and shed light on our present?
Colin Bossen: The period leading up to and immediately following World War I was a time of immense economic and political change and social dislocation. Writing before the war broke out, the journalist Walter Lippman argued that most people in the United States had become so disconnected from earlier forms of identity that the experience of “drift” and the search for belonging were endemic. Mass migration to the United States was underway. The immigrant percentage of the population was at the highest level it would reach in the twentieth century. Changes in technology were so great that, as the historian Melvyn Dubofsky observed, everyone was a “first generation immigrant [to] industrial society.”
The populist movements of the early twentieth century emerged as responses to this widespread sense of displacement by trying to develop new forms of collective identity to replace the older bonds – family, local community, small business, ancestral church, synagogue or temple – that were being uprooted and destroyed by the era’s rapid changes.
In doing so, the three primary populist movements from that period established templates that are still present in the United States today. A throughline can be drawn from white supremacist populism of the second Ku Klux Klan – with its insistence that White people are the people of the United States – to Donald Trump’s present day Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump’s father was allegedly a member of the Klan. There are disturbing similarities between the language that the current president uses and the language deployed by Hiram Evans, the second Imperial Grand Wizard of the Klan.
Similar connections can be made between contemporary movements and the Pan-African populism of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the pluralistic populism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The Pan-African populism of the era, with its vision of a unified African people that spanned the African continent and the diaspora, established much of the framework for later Pan-African movements. UNIA’s symbols include the Red, Black, and Green flag. It has been used by anti-colonial struggles since the middle of the twentieth century and can still be found on several African flags. Marcus Garvey, UNIA’s founder, remains an inspiration for many. Near where I live in Houston’s Third Ward, there are murals featuring him. Local organizations regularly recite Amy Garvey’s “This Flag of Mine” at their gatherings.
The IWW also helped establish templates that shaped twentieth century, and now twenty-first century, movements. Their vision of pluralistic populism, which imagined a people from disparate ethnicities and races woven together around working class issues, was later taken up by the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Echoes of it can be heard in the democratic socialist wing of the Democratic party. The IWW’s songs and tactics inspired the civil rights movement and, more recently, Occupy Wall Street.
The enduring presence of these types of populism suggests the question they strove to answer remains unsolved – who are the people of the United States? I find it helpful to look back to those movements because many of the conditions that precipitated them are still with us today. The immigrant population of the United States is, again, at historic levels. Economic inequality –which was a big source of the earlier populist appeal – is growing rapidly. Technological changes are so extensive that I would argue that everyone over the age of thirty is a first-generation immigrant into the world of social media.
I am not a neutral observer. I am dedicated to the project of radical democratic renewal and the belief that people are capable of self-governance. Part of my hope is that by looking backward to earlier movements we can find tools and inspiration for our present moment of struggle. I am not opposed to populism per say. That differentiates me from a lot of scholars who study the subject. Instead, I think that the white supremacist variety of populism represents an existential threat to humanity while the Pan-African and pluralistic forms contain within them some of what is needed to counter that threat.
As I was reading your book, I kept thinking about Sylvester Johnson’s work, especially his African American Religions, 1500-2000. Johnson argues that democracies, in constructing a “people” to govern them, always create another group which lies outside “the people.” For Johnson the struggle to achieve freedom by gaining membership in “the people” always entails marking another group as unfree. While Johnson is skeptical that people-making projects can lead to a flourishing of freedom, you argue they can, in fact, be liberative. Why?
The two movements in which I find liberative potential, the IWW and UNIA, are both transnational, rather than national, in their orientation. The Klan’s focus, in contrast, was historically national. I think that the issue has more to do with the relationship between the construction of a citizenry than peoplehood in general. The Klan’s insistence that the United States was a country for White people meant that they were constantly trying to subjugate and expel everyone who didn’t fit within their conception of citizenry.
In contrast, in the period I focus on, the IWW and UNIA wanted to create peoples that extended beyond the boundaries of a particular nation state. It is true that in doing so they each constructed an enemy, in the IWW’s case it was “the bosses” and in UNIA’s case it was the White power structure – but the enemies they created were, in a very real sense, groups that were bent on oppressing and exploiting them. What is more, the labelling of those groups as enemies was necessary for the creation of social power.
Labor movements that seek to cooperate with employers are rarely successful. In fact, one of the principal strategies that employers use when they are trying to crush union organizing is the pretense that there is no difference between employers and employees, and that somehow everyone is the same despite vast differences in power. Likewise, UNIA’s notions of Black economic and political power fed into visions of self-determination and independence that have been key in struggles against white supremacist populism. Marcus Garvey’s political theology, Garveyism, helped to create a shared sense of peoplehood across lines of difference and played a role in various movements of national liberation. Of course, in many African countries, and this ties to Johnson’s argument, that sense of peoplehood has largely been delineated along ethnic lines and has been a source of conflict.
Turning to the historical IWW, the situation is more complicated. The IWW saw themselves as creating a people – a unified working class – in pursuit of freeing everyone from the oppression of capitalism. Their vision was millennialist and they imagined not the endurance of a class enemy but the abolition of the conditions that made class enemies possible. Had they succeeded, there probably would have been bloodshed, as is the case in almost all successful revolutionary movements. But the energy that pluralistic populist movements have contributed to the United States without achieving total victory has been overwhelmingly positive. Almost any time groups have come together across lines of racial difference, with a sense of shared peoplehood, the result has been the improvement of living conditions and the expansion of democracy for the majority of people.
I was struck by how many Klan ministers were theological liberals. You even mention Alma White who was progressive on women’s issues yet deeply reactionary when it came to race. How do you make sense of movements that combine what are often seen as politically opposed ideas?
The intellectual historian Quentin Skinner warned that we “must classify in order to understand, and we can only classify the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar.” The contemporary heirs of the Klan are deeply reactionary and so there’s a tendency to think of the historical Klan as uniformly reactionary as well. But white supremacist movements of the first part of the twentieth century cannot be neatly mapped onto twenty-first century ideologies. Woodrow Wilson, a longtime liberal icon, was one of the most overtly white supremacist presidents in US history. Like several Klan leaders, he saw liberalism as an inherently White project. In his mind, he was a white supremacist because he was a liberal.
The same was true of Alma White’s stance on women’s issues. She supported women’s suffrage for White women because she understood it as an expression of the superiority of the White race and as a hedge against the political power of people of color and immigrants. The essential work here is Kathleen Blee’s Women of the Klan: Women and Gender in the 1920s which explores in depth why the Klan largely supported women’s suffrage.
In addition, Klan leaders like Alma White were active prior to the split between Christian modernists, who often held liberal theological views, and fundamentalists, who believed in things like biblical inerrancy. They had a different conceptual map than most people do today and issues that are currently thought of as antithetical or inherent to the Left or the Right didn’t follow the same patterns they do now. It is comparable to the way that, up until about twenty years ago, many members of the Republican Party were not hostile to ecological issues. Their vehement opposition to environmental legislation today might make it seem like political conservates in the US have always been opposed to it, when in fact views have evolved over time.
Overall, I think that the theological and political liberalism of some Klan leaders are a reminder of two things. First, that the past is always more complicated and less tidy than we might think. Second, that liberalism and progressivism have legacies of white supremacy that they need to address. There is a large body of work on this point. Personally, I have found Charles Mills, especially his book Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, to be helpful in understanding the ways that liberalism and race have often been co-constitutive. That is not to give a pass to conservatism or reaction, which always functions to buttress racial and social hierarchy. It is a reminder that self-identified liberals and progressives have to do both internal and external work and that the larger structures that we exist within and organize within are inherently oppressive.
When I was reading your discussion of “populist legitimism,” I found myself thinking about Donald Trump. While you didn’t mention him directly in that passage, I’m wondering if I was correct in making that connection. If so, would you care to expand on how Trump and the MAGA movement engages in “populist legitimism”?
The term “populist legitimism” comes from the historian Eric Hobsbawm. He used it to describe reactionary forms of populism that seek to preserve existing forms of social hierarchy rather than overturn them. It has three features. First, it identifies the movement with its leader, who becomes a symbol for the people and the people’s way of life. Second, the leader represents justice. Third, the leader is less of a real person and more of a projection of an ideal, which cannot be achieved, on a real person.
While I use Andrew Jackson as an example of populist legitimism in the book, it is entirely appropriate to understand both Donald Trump and the MAGA movement as examples. Trump took Jackson as a role-model, especially during his first term.
Trump claims to speak for and embody his movement. Despite being the son of an exceptionally wealthy real estate mogul who graduated from an Ivy League school, he is able to cast himself as a spokesperson for the working classes. Yet that’s exactly how populist legitimism works. Projections of the ideal are embodied in particular individuals. This dynamic is why historical and contemporary white supremacist populists are willing to ignore their leaders’ flaws and misdeeds. Rather than responding to an actual living person, they are engaging with the ideal that the leader represents. The idealized success of the leader then becomes something that movement members can imagine themselves achieving. Their financial success is taken as a stand-in for the success of Whiteness writ large.
You show how the rituals that populist movements develop are always drawn in part from their surrounding culture. Populist movements seek to build something new, but they have to do so using material that is familiar to their members. Throughout your book Christianity is central to your discussion of ritual and religion more broadly. I’m wondering whether you see Christianity continuing to play a central role in populist rituals, or if activities such as burning sage or building ancestor altars, as we’ve seen in recent Black Lives Matter protests, might become a new normal?
Christianity will probably continue to play a central role in populist rituals in the United States for some time to come. In order for it to lose its place, it would have to cease to be the dominant religion within the country, which I think is unlikely to happen at any point in the near future. Nonetheless, contemporary populist movements are more and more drawing from a variety of religious and non-religious rituals to create their own rituals. In Houston, where I live, a lot of the Black radical community, especially the Pan-African community, is just as likely to incorporate rituals connected to various kinds of Yoruba-influenced traditions as they are those connected to some kind of Christianity in their organizing work. You can even see this in the cultural production of artists like Beyoncé and Solange Knowles. They are from Houston originally and have roots in Third Ward, which is the historic heart of the city’s Black radical community.
Of course, Black Christianities in the United States have been suffused with African traditions ever since the first Africans were forcibly brought to this continent. Even back in the 1920s, UNIA was influenced by non-Christian allies of Garvey’s like Rabbi Arnold Ford and Dusé Mohamed Ali. It is all a matter of degree and inflection rather than the idea that populist movements in the United States were at one point influenced exclusively by Christianity and now the situation is more pluralist. The story is also going to be different for contemporary white supremacist populism, which is heavily connected to Christian nationalism, and pluralistic populism, which is often anxious to avoid overt connections to Christianity. But even then, the situation is more complicated. Hannah Peterson, for example, has done some fascinating research on Orthodox Jews who support the MAGA movement and by extension its white supremacist populism. And a lot of pluralistic populists are unaware that the rituals they use today have Christian roots. Take the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that I belong to. In Houston, we close our meetings with a rendition of Ralph Chaplin’s “Solidarity Forever.” I suspect that most of the people who sing it are unaware that the song’s music has its origin as a camp meeting song.
In reference to your question about sage burning and building ancestor altars, I think that it is worth pointing out that building multi-religious communities can be quite complicated. The question of how to remain respectful of all the traditions that might be present in a pluralistic community while at the same time being clear about the potential problem of cooptation and the disrespect that can go along with it are ever present. In my congregation, we used to burn sage in some rituals. We have stopped doing that because a number of Indigenous communities have requested people outside of their traditions cease incorporating it into our practices. At the same time, despite being a predominately White congregation, we build an Ofrenda in the sanctuary every autumn because the Mexican American members of the community have specifically asked that we incorporate one into the life we share.
Given the significant decline in Christian affiliation in the United States, as well as the growth in non-Christian traditions, does the sort of populist movement you call for need to be interfaith? How would such a movement offer space for people who are uncomfortable (either because of their theology or simply due to unfamiliarity) with participating in rituals drawn from religions other than their own?
By definition, pluralistic populism brings together individuals across lines of difference to form a people devoted to improving their material conditions and expanding democracy. Any successful pluralistic populist movement today will necessarily be open to people from many religious traditions and those without religious affiliation. I think that the labor movement has often been a good example of this. In the early twentieth century, for instance, the Wobblies had members who adhered to no religion, who were Christian, who were Jewish, or who belonged to some other religious community. While the rituals they developed primarily built upon Christian ones, that need not be the case today.
I think my own experience with Unitarian Universalism points to some of how this might work. Unitarian Universalism is pluralistic in its approach to theology. Within my congregation, people who come from the Christian tradition are predominant. But we also have practicing Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, nones, and neo-pagans as members and sitting in our pews. We are open to developing new rituals to meet the needs of the moment and constantly trying to figure out how to make ritual practice inviting to the unfamiliar. Recently, we have been working with the pathbreaking Black humanist Mtangulizi Sanyika to think about how to create a space for worship drawing on his tradition. We have also been experimenting with incorporating punk rock and electronic dance music into worship precisely with the hope of offering an invitation into ritual practice to those who are not comfortable with more traditional services.
I grew up with the house and techno scenes of Chicago and Detroit in the 1990s. I suspect I got some of my vision of pluralistic populism from participating in them as a dancer and promoter. The clubs and raves of that era were very much ritual spaces and groups like Underground Resistance and Drexciya had political theologies about the power of their music to bring people together for dance and celebration. Some of the parties I attended back then embodied the fullness of human diversity in ways that I am still unpacking but clearly offer lessons on how to open up ritual space for people who are not otherwise comfortable with ritual. There were always multiple ways to engage with the music. There was space for dancing by yourself, dancing competitively, and standing around and watching the DJs do tricks on vinyl. In some of the big warehouses, there were also separate, private spaces where you could wander off and side rooms where you could escape to if you wanted to find other forms of music and activities like tagging or skating.
The lesson here for social movements that are devoted to pluralism is that there needs to be space for many different kinds of rituals and forms of engagement while at the same time there is a strong center that can somehow hold things together. I am sure that some people would argue that political movements and dancing have little overlap, but the truth is that in the 1990s, the police viewed both as threats to the social order. In a lot of communities, these were some of the few spaces where people with marginalized identities felt free to be themselves.
You show how the IWW sought to create a populus that encompassed workers from diverse identities and backgrounds. How successful were they at actually building a cohesive community that respected and celebrated differences? Relatedly, what lessons does the IWW offer movements today who are viewing oppression through a more intersectional lens? I’m thinking about how Chris Smalls has argued that divisions within the Amazon labor union arose when college-educated White workers took leadership opportunities away from workers of color who had greater lived experience navigating systems of oppression. How might movements that embrace prefigurative politics grapple with the fact that people from privileged positionalities bring with us learned behaviors that can burden people from marginalized positionalities?
The IWW’s most successful example of bringing together workers from different identities and backgrounds was Local 8 in Philadelphia. Those wanting to know more about Local 8 should turn to Peter Cole’s Wobblies on the Waterfront. The main thing to know is that the union was intentional about nurturing multiracial leadership and insisted on having an even distribution of Black and White workers in key positions. The idea was to make sure that the union leadership reflected the composition of the workforce.
Another example of the IWW’s efforts to embody the diversity of the working class within their movement comes from a textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912. It was one of the union’s largest strikes. “Big” Bill Haywood, an important IWW organizer, saw the community that coalesced during the struggle as an instance of the pluralistic populus the union was hoping to create. It “was a democracy,” he wrote. “The strikers handled their own affairs… There was no one the boss could see except the strikers. The strikers had a committee of 56, representing 27 different languages.”
The lesson here for organizations seeking greater intersectionality is that movement leadership must always and fully represent every person involved. This is very hard to pull off, as your story about Chris Smalls points out. I have seen the same dynamic play out in my own organizing over the years. One helpful bit of advice that I received came by way of the labor historians and radical lawyers Alice and Staughton Lynd. Alice and Staughton developed a theory for organizing that they called the theory of the two experts. It is pretty simple. It is based in the understanding that everyone is an expert in their own experience and their own communities. When college-educated or professional folks organize across lines of difference, they need to recognize that their form of expertise is only one form of expertise. Other people with other experiences have other equally if not more valid forms of expertise to contribute to the organizing project. The goal of a truly effective prefigurative organization – one in which the organization embodies the kind of society it is trying to build – is to figure out how to honor all different kinds of expertise and not overly validate the forms that come from having a more privileged social position. Such an organization also needs to challenge its members to examine the trustworthiness of the systems of privilege that created such social dynamics in the first place.
This can require an extraordinary amount of unlearning. In my own growth, the most useful tool is to listen more and talk less. There is a story about Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos from the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional that is illustrative on this point. Marcos comes from a highly educated background and was a college professor before he was an insurgent. A friend of mine was at a meeting with Marcos where some big decision was being made. It lasted for a long time, and Marcos didn’t speak at all for many hours. He just sat there, listened intently, and took copious notes. When he finally did speak, his main contribution was not to offer his own position but to summarize what he heard other people saying and point out what he thought were their points of agreement and difference.
I was struck by the scene in Chapter 5 where the Wobblies counter-protested the Salvation Army by singing their own hymns back at them, but with different lyrics. You quote an IWW source that states the Salvation Army sang about “Heaven above” while the IWW sang about “Hell right here.” While the Salvation Army considers itself a religious movement and the Wobblies do not, you highlight how they both engage in very similar dynamics. Should we view the IWW as a religious movement, or is there something about it, and perhaps the other movements you consider, that meaningfully distinguishes it from religious movements?
The question of what makes something a religion or a religious movement has been endlessly debated. My approach is less definitional and more methodological. Rather than asking whether or not the IWW is a religious movement, my question is: What do we learn about the IWW when we view it through the lenses of religious and theological studies? As you can see from my book, the answer to that question is rather a lot. In fact, I think scholars have often missed key aspects of the union by refusing to consider its religious dimensions. The way in which Wobblies used religious rituals and symbols in their construction of a collective identity provides one explanation for why they were successful in generating tremendous loyalty from many of their members under conditions of extreme repression. Take someone like Ralph Chaplin, who was one of the union’s most influential members. He was raised a Protestant Christian and rejected Christianity when he joined the IWW. He remained loyal to the union until its collapse in the 1930s. Then, having once spurned celestial salvation for terrestrial salvation, he converted to Catholicism in search of the celestial form of salvation again. Some other prominent members of the union followed similar paths. Ammon Hennacy, who later was a significant figure in the Catholic Worker movement, and the poet Kenneth Rexroth had trajectories that mirrored Chaplin. That is not something to be discounted.
What are the limits to discussing the binding power of populism in religious terms? I’m thinking here particularly of groups, such as queer folks, who often have experienced religion as something traumatizing. Can terms like ritual be decoupled from their religious connotations?
The limits are the same as the limits from any other disciplinary approach. We miss some things if we look at populism entirely from the realm of economics, history, or political philosophy. I was trained in an American Studies program which emphasized a multidisciplinary approach to scholarship. In my case, that meant developing a methodology that drew from religious and theological studies, history, and political philosophy. I think that allowed me to come up with an innovative approach that I hope will further discussion about the nature of populism. At the same time, a multidisciplinary perspective like mine has its limits. I will never have the sheer depth of knowledge in a single field or discipline that a scholar trained primarily in one discipline has. I was reminded of this early on in the review process when a peer reviewer who was a social historian gave a fairly negative review of my work. The person’s critiques were, from my perspective, valid other than the fact that I wasn’t trying to write a social history. I was attempting to write a political theology and to understand better the relationship between religious thought and practice and politics. I focus more on leadership, ideas, and the construction of rituals and less on the daily lives of Garveyites, Klan members, and Wobblies. Scholars wanting to better understand the lived experiences of the populist rank-and-file might look at work by Peter Cole and Kathleen Blee, which I have already mentioned, or Adam Ewing’s excellent The Age of Garvey. My hope is that people will read my work alongside theirs rather than instead of it.
My approach to the second part of your question is less as a scholar and more as a minister and organizer. We always have to try to meet people where they are at. In my congregation, we talk a lot about recovering from religious trauma. We work with people, many of them queer, who are leaving high-control religions to find a form of religious community that accepts and loves them for who they are. Part of this is about helping them to develop their own definitions of religion, approaches to theology, and spiritual practices so that they don’t experience these things as imposed upon them but rather as elements in their lives and in their community that they get to co-create. We have a great intern minister at the moment named Nina Kuzniak who has been doing some really interesting work around this. She has been bringing things like sound baths, which have been popularized elsewhere in recent years, into liturgical space to create a religious environment where people who might otherwise be unwilling to enter a church can find a space of comfort and sacredness.
You conclude your book with a call for a pluralistic populism that engages with religious forms in order to bind people together. Where do you see the dynamics you call for today? Are there particular populist movements utilizing religion in a way you see as productive?
It would be fair to cast Zohran Mamdani as a pluralistic populist. He is trying to bring together New Yorkers across significant lines of racial, linguist, and religious difference for the common purpose of improving their material conditions and taking back a modicum of democratic control from billionaire elites. He seems to be fairly adroit at deploying religious resources to do this. During his campaign he made a special effort to reach out to Muslims in a way that invited them into his electoral movement. More recently, he gave a speech on Saint Patrick’s Day that deployed elements of Irish Catholicism in an effort to bind Palestinians, people of Irish descent, and LGBTQIA+ communities together into the shared identity of New Yorker.
Mamdani has extraordinary charisma and there are limits to his democratic socialist politics from my more anarchist perspective. Some of these are bound up in questions of state power and the extent to which it can be deployed in genuine movements for liberation. This gets back to Sylvester Johnson’s critique of people making and the ways in which, when it is connected to the state, it ends up being exclusionary because it gets tangled up in questions of citizenship. It seems like Mamdani is really trying to avoid this by focusing on serving people regardless of citizenship status, but he is always going to be caught in the trap that some folks have a vote and the ability to participate in electoral politics while others do not.
Thinking beyond the realm of electoral politics, my heart will always be with the Zapatistas. I spent more than a decade working with Zapatista communities via the now-defunct C.A.S.A. Collective. The Zapatistas typically do not get read as a populist movement, but they are actually a good example of pluralistic populism. They brought together communities across five ethnic groups for the common purpose of improving their material conditions, expanding democratic practice, and reclaiming land from economic and political elites. Religion, whether in the form of Catholic liberation theology or indigenous traditions, has been central to their success. If you read Zapatista texts, you will find them replete will all kinds of references to religious symbols and stories. And if you spend time in their communities, you will find that all sorts of shared religious practices – sometimes disconnected from institutional religion – are everywhere. If you want to find a scholarly resource on this front, go read the introduction to John Womack, Jr.’s Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader.
In my own organizing work in Houston, I have been attempting to apply some of the lessons from my scholarship on pluralistic populism. Most recently, I have been one of the co-chairs of the Commission on the Houston Independent School District Takeover. We are a community commission investigating the impact of the state’s takeover of our school district. The situation is awful. Students and teachers are fleeing the district for private or suburban schools. Neighborhoods are being torn apart. Laws around special education appear to be intentionally broken – the Department of Justice just launched an investigation into the district to find out what is going on. Bilingual education has been targeted and most school libraries have been closed. I could go on. One of my co-chairs, State Representative Lauren Ashley Simmons, has described the takeover as a form a systematic child abuse. I agree with her.
In constituting our commission and in conducting our research, we have been conscious of trying to get as many voices as possible represented. We have taken testimony in both English and Spanish. We have people from a number of different communities serving on the commission. And we have also consciously made connections to religious communities and started to use some rituals in our work. We held a number of public sessions for people to give testimony about their experience of the takeover. We decided to do these in churches because people often read them as safe spaces, and the local clergy helped us reach out to people who wouldn’t otherwise feel comfortable sharing their stories. Because the situation with the takeover is so bad, these sessions were intense, and it was not uncommon for people to break down crying when they gave testimony. We realized the participants would feel more comfortable if we incorporated some kind of ritual practice into our hearings. We started to take a break for somatic breathing between hearing testimonials. It helped a lot and made the sessions feel a lot less emotionally charged.
I hope that organizers who read my book will take away from it similar lessons about the importance of ritual and, if they are not already doing so, begin to incorporate more intentional ritual practice into their efforts. I have found that doing so is a good way to build community cohesiveness and social power. I suspect that others will too.
Colin Bossen is senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston and visiting fellow Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford
