David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and Wisdom. This week we’re looking at the holes in liberalism. And, yeah, I’m going to add an “s” on that, because one of the confusing things about liberalism is there are a bunch of them. So there is a plural of that kind. I have a little circle here that says the leftism, rightism, and centrism and then ultra-rightism and ultra-leftism in which it says whoever doesn’t think like me must die. Those are the wingnuts on both sides. Actually, not quite like that probably, but we do in psychological terms, call the extreme left and extreme right “moral panic”; what the folks tend to experience on the extremes of left and right. So as we look at this centrism being the vast middle about, you know, both of you extremists are wrong here. Let’s talk about that, how we can walk down this more accepting path. And that really is what we’re calling classic liberalism, a much older form than we are experiencing as contemporary liberalism in the United States today. So the political spectrum, this is actually a British diagram. So it’s a little different from American social socialism and capitalism and what they mean by nationalism and classical liberalism, etc. But we want to look at how these different ideas of liberalism cross over because classical liberalism and contemporary liberalism are not the same thing.

So as I discussed yesterday, quickly look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. There is no one form of liberalism. That’s one of the problems. And the fractures in liberalism tend to occur over the definition of the word itself. What is liberty? I mentioned yesterday that classic liberalism is “freedom from” that is freedom from control by government. Contemporary liberalism, on the other hand, is tends to be “freedom to” people having access to various kinds of social help, assistance, etc. in order to be free. And then there’s a third form that we do need to keep in mind, which is theological liberalism, which is based in classic liberalism, because both of them are the same age going back into the Enlightenment period of the 16 and 1700s, but also then the switch from that kind of theological liberalism to a liberalism of the more contemporary sort. We’ve discussed this in Coffee and Wisdom. Part of that has to do with the social gospel movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. But we’ll get back to that. For example, this is a study from Pew from 2017 that says six in 10 Christians and “nones” hold at least one New Age beliefs. So Christians and “nones”, six in 10, over half have at least one New Age belief. Now, of course, how are they defining New Age belief? And with that, we’re going to they believe in some kind of spiritual energy that can be located in physical things.

They believe in psychics, they believe in reincarnation, or they believe in astrology. All right. So 42% of us, adults of all kinds, believe that there is some kind of spiritual energy located in physical things. Forty one percent believe in psychics. Thirty three percent believe in reincarnation. And twenty nine percent believe that astrology does indeed predict some something of value. All right. Now, we should look down here at this and see that Christians, for example, drop a little bit below the norm in terms of this spiritual energy being in some kind of thing, and then Pew breaks it down further. But many believe in psychics – about the norm ...