When I was in high school, a girlfriend of mine from church landed a role in her school musical. So, I went with a group of friends to go see her show. I went to Wheaton High School years before it was renovated into the beautiful building you see today driving down Randolph Road. So when I entered Quince Orchard High School for the first time, I was shocked. The single production I saw that night was better funded than Wheaton’s drama club was the whole four years I went there. Quince Orchard had an art gallery in their building while Wheaton had several bathroom stalls that didn’t even have doors.
It wasn’t my first experience coming face to face with inequity, but I remember this one vividly. It was perhaps the first time I knew enough about the way the world really worked to understand that the gap between my school and hers wasn’t an accident. And it was no coincidence that underfunded Wheaton had a student body with more immigrants and students of color than almost any other MCPS high school at that time. I can still feel the anger, the resentment that filled my chest when these threads all came together. I knew, it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right.
Years later, after our first child was born, Christian began a one-man mission to shame retail stores into installing changing tables in all bathrooms, not just women’s bathrooms. Frequently he would come home fuming after having to change one of our babies on the floor of the men’s bathroom. I’m pretty sure he tracked down a few managers to share his frustration. But most often he’d log onto Yelp, find the offending store or restaurant, and write a scathing review.
Don’t even get me started on the absence of changing facilities for older children and adults with disabilities in nearly every public restroom. It isn’t just babies who need diapers changed, and when these facilities aren’t available, it tells those of us who need them that our needs don’t matter. Well, it’s not fair, and it’s not right.
These experiences came to mind when the administration first began its attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, usually abbreviated to just DEI. In the last two months, they’ve eliminated federal DEI infrastructure, requiring departments to scrub references to DEI from their websites, reports, and policies. Grants that were awarded under DEI are being rescinded, positions eliminated, and even private sector businesses and non-profits that refuse to abandon DEI are finding themselves the targets of investigations.
An incredible amount of effort is being put into convincing people that DEI is somehow immoral and discriminatory, that it means the least qualified person gets hired solely because of some piece of their identity. A great many people today seem to think that equity, (which just means making sure people’s needs are met), that discrimination isn’t allowed, that folks aren’t hired just because of who their daddy is friends with, somehow prevents people from having to “earn” their jobs. Well, to quote my colleague Rev. Carl Gregg over in Frederick, don’t fall for this “Orwellian gaslighting.”
It’s impossible to reconcile the existence of billionaires who couldn’t spend their money in a thousand lifetimes with the reality of schoolchildren going without lunch and elders forced to choose between medicine and heat. Humanity has an unending supply of stories of the rich and powerful hoarding their wealth while the poor starved and suffered. But there were also times in the past when famine and pestilence struck and the rich suffered along with everyone else. Today, equity has nothing to do with availability of resources. It has everything to do with humanity’s willingness to enable a few people to hoard the Earth’s abundance. Or as Gandhi put it, “we have enough for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.” Well, it isn’t fair, and it isn’t right.
We live in a time when the gap between the richest and poorest people in the world is at its widest. Maybe it’s because we are witnessing it firsthand, in real time. Maybe it’s because of how very few people on Earth control the vast majority of the planet’s wealth. Maybe it’s because religious liberals are conditioned to feel like humanity ought to have done better by the 21st century. Or maybe it’s the combination of all of those things that makes the inequity today seem somehow more grotesque now than ever.
Throughout millennia, the wealthiest humans use the same playbook to avoid equity. Whether slavery under Pharoah or Europeans, globalization under Rome or the United States, the reasoning for why some people have more and some less is always the same. Might equals right. The gods determine who wins and who loses, so the oppressed should just accept their fate. The poor must have done something to deserve being poor. And perhaps most dangerous of all, questioning whether the oppressed are really fully people at all.
It never ceases to amaze me how easily so many people buy into these ideas, especially people who profess to hold the Bible as their sacred text. To believe the propaganda of the greedy is to utterly miss the point of both the Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures.
In the Hebrew Bible equity is a central characteristic of God. The Hebrew word for equity is meshar, and its meaning has as much to do with space as morality. It conjures the image of a flat, level field while also conveying the idea that a thing is just. In other words, God (who is equitable) wants humanity to live on a fair playing field. Huge portions of the Hebrew Bible are dedicated to God trying to convince people that they don’t want a king, they don’t need a king, that kings lead to suffering because anytime humans have that much power over one another, they can’t seem to resist the temptation of greed. Then there are a bunch of prophets whom God uses to speak truth to the Jewish kings, to try and get them to behave and make sure their people’s needs are met. You can find a text to support just about any position you want somewhere in its many books, but the Hebrew Bible is incredibly consistent that God cares about equity, and that the people violate God’s covenant any time they fail to care for the poor and the sick, the widow and orphan, the foreigner and the vulnerable.
In the Christian Scriptures, Jesus tells people all the time to sell their belongings and give the money to the poor. He tells parables that make it clear that the kind of world God wants is one where everyone has enough. Years later, Paul encourages Jesus-followers to develop equity as a personal virtue. In his letter to the community in Corinth, Paul tells them they should be giving out of their abundance to satisfy the needs of the poor, both in their own midst and over in Jerusalem.
And then there’s the passage from Acts we heard in our reading. “No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.” Hundreds of years later when it became the state religion of Rome, Christianity would be misused by the powerful to justify all manner of atrocities for 1700 years. But it’s clear that the earliest Christian communities were striving to put equity into practice.
I share all of this because as Unitarian Universalists, these sacred texts belong to us just as much as they do to any Christian denomination. They are our religious heritage, they are the stories and struggles out of which our free faith developed. And in a time when dangerous people with tremendous power are stoking the flames of Christian Nationalism, it is more important than ever that people know there are liberal and liberating ways of understanding the Bible. Though this administration is trying to demonize and erase diversity, equity, and inclusion, our faith is rooted in those values not in spite of its Christian roots, but because of them. It is more important than ever that we join our liberal Christian cousins in refusing to cede these powerful sacred texts to the people who would misuse them for evil, that we do our best to use these stories to free, to liberate, to comfort, to inspire.
This is what it means for us to have a living, liberating faith. It’s the crucible where the stories and wisdom of the past, the reality of the present, and the power of our own personal perspective combine to create meaning and purpose.
All people have inherent worth and dignity and deserve to have our needs met. All people are precious, beloved in our diversity and yet equal before God. None of us created the Earth; it’s something we’ve all received, and as such we all have the same claim to its life-sustaining gifts. Some say that no one is entitled to education, food, medical care, or safety. But we know that’s just not true. In a world of such abundance, in a world of billionaires, it simply is not morally possible to justify the suffering of so many. It isn’t fair, and it isn’t right.
Working to right wrongs, to create equity economically, politically, socially, is, of course, an important part of our faith. But if we place love at the center, I wonder if maybe the most important thing we can do is hold fast to equity as a faith claim, not just for others, but for ourselves. Now more than ever, we must not lose faith that we are all deserving of having our needs met.
We deserve safety.
We deserve adequate nutrition.
We deserve good housing.
We deserve jobs that pay fairly.
We deserve comprehensive medical care.
We deserve good education that includes music and theater, art and athletics.
We deserve to use the bathroom without fear or discrimination.
We deserve bathrooms that accommodate people with all kinds of disabilities.
We deserve clean air, water, and unpolluted land.
We deserve equity, not just equality.
No matter how much those with power might claim that equity is impractical, too expensive, an inconvenience, in a world of such abundance that none of us did anything to earn, only equity and liberation are fair and right.
This is the gospel of equity.