Thursday Afternoons with Randy

Gregg Jamback, president of the Congregation

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem

September 18, 2005

I’m here today because Kavyo [Motsinger] asked me to do this. And, because I am president of the board, I figured I had to say yes. So if you have any complaints, talk to her, not to me.

Kavyo also suggested that I talk about leadership. Well, I don’t know a lot about leadership. I view my job as creating energy around the Fellowship. I hope that we create more and more things to do – not just committee work, but opportunities for us to get together and have fun.

Now a lot of you know me as the softball guy. To me that’s a model of the way we all could be doing things. I started the softball team for purely selfish reasons – I wanted to play. So I put up a sign-up sheet; found a bunch of other people who are interested in playing; and low and behold, we have a softball team.

So I hope that in the next couple of years we create lots of space where all of you can start your own version of a softball team. And if you don’t want to be the person to put up the sign-up sheet, be one of the people who sign up for the stuff that’s interesting to you.

The posters that you see here and in the foyer have been put up by the committees that keep this place going. They all need help. They all are places where you can get to know one another better. And they all help us keep the Fellowship alive as a place where we can find a few hours of peace from the world that surrounds us. And that is what I really wanted to talk to you about today.

I called this talk “Thursday Afternoons with Randy.”

Randy is real. I have known him since early 2001. He’s married, he has two kids – twin boys. He’s very social, a bit self-deprecating, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t eat exotic food – I think anything the other side of barbecue is pushing it, and he is a very conservative Christian.

But before I get to that, let me tell you a little bit about where I come from. I was raised a Unitarian. In fact, my grandfather was a Unitarian minister. And if you doubt me, George Briggs actually knew him!

I grew up in northern New Hampshire. I’m pretty sure we were the only Unitarian family in town – and probably the county – so although I was raised a Unitarian, I never really went to church. In fact, I remember attending only one Christmas service, at which my grandfather preached.

But there was no doubt that I was a Unitarian – and I mean Unitarian, rather than Unitarian Universalist. My mother was raised on these Unitarian principles:

The fatherhood of God.

The brotherhood of man.

The leadership of Jesus.

Salvation by character,

The progress of mankind, onward and upward forever.

The seven principles we UUs use today were adopted in 1985. So I was definitely a Unitarian child. And those of you who can remember the ‘60s will know that, besides free love and pot, the ‘60s were also when Humanism became a dominant player in our denomination.

I was about ten years old when I decided that there was no God. The whole concept of an all-knowing, all-powerful god having as an opponent someone he created and brought into being just didn’t make any sense to me. I mean, how could this God create his own enemy and then not be able to defeat him. I’ve never understood it. To this day I still see God and the Devil as comic-book images, something that most young kids play with for a while and then discard.

I think one of the things that Unitarian children do is go out and test their belief systems. I did. In college I went to everything from Campus Crusade for Christ to the Bahais, Eastern, western, anything I could find. I even scared my parents by climbing into a bus and going off for a Moonie weekend. The Moonies were very calculated in their recruitment efforts: If you were a young, lust-filled male college student, they didn’t send another guy to tempt you, they sent women. What else could I do but go?

I did all of these things and came back pretty much believing what I had believed before. At 22 I was an atheist/Humanist. I thought that attending church in general was ridiculous and that Christianity specifically was a concept whose time had come and long gone.

I guess I’m not unusual in that I like my beliefs. I mean, they make sense to me! But challenging them is hard work. But every once in a while I manage to take them out for a little spin.

I had one notable test drive when I lived in Connecticut and had a substantial romance with Carl Jung. I loved the way he talked about the power of the unconscious and the layer of personality we all wear like a hat. I am still intrigued by his story of being a small child sitting on a rock in his back yard and questioning where the limits of his being started and the rock’s ended. In the end, I found that Jung’s thought only expanded my Humanism. He made me more aware of how powerful individual human beings are.

Right about that time, I walked into the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Bridgeport. There was a jazz band playing, the people were warm and welcoming -- a bunch of really nice people, who generally felt the same way I did about things. I was ready to sign the book the first day I walked into the place. The church in Bridgeport quickly became my community. In a way, I guess, that was challenging my beliefs too. In exchange for belonging to a community, I had to give up the idea that churches were ridiculous.

Anyway, things happened. I re-met the girl of my dreams, and about the time I would have been president of the Bridgeport congregation I ended up moving down here to be with Jamie.

I know all of the Southerners down here have a thing about us Yankees. I’ve heard the joke, more than once: What’s the difference between a bad Yankee and a damnyankee? A bad Yankee visits, and a damnyankee stays. Well, until Jamie decides to pack up and move, I’m staying.

And make no mistake about it, I am a Yankee. I love the New Hampshire mountains. I love the colors of the maple leaves turning in the fall. I am not afraid of driving in the snow, and I love swimming in cold ocean water.

But maybe the thing I love the most about New England is that people don’t expect you to talk about your church. You see, in Connecticut I never talked about attending a church. Down here, church is in your face all the time.

Another thing I’ve had to get used to is being a liberal in a land of conservatives. And that’s where Randy comes in.

When I moved here, I had no job, I knew two people in town, and I had just spent a bunch of money on video production equipment. I rented a small office over on Marshall Street and opened my doors for business.

While it’s a lot of fun having your own office, it takes more than that to have a business. So I joined a referral group that met every Thursday afternoon for lunch. And that is how I met Randy.

When we first met, we were all business. We talked about how we could find work for each other and the other people in the group. I’d see him at Chamber events and we’d chat about business and gossip about other people in the group. Like I said, he’s a personable guy.

Then one day during our meeting – it was right before the 2002 election – one of our members got up and urged everyone to vote Republican. Now in this person’s defense – because it wasn’t Randy – I think he truly thought that everyone in the room was a Republican. He thought that we were all nice, we all seemed reasonable, we all basically looked like him, so, of course, we must think like him.

Afterwards, Randy told me that he thought what this person had done was inappropriate.

Shortly after that, Randy came up to me and asked if I would be willing to talk politics with him. He said he figured out that I am a liberal, and by that time I knew that he was a conservative Christian. He said he was trying to understand liberals because every year he and his family went back to Ohio for Thanksgiving and they’d be sitting at the turkey dinner table, they’d say grace, and at the end of it his liberal brother-in-law would say something like, “And may the hellfires of damnation pour down on the heads of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich.”

This did not sit well with Randy, so he wanted me to be his sparring partner in preparation for that year’s Thanksgiving Day political debate. I didn’t like that idea at all. I saw no way there could be a happy ending. There were two issues that were terrifying. The first was abortion. When I lived in Connecticut, I volunteered as an escort at a clinic and saw, and heard, the way these so-called Christians treated the women entering the clinic. I’m not sure I have the words that can describe the hate and abuse these people assaulted those women with. To me the right to control your own body is non-negotiable.

And then there is Randy’s religion. Remember, I look at that issue like it’s a comic book.

Unfortunately, that still left a lot of territory to cover. I saw no way to get out of it. So I went.

We were pretty tentative at first. Randy was giddy with conservative Christian power. I learned that his most trusted news sources are, in order, Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, the Winston-Salem Journal sports page, Fox news (but not necessarily Bill O’Reilly) and the Republican National Committee home page.

Randy blames everything on liberals. He still believes that there is a “liberal bias” in the media. And if the Republicans actually did something and got called on it, it’s only because the liberal media were holding a witch-hunt.

He believes that there will still be weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. He believes that having a good Christian like John I’m-afraid-to-stand-in-front-of-a-partly-naked statue Ashcroft was just what America needed as attorney general. He believes that Linda Ronstadt should only sing the songs that made her famous and that she should keep her political views to herself.

On days when neither one of us was busy, we’d send long, long e-mails back and forth explaining and explaining and explaining. Neither one of us would budge an inch from our positions.

We went at it long and hard before the Bush-Kerry election. The closer the election got, the more convinced we both were that our side was right.

After the election, things got downright ugly – and I am probably the one who started it. For those first couple of weeks I could not stop myself from asking, “How could 53 million people be so stupid?”

We slammed each other for a couple of weeks, and then I sent him an e-mail saying I had to stop. But truthfully, I think Randy was writing the same e-mail to me – I just hit the send button before he did.

We’ve only exchanged political e-mails a few times since then, but we still chat a bit. We’re both baseball fans: He roots for the Red Sox; I root for the Mets. So we’d e-mail about that. I think there are two possibilities why we keep in touch. The first is that I am Randy’s Sunday School Project. His goal could be to bring me to Jesus. The other is that Randy actively considers that we are friends. And right now, I’m not sure how I feel about that.

One night when his wife was out of town, he asked me if I wanted to hang out with him. It was a Friday night. Jamie and I often go down to Fourth Street and listen to music. I thought about how it would be hanging out with Randy. For one thing, a lot of our friends are gay. And we see and enjoy hanging out with them at music. So there we’d all be – Jamie, me, our gay friends, and Randy, the guy who believes that gay people are sinners and that they are condemned to hell. Maybe I’m short-sighted, but it didn’t sound like fun to me.

I told him no. And because we’d already said so many mean things to each other, I also told him why. He said, “Well, I would have been okay with that. We believe that you love the sinner but condemn the sin.” Maybe I’m being too literal, but I really don’t understand how that works. How can you condemn and love at the same time?

Randy’s also told me that he’s thinking of going into politics, and I think he was genuinely hurt when I told him that not only would I not vote for him, I’d actively campaign against him. “But I’m a nice guy,” he said. “Sure,” I said, “but I disagree with every one of the things that you believe in.”

Another time he asked me why I didn’t ask him to play on our softball team. I mean, why would I want to do that? First of all, we mostly need women and not men, and second, although we may not all be liberals who play, most of us think pretty much alike. Still we’ve got non-Unitarians on our team – and Randy’s a pretty strong guy who can actually hit the ball over the fence – which is something no one else on our team can do. But I haven’t asked him to play.

All of this has really made me question where community building and outreach and acceptance all intersect.

And then [Rev.] Charlie has told us repeatedly that we need to love our enemies. Does that mean I have to love Randy?

You know, he is, for all intents and purposes, a pretty lovable guy. During the last couple of years he’s gone through a lot. His mother-in-law has died. His father has died. His wife has been through a bout with cancer. One of his boys received a bad concussion playing football. He’s changed jobs four times. And he’s still happy Randy.

I can honestly say I have compassion for him – especially when he told me that one of his sons had enlisted in the Marines before he had even graduated from high school.

There’s not a reason in the world I’m not real close friends with him.

You know, maybe Randy can be “saved” from his conservative Christian view of the world. I doubt it will be by me, but I know that he has been affected by interacting with me. He has said more than once, “It’s amazing to me that two smart guys can see the world so differently.”

And I know that he has changed me, not because there was ever any danger that I would swing over to Randy’s side, but because arguing with Randy led me to look a little deeper at why I believe the things I do.

I’ve discovered that I actually believe our Seven Principles.

It’s amazing how powerful a position it is to say that I don’t believe we should detain people indefinitely, because I believe in the use of justice, equity and compassion in all human relations; that I don’t believe we should kill people because I believe in the inherent dignity and worth of every person; or that I believe we are all part of an interdependent web of existence.

And I have learned that I come to this Fellowship for more than community.

And I suppose this also means I need to acknowledge and support Randy in his free and responsible search for truth and meaning. I’m just working on a way to do that that doesn’t include politics.

You know, I do have one more thought about leadership. I suppose I could have survived my move South and my discussions with Randy without having the Fellowship to come to. But it was much easier for me to have the Fellowship as a place I could go to to find people who think a little more like me than Randy does. Don’t get me wrong: I love the diversity of opinion we share here, but I also appreciate that most of us can agree on at least three or four of our UU principles without major discussion.

I said yes to serving as president of the Board because I believe we all need this place, and because I want to make sure that this place is here for the next person who needs it.

But like softball, all of us need to show up and pitch in, in order to play the game.

So go on out, read some of those posters you see around our building. Find yourself something to do that is fun, and exciting, and intriguing, and that maybe challenges your beliefs a little bit – because although that’s not always fun, it probably is good for you.