Last weekend, millions of people took to the streets for another No Kings rally. What struck me wasn’t the size, though it was enormous. It was the shape of it.
Andrea Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has described coalitions as “constellations of micromovements,” distinct stars that only form a recognizable shape when you zoom out. This peaceful protest was one of those moments of zoom.
If you tried to diagram that crowd, it wouldn’t be a single circle. It would be a Venn diagram with dozens of overlapping rings: healthcare workers, immigrants, veterans, teachers, retirees, environmental advocates, people of faith, and secular humanists and freethinkers. Some of those circles barely touch. Some of those people disagree with each other about things that matter deeply. Yet, they united for the No Kings protest which included protesting Christian nationalism, also known as separation of church and state. It made me think about divisions I have seen within the secular community. How do we find the balance of perfection over progress? Is there an umbrella we can all share?
Last month I wrote about Hubert Harrison: an important voice for racial equality.
Hubert Harrison and Booker T. Washington were two people with the same foundational goal, but different strategies for getting there. Instead of working together, one tried to destroy the other, turning a philosophical disagreement about strategy into deliberate personal devastation and destitution. They could not share the umbrella.
The women’s suffrage movement (women’s right to vote) shows us a different approach.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were the partnership at the heart of American suffrage for decades. Stanton once said Anthony “forged the thunderbolts” while she “fired them.” And yet they did not agree on everything, not even close.
Stanton believed organized religion was one of the deepest roots of women’s oppression. She published The Woman’s Bible, arguing that scripture had been used to justify women’s subordination and needed to be challenged head-on if women were ever to be truly free.
Anthony took a different view. Raised Quaker, later Unitarian, (a tradition now carried forward by Unitarian Universalists) she was pragmatic, rather than combative, about religion. She believed the movement needed the broadest possible coalition, including religious women, and that attacking the Bible directly would alienate exactly the mainstream allies they needed. She wanted the movement focused on one thing: the vote.
Neither tried to destroy the other. They sometimes disagreed, yet they remained partners. And near the end of her life, Anthony told those who had worked alongside her: “Failure is impossible.” The movement won.
Susan B. Anthony also said something worth keeping close: “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” This from a woman who chose, strategically, not to make religion the center of the fight. She knew exactly what she thought. She also knew what the moment required.
Two people with real disagreement sharing the umbrella to make progress.
What room do you have under your umbrella?
This is the part I keep coming back to. We are in a moment where collaboration is more important than ever, even with people (or political candidates) we may not agree with 100%. Supporting political policies that separate church and state may find you voting for a presbyterian seminarian who advocates for this separation with religious reasons. A coalition you may have never thought you would join, an umbrella you may never have thought you would share.
The umbrella is big enough. There is room for all of us under it. You do not have to agree with every other person standing here to belong here and make them belong too.
And that is not a weakness. Stanton and Anthony showed us it doesn’t have to be. The freethought tradition has always had this tension running through it, and the people who advanced it furthest were not the ones who resolved the tension, but the ones who refused to let it become a reason for destruction.
Washington and Harrison’s story is the cost of forgetting that. Stanton and Anthony are the model for remembering it.
Which is why I keep coming back to the pansy.
Pansies were first cultivated around 1812 from wildflowers called viola tricolor. The word comes from the French pensée — meaning thought. To wear a pansy was to signal that you were a thinker, that your conclusions were your own. The freethought community has claimed it as a symbol since at least the 1800s. At the 1920 International Freethinker Congress in Prague, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner noted that the streets were full of people wearing the Congress badge alongside the pansy — openly, proudly, in public.
The pansy doesn’t represent agreement. It never did. It represents the commitment to think — and to let others do the same.
That feels like exactly the right symbol for this moment.
Want to learn more?
About the secular umbrella: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfcwTiOGnig
James Talirico: Separation of church and state as a sacred boundary
Umbrella by Rihanna https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvBfHwUxHIk
Don’t miss Tom Holland’s version on Lip Sync Battle
Discover more from Betsy DeVille
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