In his brief essay, “Notes for an Ethical Will,” my late colleague and friend Ed Harris urged his heirs to “appreciate the value of the great institutions of society – schools, museums, churches, concert halls, public buildings … are a legacy and heritage for you to enjoy, maintain, and improve.” He went on to admonish his children and then hoped for grandchildren to “participate constructively in your community’s and the nation’s political life; be a participant not a bystander. Share with others an appreciation of the benefits of a free society and the obligation of freedom. This includes its defense. Respect the rights and responsibilities of living in our democracy.”
We have become dismissive of institutions, a phenomenon that has been growing since the 1960s, although there have always been those who would undermine the institutions of society. While there have been institutions unworthy of our respect – the residential school system comes to mind – there are others that are essential to the well-being of democracy.
“The institutions that perhaps people thought were much more durable than they are now are crumbling,” observed Matt Galloway, host of The Current on CBC Radio One, a couple of days ago while interviewing Bob Rae, who recently retired as Canada’s permanent representative to the United Nations. In response, Bob Rae said: “we're looking at a generation of voters now, not only in Canada, but around the world, who are not just voters, but people who are participating in political life in some way. They don’t trust institutions and they don’t trust what they’re hearing. When they hear me on the radio, they don’t trust me. When they respond to my social media comments, they just tell me to get lost. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
At a time when liberal democracies are threatened by authoritarian and anarchistic forces that would dismantle and even destroy the institutions of democratic life, defending those institutions is essential. Now, I know that many people at both ends of the political spectrum fancy themselves as anarchists of a sort, revolutionaries ushering in a new order, but real anarchy creates a void that is almost invariably filled by some form of authoritarianism. Both leftists and libertarians are inevitably disappointed by the anarchies they promote, and history has yet to show us a progressive society that has arisen directly from the ashes of anarchy. Mark Zuckerberg’s much quoted but idiotic maxim to “move fast and break things” leads mostly to a lot of broken things, not some ideal future. Brokenness may inspire individuals to seek something better, but broken societies and the failed states that try to govern them don’t inspire the trust and confidence necessary to create things of lasting value.
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As James Luther Adams, the foremost Unitarian Universalist theologian of the last century, declared: “we deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation.” That is, we rely on institutions to embody and shape our democratic aspirations and ideals because a free society, a good society, doesn’t materialize out of thin air. That is the stuff of daydreams. A liberal democracy depends on a web of social institutions – some compulsory, most voluntary – that weave us together into a community that transcends family and tribe, which establish both liberties and responsibilities while enabling us to accomplish common goods we could not possible achieve on our own. The institutions of democracy are democracy incarnate.
Great societies generally emerge through evolution, not revolution, by refining established institutions so that they embody the greater good of all people. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that not every institution serves the common good, nor is every institution worthy of our respect and defence, but existing institutions are dismantled or replaced at our peril. And I fear that social injustice, disappointment, and creeping cynicism have coalesced to lead most people to misunderstand and underappreciate the institutions of society.
From “No Kings” rallies to the obstruction of ICE raids – by individuals, state governments, and local authorities alike – the resistance to the more draconian actions of the current regime in Washington is strong, vocal, and determined. But it must sustain itself against a threat to democracy that has become increasingly entrenched. Looking back to the Nazi era for an illustration of how quickly and completely authoritarianism can triumph in a liberal society, and how a disciplined resistance can stop it (or at least slow its progress), Timothy Snyder observes: “If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.”
So one way to defend institutions is actually to resist the efforts of those who seek to manipulate and mould them to their will. We defend the courts of law by turning to them for adjudication, even though their decisions may sometimes fail us. We defend the healthcare system by insisting that its practitioners honor the Hippocratic Oath, even when doing so pits them against the laws of the state. We defend free markets, such as they may actually exist, when we expect business leaders to pursue their own long-term interests in principled ways rather than seek short-term gain through pandering and outright bribery. We defend the public service when we rally to their support as they uphold the law and struggle to do their jobs without fear or favour.
“Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional,” says Snyder. “Then there is no such thing as ‘just following orders.’ If members of the professions confuse their specific ethics with the emotions of the moment, however, they can find themselves saying and doing things that they might previously have thought unimaginable.”
The resistance of people in their own fields of expertise and endeavour – lawyers and police officers, doctors and nurses, teachers and ministers, businesspersons and labour leaders, journalists and academics – all of these and every other vocational group can resist the fiats of authoritarian leaders, sometimes boldly and other times more quietly. “It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.”
Timothy Snyder challenges us to make the institutions of democracy our own “by acting on their behalf” – that is choosing an institution (or perhaps several institutions) that we consider essential to democratic life and making it our own cause, and investing ourselves in its wellbeing, taking its side in the battle to preserve decency.
As I listened to Bob Rae earlier this week, I realized that one of the institutions of democracy worth defending is the United Nations. Now, the UN is far from being a perfectly democratic institution, insofar as the individual people of the world are concerned, but it does represent the states of the world, not to mention our aspirations for a rules-based international order. It is deeply flawed, but it’s all that we have on a global scale, and at a time when it is challenged by imperialists, nationalists, and reactionaries of all sorts, it is worthy of our defence.
As Bob Rae noted, the UN “is made up of the member states. So every time you want the UN to do something, ask yourself the question, is that what I want my country to do? … And [while] the situations facing the UN have changed … the idea of having a multilateral, universal agency that represents all the world in all of its aspirations” remains a valuable thing.
Public broadcasting is another such institution worth defending. It is an institution that is organized a little differently on the two sides of the border. Ronald Reagan nearly destroyed the vibrant public broadcasting in the United States when his administration imposed rules of so-called fair play and did much to choke off its funding. Public broadcasting in the United States is something of a cooperative enterprise. Here in Canada, of course, we have the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a publicly owned enterprise that does a job similar to what national public radio and public television do in the United States. But here, the taxpayers own it through their government, or more precisely, the citizenry owns it. And despite all of its flaws and imperfections, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation continues to be a blessing in this society. It is one source of news that isn’t dependent upon private interests and advertising. It has a high standard of journalistic excellence. It is, overall, a great treasure for our society. There are perils, of course. There is always the risk that a malevolent government might seek to dictate the CBC’s editorial policy, but in the span of nearly a century, that hasn’t happened so far.
It might sound self-serving, but the religious community is one of the institutions that need defending, provided it’s not one that embraces some manifestation of theocracy. But many, if not most of the churches and synagogues and mosques in our society are places that celebrate democratic living – imperfectly, perhaps – and they are part of the richness of our society. Among other things, a church is a place where people can gather to develop the skills necessary to be resistance workers. Churches can host events that serve the public good. The civil rights movement in the United States and the voting rights movement were largely church initiatives. Religious communities are among those institutions that help to create a more democratic society.
Labour unions and professional associations are other institutions worthy of our defence. Whether they fight for the rights of their members, for working people in general, or seek to maintain the high standards and ethics of a particular vocation – and many do both – they are invaluable social institutions in a democratic society.
Naturally, we need to defend the courts of law, especially their impartiality, even though their judgments may sometimes disappoint them. And when their judgments do fall short of our aspirations and sense of propriety, then we support them best when we elect legislators who will enact laws that are worthy of our respect and worthy of the courts’ enforcement.
Ed Harris would have undoubtedly included our varied cultural institutions, represented by museums, concert halls, and public buildings. These are the shrines of the arts. It is through the arts – through drama, through music, through reading and writing – that we can enrich society through critique and refinement. And there are social clubs and service clubs that place us in close proximity with those we might otherwise consider strangers, even opponents.
And while it may not be an institution quite like the others I’ve mentioned, these days we are called to defend the institution of marriage, which sounds strange even to say out loud, but it’s true. Specifically, we are called to defend marriage equality against those who would roll back the legal definition of marriage to a time when it didn’t include same-sex couples – some, even, to a time when it didn’t include people of different races. While this may not be an immediate threat here in Canada, it is a real and present threat for our American neighbours, and as we all know, what happens in the United States has a way of infecting the body politic here in Canada. We have learned painfully that the Supreme Court of the United States can no longer be trusted to defend the human rights of all people against the demands of a noisy and bigoted minority, and there is good reason to worry that a court majority could emerge that would overturn the hard-won right to marriage equality.
I could go on, but I’ll rest here. What institutions are important to you? Which institutions are you prepared to invest your time in so that the prosper despite whatever adversities they may face. What price are you prepared to pay in defence of their work? These are questions we are compelled to face today because the institutions of democracy are under threat and, without us, many won’t survive. But with us, they may yet advance and even flourish.
“We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability,” cautions Timothy Snyder, “the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy ... We imbibed the myth of an ‘end of history.’ In doing so, we lowered our defences, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.”
“For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.”
A century ago, in the aftermath of the First World War, Unitarians were reminded that “the progress of [hu]mankind upward and onward forever,” which they had long proclaimed as an article of faith, was a myth. Progress isn’t inevitable and societies actually have a way of regressing in times of crisis and even times of indifference. History is not a one-way street, but rather an arduous path that includes setbacks, delays, and even U-turns. Each generation is called upon to restore and reframe democracy for itself, utilizing the institutions that already exist or establishing new institutions to fill the void. We live in a time when democracy is once again threatened. As people who affirm “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process” as a core principle – an act of faith – we must summon the courage to defend the institutions of democracy, for ourselves and for posterity
A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.
Works Cited
Matt Galloway, Interview with Bob Rae, The Current, CBC Radio One (November 27, 2025).
W. Edward Harris, A Religion of the Heart (Indianapolis: All Souls Unitarian Church, 1987).
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017).
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