Set Them Free: Religious Education Without Indoctrination, Paulo Freire, and the Sacred Freedom to Walk Away by Eric Hepburn

"If you love someone, set them free." - Sting

How can this way of putting Love at the Center, inform how we approach Religion as modern UU's? Not just in how we serve the adults in our community, but in how and what we teach our youth?

This service takes Sting's line as its heart anthem and asks what it demands of a congregation — in the religious education of children, and in the welcome of adults.

The sermon argues that mainstream religious education — in Christian denominations and, too often, in Unitarian Universalism — treats formation as indoctrination: cultivating a denominational identity deep enough that it's never questioned. Against that model stands Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of Freedom provides the Voice of Wisdom: respect for the autonomy and dignity of every person is an ethical imperative, not a favor. Education worthy of the name means trusting people enough to develop their own criteria.

So the aspiration for San Gabriel's young people is heretical on purpose: not that they grow up to seek out the nearest UU congregation by default, but that they leave here able to walk into any spiritual community and discern — to sense whether a place is spiritually alive, whether it practices welcome or merely performs it, whether it asks them to shrink or to expand. The same holds for visiting adults: this congregation is a flavor, not a superior brand, and everyone deserves a spiritual home where the language sounds like music — here or elsewhere.

Along the way: fitting in versus belonging (Brené Brown), why scarcity corrupts everything downstream — turning hospitality into recruitment and growth into butts-in-seats — and why covenant is only sacred when people are truly free to walk away. Grasping kills; open hands receive.

https://youtu.be/egwG5Ci4aYs

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The Pulpiteer Podcast Full Transcript

Lightly edited for readability: transcription errors corrected, filler words reduced, punctuation repaired. Bracketed items are editorial.

[00:00:00] Eric Hepburn (host intro): Welcome to the thirtieth episode of the second season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode. Today's episode is called "Set Them Free." It is my reflections on how to approach ministry, in both youth and adult contexts, from a perspective that values and honors diversity and pluralism deeply. If you feel like it, you can pause and pull up the Sting song "If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free," which is my heart anthem for this service. Let's begin with our Great World House segment, and then the Voice of Wisdom, delivered this week by Woody Hibbard.

The Great World House — Eric Hepburn

We pause to honor this Great World House, of which we are a part — lifting up the needs, the hopes, and the voices beyond these doors.

Here we are, in the shadow of Easter and Passover, Ramadan and spring equinox. There is much and more going on in the world out there. Some of the members of those religions are using them as pretenses for dehumanizing — and committing acts of unspeakable violence and destruction against each other. So much of what's going on is frightening and disheartening.

Yet the earth keeps spinning. And here, in this deep season of spring, we get back new images of Earth as she appears, rising over the lunar surface — reminding us of home. So we've got a lot of religions, all celebrating spring in their particular way, and all honoring that which feels universal to those of us who call this planet home. Spring has come again, with her new life, her new possibilities, and the invitation to shuck off old habits that no longer serve. Amen.

A Voice of Wisdom — read by Woody Hibbard

Let's enter a still place within, opening our hearts and minds to receive this Voice of Wisdom. After the words are spoken, we will breathe together in silence, preparing ourselves for the Word unfolding among us.

Today's Voice of Wisdom comes from Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of Freedom:

"Respect for the autonomy and dignity of every person is an ethical imperative, and not a favor that we may or may not concede to each other. My respect, as a teacher, for the student — for their curiosities and fears — demands of me the cultivation of humility and tolerance. How can I respect the curiosity of the students if, lacking genuine humility and an understanding of the role of the unknown in the process of reaching the known, I am afraid of revealing my own ignorance? How can I consider myself to be an educator, especially in the context of open-minded and enlightened teaching practice, if I cannot learn to live with what is different? How can I be an educator if I do not develop within myself a caring and loving attitude toward the student?"

The Sermon: Set Them Free — Eric Hepburn

If you love someone, set them free.

Like all deep wisdom and good advice: easy to say, and incredibly difficult to practice.

I've wanted to preach this sermon for a while, but it didn't really crystallize for me until I was in an interview with our new RE guide, Jessica, and Candice — and I was trying to explain, to someone who didn't have a lot of experience with Unitarian Universalists or Unitarian Universalism, what it is we're trying to do here that's different from what they might have experienced in other church settings. But also, I would argue, different from what is happening, perhaps, in the mainstream of Unitarian Universalist practice.

Let me address that last part first, just a little. What is happening in the mainstream of Unitarian Universalist practice, in my opinion, is what we could describe as an exercise of conventional wisdom. In other words: this is how we've always done church; this is how church ought to be done; we are following the forms. Now, you might notice from my tone of voice that when I attach the word "conventional" to the word "wisdom," I'm often suggesting that the latter part of the construction gets lost under the weight of the first — that our honoring of convention sometimes becomes a dogmatic practice that cuts us off from seeing the wisdom that needs to emerge from a real moment, or from changing circumstance. And I think that is the case here.

Unitarian Universalism in the mainstream is doing what I think most Christian denominations do, which is: they treat religious education as a process of indoctrination. We are going to teach you to think like we think, and to be carbon copies of what we think is right. We're going to form you. The word "formation" is commonly used in religious contexts for this purpose. My objection to the term is that it thinks it already knows how you should end up. I'm not sure we're that good yet — that we know how people should end up.

So a lot of the emphasis is on developing in our children a UU identity. We want them to identify as UUs. And for me, this is simply an echo of the way Christian denominations function in our culture — which, like I said, is indoctrination: I want you to grow up internalizing our community identity as one of your core identities, so that you will never question it, and so that when you move on in life, you will stay devout to our sect.

Now — I think you can tell, by the way I'm speaking of this, that I don't think this strategy aligns with UU theological commitments to open-heartedness, open-mindedness, and so on. And so in this conversation, where I was trying to explain to Jessica that indoctrination was not our goal, I was forced to answer the question: if not that, then what? If our goal is not to indoctrinate good little UUs — and I would argue, from my own life experience, that we have seen in both the Christian sects and the UU sects that deep indoctrination doesn't tend to work anyway. It doesn't tend to create loyal brand advocates. It tends to create people who, once they break out into the freedom of college and the life after, tend to say: "yeah, I don't know. That was kind of a mess. I think not."

The reading we heard this morning was Paulo Freire. He has a different take on what education is supposed to be. It's not about indoctrination. It means trusting someone enough for them to develop their own criteria.

So here's the story — the thing that came out in this meeting that, when I said it out loud, I knew I was ready to preach this sermon. It sounded like this.

Here's what I want, for any youth who go through our program. I want them to be kids who, on Sunday morning, wake up and say: yes — I want to go. Not "just like school and everything else in my life, this is another thing I'm made to do." That fundamentally shifts how we do RE here, compared to how it's done in other places. Because there are a lot of places where it's just another day of school for kids — another set of grown-ups saying, "this is what you should do, this is how you should be, here's what compliance looks like." And we're not doing that here. That is explicitly not what we're building. I've preached from this pulpit that play is the most natural form of learning, and that's what we practice here: play, and exploration, and relationship navigation — that's where the deep lessons get learned.

But here's my aspiration for these kids. They come here, and at some point they're going to grow up, and they're going to go off and have a job or a marriage or a career or a college or whatever they're going to do, and they're going to fly the coop. And when they land in some new town, here's what I want for them. I don't want them to search for the nearest UU congregation and, just by default, go there.

And that is a certain kind of heresy.

Now — I would be deeply troubled about my own performance if they didn't give the UU church in that location a shot. I'd feel like I had failed on some level. But what I want is for them to develop the skills, while they're here, so that wherever they land, they can go visit a couple of different churches, and they have the skills and the awareness and the presence to notice which one of those places is the right place for their next phase of spiritual development. That's what I care about. That's what I want each one of those little creatures over there to get out of what we do: the ability to show up in a place and detect whether that place is spiritually alive and nurturing for them.

What does diversity mean? It means we don't all need the same thing. So I can't teach them a formula — "here's the checklist for a good church." It doesn't work like that. But if I can teach them how to pay attention to their own body, and their own feelings, and their own thoughts, and to cultivate their own spirit — they can show up somewhere and know: this is where I'm supposed to be. Not forever. Not because its identity politics line up with mine — but because I can sense that this is the place where my spirit needs to be fed, and will be fed. This is a space where I can be courageous and brave — a space safe enough for that. There are people here willing to hold space for me, so I don't always have to be the strong one. I don't always have to have my armor on. Maybe, when I pull up in the parking lot, I can take the armor I usually wear — to work, and in the other places where it keeps me safe — and I can take that armor off, and leave it in the car, and walk into a sanctuary.

Walk into a sanctuary. Because — and you know this from your own life experience, or at least most of you do — not every sanctuary is a sanctuary. There are some places that call themselves that which are deep residuals and perpetuators of trauma. And I hate to say it out loud, but yes: there are some UU churches that fit that description. There is no denomination, there is no religion, that is free from this. It doesn't matter whether it's a Buddhist temple or a sangha or — it doesn't matter what religion it is. They're not all equally spiritually healthy. And because we're all weird and individual and unique, their way of doing spirit-and-worship stuff doesn't always mesh with what we need, or how we do that work, or the phase of our own development we're at.

And in having this meeting, and articulating this to our new RE guide, I realized: it's the exact same way I feel about grown-up church.

If you're a visitor, and you walk in that door — yes, I am hoping that the way we do this resonates for you, and that you have just walked in and had your first day of finding a new spiritual home. But let me be really clear: I am not hoping that because I need one more number in my membership book. I'm hoping it for you. Because I believe everybody deserves that. Everybody deserves a spiritual home. Everybody deserves a place in their life that is a true sanctuary. And we are not the right fit for every human being in Georgetown. We're not better than every other religious community out there. We are a flavor. That's it. We're a flavor.

Now — I hope we're a deep flavor. So that if you've got your "is this a healthy place that can support me spiritually?" radar tuned in, the answer to that question is yes — and you can move on to the "is it the right fit for me?" question. Because the first litmus test should be: is this place spiritually healthy? And the second: is it a good fit for me, and where I'm at on my life journey, and my favorite symbols for understanding all of this? There are folks who really love biblical Christian symbology, and folks who are uniquely drawn to Buddhist symbology, or Hindu symbology — and that's all good. If you find a spiritually healthy place that also happens to speak the same language you speak, so you don't have to translate? That's fantastic. You deserve that. I want that for you. If this place is that place for you: hallelujah. Welcome. If it's not — I don't need you to stay here. I don't want you to stay here. I want you to go find what you deserve. I want you to go find a place that can be a spiritual home for you, where they speak a language that sounds like music to your ears, that resonates with the deepest longings of your heart. That's what you deserve. That's what our kids deserve. And that's what we want to build here at San Gabriel UU.

And that's why we are the heretics — heretical, if you will. Gotta keep it heretical. You know, there's a reason they almost always call prophets heretics: they like to say things that are uncomfortable.

Which brings me back to the idea that we might turn this into some sort of assembly line — another way of circling back to the education problem, and Paulo Freire. The traditional educational model in this country — developed in the pre- and post-war years, developed as a result of industrialization — was one-size-fits-all: if you can conform, as a young person, to the expectations of the system, we will pass you through, and then you can go out and get a job, having normalized certain types of behavioral exploitation. Which we appreciate.

Now — in ways that do not surprise me, our congregation attracts a wide variety of neurodiverse folks. On the one hand, you could say: that's weird; why do we attract those people? On the other hand, you could say: other places are running on this conventional model, where your job is to fit in, not to belong. If you want more distinction on that, you can go read some of Brené Brown's writing on fitting in versus belonging. Fitting in is conforming to somebody else's stuff at the cost of your own integrity. Belonging is being able to show up as you are, and be loved and accepted. That's what we want here: you show up as you are, and are loved and accepted. And we accept that within you is a natural desire to learn and grow — and, in the same way that we all get stuck in life, a natural desire to figure out how to get unstuck when we get stuck, so we can keep moving and growing and flowing.

Some of us, who grew up with wise elders, do that work so we can honor those teachers in our lives — so we can become, for others, the wise elders we experienced. Some of us, who had a dearth of wise elders in our lives, are trying to figure out how to become wise elders because we know our kids deserve better than we got. Whatever your motivation: that natural desire to do it — to grow into something beautiful and complex that is a source of fecundity for your community — is a natural desire. One that sometimes our egos tell us is not possible. One that culture would like you to believe is a fool's errand: why don't you just get comfortable, put on your blinders, and make some money at somebody else's expense, so you can have your creature comforts? I'll try not to turn this into a sermon on the invisible hand as a substitute for God — but it's an interesting line of thought, for the Adam Smith scholars in the room.

So — we've talked a little about this church trap. When a church comes to this work from a place of scarcity, it gets concerned with attracting numbers, keeping people in the pews, that kind of thing. And that corrupts everything downstream. It turns religious education into denominational catechism. It turns hospitality into recruitment. It makes growth mean butts in seats rather than spiritual maturity. That's the big one, for me: butts in seats, rather than spiritual maturity. I'd rather have a congregation of five, really on the path, than a congregation of five hundred where nobody can find their way. UU congregations aren't immune to domestication just because we don't have a creed. Often we've replaced doctrinal conformity with cultural conformity — and the effect is the same: people learn to fit in, rather than learning how to discern.

And so this Sting song is about that. If you love someone, set them free. What I love about it is that it also keeps us honest. Because there's a narrative in church-world out there that goes something like this: you do all this indoctrination work, and you indoctrinate the kids, and then they leave and they don't come back — maybe we should indoctrinate them harder. When the truth is: if we teach them to sense the spiritual aliveness and healthiness of community and relationship better and deeper than we did, they become the litmus test for whether we're living our own values. And then, when they don't come back — or if they don't — instead of blaming them, we can look at ourselves and ask: are we practicing as deeply as we need to? If they can't find home here as adults, it might not be their failing. It might be ours. And not our failure, in the past, to stick the burrs of identity deeper into their being — our failure, in the present, to be spiritually alive enough for them to get something out of showing up.

Can you tell the difference between a community that performs welcome and one that practices it? Can you sense when a community's theology serves the people, versus serving the institution? As a spiritual seeker, do you know what your own non-negotiables are — what a spiritual home must have for you to grow there? Can you recognize when a community is asking you to shrink rather than expand?

These are learnable skills. We don't teach them, because teaching them means admitting that we might not pass the test. Freire again: how can I respect the curiosity of the students if I am afraid of revealing my own ignorance? The congregation that teaches discernment has to be willing to be discerned about. That's not only vulnerability — it's integrity.

Here's what institutional survival logic can't compute: communities that hold on tightest lose the most people. And communities that genuinely say, "we want you to find what's right for you, even if it's not us," are the ones people trust enough to stay in. This is basic relational psychology, and basic theology. Grasping kills. Open hands receive.

So what do we, as a spiritual community, do with this? What if our RE program explicitly included how to evaluate a spiritual community — as a set of classes and practices and skills, a learning objective for all ages? What if we told our young people: we're going to teach you what a healthy congregation looks like, and we're going to be honest that we don't always get it right? What if we told visiting adults: we don't want you to join because we're UU — we want you to join because this specific community serves your spiritual growth, and we want you to keep asking questions even after you join?

That's a radically different posture. It's also, frankly, what covenant means. Covenant is at the core of UU life, and it says that the community is made by the promises we make to one another — the promises we are willing to keep. And a promise like that can only mean something when people are truly free to walk away.

That freedom to walk away — the commitment to protecting that freedom — is what makes covenant sacred.

Amen.

[00:28:40] Eric Hepburn (host outro): Until next time — thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can help others find it by liking and subscribing. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can make a donation at sangabrieluu.org/give. The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted on Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew this week was Frank Sanders, Rob Berthold, Keith Hutchinson, and Andrea McDaniel. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn. See you soon.