Intro: Our Midwest Heritage

Adapted from a sermon delivered January 25, 2026 at First Unitarian Church of Omaha. (Video available below or on YouTube here.)
 
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“The American Midwest was the most democratic place in the world as it took shape in the nineteenth century.” So writes Jon Lauck, in his 2022 history of the Midwest in the 1800s, titled The Good Country. Again, “The American Midwest was the most democratic place in the world as it took shape in the nineteenth century.”
 
I’m not sure if it feels ironic or prescient that I scheduled this topic for a week when our democracy is dramatically under assault in the Midwest. In recent days I have been taking in some of the news, and particularly watching the testimony of colleagues who either serve in the Twin Cities area, or who traveled there in support of the local people late this past week. One voice of testimony came from Mel Duncan. He’s co-founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce, a major unarmed peacekeeping NGO. Duncan just returned from Gaza to his home in the Twin Cities. Nonviolence Radio interviewed him about what he is seeing in Minnesota now, and how he makes sense of it.
 
Duncan said, “Little did I know that I would be leaving one occupied territory in Palestine and be returning to my home in the Twin Cities, to another occupied territory… Just as the settlers on the West Bank and the Israeli police backed up by the Israeli army patrol the area with impunity in the West Bank – I was in the Jordan Valley [Duncan said], where the settlers would attack at will, the shepherds and the farmers, and would take their land and beat people – that’s what’s happening on the streets of St. Paul and Minneapolis right now, where they are attacking primarily people of color and taking them indiscriminately off the streets, with impunity, no accountability. Taking them to holding cells in federal buildings near the airport and taking them to points unknown.”

Duncan went on to describe some of the most egregious things that have happened, like ICE using an eight-year-old child as bait to draw out his father, before capturing them both, who are here on asylum. Worse things happened yesterday, after the interview I heard with Duncan.
 
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the administration has chosen Minnesota for this show of force. Though I doubt they anticipated how effectively the community would respond. Not only are the attacking a winter people in the winter, they are attacking Midwesterners who are caring neighbors, who are practical people, and who have been building their skills since George Floyd and before.
 
Mel Duncan told Nonviolence Radio, “We’re not waiting for the story of nonviolence to happen here. It is happening. I’ve lived here for over fifty years, and I’ve never seen the Twin Cities so well organized on multiple levels. There are thousands of people who are acting, who are being creative and are carrying out nonviolent activities in very creative ways.”

​He describes taking groceries to scared neighbors, driving people to school and work, providing a protective presence in neighborhoods and outside schools – just what Duncan himself was doing in the West Bank – supporting immigrant owned businesses, mass demonstrations, and on.
 
The past is prologue. Jon Lauck, the historian tells us, “The old Midwest could be a reservoir of idealism and hope if we knew its history… Maybe this knowledge will bolster our spirits, provide a light, and help guide us out of the current darkness and loneliness and cynicism.”
 
It is with that hope that I share with you today on the topic of “Our Midwest Heritage” – both our heritage as Midwesterners in general, and specifically as Unitarian Universalists in this region. This is the first in an occasional sermon series on the topic, and lays the groundwork for the series.
 
And by the way, if you’re not from the Midwest, it doesn’t matter – you’re here now, add yourself to the mix. If you are new to Unitarian Universalism, likewise, we’re so glad you’re here!
 
Let’s start with culture. Here I turn to the work of Colin Woodard, in his 2001 book, American Nations. His thesis is that the United States consists of eleven different regions with distinct cultures that have shaped our history and continue to shape our present. Here is a map showing the locations of those eleven regions or nations.

Image: American Nations - Colin Woodward and Tufts Magazine

Eastern Nebraska and most of Iowa are in the Midlands region. Its cultural roots go back to Philadelphia, and reflects the aspiration to be a model society rooted in Quaker religion and culture. It was egalitarian, rejecting hierarchy in religion, in gender relations, and suspicious of slavery. Germans from other religious sects immigrated to Pennsylvania later. They shared the Quakers’ moral and religious objection to slavery and melded into the Midlands culture.
 
As they spread westward into the Heartland, Midlands people brought with them a pluralistic culture. Woodard writes that “the Midland Midwest would develop as a center of moderation and tolerance, where people of many faiths and ethnicities lived side by side, largely minding their own business.”
 
As the map shows, southern portions of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri are part of the culture of Greater Appalachia. I’m more interested for our purposes in the region to the north of us, Yankeedom. The upper Midwest, including our friends in Minnesota, traces its cultural roots to New England, most influenced by its English heritage and Puritan roots. Woodard explains that “The Yankees represent an extreme example of Public Protestantism, a religious heritage that emphasizes collective salvation and the social gospel.”
 
Despite continuing waves of immigration since the regional cultures of the U.S. formed, those regional cultures stuck, and continue to feed into cultural and political divides. Analysis of recent elections supports this. In later waves, immigrants favored regions most welcoming to them – one of two that, Woodard wrote, “had been explicitly multicultural since [its] foundation” was the Midlands. “The American model of cultural pluralism originates in the traditions of … two nations” – New Netherlands (what became greater New York City) and the Midlands.

I saw fascinating parallels as I explored Jon Lauck’s history of the 1800s Midwest in The Good Country, and the development of Unitarianism as it moved westward in that same period. They are all intertwined, really, but those parallels involve democratic cultures, both politically and culturally; an embrace of learning throughout the lifespan as a core cultural characteristic; a flatter social class structure; and pragmatic attitudes out here on the prairie.

Lauck traces how the democratic culture of the Midwest starts with the legal charter for the region. He writes that that charter “yielded freestanding sovereign states that ensured the rights of citizens and contributed to the steady erosion of various forms of aristocratic privilege persisting elsewhere around the world.” Further, “a mixture of Christian denominations instilled a basic morality but also fostered a degree of pluralism and toleration and theological freedom not present in other polities dominated by one religious sect.”
 
State charters were created democratically, each one including a detailed bill of rights. Lauck writes, “These democratic documents were reinforced by a culture held open by settlers from varying regions and ethnic groups who embraced egalitarian norms and eagerly sought to participate in democratic life and an economic system open to all comers.”
 
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which established the region, explicitly provided for public education. Each township had to set aside land for schools. Per Lauck, “Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas saw enrollment of over 90 percent of school-age children by the end of the nineteenth century and ‘led the entire nation at that date’”; the Midwest “’produced the most literate people in the nation.’”
 
Book culture was big in the Midwest too, and not just in schools, with major book publishers, bookstores, and print publications thriving. Libraries, Lauck notes, “were common public projects. The Midwest would later see the building of more Carnegie libraries than any other region.” There was also a lively lecture circuit – the original self-help culture, especially popular with “the young and ambitious.”
 
Higher education also flourished in the Midwest – one historian described the region as “thickly strewn with colleges and universities.” Like the schools for younger ages, the colleges incorporated character development and vocational subjects like agriculture, as well as being co-ed from the start. Many colleges had religious affiliations and strong social agendas related to social reform. Land grant universities feature here too.
 
The social life of Midwesterners in the 1800s included not only church programs and school activities, but book groups, literary societies, civic clubs, and improvement efforts.
 
As its regional culture and identity was formed, the Midwest contrasted with both the South and the Northeast. It was a land of educated, civically engaged people, most of whom, as Lauck put it, “were farmers who prospered on the fertile lands of the region and lived in rough equality with their neighbors.” Scholar Jess Gilbert concluded that “late nineteenth-century rural Midwest was substantially a one-class society.”
 
That made it different from the slave-holding South, the industrial northeast, and Europe. All of those were more aristocratic than the middle class Midwest. Lauck reports that “Over half of the Union’s troops would come from the Midwest, even though the region constituted only a quarter of the country’s population… the Midwest provided nearly all of Lincoln’s generals and most of his cabinet.”

​Turning back to Woodards’ groups in American Nations, the Midlands formed a bloc with Yankees and New Netherlands against a southern bloc (or Dixie bloc) in causes like the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Despite its frequent alliance with New England, though, the Midwest developed its own identity, and pushed back against “feared hegemony of the East” in culture. That included distinct Midwestern voices in arts and literature, appreciation for the natural wonders of the region, and more.
 
Lauck explains, “Midwesterners saw their region as different from the aristocratic Northeast and the feudal South. This pride of place and sense of identity fostered a healthy desire to resist outside domination.”
 
All of these qualities are on display in Minneapolis right now. The pragmatic ways people are helping their neighbors, across any lines of class or culture – and how Minnesotans and their allies are embracing democracy and civic spirit at the most local level, school by school and block by block.

Marchers carrying a giant constitution through Minneapolis on 1-30-26 (photo from Minnesota Cop Block)

Resisting outside domination – as armed and masked ICE agents swarm through neighborhoods, that phrase is thrust into the present. Resisting outside domination. One of our Unitarian Universalist clergy who traveled to Minneapolis for a day of action described just yesterday being boxed in by ICE, crowded into a local store, unable to get out. Lucas Hergert, who serves our congregation in Deerfield, Illinois, wrote “They are sending buses to arrest us and prepping rubber bullets. Deploying tear gas. Beating us with truncheons… This is America now. It’s just the start. Choose your side.”
 
It feels surreal to me, like I’ve been transported back to the era of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, these images of violence coming across screens, and reports of what is happening on the ground from activists working so hard to de-escalate tense situations and prevent harm. Another colleague, Oscar Sinclair, formerly serving in Lincoln and now in St. Paul, was one of the clergy arrested at the Twin Cities airport on Friday. (He was released and is okay.)
 
Our forebears came to a point where they had to choose a side in the Civil War of their day, and again in the Civil Rights Movement of their day. Domination is on the move again, and it is time to resist.

That brings us back to the Unitarian Universalist part of this pattern in our Midwest history. I’m going to draw here from Freedom Moves West, a history of the westward movement of Unitarianism published in 1952. It was written by Charles H. Lyttle, who briefly served this very congregation, around 1920, before becoming seminary faculty.
 
I’m going to focus on one particular Unitarian who is one of my heroes. Someone posed the question at the Ask the Minister service a few weeks about what historical Unitarians or Universalists should people know more about. Well one of them, for me, is Jenkin Lloyd Jones.
 
Jones grew up in Wisconsin and knew he wanted to become a Unitarian minister someday. He went to Meadville theological school, then based in Meadville, Pennsylvania. (Hmm, Midlands.) Meadville would later move to Chicago, which is where it was when I attended seminary there. As I describe Jenkin Lloyd Jones’ service to our faith in the Midwest, see how many parallels you can spot with what I’ve already shared about the region. 

Early in his ministry, Jones championed religious education. Per Lyttle, Jones “abandoned the catechetical question-answer memorizations, as well as the ‘preachy’ story lessons,” instead favoring a more interactive, practical, and character-development approach that paired “the best of universal secular culture with religious ideals.” He expanded adult activities too, including a Mutual Improvement Club. The model Jones advocated for religious education was well received by Unitarians, especially in the Western Conference. (The word Western in Western Conference is in relation to New England – it was mainly what we now call the Midwest, although Unitarian churches were also started in this period in Denver and on the west coast.)
 
Tensions with the American Unitarian Association back in Boston, which was subsidizing clergy in the West – and potentially excluding those it perceived as radicals – led the Western Conference to assert its independence. By funding its own missionary work, the Conference could continue its efforts, unhindered by the Eastern establishment. Jones had championed this idea, and his peers appointed him the first leader of this work.
 
As mission secretary, Lyttle writes, “Jones visited distressed churches, dormant churches, isolated groups of radicals, liberals that aspired to become church societies, gatherings of delegates to form state conferences.” He was frugal, resourceful, diligent, and passionate for the cause of liberal religion in the Midwest.
 
Under Jones’ leadership, the number of active societies (churches) blossomed, debt dropped, more state conferences of Unitarian churches were formed, and the power of the Western (Midwestern) Conference in the denomination grew. To the point that the AUA in Boston declared their confidence and impartial support for the work of the Western Conference and the ministers placed there.
 
Jones was not only a pragmatist, but a feminist as well – another reason he’s one of my UU heroes. He supported the leadership of women on church boards, denominational leadership, as speakers, and then as ministers. Known as the Iowa Sisterhood, these women ministers started in Iowa and were concentrated there, but expanded into other parts of the Midwest and beyond. 

Scholar Holley Ullbrich describes them thus:  “The women of the Iowa Sisterhood generally approached ministry differently from their male counterparts, with less emphasis on the intellectual Sunday sermon and more focus on pastoral care and social ministry within the community. These women clergy were also more egalitarian and more open to experimentation. In that respect, their churches reflected a frontier culture that was less anchored to tradition than congregations in the Northeast.”
 
Champions of the freethinking Western attitude were, Lyttle writes, “like Jones, … social radical[s] in fidelity to the long Channing-Parker tradition in American Unitarianism, which antedated by decades the Social Gospel of Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, [as well as] Christian Socialism.”
 
Humanitarian work by Unitarians in the Western Conference included addressing poverty (including impoverishment of indigenous people), humane treatment of animals, temperance, women’s rights, and support for immigrants and black Americans migrating northward – like the story we heard earlier about Jane Addams and Hull House in Chicago.   

Jane Addams speaks to visitors to the Hull House in 1935. (Photo in public domain, accessed at picryl.com.)

Beyond the Western Unitarian Conference and his role in fostering the spread of liberal religion westward, Jenkin Lloyd Jones is best known for organizing the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Open curiosity toward other faiths was developing in Western Unitarianism alongside religious humanism. Humanists focused on human worth and human capability to improve life, with particular concern for social injustice and remedies. They exhibited a quality of “spiritual democrats” who respect people regardless of atheism, agnosticism or theism. Lyttle notes that another aspect of the dawning humanism was “appreciation of truth in non-Christian religions.”
 
I’ve slipped in a number of teasers today, for future installments of the Midwest Heritage series. More to come on the role of women in Midwest culture and Midwestern liberal religion, racial failures and advances (particularly in relation to both African Americans and indigenous peoples), other social reforms, and religious humanism, as well as the Universalist side of our UU family tree in the Midwest.

​The through-line I want to convey, to start with, is that the geographic expansion of Unitarianism coincided with the expansion of the tradition’s identity in theology, class and culture.

Unitarianism had emerged in New England, back in the 1820s, when folks who pushed back against narrow theological thinking and rigid creeds were pushed out of what is now Congregationalism (United Church of Christ). The boundaries of liberal religion were subsequently tested by humanism, the role of women, and world religions. And the Western Conference was where this tension in Unitarianism most palpably played out – both within the Conference, but especially between these more expansive-minded, less class-bound Unitarians in the (Mid)west and the Eastern Unitarian establishment.
 
Unitarian Universalism would not be as we know it today if not for the ways that people of pioneering spirit – people embracing Midwestern culture – stretched it.
 
My invitation to you is to lean into these qualities that are so Midwestern – and so Midwest Unitarian – as our moment in history calls us to do.

• How can we carry forward the rich heritage of democracy, in politics and culture?
  
• How can we support continued access to the kind of education and critical thought on which functioning democracy depends?
  
• How can we build alliances across social classes and create a flatter economic structure, or at least one without poverty inescapably built in?
  
• How can we use our Midwestern pragmatism in service of our values of pluralism, justice, equity, generosity?

 
Let us awaken both our caring Midwestern culture and our broad religious sensibilities. Let us draw upon our down-to-earth, democratic heritage as we resist outside domination.
 
Can I get an Amen?
 
Amen, and blessed be.

This is the full service in which the above sermon was delivered. The Time for All Ages, telling the story of Dangerous Jane (Addams), begins around 11 minutes in; the sermon around 30:20.

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Key sources for today’s sermon:  
1 - American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard  (2011)
2 - The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest 1800-1900 by Jon K. Lauck (2022)  
3 - Freedom Moves West: A History of the Western Unitarian Conference 1852-1952  by Charles H. Lyttle  (1952, 2006)