In what do we ground the affirmation that all persons have inherent worth and dignity and what might our communities look like if we live more fully into this affirmation?

The Unitarian Universalist author Rebecca Ann Parker provides the following reflections on the UU First Principle:

Reverence and respect for human nature is at the core of Unitarian Universalist (UU) faith. We believe that all the dimensions of our being carry the potential to do good. We celebrate the gifts of being human: our intelligence and capacity for observation and reason, our senses and ability to appreciate beauty, our creativity, our feelings and emotions. We cherish our bodies as well as our souls. We can use our gifts to offer love, to work for justice, to heal injury, to create pleasure for ourselves and others.

“Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy,’ the great twentieth-century Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote. Unitarian Universalists affirm the inherent worth and dignity of each person as a given of faith—an unshakeable conviction calling us to self-respect and respect for others.

https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/principles/1st

The foundation for all justice is that each person and each sentient being is a subject of inherent worth and dignity that ought to be respected by all other persons in the world. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant so precisely and concisely put it, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as end and never simply as a means” (Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Section II).

Progress within the human community is based on a growing and ever deepening understanding of what human dignity means. Everything that has been immoral and unjust in the past and everything that is immoral and unjust in the present is predicated on the lie that some people have more dignity or inherent worth than others. The sins of racism, sexism, and unjust treatment of persons with different sexual orientations and gender identities are all perpetuated on the lie that not all persons are of equal worth and dignity. The only way forward to beloved community is to repent from these sins and live fully into the reality that all persons have equal inherent worth.

Anything that makes one person feel superior to any other person is a serious problem. Far too often our understandings and expressions of religion are more about cultivating feelings of superiority than they are about embracing the equal worth of all persons and living more fully into Beloved Community. We see this in other political, economic, and cultural aspects of our lives as well.

The key to a just and beloved community is to embrace and express the following in thought and action:

• Equal dignity – all persons have equal inherent worth
• Equal treatment – no person is treated as less than any other person. All persons and their rights are equally protected by the law and by common practices within society.
• Equal opportunity – all persons deserve an equal opportunity to flourish as human beings within human community and to have access to quality education, healthcare, shelter, basic social services, and a safe healthy environment.

It is critical to realize that recognizing and embracing human dignity does not mean that nonhuman life is somehow less than human life. The existence of human dignity does not in any way preclude or erase the dignity of all sentient life in the world. We do not lift up human dignity by ignoring it downplaying the dignity of other life forms. Reverence for human life is not in any way in contradiction to reverence for all life. In fact, reverence for all life enhances our reverence for human dignity as we see that our human dignity is intimately connected to preserving dignity of the ecological communities of which we are all a part.

This realization is grounded in the reality that our differences and diversity do not make us superior to each other or superior to the greater ecological community. This does not mean that some ideals or ways of thinking are not better than others. This is not a call for moral relativism that would make every perspective and action morally equal, but it does mean that none of our differences makes us less than others when it comes to our basic human dignity. When it comes to dignity, we are all equal.

I think most of us are aware of the fact of the equality of our human dignity. Here in the United States, we lift up and celebrate this equality of human dignity found in the words and sentiment of Thomas Jefferson that “all [persons] are created eaual.” The problem is that we, like Thomas Jefferson himself, often do not fully live into our highest ideals and express them fully in our actions and through our societal systems and structures.

This is why the first principle of Unitarian Universalism is so important. It reminds us first and foremost that the equal inherent worth and equal dignity of all persons are the necessary conditions for the expression of love and creation of justice within our communities. The dignity of all persons is the red thread, it is the moral glue, that holds together all of the other principles of Unitarian Universalism. Cognitive acceptance of this first principle is but the first step. We are all called to find ways to actualize the dignity of all persons as the path forward to actualizing beloved community requires dismantling the systems that perpetuate the evils of racism, sexism, militarism, economic injustice, injustices for persons who are LGBTQ2S+, and ecological degradation. In the words of the great humanist and potential honorary fictional UU member of future, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation – make it so!