It’s Okay to Change Your Mind

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin

In the days after Renée Goode was murdered in Minneapolis and thousands took to the streets to protest the fascist brutality of ICE and the United States government, the organization Singing Resistance was born. Some of the songs they sang were passed down from generations of justice movements, and others were written for the moment they found themselves in. Even the new songs were inspired by old movements.

Annie Schlaefer, who wrote “It’s Okay to Change Your Mind,” says that she was inspired by the Serbian resistance movement Otpor!, which opposed the dictatorship in Serbia in the late 1990s (Link). Otpor is the Serbian word for “resistance.” The movement was rooted in nonviolent organizing, and their story is one example among many of how people have resisted oppression throughout history.

Even as members of Otpor! were arrested, beaten, and harassed by police, they continued reaching out to police officers and soldiers. They visited homes and workplaces with a simple message: “You might not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow.” Two years later, when the military was ordered to use lethal force against protestors, many refused their orders, some even turning on other officers who had not yet defected (Link).

“You might not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow.”

What a message.

Imagine saying that to someone who arrested you. Imagine saying that to someone who had beaten your friends. Imagine believing, day after day, that the person standing across from you was not the finished version of themselves.

I’ll be honest – I’m not entirely sure I could do it…

But it makes me ask a question at the heart of every justice movement: how do we get people to change their minds?

I think we tell ourselves a story about how people change.

We imagine someone hears the perfect argument. They read the perfect article. Someone presents the perfect statistic, and suddenly everything clicks into place. We imagine that if we could just find the right words, the right evidence, the right headline, the right study, the right way of explaining ourselves, another person's worldview would shift.

If that were true, social media would have solved politics by now.

But that isn't how most of us have changed. Think about the moments when your own worldview shifted. Maybe it was because you met someone whose life didn't fit the stereotypes you'd been taught. Maybe someone trusted you enough to tell you their story. Maybe you found yourself in a community that asked different questions than the one that raised you.

For most of us, the deepest changes don't happen all at once. They happen slowly, almost imperceptibly. A relationship complicates a certainty we once held. We begin to notice a contradiction we can no longer ignore. What once felt obvious begins to feel incomplete. We don't wake up one morning as entirely different people. We become different through hundreds of small moments that slowly reshape the way we understand ourselves and the world around us.

Social psychologists have spent decades studying why people hold onto deeply rooted beliefs, and one of their recurring observations is that our opinions are often connected to something much larger than the opinions themselves. They become part of our identities—bound up with our families, our communities, our histories, and our sense of belonging. Changing your mind can begin to feel less like reconsidering a position and more like risking the loss of the people who taught you to hold it in the first place.

That helps explain why relationships matter so much.

Take marriage equality, for example. One of the strongest predictors of changing attitudes toward same-sex marriage wasn't simply age or education. It was whether someone personally knew someone who was gay (Link). For many people, a relationship accomplished what arguments alone never could. It is much harder to reduce someone to an abstraction once they have become your neighbor, your coworker, your child, your friend.

None of this means facts don't matter. They do. Justice requires truth. Good organizing requires good analysis. We need people who can articulate why another world is possible.

But facts are rarely enough on their own. People are most open to transformation when they believe they won't lose their belonging in the process. They need to be able to imagine themselves walking into a different future.

If you don’t believe me, just take a look around at our own city.

Many of us are also watching these questions unfold in real time as our communities respond to the actions of ICE and the expansion of immigration enforcement across the country.

Earlier this week, an interfaith group of clergy – including myself and Conor, and the UUA president and vice president – gathered outside of the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark to witness, protest, and stand in solidarity with those who are being detained. We did not know whether anyone inside would hear us. We did not know if our presence would change anything. And at the end of the day, we went home to our families, to food on the table and another day of work ahead of us.

It was a hard day, although not for the reasons we thought it would be.

Moments like that can leave us with complicated feelings. We want our actions to matter. We want to know that our voices are making a difference. Sometimes the work of justice feels powerful. Sometimes it feels painfully small.

But movements are built from those moments too. They are built by people showing up before they know exactly what will happen next. They are built by people refusing to accept that suffering is normal.

Ten years ago, even a couple of years ago, conversations about universal childcare, fare-free buses, municipal ownership, democratic socialism, or guaranteed housing lived mostly on the margins of public discourse. Today, whether people agree with those ideas or not, they are part of mainstream political conversation. That didn't happen because everyone woke up one morning convinced. It happened because organizers spent years talking to neighbors, knocking on doors, building relationships, and helping people imagine a future that had once seemed impossible. It also happened because people organized, built power, disrupted systems, and made it impossible for those ideas to remain at the margins forever. Movements do not change the world through persuasion alone. They change the conditions that shape what people believe is possible.

None of that happened overnight. It happened because people were willing to have thousands of conversations whose results they would never fully see. It happened because someone believed that a neighbor who disagreed today might think differently tomorrow. It happened because movements grew, not by waiting for perfect allies, but by welcoming people as they continued becoming.

Many of us in the room know what it feels like to be the people trying to move the conversation. We know what it is like to feel discouraged, to wonder whether anyone is listening, to ask ourselves whether anything is actually changing.

History has a way of reminding every generation that our imaginations are always unfinished.

There were people who believed ending segregation was asking too much. People who believed same-sex marriage was politically impossible. There are conversations happening today that will seem equally obvious to future generations, and there are injustices we have not yet learned to recognize.

Part of our spiritual discipline is remaining open to that possibility—not because every new idea is good, but because none of us has reached the end of our own becoming.

And for those of us who already find ourselves further radicalized, there is another temptation waiting for us.

Movements can become so accustomed to disappointment that we begin to assume anyone who hasn't caught up simply doesn't care. We forget that our own political imaginations were shaped by teachers, organizers, books, communities, friendships, and countless conversations. We forget that someone, somewhere, made room for us to grow.

Organizing isn't the art of finding people who already agree with you. It's the art of helping people become who they are capable of becoming. It is also the work of building enough power that those who refuse to change can no longer maintain unjust systems unchallenged.

To be clear: that doesn't mean sacrificing your safety. It doesn't mean asking marginalized people to educate those who are harming them. It doesn't mean abandoning accountability or pretending that every disagreement deserves endless patience. Every one of us has to discern where those boundaries belong.

But if we stop believing people can change, we stop building movements capable of changing the world.

I think this is one of the gifts our faith has to offer.

As Unitarian Universalists, our shared values of justice, transformation, and equity, centered in love, call us to this work. Transformation reminds us that people and communities can become something they have never been before. Justice tells us where we are headed. Equity reminds us that the goal is not simply changing hearts but changing the conditions that allow every person to flourish. We are called not only to imagine another world, but to help build it, one conversation, one relationship, one act of courage at a time.

We declare that every person has inherent worth and dignity. Sometimes we hear those words as a statement about who people already are. I also hear them as a statement about possibility. Every person possesses the capacity for growth. Every person is more than the sum of their worst choices, their worst fears, and their worst moments. Every person is capable of becoming more fully human. That conviction does not ask us to ignore harm or abandon accountability. Rather, it asks us to refuse the temptation to believe that any human being is beyond the possibility of transformation.

Our Universalist ancestors made a breathtaking claim. At a time when much of Christianity was preoccupied with dividing humanity into the saved and the damned, they insisted that no one stood outside the reach of God's love. They did not believe that love erased justice. They believed that love made justice meaningful, because its purpose was never simply punishment. Its purpose was restoration.

Universal salvation has often been misunderstood as though it means that nothing matters, that harm has no consequences, or that repentance is unnecessary. But that has never been the heart of the tradition. Universalism takes transformation seriously enough to believe that no one is beyond it. It refuses to believe that anyone is permanently frozen in the worst chapter of their story. Salvation is not a reward for having always been right. It is the promise that love never ceases to call us toward becoming more fully who we are capable of being.

"You might not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow."

I keep returning to that sentence because it embodies that same theology. Imagine saying those words for two years. Imagine believing them enough to keep knocking on doors, even after arrests and beatings. Imagine trusting that people are capable of surprising you, capable of disappointing the systems that taught them who to fear and what to obey, capable of discovering a courage they did not know they possessed when the moment finally came to choose.

Our world desperately needs people willing to resist injustice. It also desperately needs people who have not given up on the possibility that hearts can change. Every justice movement in history has depended on ordinary people becoming capable of something they were not capable of before. Our faith asks us to believe that this work of transformation is never finished—not in our neighbors, not in our institutions, and certainly not in ourselves.

That doesn't mean every conversation will change someone's mind. Most won't. It doesn't mean every invitation will be accepted. Many will be ignored. It doesn't mean every movement will succeed as quickly as we hope, or that justice will arrive without sacrifice. The people of Otpor knew that. The people marching against ICE know that. Every generation that has struggled for freedom has known that.

And still, they keep extending the invitation.

Because movements are built not only on the courage to resist what is, but on the hope that people can become part of what might yet be.

That hope is not naïve. It is disciplined. It is practiced. It is renewed every time we choose to have one more conversation, knock on one more door, welcome one more person into the work, or remain open to being changed ourselves.

Because none of us has arrived. None of us has finished learning what justice requires, or what love makes possible. We are still growing into the people our values call us to become. We are still building the Beloved Community our ancestors imagined. We are still discovering new ways to embody justice, equity, and transformation in a changing world.

So may we have the courage to change our minds when truth asks it of us. May we have the patience to accompany others as they grow into deeper understanding. May we have the wisdom to know when to keep inviting and when to protect ourselves. And may we never lose faith that another human being—and another world—is capable of becoming something more than it is today.

It's okay to change your mind.

And you can join us here anytime.

May it be so.