Is There Any “There” There? — Articiulating UU Beliefs

Michael L. Scott

First Universalist Church of Rochester, May 30, 2010

Our reading this morning is a collection of excepts from Engaging Our Theological Diversity, by the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Commission on Appraisal.  An independent body within the UUA, the Commission is charged to “review any function or activity of the Association which in its judgment will benefit from an independent review” and to “study and suggest approaches to issues which may be of concern to the Association.”  This particular study, released in 2005, was co-authored by Rochester’s Joyce Gilbert.

One thing has become clear….  Despite consensus within the church that the liberal message of Unitarian Universalism is important in this troubled world, we find it difficult to articulate that message clearly.

…

With rare exceptions, conversations about beliefs and theology are not regular features of our congregational life….  We often give lip service to the ways in which theological diversity enriches our congregations—and there is no question that it could.  However, all the evidence suggests that in fact, growing theological diversity within the UU culture—where tolerance and acceptance are considered paramount values—more commonly makes individuals so afraid of offending one another that conversation about belief and theology is stifled.

…

Today, Unitarian Universalism is predominantly a faith of “come-inners,” those who joined the church as adults, with a minority of “born-inners,” those who were born or grew up as UUs….  [I]n general UU congregations do much better at meeting the needs of relative newcomers than those of longtime members.

…

Many UUs in this come-inner category have not completely processed or reconciled their feelings of dissatisfaction with the religion they have left behind.  Those unreconciled feelings tend to manifest themselves in the form of a strong reaction against anything that draws on the religious traditions they have abandoned.  For the unreconciled, the use of Christian scripture or metaphor in UU services tends to raise suspicion and sometimes anger….  Terms like sin, redemption, salvation, and even God require elaborate explanation and redefinition when used in a UU context.  Even then, some UUs still object, arguing that these terms have already been defined by mainstream Christianity and cannot be redefined.

…

[T]he generations coming to maturity today and in the next decades are showing a renewed interest in spirituality, and if we can catch their attention, we can become again a prominent and influential religious movement…. a place that embraces reason, yet transcends the rational and touches the soul.  However, the consensus of experts from an array of fields—from organizational development to systematic theology—is that to grow effectively, a religious organization needs clearly defined boundaries.

…

The UUA leadership talks about “our message” and the need for it, but until and unless it can be stated in a clear, generally understood manner, using language that communicates beyond the UUA’s borders as well as within them, that message will not be heard.

Sermon

My formative years were spent largely in the Bluegrass of Kentucky.  Most of my elementary and middle school classmates came from Southern Baptist families.  They knew exactly what they believed about God and hell and sin, and they had no hesitation in talking about it.  For my part, I knew that my family didn’t believe what the Southern Baptists did, but a list of what you don’t believe doesn’t get you very far on the playground.

As the son of the local Unitarian Universalist minister, I knew what causes we believed in.  We were against the war, and for science, civil rights, and education.  My father got tear-gassed on the local university campus, wearing his clerical collar.  My mother was an officer of the local ACLU chapter.  I got carried through the shopping mall on a stretcher, dressed as a Vietnamese casualty.  I was taught in no uncertain terms that my purpose in life was to make the world a better place.  But none of this felt particularly religious.

Sometime in my early teens I decided to believe in god—not the God of my Southern Baptist classmates, but a god of nature and of natural law that pervaded and ensouled the universe.  I’m not sure how or exactly when this happened, but it feels like the point at which I became a religious person, and at which church began to be more than just the place where my dad worked and where we organized social action.

As we heard in this morning’s reading from the UUA Commission on Appraisal, modern Unitarian Universalism is mainly a religion of “come-inners.”  The numbers are positively stunning: a 1997 study put the figure at 90%.  As a “born-inner” I have felt—particularly in the large, affluent, and intellectual church that I attended in college—like an alien in the UU movement.  Rejection of childhood dogma was the unifying theme for most of my fellow congregants, and the driving force behind their church involvement.  But it didn’t do anything for me.  I didn’t want to reject bad beliefs; I wanted to embrace some good ones!

For much of my adult life, I have been appalled at the tendency of UU churches to serve as “way stations” for people working their way out of organized religion.  We sometimes seem like the lite beer of liberal Christianity, or maybe the methadone treatment for recovering conservatives who aren’t quite ready to kick the habit completely.  I wouldn’t apply that characterization here at First Universalist, but for many UU churches, particularly in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, it was a pretty apt description.  At the smaller congregation I attended more occasionally in college, the aversion to religious trappings went far beyond avoidance of the god word: members gathered for a meeting on Sunday.  They sang songs and heard a talk, but no one would dare to say “worship” or “sermon” or “prayer” or even “hymn.”

To some extent, our aversion to religiosity reflects a proud 200-yearhistory  of upholding individual rights.  American Unitarianism in particular has always stressed individualism and the right of conscience, even at the expense of commonality.  It was no accident that so many of the so-called Founding Fathers were religious liberals.  They rebelled against the authoritarianism of their day in both politics and religion.  In the early 20th century, historian Earl Morse Wilbur identified freedom, reason, and tolerance as the essence of Unitarianism.  And in the modern context, with our 90% “come-inners,” anything that reminds us of the orthodoxy we’ve rejected may be seen as an affront to personal rights.

Author and consultant the Rev. Robert Latham, keynote speaker at our recent District Assembly, describes this as our “primal nemesis”: the fear that “if we hold a common answer to anything profound we will have created a dogma and, thus, will have become like, you know, Them.”  The Commission on Appraisal describes this fear as “institutionally disabling”.

This isn’t a new concern.  T.S. Eliot, writing in 1936, warned that

In religion, Liberalism may be characterized as a progressive discarding of elements in historical Christianity which appear superfluous or obsolete, confounded with practices and abuses which are legitimate objects of attack.  But as its movement is controlled rather by its origin than by any goal, it loses force after a series of rejections, and with nothing left to destroy is left with nothing to uphold and with nowhere to go.

One can argue that the process had reached something of a crisis by the time of UU merger in 1961.  Absent a coherent remaining core of belief, the new movement championed freedom itself as the core.  In the climate of the 1960s, this strategy served us well: liberated baby boomers were hungry for a place where they could “be religious” without buying into dogma they no longer believed, and many of them swelled our ranks.  But if freedom is our core, can a Unitarian Universalist really believe anything he or she wants?  Can we be comfortable with social Darwinism?  End-of-the-world millenialism?  Calvinist predestination?

With the disillusionment of the late 20th century and the backlash against humanism, our emphasis on freedom has evolved into a warmer passion for tolerance and diversity, but this has similar problems: If diversity is the ultimate good—in and of itself—how many racists, misogynists, and homophobes do we want to attract to our ranks?

Clearly freedom and diversity have limits.  And if something is beyond the pale; if some forms of diversity are undesirable—or even abhorrent—then something more fundamental must be at stake.  Failure to articulate that something has costs.  Among other things, it’s costing us our kids, 85% of whom leave our ranks when they reach adulthood.  Lacking any need to rebel against childhood orthodoxy, they simply drift away; they don’t see the point of what we do here.

Latham writes:

[W]e have raised several generations of Unitarian Universalists over the past fifty years who, because identity crisis was the state of our being when they entered our religious movement, believe it to be the normal state of our being.  In brief, a confused identity with no clear mission is what many of these generations perceive to be the essence of religious freedom….  [As a result,] Compared to the population growth of our nation, we are rapidly losing ground in membership.

Worse, says Latham, a refusal to articulate shared beliefs divorces us from the central mission of religion, which is to transform the world by offering a view of reality that changes people’s hearts.

The most profound and critical agent of human transformation possessed by the religious community is its answers to life’s compelling questions of mystery, its view of reality.  And the clearer and more committed in commonality a religion is to this message the more powerful a tool of social change it becomes.  The opposite, of course, is equally true—the more diversified a religion’s answers to the compelling questions, the greater will be its social impotence.

Lacking theological clarity, says Latham, modern Unitarian Universalism is impotent and irrelevant.

Strong words.  And increasingly grave, for with the decline of mainstream Christian denominations and the increasingly diverse (non-Christian) complexion of America’s immigrants, the supply of “come-inners” is decreasing.

So what are we to do?

First, I believe we must recognize that freedom of belief is not the central tenet of Unitarian Universalism, and that in fact we do serious harm when we speak as though it were.  I will argue instead that freedom emerges from more fundamental beliefs.

Second, we must develop a list of positive, affirming, beliefs, and imbue them with poetry and passion.  My personal preference would build on the First and Seventh of our current UU Principles.

Third, we must learn to describe ourselves and our distinctiveness in terms that the rest of society will understand and recognize as unmistakably religious.  This will require us to get over our aversion to traditional language.  We need that language to attract the “unchurched,” who have no similar aversion, who yearn for something beyond their ordinary secular lives, and who aren’t even going to notice anything couched in secular terms.

So what about freedom of belief?  Consider our historic roots.  Unitarians asserted the unity of God, in contrast to the trinity.  Universalists believed that salvation would be universal, not just for a chosen few.  Neither of these issues means much to us today.  If I can be forgiven a bit of historical oversimplification, however, I think it’s fair to say that Universalism was based on a deep and abiding faith in the worth of every person—a faith we still profess today in the first of our seven Principles.  Unitarianism, for its part, embraced a deep belief in the power of human reason—a belief we still see clearly in the fifth of our six Sources and in Principles 4 and 5.

So who decides what is reasonable?  Certainly you don’t think something is reasonable just because I say so.  Instead you think it through yourself, use your own judgment, and decide if it makes sense.  And if I believe in the worth of every person, I can’t dismiss your right to do this.  We are left with an inescapable conclusion: each individual is his or her own final authority.  Freedom of belief, I would claim, is a consequence of the inherent worth of persons and the authority of reason.

Are those two themes the core of Unitarian Universalism today?  I think they’re part of it, but they’re certainly not all.  In its final report, the Commission identified many common themes, but their principal conclusion was that a clearly explicable core for our movement as a whole was something we desperately need, but do not currently have.

As an example of what we might choose to build together, they assembled a fascinating—and to my ear quite compelling—list of theological “agreements and disagreements” for their own nine-member group; they then implored the rest of us to “Go and do likewise.”

If I were to make a personal list—a proposal, as it were, for the movement—I’d start with the First and Seventh Principles:

As Unitarian Universalists, we covenant to affirm and promote

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person; and
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

These are clearly the statements that most of us remember, and to which we have the strongest emotional attachment.  Both of them are also very positive beliefs, and distinctively UU.  The inherent worth of all people, for example, is profoundly at odds with all sorts of fundamentalism: fundamentalism is infused with righteous superiority.

Likewise, a humble respect for all creation is deeply at odds with many faiths, which emphasize preparation for some future life over care for the life we have here.  Of all the statements explored by the Commission on Appraisal, the Seventh Principle garnered the most widespread and uniform support, with more than 90 percent of both clergy and laity rating it highly important to their faith.  Several of our leading theologians have suggested that an intimate reverence for the natural world could be the unifying mythos for future religious liberals.  The Rev. David Bumbaugh writes:

The heart of a faith for the twenty-first century, I am convinced, is suggested by the seventh Principle….  Hidden in this apparently uncomplicated, uncontroversial, innocuous statement is a radical theological position. The seventh Principle calls us to reverence before the world, not some future world, but this miraculous world of our everyday experience….  It calls us to trust the process, the creative, evolving, renewing, redeeming process which brings us into being, which sustains us in being, and which transforms our being. It offers a vision of a world in which the holy, the sacred is incarnated in every moment, in every aspect of being, a world in which God is always fully present, and in which God is always fully at risk.

My personal list for our movement would include additional beliefs as well.  I would, for example, stress the unity of existence—the idea that creation “fits together.”  You can cast this as a denial—almost by definition—of the notion of the supernatural, but that’s a negative way of putting it.  Rather, I’d stress that the sacred and the secular are one—that God is embedded in creation—that the heart and the head, while not always in sync, are perceiving the same reality.  Among other things, belief in the unity of existence makes science a spiritual pursuit, and embraces advancing knowledge.

I’d also include on my list the need for balance—between work and leisure, action and contemplation, self-care and service to others.  And I’d stress the obligation to become a better person, to deepen one’s faith, and to make the world a better place.

At some point in this list-building process—maybe at the very beginning—someone will surely say “wait a minute—I don’t believe that, and I’m a UU!”  That’s ok.  It’s expected!  But it shouldn’t prevent us from stating theological positions.  A statement of belief need not be a credal test.  As the Commission on Appraisal put it,

There is a major difference between [unity and uniformity].  A community of people can be relatively uniform in practice or procedure, yet not be unified in purpose or vision.  On the other hand, a diverse community can still come together in a bond of unity.

Robert Latham adds:

Unity does not lie in diversity.  Rather, …  diversity resides in unity….  [A]ny religion without a transforming faith statement backed by the power of common commitment will be overlooked.

Not all of us will agree.  And all of us must acknowledge that there are layers of subtlety behind even our core beliefs.  The Rev. Bill Schultz, who has served both as UUA President and as Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, has written movingly of his struggles reconciling belief in the First Principle with the reality of torture.  And our embrace of the Seventh Principle must acknowledge the reality of hurricanes and plagues, and of a natural world that is constantly hunting and consuming itself.

We must also acknowledge that our beliefs may be flawed.  Liberalism requires a sort of active tension: we must act on our faith with conviction, but without certainty.  For issues of public policy, this means that we must be politically active, yet always respectful of opponents.  For issues that affect our interpersonal lives and our outlook on the world, we must follow our understanding as fully as we can, while remaining open to new insights and perspectives.

In the most recent issue of the UU World, UUA President the Rev. Peter Morales writes:

What makes the difference between [a church that is] full of life and warmth versus being dead and cold?  I think the difference is religion.  Really.  Religion.  The key to the future for every single congregation and for Unitarian Universalism as a movement is whether we can “get religion.”  If we “get religion” we will thrive.  We will touch lives and change the world.  If we don’t, we will decline.

Morales goes on to emphasize that he doesn’t see religion as a matter of what one believes, but rather of what one loves.  Personally, I’d be happy to keep the word “believe,” but I’d use it in the sense of “I believe in a life of loving care for humanity and all of creation,” rather than “I believe that Jesus arose on the third day, and sits at the right hand of God.”

Morales continues:

When you and I focus on what we love and what we long to create, something almost miraculous happens.  We are energized.  We form lasting bonds.  We become eager to commit ourselves and to work together.  We become more generous.  We come to care more about “us” and less about “me.”  In other words, when we focus on what we love we “get religion.”

As you move through life this week, think about what you love, and what you most deeply believe.  Then share that belief with others.  Start a theological conversation!  Accept the challenge of explaining who we are and who we strive to be.  And maybe—just maybe—our vision can change hearts and move the world.  May it be so.  Amen.