Paul Wilczynski's Observations

How different should UUs be?

When I first joined the UUA's UUTheology mailing list, I sent an introduction which said in part

Here's my question, and please let me know if it doesn't fit here. I find it strange that, as I'm told, Unitarians can't all "believe" in something. They can, however, all "affirm" something. Why is there nothing that we can't all believe in? (Like "the world is good" or things at least at that level). I suspect we'd somehow be better off it we could tell people that we *do* have shared beliefs.

Ideally, it would be great if we had at least one thing that we all believed in that everyone else in the world didn't all believe in. That would make us special :)

After reading it when it appeared in the mailing list, I suspect I could have done a better job of describing feelings about belief vs affirmation. I should have realized that saying "I suspect we'd somehow be better off it we could tell people that we *do* have shared beliefs." might get me into a little trouble. When I said "better off", I meant that people outside of our religion might find it a little easier to understand us.

Karl Paananen replied as follows:

One way of thinking about it is to think of Unitarianism (including American UUism and all the other national forms) as "The organized religion that was organized by people who didn't like organized religion". One of the main reasons that Unitarianism has always been shy of "official beliefs" and "creeds" is that historically these have been used to persecute people, by telling people who didn't subscribe to the beliefs that they were not welcome in church, or even telling the "heretics" that they were not welcome in society, which led to imprisonment and burning at the stake.

Another problem is that a creed can tend to "fossilize" a religion. In a creedal religion, each generation of the religion has to be taught to obey and believe in the creed that was invented by a previous generation, often a long ago and almost forgotten generation. This can lead to serious conflicts when science or other intellectual endeavors advance, but the religious creed stays the same. In the United States there are religious groups who keep demanding that evolution not be taught in government schools, because evolution conflicts with their ancient creed that cannot be updated with the new times.

Unitarianism is a "different" sort of religion. It is so different that many people have difficulty imagining it. Many people who are in a belief-centered religion cannot imagine a religion without a belief system. Maybe if they came and tried Unitarianism, they would see that a religion can do perfectly well without a belief system, and can still have all the things that they like about religion.

I don't think that we would be "better off" if we changed our religion to be more like other religions. Those people have their religions, we have ours. Unitarianism isn't a religion for everyone. The person who says "I want to go to church to be with a group of people who all think exactly the same way that I do about everything" will not find Unitarianism a good religion for them. The person who says "I want a religion that will just give me all the answers I'm looking for, without requiring me to think for myself, without leaving any gray areas or doubts, and with a promise that these answers will not change for all of eternity" will not find Unitarianism a good religion for them.

Perhaps what I'm looking for is something we can agree that we all believe in without it being a creed. Something so obvious and apparent to anyone who becomes a UU that we almost don't notice it. Something that it would be silly to have to require us to believe (in the sense of trying to teach our children, for example, that we require them to breathe).

While a lot of what Karl says makes sense, there was something about the reply that bothered me. I finally realized that it was the attitude - shared by many, many UUs (perhaps the majority, I don't know) that one of the good things about Unitarian Universalism is that it's different. We tend to hold that up as a badge of pride. I think that being different is ok to a degree, but I think we're finding that the more we hold ourselves out to be different - the more we make ourselves out to be on the fringe (consciously or unconsciously) the less respect we get and the less interest we get.

A lot of us say that there must be a gazillion people out there who are looking for a religion that's different. Personally, I think a lot of people are looking for a religion that's a little different. Is there room in Unitarian Universalism for people who don't want to go through the grueling search that we portray as some sort of requirement for being a good UU? Can we welcome Christians who feel way too pressured by their evangelical conservative church into ours? (I ask that question of UU congregations who don't identify as Christian). (And the hardest question: can we welcome self-identified Republicans?)

Unitarianism may not be a religion for everyone. But if we try, we can make it a religion for a lot more people than it is.

posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 7:24 PM