UU Exceptionalism?

May 19, 2013 Sunday service
By Chris Edwards

Last Fall, in the UU World’s cover story, the Rev. Thandeka explored President Obama’s childhood attendance at a Unitarian Universalist Sunday school in Honolulu. She concluded by expressing regret that many who, like him, had early exposure to UU’ism have not remained in the fold.

Interestingly, Thandeka gave the first report I’d seen about the opposition portraying UU’ism as the culprit for Obama’s alleged leftist worldview. His other spiritual paths, real and fictitious, became bigger targets.

But the article wasn’t “political,” and what I want to say isn’t. The question I raised in a letter, published in UU World, is different: How much does UU attrition really matter?

A poll by the Pew Foundation says 20 percent of Americans identify themselves as “nones” – n.o.n.e.’s — having no religious affiliation.

A “None’s” world view may be anything, but why, really, does any free-thinking person need organized religion?
• Want spirituality? – Get up and look at a sunrise.
• Like-minded friends? You might find them almost anywhere.
• Or a chance to do acts of kindness, support charities, work for a better world? Ditto.

In Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles,” missionary priests arrive on Mars expecting to preach to the other colonizers from Earth. The “Martians” seem to have died out. But one priest finds that the lovely blue fire balloons, floating over the landscape, are intelligent beings, who even step in to save human lives. So the priests build an altar on a mountain, to bring in these balloons and save their souls. Eventually the balloons respond and say, thank you, but we don’t need this. They’re a remnant of old Martians who attained immortality. They have no conflicts, no sins. They’ve found peace.

Not a UU story, you say? But can we be sure the world needs us?

We’ve heard much about American exceptionalism. Most of us might agree there are good and bad kinds of it. One kind of exceptionalism says “my country is Number 1; we must dominate the world from up here in our city on a hill; dissent is treason.” The other kind celebrates what deserves celebrating, calls out whatever should change, and respects anyone else’s right to love their piece of turf as much as we do ours.

Just about every Sunday I hear how exceptional UU’s are. Which kind of exceptionalism?

Here’s where I’m coming from: I became an atheist at age 15, after reading in Episcopal Church doctrines that only those who had been baptized would get into Heaven. (Infants dying unbaptized wouldn’t go to Hell, just sort of float through eternity on dark dingy clouds.) I had no use for such a God… I thought I knew more answers then, than now. Recently I heard the Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson – yes, best known as the church’s only openly gay bishop – say he believes everyone in the world goes to Heaven. Who knew?

Later I was Baha’i. That faith’s teachings began way ahead of their time, but sadly, some aspects got frozen in time. That might have been the motive for a speaker here, once, devoting a whole service to debunking that faith, in a talk that contained inaccuracies and omissions. He didn’t mention that Baha’is have no professional clergy, or that they accept all religions as essentially true. It was in Baha’I discourse that I first discovered each of the world’s major religions teaches the Golden Rule – which we read statements of today in “All Lifted Hearts,” a reading-and-hymn section from the composition titled “Sources: a Unitarian Universalist Cantata.” I’ve had wonderful Baha’I friends, and my kids grew up with contacts across cultural, ethnic and socioeconomic lines there that they would have missed otherwise. So, nearly 20 years ago when I transitioned from Baha’I to UU (after some “none” years in between), I upgraded to a more humanist perspective, but the move seemed somewhat retro as to institutional leadership, and more importantly, diversity. I’d never go back, but I’ve never been quite satisfied.

UU’s struggle with diversity. I see a desperate flailing in suggestions from UU World to never talk about our vacations, NPR, or – goddess forbid! – politics. OK, to be diverse, let’s stick to safe topics, like – recipes, or the weather? Oh — Never mind. But I can’t accept the idea I’ve sometimes heard that we have all the diversity we need since we have different philosophic worldviews. Diversity all in our heads? I have no answer, but can’t help feeling it could be better.

It used to seem presumptuous to me when Baha’is would meet someone they felt was open-minded and warm-hearted, and gush, “She’s a Baha’i and doesn’t know it.” So it’s déjà vu when I hear a UU say of such a person, “He’s a UU and doesn’t know it.” What if those folks know exactly who they are, and it suits them fine?

Recently, after someone mentioned in UU World that some other religions agreed with the UU 7 Principles, a letter appeared saying, no, no, the others only pay lip-service to them – WE’RE the only ones who LIVE them. Really?

Why can’t we accept being just a group that, like any other, has its shining and its dark moments, its times of success and failure?

Thandeka’s article points out that 9 out of 10 UU young people don’t remain in the fold. About half of mainline Protestants grew up and stayed in their denominations, compared with only 12 percent of UU’s nationally.

Sometimes we seem like a way-station –kind of a support group for those who have left some church they feel burned by, but need that Sunday morning habit. Is that a natural stage to cycle through – and then move on eventually, after they no longer need either the anger, or structured Sundays?

Although that’s not what brought me here, I think it’s fine … so long as we’re “A Gentle, Angry People,” not just angry.

Once a relative visited me, after many years. A good guy, somewhat damaged from a hard life; not intellectual or much of a talker, like most of the family is. He’s found his comfort, friends and support in his church. It sounds like a typical Southern Bible Belt church, though he doesn’t proselytize. Anyway, after his visit, I was telling some UU friends how this relative had found a very different path from ours, and that I felt it was OK. But when one friend realized I hadn’t tried to argue him out of it, that friend got furious. Like a prosecuting attorney, that person badgered me with the sarcastic questions I supposedly should have badgered my relative with. I felt that this friend (who I must add, by UU principle No. 1, has plenty of inherent worth and dignity) was asking me to bully that vulnerable person, and try to destroy a resource in his survival. It was by no means a typical experience, but not unique.

I read something once by a psychiatrist who said that even in a church with a very spelled-out theology, different members worship different Gods. Based on different temperaments and experiences, this person prays to a loving, joyful God who made the Spring flowers – that person says the same prayers to a scary, angry God, who made cancer.

When I hear about how we’re a lone colony of the enlightened, circling wagons against an oppressive, totally narrow Shenandoah Valley, or United States, I can’t help thinking of a few folks who are inspirations to me although they are not “UU’s without knowing it.” Here’s a very partial list:

• A Methodist who told me, “I’d be over with you Unitarians except I love my handbells.”
• A Baptist who volunteers personally, 1:1, with everyone who knocks on her church’s door asking for help. She advocates for them; can tell you who the local slumlords are, and the horror stories, and what services there are, and how far they reach, or don’t.
• A Catholic couple who persistently advocate for making our community welcoming to the LGBT community.
• A Xavierian brother, whose order works among the marginalized. A monk – although folks who meet him may have no idea. Once he told me the religious conflicts over evolution might be resolved by thinking of God as within us, not above. He tirelessly networks for all kinds of peace and justice efforts, and keeps his gentle sense of humor.
• When Benedict abdicated, each of these Catholic friends wished the next Pope could be a woman. (Maybe someday?)
• Several progressive local Muslims, who might even agree with the Imam in DC who performs same-sex weddings and supports gender equality.
• A Jewish friend who has lived in Israel, and, like that imam, rocks the boat within his own faith community – in his case, advocating for the rights of Palestinians.
• Three women at Temple Beth El, ranging from my age to their 80s, who invited us to their delightful bat mitzvah– a ceremony that in their younger years hadn’t been available to girls. After they read from the Torah in Hebrew, one woman gave a hilarious send-up of some of its more quaint, mostly obsolete laws. The humor felt like ours, only warmer.
• A Christian couple, one a minister, who live an incredibly low-carbon lifestyle. Their first vacation was several weeks’ backpacking, carrying their baby in a sling. They took time off the trail to wash and line-dry his cloth diapers (yes, those things still exist!) What most surprised me was their complete absence of self-righteousness.
• Our neighbors. In Park View, Harrisonburg, Robin and I belong to a minority there, the O.T.M.’s – Other Than Mennonite. We feel very welcome.
• 15 years ago, for a graduate-school project, Gloria Rhodes researched how this congregation handled conflict. She bravely stayed in the conflict transformation field, and now lives at both ends on the local-to-global spectrum: Her home is in the Mennonite farm community near Dayton, where she grew up. Her work is with a university program that takes her to developing nations on several continents – helping Christian, Muslim and other women empower themselves through education and community organizing.

None of these folks are “UU’s who don’t know it.” So, why do they stay in traditions whose flaws we plainly see? Well – I suspect — family, community, handbells, Gospel hymns, latkes, the opportunity to do good within a framework at hand (something Obama seemed to find when he joined the predominately black UCC church in Chicago), and the comfort of familiar verses, mantras, prayers. In a powerful scene, in an old movie about the Titanic, survivors on lifeboats say prayers from their many religions and languages as they watch it go down. As a denomination, we have no such things to fall back on when fleeing disaster, or keeping watch for a loved one in an ICU. (One minister told me a committee should invent something like that for us. I’m skeptical. We might do better to just keep borrowing, like mockingbirds.)

Maybe staying in any organized religion requires following an idea I’ve heard in some support groups: “Take what you want, and leave the rest.” If you encounter some stale, unnourishing, even mildewed piece of dogma among many tasty offerings, like with dishes at a potluck, you can just leave that item alone. Maybe UU’s have trouble doing that. I do. But if you can take what you want and leave the rest, you get to help change your tradition from within. Is it weird, or what, that a spark from, of all things, Puritanism eventually became UU’ism? Doesn’t that mean there’s hope in other traditions?

Who could imagine anything more alien to UUs than Puritanism? But remember that joke? — that UU’s can’t sing well because we have to read every word first to see if we agree with it? Somehow that feels Puritan to me: the rigidity, the suppression of metaphor and poetry.
When we sang “Amazing Grace” today, we intentionally didn’t instruct you whether to sing “wretch” or “soul.” I think this amazing song got in so many hymnals, from Baptist to UU, because it’s about grace – an experience transcending distinctions of theology. So what’s the problem with that one word? (Why must the hymnal have a footnote about substituting “soul” for “wretch”?) I asked my English professor in residence, one of the few lifelong UU’s among us. He said as a rule it’s best not to alter a classic. My reaction is more gut-level: “Saved a soul like me” just sounds mundane; “saved a wretch like me” feels vivid and real – that’s how it’s become loved by millions.
I think it was in a Kudzu strip that a choir sang, “Awesome grace, how groovy the sound, that saved a low-self-esteemer like me.” Was the cartoonist thinking of UU hymnal-revisers? Picture Stuart Smalley, from the old SNL, sitting on that revision committee and pushing to make hymns end with, I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!
But maybe that wouldn’t have fit John Newton, the 18th Century sea captain who wrote “Amazing Grace” when he encountered grace after his ship nearly sank. Newton was a slave trader. Not right away, but eventually, he would give up that work and become a leading abolitionist. When I think “wretched,” I try to imagine his struggle, the dawning, reluctant realization of the horror he was helping perpetrate, versus dread of giving up his livelihood. Do we ever feel wretched? Can it be a precursor to grace?
We have our own wordy issue here: church: This congregation has never resolved whether to call ourselves a church or some other, unnamed thing. Personally I like to speak the same language as whoever I’m talking with, when possible. But if we do drop “church,” why keep all those other churchy words like congregation, sanctuary, hymn, offering, or minister?

Change is happening so fast. Who’s to say where humanity is going? We may well destroy the planet, but if not, we just could be headed toward a new kind of spiritual awakening. Can we dream? The concepts expressed in the 7 principles would be there – as would giving no religion an exclusive claim to truth, but valuing contributions from all – the parts called the wisdom traditions, where they merge. The focus on this world that comes from the Enlightenment and humanism would be there, too: not necessarily ruling out anything beyond it, but mindful that it’s this world we can best know and act in and be accountable for.

UU’s have pioneered in these concepts, but should we expect to own them?

What if they became mainstream in many faith communities that had different traditions and flavors than ours? What if some groups were to have more diversity, more grass-roots governance, more compassion, more of a focus on what they support than what they oppose, and more concern for their vision than their institutional dominance? Could that be OK – Unitarian Universalism merging into a vast spiritual ocean?

In fact, will organized religion even always be needed? Or will the “nones” have it — like those Martian fire balloons?