Religion, or UUism?

15 June 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

SERMON

One of my favorite discussions of religion happened some years back with a group of Presbyterians. Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and most others, as you may know, say all the same things about their uniqueness as a group that UUs do. You’ll hear them say that steering a bunch of them is like herding cats, you’ll hear them say things like “Presbyterians are all like that,” “What would you expect of a bunch of Lutherans?” or “Nobody tells a Baptist what to believe!” and the rest.

About fifteen years ago, I belonged to an ecumenical ministers’ group. About thirty or forty of us met together every Thursday for lunch, and our churches took turns hosting the lunches, so we got to meet a nice variety of people from other religions – mostly the women who prepared and served the lunches. We were visiting a small rural Presbyterian church one Thursday, and before lunch I overheard a small group of Presbyterian women talking. They were trashing Catholics or Baptists, and one of them said “Well, I’m glad we’re Presbyterians!” After a little silence, a second woman said “We’re not supposed to be Presbyterians. We’re supposed to be Christians.” After more silence, another said “Even that sounds arrogant. We’re supposed to love one another, that’s all.”

There is a whole graduate-level course in the difference between religion and a special club in that little interchange. Social clubs are about who we are, what we believe, what is distinctive about us. So this includes political parties, fraternities and sororities, college boosters, and parts of all religions. But these identities are always about who we are. I think of them as roosters crowing to draw attention to themselves. They’re not really doing anything, just crowing.

But religion has always been very different. It isn’t about who we are or what we believe. It’s about what we owe to others, to the world, how we are commanded to behave, like the third Presbyterian woman knew. Religion is always about trying to get people to seek a higher identity than the ones we usually seek. Left alone, we identify with ourselves, or with our club, our class, our kind of people, our political party, fraternity or sorority, even with the sports team we root for. These identities can be so powerful people will kill or die for them, as has happened a few times in world soccer matches.

That Presbyterian discussion about the sacred and the profane reminded me of a bible passage, and a movie made about that bible passage. The bible passage is in the gospel of Matthew where Jesus says, “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?” (Matthew 7:9, NRSV)

And the movie, which is one of the favorite movies of many who have seen it, is a picture that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1988. It’s a Danish film with subtitles, about a small religious group whose favorite Biblical question was “Who, when your child asks for bread, will give a stone?” Yet the movie showed it was this dour little group that was doing just that. They taught conformity to their style, they really just worshiped their way of being. Even the bread they served at their meals was stale.

Who offers a stone to people who ask for bread? Lots of people, and lots of groups. It’s what the first two Presbyterians were offering: club membership rather than a transformed life and world. All you have to offer is being called a Presbyterian or a Christian, a Unitarian Universalist or a Muslim? Those are stones, not bread. And it became clear when the third woman spoke and said they were just supposed to love one another, just that. There was bread. Manna, bread from heaven, bread for the soul and for the soul of the world.

Do you see and feel the difference? It matters so much!

I want to use another word to talk about the difference between honest religion and lesser identities like club or denominational identities. It’s about the different kinds of authority that religion and clubs, political parties or social groups have. These latter, the social and political clubs, have only the authority of their group. They say “This is true because we say it is, and if you don’t agree you need to join another club or church or party. If you don’t like our truth, join the club down the street.” Political parties are not concerned with the truth as much as they are with toeing the party line, and the same is true of all religions at their most superficial level. It’s always about them: so Presbyterians are people who say they believe this but not that; Catholics believe that but not this. It’s never about their character, the kind of people they are, how they treat others. Religious wars and heresy trials are never about character or behavior, always about public profession of the beliefs demanded by the club with the club.

Religious truth must always rest on what is called ontological truth. Sorry for the two-dollar word, but it means a truth that is not determined by what we do or don’t believe, not determined by any authority. Saying something is an ontological truth is saying this is really the way life is, taken deeply, whether we like it or not. It is the only authority an honest religion can ever claim. Every religion I know has a way of saying that the quality of our life is determined largely by the quality of the values we’re living out, and that the focus isn’t on how special we are, but whether we love one another, especially those who are different from us.

The Greeks had a formula for this that I’ve always loved:

Plant a thought, reap an action;

plant an action, reap a habit;

plant a habit, reap a character;

plant a character, reap a destiny.

The Greeks believed that the authority for living well is written in the depths of the human condition, understood rightly, and that we must try to live this way or pay the price. This is so similar to the messages of Taoism, Buddhism, almost all religions. Some religions make some of the eternal dynamics and values into gods, to indicate that they are powerful and persistent and must always be dealt with. This is one way to understand the whole pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses: projections of natural and psychological dynamics that have always been with us, that frame the possibilities of living.

And the task of living wisely is the task of Zeus: to mediate between competing desires and demands, in service of a balanced life directed toward serving the greater good of ourselves and others. What is the prize for this? It is salvation by character, it is personal and communal authenticity.

You can’t get that second-hand. You can’t get it by joining a club, a denomination or a church, or putting fish named “Jesus” on your car trunk. You only get it by doing the self-examination and the work. It’s free, but it isn’t cheap.

And, as every religion I know teaches, there is a penalty for not taking our lives this seriously. Hinduism and Buddhism have you coming back until you get it right. Taoism and many nature religions talk about being out of touch with the essential balance of life, saying you pay the penalty of a diminished and less connected life. Western religions talk about Hell as a place for those who failed worst. But you don’t have to think in supernatural terms. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t think in supernatural terms.

I’ve quoted a paragraph here before from my favorite Western religious thinker, the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Movie critics say the movie “Babette’s Feast” was all about Kierkegaard’s ideas, too; and it was certainly shot through with them. He didn’t think you could fool yourself, others and life forever. He thought there was a price to pay for identifying only with clubs, churches, denominations – Lutheran, in his case. It was a kind of existential Judgment Day he called “the Midnight Hour.” It could come in the morning when your face looks back at you from the mirror and says “Who are you? Why weren’t you your more true self?” –

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself.” (from Either/Or, in A Kierkegaard Anthology edited by Robert Bretall, Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 99)

When something posing as an adequate identity short-circuits the process by giving people prizes simply for being Christian, Unitarian Universalist or Republican, then it has become a betrayal of the religious calling that’s lost beneath the shallower rewards of a group identity.

And I want to persuade you that the difference between liberal religion and a religion called UUism defined by the seven principles is the difference between religion and a social club, a political party, a secular or cultural identity. It is the difference between the authority of life taken deeply, and the authority of a club.

Now how did this brand-new faith called Unitarian Universalism, defined by those seven principles, come about? This isn’t hard to see. The UUA is funding an advertising campaign in Kansas City costing about a quarter of a million dollars, to establish brand-name recognition for UU churches in a city where almost nobody has ever heard of them. One of the women working with the project called me a few weeks ago to say that while more visitors are coming to their churches, the visitors want to know what the religion is, and when she shows them the seven principles they just roll their eyes and often don’t return. “I don’t like them either,” she said, “but it’s all we’ve got.”

They have brand-name recognition, but they don’t have a product to sell, which means a lot of the money is probably wasted. People are coming asking for spiritual bread, and feeling like they’re being offered stones. Even the woman offering the stones is aware that something is missing. That something might be called religion.

One of the slogans used in this billboard campaign is very helpful in understanding what the problem is. That billboard reads, “Many religions, one faith.” Look what they are saying – and saying honestly, I think. There are many religions in our churches, we all know that. You can be Christian, atheist, Buddhist, wiccan, whatever you like. But then there is this “one faith.” The “one faith” that they call Unitarian Universalism. This means that the “one faith” is not a religion. And it sounds like that “one faith” trumps the religions, is the higher category that defines everyone who joins the churches, no matter what they may personally believe. Where did this “one faith” come from?

Let’s look at the origins of UUism – the faith defined by the seven principles. We don’t have to go back very far, it’s a brand-new faith. But its origins were not religious.

When the Unitarians and the Universalists merged in 1961, both religions were moribund. American Universalism had the supernatural teaching that all dead people go to heaven, there is no hell. But people really haven’t worried or written much about where dead people might go for over a century, especially in liberal circles. By about 1900, the Universalists had an answer to a question few liberals were asking any more. Their last seminary closed in the 1970s (Crane, at Tufts University).

And the American Unitarianism of the 19th century as a bible-centered monotheistic religion was also about dead in liberal circles forty years ago. Most who came to our churches were asking their questions in scientific language, language about this life in this world, and they weren’t talking much about God.

Both Unitarians and Universalists, however, were cultural and political liberals, usually supporting the same individual-rights causes. So there was a common identity, it just wasn’t religious.

So as soon as the two religions merged 1961, the question of what on earth they believed arose. Some of you will remember this arising in the 1970s, when Unitarians were saying “The problem is that our children don’t know what to tell their friends they believe!” That, for the record, was a lie. That wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was that the adults, including many of the ministers, no longer knew what they believed, or even what was worth believing. They were really in about the same nebulous place as most of the liberal culture in America – as they still are.

Imagine what might have happened if Unitarians, 25 years ago when they realized they didn’t know what was worth believing, had actually become leaders and asked religious questions. They might have used some of their grant money to bring together theologians and religion scholars from around the world, to discover common themes and common beliefs that underlie all the world’s religions. They might have discovered that there is a core of beliefs that have marked people of good character in all times and places, and might have made those beliefs central – not to their shared cultural habits, but to their religion – hopefully, something with a name shorter than eleven syllables.

Theologians, sociologists of religion, cultural anthropologists, existential psychologists, historians, philosophers – think of the panels of experts, poets, religious thinkers from around the world that could have been assembled! And the results might have marked a watershed in religious history. The first time people might actually have looked beyond confessionalism, beyond religious jargon, to ask what on earth really is worth believing, what ideals must command the attention of all good people. I’m not exaggerating, I think it could have been revolutionary, both for our churches and for others.

But nothing like that happened. Nobody was interested in it. The early 1980s were very self-absorbed times in our country – it was the “Me” generation – and our people reflected that as products of the times. Also, as a religious movement that didn’t have a clear religion, there was a lot of defensiveness, and almost no faith that a set of real and necessary beliefs could be discovered.

So instead of looking outward, they looked inward. Instead of conducting a study, they took a poll. It was a poll taken to ask what current members in the early 1980s happened to believe. Not what they should believe, not what things could be argued to be most profoundly true, not what beliefs have been accepted through history as necessary in helping to form people of good character. No religious questions were asked, no religious scholars were consulted. They just took a poll. They held a mirror up to themselves to admire the beliefs they happened to bring into church with them, since they weren’t clear what beliefs worth having anyone would pick up in church.

What such a poll had to reveal, and what it did reveal, were the secular assumptions that cultural liberals of the early 1980s brought into church with them, the beliefs they had absorbed from the broader liberal culture. And the principles have been used, since then, to describe “our kind of people” – not their religion, which is at best a secondary concern, but the secular faith of cultural liberalism: the “one faith” that constitutes the ersatz new faith called “Unitarian Universalism.”

“UUism” is the religion for our masses, just as Presbyterianism is the religion for those masses. It was created by people who wanted to be able to speak for their masses, people who were frustrated by religious pluralism and wanted, finally, “one faith.” That is only likely to happen in a mass religion, a group faith. And mass religions have a different faith than religions do.

The faith of religions for the masses is the faith that there is safety in numbers and security and identity in belonging to a group of like-minded people. The faith of honest religion is fundamentally different; it is the faith that life really does have some abiding truths that can guide, strengthen and comfort us if only we will listen, hear, and obey them, even when they put us at odds with our group – which they usually will.

Club membership, society identity, religion for the masses, is easy and secure, and can feel really good if what you seek is acceptance without work, just for being you in a group of people just like you. It’s the feeling a Democrat gets at a Democratic convention, but – curiously! – doesn’t get at a Republican convention. It’s the feeling a Republican gets at a Republican convention, but – again, curiously – not at a Democratic convention. This is because political parties, like denominations and other group identities, aren’t in the pursuit of truth; they’re in pursuit of conformity with a party line that can bestow an identity on their kind of people.

I am not and have never been a “Unitarian Universalist,” though I’ve identified with the American Unitarian tradition. But even as an outsider to this new “faith” called UUism, it’s easy to see that it is in trouble, lost in the woods. Even Bill Sinkford, the president of the UUA, has said publicly that the principles are so empty and boring that nobody would want them read by their bedside in a hospital. This isn’t just my rant: even the president of the association knows that the emperor has no clothes – and suspects it isn’t a real emperor, either. That’s the definition of stones, not bread. Who would give stones to people asking for bread? The UUA would and does.

I imagine people coming to the UUA twenty years from now, or even one week from now, saying “We came to you asking for bread, and you gave us this silly faith based on principles that came from taking a poll. How could you do that? We trusted you to take us seriously. How could you do that?”

It is sad and frustrating to have watched the new and vapid “faith” called Unitarian Universalism replace the focus and purpose of an honest religion with such self-absorbed pap. Because bad faith drives out good faith. It’s also sad to observe that when a religion is dumbed down to the self-descriptive boasts of its members, people follow it to that lower level because they trusted their leaders to lead them in the ways of righteousness and wholeness, and to feed them bread rather than stones.

This isn’t finished. The mistakes made 20 years ago through lack of vision and courage are related to the fact that the adult membership of the UUA has declined 44% since 1970, and has declined 5% per decade since 1980 relative to the population of the U.S. [1]

The lack of religious vision and courage are also related to the president of the UUA saying that the seven principles of the “one faith” of UUism are so hollow and boring that nobody would want them read by their hospital bedside – even as we spend more money creating religious education programs based on them. It is material for a Garrison Keillor joke, and might be funny if we weren’t paying for it – in more currencies than we care to count.

So this isn’t finished. And I can’t finish it today with one critique. This “movement” – the one that’s moving backwards – is lost in the woods, led there marching to the chant of the “one faith” composed of seven principles no one can remember. The way out, I believe, will not be under the banner of “Unitarian Universalism.” It will only come, I think, when individuals, ministers, churches and leaders (probably in that order) forego the simple comforts of club membership for the engaging challenges of the same spirit of honest religion that has animated every great religion, every serious quest for noble character, in history.

I think a motto we use in this church could help the UUA shift their vision toward something that might point toward an exit from the woods. Not “Many religions, one faith,” but – as you see printed on all our orders of service – “One church. Many beliefs.”

The many beliefs are variations on timeless themes. Those themes are the range of commandments that have always stirred the human soul to higher and nobler aspirations, to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. They sing through the prayers of every honest religion of history, and are recognizable immediately:

– Don’t to do others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.

– Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your god.

– Whatsoever things are true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, or good report – think on these things

– Be a blessing unto the world

– Speak from the Buddha-seed within you to the Buddha-seed within others.

– A good man is a bad man’s teacher; a bad man is a good man’s job.

While these themes are legion, they are all sung in the key of honest religion, not the self-absorption of smaller identities. We know them by their sound and the seriousness with which they take both us and all of life. No two people will find exactly the same combination of variations on these themes to find their own way out of the woods, so though we can be one church – meaning a sangha, a place where religious concerns are valued higher than lesser concerns – there must be many beliefs, many variations on these themes. The variations are negotiable; the themes are not.

The way out of the woods can, I believe, only be walked along paths of religious beliefs, not the mass recitations of groups in love mostly with their kind of people. It is an unending journey, this succession of paths out of the woods, and along the way are many stones to trip us up. But there is also food for this trip, nourishment for head and heart, body and soul. We’ll be serving – well, you know.

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[1] “UUism” and its growth or decline, compared with the growth in the US population since 1970:

in 1970, UUs (167,583) were .081727% of the US population (205,052,000)

in 1980, UUs (139,052) were .06138% of the US population (226,545,805)

in 1990, UUs (145,250) were .0584% of the US population (248,709,873)

in 2000, UUs (155,449) were .05524% of the US population (281,421,906)

The 2000 figures show UUs have lost over 32% since 1970 (.05524% is 67.6% of .081727%) They’ve lost 10% since 1980, 5% since 1990.

Here are some more ways to play with those figures:

Since 1970, the US population has increased by 37.244%, while UU adult members have declined by over 7.2%. If UUs had kept up with US population growth, there would be about 229,998 adult members today instead of the 155,000+ we have. So we are about 44.5% behind where we would need to be, to have kept pace with US population growth. And we’re about 45% behind where we’d need to be actually to say we had GROWN in the past thirty years.

(Figures obtained from the UUA and the Internet.)