Davidson Loehr
August 2000
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
“I have my conviction that in religion, and also in the arts, that which is common to a group is not important. Indeed, very often it is a contagion of mutual imitation.” (Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man, Beacon Press, 1961, p. 110)
Listen to the way people in our churches use the words “Unitarian Universalist,” and you will realize they aren’t referring to a religion. It’s more vague, more generic:
“We Unitarian Universalists really like to'”
“You know, Einstein really sounds like a UU!”
“Preaching to UUs is like trying to herd cats!”
“There are a lot of UUs out there who just don’t know they’re UUs!”
What we’re describing here, in wildly self-important ways, is ‘our kind of people.’ You know: bright, witty, independent, good people: the kind on whom the hope of the world depends. I’ve heard UCCs, Presbyterians and Lutherans describe the world in the same self-centered way. It’s like the famous cover that Saul Steinberg drew for The New Yorker years ago, showing a map of the whole world, of which a few blocks in New York City make up about 90%. It is Tagore’s ‘contagion of mutual imitation,’ showing that our natural tendency is to see ‘our kind’ as the best kind of people. It isn’t a religious statement at all, it’s self-flattery, waved at an indifferent world.
Empty principles
The idea that ‘Unitarian Universalists’ and ‘good people’ are synonyms is more imperialistic and arrogant than it may seem.
Several decades ago, for instance, the Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner made a famous attempt to acknowledge all the non-Christians in the world who are nevertheless good people. He coined a phrase that’s become associated with his name and worth recalling here. He lumped together all the people of good character and intent in the world ‘ all the Jews, atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, etc. ‘ and declared that they were all really ‘anonymous Christians.’
Rahner meant well, but it was a deep insult to all other faiths, this claim that all true intelligence, compassion and good intent were really just an example of his religion.
This habit is no less offensive when people in our tiny movement make a similar claim that all reasonable, loving, liberal people are ‘really UUs.’ It won’t do, either for Rahner or for us, to claim that our peculiar habits represent the soul of all intelligent goodness in the universe. If the religion of ‘Unitarian Universalism’ is to be a real religion, it will have to have a distinct set of perspectives and understandings of the human situation that differentiate it from other, older religions. It will also have to be able to stand beside the insights of Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and other religious prophets and sages without looking trivial and silly.
No one would try to defend the Seven Principles as religious insights comparable to those of the great sages and prophets of history. It would be overkill to trudge through all seven vacuities in order to show what we already know: that these aren’t really religious principles of any insight or depth. But it might be worth taking the first and last of these, which seem to be nearly everyone’s favorites:
The first Principle we are told we affirm is The inherent worth and dignity of every person. To test the integrity of this statement, imagine how UUs would react if someone painted the words of the first principle on a banner and marched under it in a right-to-life parade. UUs would deride these people as ‘not getting it.’ This serves to illustrate that the first principle is not a principle at all. It is a bromide, a flag to be waved only over our pre-approved social and political biases. When I’ve asked Unitarian Universalists how they reconcile the first principle with their stand on abortion, the overwhelming response has been that since the Supreme Court has ruled that a fetus isn’t a person, there’s no moral issue here. This seems to mean that, for this religion, one nation’s (liberal) judiciary is granted the authority to define human life. So the ‘inherent’ worth and dignity must be added to human beings at some point after birth (‘the adherent worth and dignity”). The closer we look, the more quickly this dissolves into vapors.
The seventh Principle is Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. This is the prettiest of the bunch, but we don’t mean this, either. Just one look at faiths like Taoism or Hinduism shows us that we don’t mean all existence. We only mean the pretty parts, and the current fads of cultural liberalism. We love Bambi, but not the wolf that stalks and kills Bambi for food. We love the idea of protecting the spotted owls (which few of us could recognize), but can’t understand that loggers are equally parts of the interdependent web of all existence (we’re safe; our churches don’t attract many loggers). Here too, our application of this bromide shows that it is conditional. We only mean to use it as another flag to wave over the few parts of existence that please us. In what seem far more mature and complete religious perspectives like Taoism and Hinduism, creation and destruction are equally parts of the sacred dynamics of existence. We’re nowhere nearly that inclusive or profound ‘ nor, to be fair, do we claim to be.
Most of the ministers in our movement know the history of liberal religion well enough to know that our tradition’s greatest leaders would not have listened to a congregation of grown-ups recite the Seven Principles without running out of the church ‘ or just throwing up. The ‘Principles’ are club slogans, designed to be said in front of others, to the accompaniment of a superficial feeling of specialness.
Almost all of these so-called ‘principles’ are derived from the secular values of the 18th century Enlightenment, though with the depth and feel of something designed by a committee. But for these seven to be honest, they would all have to end with the phrase ”within the currently approved limits of our political ideology.’
The Religion of Our Masses
The Seven Principles are the Creed of Unitarian Universalism, which is the religion of our masses. When the first adult catechism came out a dozen years ago ‘ What Unitarian Universalists Believe, An Introduction to the Seven Principles ‘ The newly-invented religion began dumbing down the people who had come to us for raising up. I wrote to the men who had endorsed this program. The one who answered said the principles didn’t do much for him either, but ‘people need a simple place to start.’ I disagree, but even if so, why on earth would they need a simple social and political place to start, when our center is supposed to be religious’
The theologian Karl Barth once told young ministers, ‘People expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so.’ Maybe I’m too idealistic to survive, but I’ll take Barth’s advice over ‘a simple place to start’ any day. Wouldn’t you’ Barth’s words lift up and inspire; ‘a simple place to start’ is a demeaning and insulting aspiration for any religion with our great heritage. (Try to imagine Servetus going to the stake or Channing or Parker taking the courageous and costly stands for which we revere them, on behalf of ‘a simple place to start.’)
Unitarian Universalism may be the worst religion in the UUA, and for several reasons. One is that it is a group faith that cultivates rather than suppresses the herd behaviors ‘ that ‘contagion of mutual imitation’ ‘ which liberal religion is supposed to help us rise above. Another is that it isn’t really a religion at all, but a social and political ideology posing as (and displacing) a religion. Such political visions could lead toward a healthier world only if everybody else were just like us. But this is the dream of political solipsism, not religion.
Yet this mind-numbing groupthink controls what will or won’t be featured in the UU World ‘ which seems like little more than a cheerleader for ‘our faith,’ and a series of variations on the theme of ‘How do I love me, let me count the ways.’
There are those who say all successful religions need a simplified version for their masses, a second-hand faith taught for memorizing and rewarded by granting an easy group identity to those who conform. These people cite ‘ at least off the record ‘ the ‘realism’ of famous cynics like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor ‘ those same people Ortega y Gassett said had to have their opinions pumped into them from outside. They say a movement can’t attract numbers large enough to make a difference without dumbing its message down to give people ‘a simple place to start.’
I’ve heard these arguments in various forms from many colleagues. Maybe they’re right. My idealism wishes this weren’t so, but history offers plenty of evidence that it is. The giants of history, including the religious giants, seem to have been able to manufacture their own oxygen. The rest, like the rest in all times, breathed second-hand air through their group’s nose. ‘A simple place to start’ quickly reduces to ‘a contagion of imitation’ ‘ if it ever differed at all.
Where were our leaders?
I am using a double standard here that I’ll defend. I’m not blaming ‘the laity,’ the people in our congregations who come to our churches hoping for vision and leadership from the professionals they are paying to be their ministers. I’m blaming the ministers and the leadership at the UUA. As professionals, we are supposed to be raising the bar, not lowering it. Karl Barth again: ‘Your people expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so.’ Barth was right. How did we ever forget this’
Ministers who have had even a mediocre seminary or divinity school education can be expected to know the difference ‘ and they do know the difference ‘ between a religious identity and the more paltry one offered by social, political or denominational clubbiness.
As professionals, we owe people more than the mind- and soul-numbing bromides of ‘Unitarian Universalism.’ Every minister in our movement knows the history of liberal religion well enough to know that people like Hus, Channing, Parker, Emerson and the rest would not have listened to a congregation of grown-ups recite the Principles without running out of the church ‘ or just throwing up.
As professionals charged with taking our congregants more seriously than they take themselves, we have dumbed down religion to a denominator so common and low that no one should consent to being defined by it ‘ least of all, ministers.
There isn’t a big mystery here. It isn’t hard to know what to do. Our leaders ‘ by which I mean ministers, teachers of religion and Association officials ‘ simply have to find the courage to admit that we have made a terrible mistake by shallowing out the religious tradition which the past has entrusted us to pass on to the future.
We really have a rich, if small, legacy of genuine religious heroes, and need to be emulating them instead of aping the group faith of the ‘masses’ against which the leaders we respect stood out. A few examples:
Jan Hus, the 15th century Catholic priest whose story is symbolized in our flaming chalice, argued a century before Luther that the chalice (symbolizing the sacred and life-giving power of religion) was to be shared with all, as religion was to be the property (and challenge) of all. He was the first to translate the Bible into the vernacular of his people, in another effort to tempt ‘the masses’ into the larger world of first-hand religion. Our chalice stands for the ‘open chalice’ that symbolized his larger and more inclusive view of religion. The flame reminds us of the flame in which Hus was burned at the stake ‘ the cost of standing out too far in front of the masses.
William Ellery Channing is celebrated in our tribe as a Congregationalist minister who stood out against the conforming background of trinitarian Christians by arguing for a unitarian Christianity, stripped of the traditional myths that most people continued to recite. We don’t mention nearly as often the fact that late in his life, he also stood out against the conforming background of his own congregation, when he resigned from his church rather than agree to be spoken for by the creed his congregation had created ‘ a foretaste of today’s ‘Principles.’
We celebrate the remarkable Theodore Parker as though he represented mid-19th century Unitarians. But he did not. He was banned from speaking in other Unitarian pulpits in Boston because of his opposition to slavery and his other liberal stances. It was the background masses who really represented mid-19th century Unitarianism, and whom we would rather forget about now.
It is time for UU ministers to borrow these leaders’ bravery and lead our congregations in a healthy religious direction rather than a paltry political one.
We don’t need to traipse around in sackcloth and ashes for our sins. We can forgive ourselves for the folly of the Seven Principles and our clubby past. It is part of the human condition, as Shakespeare noticed, we seem to tend toward loving to love “not wisely but too well.’
Emulate the Leaders, not the Masses
We had some notable leaders a few centuries back. Hus, Channing, Parker, Emerson were men whose beliefs were in stark opposition to the vast majority of their fellow-believers at the time. They saw the religions of the ‘masses’ of their times as obstacles to, or enemies of, honest religion. They would have agreed with Tagore’s observation that, in religion, ‘that which is common to a group is not important’ and is very often ‘a contagion of mutual imitation’.
It takes more than merely ‘standing alone,’ of course. We expect a good religion ‘ even an adequate one ‘ to help its followers become blessings rather than curses to the larger world around them. (Evil and insane people, after all, have also had the courage and vision to stand out from the crowd. Adolph Hitler and Matthew Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate come to mind as examples from those two extremes.)
Still, the pattern is that liberal religion always seems to occur against an illiberal background, where the illiberal background is composed of the group faith that defines the religion.
I think this pattern holds in every religious tradition. The “masses” of the background ‘ always the vast majority of the religion ‘ have a second-hand religion, rather than a personal faith they can express in their own words. There’s both institutional and peer pressure to stay within the box, because the group identity is contained within that box. But groups don’t think. By definition, there’s no such thing as a herd of liberals. And we should remember that we never look back with respect for the ministers who led their people to the lowest common denominator of a group faith. We respect only those who had the vision and courage to breathe their own fresh spiritual air ‘ we have never sung hymns to the masses who breathed their second-hand air through the group’s nose. Nor will those in the future who look back to see what we passed on to them.
My prescription for our little movement is simple. We need to say goodbye to our group faith, shed our club-like mentality, then rediscover and recommit ourselves to the path of the religious liberal.
Who should we be?
We are religious liberals. That’s the umbrella term under which almost all of the religious paths within the UUA can be grouped. It is the broad religious tradition passed on to us, though it is of necessity far broader today than either the Unitarians or Universalists of the 19th century would have permitted. The reason ‘religious liberalism’ can’t be abused as easily as ‘Unitarian Universalism’ has been is because it is much bigger than our little movement, and we don’t have the authority to define it.
Liberalism is a style of being religious, rather than a position. As a style, religious liberalism is the opposite of religious literalism ‘ change one letter, and change a whole religious worldview. ‘Liberal’ means, among other things, a bigger helping. It also refers to a symbolic and metaphorical ‘ rather than literal ‘ approach to religious writings.
The soul of liberalism is the search for commonalities that transcend our more superficial differences. We’ve lost sight of that, but it still offers the only healthy road out of our morass. Lately, we seem to pretend that there are only differences, that there aren’t any significant commonalities that might let us aspire to become ‘a people,’ a part of a much larger world, not made in our image. This just isn’t true. Our radical individualism, with its narcissism of small differences, has flown the course of the fabled Gorp Bird, that mythical creature that flew at ever-increasing speed in ever-decreasing circles until its head vanished beneath its tail feathers with a sound like ‘Gorp!’ We can do better ‘ we could hardly do worse!
A Modest Start
Here is a short list of things I think both we and our children can say to those who want to know ‘What do you liberals believe, anyway” These aren’t meant to be replacements for the Seven Bromides. Rather, they are some of the common attributes of adequate faiths almost everywhere. They are attempts to identify those ideals that have the best chance of making us better people, partners, parents and citizens.
‘ We know we’re a part of life and that we owe something back to the world for the gift of life.
‘ We know that we are supposed to live in such a way that, when we look back on it, we can be proud, and can make those we care about proud.
‘ We know we are to try and make this world a little bit better because we passed through it.
‘ We believe that truth, justice, and compassion are required of us. We believe that love is better than hatred, understanding is better than prejudice, peace is better than war.
‘ We believe if there is ever to be a better world, you, I and those whose beliefs differ from ours will have to help each other build it.
‘ We know that each religion says these things differently, but we also know that down deep they are all saying that we are sacred people who need to treat everybody else as though they were sacred, too.
These fairly obvious and enduring truths aren’t rules of a club. They refer us back to the human situation, and begin to identify some of the common attributes of adequate faiths and decent people everywhere. This is the level of deep commonality that liberal religion is supposed to seek, articulate, and incorporate. Without this foundation, we are simply not engaged in liberal religion, not protecting or passing on the soul of honest religion for which the great religious figures have lived and died. Some day we’ll all die too. That’s not a failure. The failure, as we’re going now, will come when the religious liberals of the future look back toward us to see what we had the courage to live for.
