by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, April 6, 2003
I chose my two brief readings for this morning after poring over close to a score of UU thinkers and writers whose work has been stuffed into my file on Unitarian Universalism over the years. One of the things I found striking in that exercise was how common is the theme that can best be summed up with this perennial question: "What is at the core of Unitarian Universalism?" Behind the question are two rather anxious assumptions: first, that if we cannot clearly find and articulate a core, we'll have to admit (paraphrasing Gertrude Stein's observation about Oakland), "there's no there there", and we're bound for extinction because of our fuzzy or nonexistent outlines. And second, that if there is a core, it's got to look a lot like a creed, whether or not we call it that.
I want to take up this question of what it is that binds us together as Unitarian Universalists across the continent and around the world. But my own inquiry is fueled not by anxiety but by confidence. From what I observe, we're a denomination with a robust sense of self and mission, despite our diversity of faith perspectives. We have a core set of commitments enshrined in our Purposes and Principles, which come as close to a creed as we're ever likely to get. But I think we're bound together less by those statements than we are by a sense of covenant that is both more amorphous and more powerful than our Purposes and Principles let on.
It's impossible to understand the wrestling about theology and identity that goes on within our fold without being grounded in our history, both the history of Unitarianism and of Universalism. In the same way that family history can trickle down and affect many generations of a single family, it's important to know about the large turning points in our denominational past in order to understand who we are now and why we struggle so often and so passionately about our beliefs.
Both of our ancestral branches were born from radical ruptures with the theological status quo. Unitarianism in this country was born out of intellectual rebellion against New England Puritanism. It reversed the focus that filled the lens of Christianity at the time: instead of concentrating on human depravity and helpless dependence on a merciful God, Unitarians lifted up the gift of human reason and the promise it gave for the continual and positive development of the human race.
Early Unitarians in this country as elsewhere struggled to define a new kind of Christianity, one that could emphasize the human wisdom of Jesus rather than teachings about the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, which they rejected as illogical and superstitious. The Unitarians put an enormous emphasis on the power and promise of the human mind.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the Unitarian proclamation of faith was this: "We believe in the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, the Leadership of Jesus, Salvation through Character, and the Progress of Mankind Onward and Upward Forever." It's a little embarrassing to say it out loud today, not only because of the gender exclusions but because that 'onward and upward forever' sounds so much like Superman just before he launches into flight!. Nevertheless, it's a statement that communicates well the optimism inherent in historical Unitarianism and therefore important for us to recognize.
The revolution heralded by Universalism was less cerebral, and maybe for that reason the movement grew far more quickly than Unitarianism. The Universalists rebelled against the Calvinism of their day that relentlessly hammered home the sinful, depraved nature of human beings and the sure punishment of hell awaiting nearly all of us.
The Universalists spread the joyful gospel news that God was all-loving and all-forgiving, and that salvation belonged to all human beings, without exception. So appealing was this message that in the early part of the 1800s, as one writer put it, "Universalism spread across New England like mint through an untended kitchen garden. At one point there were more than 200 Universalist congregations in Vermont alone."
The Universalists didn't see themselves as revolutionaries in quite the self-conscious way that the Boston leaders of the Unitarian movement did, because the Universalist message was much stronger on the side of what they affirmed. Although they opposed the dark pessimism of Calvinism, their central teaching of love and forgiveness spoke for itself. It allowed the Universalists to define themselves by what they proclaimed rather than by what they rejected, and the joy and liberation inherent in their message made it contagiously appealing.
In the nineteenth century, as the American experiment was consolidating, as Enlightenment values were spreading, as science and reason were everywhere on the ascendant, it looked as though both Unitarianism and Universalism represented the religions of the future. Many of you have heard the famous quote from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson, in which he said with confidence that he expected that by the end of the century Unitarianism would be the nation's foremost religion. And as we've already heard, Universalism spread like crazy during the first half of the century in particular.
But it turns out that there's a peculiar vulnerability inherent in liberal religion of every stripe, at least when that religion is grounded in a free and relatively well-to-do culture and economy. Unitarianism's emphasis on human reason and individual experience opened the door for many to reason themselves right out of religion in all its forms. Universalism's liberating message that God forgives everyone, no matter what, led to the logical assurance that you were in good graces whether or not you ever went to church -- so many stopped going. There were other influences that led to the shrinkage of both denominations; but what's undeniable is that by the time they merged in 1961, neither was in particularly good shape. Nor did merger stop the decline. Unitarianism was the stronger of the two when they merged, and its ministers at the time were largely trained in and committed to the traditions of religious humanism and rationalism.
As UU Geoffrey Stokes put it, "In more and more congregations, the mention of God or of spirituality became unthinkable, and a complacent orthodoxy of dissent held sway. Not surprisingly, such an atmosphere proved insular and unsupportive, especially as congregations wrestled with the ethical crises of Vietnam. During the 1970s, adult membership in UUA churches fell by nearly 20 percent, and enrollment in their Sunday schools by almost half. Those who stayed, together with the handful that joined, began to look awfully alike: academic, professional, or managerial types who were disproportionately white and, in the aggregate, increasingly older."
But a funny thing happened on the way to extinction. Somewhere along the road, sometime in the late 1970s, members of our congregations and the ministers serving them began to recall that ours was a denomination with roots not only of rebellion but of affirmation. Something of the Universalist strand began to reassert itself, with more of an emphasis on heart and soul -- not instead of intellect, but along with it.
Universalist minister Deane Starr described the shift from the perspective of the early 1990s: "I'm not entirely sure when it began", he said, "but certainly the direction was clear by the time of one of our ministers' meetings [in 1987]. We took the three great denominational watchwords -- freedom, reason, tolerance -- and agreed that these were no longer the hallmarks of our religion. They were gradually being replaced by another three: interdependence, community, and spirituality."
I don't actually agree with Deane Starr's list, though some of what he says I can affirm from my own experience. My first exposure to Unitarian Universalism came in the early 1970s when I was still in high school and the denomination was still more humanist than it was anything else, at least out west where I was. I found nothing at all to attract me then, because I was looking for religious, not secular, grounding. I wanted a spiritual experience of worship that wouldn't contradict my intellect but would touch something in me that was not entirely intellectual: my emotions, my religious yearning, my sense of the mystery weaving through the world.
In the church I visited in my youth, none of that was available, and I didn't peer through any of our doors again for ten years. By then, the change Deane Starr articulates had begun, prompted in part by a reclamation of the Universalist heart of our faith and in part by the rapid flow of women into our ministry.
But this is where I disagree with Starr's assessment: I don't think we ever threw out or replaced our commitment to freedom, reason and tolerance; I think they are irreplaceable, absolutely central to who we are. I think we simply realized they needed to be balanced, supplemented so to speak, in order to reflect the true range of our religious needs and the true power of our religious message.
Freedom had to be balanced by an acknowledgement of our radical dependence on one another and on the fragile web of life on the planet. Reason had to be balanced by the embrace of all the things that fall outside of its reach: emotion, spiritual hunger, the experience of mystery, the urgings of faith, the inchoate intuitions stirred up by music, poetry, myths and rituals. And tolerance had to be balanced with the willingness to assert our moral values, the strength to declare that some religious teachings, some kinds of bias, some choices of political stance, were contrary to our values of human dignity and worth and would not be welcome among us.
Having now been solidly within the UU fold for nearly twenty years, two things are absolutely clear to me about this historical process of defining ourselves. First, it isn't finished yet; and second, it will never be finished. It seems to me that we struggle so endlessly with questions about what lies at the core of Unitarian Universalism because we too often misunderstand what it means to have a core.
Like every other religious tradition, a part of our core is our history. The men and women who shaped our theologies in the past continue along with us and help to make us uniquely ourselves. But unlike other religious traditions, embedded in our faith from the very beginning has been the assumption that our understanding is partial: what we do and what we believe are part of an historical process, not something final and fixed and immutable.
Central to who we are is the right -- perhaps even the obligation -- to change our minds as we grow and learn. Our central message about freedom, connection, tolerance and all the rest is utterly pointless unless we believe that through such openness we invite the possibility learning something new. And like intelligent people everywhere, when we learn something new we allow it to shape the way we see the world.
I admit this makes it a little more challenging to draw lines around what is essential to Unitarian Universalism than it might be if we had a creedal statement hanging on our wall. But this willingness to affirm diversity so deeply that we allow it to change us is a crucial part of our core. It doesn't mean there is not core or that the center is too fuzzy to hold; it means we've got to shift our metaphors, to envision something less like a monolith or an ancient book of scripture and more like a spring of cool water, always changing and always nurturing.
If we adopt that changed metaphor, it becomes clear that our gaze is turned in the wrong direction if we try to figure out what might substitute among us for a creed. We're not a creedal faith, but a covenantal one. Former UUA President John Buehrens put it this way: "Our congregations don't gather on the basis of a common creed. We agree at the outset not to ask the question, 'What do we all believe in common?' Instead, we ask the covenantal questions: 'What are we willing to promise one another, and in what hope?' In that sense, we're very much in the covenantal character that goes back to New England congregations in the very beginning, when the Pilgrims said they wanted to walk together in the ways of God, known and to be made known."
"Known and to be made known": as Unitarian Universalists, that phrase is key to who we are no matter where we land on the theological spectrum. We promise each other to walk together in the search, to aid one another and to listen as our understanding grows, in the certainty that revelation is never sealed and that the human capacity for growth and maturity is boundless.
And within that solid commitment to openness and change, there is always the possibility of stating what we've seen so far and what we most value and honor right now. In other words, there are statements of faith we can make. Our Purposes and Principles are very central to what unites and defines us. They too are framed in the language of what we promise one another rather than what we believe. They begin with the statement, "We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote:" and then they go on to list those things we affirm.
It's a list both ambitious and limited. It's ambitious in that the most noble and far-reaching of ethical affirmations are included, like the inherent worth and dignity of every person. That one statement alone has enormous implications if it is taken seriously. But the list is limited in that it reflects the processes we support -- democratic, free and responsible search, the right of conscience and so on -- and is carefully silent about any true statement of belief, constrained by the diversity within our fold.
There is one huge exception to this limitation, contained in the seventh principle: "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part." This one short affirmation represents a radical theological contribution from our little fold, lifting us completely out of the historical hierarchies of Judaism and Christianity to affirm an utterly different vision of our place in the cosmos. UU minister David Bumbaugh says of this principle, "[It] calls us to reverence before the world, not some future world, but this miraculous world of our every-day experience…It bespeaks a world in which neither god nor humanity is at the center; in which the center is the void, the ever fecund matrix out of which being emerges…It offers a vision of a world in which the holy…is incarnated in every moment, in every aspect of being…"
The ties that bind us as a denomination are not ones of canon or creed or faith statements easily summed up in a sound bite. They are filaments of covenant and trust and accompaniment, woven of two shared assumptions: that on a spiritual journey without a fixed end-point, the changing vista is the destination; and that the journey is infinitely worth our time, our attention and our trust. AMEN.