This was given on 29 April 2006 as the keynote address at the annual district meeting of the Ballou-Channing District of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and has been slightly expanded for this version.
I’ve been asked to speak to you on the question of where we go from here. For me, that also involves the question of where we are, and how we got here. And that may raise the question of why on earth anybody would care about questions like this. So I’ll start there.
These questions matter because in the UUA, we’re in a non-moving “movement” that is dying, and has been dying since before the merger of Unitarians and Universalists in 1961.
What does that mean, to say we’re dying? It means, for example, that the adult membership of the UUA has declined by more than 44% since 1970 relative to the population of the U.S. Even in real numbers, we had over 12,000 fewer members in 2000 than in 1970. Or more locally, that your Ballou-Channing District is losing around 2% of its adult members annually, while the population in this area continues to grow.
But during those thirty years, the population of the U.S. increased by over 37%, while UU adult members decreased by 7%. If adult membership had simply kept up with the U.S. population increases, there would now be 230,000 adult UUs rather than the 155,449 reported in 2000.
Another way of saying it is to note that according to the 2005 Directory of the Unitarian Universalist Association, there are 1039 UU congregations, 525 of which - more than half - have less than 100 members. Such small congregations cannot be expected to provide adequate compensation for full-time professional service, but newly fellowshipped parish ministers, with an average of $40,000 in educational loan debt, need fulltime employment.
(This information comes from the new website www.uumal.org. The “uumal” stands for “UU Ministers at Large,” and their proposal is that those entering the parish ministry would do well to have another way of making a living. They cite several UU ministers who are earning their living as lawyers or teachers, and lending their services to UU churches for little or no money. This is another measure of a dying movement, a dying profession.)
This isn’t only a problem in our churches. The reason we now have more women preparing for parish ministry than men is the same reason the Presbyterians and Methodists also do: because many men are no longer applying to seminaries, because they no longer see this as a profession in which they can earn enough to support a family, and see little chance of getting into a well-paying church even twenty years down the road. It isn’t seen as a profession with a promising future, so (especially) men aren’t choosing it. About fifty years ago, I’ve read that about 10% of Phi Beta Kappa students went into the ministry. I don’t know the figures, but suspect it would be less than 1% now. Being smarter than the average bear isn’t everything; but it’s something.
So the question of whether there is anywhere to go from here, or whether it’s just been a good ride that’s ending, is a serious question. And I don’t see a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I think there are some clear reasons to be pessimistic, which I’ll cover later. But I do think that it can be a kind of victory even to arrive back where we started, and know the place for the first time, as T. S. Eliot put it.
So what I want to do with you during the time we have this morning is to look at how we got where we are today, try to be more clear about just where it is that we are today, then to wonder with you about where we might go from here.
There are ways in which this talk is like the first part of a Lutheran sermon, that just goes down before coming up (a little) at the end. And that’s because the history of liberal religion over the past two centuries has largely been the story of the deconstruction and dissolution of the Christian and theistic myths that had been a core part of our Western civilization. That may be a new way of framing the history of liberal religion, but I think it’s accurate and useful. The most reliable estimates I know of say that only about 21% of Americans regularly attend religious services of any kind now (Kirk Hadaway, who has written about a dozen books in this area). Four out of five Americans - no matter what the media may say - don’t see religion as important enough to make a regular part of their lives.
There are many methods of studying religion, each showing a different facet of the problem. I’m a theologian, so I want to look mostly at the birth and development of liberal theology over the past two hundred years. I see it as a Trojan Horse, containing within it the seeds of deconstruction and dissipation of the intellectual foundations Western religions - see if I can persuade you.
Let’s start with some definitions. The word “religion” is usually associated with some sort of belief in supernatural critters, even though that doesn’t fit religions like Buddhism or Taoism. But the root meaning of the word comes from the Latin religio. The “re-” means “to do again,” and the root “lig” is the same root we see in words like ligament and ligature. It means a kind of connection. Religion is the search for a kind of reconnection.
Religion is also usually linked, at least in our culture, with the word “salvation.” Again, this is commonly understood as being about living somewhere else and later. But the roots of the word are completely this-worldly. It comes from the Latin word meaning “to save,” but also the root of the word “salve.” It is a healthy kind of wholeness. Putting them together, I see the religious quest as the search for a sense of reconnection to a healthy kind of wholeness.
Now, what happened to that over the past two hundred years that affects us? This starts a bit abstractly, but I hope it feels more down to earth soon.
The Western Enlightenment of the late 18th century freed reason from its allegiance to tradition, pronounced the human mind capable of examining all subjects, and all subjects - including religion - open to our most critical questioning. This contained the seeds of the end of Western theism, in ways that would not have been destructive to Eastern religions. Why? Because Western religions have always taught their myths as though they were history, as though they were facts.
On the other hand, Hinduism’s favorite god, Krishna, has blue skin; another, the beloved lucky-charm god Ganesh, has a human body and an elephant’s head; others have four arms. These imaginative fantasy pictures tell all Hindus the gods are symbols, not meant to be taken literally. So to tell a Hindu that these stories are really myths might show them that you’ve mastered the basics of Hinduism 101.
Buddhism has no gods, and teaches that we need to wake up from the illusions within which we live - illusions we create mostly through the ways we mislead ourselves with language. In this sense, the best Buddhism was an ancient version of the 20th century language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who also said that philosophy and religion create problems rather than solving them, by bewitching us with misleading language. And once more these religions can only start making sense once you realize that, of course, their stories are myths, and were not historically true. The fundamental problems in life - as both Wittgenstein and the Buddhists would say - don’t need to be (and can’t be) solved; they need to be dissolved, through understanding them in a different and more honest way.
But in the religions that grew from the Hebrew scriptures, the myths were taught as though they were facts: Abraham talking with God, being willing to sacrifice his son, Moses escaping from Egypt, David killing Goliath, Samson pulling down the temple, Jesus as the son of God in some strange genetic sense, Jesus walking on water, turning water into wine, coming back to life and the rest of it, or the prophet and poet Mohammad passively transcribing the word of God spoken into his ear. These are also myths, not historical happenings. But Western religion has ridden the literal reading of its scriptures from the start, no matter how many of its best thinkers have objected vigorously.
The God of the Bible was given human-like attributes because it was seen as a Being - a male being who once walked in the garden with Adam. It could be pictured, as Michaelangelo did. Biblical scholars have shown that the God of the bible was modeled on a tribal chief, and that the covenant between God and his people was modeled on ancient Hittite suzerainty treaties. This is why “he” gives orders, commandments, sets behavioral boundaries, promises to protect those who serve “him” and punish outsiders and the disobedient.
Of course this god was made up by creative people, just as Krishna, Ganesh, Kali and the rest were. All these questions rose to the surface with the Enlightenment. And once you start asking these questions, they lead far beyond the reach of that religion, or any religion. American Unitarianism was born and grew to adolescence fed by these questions.
The man called the Father of Liberal Theology, a German theologian named Friedrich Schleiermacher, was a child of the Enlightenment, and argued in a 1799 book still in print today that religion was a human invention, in pursuit of the human yearning to grow to our fullest size. This move brought both religion and God down to earth, where they have stayed ever since.
All liberal theologians following Schleiermacher have been influenced by him, including Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson. American Unitarianism began by removing the notion of supernatural divinity from the man Jesus, and speaking of God in such ways that words like Nature or Reason could often be substituted without loss, as Enlightenment thinkers (like Thomas Jefferson) did.
Why was this a Trojan Horse? Because when we see that the word “God” is about our own best guesses, not the description of a supernatural Fellow’s mandates, then the real authority for all of our religious pronouncements is revealed to be ourselves. It is like the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” where the little dog Toto pulls back the curtain revealing the Wizard to be nothing but an illusion created by the little man behind the screen. This is what the Enlightenment did to the best religious thinkers to follow it. So we can doubt or shrug off God, or anything about God, because what we are confronting is only the imaginations and assertions or concepts of other people. “God-talk” became an idiom of expression, a way of talking, about enduring questions rather than talk about a fellow called God, and the questions were primary, not the linguistic idiom. This revolution was built into the American Unitarian movement from the beginning, though its implications took a century or so to become evident.
But something else was going on in the 19th century that also gave liberal religion - perhaps especially the religion of the Unitarians - its special boldness, its genius, and its Trojan Horse quality. This was the rise of the natural sciences, which just exploded during the first 2/3 of that century. They shattered the worldview within which the God of Western religion had its only coherent home, and established the modern worldview within which the Unitarian spirit had its home.
It’s worth understanding how dramatically that earlier worldview changed, and how the Unitarians were wedded to the emerging picture of the world rather than the traditional one.
It may be hard to believe how much our picture of the world has changed since our country was founded, but in 1785, when the bone of some large animal was dug up in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wanted Lewis and Clark to find that animal on their westward trip. Because “Such is the economy of Nature,” said Jefferson, “that no instance can be found of her ever letting one of her species become extinct.” Thomas Jefferson said that! By 1803, the Frenchman Cuvier had assembled the skeletons of 23 extinct species, which toured Europe and this country. The earth was thousands of times older than the Bible said. This culture’s primary Sacred Text was wrong, on many points.
I remember reading one quite poignant story about how the fact of extinct species struck one minister in the early 19th century. Another skeleton had been unearthed from an obviously extinct species. This minister looked down into the hole and said “… But why would God see fit to destroy what he once saw fit to create?” And you can almost imagine the next question that must have occurred to him: “And if them, why not us?” If God wasn’t in charge and wasn’t watching over us, why should we care what “the word of God” said?
Religion came to a fork in the road in the early part of the 19th century. Believers could either hold to their received faith and find a way to deny or bracket the emerging sciences, or they could side with the emerging worldview, and be willing to amend or even lose their received faith. The majority chose faith over science, and many still struggle with this. But the Unitarians and other liberals - and I think this was their genius - sided instead with the new sciences. What they were saying was that we understand ourselves and our world through these emerging sciences, so we must stand there. And then it is the job of religion to revisit its traditions and messages, to see if they still have anything relevant to offer to us. Or more accurately, it is our job to find other ways to read the teachings of religion that can make sense. And then religion is only useful if we can be persuaded that it has as much coherent wisdom as our favorite psychologies, philosophies, poems and sciences.
Taking this path allowed the 19th century Unitarians and other religious liberals to gain a kind of intellectual integrity denied to those who must protect the tenets of their faith from the scalpels and blunt jackhammers of critical sciences and philosophies. It is my favorite aspect of that path, and why I can still identify myself as a Unitarian, though not as a Unitarian Universalist.
But it came at a price. Declaring all traditional religious teachings as human teachings open to our critiques removed them from the realm of the sacred. In fact, the whole category of “the sacred” itself was redefined as our own best thoughts, or our own best interpretations of ancient myths and stories. Notice that there is no necessary God in this picture.
However, though the sciences might be correct, they weren’t comforting, and most people then and now want comfort more than they want clarity. So it was still assumed, and preached, that the old God loved us, and affirmed our basic worth. But God had ceased to be a Being, and had become a concept, an idea. This was the real revolution of liberal religion: the transformation of God from a Being to a concept. And concepts don’t see, hear, care, plan or love. So when liberal preachers of 1850, or 1950, or 2006, say that of course there’s no Guy in the Sky, no Fellow, no Critter, but nevertheless it is true that God loves us, that’s wanting the smile without the Cat. And without the Cat, there is no smile. Even the best seminaries and divinity schools, in my experience, still haven’t come to terms with this in any candid way, and are still trying to save face for the old language-game. But some 19th century Christian thinkers saw this very early on.
In 1841, a man named Ludwig Feuerbach wrote another book that is still in print, still read at better seminaries and divinity schools. The book was called The Essence of Christianity, and that essence, he said, was projection. We took all of our own most admired traits, and projected them outward on the gods we had created as their temporary vehicles. Then we spent years on our knees, begging for the return from these gods we had created of enough worth and dignity to let us live with hope. So four decades after Schleiermacher, one man who had been influenced by him defined religion, not as the way we come to our human fullness, but as the bad force that separates us from ourselves. And what we needed, he said, was to translate the teachings of religion into anthropology, into the study and understanding of humans. The next 150 years would see liberal culture and religion going exactly there.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau left Christianity and Western theism behind almost completely. The religious scripture that made them glassy-eyed wasn’t the Bible, but the Hindu Bhagavad Gita. And by the late 19th century, Unitarians and other liberals had moved not only God but also heaven down to earth, deciding that they could figure out how to build the kingdom of heaven right here, since there was no longer anywhere “up there” to imagine “going” after we died. This was the birth of the social gospel movement, which is still at the center of our “social justice” dreams.
There were powerful critiques of this naïve arrogance, but liberals seemed to ignore them, then and now. After World War I, for instance, the theologian Karl Barth said something was wrong with this liberal notion that every day in every way we’re moving onward and upward in a never-ending spiral of Progress. This great, enlightened race, he noted, had just produced the worst war in human history. The truth, he said, is that we do not know how to create the ideal world. Removing the sense of transcendence from God and religion left us to our own uninspired means, and we couldn’t do it. We can shrug off gods, but can’t become gods.
This critique started the movement back to neo-orthodoxy, kind of a last-ditch attempt to save face for the old transcendent God. But it couldn’t last because in the modern world there was no soil in which such a Being could exist. The symbolic word “God” could only exist in our imaginations, not in or above our world. And this changed everything. This still hasn’t really sunk in, in our thinking and speaking about religions and enduring human questions and yearnings - much as we still speak of the sun’s “rising” each morning, centuries after we realized that the earth’s spinning and revolving account for the illusion that the sun is rising.
In the 20th century, liberal religion seemed to divide into liberal politics, and psychology. The century’s greatest Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, translated theology into depth psychology - much as Ludwig Feuerbach had dreamed of back in 1841. Rather than the overloaded word God, Tillich spoke of our “ultimate concerns,” and said - much as Schleiermacher had - that these became for us our God. This made intuitive sense to many people. But once you can say this, you no longer need God-language at all, because you have found another way of saying it that doesn’t involve splitting your mind into mythic and modern halves. We were playing games with language when we used the word “God” in the modern world, but the games no longer required any sort of God at all.
That was the deconstruction that lived inside the Trojan Horse of 19th century liberal religious thought.
One final vision of the language game I’m trying to identify comes from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Imagine this game - I call it “tennis without a ball”: The players move around on a tennis court just as in tennis, and they even have rackets, but no ball. Each one reacts to his partner’s stroke as if, or more or less as if, a ball had caused his reaction. (Maneuvers.) The umpire, who must have an “eye” for the game, decides in questionable cases whether a ball has gone into the net, etc., etc. This game is obviously quite similar to tennis and yet, on the other hand, it is fundamentally different.” - For there is no “ball.”
Theology without a “theos” (god) is a lot like tennis without a ball. The talk is similar, the ecclesiastical moves are similar, there are still enough conflicting certainties to go to war over, and the costumes stay the same. And yet, on the other hand, it is a fundamentally different game! When gods die, we need a healthy suspicion of the people dressing up in their clothes; it’s like the difference between Elvis and Elvis impersonators, without the music.
By mid-20th century, both Unitarian Christianity and Christian Universalism had mostly exhausted their spirits. In 1961, most of America’s scattered little groups of Unitarians and Universalists didn’t want to (and didn’t) worship together. Where they did come together, and saw one another often, was in the important secular activity of political action during the middle part of the 20th century.
When the two moribund denominations merged in 1961 some of the most important aspects of that merger were either not seen, or were ignored:
1. Neither Unitarianism nor Universalism was by then a vibrant or even viable religion.
2. What was significant about them was not theological, but political. Both had merged, to differing degrees, with the general assumptions of America’s cultural liberals: the well-educated people who voted for liberal social policies and could be counted on to support most individual-rights causes.
There were good reasons why no one noticed that religious beliefs were no longer the center of this new merger. One of those reasons was that by 1961, American religious liberals in general were losing their voice and their attachment to the traditional theological assumptions of Christianity. The word “liberal” meant political rather than religious liberals, and cultural liberals were bored with the supernatural baggage of Christianity, as they had been for over 200 years.
But another reason religion wasn’t missed in the UUA was that, in the 1950s and 1960s, the spirit of liberal religion couldn’t compare in relevance, excitement or moral clarity with the spirit of liberal politics. For good reasons, the “salvation story” of America’s religious liberals became the salvation story of political liberalism. It was a very distinctive story, with a dark side still seldom acknowledged.
The best example of this story was probably the civil rights movement of the 1950s. After Rosa Parks wouldn’t give up her seat on the bus, many white liberals followed outraged black leaders into the civil rights movement. While the movement was mostly organized and led by black people, it’s fair to say that it would not have succeeded without the support of liberal whites. They rightfully felt virtuous for their good efforts, and a new salvation story took shape. The role of liberals would be to speak up for victim groups, to accept the gratitude of their chosen victim groups, and to feel virtuous for their efforts.
So what liberals did have - and in the 60s and 70s it seemed exciting and sufficient - was a political ideology. The 60s and 70s were heady times for political liberalism in America. Individual rights movements were in full bloom, and liberal Methodists, Unitarians, Presbyterians, Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, atheists, feminists, gay rights activists and civil rights activists thrilled to the feeling that we were remaking America in the image of our shared liberal ideology.
Liberal politics replaced religion as the shared center of Unitarians and Universalists in the mid-20th century, and remains their shared center today. If this is seldom mentioned, it may be because it’s just too obvious. I don’t know what percentage of adult members of UU churches are registered Democrats or Green Party, but nationally it must be ten to fifty times the number of registered Republicans. This political story has its own kind of “salvation story,” though I think not one that works any more.
I want to describe the salvation story of American secular political liberalism and official “UUism” as I have observed it for the past twenty-five or thirty years. See if it doesn’t sound familiar.
The salvation story of leftist American politics has five parts:
1. Liberals select a few token groups among the many possible: blacks, women, gays and lesbians, etc. (In Marxist terms, these are our token proletariat groups.)
2. They define these groups as “victims” (rather than, say, survivors or warriors).
3. In return, they give special attention to these token “victims” within their small circles of influence.
4. The “victims” are presumed to feel grateful for this …
5. … and the liberals feel virtuous.
This remains the salvation story of political liberalism - and ideologically-driven “anti-oppression” schemes, which remain willfully unaware of the self-serving oppression of their own schemes.
This salvation story worked pretty well in the 1950s. But the individual rights movements of the 60s and 70s began to seek identities as survivors and warriors rather than victims, and they neither wanted nor allowed white liberals to define them as victims or speak for them.
This began with the emergence of powerful and articulate spokesmen in the civil rights and Black power movements. It continued with the women’s movement, which began and remained in the voices of a handful of charismatic and articulate women. Religious liberals were welcome to follow, but they were not leading, and could get slapped upside the head for defining these warriors as victims. (For those familiar with Greek mythology, the patron goddess of the American women’s movement was Artemis. I can’t imagine anyone defining Artemis as a victim and living to tell the tale!)
Without a group of people to define as victims and speak for, the salvation story of political liberalism and “UUism” is bankrupt. This wasn’t just a problem of “UUs,” but of all cultural liberals.
What happened next was kind of amazing, in a Vaudevillian way. Liberals either needed a new salvation story - which is a lot of hard work - or another clever way to try and extend the usable life of this one. They chose the easier path, and began inventing new victim groups, whose permission they didn’t need to speak up for them. This was part of the genesis of the Political Correctness movement, which at times seemed to have a victim-du-jour for whom they felt called to speak, still feeling virtuous. You’ve seen signs of this in the UUA, as well, where it has long seemed like we’ve become like ambulance-chasers, looking for the liberal cause with the highest media coverage, so we can rush to climb on its bandwagon for a few days.
The worst of this slide into the self-righteous Political Correctness movement came when some liberals began claiming special attention as victims themselves. We are not served well by acting weak, and we discredit our proud intellectual, liberal and Unitarian heritage with that whiny move. With this move from feeling “saved” by speaking for token victims, finally to speaking as victims, the deconstruction of our little branch of the Western religious story was complete. We had gone from being children of a transcendent God to the unwept victims of an indifferent world.
I see this two-century history of Western religious liberalism as a kind of downward spiral that began in the Enlightenment. That’s a broad claim, and it may or may not seem too sweeping to you. Here’s what I mean by it. The Enlightenment and the Romantic eras both brought God and religion down to earth. The concept of God, which we could no longer coherently imagine to be a Fellow, a Being, was unmasked as the projection of our own ultimate concerns. In the late 19th century, liberals decided that they could figure out how to create the kingdom of heaven here on earth, and accepted these fantasies of creating the ideal society here on earth in place of hoping for a heaven in a place above the sky that no longer existed. Some liberals lost confidence in this fantasy after World War I, but regained it in the 1950s and 1960s with the civil rights and women’s movements. But we began losing it again in the 1970s, as it became clear that we had no real influence, money or respect in society, and didn’t have the power to change much, even if we knew how we thought it should be changed. By now, we have become even less powerful and more marginal.
Perhaps, if the ideals of 70s liberalism ever regained political and social power, UU churches would grow. But it isn’t likely. It’s more likely that that ideology is dead or dying, as we will also be if we can’t find a different center: a religious or spiritual center.
And so: where do we go from here?
This has answers - very different answers - at three levels.
First, we can consider the largest, broadest context, and ask “Where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?” Second, we can ask, more locally, “Where do we go from here as our local church?” And third, we can ask, “Where do we go from here as individual seekers in the liberal religious traditions?” I’ll give very brief suggestions to answers at each of these levels.
A. Where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?
One answer must be, “perhaps nowhere.” Everything seems to point to a commitment to denial and a contentment with just dwindling away, not with a bang but a whimper. It’s a very real possibility.
Especially on the scale of “the movement,” I think the signs point to a movement without much possibility of changing its direction. For one thing, we don’t have the possibility of educating our ministers differently, even if we knew how to. Retired UU minister Jack Mendelson has set up a new, depressing, website called “UU Ministers at Large” (www.uumal.org), cited earlier, suggesting that those preparing for the UU ministry should find another way of making a living, so they can offer “ministerial” services to UU church at little or no cost. This isn’t a solution; it’s an autopsy. We have only two “UU” seminaries, Meadville/Lombard Theological School in Chicago, and the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley. While these schools have always been seen as having very different cultures, they are the only two we have that are grounded in the basic liberal culture of UU churches. And confidential talks are going on with the aim of finding a way to combine the two seminaries into just one, since we can no longer afford to maintain two separate schools. I can’t imagine what form of beast could result from the mating of Meadville and Starr King, and don’t look forward to it.
Right now, those preparing for UU ministry are doing so through seventy-five different institutions, meaning that virtually all of our ministers will be educated in Christian seminaries, learning texts, symbols, metaphors and vocabularies that must look backward in time rather than ahead to a post-Christian, wildly pluralistic world. This doesn’t look promising. Without having educational institutions that actually educate our ministers, we have no means of teaching a unique perspective, even if we could articulate one. I don’t see any way past this damning difficulty. How long do you think Roman Catholicism would last if 90% of their priests were educated in Methodist seminaries?
Another bleak prospect is overcoming the powerful culture of narcissism that is probably too deeply embedded in the UU culture to be dislodged. One measure of this is the longstanding habit of wanting to claim notable Americans that once, we insist, belonged to our club - the t-shirts we’ve all seen with a fair number of famous or pseudo-famous people who were, we think, either Unitarians or Universalists. Besides the fact that many names just don’t belong on the list, why on earth should we care whether they belonged to our club? Isn’t the point of a living religion, instead, to seek wisdom that helps us live more wisely and well? And if so, why would the search be limited to club members? Why not, instead, a list with names like The Upanishads, The Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Amos, Jesus, and other great sages and prophets from the world’s best religious and philosophical traditions? What is to be gained from waving about the names of a few well-known and (more often) barely-known dead people? Is there anything to this beyond the desperation of a completely marginalized, impotent and moribund movement trying to whimper, “Yes, we may be irrelevant, but once there people who actually amounted to something, who were (mostly tangentially, or barely) connected to earlier versions of the movements from which we’re trying to squeeze the last drops of a viable identity”? I don’t think this is overstated.
Our ministerial education isn’t grounded in the worldwide wisdom traditions, and I’m not sure there are any academic curricula equipped to teach that tradition, or produce PhD’s capable of teaching it.
And why on earth do we insist on trying to peg the wisdom we do cite to the handful of dead people who were once, we think, either Unitarians or Universalists? What is there to this beyond the same desperate narcissism? But how, and where, could we teach anything different, even if we wanted to, when virtually all of our future ministers will learn their understanding of “religion” from 70-odd Christian seminaries?
For these reasons and more, I think one serious answer to “Where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?” is simply, “Nowhere. From here, we just continue to dissipate into the ether of a fading nostalgia for the secular and political liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s.”
B. Where do we go from here as our local church?
I’ve heard from some Alban Institute seminars that, as money gets tighter, the most vulnerable churches are the mid-sized churches. Large churches usually have big enough budgets, not only to weather storms, but also to hire the necessary help (as staff or consultants) to react pro-actively. Small churches that exist as “family” churches can have the “familial” cohesion to stick together, with or without a full-time minister. But mid-sizes churches moving into the “Program Church” style no longer have the simpler “single-family” cohesion, and lack the budget of larger churches.
Another answer at the “church demographics” level is that white-haired congregations are visibly grounded in the past, as churches with younger hair colors are more likely to be invested in the future. There is much talk within the UUA of a “commitment to growth,” and all seem to mean by this a desire to attract more younger people. But younger church cultures are very different, and I doubt that most (not all) “older” congregations would welcome or accept the changes that younger members bring when they take over church leadership. Young people have different priorities than older people: spiritually, socially, and economically.
Here, we’ve learned some things in Austin that might be useful to others. In 2001, we began a three-year experiment with a Sunday evening worship service designed by, and to attract, 30-somethings, called Sunday Night Live! While we had the same sermon and prayer as the two morning services, nothing else was the same. The services brought in local bands, had much clapping, a lot more noise in general, and had 30-somethings taking far more active roles as Lay Leaders. The preacher was only on stage during the prayer and sermon: the 30-somethings ran the rest. These were wonderful services, and I’ll always treasure the time of working with our 30-somethings. We ultimately cancelled the service - still to the deep sadness and regret of some of our members - because attendance, which had risen to around 60-75, had dropped to under 30. What was really happening, we learned, was that younger people may have come because of SNL, but if they stayed, they transferred to the morning services, because they wanted a more traditional service - and religious education, which was not offered in the evening.
I had hoped to attract younger people into the church, and into its leadership, and that happened. I’d estimate that about three-quarters of our new members are under 40, including our outgoing board president. The “rules” we established as changes in the church culture, which I think were needed, included the understanding that “Everyone has permission to fail, so we might as well try interesting ideas,” and “The fact that something has not been done here before is one of the strongest arguments for trying it now.”
As the younger members begin to articulate what the church now “is,” I’ve found that some (not all) older members no longer feel that the church is meeting their needs. I think it’s fair to say that a church structured for the future will be more comfortable for people in their 30s and 40s than it will be for people in their 60s to 80s - and I can think of some older Unitarian churches that would not welcome this.
And a third kind of real-world answer to where individual churches will go from here depends on their minister, the culture of the congregation, and the match in chemistry and style between minister and congregation. Healthy matches can survive, regardless of their theology or, probably, their size.
C. Where do we go from here as individual seekers in the liberal religious traditions?
Here, the picture can be as intelligent, informed and optimistic as the individual seekers are. The UUA, like most liberal religious denominations, moved from a religious to a political center during the 1960s, and that seems unlikely to provide much depth or future for either individuals or churches. But individuals can shift their centers far more easily than churches or denominations can. So here, the answer can be powerfully optimistic.
The search for a religious center doesn’t have to start from scratch. Even a cursory study of the world’s great traditions shows us that religion does have an enduring subject matter. Its insights measure the quality of our lives and our worlds, for better and worse, whether we “believe in them” or not. Most of these truths do not seem to have changed much in recorded history. They seem to be species-specific traits and norms that most peoples of most times have recognized as inviolable, and which we also recognize as inviolable - though we seldom articulate these facts:
* The Way we seek is older than the gods, as Lao-tzu said.
* We want to learn how to relish the transient pleasures of life without becoming limited and defined by them, and how to nurture our life-giving circles of friends - as the Epicureans taught.
* We know that neither we nor any supernatural agencies can control what life brings our way, so we should learn how to control our responses to life - as the Stoics taught.
* Most of us believe in “salvation through understanding,” as the Buddhists have taught.
* We need to be reminded - in the Roman Seneca’s magnificent phrase - that we are all limbs on the body of humanity, and we must learn to act accordingly.
* We know, but want to be reminded, that if only we could treat all others as our equals, our brothers and sisters, as “children of God,” that we could transform this world into a paradise - as Jesus taught in his concept of the “kingdom of God.”
And world religions all think it’s hard - that there are hard demands, and that few are ever willing to do the work:
• Islam teaches the path as the razor edge of a sword stretched across an abyss.
• Jesus talked about the narrow way that few entered.
• Hinduism also speaks of the path as razor-edged, and has so many stories about how many lives you’d have to live, in order to get it right.
• Buddhists teach how hard it is just to wake up, to outgrow the comforting illusions of “our kind of people.” It’s at least as hard today, especially when the illusions of our kind of people provide the only clear “home” for most in liberal camps.
• And for Jews, the notion of being God’s “chosen people” meant God demanded more of them than others, not that they were special.
All the enduring religions of the world have been clear that the treasures of honest religion must be earned, and make the highest demands on us. That’s how those traditions raise our sights to see and hear what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
Salvation by Character
Another answer to “where do we go from here?” comes from revisiting the definition of religion and salvation we began with: the search for a healthy kind of wholeness, to become a blessing to a world not made in our image. And from the start, the salvation story of liberal religions has been the story of salvation by character. We are trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens, and believe that doing so will make life more worth living, for ourselves and those we love. We are trying to get reconnected with a healthy kind of wholeness. The simple gift of liberal religion is salvation by character; it is personal authenticity, the kind of authenticity that rejuvenates the world.
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” or “Darwin” on your car trunk. You only get it by doing the self-examination and the personal work. The gifts of all the world’s liberal religions are free, but they aren’t cheap. They can cost us our artificially small identities, and the comfort that comes with them.
The qualities of character that we admire in ourselves and others aren’t a secret. We all know them. If you doubt it, think back on all the memorial services you have seen or done, and remember what we say in our eulogies, when we look for good and true things to say about someone who has died. We know exactly what has and does not have lasting worth. When we are trying to speak well of our dead, we don’t speak of their power, sexual prowess, popularity, political correctness or wealth.
When we speak about character, we value the same things humans in all times and places have cared about: honesty, integrity, responsibility, authenticity, moral courage. We love good wit, spurn malicious intellects. We admire generosity, hate greed. We praise selfless caring, recoil from co-dependence. Selfishness and narcissism may be acknowledged in a eulogy because we know we must not lie, but they are acknowledged as faults, not gifts. We never approve of those who side with the stronger against the weaker, or who use others as “things” to serve their own personal hungers or ideological agendas. We don’t regard anyone very highly who has no sense of owing something back to life.
And all of these traits point back to the one kind of salvation that noble people in all times and places have admired and eulogized: salvation by character. Not “self- esteem” or empty pride, but developing the kind of character of which we rightly can be proud. Not “feeling good” but the far harder and longer task of being good people.
We have never looked back with pride on religious liberals who didn’t go forward into new and uncharted territory during a crisis of religious expression. We admire Channing, Parker and Emerson because they took new paths. We don’t remember the names of the vast majority of Unitarians or Universalists who stuck with “the old ways,” or got lost in their era’s religious fads. Those in the future will look back to assess us in the same way.
I consulted with some colleagues in preparing these notes, but didn’t get many promising visions from them. However, I did get a comment from the Rev. David Bumbaugh, who is Professor of Ministry at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, that is worth sharing:
“I believe we are confronted by three essential and inescapable questions: What do we profess? In whose behalf do we act? To whom or to what are we responsible? The first question requires that I continually seek to be as clear as I can be about the fundamental convictions that drive my actions and not settle for platitudes–either traditional responses or the seven principles. The second question drives me to broaden the scope of my concerns beyond the horizons of my comfort zone to include the lost, the marginalized, those who are least like me. If ministry is to be anything more than chaplaincy to those who can afford me, the answer to the second question - ‘In whose behalf do we act?’ - must continually expand.”
David’s third question is the theological question, of what we are serving that transcends our own wishes, our own kind of people, our own time and place, and how we are to speak of it. Two hundred years ago, the reflexive answer would have been, “Well, religion is about God, of course!” But the world has changed. Now we are charged with trying to serve the spirit of liberal religion by once more looking not to the past but to the future, and offering a structure or style of religion that can build bridges rather than walls, in a society where nearly 80% should be considered unchurched, and where few liberals - regardless of misleading polls and pundits - can make much sense of, or have much use for, the old deity of Western religions. Whether they are nominally Buddhist, Taoist, vaguely philosophical, or profoundly secular, they need preachers and communities that take seriously our search for that reconnection to a healthy kind of wholeness that might reconstitute the world of our spirits, our minds, and our politics.
It seems clear to me that such a religious message for a pluralistic future can only be done in ordinary language rather than the jargon of this or that religion. As Joseph Campbell said over a half century ago, propaganda for any individual religion is now not only not helpful, but is a menace. We need to know what it is we actually think we’re talking about when we step into the pulpit, and say it in plain talk rather than hiding behind slippery spiritualisms we wave about like the Catholic Church’s censer, spreading no light but only smoke.
But the argument for why religion must be done in ordinary language is another argument, for another time. In fact, every topic I’ve skimmed here could open out into whole other talks for other times.
The trap set for a speaker by inviting him to speak on where we go from here is the lure of providing stronger answers than the evidence permits, playing to what our audience might wish to hear, whether there’s anything workable in it or not. That temptation, at least, I’ve managed to resist.
I’ve tried to sketch some broad but hopefully useful patterns about where we came from, where we are and how we got here, because I think we need to see that we are in the twilight of honest and integrated liberal options within any of the Western religious traditions. And at twilight, it will do no good to wish for the return of yesterday. We must try to anticipate the next sunrise, which we cannot yet see, though we may hope to evoke or allude to it. We stand on the shoulders of some visionary and courageous people in the long history of liberal religion. In their time, when it was their turn, they looked farther ahead than others wanted to look, and helped build bridges to new worldviews that others did not want to enter. We admire and thank them for their vision and their sometimes lonely courage.
Now it’s our turn. As religious liberals enter the twenty-first century, we need to spend less time worshiping history and more time making it.