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The New Massachusetts Universalist Convention |
Universalism and UU RenewalBy Richard Trudeau
First: in 1961, when the denominations joined forces, there were a total of 151,557 adult UUs. Forty years later there were 156,968 adult UUs, or a net gain of less than four percent. Meanwhile the population of the North America went up fifty percent, and so as a percentage of the population we actually declined, considerably, in forty years. To me that’s a symptom of a need for renewal. Second: there’s a lot of talk about “spirituality” in UU churches. I think spirituality is like sex--variously understood, variously defined, variously experienced--and people who have enough don’t spend a lot of time talking about it! I interpret the talk about spirituality as a sign of a deep-seated hunger on the part of members of our congregations, and therefore as another symptom of a need for renewal. Third: a great many members of UU congregations are intolerant of Christianity. Some of these people are Jews. Most of them are traumatized former Christians. What they have in common is that they are angry with Christianity, and they are angry with Christianity because they have been hurt by it. This widespread intolerance makes our movement look ridiculous. We loudly preach tolerance, while regularly appearing to be intolerant of North America’s principal religion. We brag about our openness to world religions, but often give the impression that we don’t recognize Christianity as a world religion. Intolerance of Christianity is a wound at the heart of our movement, and to me is a third symptom of a need for renewal. I will address only the symptoms of spiritual hunger and anti-Christianity, but in my mind these are directly related to our decline relative to the population. I believe that a root cause of the spiritual hunger and anti-Christianity can be expressed in the phrase “turning away.” UUism makes it easy for people to turn away from big religious questions. UUism enables people to turn away from their personal religious pasts. UUism even turns away from its own denominational past. I will eventually say, of course, that a greater emphasis on Universalism is a solution to our problems. I will say that Universalism encourages people to face the big religious questions, that it helps people to confront their own religious pasts, and that it willingly acknowledges the UU movement’s Christian past. But first I’d better say what I mean by “Universalism.” Universalism Defined“Universalism” is a popular word, and lots of UUs want to appropriate it. I have seen ministers hold up Universalist worship materials from the late nineteenth century--a time when Universalism had lost touch with its liberal roots and was trying to blend in with mainline Protestantism--and declare triumphantly, “This is the real Universalism!” I have also seen ministers reduce “Universalism” to an openness to world religions, as the Rev. Dr. Forrest Church does in “Universalism: A Theology for the 21st Century,” the cover story of the November-December, 2001, issue of UU World. I use the term “Universalism” to denote the religion described by the Universalist movement itself at the end of its independent existence. It is the religion defined by means of a symbol, the “off-center cross,” and the Declaration of Faith adopted by the Universalist General Assemblies of 1935 and 1953. This last, official Universalism is a mostly untried religion that seeks to walk a knife-edge between, on the one hand, staying in touch with its Christian heritage and, on the other hand, staying open to insights from other religious paths. I will say more about Universalism below, but for the moment let me return to what I see as the UU movement’s principal problems. Turning Away from Big Religious QuestionsAt the time of consolidation Humanism was a potent force in the Unitarian denomination, and since the Unitarians outnumbered the Universalists five to one, and the Unitarians were bursting with confidence and the Universalists were correspondingly discouraged, the Unitarian point of view came to dominate in the combined movement, with the result that Humanism continues to shape us today. Since I’m basically a Humanist myself I’d like to begin by affirming Humanism. They say that “Humanism” is a polite term for atheism. It’s sort of true. The “Humanist Manifesto,” published in 1933 on the front page of the Christian Register, the Unitarian weekly newspaper, contained this phrase: “We are convinced that the time has passed for theism....” Nevertheless, to say that Humanism is a polite term for atheism is not, I think, exactly true. Curtis Reese, one of the early leaders of the Humanist movement, wrote, “the Humanist regards the universe as the given and is not likely to speculate unduly on either the beginning or the end of things cosmic.”(1) In other words, Humanism doesn’t so much deny God as ignore God. The Humanist attitude is that, since no adequate understanding of God has emerged from thousands of years of conventional religion, one should be practical and focus on what really counts--human life and its challenges--and redefine “religion” as concerned solely with human life. There are good things about Humanism. First, Humanism is honest. Humanists are saying what they really think and really feel. The Rev. Frederick May Eliot, longtime president of the American Unitarian Association, who was not a Humanist himself but who was sympathetic to Humanism and felt that it had a valuable contribution to make, said “[the Humanist] may not believe very much, as measured by orthodox standards, but what he does believe he believes with his whole mind.”(2) Second, Humanism is courageous. Eliot again: “[many religious people] are afraid to face the facts about their own beliefs lest they lose their faith altogether.... Such people are building their faith upon the sand.”(3) I think Eliot was thinking not only of people in the pews, but leaders at the front as well--priests and ministers and rabbis--who do not subject their own beliefs to the kind of rigorous analysis they would call into play if they were, for example, buying a house (or even a car!). A lot of religious people wall off their beliefs in a separate mental compartment, insulating them from analysis and skepticism. It’s courageous of Humanists to refuse to do this. Third, I would say Humanism is correct. In thousands of years conventional religions have indeed produced no adequate understanding of God. But I would add: we don’t need Humanism to tell us so. One of the ten commandments says not to make images of God; it’s usually understood to mean not to make statues, but I think its wisdom is broader. We make images of God all the time, with concepts, and then when these concepts prove inadequate we say we no longer believe in God--when all that we no longer believe in are our own limited concepts. There’s one respect in which I think Humanism is not as honest, courageous, or correct as it could be, and it is that Humanism tends not to face the questions that conventional religions are trying to answer. Though I agree that the answers conventional religions provide are inadequate, I think that people have an emotional need to face the questions anyway. A. J. Mattill, Jr., onetime minister of a tiny Universalist church in rural Mississippi, once said: “ ‘God’ is a name my heart gives to the mystery of the universe.”(4) That struck a chord with me. I thought, there’s a God that certainly exists. There is a mysteriousness about life, and that’s what people are grappling with when they use the word “God.” “God” is the “X” of life’s equation, the meaning we seek, the answer we long for. The all-too-human mistake that Humanism saves us from is thinking that we know the answer that the name “God” represents. The trouble is, Humanism also encourages us to ignore the question. If I ignore God, as Humanism encourages me to do, I’m ignoring the existence of the enormous mystery that is right in front of me. I’m born into a world I didn’t create. It is very old and very big--bigger than I am, bigger than any human, bigger than all humanity. I can’t say much else about it, but awareness of this mystery enriches my life. It gives me perspective. It helps me keep my priorities straight. It deepens my experience. In one of my favorite “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strips, Calvin and Hobbes are looking at the night sky and Calvin is lecturing Hobbes about astronomy--that star is so many light-years away, there’s the Milky Way, that kind of thing. In the second panel the lecture continues. In the third panel, there’s a brief pause. Calvin has run out of things to say, and the two friends are gazing at the stars in silence. But after only a moment Calvin looks at his watch and says, “I wonder what’s on TV.” To me, that’s what Humanism encourages us to do. Of course, Calvin is going to go inside and watch cartoons. What Humanism encourages us to do, once we’ve run out of facts, is to go inside and watch “Nova.” Let me tell you a Bible story (1 Kings 19:11-13, NRSV). Elijah has gone to the mountain on which, supposedly, hundreds of years before, Moses encountered God. Elijah is huddling at the back of a cave near the summit, and has heard that God is about to pass by. The story continues, “Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces ... but God wasn’t in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but God wasn’t in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but God wasn’t in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’” The text doesn’t say God spoke to him, it says a voice came to him. And the voice said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” I wish Calvin had lingered in the third panel. If Calvin had remained side by side with his friend Hobbes, in silence, looking out at the hugeness of space, the blackness of it, the great age of it, his jaw gaping open, I’m sure that within a few minutes a voice would have come to Calvin, too. He would have heard questions in his head. “What’s the purpose of all this?” “What’s it’s all about?” “What are you doing here, Calvin?” That’s the religious experience--confrontation with the mystery of the universe, with what people mean by “God.” But that’s precisely what Humanism encourages us to turn away from. I don’t think it’s surprising that in a denomination so strongly influenced by Humanism, we find widespread spiritual hunger. My StoryI’m not a birthright Universalist or even a birthright UU. Universalism is something I stumbled on and fell in love with. And like all converts, I think what’s been good for me would be good for many others. I was raised in a mainstream Christian denomination--which shall be nameless--in which, I would say in retrospect, I was religiously violated. At seventeen I left that church, and for the next fifteen years or so did not attend any church, and had nothing to do with organized religion (you might say I still have nothing to do with organized religion!). For fifteen years my sanctuary was the woods, where I went to walk when I needed to think about something, or was lonesome, or frightened. For fifteen years my fellow-congregants were my friends, with whom I swapped shop-talk about life. And for fifteen years my sermons were books that I read about the history of Christianity, the Bible, and world religions. Then, in my early thirties, I discovered Unitarian Universalist churches, and I did so with a tremendous sense of relief and homecoming. And I fashioned a new UU faith for myself by drawing on bits and pieces from many sources. The principal source was Humanism, but I also drew from Judaism, Taoism, Buddhism, and the study of nature.
Week after week, month after month, I sat in my pew staring at that symbol, and continued to feel uncomfortable at the cross within the circle. Eventually I started asking myself questions. “Richard, if your new UU faith is so inclusive, why does it include nothing from your Christian past? Richard, if you’re so tolerant, why are you so intolerant of Christianity? Richard, why are you still so angry?” At length I saw that there was no choice but to embark on the difficult and exasperating task of trying to take my childhood religion apart. It took a lot of thinking and talking and studying, but after a few years I felt I had actually accomplished this. And when my childhood religion lay before me disassembled, I noticed that it had lost the power to hurt me. I felt healed. I felt as if I were standing before four piles. First, there was a big
pile of toxic waste--hurtful things, poisonous things. Next, another large
pile of things that were not hurtful, particularly, but that just seemed
silly. And then there were two smaller piles. There was a pile of things
that didn’t seem silly--they still made good theological sense.
And there was a pile of things that didn’t make much sense, but
that felt good. And for the first time I felt free to incorporate elements
from those last two piles into my adult UU faith. These things had been
inaccessible to me before because they had been locked in combination
with things that were hurtful or nonsensical. But now they were free,
and I was able to re-appropriate them. I treasure these things because
they go so far back into my personal past, and because of them my UU faith
is now much more my own. In the course of taking my childhood religion apart I was forced to make distinctions I had never completely made. I’d like to mention three: one about the Bible, one about Jesus, and one about the cross. The first distinction was between the religious right’s view of the Bible--it’s a single book, with a single author, expressing a single point of view--and the view of modern scholarship--it’s a library of many books, by many different authors, expressing many different points of view. I’m reminded of a joke I heard from the Rev. Patricia Bowen. A man dies and wakes up in heaven and to his great surprise learns that people worship in heaven as they had on earth. His tour guide shows him a stone church with stained-glass windows and incense wafting out and says, “Those are the Episcopalians.” And--you can spin this joke out for a long time--he is shown a Shinto shrine and a synagogue and an ashram and a mosque and a Presbyterian church and so on. Finally he is taken to a clearing in the middle of the woods where people are sitting in a circle, drinking coffee, and arguing. “Those are the Unitarian Universalists,” the tour guide says. “They’re arguing about whether they’re here.” This is how I learned to think of the Bible. The Bible is like a bunch of UUs sitting around arguing. The various books are arguing with each other. The book of Job is arguing with the book of Leviticus. The book of P, one of the sources of Genesis, is arguing with another of the sources of Genesis, the book of J. The Bible is a discussion--it’s not the word of God, but words about God. The second distinction I had to make was between Jesus and Christ. This way of putting it can be confusing because a lot of people think of “Christ” as Jesus’ last name. But “Christ” is a title given by mainstream Christianity for the being it claims to have been the “son of God” who died for the sins of humanity and was raised on the third day. I had to learn to distinguish Christ from Jesus, the person. Jesus seems to have been someone like Martin Luther King, Jr.--an eloquent, courageous, religiously-motivated social reformer. I eventually came to understand him as a latter-day Israelite prophet--a critic of the status quo, a defender of the powerless, someone who was calling ancient Israelite religion back to what he understood to be its first principles--someone whose eloquent restatements of ancient Israelite ethical principles still move people today, across all the centuries and despite all the intervening theological nonsense. And I finally had to make a distinction about the cross, between its Christian meaning and its historic meaning. The reason that mainstream Christianity is so enamored of the cross is that, for Christianity, the most important thing about Jesus is that he died. In the ancient creed his career is reduced to a comma: “born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate....” But one can re-appropriate the cross by looking at it historically. Crucifixion was a deliberately cruel way of executing a non-Roman citizen who was to be made an example of because he or she was a threat to the empire. A cross is a reminder that Jesus was, indeed, a threat to the Roman empire because his message of radical egalitarianism was subversive of the empire’s patronage-based, slave-supported, hierarchical system. I now see the cross as a warning, and a call. The warning is that defending oppressed people is dangerous; the call is that we’re supposed to do it anyway. Turning Away from One’s Personal Religious PastFor me, the midwife of all of this was Universalism. The mainstream UU movement was of no help to me while I struggled to make these distinctions and then to incorporate the valuable parts of my childhood religion into my adult faith. No minister I knew was of any help, nor any General Assembly resolution, nor any UUA publication. And I fear that my experience is not unusual. They say that Unitarian Universalism is the gateway from Methodism to golf. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. Regularly people come to our churches, are encouraged to turn their backs on their former religions and then, not finding much to stay for, leave--sometimes for another church, but often for the Sunday paper or Sunday golf. We don’t encourage people to confront their religious pasts. We enable people to deny their pasts. “I was a Methodist,” says a visitor. “That’s nice,” we say, “but come read Thoreau and Emerson and let us tell you about Buddhism and the UU Principles.” While those are certainly worthy things to introduce people to, we’re not helping people to take their former religions apart, and consequently we are failing to help them to re-appropriate spiritual resources that, in combination with the UU perspective, would of great value to them. The Retreat from ReligionVisitors often comment that UUism doesn’t seem like a real religion. The UU Principles, while unobjectionable, strike them as secular (“…could have been written by an agency of the United Nations”) and for the most part unchallenging (“Who isn’t in favor of peace and justice?”). This state of affairs is the legacy of a bitter controversy that raged for more than 100 years, mostly in the Unitarian denomination, between liberal Christians and those further to the left--Humanists and their nineteenth-century forerunners--who objected to traditional religious language (like “God”) and to the singling out of Jesus among the world’s spiritual leaders. Unwilling to be split over doctrinal differences (to its everlasting credit), but seeing no alternative but to retreat from endorsing any particular religious path, the Unitarian movement came to describe itself primarily in terms of principles of procedure (“freedom, reason, tolerance”) on which everyone could agree. Unitarianism became not so much a religion as a “Robert’s Rules of Order” for having a discussion about religion. When the Unitarians joined forces with the much smaller Universalist movement in 1961, most Unitarians were unaware that the Universalists had worked out their own distinctive resolution of the Christian/Humanist conflict and so the Unitarian approach prevailed. As a result today’s UUism is not so much a religion as a process that supports people who are searching for a religion. Or as one wit put it, “In UUism you’re parachuted into a jungle, given a machete and a canteen and told, ‘You’re free’.” But while the Christian/Humanist controversy was raging among Unitarians, Universalists had quietly forged their new Declaration of Faith--reprinted below--which is a synthesis of liberal Christianity and Humanism. Two of the five points (“supreme worth” and “authority of truth”) embody Humanist values, while the other three proclaim liberal Christianity. True to its heritage, Universalism--“the Larger Faith”--had opened its arms and grown larger still. In Universalism you’re still parachuted into a jungle, still given a machete and canteen and told that you’re free, but you’re also given a compass and shown a direction in which many others have found spiritual fulfillment. Universalism is more than a process; it’s a religion. The Universalist Declaration of Faith We avow our faith in We avow our faith in God as eternal and all-conquering love. Universalism insists on using the word “God,” and so of confronting the big religious questions (“What am I doing here?” “What’s it all about?”). By linking God with love, Universalism is suggesting that the experience of love may the closest we can ever come to an answer. ...the spiritual leadership of Jesus. Not Christ, Jesus. And not only Jesus. The importance of other religious teachers (like Moses, Buddha, and Lao-Tzu) was acknowledged in Universalism implicitly at least since 1805 and explicitly since just after the Civil War. In 1946 the “off-center cross” was designed to symbolize this openness. By its singling out of Jesus and by its depiction of only the Christian cross within its symbol Universalism challenges the anti-Christianity of so many UUs and makes denial of the UU movement’s Christian heritage impossible. At the same time, though, the placement of the cross off to one side expresses Universalism’s desire to keep the Christian heritage at arm’s length. The Universalist symbol says: just as we pick and choose from other religions, we will pick and choose from Christianity. Universalism helps Jews in our congregations to see that what the UU movement chooses to keep from Christianity is mostly of Jewish origin. And Universalism encourages angry former Christians to take their childhood religion apart so that it will lose its power to hurt them, freeing them to incorporate elements of Christianity that they still value into their adult faith. The result for both groups is greater spiritual depth, and healing for the UU movement as a whole. ...the supreme worth of every human personality. This principle, of Humanist origin, has in recent years been slightly rephrased and adopted as the first of the UU Principles. ...the authority of truth, known or to be known. Universalism is committed to reason and open to new truth, from whatever source. ...and the power of persons of good will and sacrificial spirit to overcome all evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God. For Universalism, as for Jesus, the Kingdom of God is here--it is a vision of the earth, finally made just. The Rev. Walter Royal Jones, Jr., longtime head of the committee that produced the UU Principles, has expressed doubts about their spiritual depth. If in the morning you faced a serious operation of uncertain outcome, he asks, would you seek comfort by having the UU Principles read to you?(5) In the days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, the root causes of which I find simply overwhelming, I was comforted by this clause of the Universalist Declaration of Faith. “Persons of good will and sacrificial spirit have the power to overcome evil,” it reassured me. “Believe, Richard--even though your best efforts seem like grains of sand on a vast beach, believe that you can make a difference.” Neither this nor any other statement shall be imposed as a creedal test. When a proviso contained in the 1935 version of this “liberty clause” was deleted in 1953, Universalism’s commitment to individual freedom of belief became total. Universalism and Religious MaturityMuch of what I’ve said can be summarized in terms of the “stages of faith” described by psychologist and theologian James Fowler(6). Many UUs are at Fowler’s fourth (“Individuative-Reflective”) stage of faith. They have demythologized the stories and symbols of their religious heritage and have come to express their religious convictions in terms of ethical principles and commitment to social justice. UUism does a good job of feeding people who are at this stage. But UUism doesn’t do a good job of feeding people who are ready to move on to the next stage, or who are already there. This is why there is so much spiritual hunger in our congregations. Fowler’s next (fifth) stage of faith is the one at which some of the old stories and symbols are reappropriated on a new level of understanding. I feel this is the stage I was ready to move on to when I found Universalism so helpful. Fowler calls this stage “Conjunctive” because it is characterized by the acceptance of both parts of pairs of alternatives that were formerly perceived to be mutually exclusive. Universalism is conjunctive in this sense. It has a Declaration of Faith that is creed-like but claims not to be a creed. It embraces both sides of the Christian/Humanist controversy. It proclaims its Christian roots and at the same time relativizes Christianity as only one of the world’s religious paths. Like UUism, Universalism sustains people who are at the fourth stage of faith. But unlike UUism, Universalism also encourages people who are ready to move on from stage four to stage five (and beyond), and provides food for the journey. At consolidation the Unitarian majority, mistaking Universalism for an undeveloped form of their own religion instead of a distinct religion, saw no need to learn about Universalism and so Universalism was pretty much forgotten. It was wrapped up and put in the attic, so to speak, at 25 Beacon Street. As a result Universalism is now only a byway within the UU movement, trod by relatively few. But if the principal duty of a religious movement is to foster religious maturity among its people, as I believe it is, then Universalism has the potential to become a highway of renewal for the entire UU movement because Universalism fosters religious maturity to a degree that UUism cannot. A solution to the UU movement’s problems may be sitting in our own attic, fresh as the day it was put there, just waiting to be unwrapped. Notes (1) Curtis W. Reese, The Meaning of Humanism (Beacon Press,
1945), p. 20.
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After I had been
attending UU churches for several years, my circumstances changed and
I started attending a church that had a Universalist heritage. Theologically
it was a mainstream UU church, but the building contained some artifacts
that were evocative of the church’s past. In particular, there was
an off-center cross on the front wall of the sanctuary. I couldn’t
take my eyes off it. I didn’t like the cross in the circle, but
I was fascinated that it was off to the side, and I was fascinated by
the empty space at the center. At coffee hour that day, and on the subsequent
Sundays, I asked old-timers what the symbol meant. And based on what they
told me, and based also on my own imagination, I evolved an understanding
of the symbol that turned out to be pretty close to what its designers
intended to convey. The circle represents the universe. The empty space
at the center represents the mystery at the heart of the universe, a.k.a.
“God.” The cross represents Christianity, one path toward
God, the path out of which Universalism (and UUism) has grown; but it
is off to the side, to leave room for other points of view and to acknowledge
the validity of other paths toward God.