Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

April 27, 2009

On Sunday I delivered the message at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Door County. It's a small church off highway 42 in Ephraim. Large windows in the sanctuary let in just the right amount of light and the seats were filled but nothing felt crowded.. the music was nice and felt personal.. in short, it was a warm experience. My message was on the topic of sacred space and how human beings use stories to connect to the landscapes around us. Once I started preparing for the talk I realized it would be given on the day after Earth Day, so that made for a nice tie in.

Today in my Intro to Religious Studies course I showed the following video clip on Unitarian Universalists (hat tip Mackenziefrom my class):

The comment thread on this video is fascinating. Mostly you hear the voice of religious conservatives:

stoked2behere: WAHT THE HELL DOES flavor have to do with the truth of how everything came to be
...retarded..

schmoel2: Its just a man made proverb. What was implied with the comment was that this is a church that avoids contraversial issues so that everyone can enjoy being around each other. If there was no absolute truth, this would be the perfect church. As it is, there is an absolute truth, so I don't know why the average universalist doesn't just play golf in Sunday.

Both of these comments are taking aim at the way the UU church in the video accepts and allows all religious viewpoints. I'm not sure they actually state this here in the most defensible of terms, but they are engaged in the project of holding together a religious group not based on creedal specifics. One doesn't have to believe or accept any list of doctrinal points.. not even believe in God. What binds people together is a common search and a set of moral principles. There are also some actual symbols and rituals that allow the experience of one UU church to be broadly familiar to a person who comes from a different UU church. It's a religious brand, but it doesn't define that brand by specific points of doctrine.

In class I tried (perhaps not with complete success) to discuss the pluses and minuses to the UU approach to religious identity. One contrast I pointed out was an organization like the Jehovah's Witnesses, who set out a very detailed set of doctrinal points and choose religious practices that effectively set them apart from other denominations. What do the Jehovah's Witnesses gain from their doctrinally and ritually specific approach? They get the power to compel members to "volunteer" to go door to door and otherwise propagate their faith.

Although this video clip is sectarian in its critique, it shows the "timecard" the JWs have to fill out and hand in on a monthly basis.. and you get a sense of the compulsion that pushes people to "witness."

Beliefs.. and by that I mean concrete and specific claims about the way the world is.. have proven to be an extraordinarily powerful method to bring people together and stir them to action. As religious groups more tightly define their doctrinal positions and symbols they gain the right to be more demanding with respect to the personal lives of members. It's not hard to see how promises of an afterlife or other rewards.. contingent upon certain actions.. will produce those very actions.

But of course the UU church is not looking to control members in that way. The church lets go of a useful tool for group building, and grabs instead what it judges is a deeper human connection to searching and serving. This approach will probably not send out thousands of people to knock on doors, but it will possibly better meet the needs of contemporary seekers who are not interested in a hard shell of a religious identity, but who nevertheless desire to meet spiritual needs.