The UU Conundrum
Sermon by Steve Edington
April 6, 2008
Towards the end of his life Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to a friend in which he took stock of the American religious landscape - as seen through his eyes - in the early 1820s. He offered this observation and prediction: "I trust there is not a young man alive today who will not die a Unitarian." Jefferson was a brilliant man; but even brilliance does not guarantee accuracy on all counts. The Man from Monticello apparently assumed that the principles and ideals of the European Enlightenment that he'd shared with such contemporaries as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Paine were, to use a phrase he inserted into the Declaration of Independence, "self evident truths"; and that these self-evident truths would, in time, become absorbed into the population at large by some sort of cultural osmosis.
Since Jefferson's Deistic God and his take on Jesus as a moral exemplar - ideas that were very compatible with his Enlightenment views - were also tenets of the Unitarianism of his day, he must have figured that this Enlightenment osmosis he saw coming on would transform the American population into Unitarians. Jefferson further believed that this process would be accomplished within the generation that was coming of age even as his life was coming to an end. Hence his belief that there is not a "young man" alive today who will not die a Unitarian. I'm not sure how he felt about the religious beliefs that young women might take on, but I'll leave that aside.
Well, as to Jefferson's prediction, it's like that car rental commercial once put it: Not exactly! Even as he wrote those words a movement called The Second Great Awakening was getting underway, with very emotion laden, sin-and-salvation revival meetings - some of them lasting for days - sweeping the newly formed country. Then, following the Civil War, as the modern scientific era began to dawn, there was a very strong, religiously based reaction to it, as many people felt their belief structures and their moral foundations were being undermined by these new currents of thought and new ways of perceiving the world and our place in it. That movement was called Fundamentalism, and it is still with us today.
Jefferson, to make one more pass at him, was such a strong believer in the power of ideas and in the power of the mind, that he felt that promoting and extending a religion - like, say, Unitarianism - was simply a matter of "may the best idea, or may the most intellectually defensible beliefs, win." He assumed the ideas and beliefs of Unitarianism would. The place where Jefferson had a blind spot, or possibly failed to fully understand and appreciate, was just what a complex, multi-layered phenomenon religion, any religion, really is. It's not just something you buy with your mind. For it to really work, and have real meaning and impact in a person's life, it has to be something that is internalized into one's whole being.
I'd like you to file that point for future reference, because it's one I'll come back to later. For now I wonder, had Jefferson somehow managed to live for several more decades beyond his death in 1826, if he would have asked, "So, how come Unitarianism isn't growing the way I thought it would?"
Even if he didn't get the chance to raise the question, plenty of other Unitarians, and now Unitarian Unversalists, certainly have. It's the question the troika of Phil Brown, Harry Purchaser, and Jim McCormick put forth when they collectively entered the highest bid at last year's service auction, where one of my donations was a sermon topic of one's choosing. My other offering was to paint a room in someone's home. I've done that one already. Now, with our next auction two weeks away, I'm finally getting the high-bid sermon - just under the wire as it were.
The sermon title they asked for is indeed the title for today's sermon: "The UU Conundrum." The conundrum, to which these high rolling gentlemen refer, was put to me in an e-mail from them some months ago, in these words: "We're thoughtful, relevant, and non-dogmatic. If we are so tolerant, welcoming and relevant why aren't there more of us?" That's probably not too far off the mark from how Jefferson would put it were he around to pose the question himself.
The easy way out here for me would be to say, "Be damned if I know," sing the closing hymn, and give these guys their money back. Seriously, it is a question that bedevils me as well. It will be 30 years ago this fall that I was granted entry into the UU ministry by our Association. In that time I've seen our Association launch various growth campaigns, and advertising and promotional campaigns - even as our numbers across out denomination have stayed more or less flat. This does not make me a cynic, I should quickly point out, when it comes to growth. I'm still in here pitching after all - and doing so with a very fine congregation. But these 30 years have given me certain perspectives that might be helpful in getting at the question.
True to my sermon style, I'd first like to look at the big picture; which quite fortuitously was handed to me - and to all other interested persons - about 5 or 6 weeks ago when the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released the results of one of the more comprehensive surveys ever done on the nature and scope of religious life in our country. I know there's nothing that can make the eyes glaze over more quickly in a sermon than a bunch of number crunching - so I'll try to be as succinct as I can with this while hopefully still doing some justice to the findings. To boil it down to a single a sentence, our religious views, attitudes, and affiliations in this country are all over the place at the moment and in a high state of flux.
To get at some of the numbers behind that finding, only 30% of our population now claim affiliation with the faith in which they were raised. So, with about 20% of UUs today being birthright UUs, we're not all that far off the national average really when it comes to the make-up of our congregations. In the category of misery loves company, both the mainline, moderate to liberal, Protestant Christian denominations, as well as Roman Catholicism, have been in a flat-lined, plateau state for the past 15-20 years, even as we UUs have been. In fact, the only thing that has kept our Catholic friends from losing ground has been the number of Catholic immigrants coming into our country who wish to continue in their faith. It probably provides them with a familiar and secure anchor in a new and strange land. I was not surprised to learn that it is the evangelical, Protestant Christians, who are not all that strong on denominational affiliation, that are growing - especially with their non-denominational mega-churches - even as the more mainline, moderate Christian bodies tread water.
But the intriguing piece in all this research for me was the Rise of the Unaffiliateds. The fastest growing religious body in the country is not a definitively religious body at all; but rather an amorphous group - comprising 25% of the population no less - who do not claim an affiliation or relationship with any religious body or faith tradition. These folks are not primarily atheists or agnostics - although there are some amongst them. They are more like spiritual seekers, for whom the idea of God, or a Higher Power, or a Life Force or Life Spirit, however vaguely defined it may be for them, is still in some way meaningful; and they haven't found a place to go with it.
These folk are not looking for an escape from religion, or an escape from belief. Rather, they are looking for a place where they can be authentically religious, be authentic believers, and find a spiritual path that resonates with who they are and where they want to take their lives. I'm convinced that if we UUs are going to get out of our flat-lined state - a state we share with both mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism (granting our actual numbers are infinitely much smaller than theirs) - then it is these Unaffiliateds to whom we're going to have to appeal. What we offer by way of liberal religion is not going to work, or appeal, to all of them. But there's enough of that 25% Unaffiliated chunk, I do believe, that could be brought into our congregations.
But there are some hurdles we're going to have to clear, and some understandings we're going to have to come to, if that's going to happen. Otherwise all the ad campaigns in the world - however well done and as much as I do support them - are not going to help us much. Our UU Association is running another of its ads in this week's Time Magazine. I've already seen it, and it's a good one. It appears to be aimed right at those Unaffiliateds. I don't want what I just said, or will say, to detract from it in any way. What I'm suggesting is that there are some things we need to be a bit clearer with ourselves about, within our family now, if these ads are going to add to our ranks in any significant way.
First of all, we have to get past that blind spot of Jefferson's to which I referred earlier. The power of a good idea, or set of good ideas, by themselves will not grow us. Remember, Jefferson felt that all it would take would be for Unitarian/Enlightenment ideas to permeate the population and everyone would just jump into the Unitarian boat. The three people who requested this sermon were quite correct in describing UUism today as "thoughtful, tolerant, relevant, and non-dogmatic." Indeed these were among the ideas that brought me over to the UU fold myself.
What kept me here, however, was finding a community and a faith tradition that I knew I could connect with, and with which I could feel a close identity, with all parts of my being - mind, soul, and spirit. You see, I can be a thoughtful, tolerant, relevant, and non-dogmatic person without ever walking through the door of any kind of religious community, this one or any other. This is why I've come to believe that religion, of any kind clear across the conservative to liberal spectrum, is more "caught" than it is "taught." I say that as someone who loves to teach - both here in this church and in other settings. By caught I mean one has to see, sense, and feel that there is a culture that I can connect with, when he/she comes into one of our congregations.
I wish I had more time to develop this point further, but there are some other areas I want to get to. I'll just say for now that all the great and wonderful ideas in the world - in and of themselves - are not going to keep a person attached to a religious community, however liberal it may be, if they do not develop a sense of relationship and connection with those who are in that community. And that's where our efforts really need to be. I think we do a pretty good job of attracting people here. The challenge is what kind of home we offer once they get into the house.
For my next point let me offer the metaphor of a lifeboat, since I think that's what a good number of these unaffiliated folks are looking for, or would welcome if one came along whether they're actively looking for one or not. One reason I think the evangelical sector of our population is growing is because they're putting a pretty good lifeboat out there. We live in a rather overwhelming world right now. Many of us deal with economic insecurities, with concerns about how well or not we're raise our families, and what kind of grounding we want to give our kids. We see shifting codes and norms of moral and ethical behavior, with religious beliefs in flux as the Pew Survey indicates. Then there are the national and global concerns of how safe and secure of a country are we living in now.
Think of all of that as a sea of uncertainty. For some who feels like they're drowning in that sea practically any lifeboat will pretty well. The evangelical lifeboat - and since I grew up in one I have a good idea as to what it looks like - offers a prescribed way of believing, a well defined way of looking at the world and your place and role in it, and a well defined lay-out of what is right and wrong, moral and immoral. On top of all that you usually get a group of happy and loving and enthusiastic people who all feel the same way about these things. Giving credit where it's due, there is a social conscience in that lifeboat where Jesus' admonitions about caring for the hungry and clothing the naked and caring for the earth are taken seriously. All in all it's a pretty attractive, safe, and secure lifeboat. If the Pew Study is correct, as I believe it is, a lot of folks are climbing on board.
As for those of us in the UU camp, we can waste a lot of time bemoaning all the people who are hopping into this lifeboat, or we can devote some attention and energy and effort into what we might put in our own. There are, after all, a lot of folks in the unaffiliated sea who would welcome a boat such as ours. What we want to keep in it, to be sure, are thoughtfulness and a free mind, intellectual integrity, and the with tolerance, relevance, and lack of dogma cited by those who requested this sermon. If those things ever get tossed overboard then I'm going with them, since they are among the things that got me in the boat to begin with.
But along with such attributes as these there also has to be a safe and accepting place for searching and finding in our boat. If people wish to speak of faith and seek out a God or Spirit or Life Force that is meaningful for them and grounds their life - those opportunities need to be in our boat. As noted earlier, those unaffiliated folk are not looking for an escape from religion as much as a place where they can openly and authentically be about finding a religious and a spiritual grounding for themselves. I've been impressed by the number of people who've been attending our Spirit in Practice series we've been running on Thursday nights - that Cynthia and Adam have been leading. Thirty-five people showed up on one of those evenings - that's 10% of our congregation. Such a response tells me that a place for spiritual journey making and guidance and direction need to be in our boat.
I'm aware that what I've offered really the beginning of a conversation we UUs need to be having both among ourselves. More important, it's a conversation we need to be having with those who are checking us out to see what's in our boat, and trying to decide whether they want to climb in or not; and stay in once the do. So I hope you'll consider the ending up of this sermon as the beginning - or continuation - of such a conversation.
I'll wind this down for today with an observation Dr. Huston Smith makes in the opening chapter of his book Why Religion Matters. Dr. Smith, whom I've had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with, is a very delightful and engaging guy who now lives in Berkeley, California after teaching religion and philosophy at several Universities - including MIT. Here the paragraph of his I want to hold up:
"Wherever people live, whenever they live, they find themselves faced with three inescapable problems: How to win food and shelter from their natural environment (the problem nature poses), how to get along with each other (the social problem), and how to relate themselves to the total scheme of things (the religious problem). If this third issue seems less important than the other two, we should remind ourselves that religious artifacts are the oldest that archeologists have discovered."
We all have to attend to our physical survival - food and shelter. We have to figure out, and we often struggle and fail and then try again, to find ways to live with one another in a reasonably safe and secure world. That's the social problem as Smith calls it. And then, as he puts it, there is the equally compelling challenge of determining and discovering how we're going to relate to what Dr. Smith calls "the total scheme of things." He calls that the problem of religion.
We could also call it the problem of meaning - or the challenge of the spirit. Who am I? Where am I? Why am I? in the total scheme of things. These are questions for our minds, our souls, and our spirits. They are the questions that touch the head and the heart. They are the questions and challenges that have always drawn human beings into religious communities. We are one such very small, but - I feel - still vital and important religious community in the much larger landscape of the society and culture in which we live. If we tend it well then it will continue to have it rightful and necessary place.
Stephen Edington
April 6, 2008
