I belong to a Unitarian Universalist congregation. If you know anything about the UUs, you probably know that UUs can believe anything they want. There is a list of principles and purposes that the organization shares. I don’t have a problem with those principles and purposes, but on Sunday, one of my co-ministers challenged us to consider the possibility that there might be more beyond them that we need to consider. In particular, he wondered–along with other “heretical” ministers–if there might be some shared beliefs and values that we can profess. You can read or listen to his sermon here.
Stuck in a hotel room last night, I did some surfing and found several of the heretics online. They are not suggesting that we adopt a creed, but instead sort of an underlying spiritual belief that would support those principles. Davidson Loehr is particularly tough on the principles:
So instead of asking religious questions about what was worth believing, what was necessary to believe, what beliefs might best be used to fashion people of good character, and so on ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù instead of this, the Unitarians simply took an extended poll. They asked a handful of churches ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú including the first church I served ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú to hold discussion groups, to discover what the people who attended there (and liked discussion groups) happened to believe. What such a poll had to, and did, reveal were the generic cultural beliefs these people brought into church with them: the profile of social and political liberals.
This process produced the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìseven principles?¢‚Ǩ? ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù known in some circles as the Seven Banalities or the Seven Dwarfs ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù which soon became the de facto creed of a brand-new religion called ?¢‚Ǩ?ìUnitarian Universalism,?¢‚Ǩ? a religion that had never before existed anywhere, and to which no one of any note in history had ever belonged.
I guess the real problem here is how do we distinguish our church from just any other non-profit working for social justice? What makes us different? Really, the question is, what makes us a church. Then, you have to laugh a bit since my “church” isn’t even called a church or congregation. It is just called Unitarian Universalists without any kind of description of the group so as not to offend those who might find “church” to be a problematic word. But, this is a topic I am very interested in exploring. I wrote about it this morning in my morning pages and discovered that it has been awhile since I really thought about anything spiritual. Maybe I have stumbled upon a larger purpose for this blog!
