50 Years of Unitarian Universalism

Introduction

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Unitarian Universalist Association.  Last Spring, when I was asked for a title for this morning’s presentation, I realized I want to reflect on Unitarian Universalist theology through the fifty years since the merger of the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association.[1]

I want to document developments and trends in our theological discourse since 1961, and, more importantly, to make a stand as to where we are theologically, looking forward to our next fifty years.

The text of this presentation, with extensive footnotes, will be posted on the UUCB web site.

As I have in years past, I use the definition of theology as the systematic reflection on religion.  Religion is the search for, creation, and celebration of meaning in life.

This being the Personal Theology Seminar, I offer you these reflections from a personal perspective.  We might say all theology is personal, that we cast our personal visions upon the Cosmos in order to understand our place within it.

The more I reflected on this topic a new question emerged:  To whom am I accountable in this telling?  It’s an interesting and telling question.

The Personal Part

I began these fifty years of Unitarian Universalism as a thirteen-year-old eighth-grader, living with my mother and father and two sisters, active in the Junior High youth group of All Souls Unitarian Church, Tulsa.

To whom would I have been accountable in my telling of Unitarian Universalism then?  My father, like his father before him, was an active lay leader.  His mother, the daughter of a Unitarian minister, was an intellectual leader of the congregation.  1961 was probably the year the male minister of the congregation first invited me to consider a future in the ministry.  I would have felt accountable to them.  I would have felt no accountability to Universalism, and my story would have reflected no knowledge of its rich tradition and gifts.

Twelve years into Unitarian Universalism (in 1973) I entered theological school.  That’s where I began learning about Universalism.  I believe there was one woman in the student body at that time.  The one woman on the faculty was an adjunct professor who taught one course, the Director of Religious Education at the First Unitarian Society of Chicago, Starr Williams.

In my second year of theological school I received an invitation from Joan Goodwin.  She was the Extension Consultant at the UUA, putting together visiting teams for the Sharing In Growth program.  She asked me to join four others on the team to consult for a year with the Abraham Lincoln Unitarian Fellowship in Springfield, Illinois.

After graduation, when I became an Extension Minister in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, Joan was one of the UUA staff who trained us, and she consulted with me regularly for the next three years.

In 1980, I was invited to join the UUA Extension staff, and Joan became my mentor colleague.  I didn’t use the language at the time, but we were in team ministry, and remained so for the next decade.  Over the years our team grew, not only in numbers, as we added men and women, lay and clergy, straight and lesbian, and people of color.

Joan Goodwin was strong and intelligent.  She was a Director of Religious Education in the Dallas church when I was in high school.  She applied the developmental theories of Erik Erikson and James Fowler, to the development of congregations.  If a congregation was committed to growth, developmental tasks were clear.  Joan charted them.

Personally, Joan was quiet, relational, and empowering.  She asked questions, and she answered mine.  She knew the world would be a better place if more and more people practiced the values of Unitarian Universalism.

She was an empowering person, and I miss her.

In telling this theological tale I am accountable to Joan Goodwin.[2]

Unitarian Universalist Theology:  1961

In January 1959, three years before merger, six commissions were appointed by the American Unitarian Association to name where we were as a religious body.[3] The Coordinating Council for this project included thirteen prominent Unitarians, who were all male, and none, to my knowledge, were persons of color.

The reports of the six commissions were published as The Free Church in a Changing World in 1963.

The report of the Commission on Theology and the Frontiers of Learning documents our theological diversity at the time of consolidation.[4] The Commission included fifteen members, only one of whom was a woman (Sophia Lyon Fahs), and, I believe, no persons of color.[5]

The 23-page Report included 17 sections, including recommendations.[6]

Introducing the major theological emphases the Commission identified among us at the time of merger they said, “It has been our ideal always to be hospitable to dissent, as the path to new knowledge.  As we have striven to maintain the spirit of unity, a creative diversity has woven many strands of thought into the fabric of our faith.”[7]

What they called theological emphases and strands of thought, we have come to call the sources of our living tradition.

The major theological emphases they found are:

1. Christian Liberalism
2. Deism
3. Mystical Religion
4. Religious Humanism
5. Naturalistic Theism, and
6. Existentialism.[8]

I remember at the time either/or conversations about theology.  If you were a Unitarian Universalist you were either a theist or humanist.  Of the six emphases, four leaned toward theism, and two toward humanism.[9]

One of the major factors discussed in the report is the relation of religion and science.  This discussion permeates the report.

In 1961 we were a religious perspective changing for the last hundred years with the understandings of evolution.[10] We had traditional liberal religious concepts, both theistic and humanistic, and a belief in the scientific method as a new source for revelation of truth.

Important for understanding how our theology has evolved is the Commission’s discussion of The Liberal Style.  They noted that more than any common belief, what characterizes religious liberals is a way of being and valuing in the world.  Four examples are:

1. This-worldly concerns,
2. Strong ethical responsibility,
3. Deep commitment to democracy, and
4. True community is religiously-based.[11]

We hear in some of these values a precursor to our current statement of principles.

In the ten years following the Commission’s report, two documents provide insight into our theology at the time of merger.  The UUA Board-appointed Committee on Goals reported in 1967 the results of their survey of current denominational opinion.  Six years later, the Chair of the Committee, Robert Tapp, published a more extensive consideration of the survey results.[12]

Perhaps the most important finding was that “only 10.6 percent of the respondents were born Unitarian or Universalist, (and) only 12.1 percent had Unitarianism or Universalism as the family religion during childhood.”[13]

We were a religion of converts.  An over-whelming majority of us came from other religious backgrounds, rejecting most of what we had experienced.  For many there was an uneasy relationship with traditional religious beliefs.  For instance, nearly 30% of respondents saw God as an “irrelevant,” or even “harmful” concept.[14]

The seeds of a pluralistic religion, open to new sources of authority, had been planted over decades and were beginning to mature.

A Time of Transition

Let’s pause for a minute to reflect on all that happened in the culture in which we live in the last fifty years.  It is not a stretch to say that in these fifty years we have moved from a cultural to a multicultural awareness.  Fifty years ago the Civil Rights movement was just getting started.  Unitarian Universalists had yet to suffer through our Black Empowerment struggle.  Women’s Liberation, the Sexual Revolution, Ecology, and LGBT Human Rights, were not in our consciousness.  The Vietnam War had yet to take its toll in lost and injured soldiers and on the morale of the people of the United States.

While the atom bomb had exploded, humans had not gone into space.  The moon was still made of green cheese (!).  We had TVs and telephones but no one had computers in their homes, much less cell phones, laptops, and Ipads.  An Apple was something you ate every day (!).  I don’t remember hearing or speaking in theological school, 1973-77, the word spirituality.  Now, spiritual growth is one of the main reasons new members give for joining UU congregations.

Purposes and Principles

Within Unitarian Universalism, this percolating time of turmoil led to the 1977 Women and Religion Resolution adopted by delegates to the UUA General Assembly.  Largely the effort of lay women, the Resolution “aimed at bringing a set of values to the center of our religious faith and practice:  relationship, equity and justice, inclusiveness, open process, compassion, and focus on family and children.”[15] (italics mine)

Looking back, especially if you were not an active Unitarian Universalist at the time, the impact of women on the theological evolution of Unitarian Universalism may not be clear.  Perhaps this will help:  “In 1968 women made up 2.6 % of the Unitarian Universalist ministry.  [Only twenty years later,] by 1988 this proportion had grown to 25 percent, [and] just eleven years after that, in 1999, the percentage of UU ministers who were women crossed the 50 percent mark.”[16] In thirty years the percentage of women in UU ministry had grown 20-fold.

The Women and Religion Resolution had a transformative impact. What began as an audit of sexist language we used in worship, led to adoption of a new statement of Purposes and Principles in 1985.  The 7 Principles reflect an emerging theological orientation:  Interdependence, Spiritual growth, Compassion, Equity, and Justice.  For the first time in our self-identification the image of the Web was used.  We are all connected and we depend upon one another more than we know.

This new Covenant named the sources for our religious lives:

Direct experience of transcending mystery,

Words and deeds of prophetic women and men,

Wisdom from the world’s religions,

Jewish and Christian teachings, and

Humanist teachings.

Significantly, in the last paragraph of this new statement of identity we affirm our gratitude for the “religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith.”

What began as an audit of sexist language opened us to an exploration of the wide varieties of sources for our religious journey.  The “Theist or Humanist” religion of my childhood was changing.  With the rise of the women’s movement and the language of spirituality, the seeds of a pluralistic religion had been planted over decades and were beginning to mature.

To reflect this new theological direction a new hymnal, Singing our Living Tradition was published in 1993.  It is structured around the sources, offering hymns and readings to enable us to celebrate this religious perspective.

It includes for the first time in Unitarian and Universalist hymnals significant numbers of resources from the religions of the world, and from our African American heritage.

Just after the hymnal was published, delegates to the General Assembly recognized a new source, Inspiration from Earth-Centered religions. It seems appropriate for a religious perspective that embraces openness to new understanding of truth that our hymnal would be out of date almost as soon as it was published.

Our pluralism took many forms.  We became more inclusive.

When I went to work for the UUA in 1980 we recently had established the Office of Gay Concerns.  Think of the evolution in our thinking.  Gay became Lesbian and Gay.  Then, Lesbian, Gay, and Bi-Sexual.  Then our consciousness of Transgender people emerged.  Questions of gender identity and sexual and affectional orientation became more and more refined.  LGBTQ became a familiar acronym.

In my last years in the UUA Extension Department we added the first UUA staff person with the sole intention of helping us become more racially diverse.[17]

Unitarian Universalist Theology:  2005

Our evolving theological identity is reflected in Engaging Our Theological Diversity, the 2005 report of The Commission on Appraisal of the Unitarian Universalist Association.[18]

The increasing impact of women on UU theology was apparent.

Forty-four years into our UU journey, the Commission found:

Almost universally among UUs, personal experience is considered the most important source of religious conviction.  While support for deriving convictions from one’s own experience is consistent across variables, significant gender, generational, and personality-type differences do appear in the comparative importance assigned to reason and intuition.  The groups that contrast most strongly in valuing reason as a source of convictions are men over age sixty and women under sixty.  Conversely, female respondents value dialogue as a source of conviction more than men do, especially older men.[19]

The emphases of women in Unitarian Universalism on relationship, equity and justice, inclusiveness, open process, and compassion met with the affirmations of Process Theology to produce a new expression of theology.

In the 1963 Commission on Theology report the closest label for “process theology” was naturalistic theism.  It was described in gender insensitive language as:

The world that the sciences are discovering is marked by evolutionary processes, only in part controlled by man.  Man’s highest good lies in discovering and serving this creativity.  The God of creativity operates within nature under specifiable conditions and thus is not marred by the mysteriousness of a supernatural God.  Preserving and destructive forces are also recognized as involved in the creative process.[20]

Process theology was taught in Unitarian Universalist theological schools as early as the 1920s.   Rooted in scientific, evolutionary thought, it’s understanding of the natural world as a web of interdependent connections finds affinity with the focus on relationship articulated in women’s spirituality.

For many of us, the transcendent image of our developing consciousness is that of the Earth from space.  Remember the first time you saw what the astronauts had seen:  a blue-green ball with swirling clouds and no political boundaries.  One body, interconnected, interdependent.  No hierarchy.  Everything in relation.

The emergence of the language of the Web, with its roots in naturalistic and pagan experience, and its articulation in the rise of ecology and women’s spirituality, gave us a new focus for our theological reflections. In the language of our seventh principle, we affirm the interdependent web of all existence of which we are part.

We continue to hold each person accountable to follow her or his conscience in matters of religious belief.  Focus on personal experience remains central, yet, as has always been the case in our religious tradition, it is personal experience grounded in the communal.  Our covenant is “to walk together.”

That’s why gatherings like this Personal Theology Seminar are so UU!  It is not a coincidence that this seminar arose when it did thirty years ago.  Bernie Loomer was a process theologian who understood more than most the importance of grounding theological expression in the reality of the interconnected web.

While we have long affirmed individual freedom of belief, within the last 25 years we have, in group settings, explored “Building Your Own Theology,” and more recently Evensong and other Small Group Ministry, like our Chalice Circles.  These are expressions of a focus on relationship.  While each person speaks her or his story, no one is interrupted.  We listen appreciatively, not to take issue with what is said, but to affirm the speaker and glean their wisdom that it may nourish our unfolding.  When it’s my turn to speak I am held in a circle of people affirming my spiritual journey.

My internship supervisor was Rev. David Bumbaugh.  He says our Seventh Principle “calls us to trust the process, the creative, evolving, renewing, redeeming process which brings us into being, which sustains us in being, and which transforms our being.”[21]

Unitarian Universalist Theology:  2011

Perched as we are on the threshold of our second half-century, where are we Unitarian Universalists theologically?  Here are some thoughts:

With the insights and language of Women’s Spirituality, Ecology, and Process Theology, our ways of being together are evolving.  Remember the aim of those women in 1977 to transform Unitarian Universalism values?   Relationship, equity and justice, inclusiveness, open process, compassion, and focus on family and children have become central among us.

We are an interconnected web.  It is common to be in groups where each person is given the chance to speak before anyone speaks twice.  We are known for our commitment to human rights and marriage equality.  While we continue the difficult journey of racial inclusiveness and multicultural identity, we have more Unitarian Universalist ministers of color than at any time in our history.

Immigration has emerged as a major focus as we prepare for an exceptional Justice General Assembly in Phoenix next June.

Conversation not always easy for us males to enter has helped us to understand the ethics and politics of gender, privilege, and entitlement.  The entrance of significant numbers of women in ministry has transformed our understanding of collegiality.  Ministerial gatherings are no longer competitions for telling stories of one’s achievements.  Gender equality has transformed our understanding and articulation of gender and sexual ethics.

Who are we?  People who embrace change, though often reluctantly.

We are “open to new truth whence so ever it may come.”

We believe the nature of existence is change.  We are in process.

We participate in the on-going change of the cosmos.

We see religious authority as horizontal rather than vertical,

not hierarchical but democratic.

Each person has a voice.  We like to talk.

We are finding ways to honor each one.

We are covenanters.  We understand human community is made possible by assuming the good intentions of others and promising to hold one another in high regard.  When we break our promises, we seek ways to renew them, or make new ones, knowing in the process of the conversation we grow, as individuals, and as related beings.

Our vision of an interconnected world with no boundaries calls us to become more radically welcoming, with ever more curious minds, loving hearts, and open arms to embrace the gift of the stranger.

Those of us who began these fifty years as Unitarians have learned a lot from Universalism.  Its historic affirmation of a loving God and universal salvation reminds us all beings are one.  We participate together in on-going creation.  There is room for all.

Personally, I have evolved theologically to the place where I am comfortable calling myself a mystic.  I now spell theology as:  The-All-ogy.  It makes a huge difference to ground my understanding of being in “the interdependent web,” instead of the radical individualism that has too often characterized our Unitarian focus on freedom of belief.

The Personal Resumed

Last summer, Barbara and I visited the Brooklyn Museum to see an exhibit on the avatars of Vishnu, an interest we had developed on our sabbatical in India.  I did not realize until we arrived at the museum that it is the permanent home of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party.

You may remember this controversial and culture-shifting creation.  It is a huge, room-size installation, a triangular dinner table with thirteen place settings on each side.  Each place setting is for a woman important in human history.  Each is unique, reflecting the artists’ – and that should be spelled with the plural possessive because Judy Chicago worked with about 300 women in creating this piece – each place setting is unique reflecting the interests and offerings of the woman being honored by a place at the table.

Inside the triangle, on the floor, are at least a thousand names of women.

Who wrote the history books you read as a student?

Who formed your understanding of the important contributors to human culture?

The Dinner Party reminded me of all the herstory I have not learned.

I could tell this tale of Personal Theology as a displaced male, resentful at the increasing loss of position and power of men in our Association.

But that is not my experience.  Women’s Liberation, or as we might call it now, the Empowerment of Women has given me the gift of this mystic awareness, this the-all-ogy that begins with our interconnections.

It was largely due to my experience working with Joan Goodwin that I was drawn to the possibility of co-ministry with Barbara.  Though I had been as a boy, I was not drawn to the image of the Lone Ranger.  Tonto was always presented as the assistant. Barbara and I envisioned a ministry of mutuality.  We chose to hyphenate our name as a constant reminder that though we each have our unique personalities, interests, and skills, our relationship is one of equals.

For 22 years we have pictured the hyphen as a balancing bar, a symbol of mutuality.

I don’t pretend to have much insight into where we will be as a religious body fifty years from now.

But this I know:  there is no turning back.

We have been fundamentally changed.

Though we are yet to have a woman as President of the UUA,

we are no longer the male-dominated body we were fifty years ago.

We are the better for it.

We are learning to think and to act from a new grounding, with new values:

relationship,

equity and justice,

inclusiveness,

open process,

compassion, and

focus on family and children.

These gifts to us from the rising spirit of women have changed us.

I am grateful.

And, I wonder, if they lead us, in the next fifty years, to

Gender Liberation

as the vision for tomorrow’s theology.

Let’s check back in, in 2061, to see!