Davidson Loehr, senior minister at First Church Unitarian Universalist of Austin, Texas, wrote a letter to the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) back on November 30, 2005. In that letter, he lambasted the Pathways Church project, a Unitarian Universalist start-up church sponsored by denominational headquarters, for its complete failure to meet any of the initial goals of the project. Loehr said he believes that failure is tied to another problem with contemporary Unitarian Universalism, “the lack of a serious religious center.”
Now that’s a sweeping generalization, but Loehr does have a point about the wider denomination. My partner, Carol — who is unchurched — once pointed out that many Unitarian Universalist sermons sound like commentary on National Public Radio, which is to say, while hip and fun they are not particularly religious. At denominational headquarters, I am not aware of serious theological thinking affecting policy since Hugo Holleroth (who grounded religious education in existential theology) left there in the 1970s. Loehr elaborates on this problem later in his letter:
The center [of Unitarian Universalism] is political rather than religious, as it has been for decades. I’m not saying this as a crank; I’m saying it as someone who earned a Ph.D. in theology, with a good understanding of what religion is, and what it isn’t.
Rev. Peter Richardson has been instructive for me in this area, in pointing out that there actually once was a vision of a religion for the future that would still work, but that the UUA actively sabotaged it from the beginning. This was the vision of a religion grounded in the deep ontological commonalities of the great world religions — the “wisdom traditions” of the great religions — with its symbol of the circle of logos from eight or so of the world’s religions. While this seems the logical — even obvious — path toward a pluralistic future for any liberal religion, it simply can’t be done now, and may not be possible for a decade or more, unless there is a conversion of consciousness.
Actually, Ph.D. or no, Loehr is a little behind the times, intellectually speaking. That old idea of thinking that Unitarian Universalism could be a “a religion grounded in the deep ontological commonalities of the great world religions” has been seriously challenged in recent years. If you subject that idea to some simple deconstruction, you uncover tendencies towards an unfounded sense of superiority, reductionism, and imperialism. The unfounded sense of superiority comes into play in the assumption that we’re so much better than anyone else that we can find those “deep ontological commonalities” that somehow managed to elude the greatest religious thinkers up until now — it’s possible, but no one else in the world seems to recognize this superiority of ours. The reductionism comes into play in the assumption that religions can be reduced to relatively simple ontological “commonalities” that can be divorced from a lived religion, including liturgical practice and day-to-day embodied living of one’s religion — that’s a little too Cartesian and Western to be considered universally true. The imperialism comes into play when the previous two assumptions remain unexamined; and the imperialism can manifest itself as cultural misappropriation or worse.
A number of us who are a bit younger than Loehr are heading in a different religious direction. Some of us are looking within our own tradition for a religious center — and we’re finding it. I don’t want to speak for others who are doing this work, but I know I’ve been drawing on Universalist and Transcendentalist religious thought, filtered through American pragmatism (which has roots in Emerson) and ecological theology and ecojustice (with roots in Thoreau and Emerson) — and uncovering a deeply religious center for my religious praxis. This is in distinct contrast to Loehr’s stated aim to incorporate “eight or so of the world’s religions.”
I have a suspicion that what I’m seeing, in my differences with Davidson Loehr, is that he is very much within the modernist tradition of creating grand meta-narratives that attempt to encompass and explain everything. Those of us who find themselves immersed in post-modernism are far more wary of making grand claims about religion — for instance, we’re wary of saying that we can incorporate other religious traditions into our own. Instead, from a postmodernist perspective, I might say that I am a post-Christian: acknowledging that I am very much in the Christian tradition, but recognizing that in a postmodern globalized world we have to accept that we are influenced by other world religions; the difference being that we aren’t trying to co-opt those other religions, but rather to understand what impact they have on us.
So where does this leave us? I think we do have a religious center, which I’d call post-Christian. Other Christians might not accept us, but we know that we are in, and came out of, the Christian tradition. Looking back to our past, I think we started becoming post-Christian as early as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hosea Ballou, diverging from the Christian mainstream, rejected by them, and growing into something new. By claiming our place on the margins as our religious center, by engaging in “theological archaeology” to find out who we were and who we are, by avoiding the construction of grand metanarratives about who we might be — I think we could become a far more viable postmodern religious tradition.
What do you think?
Original post revised in light of Scott Wells’s comment.
Scott’s comment refers to the original post, which has now been revised based on what he had to say. Thanks, Scott!
I got to your last sentence and I’m at a loss as to how to respond. What is our tradition? I don’t (a) pretend to be anything other than Universalist and (b) don’t engage with other Christians any more than Universalists have within living memory, and yet all number of assumptions have been projected upon me: that I’m atavistic, very old, or most commonly, don’t belong. When, I think, I also reflect my generation’s (I’m 36) senibilities. The one thing I’ll grant is that I may not belong, but if that the case, it is the sour and unintended side of that (Universalist) bromide, “We don’t stand [for some position], we move.”
Add in the notion — which I think is well accepted in our circles — that change happens at the margins, not the center. Center, edge, in, out. You get exhausted looking out for earthquakes.
Dan,
I think we should look at how we “do church” in our UU congregations looking at this as a descriptive and not prosciptive issue. That may provide some insight into where our “theological center” is today.
Rebecca Parker (Starr King President and 2002 theme speaker for the LREDA Fall Conference) spoke about how we do have a shared theology but that most of it is implicitly defined and not explicitly stated. Rebecca Parker used a “house” metaphor where the various aspects of our theology (foundation, walls, roof, etc) can be viewed as components of our theology (theology, eccesiology, soteriology, etc).
This house metaphor is used in a young adult UU identity curriculum developed by Katie Erslev:
UU Identity
http://www.uua.org/ya-cm/resources/pdf/UU_Identity-Erslev.pdf
It’s also used in an online course developed by Rebecca Parker that is offered online as a contuning education credit:
Our Theological House — An Introduction to Theology for Unitarian Universalists
http://online.sksm.edu/ce/courses/current.htm#OUH02
Here’s Katie’s summary of Rebecca’s take on the implicit UU theology as it exists today:
“Our UU theology has emerged out of a historical process. Our theology is not that ‘We can believe anything we want to.’ The early house of Calvinism in the 19 th century had as its foundation that human power was in bondage to sin. In contrast, the American Unitarianism that emerged had as its foundation that humans have a power to choose. Humans had willpower, and the powers of the soul are good. Universalism gave us a foundation that God is good. Twentieth century humanism contributed to the foundation of our house by adding that we don’t need a supernatural ‘God’ but that goodness comes from within us as human beings.”
And here’s a summary of our eccesiology and soteriology (again from Rebecca filtered through Katie’s curriculum):
** Ecclesiology
“Our UU ecclesiology began in the 16 th century when the Protestant Reformation reconceptualized the church from the hierarchy of the Pope to being formed by free human beings who make a promise (a covenant) to each other. Our walls are characterized by a more democratic concept of the term ‘church.’ Our neighbors in this ‘free church’ tradition are the Baptists, Disciples of Christ, and Quakers.
Another characteristic of our ecclesiology, our walls, is that we are profoundly distrustful of pronouncements from ‘on high.'”
** Soteriology
“Once again, in contrast to the predominant foundation of the theology of Calvinism, our roof was raised by the 19th century Universalists. Universalism gave us a roof that saved us all. They said that what saves us is the power of creative love made viable to us in the person of Jesus.
Do we need to be saved from Hell? The Universalists said that we create heaven and hell on earth. We need to be saved from the Hells that we create.”
Katie’s summary of Rebecca’s work provides this comment about the cultural origins of our current shared theology and where our shared implicit theology might have problems adapting to a multicultural world:
” … the house of our faith comes from a particular cultural heritage – European and Christian, with a dash of Manifest Destiny.” This is related to Dan’s concerns about imperialism in modernist UUism.
I also think we have a lot of what theologian James Nelson calls “embodiment theology” in how we address sexuality issues and sexual ethics. This embodiment theology can be seen in how we look at sexual orientation as a justice issue and the type of sexuality education we offer in UU congregations.
I’m not sure if our post-Transcendentalist pragmatist tradition is not in fact a modernist metanarrative based on ontological individualism (to use Bellah’s description in 1998). I know that Jameson considers postmodernism to be the cultural logical of late capitalism, but sometimes I think consumerist market influenced individualism is a kind of haute modernism or hypermodernism. Because the same cultural capital is valorized as in Fordist modernism I’m not sure there is anything postmodern about it.
The idea that a geographical rooted covenantal community could develop a truly local praxis for finding value and making meaning may be the best merger of JLA and postmodernism we can create.
James: You’ve hit on the big problem I’m facing right now as a neo-Transcendentalist (“post-Transcendentalist”?) — how do I keep Transcendentalism from slipping into yet another metanarrative? My approach is to try to stay firmly located in a sense of local place, which is easy to do with Transcendentalism here in New England. The bigger problem is: does Transcendentalism translate into other eco-systems/bio-regions/watersheds (however you want to define locale)? When I was living in Northern California, I turned away from Thoreau to Gary Snyder and other local poets — Thoreau just didn’t make a certain kind of eco-theological sense in that bio-region….
I just wrote on the topic, the other day. The question people keep asking is “What do UUs believe?”–and we have profound trouble with that.
It’s because we’re not about what we believe. We’re not a religion about orthodoxy. We’re about orthopraxy.
And that practice consists essentially of two things:
How we are together–and with others–as a community
and
Our Social Justice work
We’ve given up on trying to get everyone to agree on what we think we believe about what we think “it” is all about, what God wants (if there’s a god, if god wants anything), and so forth.
We’re about doing the absolute best we can in terms of humanity dealing with the rest of humanity, and taking care of the world.
I think I was mildly more articulate at a more reasonable hour in my blog-post.
I had pretty much the same (mixed) reaction to Rev. Loehr’s letter (also to his sermon on
“why UU is dying”). My view of the core of our faith can be summed up as an “Enlightenment
sedan powered by an ultra-protestant engine.”
Seems to me that what we have to offer–as an “uncommon denomination”–draws heavily from
both our “Enlightenment heritage” of natural curiosity and hunger for truth tempered by a
healthy measure of humility, and equally from a stubbornly protestant spirituality—an
insistence upon individual free-agency, private judgement and personal honesty as a legitimate
beginning-place for the quest for truth and meaning.
I do think that we are still thoroughly and radically protestant–although the scope and
breadth of our “ultra-protestantism” is far more pluralistic and far more inclusive than
earlier, more Christocentric versions (in our perceptions of what “boundless, unconditional
love and unrestricted brotherhood” really mean). We still embrace a traditional radical
protestant (and universalistic) emphasis upon both the “inherent worth and ultimate
connectedness of all souls” (as children of a common creation, from a common source and
presumably a common ultimate destiny as well). So, to me, this combination of the rational,
curious and humble “Enlightenment” vision and the freedom-insisting, and compassionate,
loving ultra-protestant (and arguably radically-catholic) spirituality define the uniqueness
of our liberal faith, and both the “Enlightenment sedan” and the “ultra-protestant” engine
are equally vital to our liberal faith in the 21st century…a faith for both the mind and
heart.
Is Loehr the fellow who wrote the US was becoming fascist?
Yes, I reacted to his letter much as you did Dan. I think there
is a split with an older viewpoint …looking for religion grounded
in the deep ontological commonalities of the great world religions
that isn’t holding up well..
While I think there may still be some fruit to be found in looking at the commonalities of world religions (I even have a replica of the circle with the logos of the different religions), I tend to focus on a different problem.
I think a certain supersessionist triumphalism reflected in the first Humanist Manifesto took hold in our movement and that worldview has not held up well after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Cambodia, or even things more mundane like Watergate or the failures of the social movements of the 1960s (what critics of post-modernism call the influence of post-68 defeatism on continental philosophy) have made the progress narrative less and less acceptable.
Steve: A house metaphor for theology, huh? The metaphor just doesn’t work for me, and therefore I’m not sure I follow the rest of the argument. I’m more interested in using theology to describe what’s really out there, without imposing some grand schema onto it.
Rod: Thanks for the insight. I guess my question is this: are we still following Enlightenment ideals, and if so, do they still work? I don’t have the answer for this, I’m just asking.
James: Thanks for bringing up the first Humanist Manifesto. It’s almost embarrassing to read these days. What else of our theology is embarrassing?…
Dan: The version of Rebecca Parker’s house metaphor that Steve posted is a watered down model of a very simplified model. As luck would have it, I heard Rebecca discuss this last week and I think it is pretty good. The only point of the house metaphor is to provide a metacognitive scaffold for people to better understand the elements of classical systematic theology. Don’t read anything more than that into the metaphor.
My thinking today is that we may be wired for metaphor and narrative regardless of how apt or useful they are. Sadly, we are probably also wired for the tendency to replace the terrain with the map (Beaudrillard’s simulacra or idolatries of the mind in JLA’s terms).
What if (via Frankl) as we attempt to make meaning of the world we are directed by our language (via Whorff-Sapir) towards constructive metaphors that we string into narratives? The ultimately complicates any idea of us each having a “unique relationship to the divine.” Maybe this is the importance of mysticism or of ecstatic experiences that may push us beyond our normal linguistic bounds.
Anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts on developing a sense of theology and praxis as geo-local and community centric that may be relational rather than based on ontological individualism. I’m still trying to make my way through “creative interchange” and “jouissance” as possibilities.
Dan,
The model presented by Rebecca Parker at the 2002 LREDA Fall Conference is more complex than the simplified version provided in the young adult curriculum link. LREDA was selling audio tapes of Rebecca’s talk. I don’t know if any copies are still available for sale. However, I suspect that a nearby DRE might have a copy for you to borrow. Rebecca’s talk is an attempt to use ” .. theology to describe what’s really out there” today in our congregations and make it accessible for those without formal seminary training.
One of the points that Rebecca made about our congregations is that who we are theologically today and how we “do theology” in daily congregational life is rooted in our history. This history helps explain us today and it also points to places where our shared implicit theology breaks down. Where aspects of our theology (as currently practiced today in many UU congregations) break?
For example, our congregational polity developed in reaction to other forms of church polity where power was centralized and authoritarian hierarchies were present. While our polity came about to address certain anti-oppression concerns, are there ways that congregational polity might oppress members of our congregations and the wider community?
Finally, we do need to keep in mind that any old and dusty piece of writing can look embarrassing to us today. This is true about the Humanist Manifesto I and many early Unitarian and Univeralist writings. We need to keep in mind the historical context that created these writings. In any case, the Humanist Manifesto I is probably less embarrassing for us than Theodore Parker’s comments on why the US should not fight the Mexican-American War:
“Although he [Theodore Parker] was against the Mexican American war, he described the Mexicans as ‘A wretched people; wretched in their origin, history, character, who must eventually give way as the Indians did. Yes, the United States would expand, but not by war, rather by the power of her ideas, the pressure of her commerce, by the steady advance of a superior race, with superior ideas and a better civilization, by being better than Mexico, wiser, humaner, more free and manly.'” (as quoted from Howard Zinn, _A People’s History of the United States_)
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ideas/onparker2.html
I would suggest that the implicit theology in Parker’s statement is more embarrassing to us than anything in the Humanist Manifesto I.
But embarrassing things in our past are OK because we are part of a “living tradition” that is not static. We might bungle things and make mistakes. But our tradition doesn’t preserve too many of our mistakes in amber as fossilized relics that must never change. We can choose to improve (with the realization that “improvements” today may be mistakes in the future).
Want to echo what everyone here is saying about the progressive narrative being kaput. I know Richard Rorty offers one solution to the problem this present for liberals—private irony (knowing our metanarrative ain’t necessarily so meta) and public liberal/progressive action. Not because we “know” the individual has inherent worth and dignity. Because we hope it to be so and are willing to live it into being. (Getting a bit more theological than Rorty does. Heh.)
You can’t escape metanarrative. We seem to need it. The challenge is to “own” your own metanarrative, instead of just taking what’s given to you. And we religious liberals are as guilty of that as all the religious conservatives we like to look down on.
Chutney: Thanks for the Rorty point — I knew he’d written something good on metanarrative, but couldn’t remember where. Can you point us to an essay or book where Rorty discusses this? Thanks, Dan