Category Archives: Theology

Associationism, part two

Part One of this four-part series

A historical and descriptive definition: 19th century

The Universalist approach to associationism in the first half of the 19th century had strengths and weaknesses. The decentralization and methodological diversity allowed Universalism to adapt readily to local circumstances, and small Universalist congregations sprang up all over the United States and its territories, and to a lesser extent up into Canada. That same decentralization also meant that there often was no ongoing support and nurture for small new congregations, many of which died out two or three decades after they began.

Meanwhile, the Unitarians found themselves forced into associationism, kicking and screaming as it were. Disestablishment meant that the strongest and most powerful Unitarian congregations suddenly had to learn how to provide their own financial support; not only that, but they also found themselves competing for potential members with a wide range of other denominations (including, of course, the Universalists). The first feeble step towards real associationism came with the establishment of the American Unitarian Association (AUA), so at least there was some central body to distribute Unitarian propaganda; but the AUA was an association of individuals and a few congregations, so it cannot be considered true associationism, an association of congregations, using my definition. The Autumnal Conventions represents the first real emergence of associationism in the Unitarian camp: a few far-sighted individuals decided that delegates from Unitarian congregations needed to meet annually to organize themselves around topics of mutual interest. The Autumnal Conventions were weak associationism, however: many Unitarian congregations did not send delegates (or much care about the Autumnal Conventions), and the Conventions didn’t do all that much.

Associationism among the Unitarians really begins with Henry Whitney Bellows and the National Unitarian Conference in the 1860s; that well-documented story need not be reviewed here. Unitarian associationism is also represented in the old Western Unitarian Conference, which actively promoted connections between congregations, and actively worked to spread Unitarianism in new areas, using innovative methodologies such as encouraging women ministers (e.g., the women ministers known as the “Iowa Sisterhood”). What is important is that Unitarian associationism required neither covenant nor Puritan-style connections between congregations. Continue reading →

Associationism, part one

Abstract: In this four-part essay, I claim that the central organizing principle of Unitarianism, Universalism, and now Unitarian Universalism, has less to do with theology, liturgy, religious practice, etc., and more to do with social and institutional structures. We are unified by an institutional approach which I call associationalism. I define associationalism through describing past and existing associational structures, and then briefly set forth a possible direction for the future of associationism within Unitarian Unviersalism.

A historical and descriptive definition: Beginnings

In terms of organizational structure, Unitarian and Universalist congregations in North America are often closely related to the Congregationalist and Baptist traditions. Stephen Marini has documented how early Universalist congregations in central New England often started out as Baptist congregations; and it is well known that many New England Unitarian congregations began as Puritan congregations, and so are closely related to those Congregationalist congregations that also emerged from the old Puritan Standing order churches. We could say, more broadly, that these are congregations that come out of the English Free Church tradition.

It is important to remember that not all Unitarian and Universalist congregations trace their historical roots back to the English Free Church tradition. The Icelandic Unitarian churches in Canada were founded by liberals from the Icelandic Lutheran tradition, who happened to find a comfortable institutional home within Unitarianism; similarly, Nora Church in Minnesota was founded by liberal Norwegian Lutherans. King’s Chapel in Boston evolved away from its Church of England roots to a Unitarian theology, but it still keeps its revision of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer today. There are churches like First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia and the Independent Christian Church in Gloucester which were founded independently as Unitarian and Universalist churches without any previous denominational connections. And once Unitarians and Universalists traveled West of the Allegheny Mountains, they often had tenuous and even antagonistic connections with eastern churches, and their organizational structures were innovative, diverse, and/or fluid.

Thus it is quite simply wrong to state that all Unitarian Universalist congregations today trace their organizational structures back to the Puritan congregationalist methods captured in 17th century New England political theocracy, church covenants, and documents like the Cambridge Platform. That 17th century New England inheritance is one part of our organizational history, but it is only one part. Continue reading →

When covenants do make sense

As I continue to think out loud about covenant in liberal religious congregations, I can think of three cases where having a covenant makes a lot of sense:

(a) Congregations that can trace their institutional roots back to churches that historically had covenants as their central organizing principle. For Unitarian Universalist congregations, this probably means tracing institutional roots back to the mid-19th century or earlier, to churches of the New England Standing Order. The concept of covenant would have to have been kept alive in some form since then; e.g., the New Bedford, Mass., Unitarian church grew out of a Puritan church that had a covenant up through the 19th century, and later maintained that covenant in the way in which newcomers were allowed to join the church as full members (i.e., newcomers have always had to sign a statement stating they would uphold certain moral standards).

(b) Congregations that otherwise derive from churches of the old New England Standing Order, e.g., the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois (see first post in this series for details).

(c) Congregations that were not originally Puritan, but were nevertheless initially organized around covenant as a central organizing principle. I believe some of our newest congregations were intentionally formed around covenants.

In each of these three cases, in order for covenant to remain viable as a central organizing principle, the covenant must:— be kept theologically fresh by the minister(s) or other theologically sophisticated persons; be constantly presented to new members; and be a part of the day-to-day life of the congregation. That is, in order to be viable, a covenant must be a living document.

Third in a series on covenant. Part one.

Let’s get rid of covenant, part two

Following up on yesterday’s post on covenant, here are two more reasons to get rid of covenant as an organizing principles of Unitarian Universalist congregations:

(5) Enforcement of covenant has become increasingly difficult in Unitarian Universalist congregations. Yahweh/God enforced covenants in the Bible, and he would send plagues, dissension, etc., etc., if his covenant was violated. The Bible stories about covenant served as models for Puritan covenants, although the ultimate enforcer would more probably have been understood to be Christ/God or Trinity/God. For the Puritans, enforcement by a deity was not enough, and covenants were also enforced by human theocracies with power to tax, fine, and/or imprison.

In the absence of general belief in an enforcing god, and in the absence of theocracies (no, the Unitarian Universalist Association is not a theocracy, not by any stretch of imagination), there really is nothing left to enforce the provisions of a covenant except the good will of the people involved. Therefore, it would seem to me that contemporary Unitarian Universalist covenants at best have no more power and authority than bylaws, annual meetings, minutes, all the familiar trappings of associationism; at worst, covenants have significantly less power and authority than does associationism because at least most bylaws have distinct rules for disciplining members by removing them from membership.

In short, most Unitarian Universalist covenants are unenforceable, given our current theological situation.

(6) Covenant as currently constituted in United States Unitarian Universalism is less flexible and more hierarchical than associationism.

Covenantalism has evolved in a hierarchical direction in U.S. Unitarian Universalism. I think many people believe that the covenant embodied by Article 2, “Principles and Purposes,” of the Unitarian Universalist Association takes precedence over the covenants of local congregations; and that the covenants of local congregations must explicitly include the “Principles and Purposes.” Yet at the same time, probably many Unitarian Universalists, if they stopped to think about it, would feel uncomfortable with this kind of hierarchy.

Mind you, hierarchy is not necessarily bad; from an organizational standpoint, hierarchy makes a great deal of sense, and it makes more sense the larger an organization gets. But a hierarchical organization must also retain a great deal of flexibility, and this is where I believe current hierarchical covenantalism breaks down. Our hierarchical covanentalism requires that any new congregations reach certain standards. Hierarchical covenantalism also requires that for a person to be considered a Unitarian Universalist, that person must belong to a local congregation that meets those standards (i.e., must sign on to the covenant of a local congregation that properly adheres to the covenant in Article 2 of the UUA bylaws). Our present organizational structure rules out new-fangled “house churches” and old-style fellowships; this structure tends to rule out storefront congregations operating outside the implicit “franchise system” of the UUA; and this structure has little provision for online religion, congregations that don’t meet weekly, etc. There is a methodological rigidity built in to our current hierarchical covenantalism; associationism is inherently more flexible.

Second in a series on covenant. Part one. Part three.

One final point of interest: If we are going to build a world-wide movement of religious liberalism — and some of us are still committed to such a movement — then associationism, not covenantalism, will continue to be the means of doing so. Associationism is designed to allow the sharing of information and resources while allowing a great deal of local autonomy; the local congregation, and the local association, find the best way of running their organizations given the current local circumstances, yet they also commit to regular communication and sharing with national and international associations. Under associationism, the Transylvanian Unitarians maintain their hierarchical system of bishops, the Phillippino Universalists maintain their unique form of polity (which I don’t quite understand), United States Unitarian Universalists can continue with their hierarchical covenantalism, and each of these groups can participate as equals in the world-wide association of religious liberals. Sometimes I do worry that United States Unitarian Universalists (U.S. UUs) will try to impose their covenantalism on other religious liberals; we are a fairly smug lot, we U.S. UUs, with paternalistic tendencies. If we must continue with covenantalism in the United States, let’s not try to export it overseas.

Let’s get rid of covenant as an organizing principle. No, really.

Let’s get rid of covenant as something that is supposedly at the center of Unitarian Universalism. Here’s why:

(1) In the past 15 or 20 years, various writers have conflated two different organizational principles under the rubric “covenant.” Unitarian churches which began their existence as Puritan churches of the Standing Order did indeed have covenants, that is, documents around which the congregation was organized. However, Universalist congregations and congregations founded well after the Puritan era are far less likely to have been organized as covenantal congregations; instead, the organizational principle was what is best called “associationism”; James Luther Adams studied this organizational principle in his work on voluntary associations. Although the two are often confused, associationism as an organizing principle can be looser and less formal than a covenant; we might consider a covenantalism as a subtype of associationism.

(2) Historically, those congregations that used covenants understood them quite differently than we do now. Congregations of the New England Standing Order consisted of two separate organizational structures. There was the society or the parish, which oversaw the finances, physical plant, etc., and which was organized around the concept of associationism; until those congregations were disestablished, the political structure of the town meeting took care of some of these responsibilities; after disestablishment, this half of a congregation might have been run by a meeting of pew owners, or other meeting, or elected officials, and such meetings were run along the lines of political business meetings. Then there was the church, which oversaw the religious lives of people, and oversaw who got to participate in the eucharist; the church was organized around the covenant; often, members had to make a public declaration of their adherence to the covenant, and a public declaration of adherence to doctrine or creed, before they were allowed as members of the church. Creedal statements, which we now find quite problematic, were often included in covenants.

(3) The concept of covenant has an unfortunate mental associations for people living in the United States: for most people, covenant is most often understood in its legal sense. Legal covenants include restrictive real estate covenants that enforced racial segregation in the past; today, restrictive real estate covenants enforce ecologically unsound behavior by, for example, requiring front lawns or preventing laundry from being hung outside to dry. Therefore, in order for a congregation to organize around a covenant, there needs to be constant education of newcomers as to the religious meaning of covenant, and how it is different from legal covenants.

(4) The concept of covenant has another unfortunate mental association for many people: many people associate covenants with behavioral covenants, documents or agreements which try to alter people’s behavior in specific ways. Indeed, many so-called religious covenants in today’s congregations are actually behavioral covenants. While good behavior is necessary in a congregation, it is not a sufficient principle around which to organize a religious institution.

To sum up, trying to impose a covenant on Unitarian Universalist congregations too often means imposing an alien concept; a concept, furthermore, which is too easily confused with other, non-religious, uses of covenant.1 I have come to believe that instead of imposing this alien concept on our congregations, we would be better off extending the work of James Luther Adams and others on understanding associationism.

Now I am sure you will tell me what you think about covenant….

First in a series on covenant. Part two. Part three.

1 I can think of a few congregations which use covenant well. The paradigmatic example is the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois (UUSG): the congregation wrote its first covenant in 1843 based on its members’ having lived in covenantal congregations in New England Standing Order churches prior to disestablishment; the congregation revised the covenant slightly in the 1880s, the covenant received strong theological support through the 50 year ministry of Charles Lyttle in the early 20th century, which support continues in the 30+ year ministry of Lindsay Bates today. UUSG came by its covenant naturally, and continues to support its covenant theologically.

Unsystematic liberal theology: Aretalogy

Aretalogy, says Biblical scholar Helmut Koester, is “the enumeration of the great deeds of a god or goddess (e.g. Isis) or of a divinely inspired human being (a ‘divine man’).” The word is derived from arete, meaning a virtue or powerful act. More broadly, aretalogy is the study of virtues as they are embodied in divine or haumn exemplars.

Aretalogy can take different forms: a simple listing of the subject’s virtues; a series of stories, each of which demonstrates a virtue of the subject; a series of miracle stories. I would distinguish aretalogy from hagiography; a hagiography is a worshipful or laudatory biography, that is, a more coherent narrative than a listing of, or a series of stories demonstrating, virtues.

Liberal religion has generally rejected hagiography, considering saints and their biographies religiously unimportant. Liberal religion tends to attenuate the vertical dimension of religion, that is, tends to de-emphasize supernatural divinity. Rather than relying on divinities or saints to enforce moral and ethical norms, religious liberals are far more likely to turn to great human beings as exemplars of moral and ethical virtues. And rather than using coherent biographical narratives to tell about these great human beings, religious liberals are far more likely to pick an outstanding virtue that a great human being represents, and tell a story or stories that exemplify that virtue.

Thus, Universalists use aretalogy to talk about John Murray, and they tell the miracle story of his arrival in North America, and stories of his fearlessness in the face of opposition to his Universalist preaching. Some Unitarians use aretalogy to talk about Thomas Jefferson, and they tell stories of his free-thinking approach to the Bible. Like hagiography, aretalogy is likely to present only the good side of its subject; thus aretalogy ignores that John Murray was a trinitarian; and aretalogy ignores the fact that Thomas Jefferson kept slaves. The point of aretalogy is not to present a coherent, reasoned narrative of a person’s life; instead, the purpose of aretalogy is to enumerate virtues.

It is helpful to learn to recognize aretalogy when trying to make sense out of liberal theology. For example, when Unitarians continue to claim to Thomas Jefferson as a Unitarian, you might at first consider this claim to be unreasonable, since any reasoned narrative account of Jefferson’s life would reveal that Jefferson actually attended an Episcopalian church, and never set foot inside a Unitarian church. But the Unitarian claim on Jefferson is not part of a reasoned, coherent narrative biography; instead, it is a part of a Unitarian aretalogy that has less to do with Jefferson as a real live human being, and more to do with enumerating Unitarian virtues (in this case, the virtue of challenging the literal truth of the Bible).

“Separate truths”

Ed1 pointed me to an article on religion in yesterday’s Boston Globe that asserts that different religions are not different paths to the same basic wisdom. Stephen Prothero’s essay “Separate Truths” begins by saying:

At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true. This claim, which reaches back to “All Religions Are One” (1795) by the English poet, printmaker, and prophet William Blake, is as odd as it is intriguing. No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism are so self-evidently at odds that their differences hardly bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy. Yet scholars continue to claim that religious rivals such as Hinduism and Islam, Judaism and Christianity are, by some miracle of the imagination, both essentially the same and basically good.

In reality, of course, different religions are, well, different. I got over my fascination with Buddhism when I realized that nirvana seemed too much like nothingness for me to want to aspire to it; I’d rather be compost when I died, not mere nothingness. As Prothero points out, different religions may share the same starting point, but they take different journeys which end up in different places:

What the world’s religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point. And where they begin is with this simple observation: Something is wrong with the world. In the Hopi language, the word “Koyaanisqatsi” tells us that life is out of balance. Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” tells us that there is something rotten not only in the state of Denmark but also in the state of human existence. Hindus say we are living in the “kali yuga,” the most degenerate age in cosmic history. Buddhists say that human existence is pockmarked by suffering. Jewish, Christian, and Islamic stories tell us that this life is not Eden; Zion, heaven, and paradise lie out ahead.

So religious folk agree that something has gone awry. They part company, however, when it comes to stating just what has gone wrong, and they diverge even more sharply when they move from diagnosing the human problem to prescribing how to solve it. Moreover, each offers its own distinctive diagnosis of the human problem and its own prescription for a cure. Each offers its own techniques for reaching its religious goal, and its own exemplars for emulation.

Good hearted Unitarian Universalists are often guilty of believing that all religions ultimately have the same goal, and we even sometimes believe that we get to choose the most attractive religion, the path that attracts us most. But to say this glosses over the differences between religions, and too often becomes a way of reducing other religions to our own pet beliefs; this attitude causes us to be intolerant of real religious differences, and ultimately disrespectful of other religions. It’s a kind of cultural imperialism, taking over other religions to serve our own ends. Since tolerance is one of our chief values as Unitarian Universalists, it behooves us to remember that true tolerance grows out of acknowledging and respecting real differences.

You can read Prothero’s full article online; it’s adapted from his new book, God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter.

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1 A propos of nothing, Ed is the only person I know who has a mountain named after him.

UUism declines for 2nd straight year; RE for 7th straight year

uuworld.org, the official news Web site of the Untiarian Universalist Association, reported on Monday that Unitarian Universalism (UUism) has declined in the United States for a second straight year. The actual decline is small: down 267 adult members in 2009, a decline of 0.16 percent. Given that membership numbers are somewhat fictional to begin with, and given that many congregations are determinedly purging their membership rolls in order to reduce their annual Fair Share financial contribution to the denomination, we can console ourselves that perhaps we’re not really declining.

The really depressing news is that religious education enrollment for children and youth has been declining since 2002. And in 2009 it declined a lot: “Religious education enrollment dropped 1,262, for a total of 55,846 children and youth this year. A year ago it dropped 809. In 2002 it was 60,895.”

This is a clear downward trend that cannot be explained away. Considering that we are in the midst of a population surge for children, with birthrates that highest they’ve been since the tail end of the Baby Boom of the early 1960s, this is especially depressing news.

I believe several things are contributing to the decline of our religious education program. Continue reading →

Unsystematic liberal theology: God

Fourth in an occasional series of essays in unsystematic liberal theology, in which I assume theology is a literary genre more than a science, a conversation more than a monologue, descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Religious liberals perceive themselves as being profoundly ambivalent about God. There are the death-of-God people, there are the humanists, there are the moral atheists, there are the traditionalist theists, there are those who tell the local clergyperson, “I’ll believe whatever I want to believe.”

While most religious liberals believe that they can never agree on questions concerning God, in fact we religious liberals all share several basic beliefs about God:

— We all share a belief in heterodoxy, that is, that our opinions about God will differ. Some of the more theologically sophisticated among us are aware of the wide variety of definitions of god/divinity among those who are more orthodox within their faith traditions; proving or disproving one conception of god/divinity does not prove or disprove other concepts of god/divinity (e.g., disproving Karl Barth’s God does not disprove the Bhagavad Gita’s Krishna); thus a firm belief in heterodoxy seems the only sane response to the bewildering variety of of proofs and disproofs and beliefs and disbeliefs in gods, goddesses, and other divinities.

— We all share a belief that regardless of whether or not god/divinity exists, we are ultimately responsible for our lives. We do not believe it is acceptable to say, “It is God’s will that your baby died”; we know it’s the drunk driver’s fault, or the fault of the drug-resistant staph infection that we are unable to cure, or the fault of a random accident. A theological term for this is the “functional ultimacy of humankind”; that is to say, whether or not you happen to believe/disbelieve in god/divinity, from a functional perspective we all believe that humankind is ultimately responsible, allowing of course for the possibility of random chance.

— Generally speaking, we are less interested in ontology, and more interested in practical ethics. While we do have energetic ontological arguments, e.g., about the existence or non-existence of God, we are more inclined to work to make the world a better place. Those who are more interested in ontology than practical ethics are not likely to remain religious liberals for long. Thus over time the fundamentalist humanists who insist on an orthodoxy of non-belief in God get frustrated with religious liberalism and drift away to form their own orthodox humanist groups; pagans who insist in absolute belief in goddess/es over time find that they are more comfortable in orthodox pagan groups; etc.

Because we are so committed to heterodoxy, it may seem hard to understand why we religious liberals spend so much time arguing about God, when arguments about God are really appropriate only for the orthodox (who actually want to make other people think and believe just like themselves). However, we have to remember that the surrounding culture is dominated by orthodoxy as a mindset; it is a culture in which it is difficult for heterodoxy to survive at all, let alone thrive. It’s a miracle that we manage to hold on to our heterodoxy at all.