Daniel Harper – Page 22 – Yet Another Unitarian Universalist

The ongoing Southern Baptist abuse crisis and us

Today brought another news story about the ongoing Southern Baptist abuse crisis: “A Southern Baptist leader hid decades of abuse. Will his fall doom SBC abuse reforms?” Why should Unitarian Universalists pay attention to this? Because we can learn a great deal from what’s going on in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Like the Southern Baptists, we Unitarian Universalists (UUs) have a history of sex abuse. (Nor are we alone: nearly every American institution, from schools to sports to health care to entertainment, has its own history of abuse.) I’ve mostly heard allegations about male UU ministers and lay leaders targeting women over the age of 18. But I’ve also heard allegations about powerful men targeting legal minors.

And like the Southern Baptists, we have a decentralized structure. Each local congregation is theoretically autonomous. If a local congregation wants to hire a minister who’s known to have a history of abuse, there’s no way to stop them.

From today’s news story, it appears that the Southern Baptists have used their decentralized structure to avoid taking responsibility for dealing with their sex abuse crisis:

“…Southern Baptist leaders boast of their power to spread the gospel but take little responsibility when things go wrong. And local congregations have little power to fix things that are broken on a national level. ‘The beauty of SBC is that we’re local and autonomous,’ said Adam Wyatt, a Mississippi pastor and member of the SBC Executive Committee, recently. ‘The challenge is, we’re local and autonomous.”

A lawsuit against Paul Pressler, one of the most powerful Southern Baptist leaders over the past fifty years, alleges that Southern Baptist leaders might talk about local autonomy, but they have also been evading responsibility.

This is what we Unitarian Universalists can learn from the Southern Baptists. We, too, like to talk about the autonomy of local congregations. To what extent do we (and I mean all of us) use local autonomy as an excuse to evade our responsibility to protect against sex abuse?

I think we Unitarian Universalists have made more progress at dealing with sex abuse than have the Southern Baptists. But we have lots more work to do before we really address the problem. At least we can learn from the Southern Baptist debacle that local autonomy is no excuse.

Teacher of the year

De’Shawn Washington, teacher of the year in Massachusetts, came to Cohasset at the 20th annual breakfast honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Washington is a fourth grade teacher at Maria Hastings Elementary School in Lexington, Mass.

His was one of the best talks I’ve heard in a long time. He spoke about how Martin Luther King’s message continues to inspire and inform his own teaching practice. But he really shone during the question and answer period after his talk. Of course you’d expect a fourth grade teacher to be able to think on their feet. What I really appreciated, though, was that he kept his focus on children and their families. His worldview is both humane and child-centered.

Washington is speaking frequently across the state this year. If you get a chance to hear him, go. We’re luck to have him representing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as our teacher of the year.

Washington’s talk was sponsored by the Cohasset Diversity Committee and the Cohasset Clergy. The hosting congregation this year was First Parish in Cohasset.

Man standing at a podium draped with the Pan Afrian flag. — De’Shawn Washington at the podium

(I had this post written then got caught up in work responsibilities and forgot to post it on Wed. So the post is dated Wed. but was actually posted on Sat.)

Violence, nonviolence

A hundred days ago, Hamas unleashed their attack on Israel. In response, Israel has been carrying out reprisals on the Gaza Strip. And the war is spreading throughout the region, so that the U.S. and other countries have sent warships to protect shipping in the Red Sea. An initial act of violence led to an ongoing violent reaction, which in turn is leading to violence spreading even further….

Many years ago, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov had a character in one of his novels say, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” This pronouncement by a fictional character is a gross generalization subject to all kinds of exceptions (think about Ukraine). But there is a truth underlying this fictional pronouncement, and that is that violence does tend to beget more violence, so any use of violence can suck you into a vicious circle of more and more violence.

This was part of the genius of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his principle of nonviolence. It’s something worth remembering as we celebrate his birthday tomorrow.

Why clergy are quitting

A group of social scientists at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research have been investigating the impact of the COVID pandemic on organized religion. They have just issued a new report titled “‘I’m Exhausted All the Time’: Exploring the Factors Leading to Growing Clergy Discontentment.” A PDF of the full report is available here.

One key finding in this report is that in the aftermath of the panedmic, the number of congregational clergy who are both considering leaving their current position and who are thinking about changing careers keeps increasing. We’ve been seeing some of this in Unitarian Universalism — I personally know of several UU ministers who have not only left their congregations, but who are now transitioning to a new career.

I participated in this study — I have no idea how they found my email address, but they sent me the survey forms and I filled it out. Now that I see the results of the report, it turns out that I’m in the minority of clergy who still love their jobs and who have no intention of leaving ministry.

But the fact remains that many other clergy are leaving the profession. It remains to be seen what effect this has on organized religion. Will it have a positive effect, in that new clergy come along whose expectations for the profession are more aligned with the new realities of congregational life? Will it have a negative effect, by reducing the pool of qualified ministers such that too many congregations can’t find qualified leadership? Or something else entirely?

Christians against Christian Nationalism

You’ve probably already seen this, but I just discovered the Christians against Christian Nationalism website. The tagline of the website is “We believe that Christian nationalism threatens our faith and country.” Amen to that.

For my co-religionists, and any other readers, who are Christians: you can read and sign their statement against Christian Nationalism. It’s just so refreshing to see Christians standing up against this pervsion of the Christian faith.

For everyone: that website has great printable resources you can share with your Christian friends. Plus there’s a related TikTok account, @EndChristianNationalism, which might also be worth sharing.

Native American members of a church that became UU

(I don’t usually link to my sermons, because reading sermons can be about as interesting as watching paint dry. But today’s sermon had some interesting history in it, and I’ll provide direct links to the interesting bits so you can skip the boring bits.)

In the 17th century, our congregation, First Parish in Cohasset, had at least two Native American members.

Sarah Wapping joined our church on January 7, 1738 [N.S.], exactly 296 years ago today. Not much in the historical record, but I found a few things to say about her.

Naomi Isaac joined our church on September 19, 1736 [N.S.]. I may have found out more about Naomi Isaac’s life — though you have to read the footnotes so you can see why much of what I say is only tentative.

None of this is to imply that either Naomi Isaac nor Sarah Wapping was a Unitarian Universalist. Our church was not Unitarian in the 1730s. It was a fairly liberal Christian church for its time and place, since it was under the influence of Ebenezer Gay of Hingham; but it was not yet a Unitarian Universalist congregation.

Nevertheless, it’s still very interesting that our congregation had Native American members i the mid-eighteenth century. There were Black members, too. Thus, in spite of a rigid racial hierarchy, in the mid-eighteenth century ours was a multiracial congregation. Then by 1790, the town of Cohasset had become entirely White (the 1790 U.S. Census reports no non-White population at all), and the congregation was also entirely White. The town and church went from moderately racially integrated, to entirely segregated in the space of half a century.

Noted without comment

“‘Of course, I did it!’ she blazed.’And why not?… It’s all right to talk about respectability if you’ve been educated so you can get by and be respectable, but when you have nothing back of you, you have to take things as they come….”

A character being interrogated by the fictional lawyer Perry Mason, in Erle Stanley Gardener’s The Case of the Rolling Bones (William Morrow, 1939).

Intersectional

Christian Cooper, a self-described gay Black nerd, writes:

“Some African Americans — some of the ones who aren’t LGBTQ — dismiss the gay experience because, unlike Black folk, gays can blend in at will…. Being Black and gay, I find the ‘Who’s More Oppressed?’ sweepstakes exasperating. There can be no winner, and it creates the false impression of a stark divide between communities. (It also ignores a special case where the gay and Black experiences are remarkably similar: the situation of light-skinned African Americans who hide their heritage to ‘pass’ as white, which maps closely with the experience of being in the closet.) The reality is that these experiences live together in the brown-skinned, queer bodies of hundreds of thousands of people, including me.” [Better Living Through Birding, pp. 25, 26-27]

As a gay teenager, Cooper found refuge in the nerd worlds of birding, and of science fiction and fantasy. (Coincidentally, he and I were both at Noreascon in 1980 worldcon, which is the only worldcon I ever attended.) Which is kind of interesting, since both birding and science fiction fandom are astonishingly White.

Year in review, pt. 2

In part 1, I reviewed the year in U.S. religion. In this second part, I’ll review they year in Unitarian Universalism.

How non-UUs viewed us

Let’s start with how others perceived us this past year. Unitarian Universalists are a tiny, tiny group, but we made the news with four stories this year. I’ll start with the lesser stories, and save the big one for the end.

1. Religion News Service (RNS) covered the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) back in June, and wrote about two main stories. One story, with the headline “Unitarian Universalism revisits identity, values at 2023 gathering,” talked about the proposed revision to ARticle II of the UUA bylaws. It was the kind of article where you felt the reporter was working pretty hard to make it sound newsworthy. Revising bylaws isn’t going to be of much interest to non-Unitarian Universalists.

2. RNS was much more interested in the fact that the “Unitarian Universalists elect first woman of color, openly queer president,” especially considering the fact that this new president was taking over from the first woman who served as president. They wrote (by my count) four separate articles on this basic story.