Religion – Page 3 – Yet Another Unitarian Universalist

MFC/RECC action

The Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC) and the Religious Education Credentialing Committee (RECC) of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) sent an email dated July 9. It reads:

“This email is to inform you of recent decisions of the UUA’s professional credentialing bodies. The Religious Education Credentialing Committee (RECC) has terminated the religious educator credentials of Gregory Carrow-Boyd. This determination was upheld by the Board of Review, upon appeal. The RECC was referred this case, following a decision by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee to remove Mr. Boyd from ministerial aspirant status because of conduct unbecoming of a minister, pursuant to UUMA Ethical Standard 13 – specifically sexual misconduct connected to consent, boundaries, and power dynamics. The MFC affirmed the findings of the thorough, independent investigation, which found a persistent pattern of these boundary violations and misconduct over many years.”

He was most recently the combined minister and director of religious education at the UU congregation in Honolulu. As always, by posting this I’m making no judgement about the facts of this particular situation. I post these on my blog simply because not everyone gets these emails. In addition, the page on the UUA website where these decisions are listed now appears to be hidden from public view and available only by application to the UUA; presumably this is part of the UUA’s decision to hide names and identifying information from bad actors. While making it more difficult to see this page is probably the right thing to do (in our current tumultuous socio-political moment), it also makes it easier to overlook this important repository of MFC judgements.

There is one thing in this email that I’d like to know more about. The email references a “thorough, independent investigation.” It makes sense to have an independent investigation, but I’d like to know who made this investigation. Identifying the investigating body would increase transparency, and consequently increase trust in the overall process.

On another topic — I don’t remember getting an email from the Religious Education Credentialing Committee before. I didn’t know that they could terminate religious education credentials. It makes sense that they can do so; I just didn’t know about it.

Update 15 July 2025: Added a sentence that got left out by mistake in the editing process.

Secularism stalls? Not so fast…

In the June 14 issue, The Economist reports that the decline of organized religion has seen a mild reversal since COVID. In 2023-2024, according to this report, three different surveys show a decline of “Nones,” those who report no religious affiliation, by four percentage points.

Unfortunately, The Economist neglects to tell us which three surveys report this decline (sadly typical of their reporting). A survey by Pew Research is probably one of them. On January 24, 2024, Pew Research published an online report titled “Religious ‘Nones’ in America,” in which they document a drop in the number of Nones from 2022 to 2023. However, in an analysis published the same day, Pew Research felt that it was “too early to tell” whether drop was significant. In another article published this year, on June 9, Pew Research detailed global religious decline from 2010 to 2020. One of the things they looked at was which religions suffered the greatest losses via “religious switching,” i.e., people switching to another religion or switching to no religion at all. Based on global surveys conducted from 2008 to 2014, Pew found that the biggest religious losers were Christianity (-11.6%) and Buddhism (-9.8%); the biggest gainer was no religious affiliation (+16.7%).

Screenshot of an infographic — Screenshot of web page with the infographic by Pew Research showing global percentage losses over five major religions, plus gains by the religiously unaffiliated. Click on the image above to go to the original.

The Cooperative Election Survey (CES), housed at Harvard University, also asks questions about religion, and serves as another good source for data on religious affiliation. The CES tracks the Pew Research surveys within a few percentage points. But there are some curious differences. CES finds 5.1% fewer Protestants than Pew does. There’s also a significant gap in those reporting as “Something else” — which is probably what many Unitarian Universalists would report themselves as.

Screenshot of inforgraphic — Screenshot of web page with infographic showing differences between CES and Pew. Click on the image above to go to the original.

Also of note — in my view, both CES and Pew define “religion” in such a way that Christianity serves as the paradigm, which may not capture the religion of, say, Unitarian Universalists who strongly identify with their religion yet don’t believe in God, don’t pray, and don’t feel the need to attend regular worship services. If you don’t assume that religion centers around Christian-style belief in God and attendance at church, then social atomization and disaffiliation (as reported, e.g., by Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone) might be the stronger factors driving so-called secularization.

The Economist does report one possible explanation for the slight increase in religious affiliation from 2022 to 2023:

“The most plausible explanation for the changing trend is the covid-19 pandemic. Lockdowns, social isolation and economic shocks affected almost all countries and age cohorts at about the time the data on religious belief hit an inflection point…. Research by Jeanet Sinding Bentzen, an economist at the University of Copenhagen, shows internet searches for prayer and other religious practices shot up in alsmot every country in 2020. Pippa Norris of Harvard and the late Ronald Inglehart argued that in times of existential insecurity, people tend to turn to religion for comfort…. Ms. Bentzen’s previous research on devotion following earthquakes — a different sort of shock — shows that religiosity tends to remain elevated for up to 12 years after a catastrophic event.”

Time will tell if we’re actually seeing a slight decline in “Nones,” or if this is just a temporary blip. As a Unitarian Universalist, I’m also less worried about secularization — after all, by many definitions we’re already secular — and far more worried about social atomization and disaffiliation. We don’t have to convince people to believe in God. We only have to convince people that being part of a values-based community is a good thing.

GA wrap-up: from Global UUism to administration

On Friday morning, I went to “Global Worship: Celebrating Our Diverse Faith,” led by (among others) Rev. Zsolt Elekes of the Transylvanian Unitarians; Juban Lamar, a member of the Jowai church of the Khasi Hills Unitarians; Vyda Ng, executive Director of the Canadian Unitarian Council; and Liz Slade, chief officer of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches (United Kingdom). As I understand it, a couple of other primary worship leaders did not receive visas and were unable to attend General Assembly.

I found this worship service to be very moving. Zsolt Elekes talked about how the Transylvanian Unitarians went through some hard times, particularly under the repressive Ceausescu regime; yet they found strength through their international partnerships. All the speakers used the image of a bridge held up by many pillars — the bridge representing worldwide liberal religion, and the pillars representing the various Unitarian, Universalist, Unitarian Universalist, and Free Christian groups that are spread throughout the world.

What holds all these groups together? What, for example, do the distinctly theistic Khasi Hills Unitarians have in common with some of the fundamentalist humanist Unitarian Universalists in the United States? One of the speakers said, half-humorously, that we’re all heretics — but that remark was only half humorous, because in all seriousness our willingness to be heretics is a unifying factor. We also share the symbol of the flaming chalice, which is used by our co-religionists around the world. Zsolt Elekes also pointed out that the Flower Celebration, developed by Norbert and Maja Capek in the Prague Unitarian Church just over a hundred years ago, is something else we hold in common — a religious celebration that symbolizes how we perceive human unity in our diversity.

Why Are You You?

I’ve got convention brain. What did I do after yesterday’s business meeting? What programming did I attend? With whom did I talk? It’s a bit of a blur.

But I do know that last night I went to a screening of the documentary “Why Are You You?” a new documentary about the now-defunct youth program Young Religious Unitarian Universalists, or YRUU. I was fairly heavily involved in YRUU as an adult advisor from 1995 through about 2003, serving as an advisor in local youth groups, as well as at district and continental “cons” or conventions. As a result, I got to meet youth leaders and youth advisors across the continent, from Alaska to Maine.

The filmmakers interviewed a number of former YRUU youth leaders, and I recognized several of them. I enjoyed hearing their memories of YRUU conferences and programs; I especially enjoyed hearing about how YRUU changed their lives. Given all those hours I spent supporting youth leaders and UU youth institutions, it’s nice to know that those hours weren’t wasted. But the ending of the movie is a little depressing. The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) ended funding for YRUU in (I think) 2007. There was no replacement for YRUU — YRUU was a semi-independent organization with youth leadership, not just another department of the UUA.

Not that YRUU was perfect. The documentary touches on some of its problems. What’s missing are the voices of all those teens for whom district and national YRUU programs held no interest, or those for whom YRUU did not feel safe — I knew quite a few of those teens, some of whom were devoted members of a local youth group. What’s also missing is mention of the adult advisors with poor boundaries — I saw a few too many of those; part of the reason I pulled away from district and national youth events was that I felt YRUU didn’t train adults adequately, nor hold them fully accountable.

Yet these were all solvable problems. The solution was not to get rid of the national youth organization; the solution was to reform that organization. For the past twenty years, I’ve had the sense that Unitarian Universalism broadly construed, especially at the national level, just really doesn’t like children and teens. Children and teens are messy, they take up a lot of time and energy, and if you don’t like them that much, it’s easier to shut them out rather than support them and their families. I feel that the death of YRUU is part of this larger trend.

P.S.: If the issues raised by this film are of interest, you might also be interested in childist theology, a new approach to Biblical interpretation that places children at the center of Biblical interpretation. So… What would it mean to place children and teens at the center of a Unitarian Universalist theology?

South Arabian goddess

The Walters Museum in Baltimore has a small selection of South Arabian art. I’m completely unfamiliar with South Arabian art, and before I went to the Walters Museum yesterday I knew nothing about its long history. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art:

“For over a thousand years, from around 800 B.C.E. to 600 C.E., the kingdoms of Qataban, Saba (biblical Sheba), and Himyar grew fabulously wealthy from their control over the caravan routes of the southern Arabian peninsula and, in particular, from the international trade in frankincense and myrrh. Excavations at the capitals of these ancient kingdoms have yielded spectacular examples of architecture, distinctive stone funerary sculpture, elaborate inscriptions on stone, bronze, and wood, and sophisticated metalwork.”

One of my favorite pieces of South Arabian art on the view at the Walters Museum is an unnamed goddess, who appears in a fragment of a pediment. She sits next to a child deity. Due to the lighting, I found it difficult to take a photograph due to the reflections on the glass case which houses this goddess; I had to do a fair amount of digital manipulation to make her look more or less the way she looks in the museum.

Here’s what the museum label says about this sculpture:

Fragment of a Pediment with a Goddess
South Arabia (Marib), 2nd century A.D.
The upper left side of this composition depicts an imaginary creature composed of an Asiatic lion’s head, a serpent-like body, a fishtail, and wings. A nude child deity grasps one of the creature’s wings with his left hand and holds a short sword in his right hand to control it. A smaller fragment containing the head of a similar composite beast in the British Museum might be the complement to this vignette. The lower right section depicts a nude fertility goddess emerging from vine leaves and grapes. With the increasing influence of Greco-Roman culture curing the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D., new artistic styles and motifs, such as this female deity, became a part of South Arabian culture.
Calcite-alabaster
21.74, gift of Girard and Carolyn Fester, 2014

I wonder if she was really a fertility goddess, or a goddess of wine. I don’t think we’ll ever know.

Multiplatform GA

Wednesday evening, Carol, Ms. M., Roger, and I joined the watch party for the opening worship service for General Assembly. The video worship service was well done — the script was good, the performances of the individual elements were well done, and the editing as good. But online worship always makes me feel like a passive consumer, whereas live worship (if it’s done right) makes me feel like an active participant.

Not that many people showed up for the watch party. A few hours earlier, the room looked nearly full, with a few hundred ministers and family members. But for this watch party, the room felt empty.

A hotel ballroom, with a few people clustered near a large video screen.

I also noticed how the audio system boosted the lowest audible frequencies. If you record your audio with a mediocre microphone, your audio track can be filled with low frequency rumble. When you listen to that audio on your laptop, you’re not going to hear that rumble (unless you have really good headphones). But when you pump that audio through speakers big enough to fill a hotel ballroom, that rumble is going to be noticeable. This is something I’m going to remember to be aware of if I ever produce video/audio content that will be heard in a large room.

On Thursday morning, I started walking to the convention center from our hotel. I got almost all the way there when I realized that I had forgotten my face mask. So I walked back to the hotel, and then back again to the convention center, by which time the “Meet the Moment” programming had already started. I tried to figure out which programs were in which room, but I found the Whova event app so user-unfriendly that I gave up and downloaded the PDF program from the UUA website. Then I saw that we are supposed to commit to a single “Meet the Moment” program track for all three days. Frustration set in. Just then, Jen, an old friend, walked up. Jen said she was going to several different “Meet the Moment” tracks, because she was the only person from her congregation and she wanted to be able to go to as many tracks as possible. Yay! I had permission to ignore the rules!

At lunch, I walked through the Baltimore heat to a ramen place about ten minutes away. I was joined by Jen and Abby, who belongs to a UU congregation near my congregation. Abby and I talked about ways our congregations could cooperate. (It’s a little weird that I had to travel all the way to Baltimore to meet someone from a nearby congregation.) Then Jen reminded us both that Spirit Play would be a great kids program for small congregations like ours. So far, this lunchtime conversation is the most valuable thing I’ve gone to at this General Assembly.

Now I’m sitting in the meeting room listening to this year’s Congregational Study/Action Issues (CSAI). Somewhat to my surprise, there’s a CSAI that is fully aligned with one of the big priorities of our congregation — “Housing: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” And one of the speakers in support of this CSAI actually mentioned classism (she’s affiliated with UU Class Conversations). The other two CSAIs are also worthy projects, but as the only delegate from our congregation, I’m going to vote for the issue that I think will be of the greatest interest to us.

Lead-up to GA

It was nine o’clock by the time we checked into our hotel, so I gave up on any notion of attending the last activities at Ministry Days, the annual meeting of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. In the morning, I walked the four blocks to the convention hotel in time for the opening worship service at Ministry Days. The service was fine, but marred both by the horrible acoustics and dreary aesthetics of the hotel ballroom (I never understood why they call it a “ballroom” when no one holds balls any more), and the uncomfortable chairs that always seem to plague hotel ballrooms.

I went for a long walk during our lunch break, and arrived back in time for the afternoon program. The program tracks included “Joy and Creativity,” “Rest Is Resistance,” “Organizing” (community organizing, not organizing your job better), and identity caucuses. None of these seemed like a good match for my professional development needs, so I sat outside the meeting rooms and waited to see if I’d wind up in an interesting conversation. Sure enough, Jay Atkinson sat down and started to tell me about a research project he’s working on. Our Unitarian Universalist leaders, said Jay, often talk about “our theology” as that which unified Unitarian Universalism. But what is that theology? Do we even have a distinctive Unitarian Universalist theology? I especially liked the distinction between “scholarly theology” and “vulgar theology.” Jay told me the name of the scholarly theologian who coined those terms, a name which I promptly forgot, but it’s a useful distinction, analogous to the distinction that sociologists make between “lived religion,” the religion of ordinary people, as opposed to the religion of elite practitioners.

Carol and I had dinner with Ms. M and Roger. Fortunately the restaurant wasn’t crowded, because we were there for two hours catching up with what was going on in each other’s lives.

This morning, I went back to the convention center hotel for the opening worship at Ministry Days. But I just wasn’t in the mood for sitting in a dreary hotel ballroom with a few hundred other people, passively consuming the excellent music, the dance performance, and the spoken word. I ducked out and now I’m headed up to the Walters Art Museum to meet Carol.

Off to General Assembly

I’m leaving tomorrow for “Ministry Days,” the annual gathering of the UU Ministers Association, and after that I’ll be at General Assembly (GA) until Saturday morning. This year, I’ve done very little advance planning. The only session I know I want to attend is the session on Thursday afternoon on ending poverty. I have train tickets, I have a hotel room, I’m registered — beyond that, I’ll be making it up as I go along.

What’s the biggest problem of this political moment?

Back in 2018, I wrote about some of the challenges the Baby Boomers face — including financial challenges. We hear over and over again how the Boomers are inheriting a ton of money from their parents, so of course all Boomers must be financially secure. Well, not exactly true…

There’s an article in today’s Boston Globe titled “Mass. officials are scrambling to stem the wave of older adults losing their homes.” In the article, reporter Kay Lazar reports on “an ominous wave of older adults who are losing their homes or just scraping by.” Lazar cites some depressing statistics:

“Adults 50 and older are the fastest-growing age group experiencing homelessness, comprising nearly half of the country’s homeless population, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services. Federal data show a 17 percent jump in the number of Massachusetts adults ages 55 and older counted as homeless from 2023 to 2024, the most recent numbers available. Nationally, that increase was 6 percent.”

This reminds me of a book by Elizabeth White titled 55, Underemployed, and Faking Normal: Your Guide to a Better ~~Retirement~~ Life. White’s book, published a decade ago, showed that many 55 year olds simply didn’t have enough money to retire — and that included people like White herself, a highly educated woman who at age 55 found herself working low-paying jobs because that’s all she could get.

White’s book is still in print — because it’s still relevant. White wrote: “This is why the budget battles on Capitol Hill — which until recently only threatened to cut social security and other social-insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid — are so ludicrous. What we’re really talking about is dooming millions and millions of women to misery and destitution.” And here we are, ten years later, hearing exactly the same claptrap from political leaders, including from our elderly (78 years old) president. Yes indeedy. I’m so glad we live in a Christian nation where our leaders devoutly follow the teachings of Jesus: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Matt. 19:21, NIV) I’m just so glad we have good Christian leaders who read their Bibles and decide to cut aid to poor elders so they can doom millions and millions of women to poverty and destitution.

OK, that’s enough sarcasm for now.

My real point is that the current culture wars are actually being fought over whether we help poor people move on up out of poverty, or whether we push more people into poverty. Rev. William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign make the point that there are 140 million Americans who are functionally living in poverty. Nor do I see either major political party facing up to the magnitude of this issue. Actually, I don’t see Unitarian Universalists at the national level facing up to the magnitude of poverty in this country.

Back to the Boston Globe article for some insight into just how bad the problem is:

“‘I am finding more seniors living in their cars,’ said Sheri Miller-Bedau, a city health inspector in Attleboro. ‘We are in Massachusetts. We have great schools. We are supposed to be leading edge. How is this happening?’ She said local shelters were so full this past winter that even older adults living in their cars were not considered an emergency and were told they had at least a six-month wait.”

And to drive the point home, here’s another quote from the Globe article:

“[Julian] Cyr [D, Provincetown], whose district — Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket — is home to the state’s oldest population, said it’s becoming increasingly common to see seniors living in their cars. ‘It’s a housing crisis on steroids,’ he said. ‘When I stop at a park or restroom [on the Cape], I will often see a car, a sedan packed to the gills, and there is an older person, usually an older woman, who is living in the car.'”

And it just might be that the biggest problem of this political moment is not fascism, or racism, or sexism, or homophobia, or immigration, or global climate change — the biggest problem of this political moment just might be poverty.

Walk in the woods

It’s a stressful time in the world right now — what with brutal wars in Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, and elsewhere — and with economic uncertainty and political instability in the U.S. — and a host of other problems, like looming ecological collapse.

As a result of all these stress-filled events, there are lots of pundits telling us how we can reduce our stress. Recently, I’ve heard a number of pundits tell me that if I want to reduce my stress I should take a walk in the woods. (Before you get all snarky, yes I know this advice makes unwarranted assumptions: that I live in a bioregion where there are woods to walk in; that I live in a human place where enough woodlands remain to walk in; that if there are woods to walk in, they’re safe enough that you can walk in them; that I don’t have physical limitations that preclude walking in the woods. As it happens, I do live in a bioregion which does have woodlands, I’m fortunate enough to live near a 3,000 acre state park which is mostly wooded and mostly safe, and I am physically able to walk in the woods.)

I hate to tell those pundits, but taking a walk in the woods is not going to reduce my stress.

Yesterday, I took a walk in our nearby state park. In many places in that park, American Beech (Fagus grandifolia) are the predominant tree species. But our American Beeches are under attack, and most of the beech trees I saw appeared to be in poor health. To be blunt, beech trees are being killed off by invasive organisms.

First, there’s Beech Bark Disease (BBD):

“BBD is an insect-fungus complex that involves the beech scale insect (Cryptococcus fagisuga Lind.) and the fungi Neonectria faginata and Neonectria coccinea…. It is predicted that BBD will spread across the entire range of American beech in the United States in the next 40–50?years.” (Catalina Salgado-Salazar et al., G3 (Bethesda) [Genes, Genomes, Genetics]. 2021 Mar 9;11(4). https://doi.org/10.1093/g3journal/jkab071 )

The scale insect, which arrived in North America in the early twentieth century, spreads the fungus. The fungus infects the tree causing unsightly canker sores on the bark:

Smooth beech tree bark, with rough canker sores running across it — Beech Bark Disease on an American Beech tree in Wompatuck State Park

There is no known cure for Beech Bark Diseases. It often proves fatal.

Second, beech trees are also under attack from Beech Leaf Disease:

“Symptoms of beech leaf disease (BLD), first reported in Ohio in 2012, include interveinal greening, thickening and often chlorosis in leaves, canopy thinning and mortality. Nematodes from diseased leaves of American beech (Fagus grandifolia) sent by the Ohio Department of Agriculture to the USDA, Beltsville, MD in autumn 2017 were identified as the first recorded North American population of Litylenchus crenatae (Nematology, 21, 2019, 5), originally described from Japan.” (Lynn Kay Carta et al., “Beech leaf disease symptoms caused by newly recognized nematode subspecies,” Forest Pathology, 27 Feb. 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/efp.12580 )

Here’s what the leaves look like after the nematodes have attacked them (I took this photo last May):

Beech tree leaves that are curled and discolored — Curled leaves of American Beech, showing damage by Beech Leaf Disease

As I understand it, foresters and dendrologists are still learning about Beech Leaf Disease. But it’s very clear that Beech Leaf Disease causes trees to lose most of their leaves, and it’s equally clear that Beech Leaf Disease eventually leads to the death of the tree.

As with Beech Bark Diseases, there is no known cure.

The upshot is that we’re going to lose all, or nearly all, of our American Beech trees in the next decade or so — just as we lost nearly all of our American Chestnut trees in the early twentieth century (due to Chestnut Blight, an invasive fungus), and just as we lost nearly all of our American Elm trees in the mid-twentieth century (due to Dutch Elm Disease, an invasive fungus), and just as we lost nearly all of our ash trees in the early twenty-first century (due to Emerald Ash Borer, an invasive insect).

Invasive organisms are predicted to be one of the major causes of the calamitous decrease in biodiversity that we’re now facing. I suppose you could go for a walk in the woods and willfully ignore these evidences of global environmental disaster. If you’re going to do that, you might as well engage in one of those chic mindfulness practices that helps you forget that anything bad is happening. And what the hell, if you need to be in denial — if that’s what it takes to reduce your stress and keep your sanity — then I say, go for it. But please don’t tell me that I should take a walk in the woods to reduce my stress — what works for you doesn’t necessarily work for me.