One Transcendentalist’s religious naturalism

The following is the text of a talk I gave at a meeting of Humanist Roots Group of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto on Saturday 2 February 2013.

Religious naturalism defined

Let me begin with a capsule definition of religious naturalism. This comes from Jerome Stone’s book Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative. The very first paragraph reads:

“Religious naturalism, a once-forgotten option in religious thinking, is making a revival. It seeks to explore and encourage religious ways of responding to the world on a completely naturalistic basis without a supreme being or ground of being.”

Jerome Stone then goes on to list some thinkers who might be considered religious naturalists. If you’re a philosophy or theology geek, some of these names will be of interest to you: George Santayana, John Dewey, Henry Nelson Weiman, Bernard Loomer, Randolph Crump Miller (someone who influenced me through his work in religious education theory), perhaps Gordon Kaufman, and biologist Ursula Goodenough.

Historically, Jerome Stone says the roots of religious naturalism go back to Spinoza, and he also includes Henry David Thoreau as a religious naturalist. He also points out that some (not all) religious naturalists may be willing to use the term “God,” suitably defined. He writes:

“On the topic of God, I find that religious naturalists tend to fall into three groups: (1) those who conceive God as the creative process in the universe; (2) those who think of God as the totality of the universe considered religiously; and (3) those who do not speak of God yet still can be called religious.”

The first group, which includes people like Henry Nelson Weiman, would say that while the creative process (whatever that is, in terms of their definitions) is not ontologically distinct from the rest of the universe, they still think it is useful to name that creative process “God.” I am not particularly interested in this group of religious naturalists, and cannot speak intelligently about them; if this is a topic that interests you, Jerome Stone’s book would be a good place to start to learn more.

The second group, the people who think of God as the totality of the universe considered religiously, I find far more interesting. If you have some familiarity in Western philosophy, you will want to know that Stone places Spinoza in this group. And this group intersects with those pantheists who understand God as being the totality of the universe, where the universe is understood in completely naturalistic terms. Those who are advocates of the “Gaia hypothesis” — that’s the hypothesis that the entire biosphere of the planet Earth can be understood as one vast, perhaps sentient, organism — might be close to religious naturalism, although true pantheists who include the rest of the universe beyond the Earth, too. Continue reading “One Transcendentalist’s religious naturalism”

Timeline of Christian schisms

We’ve been running the “Church across the Street” or “Neighboring Faiths” program for our middle schoolers this year in the Palo Alto church. We’ve been going to different Christian churches all fall and into the winter, and I wanted to come up with a resource that would give our kids at least a general sense of how different Christian groups are related to one another. I finally decided that a timeline might do the job best.

However, as I worked on the project, I realized that most of the churches we visited were Protestant churches. And I realized that I would have to do a general timeline for Christianity, and another timeline (on a smaller time scale) for Protestantism. Below is the first part: a general timeline of Christian schisms and splits, showing the origins of the main Christian groups (including a couple of extinct Christian groups). Since I’m using this with Unitarian Universalist kids, I also placed Unitarians and Universalists on this timeline for reference. Click on the thumbnail to see the full-size PDF:

Timeline of Christianity

Update 2/5/13: The handout above has been updated thanks to your comments and email messages.

Theological disunity

In a previous post, I looked at some areas where Unitarian Universalists have a great deal of theological unity. Now I’d like to turn to four areas where there is far less unity.

(1) Unitarian Universalists are not in agreement regarding a fundamental ontological claim of process theology. To oversimplify, process theology asserts that God is in the process of evolving. Therefore, a Unitarian process theologian like Charles Hartshorne might call the concept of omnipotence a “theological mistake”; God cannot be omnipotent because God is in process. By contrast, many Unitarian Universalists today will argue that if you’re going to talk about God, one attribute that God must have is omnipotence; this is the foundation for many arguments by Unitarian Universalist atheists or humanists showing that God must not exist.

This represents fundamental theological disagreements about the nature of God, and about the nature of reality (ontology).

(2) Unitarian Universalists are not in agreement regarding one key component of most liberation theologies. Continue reading “Theological disunity”

Quote of the month

From the article “Flea market capitalists: disaffected and disenchanted,” by Arthur E. Farnsely II:

Disaffection is not going to be repaired by politicians, business leaders, or pastors trying harder. Over the decades the modern West has built a consumer society in which people get more personal choices and lifestyle freedom in exchange for a loss of community, tradition, and stability. We are still interdependent, of course, but the connections are complex, malleable, idiosyncratic.

Some people still live in tight-kint communities; others are lucky enough to have the education and money needed to pursue their “lifestyles choices.” But the people at the bottom have limited choices, and some choose to be left alone. Flea market dealers are an extreme example of this segment, but poor and lower working class people all across America have tenuous relationships to the institutions of family, school, business, and government.

A recent Pew study confirms the rising number of people who claim “no religious affiliation.” People are also increasingly choosing “no political affiliation.” (Many people who say they are politically independent reliably vote conservative or liberal, but this only proves the point — they have opinions but resist membership commitments.)

— in Christian Century, 23 January 2013, p. 25.

If you want to adequately explain why people are choosing to have no religious affiliation, you have to take into account the effects of consumer capitalism on the way we perceive and live in the world. We expect to have choices these days, and institutions of any kind limit the kinds of choices we have come to expect as consumers.

Golden haze

Carol and walked down to the waterfront in San Mateo. It was a beautiful evening. It’s the rainy season, so the hills across the bay are now a soft green. The setting sun glinted off windows of houses far up in the Oakland hills. And a beautiful golden haze hung over the waters of the bay.

“It’s the golden haze again,” I said to Carol. We’ve been seeing this for the past week or so: cold, still air has settled down over the area, trapping pollutants in the wide bowl formed by the mountains surrounding the bay. The people who monitor air pollution have been detecting high levels of fine particles, and because of that all wood fires have been banned most days this week. The air quality index has been moderate to unhealthy. That’s what has caused the golden haze.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. We kept walking, watching the shorebirds, and the play of light on the water.

Written on Monday, posted on Saturday; I’ve been slowed down this week by a cold this week.

Treasure

Two nearly identical houses across the street from us went on the market today. An artist couple had been living there, but finally they decided to sell.

I was out in our driveway putting racks on our car. I saw a couple pushing a stroller come up to the first house, and I heard a well-dressed woman, presumably the real estate agent, tell them, “We’re not quite ready to open yet. Come back in half an hour.”

When I came back from picking up some plywood, the houses were obviously open. Two or more cars a minute drove slowly down our dead end street, slowing down when they reached the two houses. The sign out in front of the first house said, “Treasure behind door #1.” I didn’t bother to see what the sign in front of the second house said.

Carol went over to look. She said that paintings done by the artists who used to live there are hanging on the walls. She overheard someone say, “…but they won’t appreciate that much because they’re on the wrong side of….” We are on the wrong side of the tracks: gardeners and artists and cab drivers and ministers live down this street; many of us are renters, and the majority of us aren’t white.

But these houses are going for less than half a million, an incredible bargain in the Bay area housing market. So the people keep coming, amazed to find houses for so little money.

Jan 19 2013

Theological unity — a conversation

On Thursday, January 31, Amy, the senior minister at our church, and I are going give a class on theological unity within Unitarian Universalism. We’re starting our class with an online conversation about the topic. And I’m going to begin my side of the conversation by listing five areas where I think Unitarian Universalists already have some degree of theological unity:

(1) Women and girls are as good as men and boys: During the 1970s and 1980s, Unitarian Universalism, like many liberal religious groups in the U.S., went through the feminist revolution in theology. We came out of those decades with a very clear theological consensus: when it comes to religion, women and girls are just as good as men and boys.

(2) Human beings must take responsibility for the state of the world: The Unitarian Universalist theologian William R. Jones has argued that humanists and liberal theists have come to resemble each other in that both affirm the radical freedom and autonomy of human beings (“Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows,” Christian Century, May 21, 1975, pp. 520-525). Today, we have a wide consensus that, whether or not we believe in God, none of us believes some larger power is going to come fix up our problems for us — if humans made the mess, it’s up to us to fix it.

Continue reading “Theological unity — a conversation”

Another approach to fundraising

Looking for some new inspiration around fundraising? Amy pointed me to an article on the Nonprofit Hearts Web site titled “Asking Kindred Spirits for Money.” The author, Rich Snowdon, works as a coach for nonprofit leaders.

His approach to nonprofit fundraising aligns well with the approach to congregational fundraising set forth by Ed Landreth in his consulting practice, and in his book Fundraising with a Vision. As a former salesman, it’s what I’d call a soft-sell approach, emphasizing relationship-building over the long term, rather than squeezing the most money possible out of people in the short term.

The most useful part of Snowdon’s article may be the many hypothetical fundraising conversations he writes — what do you say to different kinds of donors? — where might those conversations go? It’s a long article, but definitely worth reading — to read it, click here.

Why UU youth programs suck

Our model for youth ministry in Unitarian Universalism sucks. The reasons why it sucks begin in our recent history, and in our current responses to the social changes going on all around us.

History first: Our model of youth ministry is an amalgam of three old models; none of the older models is particularly relevant to today’s world.

(1) First, there is the core model of youth ministry dating back to around 1900, when the Unitarian and Universalist denominations (along with many other denominations in mainline Protestantism) decided that persons in the age range of about 14 to about 20 had different religious and spiritual needs than adults — they did, that is, if their families were wealthy enough to keep them in school through their mid-teens; and since mainline Protestants were the ruling elite in the United States at that time, many mainline Protestant families were wealthy enough to keep their kids in school up to or even past the age of 16. By contrast, families in the Black churches and “ethnic” Catholic churches were less likely to keep their children in school up into their mid-teens, and those churches were less likely to have youth ministries that looked like mainline Protestant youth ministries.

This first model of Unitarian and Universalist youth ministry is rooted in entitlement and privilege that is based in unconscious membership in a religious elite that ruled the United States to serve its own purposes and values.

(2) The second layer of youth ministry emerged in the 1950s, when mainline Protestantism was at its peak in the United States. Continue reading “Why UU youth programs suck”

The year in review, pt. 1

It has not been a great year in liberal religion.

In one ongoing negative trend, most Unitarian Universalists continue to act as though we are part the ruling elite in this country. Mind you, as recently as the 1950s, Unitarian Universalists actually could claim to be part of the ruling elite. Back then, Unitarians and Universalists were considered mainline Protestants, and the United States was run by mainline Protestants, for mainline Protestants. And while the Universalists were marginal at best by the mid-twentieth century, the Unitarians could claim to have some real influence. Most notably, A. Powell Davies preached to a congregation containing a number of high-level functionaries in the federal government, as well as a few elected officials; and the Washington newspapers supposedly held their Monday morning editions until they could get the text of his Sunday sermons. Also worth noting: Adlai Stevenson II, Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, was a Unitarian, as were a number of other politically influential people.

Today, however, the mainline Protestant coalition that long dominated the United States is crumbling, and Unitarian Universalists have moved themselves out of, and been pushed out of, mainline Protestantism. As a result, politicians either don’t care about us, or they can dismiss us since we represent such a tiny minority (about half a percent of the total U.S. population). As a religion, we have no real power or influence.

Yet we continue to act as if we do have political influence. The most blatant example of that was the “Justice General Assembly” in June of this year. A few thousand Unitarian Universalists from across the country went down to Phoenix, Arizona, and protested unjust and discriminatory state law. Sheriff Joe Arapaho of Maricopa County used our presence to bolster his carefully cultivated image with his voters — here come these out-of-state leftist hippies, telling me what to do, but I’m standing up to them! — and I’m sure our interactions with him did nothing to weaken his political position; indeed, our presence in Phoenix probably strengthened his political position. As far as our influence on state politics, I could find no evidence that we were even noticed — OK, we made it into the local newspapers, but honestly who cares about newspapers any more? In short, we’re doing social justice as if it’s 1955. Justice GA made us feel good, but had little positive impact beyond that.

On the other hand, there are some Unitarian Universalists who have moved beyond social justice c. 1955. For example, I continue to be impressed with the organizing efforts of groups like the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of California (UULMC). But UULMC represents a quite different approach to influencing politics — UULMC is a separate nonprofit organization that employs ministers who are not serving a local congregation, as well as other staffers, to do organizing around specific legislative issues. UULMC can not only build coalitions with other advocacy groups, it can use the skills and abilities of ordained ministers to influence legislators, without those ministers having their time and attention divided between politics and a congregation.

This approach to influencing public policy is significantly different from the 1950s approach in which Unitarians assumed they were part of the ruling elite and deserved special access; it’s also very different from the 1960s model of protest politics, where the grounding assumption was to disrupt the ruling elite. Justice GA remained mired in the 1950s and 1960s — you have to pay attention to us because we’re important! and — we’re going to be angry protestors just like in the 1960s! UULMC have moved forward into the very different realities of the 2010s.

Tomorrow: The year in review continues, with thoughts on why UU ministry to children and youth sucks