Tag: childist theology

2025: liberal and progressive religion in review

A/ The decline of organized religion has halted (for now)

In 2025, the big news in progressive religion was that religion is not quite as dead as the social scientists want us to believe. A Pew Research Center study released in December was titled “Religion holds steady in America.” At the same time, the study also found that “people in every birth cohort — from the youngest to the oldest — have grown less religious as they have aged.”

However, as usual, religiosity is measured with phenomena that are very much Christian-centric. One of the metrics that Pew looks at is how “prayerful” people are. By that metric, I’m completely non-religious, since I don’t pray. Another metric used by Pew is whether people “identify with a religion.” That means that Pew is measuring religiosity as a function of affiliating with an organized religious group. But we already know that the twenty-first century is a time when people are disaffiliating from all organizations. I would also say that lots of people I know are religious/spiritual without belonging to an organized religious group — I think of the people I know who do yoga or qi-gong, or who create their own spiritual rituals for groups of friends, or who consult Tarot cards, etc.

You also have to consider how organized religion gets defined. If you’re a practitioner of Orisa devotion (such as Santeria) and regularly visit a botanica, you’re not going to be counted as participating in organized religion. If you’re a yoga teacher, spending many hours leading classes and attending ongoing training, you’re not going to be counted as participating in organized religion. The unacknowledged influence of Protestant Christianity on American social scientists is still there. The more something looks like a Protestant Christian church, the more likely it is to be defined as a religion. The more something looks like Protestant Christian spiritual practice (e.g., prayer, regular attendance at religious services, belief in God, etc.), the more likely it is to be defined as a religious practice.

B/ Protest politics remains important for White Christian and post-Christian religious progressives

In a year-end article on Religion News Service, veteran religion reporters Jack Jenkins and Bob Smietana wrote about the Americas religious figures whom they expect to be most news-worthy in 2026. They chose a mix of religious conservatives, moderates, and liberals/progressives — and a range of races, ethnicities, and religious affiliations. The only person they chose who is best known for protest politics is Rev. David Black, a progressive White minister in a majority-White denomination, Presbyterian Church (USA).

Contrast that with the person Jenkins and Smietana picked to represent Black Protestantism, Rev. Frederick D. Hayes, who is running for Congress in his Dallas congressional district. Instead of protest politics, Hayes is using his religious platform to try to add another progressive voice in Congress.

Or consider Brad Lander, a Jew who is running for Congress in New York City. Lander offers a nuanced, liberal Zionist take on Israel — he calls himself a “steadfast supporter of Israel,” while also calling the Israeli campaign in Gaza a “genocide.” But instead of setting up a protest like a tent city, Lander hopes to take his nuanced view of Israel to Congress.

Or contrast that with Mehdi Hasan, a Muslim journalist whose show was canceled by MSNBC. Hasan went out and founded his own media outlet using Substack, and now has 50,00 paid subscribers (and 450,000 total subscribers). Instead of protest politics, Hasan is contributing directly to public discourse.

Speaking personally, most of the Unitarian Universalists I know (i.e., people who are mostly White, mostly progressive, mostly post-Christian) seem to place highest value on protest politics. If you want to get maximum kudos in Unitarian Universalist circles, tell people that you’re going to go to a protest rally. But if you say that you’re running for the local school board, or helping to run the local food pantry, or doing progressive journalism, it doesn’t seem to impress other religious progressives as an expression of your progressive religious values.

White religious progressives seem to place the most value on protest, and on what they call “resistance.” I just wish they placed more value on constructive ways to change the world.

C/ What religious progressives don’t seem to pay much attention to

The religious progressives I know don’t seem to pay much attention to several trends that I would have thought interesting to all religious progressives.

Continue reading “2025: liberal and progressive religion in review”

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?