The original essay: Tipping Points

SATURDAY, JULY 16, 2005

Tipping Points
by Matthew Gatheringwater

Before delving into Engaging Our Theological Diversity, the latest report from the Unitarian Universalist Association's Commission on Appraisal, I'd like to share a lighting-strike moment after which I've never been able to look at the issue of theological change in quite the same way.
While working at the leaky and sadly dilapidated library at my seminary, I came across a little publication filed away in the forties and promptly forgotten. It was an open letter to Unitarians written by a minister named Edward Ohrenstein. He had been leading Starr King School for the Ministry and the experience was apparently not a good one. Ohrenstein was a Unitarian who believed his religion could only stray so far from its Christian roots and still lay claim to theological and historical continuity. A group of secularists, he warned, was trying to take over Starr King in order to turn out ministers of a "pseudo-religious cult." He believed there was a fight going on over the identity of the Unitarian faith and its relationship to Christianity, and it wasn't being waged so much in our congregations as in our institutional leadership and seminaries.
As a religious humanist, I have to admit that I'm glad of the theological changes that have allowed me to find a religious home in Unitarian Universalism, but Ohrenstein's letter made me wonder for the first time what the cost of those changes had been in terms of community. Had other people been displaced to make room for me? It was also the first time I wondered just how stable my own religious community would be. Like Ohrenstein (who had been a student at my school), I was going through the arduous tasks of ministerial education and preparation. Would I also, like him, find that I'd prepared for ministry to a faith which no longer existed? It became very important to me to discover what happened to him, to see how he managed to love and serve a changing faith. In the end, I found he couldn't. He joined the Christian Unitarian migration and eventually became a minister to the United Church of Christ. He worked for years as a prison chaplain not far from my home congregation, but he is dead now and I am sorry. I would very much have liked to talk with him.
I came upon this story at just about the same time that I was hearing about another migration, this time of Unitarian Universalist humanists. A former president of the American Humanist Association came to lecture at my seminary and he talked about the way many humanists, unreconciled with an influx of New Age spirituality and an uncritical embrace of the supernatural, were no longer at home within member congregations of the UUA. His contention was that their numbers swelled the ranks of non-attending UUs who mysteriously show up in national surveys of religious identification. I wasn't sure if this was true, but it was clear that there had been a change in attitude toward humanism within the seminary. For a start, I was surprised to realize I was the only person who identified as an atheist during a school retreat. My school used to be notable for innovations in religious humanist theology. We used to be at the forefront of efforts reconcile science and religion; now, visiting scientists reported that seminarians lacked basic scientific education. Humanist was a word often used in a derogatory sense in my UU classes and it was more often than not preceded by adjectives like "old", "crusty", "corpse-cold", "bloodless", and "unfeeling." It was creepy to hear people use expressions like, "the congregation is waiting for the old humanists to die off before it changes the order of service." It was more popular among students to be a Universalist (in a romanticized, ahistorical sense) than a Unitarian, a feeler than a thinker, a prophet than a pastor, a theist than an atheist, and anything but a humanist. Was history repeating itself? To be sure, there were still humanists on the faculty and in the student body, but the writing on the wall didn't look so good.
Once I started to think about it, I realized that the history of our religious movement, from the Unitarian Controversy onward, can be seen as a series of theological conflicts resolved, not with tolerance and persuasion as we would like to believe, but by institutional struggles over who gets the right to define what our religion is about. Why should our future be any different? One of the biggest fears related to the "language of reverence debate" is that articulating our faith will really mean consolidating institutional authority to redefine Unitarian Universalism in a way that will leave some of us with the unhappy choice of either going on the defensive as the loyal minority or voting with our feet and leaving the Association. If this seems an overly dramatic assessment, consider Sarah Lammert's homily at the Friday worship service at the General Assembly. She relegates old liberal religious values (freedom, reason, and tolerance) to the past, while articulating "a new way of framing our free faith." Referencing a poem by Mary Oliver, she acknowledges that this reframing may result in not everyone in our churches fitting into the new picture of Unitarian Universalism, but indicates that the people we lose are not as important as the people we will gain when she closes by saying, "Seven may rise from their chairs and leave the room as we struggle together to find the language which expresses the good news, while seven others lean forward in their chairs, and seven more feign indifference. But seven and seventy and 700,000 more will walk in our doors and stay when they hear us claim our saving words€¦" There, in a nutshell, is what is debatable about the language of reverence debate.
All religions must cope, to one degree or another, with theological change. Even the most stable historical faith communities cannot entirely isolate themselves from a changing world. Unitarian Universalists, I contend, experience unusually rapid and localized theological change. A number of factors contribute to this. Without creedal tests, it is hard to challenge the beliefs of anyone who wants to identify as a UU. Tradition holds little authority for us and, with the majority of UUs coming from other religious traditions, our sense of history is sketchy and distorted. New members "identify" with a community that reflects who they already are; there is not an expectation of conversion or transformation. We attract religious liberals, but we don't teach people how the practice the method of religious liberalism. We used to say we were on a quest for truth; now, we often relativize the statement by saying we search for "our truths." We rarely in congregations or as an association endeavor to explore how we know what we know is true, or just what constitutes the "responsible search for truth" we enshrine in our Principles. As a result, our faith is less like a beacon or an anchor than a kite blown here and there by demographic shifts and religious fads.
No wonder there is anxiety attendant upon discussion of UU theology! We talk a lot about the value of being part of a religious community but we spare little concern for people who feel they are becoming unwelcome in their own religious home. UU leaders dismiss people concerned about losing their place at the table as whiners and complainers or themselves complain about the tyranny of the minority. I just don't see it that way. If the liberalism of our way of being religious (a good thing overall, in my opinion) means that we experience a higher rate of theological change, shouldn't we recognize the fact and respond to it with a correspondingly higher level of concern for the negative effects of change upon our community? At bottom, I think this is a pastoral issue, whatever theological minority is at stake.

That is why I am so very grateful that the COA acknowledges the pain of theological change. There was a wonderful quote in the book and in the General Assembly presentation that sums up the problem:

[UU Christians] understand exactly what [the humanists] feel, because their sense that 'I am in the process of being thrown out of the house that I built,' that's where we were--we understand that completely€¦The question is to somehow change the system so that€¦it doesn't hold that possibility anymore€¦We tell the story of the increasing tolerance always, but we don't say, "And people lost their church."
I have to admit I was streaming a few tears while I was watching my streaming video. I thought about Edward Ohrenstein and I wondered if he stayed as angry and bitter as he was in 1947 or if he finally found a measure of peace in his new religious home. I considered my own fears for the future and just let them go for a moment. It was a wonderfully validating experience to know that other people cared about this issue, too.

I think any discussion of UU theology should be grounded in the knowledge that we aren't really talking in the abstract; we are talking about who is welcome within our beloved community. It makes sense to me, therefore, to start the discussion of Engaging Our Theological Diversity by defining the boundaries of fear and pain we should be conscious of pushing each other toward. Hopefully, we can have a conversation where diverse points of view are welcomed, agreement is not an expectation, and no one is left feeling they weren't heard.

My question to you, then, is where is your tipping point? What are the circumstances in which you'd feel you no longer belong in your own religious home?