I read with concern some information about my UU community. Is this true? It can't be!
I assume that there is a variety of ways of doing things in UU congregations, but signing a delegate card for someone who had been in the congregation a few weeks. Bad Practice.
The congregation in which I was a lay person discussed everything that was to come before the UUA General Assembly including resolutions. When I went on to ministry, I assumed that was the way it was done, and tried to make it my practice after I was ordained. Two congregations resisted making it official, others were grateful that the church was taking their connections to the wider association seriously.
My home church elected the delegates in a competitive election and paid the registration fee and a small subsidy toward the expense. I have tried to likewise, and while I haven't convinced every church to be that strict, the delegates have been chosen by a announced open process. The delegates from congregations I have served have represented the congregation's discussions and ideas at GA with one exception (a youth who got his ideas from the YRUU.) No one should be a delegate to GA who isn't at least discussed by the board after being selected by the Association Affairs Committee. I prefer my delegates elected by the nominations committee and annual meeting, but I haven't been able to convince the lay leadership of that yet.
And I hear that preachers preach partisan politics! I can see UU ministers preaching peace, and against all sorts of injustice, but the idea that one party is good and the other bad isn't church for me. I ask my colleagues in chapter meetings and they agree; issues yes, Republican bashing no. But I hear it happens.
There are Republicans and Democrats in the congregation I serve, and a scattering of Libertarians. I have an affirmative action policy toward democratic socialists, but no takers yet. Fascists need not test my tolerance. I work to be inclusive, but I have my limits. Remember Channing said no one would be excommunicated, except for the death of goodness in their hearts. I would think that is a practical guideline when it comes to violent and coercive politics.
Is this a mild mannered rant? I suppose so.
I do find some of the complaints about the UUA interesting. Although they don't reflect my experience, I have always assumed where there is smoke there is fire. I suspect many complaints could be addressed by good practices at the congregational level. In fact some of the complaints and concerns like growth can only be handled by good practices at the congregational level. The UUA does not grow the congregations, the congregations grow the UUA.
Unitarian Universalists: January 2006 Archives
Chalice Chick has opened up a discussion about "fixing the UUA." There have been several ideas, several of which might be embraced by enough folks to make it a serious proposal.
For example, what about moving the UUA HQ out of Boston! Enough congregations might support a business resolution to move and it would be an interesting debate at General Assembly. If we sold the quaint and crowded headquarters buildings in Boston and bought real estate in a less expensive city, we could get nice offices and a real hotel for those who travel from out of town to do business with the Association, and increase the endowment at the same time. I doubt it would make much difference in the UUA culture however, there are few if any Bostonians working in professional positions at the UUA HQ. The notion that Brahmins control the HQ is an urban myth, and won't die even after we get to Missouri. (Please pick an air hub with cheap housing, and good medical care, so the salaries can cover living expenses. A Canadian city with a warm climate sounds ideal.) But on a related proposal, I will vote against any reduction of staff, unless some one can find a way to do the work that they do. Those who argue that staff doesn't work hard have no idea how hard they work.
Some have observed that we pass a lot of resolutions of immediate concern. It is hard to remember them all. But even if we increased the super majority required to pass such resolutions, most of the resolutions would still pass since the sentiments contained in the resolves enjoy the support of most UUs. Conservative UUs refuse to acknowledge how liberal their co-religionists really are, and how much they enjoy making statements witnessing their liberalism. On the other hand, asking the drafting committee of new resolution to make it sound more religious is a great idea, but isn't that going to get a reaction from the folks that objected to the suggestion that we be more open to the religious language?
Philocrites asks how does one make change in the UUA? He suggests a Guide Book for the new change agent. I have seen change in the UUA over the years, in fact I am a habitual UUA reformer. Since I was a youth, I have joined with others to affect some change by organizing grass roots efforts in support a reform, in the form of a business resolution, or amendment to the by-laws. But with all my efforts, more change has come from Presidents who run on reform platforms and who actually implement some of their ideas in programmatic and structural change. Much of Bill Sinkford's original platform is still waiting for the capital funds and free time to turn them into programs and proposals. His idea of decentralizing the UUA out of Boston and creating centers of excellence at Meadville and Starr King for developing programs remains a good idea, whose time has come again and again. So the most effective way to get an idea out there, and get it debated, is run for President. But Presidents seem less energetic about reform after they have been elected, especially in the second term.
I have seen change, and I have seen reform. But with all the changes and reforms, I don't think that the UUA has been fixed. Perhaps Roger Kuhrt has identified the problem. He calls it hypercorporatism. The UUA HQ doesn't function as the administrative and program offices of an Association of Congregations, it functions as a denominational headquarters separate and apart from the community of congregations. And the corporation gets enamored with its identity and generates programs to promote itself. The congregations have become consumers of services, rather than partners of each other. Our little reforms do little to change such a culture. We can't "fix" headquarters without a different way of relating each congregation to each other congregation. And running for President won't change the inter relationship of congregations, it can just reshuffle the staff, move the staff West, and change the priorities of the corporation.
Hills. Mountains. It is good for the human soul to behold the earth rising up toward the sky and falling down in to ravines and valleys.
Florida is beautiful, but it is so flat. I miss the rises. Marjorie and I arrived in Albuquerque yesterday afternoon. We met two colleagues, rented a van and drove up to Sante Fe by way of the scenic route stopping for a little browsing in an old mining village which apparently has been converted into a dozens of art galleries. The rents for setting up a gallery in Sante Fe must be really high, or the tourists must drive this scenic road a lot, to make it worthwhile. We didn't see may customers, but there were lots of vendors and quite a few artists.
I am here in Sante Fe for the January meeting of the UUMA exec. Our agenda is full. There is work relative to the UUA policies and ministers that we spend lots of time working on. But in our polity the association of ministers and the association of congregations are partners rather than antagonists. Some ministerial colleagues would love it if the UUMA were a union, and fought for ministers rights with congregations and the association. I have more experience as a trade unionist than 99% of my colleagues (three unions, steward, secretary treasurer of a local, and a field organizer) and I can't imagine how such a minister's union would work. Already we help by creating model contracts for parish ministers with congregations, and creating best practice guidelines. But the UUA is as association of congregations is not an antagonist to ministers, and ministers are not antagonists to their congregations. The UUA can't implement its policies without ministers, and ministers interests are bound up in the health and welfare of strong congregations. We are not employees, we are clergy, and the UUMA is an association of clergy. I am sure the conversation will go on.
So this morning I am a mile higher than yesterday. Loving it.
Religious liberalism arose not on the basis of abstract principles, but within a concrete social context. Unitarian Universalist church historian Conrad Wright probes how some of our principles reflected the historical conditions of the time (and place), and suggests that subsequent social changes challenge those principles. Conrad Wright writes in Walking Together:
"Liberal religion articulated a value system that derived its strength from the social arrangements made possible by the discovery of the resources of the New World. But those resources were not limitless. The infinity of the private individual was plausible enough on the shores of Walden Pond, when there was no closer than Concord Village a mile away: it is hollow rhetoric on the streets of Calcutta or in the barrios of Caracas. The progress of humankind onward and upward forever may have seemed an axiom grounded in history to James Freedman Clarke: it seems something less than that to the residents of Middletown, Pennsylvania. The principle of religious toleration was easy for Jefferson, who could not see that it did any injury to his neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no gods, but the principles of toleration takes on a sharper edge when the decisive differences are not in the realm of speculative theology, abut on the question of apartheid and what it is others should be forced, despite their opinions, to do about it."
So what is permanent and what is transient about liberal religion? Contemporary religious liberals assert that it is a religious principle to work to build a world of peace, democracy, equality and justice - we may disagree whether such a world can be attained, and just what such a world might look like, but social justice and overcoming violence and coercion have become foundational to our religious community. Our spiritual ancestors shared these values with us.
Yet Wright points out that their understandings of these principles were based on their peculiar social situation. He doesn't mention, but I will, that one particularity of that social situation of early American religious liberalism was that it rested on power, and privilege. That power and privilege was based on an accumulation of wealth that resulted from: the conquest of North America, and its peoples; the privatization of the land; the institution of slavery; and the exploitation of impoverished laborers in a rising industrial society. North America's economy today is the product of that historic accumulation.
So religious liberalism arose in a social context, and the social context was based on a history which many of us would describe as unjust, exploitative and contrary to the principles that we espouse. Our contemporary Unitarian Universalist movement exists in a social context as well, and many of us would argue that the social order in which we exist is contrary to our values, and principles. The difference between us and our spiritual ancestors may be that we are aware of the contraction, that we can understand that our religious values call upon us to transform our social situation.
The founders of religious liberalism saw the best hope for their values in their new republic, and its unfolding destiny. Today, Unitarian Universalists are much less optimistic about the wonders of an American future, than our spiritual ancestors.
One of the tasks of Unitarian Universalist theology is to articulate what is the basis for our optimism. We continue to articulate an optimistic theology and social vision. But what is the basis for that optimism. If not the republic, then have we really come to embrace a set of abstractions; such as the triumph of reason and science, the potential of human beings to do good, or love overcoming evil?
What does it mean to affirm the goal of a world community of peace and justice? And what are the means toward that end?
Some times new Unitarian Universalists are curious about why so many of our congregations consider saving the whales a social justice issue. Whaling! Didn't that go out with Melville's generation. Now days it is just those Japanese who take a few whales as a cultural delicacy, right?
Wrong! Many thousands of whales are being killed every year, and several species are on the verge of extinction.
The Independent reports that "We cannot be excused our culpability. Almost anyone born before 1960 ate whale - in margarine or ice cream - wore it as a cosmetic or fed it to their pets. The peak of whaling was not the brutal days of Melville's Moby-Dick, but the 1960s when, in one season alone, floating factories "processed" 6,158 blue whales, 17,989 finback whales, 2,108 humpback whales and 2,566 sperm whales - not including the thousands killed by the Russians, unreported to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The whale, too, was a victim of the Cold War. "
Read the Independent report
Is Micheal Moore's vision of a more democratic, more inclusive United States distorted by white privilege? Kenyon Farrow & Kil Ja Kim seem to think so, they write:
"[W]e think Michael Moore is a white nationalist. . . .
Some will be confused by our use of white nationalism since it's a term usually reserved for "extremist" organizations. To the contrary, we consider white nationalism to be normalized in US social relations since by white nationalism we mean the project of nation building that is driven by the experiences and history of white people. White nationalism, however, is more than just being white-centric, per se. Rather, white nationalism is the project of maintaining or expanding the white nation-whether established along state lines or as socially created communities or both-in ways that reflect the anxieties, fears, dread and aspirations of white people. As such, in a white nationalist discourse, whiteness and US civil society as well as the racialized and sexualized project of citizenship that maintains both are not confronted. Instead the point of departure for a white nationalist approach is: what stands in white people's way of being able to claim the nation as rightfully theirs? A white nationalist project therefore is fixated with what government forces, "subversiveness" from below or shifts in the global economy threaten the rights of the white citizenry.
I find this critique of Moore challenging, because if he is engaged in revisioning the white nation state then Unitarian Universalists need to probe deeply into the vision behind our social justice statements and resolutions. Does this critique extend to Unitarian Universalism? Kenyon Farrow & Kil Ja Kim's complete critique of Moore can be found on
One of the threads that emerged in the recent conversation about theology that took place in and among Unitarian Universalist weblogs focused on the "big words" that theologians use. It was argued that words like eschatology, soteriology, and ecclesiology are words that indicate an advanced and specialized education, and so ordinary lay folk can not do theology.
Most of these words indicate concepts that people active in a religious communities have struggled with, for example ecclesiology refers to theological thinking about the nature of the church. What is the purpose of religious community? Is it to provide a sanctuary from a world of woe, or is it more like a filling station, which energizes its members so that they can function in the world? Does it deliver a message that informs us that our hope is in another world, or does it deliver a message about a vision for transformation of this world? Is it a model of the beloved community, or is it more realistic to think of it as a dysfunctional family where we learn the skills of family therapy and practice the spirituality of being non-anxious presence? I have heard all these ideas expressed about the purpose of church.
When we attend worship the opening words almost certainly contains a message about what the church thinks it is about, as do the hymns, the prayers and mediations, the sermon, and other service elements. Our theology of religious community is announced in pamphlets in the literature rack. It is also made manifest in the practice of the church, we ask just how welcoming is the church that says its mission is radical inclusion? and just how pluralistic is the church that claims to be informed by wisdom from the all the world's traditions?
We encounter ecclesiology, we reflect on what we hear and read, and we talk about it with others, and hopefully we practice our understandings about what religious community is supposed to be.
I believe lay members do theology "without knowing it." So how do we come to understand what we are doing, so that we can do it more intentionally?
I will explore this idea further in subsequent posts.
The idea of taking concrete steps to remedy and to prevent discrimination - in employment, housing, education and access to programs - for all historically marginalized and oppressed racial and cultural groups and for women originated in the 1960s. It was modeled on the GI bill of rights and other programs to support veterans. In the 1970s affirmative action programs were instituted to include people with disabilities.
Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way in the 1967: "This is a day which demands new thinking and the reevaluation of old concepts. A society that has done done something special against the Negro for hundreds of year must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis." Unitarian Universalists have supported affirmative action to eliminate discrimination and advance equality for four decades. Beginning in the 1970s Unitarian Universalists extended affirmative action to overcome discrimination based on sexual orientation. The second and sixth principles are wishful thinking without a commitment to affirmative action.
Affirmative action programs have been among the most effective instruments in deconstructing institutional racism. But those who are privileged by racism have raised many counter arguments seeking to discredit affirmative action.
It was argued that affirmative action constituted some kind of reverse discrimination. Manning Marable effectively answers that argument: "Given the fact that the average white household's net worth is ten times that of a black families, and that the overwhelming majority of leaders in business, government, banking and the media are upper-class white males, the argument that whites suffer "reverse discrimination" is absurd. Justice demand affirmative action based on race and gender to address continuing patterns of inequality in America."Some of the anger generated against affirmative action stems from illusions stemming from the ideology of Whiteness as Kenneth B. Clark pointed out: "The illusion of classlessness among whites led them to believe that all whites had opportunities to succeed until blacks came along. every psychologists knows there are individual preferences in every group. Every white applicant for say, a policeman's job, believing he'd get a job or promotion were it not for affirmative action, is engaging in a fascinating sort of idiocy."
Another objection has been raised is that somehow affirmative action confers a stigma, that the woman or minority who has a job has it not because they are qualified, but because they benefit from affirmative action. Answering that objection is Andrew Hacker "How, it is asked, can people go through life, knowing that they have been hired not on their inherent talents, but to fill some quota or to satisfy appearances? Not surprisingly, white people seem to do most of the worrying about this apparent harm to black self-esteem. In fact, there is little evidence that those who have been aided by affirmative action feel many doubts or misgivings. For one thing, most of them believe that they are entitled to whatever opportunities they have received . . . . Nor should it be forgotten what feelings of unworthiness seldom plague white Americans who have profited from more traditional forms of preferment." [How many Veterans complain about Veterans preferences?]
Rachel Neumann writes that "despite Bush's dismal approval ratings, the war of the frames -- how we talk about the big news and big ideas in the culture sphere -- was won by the conservatives in 2005. Think of the catch phrases of the year: The 'War on Terrorism,' 'Intelligent Design,' the 'War on Christmas,'even 'cut and run'"
Neuman zeros in on five issues that progressives can take the initiative around to help clarify the issues so that the real majority of democratic and fair minded people can defeat the theocratic coalition gathered around Bush. One of the most interesting parts of her essay for Unitarian Universalists is her argument that in the debate between the frames "life" versus "choice" most people will choose life over the abstract freedom that the supporters of reproductive freedom have held up. She points out "that 'choice' was not always the key factor in determining whether they have abortions; often economic, social, personal or other factors they didn't have control over forced their decisions. Yet despite a new urgency to protect reproductive rights, progressives still flounder when it comes to how to talk about it."
Religious liberals can make a contribution for democracy, and for our values by learning to communicate our vision for a fair and democratic society.
