Above: The Revs. Rosemary Bray McNatt and Charles Ortman listen to questions posed to them by students during the workshop "Whose Job Is It Anyway? The Ministry of Antiracism, Anti-oppression and Multiculturalism."

The Census Bureau projects that by 2042, whites will no longer constitute a majority of the U.S. population… the fastest growing group will be those who identify as multiracial…. If we fail to respond to this new multicultural reality – if we choose to stand rather than to move – we will not only fail to honor this core principle of liberal theology, we will simply become irrelevant.

This is from the lead article in the current Unitarian Universalist magazine, UU World.

Being good liberals, Unitarian Universalists have been engaged in wrenching self-examination for several years now, at least since the 1992 General Assembly Resolution on Racial and Cultural Diversity.

But the demographics show UUs are as white as they ever were. In a follow up article, well known UU minister Rosemary Bray McNatt writes:

... and these are the students listening to Revs. Bray McNatt and Ortman.

My sons are third-generation Unitarian Universalists. After his beautiful and moving Coming of Age ceremony at our congregation, my older son, Allen, asked me whether I would be offended if he joined another religion when he grew up. Now, as his mother, I couldn’t possibly be offended. My husband Bob and I have raised our children to know that they must find their own way, even as we have been clear about what path we follow as Unitarian Universalists. We want him to feel free to be the spiritual seeker he has been raised to be. On the other hand, as a Unitarian Universalist minister, I was internally screaming, “YES, I’m offended! Just what do you think I’ve been doing around here?”

When I asked him why he thought it would be better to be a different religion, he said, “It’s not that I don’t like being a UU. I am just tired of being the only black kid in the youth group, and the only black kid at camp, and the only black kid everywhere.” He loves our faith, but he is lonely.

Of course there are any number of black churches and a few multiracial ones where a politically liberal or left person can be at home. But most black churches are still theologically much more conservative than the UUs. And this frequently also means conservatism on issues like GLBT inclusion.

What is a theological liberal? Someone who smiles with recognition when told that Rabbi Lerner welcomes atheists to his services with the assurance that as far as his congregation is concerned “the God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist” before he launches into prayers and praise. Someone who believes in what Mitchell Silver called “A Plausible God,” a God even an atheist might believe in. The UUs have been called the largest group of organized agnostics in America. Be Scofield has been blogging here about future ministers at his seminary who are agnostics or atheists. But many other UUs, and theologically liberal Jews, Christians and Muslims are believers and use God language. It’s just that belief is not the central principle around which their worldview and membership of their congregation is organized.

The quote that turned Karen Armstrong, ex-nun turned atheist (and now one of the best known writers about religion), back to religion was Rabbi Hillel’s famous “Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.” She objected to Jewish scholar Hyam Maccoby that believing in God surely can’t be just commentary. Maccoby replied: “Easy to see that you were brought up a Christian. Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There’s no orthodoxy as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like.” Armstrong writes in her memoir, “I stared at him. I could not imagine a religion without belief.” From this time she began to absorb the notion that religion is not about intellectual assent, but about compassionate action.

But if that is what liberal religion is, then why are the most theologically liberal congregations, whether UU, Jewish, or Christian, so predominantly white and so highly educated? (I know of many theologically liberal Muslim individuals but not of mosques or congregations that so identify, and would be happy to be corrected; and it’s more than I can do here to include the complexities of Hindu, Buddhist and other congregations).

If it really is about compassionate action, doesn’t everyone respond equally to that? Maybe not if one is the recipient of the compassionate action, but is not attracted to joining the compassionate givers and to making their worldview one’s own, because the language is all wrong. Is it, then, all about changing the language, including the music, the accent, the cultural gestalt?

The author of the UU World‘s lead article, Paul Rasor, a UU theologian, argues that the denomination must become multicultural not to be politically correct or to grow, but “for spiritual and theological reasons.” These reasons seem to boil down to preserving theological liberalism itself, keeping it “intellectually credible and socially relevant.”

But this, in my limited experience as a UU, does often seem to mean in practice trying to modify the inherited WASPy culture of UU services to attract a wider cultural mix. This is a very hard thing to do. The most successful example I know of came about not by incremental changes but by a UU church joining with a black congregation that was moving theologically from born-again go-to-heaven-or-hell Christianity to a universalist God-loves-everyone faith: Carlton Pearson’s remarkable saga in Tulsa, Oklahoma. [Later addition: I am focusing on cultural language here, not on actual racism or class prejudice as a limiting factor: not because they don't exist, but because we white UUs seems to be much more aware that that's something we need to work on, and even if it were theoretically gone, our cultural style would remain].

Of course the old New England white culture of emotional restraint and ancient hymns and so on is very out of sync with our wider US culture today, including the culture of most white young people. So I am one of those UUs who long for more emotional expression, more recognition of suffering and evocation of joy, more moving music and inspiration in UU services. But not every UU I know agrees with me. If they would find a more expressive style alienating, then why should they do it? If the traditional style is a good place for their true spirituality to flourish, then it will show, love will be present, and people will feel it.

There can be many congregations and many styles. We don’t all have to worship together.

There were only a handful of Pentecostals in 1900. At current projections they will surpass the one billion mark by 2050. By 2000 Pentecostal numbers were increasing at about 52,000 a day. I am no expert on Pentecostals, but I assume that when they think about being relevant to poor inner city people, for example, of whatever color or culture, they don’t agonize about how to include them in middle class congregations: they start a home circle in the inner city, speaking the language of the people there and singing their music, and move into a storefront church as they grow. Christianity has done a lot of this down the centuries: think Christmas, The Virgin of Guadelupe and countless examples in Africa today of what sociologists call syncretism.

I have never heard of UUs who simply left their WASPy congregations and retooled their language and music so that they could bring the compassionate action of their worldview into play in poor neighborhoods: UU equivalents of the New Monastics for example. I am sure they have tried and I would like to hear the stories.

Has it in fact been tried and failed? Forget race for the moment and think about class (even though in this country they so often go together). Many people think that liberal theology itself is too conceptual, too ethereal, too intellectual to appeal to uneducated and stressed-out people in poverty. I don’t get it. Love is love. If belief is a barrier to you to expressing love in a congregation or a neighborhood, then making belief optional will help you, at least, to be more giving, open, generous, welcoming. And it’s not as if every poor person is a deep believer in a particular personal God who answers prayers and takes you to heaven: yes, that has it’s attractions but lots of people who are poor don’t believe it! Every congregation has its gradations of belief, even Pentecostal congregations, from the most believing to the least, who may be along just because the belief actually releases love vibes in the believers. Many belief-centered congregations are very loving and welcoming to their members (even if they think everyone else is going to hell and–at the extreme–think they could be helped to go there with a few more wars).

I think it fairly natural that since our first knowledge of love is our mother’s arms and breast or another caregiver’s arms, and that as we grow we depend on and long for love from the individuals around us, that we should respond to images of a loving cosmos in terms of a personal God. The personal God language does seem to be effective for many in turning them towards a religion of compassionate action. But others simply don’t buy that there is a God of that kind: tsunamis, genocides, wars and diseases do tend to erode that kind of confidence that Someone is answering our prayers. Why wouldn’t a religion based on a liberal theology be just as effective in poor neighborohoods if it releases in its practitioners an ability to love fiercely, or “ferally” as Lynice Pinkard likes to say?

In case I sound too lovey-dovey, as if I think the reason people stay in congregations is because of the love-vibe, let me just say I do understand that there are many reasons people get together in groups, and they seek all kinds of other goods in terms of status, material connection, existential comfort etc. I even completed a doctorate in the sociology of religion at Oxford. But I do think that the theological belief or unbelief that works best, that is truest, is the one that releases in you or me the ability to best love the other, and in ways the other can recognize and return or pass on. It is truest when it doesn’t leave anyone, or any living creature, out. That encompasses a wide range of belief and unbelief. I think liberal religion has a wide future if it enables us to be more compassionate and open, and not if it doesn’t. I’m not saying I know how to do it. I’m a novice. Probably most of us are.


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