Success of Unitarian Universalism

We imagine we should grow as a religious community.  Why?

A lot of people intuitively imagine Unitarian Universalism should grow and so jump to figuring out how to make it happen.  But why should we?  Is it imperative that we grow – or is it just a good idea?  As long as we miss some clarity about the imperative, that it would be dangerous and foolhardy not to grow, then I think that any growth we experience will be adventitious, ephemeral – and basically – just not worth the cost.

Churches are a kind of mental hope machine.  The hope itself, however, cannot be wishful thinking.  The vision must include an intensely accurate awareness of the immense difficulties we face and provide the map of faithful living by which route those difficulties can be truly overcome.  Hope can’t be simply – we want it (something better) to happen; but must offer up the means of making it happen.  Do these things (our faithful behaviors) and good outcomes will follow.  Certainly not tomorrow – but we don’t need immediate success. But we do need to persuasively claim that the movement we propose in a certain direction is a movement toward success.

Unitarian Universalism can’t claim to have sole proprietorship of the future – but we are the inheritors of an amazing theological method in Unitarianism and an amazing theological product in Universalism.  A true merger of these two, process and product, I believe, does create a robust commentary on our current situation as well as an excellent vision of a future state of being  for humanity.  Get that merger done – and we not only will grow – but  must grow because lackluster effort on our part is simply unconscionable.  If you know where is the good water, do you ever refuse to slack the terrific thirst of another?

 

 

Universalism is not impossible.

To be fair, it seems that before I describe my qualms with past efforts at finding a robust universalism, I should describe how I think it can be done with credibility.  So here’s a strong hint.

There was a time, certainly before the neolithic revolution (12,000 YA) , when human life was always conducted within the context of a tribe.  The tribe thus served as a very hard boundary, forming a kind of mental vessel beyond which thinking just did not go.  People always identified themselves as being a member of some tribe.  There might be a larger “family” of tribes but that relationship was always extremely tenuous and carried no special protections such as one enjoyed within a tribe.  So consider – murder theft, etc – not well received within a tribe but murder of and theft from someone from another tribe – perfectly okay – in fact, laudatory.

One of the features of the neolithic revolution was a revolution in mental habits that allowed for robust relationships between tribes – for the first time.  The revolution with which we are most familiar is the formation of the Jewish nation as referenced in the 10 Commandments.  What many do not seem to grasp is the fact that the document does not represent some new set of moral rules which the various Hebrew tribes did not know beforehand.  Any tribe that doesn’t know that murder is wrong, theft is wrong, that adultery is (theoretically at least) wrong would tear itself apart in short order.  But what the 10 Commandments do assert is that rules which individuals honored within a tribe – now had to be honored across those mental barriers to include all individuals within Hebrew tribes that put away their tribal deities and embraced  monotheism.

Previous to the shift no one could imagine that they could share any kind of meaningful common identity with someone from another tribe.  After the shift that common identity became possible. Other Mediterranean cultures pulled off the same kind of mental stunt with the invention of law – which applied to everyone regardless of tribal identity.  Mohammad was able to persaude the fractious Arab tribes to adopt an inter-tribal identity once they embraced Islam.

So – think of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. as having a kind of seemingly impervious mental boundary which keeps them from having a sense of common identity.  But just as tribes were able to forge a sense of larger common identity, so too can Christianity, Islam, Judaism, et al. forge a sense of having a common religious identity. And just as adopting an inter-tribal identity didn’t mean you have to stop thinking of yourself as a member of a tribe – so too would having a larger inter-religious identity not require that one stop being a Christian, Moslem, Jew, etc.

There’s a lot more that needs to be said, but the important point to note  – it’s entirely possible.  Human beings have made a seemingly unfathomable leap before – and they can do it again.  And – lucky (sort of) for us – we need to do it again.

 

Many Faiths for One People?

A colleague recently told me that celebrating many faiths in one UU church was an invitation to being shallow.  “Stick with one – and dive into it.”  I don’t think I’m going to do that.  But how does a UU church do the many faiths for one people thing with integrity?

There are lots of ways to botch it, that’s for sure. To get to a way that  works, it’s helpful to know the dangers to avoid.

Botch #1  Syncretism.   There was a hope in the 1950′s and 60′s that UU’s could borrow pieces from a lot of different traditions, leave out the stuff they didn’t like, and end up with a kind of Esperanto kind of religion.  Well, just like few, if any, speak Esperanto – or even know what it is, so too did the syncretist approach prove to be a dead end.

It did so because syncretism turns religion into something that someone observes instead of something that someone does.  What is normally called a congregation is thus much more like an audience and religion is turned into an aesthetic experience.  We can enjoy, for example, a gospel performance but UU’s will not sing with such rapturous abandon. Learning about Buddhism is not at all the same thing as being a Buddhist.

If all we had to do was observe life – syncretism would be fine.  But religion is supposed to help us live more fully, more authentically, more courageously, more ethically.  Our observations are supposed to help us gain ground in these life tasks and not merely appreciate how others have gained such ground.  Knowing that all religions, for instance, have a sentiment similar to “love they neighbor as thyself” is interesting – but what religion is really supposed to do is help us do that loving.

Restart

After I began this blog last I soon caught on that my subject was not the best for blogification. What I had wanted to say was too dense for a couple of paragraphs. So I took a break – and now know what I’m going to do. Very limited but of great importance to me – Commentary on reviving Unitarian Universalism. The Subtitle will be “The Flood”

Why?

A beloved member of my congregation, who was insurance executive, once told me this joke.

Two elderly gents are sitting on a bench on a boardwalk in Southern Florida. One asks, “So how did you get down here?”

His companion replies, “I owned a huge warehouse in the Bronx which caught on fire. My insurance company gave me a nice fat check that made it possible for me to live down here in comfort.”

The other man says, “What a coincidence! I had a huge warehouse in Brooklyn and it flooded. I got a nice fat check from my insurance company too and so here I am, enjoying my retirement.”

To this the owner of the first warehouse said, “That is amazing, but one thing puzzles me. How do you start a flood?”

I have long felt that many of our great programs for supporting growth over the past decades were necessary – but not sufficient. I’ve felt that our excellence at process development led us to neglect product development. Yet how can we grow our product? I have some very good ideas about what that product could look like – but do not know what to do with those ideas. I feel like the second warehouse owner. “How do you start a flood?”

Well, maybe this is one way.

Shutdown!

I do not believe for a nano-second that our country does not have the material resources to resolve our phony financial crisis.  What we do lack is any robust sense of the common good (aka – capacity for cooperation).  There are numerous ways by which that tragic omission could be explicated – but those who do nothing but continue to dismantle the potential for establishing some sense of the common good  are myopic and narcissistic.

Some say, with feeling, how we cannot hand this debt onto our grandchildren – quick- hand to the brow!  In truth, their grandchildren will be somewhat better off than others, protected from the harsh realities of life by trust funds and other inherited assets.  However, what such individuals do not realize is that the overall wealth of the nation will do nothing but decline if we do not increase our investment in the public sphere.  Firing teachers, eliminating funds for family planning, reducing health care for the elderly, all this and more will only put more people into bankruptcy, put more people on the streets, put more people onto an an already shrinking public dole. How that makes anything financially better absolutely eludes me.

Critics of government programs derive their energy from the fact that they resent having to help other people or protect other people from harm.  They claim to only want to help the deserving which distinction they confidently claim is only derived from the practice of capitalism .  That might be a good theory – but what are we going to do with the “undeserving?”  (Warning – argumentum ad hominem – I know some of the children of our government critics and more than a few of those children will get rewarded far more than they theoretically deserve.)  But the confident politicians (with their salary’s far exceeding the average American, and a gold plated health care coverage) will be issuing a death warrant to how many thousands of Americans, deserving and undeserving alike?    I am sickened by this madness.

There was a time when America had some potent sense of the common good and shared sacrifice – not now.  Those who want to know the end point of our current strategy should read Jared Diamond’s Collapse, particularly the chapter on the fate of the Vikings’ first settlement of Greenland.  If we do not recover a sense of the common good odds are we will share their fate – not a good one.  Societies with no detectable sense of the common good are just not long for this world – for such is no society at all.

 

 

The Mind that “Knows” God

Scott Atran’s In God we Trust contains a magnificent analysis of why our minds can conceive of a god or gods – it’s not even remotely a difficult thing to do after the age of about four (although newer evidence suggests that “theory of mind” begins even earlier when tests for the capacity do not rely upon formal language skills).

Theory of mind is, in its simplest form, our ability to understand that others have a domain of thought which is distinctive to our own.  The traditional “Sally and Ann doll test” points out that at age three  children imagine that everyone else knows what they know – even when what they know can’t be known by anyone else.  But  after age four children become aware that people can be wrong about things they (the children) themselves know – that others therefore have a mind that operates independently of their own.  This capacity in turn makes it possible for us to easily imagine that we can understand the thinking of other people – understand, in fact, even people we do not know and have never met.

I could spend some time, for instance, writing about my father.  You would feel, but only because of what I wrote, that you had some insights into his character and his story.  You’ve never met him – and for all you know I could be making up the whole story.  But as long as you had little reason to distrust me and  the story didn’t completely violate what you imagine could be true you would be inclined to accept what I had to say about my father.

Nothing too mysterious here.  We all are capable of this kind of communication and do it all the time.  But what exactly is the real  difference between Samuel C. Lange the Father and God the Father?  From a neurological perspective there’s not much of any useful distinction.  You’ve never met either my father or God the Father but clearly people don’t have much trouble accepting  information about such  non-present “realities” from people they have no reason to distrust.

Of course, the cost benefit ratio in believing in either Samuel or God is different.  There’s little cost or benefit when it comes to believing or disbelieving the story about Samuel.  Agreeing to the story about God is far more costly, but the promised benefits are also of some consequence.  Add also the difference that perceptions about authority make.  If your neighbor talked at some length about “god the Father” you might say, “Interesting idea.”  But put that neighbor in a highly ritualized setting and give her a big hat and you would be surprised at how much more willingly you would entertain the idea.

The bigger issue is, however, not whether the brains of human beings are good at this kind of thinking – they are. But is the god that can be thus imagined a god that exists?  Not everything we imagine does exist and it is really important to remember that there is always some difference between what we believe to be the case – and what is the case. Religion needs to be about the latter, even at the expense of the former.  The closer our beliefs cohere with what is the case, the better off we will be – always.  There are lots of reasons to be skeptical about claims about god; but then, proving that a god doesn’t exist is always harder than proving that a god does exist.  Both equations may turn out to be impossible to solve – but is that a fact of the world, or a feature of our minds?

The Death of Liberalism, Part 2

Since the arrival of the environmental movement liberalism has found it almost impossible to get much traction and I suspect it is our old friend the brain saying, in effect, “Are you out of your mind?  We’re running out of water, food, energy, copper, even helium, etc.  Time to emphasize competition because the race for survival has become far more selective.  Do everything in your power to make sure your kid gets into Harvard.  Say you favor civil rights – but if it costs you something – don’t really make any substantive moves.”

It is sad that arguments for the commonweal get no traction while calls for privatization and “it’s your money” demands for lowering taxes seem almost bulletproof.  The notion that government can do no right while corporations can do no wrong is ludicrous – and seemingly unassailable.  If government had been run by Bernie Madoff, Enron, BP, General Motors, AIG, numerous banks on Wall Street, etc. etc – there would be talk of revolution.

But ultimately, criticizing corporate reality will do nothing for liberalism.  Liberals tend to greatly overestimate the attractiveness of their critical analysis – it always comes out sounding like we all should eat 8 servings of vegetables while the contravening point of view’s “Sure you can live on desert” is powerfully seductive.

Liberalism, no matter what we call it, will not thrive until people can be convinced that liberals can create the conditions for success better than any other point of view.  In sum we must be able to demonstrate that a greatly invigorated capacity for cooperation will help us more than the continued increase of competition.  And we should ride hard with the clear advantage: cooperation – as long as it is fair – is always way more fun.   It is not hard to step over the line which separates enjoying a game from being a jerk.

What this means is that liberalism’s revival will not depend upon our ability to provide reasonable alternatives to fears of falling behind in competitive fitness nor upon our ability to scare people into behaving well with each other.   But convince people that there is more than enough to go around – and getting it is easier with cooperation – we’re good.  Thankfully, there is more than enough to go around.  And besides which, cooperation is not merely a nice idea – all our children will inherit a far crueler world if we don’t get some game.  Wealth can only forestall – but not end – the threat to our well being.  Actually – wealth will only bring dire consequences more quickly.