WHERE HAVE ALL THE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS GONE?
A few days ago I pulled an interesting fossil from my library, Leo Rosten’s Religions of America. It is an early Seventies almanac of the most significant religions practiced in the United States. As such it preserves the era’s zeitgeist of religious belief, like an ancient insect in amber. Rosten’s almanac captures the zenith of that giddiness of liberation from what every thinking man or woman understood to be the musty dogma, mean-spirited morality, and docile faith of that dank, cramped, fearful religion of yesteryear.
It was a cocksure giddiness blind to the re-awakening of orthodoxy, evangelicalism, and pentecostalism in Christianity, the resurgence of traditionalism and mysticism in Judaism, and, darkly, the jihadism in Islam that would envelope the world only a few years later. It was a short-lived giddiness of the sudden lightness of being born of cutting loose from the ground that had frustrated flights of fancy but also rooted one in the nourishing earth of reality, and so once deracinated soon shriveled. Indeed, it was a misbegotten giddiness as the subsequent decline of the now rootless mainline Protestant denominations and their liberal Catholic fellow-travelers in the wake of the revitalization of traditional religious beliefs attests.
The vanguard of this liberation from old-time religion is best exemplified in Rosten’s almanac by the Unitarian Universalists. Here are some of the responses by a Unitarian Universalist representative to Rosten’s survey:
On faith: “[We] are agnostics, humanists, even atheists, as well as nature worshipers, pantheists, and those who affirm a personal God.”
On hope: “For Unitarian Universalists, prayer is less a matter of who is listening and more a concern with the aspirations expressed.”
On social justice (i.e., charity): “Unitarian Universalists have pioneered in movements to eliminate restrictive laws regarding abortion.”
On sin: “Unitarian Universalists reject the traditional Christian idea [of] original sin … They believe in the importance of virtue and virtuous living and doing for its own sake, and not out of some hypothetical ‘salvation’ or ‘reward’ in the future or the ‘hereafter’.”
On divine judgment: “Heaven and hell are states of mind, created by human beings.”
On authority: “Many Unitarian Universalists have a concept of a ‘loose-leaf’ Bible, that is, they find inspiration in many writings, the scriptures of many religions, the philosophers of many times, the literature of many cultures.”
On creed: “A Unitarian Universalist is one of a community of religious persons whose beliefs and ethics are freely chosen … They rely upon their own reason and personal understanding. … All know there is no special virtue in being able to declare, ‘I believe in God.’”
As to that declaration, perhaps not by itself. But then it is religion that brings meaning to that declaration and so makes possible virtue in the belief in God. So why would a person who feels no need to make that declaration feel any need for a religion that affirms that feeling? Absent that foundational belief, what can a religion meaningfully affirm? As the expressions of Unitarian Universalist sentiment above show, not much but the endorsement of antinomian willfulness, which is the mark of the appetite-appeasing clever beast in us and not the purpose-seeking spiritual being. Religion nourishes the latter and frustrates the former. Hence, the vapidity of Unitarian Universalism and its near-extinction today.
Unfortunately, too many Protestant denominations and Catholic bishops over the past three decades have not heeded the cautionary tale of the Unitarian Universalists. They have lost many in their flocks as they have drained religion of its meaning, all too often to put into the service of secular agendas. For some once-prominent Christian communities, especially Anglican and Reformed denominations, this has become a clear and present danger. They are riven between the liberals who are marching head-long, like the Unitarian Universalists before them, toward nihilism and the traditionalists who are resisting the destruction of their churches in a black hole of meaninglessness. Yet other denominations have become de-spirited carcasses for vultures to feast upon and twist individual congregations to their own perverted ends – as recently exemplified by Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, who has transmogrified the faith of the Puritans into an orgy of hatred against all, even God, opposed to his plan for Heaven on Earth.
Fortunately, Catholics have the Magisterium, which has maintained the integrity of Church doctrine in the face of assaults as vile as that of “liberation theology”. (Although lesser threats from liberals who would “liberate” the Church from orthodoxy remain insidious.) In addition to the renewal of orthodoxy among large segments of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, there has been a great flowering of religious enthusiasm over the past few decades, especially in the form of evangelicalism and pentecostalism. Without making light of the profound theological differences in these various re-awakenings, their common vigor resides in a full-throated institutional commitment to articles of faith. Unlike the Unitarian Universalists and the liberals following their dead-end path, the re-awakened are not scandalized by certitudes in religious belief. This is because in that certitude they have embraced a transcendent meaning for their lives that the liberals have traded away for a mess of hedonist pottage at best and nihilist at worst.
So where have all the Unitarian Universalists gone? Nowhere.
