Occupy Unitarian Universalism

The Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence has extended an invitation to members of their local Occupy movement to camp at their church.  The initial expected numbers are about 12-15 people in six tents.  Details about the regulations of the arrangement are available at Occupy Northampton’s website, as well as a report about the meeting between Unitarian Society representatives, Occupy participants, and the mayor of Northampton that produced the agreement, and a report of the discussion that subsequently occurred within the Occupy Northampton group.

Meanwhile, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee has created open letters in support of the Occupy movement  which can be read and signed online, one for individuals and another for congregations and organizations.  The former has 4200+ signatures at this point, suggesting a widespread support for Occupy ideas within Unitarian Universalism.  UUA president Peter Morales visited Occupy Boston in October and participated in a UU vespers service at the site; subsequently he released a statement of sympathy and solidarity.  Later, the Board of Trustees of the UUA visited Occupy Boston as well.  Perhaps the best place to keep track of the ongoing interaction between Unitarian Universalism and Occupy is via the tracker set up by Peter Bowdon at his UU Growth Blog.  UUpdates, the UU blog aggregator, also helps one keep tabs on the online discussion (and is one of the only places you can find the few–but vocal–conservative UU voices opposing Occupy).

Unitarian Universalism’s alignment with progressive political/social causes is well known.  Perhaps the most direct precedent for the actions of the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence is the participation many UU churches had in the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s, or perhaps the shelter provided to draft resisters during the Vietnam War era (if one wants to go back much further, shelter and aid to fugitive slaves by Unitarian and Universalist churches might apply as another example of offering church space for people to sleep at).

In 1841, Rev. William Ellery Channing, founding father of American Unitarianism, wrote a letter to miners in England, detailing his mid-19th century prescription for the elevation of the laboring classes:

1. Temperance: “Ardent spirits have been the curse of the laborer.”
2. Renunciation of violence in the cause of class warfare: “Your true strength lies in growing intelligence, uprightness, self-respect, trust in God, and trust in one another.”
3. Avoidance of atheism: “It is under the cross that the battle of humanity is to be fought.”
4. National education: “To make [the laborer] enlightened and efficient, at once able and disposed to discharge wisely his public and private duties.”
5. Focus on inward satisfaction: “Good wages are not happiness.  A man may prosper and still be a poor creature. . . Our very thoughts may be the means or occasion of signal virtues, and in this way may bring a peace and hope which no mere prosperity can give.”

From this we can see both that Unitarianism has had a long-standing interest in the plight of workers, and that it has often been approached from the perspectives of the middle and upper classes.  Paternalism and concerns for propriety have often been mingled, therefore, with genuine sympathy and actual assistance.  This pattern has by no means passed away today, though in the contemporary context the gulf has grown so great between gigantic corporations unimaginable in Channing’s time and everyday workers (including so-called white collar workers in many cases) that class lines must be drawn differently than in his day.  The situation of the Universalists, who generally occupied a notably lower class standing than the Unitarians is somewhat more complicated.  Readers interested in UU class history can get a good start with Mark Harris’s Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History.

A Survey of Non-UUA-Affiliated Unitarian Universalists

Tandi Rogers, the Growth Strategy Specialist of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, is reaching out to UUs beyond the walls of UUA-affiliated churches.  This means people who identify as Unitarian Universalists, but don’t attend churches that are part of the UUA (what she calls “Free-Range UUs).  It is well known that perhaps the majority of UUs in North America are not actually members of UUA churches.  What isn’t as well known–beyond anecdote and supposition–is why that is, what the demographics of these free-rangers are, how they conduct their lives as “independent UUs,” and other related questions (Peter Bowden lists some of the reasons people don’t attend UU churches at his UU Growth Blog).  While the survey is not systematic (it casts a wide net hoping to snag willing participants, rather than methodically working with a representative sample size), it will be a good start toward better comprehension of the phenomenon of Unitarian Universalism beyond the congregations (hopefully Ms. Rogers will share her results when the project is completed).  If you are a UU who doesn’t belong to a church, please consider taking part in the short survey.  And if you know anyone who might fit the profile of a free-range UU, please pass the survey on to them.  The site link is: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FreeRangeUUs

Dr. Emily Mace Hired as New Director of Harvard Square Library

Harvard Square Library, a project of First Parish in Cambridge (Mass.), has hired Dr. Emily Mace as their new director.  Dr. Mace is a great fit for the site: she was trained in liberal religious history at Princeton University, and she teaches on Unitarian Universalist topics for Starr King School for the Ministry.  For those unfamiliar with Harvard Square Library, it’s a website that includes biographies of important Unitarians and Universalists, as well as some documents by/about these figures (including entire books!).  Not surprisingly, it tends to have a particular focus on Cambridge and the Boston area (hardly inappropriate for UU history).

Strolling Through Boston’s Unitarian-Universalist History

HUUMS (Harvard Divinity School Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Students) sent out a notice recently to draw attention to its historic UU walking tours.  UU seminarians are available to lead two hour walking tours in the Holy Land (aka Boston and its environs), which can include Divinity Chapel where Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famed Divinity School Address on July 15, 1838.  Check out their website for more information.

The Unitarian Universalist Association also provides a walking tour pamphlet,created by Christine Jaronski, if you prefer to do it yourself.  It doesn’t include Divinity Chapel (since it sticks to sites right around UUA headquarters), but has many interesting sites.  Perhaps readers will want to suggest other nearby sites that walkers can appreciate.

Coming Soon: An Introduction to the Unitarian and Universalist Traditions

Mark Harris, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society and author of many books on Unitarian-Universalist subjects, has a new co-written (with Andrea Greenwood) volume coming out next month from Cambridge University Press.  An Introduction to the Unitarian and Universalist Traditions is the latest offering in the long-running Introduction to Religion series.  While details will have to wait until the book is released, it is clear that Greenwood and Harris situation Unitarian-Universalism as a global religion, with the United States just one (important) site for the religion’s development.  Here is the table of contents:

1. Liberal religion and the foundations of the Unitarian and Universalist faiths
2. The European background
3. Great Britain
4. Early America
5. Unitarians and Universalists in the Republic
6. A religion for one world
7. Polity
8. Theology
9. Worship
10. Science and ecology
11. Architecture, music and the arts
12. Education, welfare and human rights
13. Unitarian Universalism in the 21st century.

Harris has produced many fine books worth checking out, most recently the slim but important Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History.  He also wrote the massive reference volume Historical Dictionary of Unitarian Universalism (hint: available far cheaper in the paperback version with the title The A to Z of Unitarian Universalism).

More Details on the UU Scholars and Friends Session at the AAR

Unitarian Universalist Scholars and Friends Discussion

Saturday, November 19, 6:30-9:00 pm

Continental Ballroom 2, Hilton Union Square

Theme:  “Celebrating Embodied and Transformative Worship and Ritual”:

“Our annual conversation will explore ritual practices that build multi-religious, justice-loving beloved communities. Unitarian Universalists have long struggled to transcend both the cultural and class privileges of our forebears and our inherited skepticism about ritual and the body. In this event we will celebrate the new possibilities that open up when we join these two struggles together. A diverse group of panelists will share both specific case studies and general principles drawn from the fields of theology and ritual studies.  Our emphasis will be on what is now working well within and beyond Unitarian Universalist communities, as well as on ritual strategies for turning failures into opportunities for growth. Panelists include Dorsey Blake, Clyde Grubbs, Emily Mace, and Robert McCauley. Myriam Renaud will moderate and Nancy Palmer Jones will respond. Sponsored by Starr King School for the Ministry, Meadville Lombard Theological School, Harvard Divinity School, Beacon Press, and UUA Panel on Theological Education.”

Schedule for Collegium 2011

Collegium is the annual conference for Unitarian-Universalist scholars, be they undergraduates or senior professors.  This year the gathering will be in Los Gates, CA, timed to be advantageous to scholars attending the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in San Francisco.  For more information and to download the conference registration form, visit http://www.uucollegium.org/.  Here is the current schedule for Collegium 2011:

COLLEGIUM 2011 PROGRAM

Presentation Retreat and Conference Center

Los Gatos, California

Wednesday, November 16- Saturday, November 19

Wednesday, November 16

2:00     Registration

4:30     Social Hour: Special Welcome to UU Doctoral Students and Seminarians

6:00     Dinner

7:30     Ingathering: Welcome & Introductions

8:00     Distinguished Guest Gabriella Lettini: “Community Truth Commissions as Spiritual Discipline and Lived Theology”

 Thursday, November 17

8:00     Breakfast

8:45     Devotions

 9:00     Session I: Unitarianism

Megan Joiner: “Fresh Thoughts on Public Theology: The Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Unitarian Women”

Sheri Prud’homme:  “Apocalypse of the Mind or Creative Middle Ground: God, Nature and Humankind In Emerson’s Nature”

Lydia Willsky: “William Ellery Channing, Frederick Henry Hedge and the Dilemma of the Embodied Woman”

10:45   Break

11:00   Session II: Universalism

Bob Lane: “The Restorationist Controversy and the Challenge of Punishment”

Avery Guest: “The Decline of the Universalism in New York State”

12:00   Lunch

1:30     Distinguished Guest Gabriella Lettini: “Moral Injury as a Hidden    Wound of War and the Need for Soul Repair Communities”

3:00     Break

3:15     Session III: Religious History as Narrative

Arliss Ungar: The Life and Times of Francis Cutting (1834 – 1913): Unitarian Lay Leader,

Businessman, Benefactor

Helene Knox: “Chronology of the Radical Reformation in Transylvania”

Richard Kellaway: “Rev. John White, The Founder of New England; Launching the Journey Towards Unitarianism”

5:00     Social Hour

6:00     Dinner

7:30     Annual Collegium Business Meeting

 Friday, November 18

8:00     Breakfast

8:45     Devotions

9:00     Session IV: 21^st Century Liberal Theology

Allison Downie: “Turning Inside Out: Toward an Ecofeminist Spirituality of Openness”

Patrice Curtis: “Taking Testimony, Giving Testimony”

Myriam Renaud: “The Evolution of the Symbol-Concept, God, in Gordon Kaufman’s Theology”

10:45   Break

11:00   Session VI: A New Unitarian Universalist Primary Source Collection: A Brainstorming Session led by Dan McKanan

12:00   Lunch

1:30     Session V: Panel: UU Epistemologies: How Unitarian Universalists Know What They Know

3:30     Memorial

5:00     Social Hour

6:00     Dinner

7:00     A Reading of Poetry Inspired by UU forebears with Helene Knox

8:00     Ingathering: Reflections and Conclusions

 Saturday, November 19

8:00     Breakfast, Farewells, & Departure

19th Century Hymn Tinkering

It is often noted how eagerly and often contemporary Unitarian-Universalists alter hymns.  Usually this is done to remove some aspect of the received hymn that is deemed objectionable; sometimes a more acceptable replacement is inserted, while at other times the offending words, phrases, or concepts are simply excised.  Common targets include male-gendered language, God, and the supremacy of the Christian religion.  At other times, the alteration is made for aesthetic, rather than ideological reasons.

Garrison Keillor of NPR’s “Prairie Home Companion” created a controversy when he–somewhat sourly–observed in  December 2009:

Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough.

Keillor attributed this religious buccaneering to the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson (who served as a Unitarian minister for a few years, retiring in 1832) and to cultural elites in general.  Emerson is not remembered as a particularly flagrant hymn-tinkerer; indeed, he was himself a hymnist, whose hymns have imparted phrases preserved today in the common culture, such as “the shot heard round the world.”  That one is from his 1836 “Concord Hymn,” which was set to an older tune, a common practice in Emerson’s day and one that continues among Unitarian-Universalists and many others today.

Emerson was by no means the originator of liberal religious hymn-altering.  Nor was it simply a practice of cultural elites.  Consider for example the Universalist Hymn-Book published by Hosea Ballou and Edward Turner in 1821, when the 18-year-old Emerson was still years away from enrolling at Harvard Divinity School.  Ballou and Turner were the greatest Universalist ministers of their generation, but they could hardly be ranked among the true elites of New England.  Neither had attended college, and the largely self-educated Ballou was the son of desperately poor farmers, a not uncommon demographic for Universalists.  Unitarians typically looked down on Univeralists as poor, uneducated bumpkins–Ballou not excepted–and these class divisions were a major factor in keeping the liberal Unitarians and Universalists from cooperating more closely.

Non-elites from the pre-Emersonian era, Ballou and Turner were nonetheless staunch liberal Christians.  Whenever it suited them, they altered received hymns, often for the purpose of making them match the doctrines preached in Universalist churches.  Critiquing earlier Universalist use of partialist hymns, they noted:

The sentiments, that the Deity required an expiring victim, by way of satisfaction to his judgment; that the death of Christ operated to cancel the debt which the sinner owed; and that God died upon the cross and rose from the dead; these, though undoubtedly believed with sincerity by those who composed the hymns in which they are found, are considered as unsupported by revelation, and unapproved by reason; and they are not GENERALLY believed in our societies.

Hymns with such sentiments were excluded altogether, or modified to suit the whims of the editors.  Such liberties should hardly be shocking: the English hymnody tradition as we are familiar with it (starting with Isaac Watts) was little over a hundred years old, and thus had yet to go through the fossilization process of nostalgia and conservative traditionalism.  Watts was a target of Ballou and Turner’s reform, for instance.  His hymn “Let us adore the eternal word,” ended thusly:

Daily our mortal flesh decays,
But Christ our life shall come;
His unresisted power shall raise
Our bodies from the tomb.

But as altered by Ballou and Turner, it ends:

Daily our mortal flesh decays,
But Christ our life shall come;
And by his mighty power shall raise
And take his children home.

The line about the dead bodily coming forth from their tombs has been removed, replaced with a less supernaturalist line that relies on the characteristic Universalist familial imagery. Likewise, another Watts hymn declares:

‘Tis love that makes our cheerful feet
In swift obedience move;
The devils know and tremble too,
But Satan cannot love.

But this is far too supernaturalist for Ballou and Turner, who did not believe in literal devils.  Their version of this hymn reads:

‘Tis love that makes our cheerful feet
In swift obedience move;
Affliction’s bitter cup is sweet,
When mixed with heavenly love.

This is a truly Universalist sentiment, as Ballou so often emphasized in his preaching that God allowed misfortune to occur during life yet the experience of such was transformed by the constant knowledge of God’s ever-present love.

The takeaway from this is that religious liberals have been altering hymns for a very long time–indeed, one could claim that alteration is itself a form of traditional practice–and that it derives in no way from the proclivities of the top of society.  It is the liberal spirit itself, not class prerogatives, that drives such practices, and it has not been confined to the Unitarians or their descendants.

Muslim Influence on the Roots of Unitarian-Universalism

Like all religions and denominations, Unitarian-Universalism springs from multiple sources, acknowledged and otherwise.  The overwhelming taproot of UUism is Protestant Christianity, especially the Reformed tradition, with more recent contributions from Humanism (itself connected in ways to the liberal end of the Protestant tradition) and today a wide variety of religions that inform individual members (their overall impact is much more partial).  Less often noted are the traces of Muslim influence on the denomination’s founding figures.  But while the Muslim influence has never been critical, it has at times played a noteworthy role.

For the Universalists, perhaps the greatest example lies in the religious awakening of George de Benneville.  De Benneville was the first person to openly teach Universalism in colonial America.  An immigrant from France, he was first turned toward Universalism by the example set by some Muslim Moorish sailors whom he encountered:

Being arrived at Algiers, as I walked upon deck I saw some Moors who brought some refreshments to sell. One of them slipped down and tore a piece out of one of his legs. Two of his companions, having lain him on the deck, each of them kissed the wound, shedding tears upon it, then turned towards the rising of the sun, they cried in such a manner that I was much moved with anger at their making such a noise and ordered my waiter to bring them before me. Upon demanding the reason of their noise, they perceived that I was angry, asked my pardon, and told me the cause was owing to one of their brothers having hurt his leg by a fall and that they kissed the wound in order to sympathize with him, and likewise shed tears upon it and took part with him; and as tears were saltish, they [were] a good remedy to heal the same; and the reason of their turning towards the sun’s rising was to invoke him who created the sun to have compassion upon their poor brother, and prayed he would please to heal him. Upon that I was so convinced, and moved within, that I thought my heart would break, and that my life was about to leave me. My eyes were filled with tears, and I felt such an internal condemnation, that I was obliged to cry out and say, “Are these Heathens? No; I confess before God they are Christians, and I myself am a Heathen!” Behold the first conviction that the grace of our Sovereign Good employed: he was pleased to convince a white person by blacks!

This meeting led de Benneville on a long and colorful spiritual journey that ended with him espousing Universalism in pre-revolutionary America.  The whole account is well worth reading, especially as it shows the emotional and mystical flavor of many early Universalists.

In distinction from de Benneville’s willingness to be moved and influenced by non-Christians, early Unitarian views toward Islam tended to be quite exclusive and derisive (no moreso than the general Anglo-American attitudes of the time, it should be said).  But there were moments of measured praise as well.  Proto-Unitarian and Unitarian arguments over religion in the 18th and early 19th centuries raise the matter of Islam (or Mohammadism, as it was typically called) with rather surprising frequency.  While declaiming other aspects of the religion, these early Unitarians were sometimes impressed that a religion with such a large following held a strictly monotheistic (i.e. unitarian) view of God.  While a minor weapon in their arsenal, the early Unitarians were willing to point to unitarian Islam as evidence for the correctness of their viewpoint (often as a way to ridicule Trinitarian Christians, in effect saying: “see, even these pagan Moslems can grasp the correctness of the Unitarian position, while you supposedly enlightened Christians hold to a superstitious and irrational doctrine of three-equals-one”).  Consideration of Islam often served the role of helping Unitarians to refine their positions, locating exactly what was Christian in their tradition and how it could be argued.  In the mid-19th century Ralph Waldo Emerson found poetic inspiration in the words of the Quran, though his view of Muhammad was not favorable.  As the 19th century wore on and moved into the early 20th century, Islam remained a frequent topic of Unitarian discussion, especially in relation to the debate over missionary activity.  Some used standard arguments against Islam (that took on an increasingly racist tone in the later 19th century) in order to privilege Unitarianism over Islam, in part out of reaction to criticisms that Unitarians were essentially teaching a (heathen and inferior) Muslim doctrine in the guise of Christianity.  A growing number of others, however, found much to admire in Islam, and in particular Muhammad’s image among Unitarians was progressively rehabilitated.

Dragged Kicking and Screaming into Heaven

Thank you to the various people who made suggestions (at this or other blogs) of material for the Universalism course.  The final syllabus is still months away, so there’s still plenty of time to tweak it.  One suggestion for contemporary Universalist resources was made by Patrick McLaughlin at Dan Harper’s blog: Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed’s sermon “Dragged Kicking and Screaming into Heaven.”  Dan expressed the hope that it would show up online, and others may find it interesting, so here are the pointers:

The sermon in pdf form:

http://www.mluc.org/Sermons/100314mmr.pdf

The sermon in mp3 form:

http://www.firstuusandiego.org/dragged-kicking-and-screaming-into-heaven