Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church

An Address at the Church on 9th June 2002 by Peter Abrehart

It will hardly come as a surprise to you as I speak today with some optimism about Unitarianism and its future. But in doing so I do include a number of ifs, ands and maybes, but then almost everything in life is predicated by these words in one form or another.

I was dining with an old friend recently and the conversation turned around to what I'd be talking about today. Perhaps I should mention that the friend is a Psychologist, an Atheist and her experience of Unitarianism, apart from what she's gleaned from me, is American (her father was raised in a Amish type religious community in Wisconsin, but that's another story).

While she recognised the role of Unitarians on social issues, she made a point which could be paraphrased in these words "I agree with most of what Unitarians say and do, and I say and do most of those things without guidance from a Church; so why do you need to do good things in the context of a Church, which is an antiquated and obsolete concept?" She added that in all developed countries, apart from her native America, the word 'Church' would be off-putting rather than an encouragement to participate in activities. Her 'parting shot' on this subject was that when I could show her an important current social issue where the Unitarian Church played a pivotal, or even important role, she would recant.

I suspect that the attitude of my friend is probably very typical amongst a broad range of social strata from developed countries in Europe, Britain and here in this part of the South Pacific. We are predominately 'secular' societies where Church attendance is relatively small and, if the statistics are correct, declining at a fairly steady rate. Within those statistics there are contradictions, as there always is; one contradiction is the rise in fundamentalist religions – spectacular increases in membership, in the hundreds of percent are recorded; these can be a bit misleading because as the statisticians tell us, the numbers started off from a very small base; in any case the recruitment into fundamentalist religious groups seems to have plateaued, at least in the developed countries where reliable statistics are available from the late 1990's.

Speaking of which, if you have access to the Internet try and look at the site of the fastest growing religious cult in Russia – its leader is called 'Jesus of Siberia', his is only one of literally hundreds of cults that are flourishing in countries of the former Soviet Union.

So what does all this mean? We can say for sure that organised religion is declining, that the number of people classifying themselves as 'No Religion' or not replying to the religious question in the census is on the increase. We can also say that over three quarters of those who call themselves 'Christian' or more specifically 'Anglican', 'Uniting', 'Catholic' etc. do not attend Church in a manner that anyone could call regular i.e. most Christians are of the nominal variety (funerals and weddings notwithstanding).

But there is another thing happening which isn't reflected directly or clearly in the statistics, something we're all aware of as we mix with friends and watch, listen and read in the media; that is the emergence of people calling themselves 'Spiritual'.

It's that phenomena that I would like to concentrate on today because I believe it's interpretation, it's meaning and more importantly it's application has become a fundamental issue to Unitarianism – a core issue if you like about the existing and future relevance or redundancy of Unitarianism.

The debate is not just going on in our part of the world within ANZUA, but also in the US and UK equivalents. Debates within Unitarianism are not, of course anything new (you could mount a respectable argument that our denomination could be defined in this way).

I should emphasise at this stage that while I would not define myself as 'Spiritual' (which in itself is hard to define), I certainly recognise and respect people both within and outside Unitarianism who do classify themselves as such – in fact the net result of a diversity of beliefs should be that a more fundamental spirit of unity emerges from which can be found a substratum of truth (in the words of Rev. Victor James).

My concern about the relevance or otherwise of Unitarianism does not come from a concern about a multitude of opinions or beliefs, about Spirituality, Theism, Deism, Humanism etc., but rather something far more fundamental.

Many years ago I read a sermon about 'Diminished Unitarians' by Rev. Stephen Fritchman of the first Unitarian Church in Los Angeles. Some have argued that the points made by Fritchman are irrelevant in today's environment, and further that they were a reflection of the 'old' Theist/Humanist debate within Unitarianism, particularly American Unitarianism. This is simply not the case, as much of Fritchman's arguments centered on the outward looking nature as opposed to the inward looking trends within Unitarianism; that Unitarian social action should be aimed at cause rather than effect.
It would come as no surprise that Fritchman was accused of being too political - this same criticism has been levelled at numerous Unitarian luminaries and co-incidentally, at many social activists in the mainstream Protestant and Catholic Churches (including many who have spoken at this Church). A rather straight talking priest described it thus "...feeding and clothing the poor is considered OK, very Christian - start to ask too many questions about how and why poverty exists and you'll soon be the proverbial anti-Christ". The same priest confided to me after the service that he had worked with Unitarians in the UK and US for almost 6 years; he said they were 'lovely' people but seemed to be 'going backwards', he saw the look on my face and hastily added that "perhaps it seems that way because so many in the other churches have moved away from the band-aid attitude" - out of the mouths of priests?

Getting back to the Fritchman argument about 'Diminished Unitarians'. To those who talk of 'old hat' debates I would draw your attention to a very recent Essay entitled 'God, Worship, and the Tyranny of Intimacy' from one of the leading Unitarian Theological Schools, Meadville Lombard. Its author is David Bumbaugh, the Associate Professor and head of Religious Studies; with four decades of parish service, including the Ministry, his message is an important one. In quoting the following extracts from the Essay, I hope the essence of this message has been maintained (highlighting is mine):

When I joined the faculty of Meadville Lombard Theological School in January of 1999, following four decades of service in the parish, I was given the rare gift of time to reflect on what seems to be happening within Unitarian Universalism as fashions change and enthusiasms drift across our movement. My visits to a variety of congregations and my conversations with lay people, ministers and students leads me to believe that a significant theological shift is taking place among us--a shift which I believe radically challenges the way in which we understand ourselves and the nature of the religious venture.

I am not the only person, and certainly not the first to note that something significant has been happening to the way we understand ourselves and the nature of religious community. For sometime now we have been aware of new elements, new attitudes, new behaviors, new expectations arising with the Unitarian Universalist community. As is often the case when something unfamiliar emerges within a human society, we attempt to understand it, engage it, structure it using familiar terms and categories. We look back to our past and try to find some process, some framework, some precedent which will help understand what is happening to us. And that is largely how Unitarian Universalists have been responding to the theological shift which is manifesting itself among us.

I would like to suggest to you that these categories of struggle--Humanist-Theist;
Christian-non-Christian--are familiar terms which are ready at hand as we attempt to understand what is happening, but, in fact, they do not fully fit the circumstances and may, in fact, hide more than they reveal, blinding us to a wider dimension. I would submit that what is happening among us is but our version of a much larger shift that is occurring in religious thought and practice throughout the western world. In his book, WHEN GOD BECOMES GODDESS, Richard Grigg suggests that religion in the west is at a moment of deep transition, a transition caused by more than the generational differences and styles some observers have recognized.

The God who is emerging in contemporary thought, suggests Grigg, is a limited God, not omnipotent, not omniscient, not the cosmic CEO, but also not the impersonal God of Deism. Rather this is a God who can be relied on to provide strength to human beings in times of trouble and pain, in moments of sorrow and despair. This God is a source of power into which human beings may tap when their resources have grown thin and unreliable, when pain and confusion threaten to overwhelm them. This is the God of twelve step programs--a God who seems impotent in the face of self- destructive behavior--who cannot stop or prevent addictions or other self-defeating actions--but who represents a power greater than individual will, able to support and under gird personal efforts.

Grigg suggests that throughout the western world, increasingly it is not the God of
power, "Immortal, Invisible, God only wise" who is being invoked by religious people. Rather, he suggests it is the God of the still small voice, the God who, "When other helpers fail and comforts flee, help of the helpless [will] abide with me." I suspect that this is the God who is increasingly referenced in the revived theistic language being used in our congregations these days.

While this God seems to be very personal, very much like a household God, the God ensconced on personal altars in bedrooms and meditation rooms, Grigg suggests there is also a corporate quality to this God. Citing the influence of feminist theologians and the emergence of Goddess worship, he indicates that the corporate aspect of the God who is emerging is not the King, Lord, Father God who is out there, separate and apart from the world, but rather the divine spirit which is evoked in our coming together and which emerges in our relationships with one another and with the rest of creation. Grigg refers to this as enactment theology. By this he means that God does not have a separate existence apart from the relational community in which the sacred is enacted. And so, in our coming together, in the symbiotic relationship in which something arises which is more than the sum of its parts, God emerges, is enacted, is called into being. This is a transpersonal God; the sacred matrix out of which this God emerges is relational and the qualities and nature of this God depend upon the nature and quality of the relationship.

Again, I would argue that this is the kind of theism that seems to be finding voice within our congregations. It is a far cry from the theism against which the Humanist Manifesto reacted in 1933. It is Christian only in the sense that it carries the flavoring and the tint of having arisen in a Christian context. Clearly our predecessors who struggled over how and whether to maintain the Christian witness within Unitarianism and Universalism would scarcely recognize it as Christian. To attempt to explore the new theological landscape using the old maps of the Humanist-Theist or Christian-Non-Christian controversies is to misread the territory and to misunderstand the challenges this emergent theology presents.

But while the God of enactment theology, the sacred reality evoked by our genuine interactions and acknowledged relationships need not be limited, in truth we increasingly circumscribe the size and scope of our relationships until the enacted God is revealed to be a small and puny thing. I would submit to you that increasingly Unitarian Universalists are defining religious community in terms of intimacy and as a consequence we have permitted the vision of a larger arena of moral action and religious responsibility to weaken. The inevitable consequence is a lessened sense of what is possible, to whom or what we are responsible, and of the meaning of our own existence. Increasingly we are encapsulated within the narrow confines of intimate community and when this trend is joined to the new theology, the God who is enacted by us turns out to be little more than a team mascot.

Edwin Wilson's hymn asked "Where is our holy church?" and answered that question with this affirmation: "A mighty host respond, the people rise in every land to break the captive's bond." This is a vision of the religious institution which escapes parochialism, which is open to diverse ways of engaging the sacred, which takes seriously the stranger, the one who shares a prophetic imperative but who may never attend our worship service or be a visitor to our church building or settle into our community. But increasingly, Chris Raible's parody of Wilson's hymn seems more appropriate to what we are becoming. Chris wrote, "Where is our holy church, we only wish we knew. It might be those now gathered here, except we are so few."

In recent years, we have walked away from the understanding of the church as a public institution with a public responsibility, and have begun to embrace metaphors like church as family, and church as caring community, metaphors that reek of what one author calls "the tyranny of intimacy." What is missing in this approach to religion is any deep or genuine appreciation of the larger world that is symbolized by the stranger among us--the person who is not part of our intimate community of sharing, but whose insight and concern might preserve us from a kind of narrow narcissistic intimacy. What is missing in this approach to religion is any sense of the church as a public institution, in which the focus is broader than our immediate itches and personal scratches and which seeks to lift us out of our little local universes and into a world of over-arching concerns and responsibilities.

What is missing in this approach to religion is an understanding that the circle of relationship out of which a genuine sense of the sacred might be enacted must be broader than those who sit knee to knee with us in our circle of intimacy, but must also include the stranger we pass in the street, the women and men who will never sit in a circle with us, the woman or man who wanders into our church but is not willing to submit to the tyranny of intimacy which rigidly defines the boundaries of our institutional culture.

What is missing in this approach to religion is an understand that the job of the church is to lift us out of dumb fascination with ourselves and into a responsible engagement with a broken and bleeding world.

There are any numbers of rituals that have emerged within our corporate worship that demonstrate this shift in focus. Perhaps the most obvious is the ritual lighting of candles of joys and concerns--a practice which has swept our churches in recent years. The theory seems to be that if we can share our personal triumphs and tragedies we will strengthen the bonds of intimacy and, therefore, the sacred that is enacted among us will be more powerfully sustaining for us as we cope with the challenges and conflicts of our personal lives. That assumption may be right, but what a shrunken vision of the religious venture such a theory represents.

This was not always the case. In many churches there once was a feature of the Sunday service that was called Congregational response, Congregational Conversation, or less felicitously, Congregational Talkback. It was a symbolic act, as are virtually all elements of a worship service. But what it symbolized was a willingness to engage in a public conversation.

Worship is not the only place where the consequences of the new theism, based as it is in intimacy, can be seen. It can be seen dramatically in our evolving understanding of social action or social justice work. Once upon a time we understood it to be the responsibility of the church to speak truth to power, to expose the underlying assumptions and conventional behaviors which generate injustice and suffering, to call society as a whole and ourselves individually to confront the distance between our professed values and our policies and practices and seek to remove the causes of injustice and misery. As the new theism has arisen among us, a new sense of what is called "social justice work" has emerged. Just as the God of the new theism is a limited "God with us," sharer of our burdens and our sorrows, so we have limited our sense of what is required of us. We have given up the dream of a renewed society, in which justice would roll down like waters and mercy like a never failing stream, and have settled, instead for ways to be in solidarity with those who are victims of an unjust social order, and for programs which will ameliorate pain while giving us a sense of satisfaction and of immediate gratification. Just as "God with us" is unable to end pain but can provide support to us in our pain, so we have surrendered the dream that we might build a just society and have settled for supporting and being with those who suffer the consequences of injustice.

The dream of a redeemed social order has receded until is as distant as the second
coming and the New Jerusalem.

I began by suggesting that a significant theological shift is occurring within contemporary Unitarian Universalism. We misunderstand that shift if we think of it in terms of Theism and Humanism, or Christian and non-Christian. What is happening is a privatizing of religion, a domesticating of the sacred, a tribalizing of the holy, a long, slow retreat from the dream of "a world made fair and all her people one." For some of us, at least, it is this refocusing of the religious venture upon intimate rather than public relationships which is the source of conflict and which I, at least, fear will end by trivializing the entire religious enterprise.

The Bumbaugh essay rings particularly true to me, perhaps in part because I came to Unitarianism via a particular path, namely the Vietnam War and a simultaneous religious search. The Unitarian Church in the mid to late 60's provided an ideal environment for a young man looking for answers (they were very patient with my occasional lapses into militaristic and Catholic rhetoric). Many of the elderly members of the Church at that time were First World War veterans (including the minister Victor James), radicalised in both politics and religion by their experiences of war and depression. It didn't take me long to recognise the common threads of the 'radicalisation' process, it took a bit longer to see some very basic differences in attempting to provide answers to what had been experienced (Pacifists, Fabians socialists, Plymouth brethren to deistic Unitarian etc.etc.).

Many Unitarians such as I have, for most of our adult lives, viewed Unitarianism and social activism as mutually inclusive beliefs - when does a religious act become, or cease to be a political one? (or visa versa). To me the oft repeated saying that social activism should spring from Unitarian philosophy is a chicken and egg argument. Even the hiding of runaway slaves by Theodore Parker has been subject to 'revisionist' portrayal as a moral or religious act which had (almost accidental) political connotations; any reading of Parker shows that his morals and politics were so intertwined as to be indistinguishable - in any case his views were not shared by most his fellow Unitarians of the day. In fact most of our Unitarian 'saints' Martineau, Channing, Emerson, Parker etc. were not very popular in their day, including in Unitarian circles.

I would agree that 'my' or 'your' Unitarianism is not the only response to life experiences, nor is it restricted to social activism or fixed and immovable, because nothing in life can be anything but an ongoing learning process. There are many common beliefs that I share with other Unitarians and many that I don't - so even a 'secular humanist wedded to scientism' (one of the nicer things I've been called recently) can, and must respect other beliefs within and outside the Unitarian tradition - the only caveat for 'uniting' or 'engaging' being mutual respect (with respect being a real life attitude rather than just a word).

In closing I return to the question posed by my Psychologist friend that I mentioned earlier. The answer to what role we can play in taking up the important issues of the day is twofold in my view. Firstly, how much of that substratum of truth we can gain from our interaction with each other and secondly, having gained such truth upon which we can unite, what we do about it - both as a group and as individuals joined with others outside this Church – With the emphasis on DOING of the word rather than HEARING only.

To me this is the raison d'etre of Unitarianism, not the whole picture but certainly the essential core without which the structure becomes little more than a friendly get-together of what our visiting Priest called 'lovely people'. Our relevance as a denomination is, and always has been tied to our contribution to social progress; I sincerely hope that no amount of distraction will deflect us from this imperative – the service to humanity delivered in such a way that neither 'Diminishes' or 'Trivialises' our proud heritage.