WHY AM I A UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST?

November 13, 2005

Kenneth Torquil MacLean

          During  the last thirty-five years I have spent a lot of time in England, and I have often preached in Unitarian churches there and attended them when I was not preaching.  Any American who is involved with religion is confronted with certain puzzles when in England.  In a place with so many churches, many of them very historic and some of them very  beautiful, why do so few English people go to church?  And what do they put in its place?  Though it is tempting to believe that many Americans go to church just out of habit, I really do not believe that is so.  There must be genuine needs that are fulfilled when Americans in such large numbers and proportions of the population go to church, and it is easy for us to think that those are universal needs.  But how do people in England and in the rest of Europe fulfill those needs, since so few of them—some say 2%-- go to church?   The only acceptable easy answer I know is that those people are just different from Americans.  Their history is certainly different.

          When we go back behind the question of why we attend this particular church to the broader query of what is religion, there are plenty of answers and definitions.  I like a couple of short ones and the longer one that I read to you this morning from my friend Ralph Helverson.  He says that we all share a “religious impulse” that arises out of the “passions of our” physical being, and we are religious when we react in certain ways to that impulse.  Paul Tillich, of course, says that religion is ultimate concern or taking life and death seriously.  By Tillich’s first definition, everyone is religious, because everyone must have some ultimate concern, something that drives the way they live.  And since I have gone to church all my life and devoted the last fifty years of my life to a religious profession, I guess I must be religious.  But why this particular type of religion?  Why am I a Unitarian Universalist.

          The first easy answer is that I married into it.  When I met Harriet Johnston she was working as the Director of Religious Education in a Unitarian church—we had not yet merged with the Universalists then.  Harriet had attended the Yale Divinity School for two years, and when she came out of that experience she did not want to return to the Disciples of Christ in which she had grown up.  She worked for the YWCA in Pittsburgh for a couple of years and then accepted a job with the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.  When she went into the Arlington Street Church in Boston one day, almost by accident, she decided that she had come home.

          I had grown up in the Methodist Church and was active in the University Church on the University of Southern California campus until we were married.  I was a high school teacher at the time.  We started attending the Unitarian Community Church of Santa Monica, and I felt very comfortable there, both with the Sunday services and with the people I met.  After a year and a half I suggested changing my career plans and going to divinity school myself, and we made the decision that day.  I was very surprised, and I was halfway through divinity school before Harriet told me that she had always planned to marry a minister.  She gave me a strip of cartoons all on the theme of “Never underestimate the power of a woman!”

          Divinity school challenged me to figure out what I really believed about the usual religious questions and also to decide what I thought the real religious questions were.  And I found my point of view shifting away from what I had been taught was important to believe and framing the questions in what seemed to me a more basic, fundamental way.   When I was in high school my wonderful Latin teacher, Miss Reeves, had told the whole class that I was cynical, which I took as rather a compliment.  Now, in divinity school, I came to think of myself as more skeptical.  When I asked myself, “Did Jesus Christ rise from the dead?”  “Do I believe in the Trinity?”  “Do I believe in God?”  “Am I still a Christian?”  I came away from that interrogation of myself with skeptical answers.  It did not happen overnight.  And I received support and encouragement from my work in a Unitarian church, but it was my journey; nobody told me what to believe.  I began, especially after I served a church as a student minister in my senior year, to formulate different questions:  What do I believe about death?  Is Jesus a significant figure in my religious understanding?  How do I really know what is right and what is wrong?  What is my life really all about? 

Of course I am making this all sound very intellectual, but that was only a part of it.  In the Unitarian church, from the beginning, I was meeting a lot of interesting people and making some good friends.  It has seemed to me that when people go looking at a religious community, part of what they are looking for is attitudes that fit in somewhat with their own, and people they are comfortable with, people who are warm and welcoming and stimulating and good to be with.  What people I have come to know in this denomination!  Dick, who spent seven years going up the Amazon River in a canoe collecting plant specimens and becoming the world authority on psychedelic drugs.  Emilie, who often could not sleep and would read Whitehead and Wordsworth until morning came.  Jack, who left ministry for a while for a day job and taught dancing at night for Arthur Murray.  David, who instructed two newly-elected Presidents of the United States about health care in our country.  Edith, a wonderful nurse who said that she specialized in Unitarian gall bladder cases.  Sam, who was called in to put the finances of the Smithsonian in order.  And Janet who is now about ninety-four, who said when I visited her last year: “When the Poor People’s March came to Knoxville, you asked me to feed a thousand people, and that was the biggest thing I ever did!”  Rebecca and Lillian, who have been the mainspring of Unitarian groups in isolation, one in the Philippines and the other in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

I could go on telling you of wonderful, wonderful people who have enriched my life everywhere I have gone in this ministry, and they are part of why I am still a Unitarian Universalist, but that is not the whole story.  Together we make up a different kind of church, I believe, and the distinguishing feature must have something to do with religious freedom.  That is what we have stood for in many different settings over more than two centuries, four centuries if we count the Unitarians in Transylvania.  Like so many religious, social, and political movements in the world, we started out by opposing the dominant beliefs of the time.  For Unitarians in the Puritan Congregational churches of New England, what was rejected was a belief in the Trinity—that gave us our name, Unitarian instead of Trinitarian—and for the Universalists it was the preaching that told them they were going to hell.  They believed in Universal salvation.  The meaning of salvation has changed for many people over two centuries, but the basic idea that this is a church for all—not for just the elect, or the saved, or the born-again—has not changed. 

That leads me to the inevitable question: when strangers discover that I am a Unitarian Universalist minister, they often ask, “Oh, what do Unitarian Universalists believe?”  It seems like a reasonable question until you wonder, as you balance an hors d’oeuvre and a glass of wine, where to begin.  Do you give them the history?  Do you start by talking of Christianity?  Do you tell them the things we don’t believe?  Do you tell them about the people who died for rejecting certain beliefs in Europe?  It was an impossible dilemma until I fashioned my two-word response:  When they ask, “What do Unitarian Universalists believe?” I say, “About what?”  The truth is that there are just a couple of ideas that I can say with confidence just about all Unitarian Universalists will accept”  human dignity and the democratic method of making decisions.  Most of our stance on basic issues flows from those two principles.  Our commitment to human dignity meant that we were early involved in the civil rights struggle; the feminist revolution; and the movement for gay rights and equality in civil marriage.  Most but not all Unitarian Universalists believe that women should make the decision whether or not to have an abortion without interference from the state.

These issues tend to be dominant over such questions as what happened two thousand years ago?  What do we believe about Jesus?  Are we Christians?  It is clear that our roots are firmly in the Protestant Reformation, more Calvinist than Lutheran, more Puritan than evangelical, and more Congregational than Presbyterian.  But, like the original Puritan churches of New England, we have no hierarchy, no bishops, no authority over the local church, and no creed that everyone must accept to join.  That means that we can, on occasion, be radical.  Most of the time, we are not.

          Then are we really a religion?  Are we spiritual?  My response to the first question is that by the definitions I have offered: “being religious means asking passionately the questions of the meaning of our existence and being willing to accept answers, even when the answers hurt,” we are religious.  Are we spiritual?  I like the definition of spirituality that came from a sermon delivered by Alida De Coster, who was my Associate Minister: “Whatever summons us to transform the world into ever wider channels of justice and of love—this is spirituality.”  We try to do our part.  When we join a church, we are acknowledging that religion is not simply an individual matter.  Whatever we believe about ultimate questions, whatever we feel we are called to do, we cannot do it alone.  Together we have a better chance of transforming some part of the world, especially when we join our efforts to larger groups, focused on the great needs of people near and far.  This church does that, and it is what makes me proud to be the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Desert!

I spoke with Ric Masten yesterday.  He is an old friend of long standing who has had a great impact on our denomination through his singing, his speaking, his poetry.  He is the only Troubadour who has received ministerial fellowship in our denomination.  For several years he has been fighting cancer, but he seems to be doing pretty well.  I must write and tell him that he wrote the hymn that we sing best: Let it be a dance!  Let it.