Theology and society
Somehow, I missed Diana Bass Butler’s book The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church when it first came out in 2004. Butler has excellent insight into the current state of congregations in North America, and I find myself returning to the book again and again First Unitarian in New Bedford and I navigate the changed religious landscape of the early 21st C.
One key insight that Butler offers is that when things go wrong in your congregation, maybe you shouldn’t try to point fingers at blame at anyone in particular:
In the midst of [congregational] conflict, people often fail to recognize the obvious. What if no one can be blamed? What if no one is at fault? Many changes, conflicts, and tensions do not arise from factors within religious communities themselves. Rather, these things are the result of institutions reacting and responding to larger cultural changes — trends, ideas, and practices outside the church building [emphasis in original]….
As I think back on some of the congregational conflicts I have witnessed over the years, that strikes me as a very useful insight. Even in conflicts that have arisen from identifiably egregious behavior — clergy sexual misconduct comes immediately to mind — I believe that in some cases the egregious behavior has been able to infect a congregation only because the congregation’s natural “immune system” has been seriously weakened because the congregation is no longer well-adapted to the world around it.
Butler points out that the past fifty years have seen major cultural shifts in the surrounding culture:
The congregational experimentation in the 1970s and 1980s was the result of cultural shifts that occurred in the two decades immediately following World War II: the rise of the middle-class meritocracy, suburbanization, the birth of the baby boom generation, expanded access to college and university education, the civil rights movement, feminism, Sunbelt immigration of whites and northern migration of blacks, and the turmoil over Vietnam. All these changes unhinged traditional American religious patterns and called for greater clarity about the Christian message and greater authenticity in Christian congregations.
Obviously, you could substitute “post-Christian” for “Christian” and come up with the same conclusion.
UU culture and theology
For most Unitarian Universalist congregations, these cultural shifts in the surrounding culture paralleled a theological shift within many or most of our congregations — the shift from liberal Christian to post-Christian positions. (Not coincidentally, 1971 is the first time I am aware of a Unitarian Universalist leader referring to our movement as post-Christian.) But what I see is that our social patterns didn’t get updated to match our theological changes.
Butler continues:
Some churches rose to the challenge, but many did not. In a wave of social change (and often unreflective resistance to it), many congregations lost their ability to retain younger members or attract new ones. Congregations often suffered because of the gap that developed between their internal inherited practices and external cultural realities.
This was certainly true of Unitarian Universalism during the 1960s and 1970s — those were the decades when we saw a precipitous drop in membership, and when young people stopped being a part of our congregations. In the next passage from Butler’s book, but I’m going to substitute “Unitarian Universalist” for Christian, and change a few other phrases, so that it sounds as if she’s talking directly to us:
…Congregations often suffered because of the gap that developed between their internal inherited practices and external cultural realities. And, more than occasionally, they suffered because their particular pattern of congregational life was considered coterminous with “Unitarian Universalism” or “liberal religious theology,” hence confusing a historical moment in American culture with theological vitality and eternal truths. In short, many mid-twentieth-century Unitarian Universalists enshrined the social pattern of their congregations as something akin to eternal truth!
And that’s just what happened in the the 1960s and 1970s.
Then in the 1980s and the 1990s, social change continued and even accelerated, through the twin processes of detraditionalization, and the disestablishment of the 1950s civic religion. The end result? Many or most Unitarian Universalist congregations today follow social patterns straight out of the 1950s. Our post-Christian theology is increasingly relevant to the world around us — but that theology is trapped in outdated congregations.
I hope I have piqued your curiosity enough that you will now go read the rest of Diana Butler Bass’s book, and find out how to update your congregation to match the changed society around you. It’s available from the Alban Institute.
Just a reminder — this blog is completely non-commercial and ad-free? I discussed this book because it interested me, not because anyone asked me to, or paid me to do so.