Davidson Loehr, senior minister at First Church Unitarian Universalist of Austin, Texas, wrote a letter to the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) back on November 30, 2005. In that letter, he lambasted the Pathways Church project, a Unitarian Universalist start-up church sponsored by denominational headquarters, for its complete failure to meet any of the initial goals of the project. Loehr said he believes that failure is tied to another problem with contemporary Unitarian Universalism, “the lack of a serious religious center.”
Now that’s a sweeping generalization, but Loehr does have a point about the wider denomination. My partner, Carol — who is unchurched — once pointed out that many Unitarian Universalist sermons sound like commentary on National Public Radio, which is to say, while hip and fun they are not particularly religious. At denominational headquarters, I am not aware of serious theological thinking affecting policy since Hugo Holleroth (who grounded religious education in existential theology) left there in the 1970s. Loehr elaborates on this problem later in his letter:
The center [of Unitarian Universalism] is political rather than religious, as it has been for decades. I’m not saying this as a crank; I’m saying it as someone who earned a Ph.D. in theology, with a good understanding of what religion is, and what it isn’t.
Rev. Peter Richardson has been instructive for me in this area, in pointing out that there actually once was a vision of a religion for the future that would still work, but that the UUA actively sabotaged it from the beginning. This was the vision of a religion grounded in the deep ontological commonalities of the great world religions — the “wisdom traditions” of the great religions — with its symbol of the circle of logos from eight or so of the world’s religions. While this seems the logical — even obvious — path toward a pluralistic future for any liberal religion, it simply can’t be done now, and may not be possible for a decade or more, unless there is a conversion of consciousness.
Actually, Ph.D. or no, Loehr is a little behind the times, intellectually speaking. That old idea of thinking that Unitarian Universalism could be a “a religion grounded in the deep ontological commonalities of the great world religions” has been seriously challenged in recent years. If you subject that idea to some simple deconstruction, you uncover tendencies towards an unfounded sense of superiority, reductionism, and imperialism. The unfounded sense of superiority comes into play in the assumption that we’re so much better than anyone else that we can find those “deep ontological commonalities” that somehow managed to elude the greatest religious thinkers up until now — it’s possible, but no one else in the world seems to recognize this superiority of ours. The reductionism comes into play in the assumption that religions can be reduced to relatively simple ontological “commonalities” that can be divorced from a lived religion, including liturgical practice and day-to-day embodied living of one’s religion — that’s a little too Cartesian and Western to be considered universally true. The imperialism comes into play when the previous two assumptions remain unexamined; and the imperialism can manifest itself as cultural misappropriation or worse.
A number of us who are a bit younger than Loehr are heading in a different religious direction. Some of us are looking within our own tradition for a religious center — and we’re finding it. I don’t want to speak for others who are doing this work, but I know I’ve been drawing on Universalist and Transcendentalist religious thought, filtered through American pragmatism (which has roots in Emerson) and ecological theology and ecojustice (with roots in Thoreau and Emerson) — and uncovering a deeply religious center for my religious praxis. This is in distinct contrast to Loehr’s stated aim to incorporate “eight or so of the world’s religions.”
I have a suspicion that what I’m seeing, in my differences with Davidson Loehr, is that he is very much within the modernist tradition of creating grand meta-narratives that attempt to encompass and explain everything. Those of us who find themselves immersed in post-modernism are far more wary of making grand claims about religion — for instance, we’re wary of saying that we can incorporate other religious traditions into our own. Instead, from a postmodernist perspective, I might say that I am a post-Christian: acknowledging that I am very much in the Christian tradition, but recognizing that in a postmodern globalized world we have to accept that we are influenced by other world religions; the difference being that we aren’t trying to co-opt those other religions, but rather to understand what impact they have on us.
So where does this leave us? I think we do have a religious center, which I’d call post-Christian. Other Christians might not accept us, but we know that we are in, and came out of, the Christian tradition. Looking back to our past, I think we started becoming post-Christian as early as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hosea Ballou, diverging from the Christian mainstream, rejected by them, and growing into something new. By claiming our place on the margins as our religious center, by engaging in “theological archaeology” to find out who we were and who we are, by avoiding the construction of grand metanarratives about who we might be — I think we could become a far more viable postmodern religious tradition.
What do you think?
Original post revised in light of Scott Wells’s comment.