March 2008 Archives

Over at his blog, Rev. Scott Wells began a discussion contrasting the heavily politicized insular culture of UU youth to the movement of young people being energized by Obama. I've been avoiding blogs and religion in general these days, needing to focus on more productive things for simple reasons of sanity and survival, but a good friend forwarded me this particular link. It prompted me to put several hours into crafting the below response--usually I would acknowledge that I had better things to be doing with my time, but this time it actually helped me connect the dots on a lot of my conflicted feelings regarding the UUs that I've been trying to ignore.

Anyway, I encourage whoever's reading this to check out Rev. Scott's thread, or talk to me here about my particular response. Peace.

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Thanks to everyone for what they’ve shared here! I’ve been so burned by my local UU experience that it’s left me bitter towards most everything religious at the moment, which is unprecedented for me. I feel much more spiritually lost than I did when I joined with the UUs just out of college. Not that I regret the past five years, but most of the lessons learned have been about the good intentions that pave the road to hell.

Scott, I think you’re pretty dead-on in your observations of the resolution-happy politically heavy us-and-them environment of the UUA and its youth culture, in contrast to the actions of the self-empowered people that change the world. But I’d like to take it a bit further, because it still seems to me that the UUA was founded by the same kind of self-empowered people supporting Obama today. So what went wrong?

It seems to me the problem is that, much as resolutions are rightfully blessings at the end of the process, institutions and their authority are likewise epiphenomena of the real world-shaping efforts. The major failing of the old-school liberal mentality seems to be its belief that the institutions themselves would continue cultivating the process, and democracy would keep them on task.

But, much as you can’t help the environment *merely* by becoming head of the EPA, you can’t help religious seekers merely by winning an election in the UUA. It takes a deeper wisdom and good spirit to keep the institution and the work it represents running. And in the end, the good work chugs on through the sheer force of human good will, and it’s up to democratic institutions to keep up with that or be abandoned.

What I see happening in the UUA is that they’re stuck in a downward spiral: the folks with the real power to change the world don’t waste their time fighting petty electoral struggles for denominational affirmation. But this simply cedes more electoral power to those for whom denominational affirmation is inappropriately important, making it an even bigger waste of time.

Sure, this is a problem in any religious denomation, but usually there’s some larger common spiritual identity to help guide and sustain those communities through such all-too-human power struggles. But the UUA, with its overwhelmingly secular framework, seems to have cut to the chase in a single generation. As they say, the idea became an institution-Unitarian Universalism became the UUA-and the youth were taught how to be in good standing with the institution rather than how to carry on the idea.

One of the things I love about Obama is that he doesn’t seem to be calling us to join an institution or party, so much as he’s calling us to be our better selves as a nation. Instead of demanding pride in the current American institution, he points us toward an idea of America we can be proud of again. He doesn’t make it about passing the right rules to fix the institution, but rather about doing the good work to carry on the torch of the idea. And that’s why he gets the massive following.

I had to walk away from my local UU institutions because the politics were simply overwhelming; it’s gonna take a lot of time for me to heal enough to feel comfortable committing myself to any religious institution. But the whole experience has made me much more keenly aware of the religious ideas that are most important to me, the things that drive me to action even when I’m massively outvoted and unsupported. Obama taps into those “unitarian universalist” sentiments at the core of my being; too bad the Unitarian Universalists couldn’t.