Liberal Media Puzzle: Why Would Those ‘Progressive, Nondogmatic’ Unitarians Be Shrinking?
The religion section in Saturday's Washington Post spotlighted a Daniel Burke story from the Religion News Service . While reports on orthodox religions often wonder whether followers won't leave “in droves” because a church won't bend to the popular will, Burke explores why the Unitarian Universalists can't keep adherents when it tries not to have any identifiable creed at all. That's intriguing, except Burke seems to accept that the UUs don't have a “dogmatic” faith, when it appears that its inability to actually talk about God for fear offending people might be a dogma all its own, an anti-dogmatic dogma. Here's how Burke began: A recent Sunday service at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore ended with an apology. Laurel Mendes, a neo-pagan lay member who led the service, feared that a reference to God in the hymn “Once to Every Soul and Nation” might have upset the humanists in the pews. So, Mendes explained to the congregation that religious doctrine had been duly scrubbed from hymns in the Sunday program. “I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable by reciting something that might be considered a profession of faith,” Mendes, 52, said after the service. “We did say ‘God,’ which you don’t often hear in our most politically correct hymns.” Welcome to a typical Sunday in the anything-but-typical Unitarian Universalist Association, a liberal religious movement with a proud history of welcoming all seekers of truth — as long as it’s spelled with a lowercase “t.” Dramatic readings from the biography of 20th-century labor leader John L. Lewis? Sure. An altar crowded with Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and Jewish symbols? Absolutely. God-talk? Umm, well . . . The other question a religion reporter might ask is: Can you call it a “religion” if the “religion” shuns “God talk”? Isn't that just a large discussion group with an avoidance strategy? The failure of the Unitarian Universalist Association to grow is a serious challenge to the liberal-media notion that orthodoxy and popularity should be opposites in the modern world.
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on July 10, 2011. Filed under