At home with the Unitarians | Theo Hobson

My time with the Unitarians provided a welcome break from some of the more violent undertones of Christian worship I went to a Unitarian service on Sunday, near where I’m living in Brooklyn. I didn’t know much about this denomination. I knew that they don’t believe in the Trinity, but that doesn’t narrow things down very much – nor do Muslims or Richard Dawkins. Do they believe in God at all? They don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, but do they nevertheless see him as a unique moral teacher? I knew that they originally believed very strongly in God, back in the late 18th century, and rejected his threeness as irrational: they believed in the God of the rational Enlightenment, and saw Jesus as the heroic communicator of this superstition-busting deity. Could it be that they still believed in that? I also knew that, in its early days, this movement was favoured by some of the Founding Fathers. Jefferson once expressed the hope that soon all young men in America would be Unitarians (I suppose he was less optimistic about young women). John Adams was also a big fan. And some decades later the movement influenced the Transcendentalism of Emerson and others. I wanted to know what had become of this early strain of the American soul. We gathered in a surprisingly crowded church hall. The service was led by a group of laywomen who had recently put on a play called Mother Wove the Morning. Between gentle, participatory songs, some accompanied by a ukelele, these women spoke on a jittery hand-held mike. The first spoke of her “journey into the goddess”. She briefly mentioned her childhood image of God, a cross between Santa Claus and Jesus – this produced a small ripple of knowing laughter in the congregation. It was the only time that Jesus was mentioned I think. Another woman spoke of the sexism she had encountered in the financial industry, and of the succour she had found in Native American folklore, and of the need to keep taking “buffalo medicine” which I think was a metaphorical substance. Another spoke “as a therapist” about some of the issues raised in the play they had performed. Another, who identified herself as a humanist, noted that Unitarianism had in the past “committed heresy” by overemphasising oneness, as if there were just one path to the divine. As she spoke I noticed a row of old photographs of men, many wearing facial hair, all wearing serious expressions, as if pondering the saving oneness of God. They looked on unimpressed at our final song, Ancient Mother, I Hear you Calling, for which baskets containing percussion instruments were handed round. It was a fun atmosphere; some people got really into it and made surprising whooping animal noises. I have no idea whether this spiritualised feminism is a regular component of this community; maybe most weeks it’s burly men doing the talking, about the sense of rational peace they have while out fishing. But at least three quarters of the congregation was female. And it felt as if the language of therapeutic self-affirmation, whether feminist or not, was very well rooted here. It is now seemingly the Unitarian fashion to deny any single path to truth, but there is still an element of oneness to justify the denomination’s name: its very deep respect for Number One. I came away with the feeling that it was very harmless. And maybe that’s the key difference from Christian worship. In Christian worship there’s a certain sense of risk: we risk affirming an idea of truth that is somewhat at odds with natural wisdom, inner peace. And we risk affirming a tradition that has an aura of violence – the violent rhetoric about the Lord of hosts and so forth – and the references to death and blood in the sombre ritual. There’s a sense of potential danger in Christianity – this religion has been used for violent ends, and people have suffered martyrdom for it too. There’s a disturbing absoluteness. Unitarianism carries about as much sense of dangerous otherness as a tots’ singalong at the local library. Christianity Religion New York United States Theo Hobson guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 14, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.