One of the best things about General Assembly, the annual meeting of the Unitarian Universalist Association, especially if you've been going to it as long as I have — I think this was my 28th — is picking up threads with beloved friends. The first night I was there for the ministers' meeting that always precedes the Assembly, I had dinner with four of my dearest colleagues. A fifth one dropped by the table to schmooze a bit and commented that it was surprising to see such a died-in-the-wool humanist in such a hot-bed of Christians. She referred to it again the next day saying that she had found it not only surprising but highly amusing. I had known, of course, that one was the president of the Christian Fellowship, and that the others, if not members of it, were self-identified as Christian, just as they knew that I was, however reluctantly, on the board of the UU Humanists and an occasional spokesperson for them, but that information was so irrelevant that none of us had even noticed it — much less thought about it when we decided to have dinner together. It is not our theological agreements or differences that bring us together but our shared interests and values and our shared understanding of our Unitarian Universalist religion. Theology is the fun part, the decoration, the icing on the cake. It is our entertainment to argue theology — sometimes very hotly indeed — but it is our great joy to be together in the covenant of our shared faith. What we may individually believe makes no difference whatsoever to our friendship except when disagreements give us the pleasure of an entertaining argument and knit us more closely together.
Some years ago now I wrote a poem to use in a memorial service which was published in the ministers' newsletter. One of my colleagues wrote to me that he absolutely disagreed with the theology that I had expressed and told me what he thought was true. It looked to me as if it was the same as what I had said, and when I responded and told him so, I said that I hoped I was right about our agreement because I would hate to lose the opportunity — if there was one — for a good theological argument. Unhappily we don't have many opportunities for that any more. We've gotten so careful to celebrate our differences, and perhaps so attached to our particular beliefs that we have become afraid to risk an argument. We seem to be afraid that we will either make our opponents feel marginalized or become marginalized ourselves.
Over the last twenty-five years or so we've been separating ourselves into theological enclaves. At that time the humanists pretty much had it their own way and it was the Christians who were feeling the pinch. Those were the only two identified groups in those days even though there were many of us who didn't quite fit comfortably into either group. It was about then that Judith Hoeler, one of the co-ministers in Weston, MA wrote an essay in which she said that since we could no longer live together we should establish congregations of one strain or the other, well-publicized so that Christians and humanists would not have to try to accommodate one another's differences. She did not take into account the fact that there are few areas that have enough Unitarian Universalists to support two congregations, and, more importantly, that theology is not a defining characteristic of our faith. It is not what we believe that matters.
You wouldn't know it by the way we've been trying to deal with it ever since, however. Those of us who didn't quite fit into one of the two main categories started finding other ways to identify ourselves theologically. Besides Christians and humanists we became theists, pantheists, panentheists, pagans, process theologians, mystical humanists, infidels, naturalists, Gaia theorists — you name it. All that could be very interesting if we did more than name it and divide ourselves theologically — if we talked about it. However, we seem to be afraid to use one of the best tools for spiritual growth: theological argumentation. We're too busy accepting one another. When I go to a workshop about all the things we have become and how we are to live together anyway, someone is sure to say, sadly, either in the discussion or in a side comment, "Why can't I just be a Unitarian Universalist?" Well why not? We seem to have mislaid the recipe for the cake.
Once someone from the University of New Orleans invited me to come to a pastoral counseling class to explain Unitarian Universalism to them so that they could be useful should one ever come to them for counseling. After about ten minutes of explanation they began asking me questions. They were all about beliefs. What do Unitarian Universalists believe about the afterlife? about God? about the Bible? about abortion? about euthanasia? Each time I would say, "I can't tell you that. I can tell you what I believe. I can even tell you what I think the majority of us probably believe, but I can't tell you what Unitarian Universalists believe." It was my triumph that toward the end of the class when the students had begun reframing their questions, a student asked me another belief question and several of the other students said, "She can't tell you that."
The problem is that religion in general in our culture is based on beliefs. The divisions within a particular religion are divisions of belief. All Christians believe in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. They may believe different things about that, but it is the essential. Simplistically it can be said that the essential difference between Protestants and Catholics is that Catholics believe that the authority of the pope is divine and Protestants don't. Within Protestantism the divides are among certain beliefs, infant baptism versus adult baptism, for example. Even the Baptists, who, like us, have no creed and practice congregational polity, have certain beliefs to which their ministers are required to ascribe. Sects are formed on the basis of belief about the end times. Within the various sects there are undoubtedly more variations of belief than we think or that they probably wish to admit, but it is belief that is the key to their own definitions of themselves.
That is why it is so difficult for us to define ourselves to others and often even to ourselves. Everybody, even we ourselves want to know what we believe, and the only answer is, "I can't tell you that." In fact, even to say the words, "We believe" is to go against the very essence of who we are. We find ourselves doing it all the time because of the insistence of the culture which is an ineradicable part of us. I was humiliated to realize that I did it myself the other day in a letter I wrote to the editor of the Naples Daily News. I said, "We believe in freedom, reason and respect for new knowledge and for other people." Mostly that's true, of course, and those qualities are essential aspects of our religious process, but I have known Unitarian Universalists who misunderstood freedom, rejected reason or showed little respect either for knowledge or people.
"We believe" may be almost right, but it can never be completely right because our religion is not based on any belief however ancient or likely to be true but on how we go about believing. That has been the same since the very beginnings of our faith, even when we were wholly Christian. It is what made it a heresy. We could never believe anything simply because we were told it was true. A belief needed to be examined, tested, compared to our own experience and then accepted as true or rejected as false.
Thomas Jefferson, who, though he never joined a Unitarian church, explaining that there was none in his neighborhood, called himself a Unitarian, published his own version of the New Testament, omitting all those parts of it that he considered to be untrue. Even if he had not claimed the identity, he was clearly a true member of this faith. He was, in fact, a disciple of Joseph Priestly who migrated to America after being burned out of his English parsonage for his Unitarian views and was minister of a church in Philadelphia. That's the same Joseph Priestly who discovered oxygen. And that should not be surprising, since the same method that is used to discover the truths of science is the one Unitarian Universalists use to try to discover the truths of religion. One problem with that of course is that it is much easier to test processes of the material world than those of the spirit, but it is not too far off the mark to say as I occasionally do when pressed for time in explanation of this faith that we are the scientific method of religion. We look at the evidence, test it against our experience and that of others and believe not what we are told is true, or what is attractive to us, but what we have been convinced is true through that process.
That's why we have different beliefs. We never have all the evidence; our minds do not necessarily all work in the same way; we may draw different conclusions; but we all go about it in the same way.
Sometimes I'm asked how we can teach our children this kind of religion. I am assured that they need concrete beliefs to hold onto. My experience has been otherwise. They will ask their parents and teachers what they believe about all those religious questions, and most of us have been reluctant to tell them what we think is true for fear that we will interfere with their freedom of belief, so basic to what we stand for. We tell them that some people believe one thing and some people another and let it go at that. To truly model our faith for them and to give them a way in which to think about it we should go the further step of telling them what we ourselves believe and why we believe it. It's the why we believe it that's important. It is not that we are trying to prove that what we say is true, but that we are showing the bases for whatever belief it is so that we can be understood, and later, if there is a flaw in the argument it can be challenged. We do not tell them that we have the truth for them but that we think what we believe is true, for certain reasons that they can judge for themselves.
The great strength of science is that it is self-correcting. No scientific theory is beyond question, testing, amendment or even rejection if it proves to be contrary to later knowledge. Our religion has the same strength. No belief is beyond question, testing, amendment or rejection. At least that has been its strength and can be again if instead of allowing our differences to silence us for the sake of acceptance of one another we are willing to talk about our beliefs, even argue about them in the knowledge that it is the values that we share that are the cake and theology is only the icing. Differing beliefs cannot divide us. The unquestioned acceptance of both our own and others' beliefs can.
One of the friends with whom I was having dinner that evening in St. Louis said that it wasn't the principles in the Unitarian Universalist Association bylaws that were important. After all, even the Rotary Club can accept them. It was, he insisted, the list of sources of our faith that was unique and significant. I have never been entirely comfortable with that list. It has seemed to me that people have used it to justify their divisions. The humanist one belongs to me, the Christian one belongs to you, the Pagans can have the earth-centered one.... However, on reflection I decided that he was right. In our free faith we must find and use every piece of evidence available to us — everything in the sources and whatever else we can discover — scientific discoveries, poetry, music, mathematics, all of it grist to our mill in the search for truth. We don't pick and choose among them but use all that we can. The fact that the sources are listed in the bylaws at all, in spite of the fact that their provenance was a political sop to alleviate some odd pressures, says something important about us. It is not, as implied in the sources' poetic benediction, our pluralism on which we should pride ourselves, but rather our willingness to seek religious truth wherever it may be found.