Response to Davidson Loehr

Resurrecting Unitarian Universalism

Davidson Loehr in his monograph, “Why Unitarian Universalism is Dying” published the Journal of Liberal Religion, told us that he heard noises and the music of the spheres hearkening the death of Unitarian Universalism. As a layperson, I hear that same music. I appreciate David’s article for its cogent assessment of the movement’s history and its insight as to the core reasons it fundamentally fails as a religious movement. At the heart of his argument is the proposition that Unitarian Universalism lacks a profoundly meaningful “spiritual” message that compels commitment.

Peter Morales, pastor of the Jefferson Unitarian Church in Golden, Colorado, makes the point that people come to church for fundamentally religious reasons. They are looking for spiritual truth, deep answers to life’s most difficult questions. In the end, he says, we, Unitarian Universalists are churches - not lecture halls, or debating societies, or lobbying groups or social clubs – we are churches - and the people who come as guests are looking for the same things that people have always looked for when they have come to church – religious answers to life’s most profound questions. Morales’ observations find a great deal of ancillary support in the Faith Communities Today 2005 national survey.[1]

When Morales’ observations and Loehr’s assessment are juxtaposed, they appear to be flip sides of the very same coin. People want the answers religion promises but, on the whole, we as Unitarian Universalists are unable to fundamentally deliver on those promise in a coherent and consistent way.

I agree with Loehr’s arguments and, at the same time, his observations obviously exist in the broader context of a culture that has become largely soulless. The Western world has largely adopted a view of the world founded on scientific materialism that ultimately provides no true answers, only data. It cannot provide an adequate basis for wonder, awe, gratitude, enlightenment, morals, ethics or social justice.[2] It is about what is seen, not about what is unseen. It is about what is, not what ought to be. On its own, scientific materialism cannot adequately address the fundamental questions that human consciousness, by its very nature, raises.

It is safe to say that meaning in our culture has faded. Indeed, the notion of meaning in life is seen largely as a cruel joke. We have no moorings for determining what is true or false on anything other than a scientific level. We have no measures of determining the veracity of ontological, epistemological or metaphysical formulations. The scientific method works very well in the world of matter and energy. It provides very little help in providing meaning or understanding at the levels of Life and Consciousness. The barrenness of this worldview was laid open and explored by the existentialists of the middle of the last Century. While they did and admirable job of diagnosing the problem, they were unable to create a metaphysical response to the problem nor where they able to craft a rationally based human response that would satisfy the “soul”.

Beyond this lack of meaning, our modern American culture also offers very little in the way of connection. We are a culture without villages and without genuine organic or intentional communities. Our affiliations are shallow, transitory and utilitarian. We experience our culture through electronic media and connect through wires and silicon. On the whole, we have virtual, not authentic, communities. The communities we do have are meritocracies or wholly teleological. We have few, if any, communities that exist for the sake of community, let alone for the sake of deriving meaning from life.

Given the above, it is no accident that the dominant religion in our culture is materialism. The outworking of our modern American lives in consumerism, apathy and disengagement and be seen as the logical “ethical” mandate of scientific materialist worldview. However there is clearly a deep dissatisfaction with many aspects of materialism – it simply cannot satisfy the deepest of human needs. There is a vacuousness and emptiness that many intuitively sense – a sense that there is something more. Whether people are consciously aware of it or not, they long for meaning and connection. My sense is that it is those who see through to this emptiness who are the ones who are coming through our doors on Sunday mornings. As Loehr and Morales say, these folks are looking for meaning and for connection.

What is interesting in this is that these needs seem to dovetail nicely with what is fundamental to the religious instinct in man. It seems that grasping for meaning and connection is fundamentally a religious quest. While many definitions of religion exist, these fundamental human drives – for connection and meaning - seem to be common to many of them. Clearly religions define meaning and connection in very different ways, they find different foci and they take on different forms, but these seem to be at least two of the underlying human wellsprings of the religious quest.

If it is true that the two basic failings of modern American culture are its inability to find a way to transcend materialism and an inability to create authentic community, and if these two issues are close to the center of what the religious quest in humanity is all about, then it seems to me that we, as Unitarian Universalists have the possibility of pulling ourselves from the death spiral that Davidson Loehr so aptly details. We also have the possibility of creating a fundamentally religious answer not mired in tired and discarded myths of Christian tradition, in hokey platitudes of the New Age fringe, or the fundamentally solipsistic paths of many eastern traditions. Perhaps we can craft the beginnings of a cogent response to the question of meaning that can bravely answer the fundamental questions that materialism cannot satisfy. [3]

Sri Aurobindo, the 20th Century sage and mystic, states in Life Divine[4], about India, that “any number of religious formulations, cults, and disciplines have been allowed and even encouraged to subsist side by side and each man was free to accept and to follow that which was congenial to his thought, feeling, temperament, and build of nature. It is right and reasonable there should be this plasticity, proper to the experimental evolution: for religion’s real business is to prepare man’s mind, life and bodily existence for the spiritual consciousness to take it up” (Aurobindo, p. 899.) The first portion of the quote could be a flattering description of modern Unitarian Unversalism. We have great diversity, great plasticity, but to what end? If all of this is not driving us to a deeper confrontation with “spirituality” and the emergence of that deeper realization in our lives, it seems to have missed the point.

I would submit that liberal religious thought, in the lineage of Schweitzer, Kierkegaard, Bultmann, Tillich, Chardin and others, is fundamentally played out. It has nothing of substance to offer, no new ideas. It reached its zenith at the same time as the existentialist movement so mercilessly diagnosed the hole at the heart of secular culture. If this is the case, we must look elsewhere for answers and if we continue down the path of liberal religious thought as traditionally understood, we are, it seems, doomed to irrelevance.

So where do we look? How do find our way through the thicket of meaning?

My intuitive sense is that the latest incarnations of the human potential movement that sprung to life in the late 1950’s and has evolved into the transpersonal movement of the later part of the 20th Century is a vital place to begin looking. These ideas exist at the cusp of science and spirituality. Growing out of the work of Maslow and others, they point to things beyond ordinary human consciousness while remaining deeply rooted in scholarship and academic discipline. What is interesting to me is that this movement arose in direct response to the existentialist diagnosis of the 1940s and 1950s. It is the secular version of what we are looking for on a religious/communal level. If the existentialists defined our culture’s plight, these folks are formulating the way out. Their work points to a distinctly religious response, whether they realize it or not. Our job would be to synoptically bring these ideas into the context of religious community.

The most popular exponent of this movement is Ken Wilber. While Wilber has offered some new thoughts, his work is largely derivative. He synthesizes of the works of scholars and learned practitioners who have been working in the field of human consciousness in much more rigorous ways. These folks are on the cutting edge, trying to create coherent world views that account for not only science but spirit. Those in this movement include psychologists, sociologists, political thinkers, ecologists, physicists, writers, artists, poets and a host of others from a wide variety of disciplines. It seems that we need to be paying particular attention to recognized academics and practitioners working in fields of human developmental psychology, transpersonal psychology, transformative studies, East-West studies, and transformative leadership.[5] Much of this work is groundbreaking and it pointing to future stages of religious development, states of consciousness and paths to growth on individual, organization and societal levels. I firmly believe that these academicians can help us as we begin to think through what is next in store for us as Unitarian Universalists as we seek to regain relevance. We need to stop listening to theologians and start listening to these pioneers.

While I agree wholeheartedly with Loehr’s notion that we as Unitarian Universalists espouse the Seven Banalities, I am not sure that I agree that each and every one of them is truly banal. There are two that almost all Unitarian Universalists can recite with heart: the first and the last. These seem to be Noble Truths for us – the inherent worth and dignity of each human and the interconnectedness of existence. And here we have it echoed again – meaning and connection. What seems most interesting is that these ideas lie at the very core of the substance of the work done in the transpersonal disciplines. Perhaps this is a place we can look to begin to find new meaning for a faith that can wrap itself in the lineage of Unitarian Universalism.
[1] The study was sponsored by The Cooperative Congregational Studies Partnership (CCSP), hosted by Hartford Seminary’s Institute for Religion Research.
[2] The Evangelical movement can be seen as a response to this world view. It is a reactionary response to what it sees as the emptiness of modernity. The problem is that it offers no new solutions, only a pre-rationalist worldview at odds with the evolutionary progress of society.
[3] I will not address here the nature of community. Much could be written about it. My own sense of the importance of community grows out a central observation about the nature of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It seems that the core genius of the Jewish tradition and the gospel as taught by Jesus is that salvation is not ultimately about an individual experience. Salvation comes through being inducted into community. Salvation comes from being one of the Chosen People or being part of the Kingdom of God.
[4] This book is one of the most influential but least read books of the 20th Century. The leaders of the human potential movement (the late 20th Century’s response to existentialism) were dramatically and powerfully influenced, whether they were aware of it or not, by Aurobindo’s writings.
[5] A search in Wikipedia on developmental psychology and transpersonal psychology will provide the names of some scholars. Schools that are focused on this include California Institute of Integral Studies and Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center.

© 2007. Matthew W. Wesley. All rights reserved.