Why I Don’t Hate Evangelicals: Part I

We in the UU church have a low tolerance for evangelical Christians. In our intolerance, we tend to lump all orthodox Christians[1] into one category and then dismiss them as deluded and morally inferior. This means that evangelical Presbyterians are painted with the same brush as tent revivalists. We fail to make important distinctions and to see nuances that exist not only among individual Christians but also in broad groups of “evangelicals”. There is a word for ascribing negative characteristics to broad swaths of people – prejudice. We suffer from this type of prejudice and it gets expressed in the same way prejudice expresses itself in any other group – demonizing, fear mongering, “us versus them” thinking and so on. As always, the antidote to prejudice is understanding.

In the interests of full disclosure, I hold a Masters of Divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary (the intellectual center of the Evangelical left) and before “loosing my faith” in 1984 considered myself to be an Evangelical Christian. Much of what follows reflects my insider’s understanding of this from a relatively sophisticated level – I was at the heart of the intellectual engine of neo-evangelicalism and therefore keenly attuned to the nuances and differences within the conservative wing of Christian church in America. My current information is admittedly a bit out of date, but hopefully not so much so as to undermine the usefulness of this post and the next.

This blog entry will come in two parts. The first will trace the history of the evangelical movement in the United States and try to tease out a number of key components and lineages that help us to place the overall conservative religious movement in a broader context of religious history. The second will attempt to assess the evangelical movement from a perspective of human development by looking at social and cognitive lines of development and their interplay with belief systems.

So let’s start with a little history….

Evangelicalism

The strands of Evangelicalism in America has parallel but different roots. However, all of these strands trace their deepest roots to the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s. During that time, the Anglican Church in England was deeply entrenched and wedded to upper class interests. This was true both in England and the Colonies. The religion was largely civil and had become depersonalized in many respects. It was a sterile, intellectual faith that was articulated by a church which, by its very mandate, was an extension of the state. Against this backdrop arose the Methodist movement initiated by John Wesley. This movement emphasized personal experience of the divine, personal piety[2] and social justice. There was a strong emphasis in this movement on the notion of free will and the commitment (conversion) to the saving work of Christ. Soon another stream arose from the Calvinist tradition, represented by George Whitfield in England. Both of these movements swept through the urban lower classes. The Methodist movement in particular emphasized a keen interest in social change through the betterment of society. The Calvinist tradition (with its post-millennial [3] point of view) also believed in progress of humanity towards an eventual kingdom of God on earth in which justice and mercy would be available to all. These groups were far from separatist. They were deeply engaged in social reform and held deep convictions about the importance of social justice.

In the United States a Calvinist preacher, Jonathan Edwards, was preaching a message of personal conversion in Northampton Massachusetts which began to spread throughout the urban areas of the north. The movement swept the colonies in the 1730s and 40s through the work of both Wesley and Whitfield. among others. Much of this Great Awakening occurred in northern urban settings though Wesley rode into the south and found success there. These plantings of Methodists in the south lead to the second Great Awakening in the early 1800s primarily in the Appalachian region and tidewater states. This time the religious movement largely took the form the tent revival meetings and focused on personal conversion and personal piety (particularly abstinence – alcoholism on the frontier was epidemic).

The Third Great Awakening began in the 1850s and had a strong social gospel component. This was a largely urban movement spawned by opposition to slavery and then to the exploitation of labor and the excesses of the gilded age. It was largely populist in its message and post-millennial in it understanding (i.e. that Christ would return when peace and justice had been established throughout the earth). While many rural areas were touched by this movement, it was largely urban in its focus. The Universalist movement was an outgrowth of this time of religious ferment. (Note: See Jeff's comment for a well taken correction to this last sentence.)

Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism takes its name from a twelve volume series of essays entitled “The Fundamentals” published between 1910 and 1915. These essays reflected a number of specific tenets and advanced one important new belief. The main impetus of these essays was to affirm the validity of Christian scriptures in the face of Biblical criticism that had emerged in Germany and was beginning to be felt in England. These schools of criticism questioned the accounts of Biblical miracles based largely on reason and the scientific world view that had emerged in the Enlightenment. The Fundamentals were written as a defense against this “encroachment” of modernism. As such, these writings defended the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Infused into this concoction was a heavy dose of something that had been only peripheral in Christan dogma until that time. The Fundamentalists espoused pre-millennialism or the belief that Jesus would be returning to earth to set up an earthly kingdom sooner rather than later. This pre-millennialism held to a view that the world was on a dark path of increasing sin and degradation and would only be saved by the advent of Christ. This view was distinctly contrary to the entire history of Christianity in America (and indeed the most generally accepted doctrine of both Catholic an Protestant churches). Until this time, the dominant view had been post-millennial – the view that the world would, with the efforts of good Christian people – improve until it was worthy of Christ’s reign.

The post-millennial view had lead to deep commitments to social progress and reform. This pre-millennial view led, perhaps inevitably, to a very heavy dose of separatism. The leaders of the fundamentalism movement launched a two prong offensive against modernity. They attempted to fight it in the marketplace of ideas and they attempted to protect their flocks from its “dangers” by instituting a profound separation from secular society. The Scopes trial is perhaps the most famous initiative of the first effort. The social prohibitions (no dancing, no drinking, etc.) and imperatives to flee worldly pleasures was the most obvious manifestation of the second.
Early Fundamentalism was primarily a phenomenon of the south and of rural areas. The importance of this rootedness of Fundamentalism in rural, non-urban populations in Tidewater and Southern states cannot be overstated. Even today, the political divide in the United States is not between blue states and red states, but between rural America and urban America.

The Advent of Billy Graham

In 1949, Billy Graham held revivalist tent meetings in Los Angeles and struck a chord. The movement he started has been called by some the Fourth Great Awakening. Graham was, at the time, a fundamentalist. He had grown up in a Tidewater state but lived in an urban area. His family had been liberal Christians, but he himself was converted by an evangelist named Mordecai Ham from Kentucky. Ham could trace his spiritual lineage from Fundamentalism back to the Second Great Awakening. Graham, who had been raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, was able to take the message of fundamentalism and shape it to be heard by a new audience. While Graham himself was intellectually a pre-modern fundamentalist by religious confession, he was in every other important way a modernist. He understood corporate structures, was motivated by success and achievement (albeit for “God”) and was thoroughly comfortable with using the structures of the modern world for his ends. Unlike his fundamentalist forebears, he was not socially marginalized or inept. He proceeded to strip fundamentalism of its separatism, but retained the anti-intellectual and pietistic aspects. He poured pre-modern mythic religion into modern wineskins. As was true of the Second Great Awaking, Graham’s message was highly quietist – it spoke of personal salvation without a specific social agenda (except for vague patriotism and culturally inspired anti-communism). He borrowed much from the successful revivalist techniques but combined those with remarkable marketing and preaching skills. This combination managed to reach the growing hoards of post-war suburbia.

Thus a profound new force in American religious history came to the fore – the Evangelical – doctrinally conservative, highly pietistic, non-separatist and, most importantly, politically quietist. This largely suburban movement from the 1950s to the early 1970s was markedly apolitical. It stressed personal piety and conversion. While undoubtedly conservative on the whole, it did not espouse an overt political agenda. At the core of this movement was a belief that “saving” people by initiating personal conversion was the only thing that ultimately mattered. This required that individuals be “in this world, but not of it” and there was therefore a sense that one participated in society in order to save individuals.

And so in the 1960s, all major orthodox lineages in the United States could trace their roots to the First Great Awakening, but from there they fractured into four main streams:

• Politically active and socially assimilated liberal movements of
  mainline churches found in urban and suburban areas, (having been influenced by the
  Third Great Awakening and fundamentally modernist in their perspectives),
• Politically marginalized, socially separatist, highly pietistic fundamentalist churches found mostly in rural areas and in the deep south, (influenced by the Second Great Awakening and galvanized by the Fundamentalist Movement and deeply pre-modern in their perspectives),
• Politically quietist, socially assimilated and personally pietistic suburban churches, (who were pre-modern in their beliefs but modern in most other ways), and
• Politically liberal but socially oppressed and personally pietistic urban black churches (shaped mostly by oppression, but in part by the social gospel of the Third Great Awakening and the religious revivalism of the Second Great Awakening.)

The 1960s.

In the 1960s, post-modernism crashed into modernism and exploded in a way few cultural shifts have done in recent history. The importance of pluralism was reflected in the civil rights and feminist movements. The failures of capitalistic imperialism were reflected in opposition to the Vietnam War and the rise of the ecological movement. The culture wars were fully engaged. Those cultural creatives who embraced postmodernism moved to a progressive social agenda that admitted large scale change. Those who remained modernists were shell-shocked and huddled in suburbia (though suburbia ended up having its share of postmodernists as well). Those in rural America thought the modernists and postmodernists alike were at best crazy and at worst of the devil.

The Rise of the Christian Right

The Moral Majority came to the fore in 1978 with the rise of Jerry Falwell. Falwell had started Thomas Road Baptist church in the 1950s and had grown that church over the succeeding decades. As part of his work, he did a radio broadcast entitled “Old Time Gospel Hour". At first, this radio show was distinctly fundamentalist. It preached a separatist message and focused on personal conversion and piety. It was distinctly pre-millennial in its eschatology – emphasizing that the secular world would continue to deteriorate into sin until the eventual return of Christ.

However, Falwell was moving away from a purely fundamentalist perspective. (In the end, he renounced the term Fundamentalist and took on the label Evangelical). He was increasingly disquieted by the marginalization of fundamentalism and the separatism that spawned it. Seeing the tremendous evangelical inroads made into suburban American and also seeing a complete absence of political agenda, he realized that there was a tremendous vacuum in the movement Graham had inspired. (While himself politically conservative, Graham had assiduously avoided politicizing his movement – it was about saving individual souls be they white, black, Asian, American, Soviet, Republican or Democrat.)

From his fundamentalist roots in its original opposition to modernity and now post-modernity, Falwell saw the opportunity to capitalize on the religious faith of suburbia and fill the vacuum that had been created. He went on to interject a fundamentalist soco-political agenda that was, at its heart, aggressively anti-post modernist. It struck deeply at the relativistic moral value structures of post-modernity and pushed hard on the demographic that Billy Graham had created. However it scrupulously avoided offending modern sensibilities. ( This is reflected in Falwell's moving from "Old Time Gospel Hour" - a Fundamentalist title - to the "Moral Majority" - a distinctly modernist name.) This emergent created a new force in the religious landscape.

Suburban Christians, who had a pre-modern religious belief, were personally pietistic and socially assimilated with a modern political ideology but strongly opposed to post-modern pluralism were vulnerable to this move. This group was primed for political action – and the agenda of the Fundamentalist stream became one of all out assault on the post-modernist advances of the 1960s with a few of the old fundamentalist attacks on modernity thrown in for good measure. This rise of essential fundamentalism stripped of separatism and with a revived political mission provided the basis for the Christian Right. This movement has fed largely on the fact that suburbia sits pulled between the poles of urban and rural America and, because it holds the balance of political power between the two different world views held by those segments, it has had a profound impact on the partisan political balance of power. Falwell's understanding of this strategic importance made it his prime battleground against post-modernism.

It is this disproportionate influence coupled with the virulent anti-post-modernist agenda that concerns most UUs. If all of the suburban Christians simply believed in a mythic god and went quietly to their Bible studies on Wednesday night, we might write books on the virtues of atheism and the idiocy of faith, but we would not hate them so. However their fight against the post-modern political agenda is what raises our hackles and causes us deep concern. We are, to our bones, post-modernists and this assault threatens our most cherished beliefs.

It is interesting to note that the movement stands outside of the mainstream of the evangelical heritage in the United States. The Evangelicals of the First and Third Awakenings were profoundly progressive. These movements were rooted in urban movements that shaped the rise the liberalism in this country. What happened in the recent Culture War was a highjacking of this tradition by a southern revivalist movement with its roots in Fundamentalism which played on the shock and fears generated by a post-modern worldview and the inability of many in suburban America to assimilate that perspective. The modernists in America, those living in the suburbs, retreated in the face of the onslaught of post-modernism and sought something to “conserve” their sense of the world. For some, they regressed to take on pre-modern religious beliefs. Their fear and existential dread was exploited and turned into a virulent and aggressive anti-post-modern movement. This highjack of the Evangelical movement resulted in a huge confusion of the distinctions between Evangelicals and Fundamentalists as they had emerged historically. Indeed the leaders who coopted the Evangelical movement intentionally conflated those movements in very unfortunate ways. As a result, the landscape today is confusing. In the "Evangelical" movement we now have:

• Rural fundamentalists (those who have pre-modern beliefs, separate from the world and are not active politically)
• Rural evangelicals (those who have pre-modern beliefs, don’t separate from the world and are not politically engaged but are personally pietistic)
• Suburban fundamentalists (those who have pre-modern beliefs, seek not to live a lifestyle of modernity and are not active politically)
• Suburban Evangelicals (those who have pre-modern beliefs, live a modern lifestyle, tolerate post-modernity and are not active politically – think orthodox Presbyterians)
• Suburban Evangelical-Fundamentalists (those who have pre-modern beliefs, live a modern lifestyle, are actively opposed to post-modernity and are active politically – think anti-gay, anti-abortion, prayer in school charismatic and bible church types)
• Urban Evangelicals (pre-modern belief systems, personally pietistic, working on progressive political agendas – think black churches and groups like Sojourners)

What leaps out from this is that conservative political activism doesn’t seem inexorably tied to pre-modern belief systems. This strongly argues against the notion that it is the Christian belief structure that is motivating the conservative political activism. It is my contention that the Christian Right is more a function of sociological trends related to post-modern incursions on the social and belief structures of modernity than it is about religious ideology. Our "fight" is with one group of evangelicals - those who are Evangelical/Fundmentalists - and our fight is not about religious belief systems but the clash of post-modernism with the popular culture.

This shifts the “battleground of ideas” from one of religious perspectives to one of sociological development. It is my hope that, as UUs, as we come to understand the nuances of these various groups and the sociological forces in play, we will come to find more skillful means in addressing the real issues involved. Demonizing “evangelical Christians” paints the world with a very broad brush and causes us to miss the underlying dynamics of the forces at work. This makes us singularly ineffective. Indeed the spate of books that have come out in recent years decrying religious belief structures as the problem miss the point almost entirely. The problem is not one of intellectual belief but of the development of human consciousness as expressed in sociological development. The belief structures are a symptom or manifestation of this underlying issue of cultural development - not its cause. To think we can argue our way to sociological development by harranging people about their premodern belief systems makes about as much sense as harranging an 8th grader to do differential calculus. They simply aren't ready developmentally to hear it and will not hear it until they are. There are more skillful ways to address this although they don't allow for the same sense of self-righteousness. (This will be the subject of the second post.)

Interestingly, there is a growing movement of Suburban Progressive Evangelicals. This group has a pre-modern belief system, but a progressive social agenda involving stances that are anti-war, pro-environment, pro-human rights, pro-feminism, but also pro-life. This group is being led by people who understand the great traditions of American progressive religious thought pioneered in the First and Third Great Awakenings. They are attempting to build bridges with modern society and not engage in the destructive culture wars of the past forty years. they are actually our natural allies in changing cultural values - provided we can graciously allow them to continue to hold to a premodern belief structure. This group is proving remarkably flexible in allying itself with postmodern feminists and envirnonmentals to achieve joint political aims. We risk marginalizing this emergent group if cannot develop the tolerance to give them the space to intellectually hold the beliefs they hold.

___________________



[1] I am differentiating orthodox from liberal and heterodox. An orthodox Christian, roughly speaking, would be one who would subscribe to the literal truth of the Nicene Creed (a benchmark of orthodoxy for both the Catholic and Protestant churches). Those who don’t believe the literal truth of this creedal statement would either be liberal (seeing the creedal statement as metaphor, archetype or meaning making myth) or heterodox (not believing one or two specific creedal statements to be true but ascribing literal truth to the remaining statements.
[2] By pietistic I mean committing to a lifestyle of personal integrity in line with scriptural injunctions and engaging in a strong devotional practice.
[3] The post millennial and pre-millenial views are extremely important to this discussion. Post-mileniallists believe that the church’s mandate is to create a just and equitable society (the Kingdom of God) on earth that will be fit for Christ to reign over. Pre-millenialists believe that Christ must come back to set straight a world lost in increasing sin and depravity. The post-millenial view has been the historic orthodox doctrine of the Catholic and virtually all mainline Protestant churches. Contrary to many assumptions, the pre-millenial view was not a force in Christian theology until the early 20th Century.

© 2008. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Oprah and Eckart Tole

Oprah understands something that we in the UU church have not yet recognized. She sees not only that millions of us are seeking spiritual truth, but that authentic spiritual experience is much deeper than the mantras of liberal religion can accommodate. Her discovery of Ekhart Tolle, and her drawing millions of people to a webcast discussion of his book is news to which we as UUs should be paying close attention.

Ekhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth, reflects the profound insight of a remarkable spiritual teacher. His own personal experience comes into deep context in the teachings of esoteric religion in any number of traditions. Many people confuse his work with the New Age. However, there are profound differences. Tolle’s work is unmistakably transpersonal. The New Age tends to devolve into the pre-rational. Tolle’s work calls us to transcend egoic structures whereas the New Age invites us to wallow in narcissistic impulses. The transrational Tolle speaks of is not irrational – it is consistent with reason, but recognizes that reason is a blunt instrument in truly understanding reality in its immediacy. Reason parses reality beautifully, but it cannot put it back together again. Reason objectifies reality to allow us to understand how it works, but in that objectification it deadens reality, separates us from our own true nature and becomes the cause of our fundamental alienation. Post-modernism is the end result of that rational enterprise – millions upon millions of data points with no wisdom; understanding everyone’s perspective, but endless nihilism. Pre-rationalism or romanticism (the old Romantics are the new New Agers) collapses into moment by moment waves of emotion and impulse. It is a reversion, not an advancement, in human consciousness.1

Tolle, and the teachers before him, point to a way out.

What is profound about Tolle’s work is his ability to allow us to glimpse that place of the transrational – not denying reason but moving beyond it to where we see the whole again, but from a place that is not pushed around solely by emotions and impulses. It transcends reason without descending to pre-rational states of consciousness. This is the place sages from Buddha, to Jesus, to Plotinus, to Nagarjuna, to Sankara, to Ramana Marharshi and hosts of other have gone and have pointed to. Eckart’s work is not new – it is the perennial philosophy re-framed for a modern audience. It is the awareness of our Ground of Being – of Awareness itself – choiceless, unmoved, ever present, always and ever existing, our own true Self.

What was interesting for me in watching Tolle and Oprah was the radical difference in their structures of consciousness. Oprah’s language and approach represented the multiplistic pluralism of liberal free-thinking religion. For us UUs we would have seen nothing new in her articulations and even though she identifies as a Christian, it is as a free thinking Christian that we would find wholly unobjectionable. Her belief structures were evident in the way she discussed Christianity and world religions. We should cheer that such a powerful figure is introducing open-mindedness to those Christians who are unsettled about their faith and seeking their own next stage of development. She can speak to them in ways that we cannot whether we be humanist or post-modern pluralist.

Tolle speaks from a different place. He made categorical statements (just as Oprah did) but did so from a set of transpersonal experiences that Oprah, by her own admission, is only beginning to glimpse. Indeed, the reason Oprah has been so taken with Tolle’s work is precisely because he taps not into a belief structure but into an experience of wholeness that liberal religion simply cannot deliver. We are watching Oprah move from one stage of consciousness to the next before our eyes and it is fascinating to see someone who has one foot in each world. The structures of consciousness that produce the doctrines of liberal religion (all paths lead to the same place, Jesus and Buddha were teaching the same truths, yada yada yada), is at least two developmental steps short of deeper realization of the dissolution of the self in the discovery of the Self. Indeed, if you listen closely to Tolle, he doesn’t say that these religions’ leaders “taught” the same thing – their content varies dramatically – but rather that they experienced something similar (sahaj, samadhi, the kingdom of God) and that they attempted to transmit these experiences to those around them. There are “jewels” of insight in the sacred writings that point to the ultimately ineffable experience. They communicated in the cultural language of their times and so the teachings are different, the exoteric religion is distinguishable, but the underlying mystical experiences, the esoteric religion, are profoundly similar.

What is interesting about most people who follow Tolle’s teaching is that they feel good for a time, but they get caught back up in their lives and the feeling state they experienced passes. Tolle inspires momentary experiences of living in the now. The systematic dismantling of the egoic structures that Eckart talks about is often painful and difficult work. In his case, he came to his awakened state only after years of despair and near suicide. His experience, as is the case with some, immediately rested in semi-permanent state. For most, these states begin as incidents or episodes but must be nurtured through spiritual exercises in community. Rarely does one progress on the spiritual path without a proven practice rooted in a wisdom tradition. And rarely does one progress on the spiritual path alone.

As a UU, I find liberal religion (as an ideology) is radically differentiated from the fundamental experience of enlightenment that Tolle experienced and teaches about. It is this deeper, more authentic teaching that we miss in our churches. And by authentic, I mean time-tested and profoundly proven approaches to spiritual experience. (I will write more about this in the next few posts.)

This fascination with Tolle will pass - it is a fad just like all of the other fads before it. Last year it was "The Secret", this year it is "A New Earth" and next year the pluralistic consciousness, which has difficulty putting down roots in any one place for long, will move on. However, for some, for a few, this will stick because it is rooted in a profoundly human experience. It is rooted humanity's experience of Consciousness itself. Those in our UU tradition who have practices in Zen or Kasmir Shaivism or Dzogchen or Advaita Vedanta, or contemplative prayer, or sufi whirling or any one of a host of other spiritual traditions and practices, get this stuff. If we are there to support those for whom this brings a shift...if we continue to work with this process with people who are seeking this depth, and if those of us who are living the lives of ordinary mystics are there to help, then good things will happen. The trick will be to use upaya (skillful means) to help people find deep spiritual paths that suit their sensibilities and stages of development. As more and more UUs get well and truly turned on to this work – and see it pass from the shallow grid of new age pluralism to the sacred work of grounded traditions– it will be useful for us to stand by and try to catch the attention of those who want to move from having occasional state experiences of transcendence or glimpses of meaning to living lives that rest more or less permanently in the Ever Present. If we are able to do that, we can change the world.

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1. In one of my first posts I suggested that the UU church should be paying attention to those who identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious”. I mentioned that there are those who are rational but spiritual. This post is designed to clarify and explicate some of these distinctions as well as place what I see as this most interesting cultural event of the media phenome and the transperonal pandit sitting down to talk about the fundamental nature of reality, human consciousness, and lasting transformation.

© 2008. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Reflections on the District Annual General Meeting

I just returned from our annual district meeting. I was privileged to speak at a workshop entitled “Bullfrogs in Wheelbarrows: Planning Along the Chaordic Path.” The workshop addressed a number of the issues discussed in a series of entries in this blog last summer regarding church growth and development, with an added overlay of the Spiral Dynamics model. What surprised and delighted me was how many in the audience were clearly ready for something like this. They seemed a bit tired of one-dimensional models of church leadership and are truly interested in understanding church life as a system. I had expected a chillier reception because I was speaking some hard “truths” to people I had assumed were not systemic thinkers. I don’t know if the maps I was able to present are the best around – but they aren’t too bad and they seemed to make some sense. Many seemed to be happy just to hear someone speaking candidly about difficulties in church life and putting them into a broader context. Too often the “solutions” that are offered are mere techniques and do not address the complexity of the church as a living organism.

At the same time I had the opportunity to hear and get to know some other people. While the UU movement as a whole is still mired in fundamentally dead-end notions of political liberalism and a self-congratulatory notion of political righteousness, there are signs of progress. I do believe deeply in liberation theology, but that liberation must be rooted in personal spiritual transformation if it is to be authentic. Gandhi and MLK both understood this, as have others from our past. Political action without piety devolves into anger and bitterness and violence. If we are not working on our own liberation – and working at it assiduously – how can we have the moral or personal integrity to be prophetic voices in the world? ‘

A few weeks ago I had reason to ponder anew Gandhi’s notion of himsa (violence) - that simply by being alive, we contribute to the violence of the world. We are all complicit. That can paralyze us or it can motivate us to develop greater awareness and intentionality. Ahimsa (nonviolence) is an impossible ideal and Gandhi goes so far as to say that in a war there is no appreciable difference between the soldier who kills and the medic who binds up the wounds (he drove an ambulance for a brief time in the Boer War and his reflections are clearly based on that experience). What Gandhi seems to be saying is similar to one of the central messages of the Bhagavad Gita where Krisha tells Arjuna that he must remember the divine and do his duty, which in that case involved initiating a battle in which many of his kinsmen would die. We cannot truly make the world a better place unless we ourselves are seeking liberation form the egoic self that is the source of so much suffering. In the end it is about awareness of our actions (which will decrease our net contribution to himsa if we are paying attention) and taking responsibility for our complicity in the whole. Failure to recognize this complicity inevitably results in self-righteousness and arrogance which ultimately is a pretty sure path to outward and explicit violence towards others. If the ambulance driver thinks he is morally superior to the soldier, all is lost and the spiral of violence deepens.1

Back to AGM – I was also struck, and positively so, by an increased focus on spiritual practice. There were workshops on it, there was discussion about it. The workshop I attended was basic but quite good. Sparking and feeding interest in this is wonderful. All of this seems positive. So much of what we need to do in this church is transcend the notion of materialism. We, as UUs, are still fundamentally post-Enlightenment, post-modern materialists – we cannot bring ourselves to believe that our soul or even our mind reflects a dimension other than mere physicality. Until we admit to the authentic reality of Spirit, it seems we are likely to continue to wander in the wilderness. I am seeing a few UUs (mostly ministers) beginning to get this. For more on this notion, click here.

These discussions about UU spirituality remain in the realm of what Ken Wilber would call “translative practices” or spiritual practices that focus on adjustments to ordinary life and which don’t fundamentally challenge current structures of consciousness. (And that is true of the course on building a spiritual practice that I am co-leading in our church as well.) In contrast to the notion of translative practice, Wilber claims, and I think he is right, that all of the great wisdom traditions demand a form of "transformative practice" and by that Wilber means that egoic structures are systematically and wholly dismantled in the face of development towards divine consciousness. (Wilber affrirms the validity and importance of both of these types of practice - but suggests that we should not confuse the two.) While all sorts of goals of spiritual practice exist (reducing stress, connecting with the body, becoming more mindful, etc.), the whole point in virtually every tradition when you follow it out to where it is heading is the mystic experience of the destruction of egoic self-contraction in the presence of the Ultimate (the destruction of self in realizing Self). We have a very, very long ways to go – and our complacency at our level of structural development of consciousness continues to be our own worst enemy.

The only sour note for me was Dr. Rebecca Parker’s keynote address. I found it sadly disappointing and even troubling. She is undoubtedly a wonderful person and may have a deep and rich spiritual life, but it didn’t come through. Her talk was a rousing cry for caring for the world, but it was without depth or any genuine compassion – it was laced with latent anger and vitriol with a heavy handed overlay of the rhetoric of oppression, which in this day and age simply sounds shrill and unskilled The realities she points to are painfully real and beyond worthy of our compassion and zealous activism. The shame of it is that the ways she addressed it are alienating and singularly ineffective for this time. For me, it seemed the same message from the progressive left that I have heard since listening to Jerry Rubin and Angela Davis but wrapped in a veneer of postmodern religiosity. How often do we have to replay the rhetoric of the 1960s New Left. Flatland yet again. C’est domage.

More concerning to me was the dehumanization of the evangelical Christians and other “oppressors”. They were the enemy in Dr. Parker's talk. It smacked of cheap pandering - bash the Christians and bash the Republicans and you bring a group of UUs to their feet in applause. The problem with this type of self-righteousness is that eventually degrades into bitterness, nihilism and performative self-contradiction. Dr. Parker's speech left me wondering if she wouldn't just rather wipe the evangelical Christians from the face of the planet, or at least their leaders. I could take no joy in these "us v. them" characterizations of first tier thinking and the standing ovation for a talk with the level of animosity reflected towards those groups truly saddened me. It is liberal fundamentalism at its worst. Until we have the wisdom of Pogo (“We have met the enemy and he is us.”) we have no hope of bringing any real transformation either on a personal level or to our culture. In fairness, Dr. Parker may believe that as well, but it just did not come through in her talk.

The self-congratulatory new progressive rhetoric is so strong in our churches but the actions are so anemic and inconsistent (we play at engaging in a costless form of social justice often designed it seems to salve our liberal guilt) and it seems to me to stem from the fact that we have no stomach for genuine liberation. That type of liberation demands that we die to our self (our egoic sense of who we are) and that we find God (our true Self existing before we were born). Once that happens, life cannot be a tepid thing and if we then decide to engage, we engage wholeheartedly and because of calling that is rooted in the timeless now and the Ground of all Being. We show up, we don't flit through.

Perhaps I am being too hard on good folks who are doing the best they can, but, doggoneit, I am tired of pretense and lack of any real "there there" and I think my fellow UUs are feeling the same. We need better stuff from the president of our seminary which is turning out people to work with us in our congregations. We UUs are as trapped in our culture as any and the thing we long for is genuine liberation - we seek the meaning of our lives and much of that meaning can be found in service to others, but not without spiritual depth. Reductionist materialism (as a rock bottom philosophy of life) ain't going to get us there - it won't even get us out the door. A political agenda based on reductionist materialism is a dead end - why liberate the huddled masses if all they are is just a slab of meat with neuropetides? Until we recognize either that evolution is taking us collectively towards divinity and that glowing embers of that divinity are in us (a la Whitehead, Chardin, and the German Idealisists) or we believe that involution has brought divinity deep into our our material existence and into our humanness (a la Plotinus, Eckhardt, Sankara and Nagarjuna), or both (a la Aurobindo), we might as well go back to watching TV.

1. This is not to deny concepts of moral development - there are higher and lower stages of moral development. It is only to disparage the notion that morality can be used as another form of oppressive heirarchy. The moral high ground does not permit you to dehumanize those who are developing to your level.

© 2008. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

What are We Missing?

As we reflect on the spiritual marketplace in our modern, secularized world, there is no question that something is afoot. This week in Seattle an innovative trust and financial management company that serves families of extreme wealth rented the symphony hall to have alternative medicine expert Andrew Weil speak to its customers, potential customers, and their advisors on aging in one of its “Thought Forums”. Andrew Weil wasn't always so mainstream. In 1971 he first visited Esalen where he participated in then cutting edge seminars on health and human consciousness. His efforts and the efforts of other physicians and healthcare professionals and researchers who largely gathered under the initial aegis and leadership of Esalen brought alternative medicine to the United States and within a few short decades turned it into what is now referred to respectfully as "complimentary medicine."

The stuff that was on the very outer fringes of cultural acceptability only recently is becoming mainstream in some very important ways. Yet we as Unitarian Universalists are missing this cultural sea-change and dooming ourselves to fundamental and, I suspect, quite permanent, irrelevance. We sit back and dismiss these movements out of hand – this hunger people have for something of significance that feeds their souls. We see it as somehow too “woo-woo” or “New Age”. Yet in our complacency, the world is passing us by very, very quickly. The folks who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious”, some of whom are referred to as Cultural Creatives, constitute approximately 20% of our population and probably reflect an even larger percentage of the demographic in more hip, urban and liberal areas where many of our churches exist.

As sophisticated UUs, I have heard us scoff at those who race after chimeric “spiritual” fixes – like The Celestine Prophecy or The Secret or “What the Bleep Do We Know” – and yet people who are seeking comfort in these things, and other ideas that are even stranger, have a deep human longing to become more whole and more loving people whose lives are rooted in something deeper than the shallow materialism of our age. This “pop” spirituality speaks of something much more profound - a human tropism towards the spiritual. It speaks of something that is emerging in our culture that has profoundly ancient antecedents. It runs so deep that it might even be irreducibly embedded in structures of human consciousness or even the fabric of the universe itself. The problem is that these popular forms of spiritual expression are ill-formed, lack depth, and are concocted out of ideas that seem to us rational folk to be patently foolish, confused and magical. In short, a throw-back to pre-rational superstition.

And many of them are. And yet…

While this frothy spirituality oftentimes denies and condemns the deeper wisdom traditions, their ideas are the distant and sometimes barely recognizable relatives of the much deeper truths found in perennial philosophies and the paths of mystics in Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu traditions, among others. While the airy ideas of these facile trends lack depth and discipline, they can serve as gateways for literally millions of people to possibilities of real spiritual depth and profound experience. In talking with many UUs, the story is the same. Plenty of visitors, but few stick. Could part of the reason be because we are so very close to what they are looking for on paper, but fall short of embodying that promise in action, particularly with respect to spirituality?

As a faith that ostensibly draws on these well-grounded and respected traditions, we as Unitarian Universalists have the opportunity to deeply explore and live these truths and thereby offer to the world a path of depth, integrity and real meaning. But this way requires that we take our spiritual calling as seriously as we take our political one. It requires that we truly acknowledge the sources, not just with affirmation, but with incarnation. It requires discipline and study and devotion to spiritual practice.

Our denomination runs the risk of being swept into irrelevance. It continues to shrink in most appreciable ways and it is rapidly aging. We live in deadened humanism and narrow definitions of liberal political orthodoxy that have already been dismissed by our culture as fundamentally irrelevant. At this point, we have no voice that is resonating with those around us. Yet in our Sources we have latent depth and profound messages that, if taken seriously and coupled with spiritual practice, can not only revitalize our congregations but drive a new message of relevant political and social transformation.

Many leaders of cultural thinking point to emerging structures of consciousness that profoundly integrate the spiritual, the psychological, the intellectual and the ethical dimensions of life in ways that shape the soul. While this emerging consciousness is clearly not a panacea, and will raise its own problems, we are on the cusp of a revolution in the way ordinary people construct the meaning of their lives. It would be a shame to sit on the sidelines and only watch when we have the very real potential of dynamically participating in the emergence of a new order of human consciousness.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Boomeritis

Ken Wilber and others have put their finger on a very real set of problems associated with late stage pluralism. Wilber calls this complex of issues “Boomeritis”. As I mentioned in my last entry, much of our church reflects a consciousness reflective of post-modern pluralism. We live in a world of diverse cultures, races, and religions and increasingly these coexist in close proximity. From that melting pot comes the intellectual capacity to appreciate differences, deconstruct perspectives, and form identities that are not derived solely from one’s family and traditions. For the first time in human history, entire generations are able to transform the ways that they view themselves and revolutionize their understanding beyond the narrow confines of provincial enculturation. What this has produced is a remarkable mix of political activism and intentional personal development. However, the latter has, in many ways, gotten us into trouble.

The Deeply Subjective Self

The postmodern self is a deeply subjective self. By rejecting traditional values and even recognizing the limits of scientific understanding, and by understanding intuitively that we construct reality as we go along, we are left with only our inner, subjective experience as authority. Our truth is relative. We cannot exercise judgment because there is no place to stand to determine validity. We reject the notion that anyone has anything of real value to say because we distrust both authority and hierarchy. And our feelings become the ultimate arbiters of good and bad, right and wrong.

In the end, we evade personal responsibility, because, after all, there are no true standards which can universally govern our behavior. We alternate between terminal “niceness” (because, after all, a person’s feelings are at the core of the truth of their being) to a rampant meanness (because I have a “right” to my opinion and a responsibility to assert myself to avoid giving in to my “victimhood” or to establish appropriate “boundaries”). This is the world of the sensitive self, the “Me” generation, self-righteous political correctness and cultural creativity.

When you strip all of this away, you are left with a very loud mantra: “Nobody tells me what to do!” This, in essence, is a deep form of narcissism and it is potentially quite dangerous. As Elizabeth Debold says in her article “Boomeritis and Me”:

[I]n the context of a world careening out of control precisely because we are so out of control, this is actually no joke. Narcissism is a force in us, built up over hundreds of thousands of years of human history, which must be renounced in order to make the evolutionary leap to a new way of being. It is a willful, and aggressive, denial of the creative force of the universe, whether we call it the Divine or God or what you will. This core motivation—Nobody tells me what to do!—sounds like the peevish rant of a two-year-old, which it is, but it is not harmless when it provides us with an excuse not to care beyond ourselves, destroys the true nobility of the spiritual quest and the imperative to reach for the highest in human potential, or justifies the rage of the innumerable sensitive selves who feel victimized in contemporary culture.

Boomeritis in the UU Church

I see this in myself and I see it everyday in our church. We UUs participate in this cultural complex without even thinking about it. We see it in our culture of criticism. We see it in our intolerance of conservatives. We see it in our stated commitment to liberal political action but failure to back up that commitment with sacrificial action. We see it in our token environmentalism and our claims to seek diversity (while our churches remain overwhelmingly homogenous). I am the first to admit to my own hypocracy in all of this. I am infected as well. However, for the good of the planet, I have to move on and I suspect we in the UU church have to do the same.

The trick, it seems to me, is to recognize that I am not here to have my way but to serve. I am here to contribute, not to take. I am here to lay my life down. I can no longer afford to say “Nobody can tell ME what to do!” but rather I must fundamentally say “My only hope lies in being of use in this world and what gets in the way of that is my self.” To my mind, that requires that I seek deeper spiritual truth -- that I learn and realize the true nature of my egoic self.

Jean Gebser, Don Beck, Chris Cowan, Ken Wilber and many others claim that we are on the threshold of a new level of consciousness. If we manage to negotiate that process, we open ourselves to new stages of human evolution in which we deeply see and understand the integrative nature of reality. Those perspectives hold promise for our solving some rather pernicious and dangerous problems. But those perspectives require that we let go of myopic understandings of who we really are and begin to understand that all that we think we are is merely a passing emergence in flow of infinite time and space.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Pluralism in UU Churches

On earlier blog posts, I took on humanism, arguing that it is a fundamentally played out moral view of the world resting on assumptions that were conclusively debunked in the late 1700s. I have taken the position that building a faith on a humanistic worldview is doomed to failure and that we, as a movement, have to look beyond mere humanism.

This article takes on the next step of development – post-modern pluralism. If our modern church was founded on humanist values, it is now dominated by post-modern pluralism.

Pluralism Defined.

What do I mean by pluralism? Specifically, pluralism refers to a post-modern understanding of the world that recognizes the relative nature of “truth” and the central reality of human experience. With the breakdown of epistemological certainty ushered in by Hume and later Kant, it became evident that what can be known is extremely limited if, indeed, it is possible to know anything at all with an appreciable level of confidence. As is often the case, it took awhile for humanity to catch up to the implications of these philosophic conclusions. However, by the early 20th Century, the philosophic schools of phenomenology, logical positivism, linguistic philosophy, semiotics, existentialism, structuralism and a few others reflected the full blown attempt to come to terms with the notion that “man” is not the measure of all things. By the 1960s, these intermediate ideas had penetrated the general culture and “post-modernism” in art, literature and social criticism. Representative intellectual apologists of this post modern movement include Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Roty and Jean Baudrillard.

While this is a diverse crowd and any generalizations are bound to oversimplify, for the sake of this blog, it seems the central theme is the general consensus of these schools of thought that our reality is, largely, constructed by human beings. There is no “objective” truth which is out there that we perceive. Rather, we attempt to make sense of a maelstrom of phenomena and in the process construct reality. Schools differ as to whether the primary drives of this construction lie in language, political structures, or cultures. On the positive side, this leads to recognition that no one has a corner on the truth. Truth can be found in all cultures and in all peoples and all cultures and value systems must be honored. This world-centric understanding is profoundly important on the level of political action.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Post-modern Pluralists, at their best, have a deep desire to act politically on behalf of oppressed peoples. being deeply sensitive to matters of race, sexual orientation, gender, poverty and marginalization. On a societal level, this postmodern worldview has accomplished much: the civil rights movement, feminism, environmental protection and ecological sensitivity, the beginnings of health care reform and an awareness of political marginalization in all manner of forms

However there is a very real downside to this world view. Postmodern pluralists share a common and fundamental mistrust of the spiritual, especially when experienced at the individual level. They are also thoroughgoing materialists. Given a lack of any basis for determining validity claims, and a radical mistrust of individual subjective experience coupled with a denial of the notion of transpersonal reality, they end up with a highly relativistic world-view. Because everything is constructed, there is no place to stand to evaluate value systems. You, in your perspectives, are as conditioned by language, society, culture and so on as everyone else and so you have no authority to “judge” the value systems of others. This leads to is a significant distrust of subjective experience, a rabid dislike of hierarchy, and spiritual experience and as a logical consequence, the result is a relativistic moral despair. (In its inevitable extreme, we can’t condemn Hitler because, after all, his value system is just one of many and who is to say, in any absolute sense, that his viewpoint wasn’t valid.) Indeed, it becomes very difficult to ultimately justify actions of liberation and political action – if every system is as valid as any other, then what allows us judge the oppressor’s way as “wrong”. Ultimately, postmodernism ends up becoming form of moral nihilism. Foucault recognized this, rejected his deep constructivist approach in the middle of his career and began working towards a different model.

In response to this moral quagmire, Pluralism hypocrically simply asserts an elitist moral system. All systems that are less broadminded are simply declared to be inferior on the grounds that they are not inclusive. Thus, in the name of inclusiveness, the Pluralists exclude vast swaths of human culture. Their ire is directed towards what are perceived as dominator worldviews – namely mythic religion and rationalist scientism. In self-contradiction to the notion that there is no morally superior worldview, the pluralist sees any moral system that cannot tolerate other systems as intolerable. There is also a tendency to romanticize and exalt cultures that are indigenous or non-Western. These are seen as pure and the victims of the dominator cultures of Europe. Moreover, feminine values are exalted over male values. The former are seen as inclusive and connective while the later are seen as destructive and purely agentic. Thus for all of its vaunted open-mindedness, the pluralistic worldview cannot admit even the partial validity of the moral stance of religious or scientific worldviews.

Consequently, postmodernism tends foster the apotheosis of victimhood. Victims should be rescued from the dominating forces of Western culture (whether religious or scientific/industrial). There is a great deal of anger and judgment against those who are perceived to be seeking the imposition of their value system on others. On an individual level, this leads to a certain degree of narcissim (which I will explore in a different blog entry).

Politically, pluralists tend to have a very difficult time figuring out how to address “evil”. They are deeply conflicted around issues of crime and punishment, terrorism, use of force and other agentic action. They simply don’t have the bandwidth or the categories to figure out how to address such issues from their framework. They recognize that lower tier responses are wanting, but they have nothing compelleing to offer in their stead.

The Fundamental Failure of Open-mindedness

While the entire ethos of this worldview is a purported open-mindedness, the irony, of course, is that this elitist and monoptic view of the world denigrates any value system perceived to be less open-minded. Despite that fact that it has a deeply nihilistic moral fabric, it seeks to impose its view of what is moral on anyone it perceives to be less morally developed. In fact, postmodern pluralism is a very closed system. Political correctness and thought policing are endemic. Straying from relativistic notions is met with fierce opposition and castigation.

If humanists are alive and well in the UU church, so are post-modern pluralists. Our denominational academic institutions are predominately pluralistic (as are most higher level academic institutions). Post-modern pluralism is also easy to spot in our churches. Most Unitarian Universalists claim open-mindedness and tolerance, yet cannot tolerate political or religious conservatives. There are certain things which could not be said in a UU church without provoking a virulent response. There is a stark dualistic thinking that takes hold of many with certain things declared to be good and other things declared to be evil. Our ability to think in nuanced and creative ways is hampered by the fact that we simply write off vast amounts of cultural and intellectual legacy that could be used as fodder for advancing our understanding of the world.

What's Next.

So why do I bring all of this up. A few posts ago, I talked about Jean Gebser and his view that humanity is on the brink of a significant transformation. Pluralism may well be a way station in the evolutionary development, but it is a mistake to linger there for too long. Indeed, post-modernism may represent the final stage of the mental structure with its insistence that material reality is all that exists. Gebser would encourage us to recognize that there are orders of consciousness that are above this worldview.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Corrosive Criticism

When my wife and I joined our first UU church in 2003, it was obvious to us that we had “come home”. We found in our community a group of very congenial folks who cared about the world and were willing to engage with each other and with life in thoughtful ways. We got involved immediately and have never looked back. I have my issues with the UU church as a whole. I am concerned with what I view to be a fundamental failure of the larger church to address the deeper spiritual needs of congregants and capture a cultural trend that could sustain us into the future. However, none of that affects my deep respect and compassion for my fellow UUs, particularly those I know at my church.

It is now three years later. I have sat on and chaired several committees. My wife is now president of our Boar. During that time I have noticed something I have found endemic to the life of our community and, from what I hear, is pretty characteristic of other communities as well. It is the pall of corrosive criticism.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do believe that there is a place for thoughtful and informed feedback and even criticism if it well conceived and designed to build up and improve on what exists. However, this type of criticism takes a lot of work and care. It is almost never an immediate reaction to a fresh set of facts and circumstances. I am not taking about this kind of thoughtful, constructive criticism. Rather I am talking about what might be called “corrosive criticism”.

In my sort tenure with our church, I have seen people leave our community because of the harshness of people’s judgments of their contributions or the contributions of others. I have watched good people who have put in hours and hours of hard work have it torn to shreds by people in seconds who are reacting without any real thought or consideration. I have seen good, thoughtful ideas tentatively put forward by people who have potential leadership skill put down and dismissed without any real understanding of what was being said. The toll of this type of criticism is enormous.

From what I can see, more than any other dynamic in church life, this type of knee-jerk response and lack of restraint in sharing every idea that pops into our heads, demoralizes people and makes it difficult to recruit leaders. Who wants to set themselves up for this kind of abuse? Why would people want to put their heart and soul in the work to have it so cavalierly disregarded?

Personally, I think this is a real problem. I am really trying this year to be a part of the solution. As such I am working on the following:

• Affirming people for the work they are doing and the contributions they are making.
• Using as a mantra: “Those who do the work get to make the decisions.”
• When I don’t understand a decision of some import, I am trying to go to a person who participated in making the decision and ask questions. The types of questions I have found useful include: How did you come to that decision? Did you consider X and how did that factor into your decision? Is the decision final or is there additional opportunity for input? How are you finding that people are responding? Is there anything I can do to help?
• In conversations about decisions, I am trying to acknowledge the hard work of the people involved and the fact that they undoubtedly had more information than I do.

I find that these questions are almost always best prefaced with something like: “This must have been a tough decision. Have you gotten any flack for it? I want you to know that I support your personal work in this community and I know how much you give. I also want you to know that, to the extent the opportunity arises, I will publicly support the decision you all made. It would help me to understand how you got to the decision both for my own sake and also to help me in my conversations with others."

In trying to avoid corrosive criticism, I feel that I can positively contribute to the community. What I have found is that the people who are making decisions have most often very thoughtful reasons for deciding as they did. I may agree or disagree, but these things are rarely so clear cut that there is only one right course of action. And for the sake of my community, and its long term health, I can support people of goodwill who are doing the best they can as volunteers.

Finally, I would note, that if we cannot be civil and supportive of one another, it seems that it will be very difficult to make an appreciable difference in the world. And so, out of compassion and out of a desire to support and strengthen those in my community who contribute, I am seeking to avoid corrosive criticism.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Humanism Reprise

In the recent article “Does Humanism need to be new?” Doug Muder wrestles with the question of how humanism can be made relevant and how a militant new atheism fits into the picture. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, “practical people who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct philosopher.” Some of my very best friends are religious humanists, and I care for them deeply. They are very moral and kind people and have very good intentions. However, I have to say that they are the unwitting slaves of some very defunct philosophers.

With all due respect to them and to good humanists everywhere, humanism is fighting a rearguard action and simply will not succeed. Its quest for widespread acceptance of an Enlightenment worldview is doomed to ultimate failure. While the reasons for this inevitable failure are intensely complex and wrapped in long history, the culmination of the line of the thought that spelt their demise is found in the thinking David Hume. While this grossly oversimplifies the matter, it is the best leverage point I know of to make this point. Hume’s body of work conclusively demonstrates that one cannot arrive at a moral system from observable phenomena alone. That singular observation, the rationale behind it and its necessary corollaries spelled out more fully in Hume’s broader work sound the death knell to an optimistic humanist value structure. This fundamental breakdown of the ability to of representational reason alone to cope with moral and aesthetic truth, as acknowledged by Hume, accounts for the Humanism’s increasingly marginalized voice

If humanism had its birth in the early renaissance, it met its demise over 300 years ago in the late Enlightenment. The rise of empirical skepticism was a deathblow from which it cannot recover. The German and English Idealists attempted to revive a moral center, but in the end were unsuccessful. To date we have not been able to find a widely acceptable answer to the question of the relationship between reason and morals. Post-Kantians everywhere (and most of those educated in universities after the 1960s are the unwitting slaves of Kant and his intellectual progeny) understand this problem at a visceral level. Such people recognize the fundamental inability of Humanism to put forward a compelling moral position.

This fundamental failure of humanists to grasp post-modernist thought means that they will be forever marginalized. The world has clearly moved on into postmodernism and many are now exploring integral models of understanding the world. Humanism simply does not have the intellectual horsepower to address humanity’s deepest questions. Continuing to dream of a rationalist renaissance is a fine fantasy, but rather quixotic in a post-modern world.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

The Big Mistake

In my last blog entry I wrote about our denomination’s difficulty in addressing the needs of those who are “spiritual but not religious”. In fact, this group is not particularly new. While this group is a substantial percentage of the populations now, it traces it heritage back to the New England Transcendentalists. One of these, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a famous UU…at least in our time. While we enthusiastically claim him as one of our patron saints today, Emerson had a rough go of it in his own day. His ideas were not particularly embraced with open arms and he was a lightening rod for controversy throughout his adult life.

His Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838 was a manifesto for what was to become the Transcendentalist movement. It was an immediate sensation and it almost instantaneously polarized ministers and laity in the Unitarian Church. Between that address and 1885, a debate raged in the Unitarian church between liberal Christian traditionalists who espoused the Enlightenment understanding of the Christian gospel expressed in social action (represented by Theodore Parker), and the Transcendentalists who sought to ground theology and political action in personal experience and a sense of union with the cosmos.

In 1885, three years after Emerson’s death, the debate ended with a near total victory going to the Christian side of the debate. As is often the case, the "winners" co-opted a good deal of the intellectual capital of the vanquished faction – such as a notion of universal religion. However, the Unitarians steadfastly refused to accommodate any form of inner mysticism in favor of a strict rationality and outward focus.

Those in the United States who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” are the direct cultural and intellectual heirs of Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement. Could it be that had the tent of Unitarian Universalism been large enough to embrace the notion that spirituality is not merely a matter of mind, and even action, but also of something deeper and more primal – something mysterious – we might be living in a very different church today? It just might be that those in our culture whose hunger for a spiritual reality is not satisfied by consuming the cheapjack wares in the markets of New Age cranks and charlatans would have found a home with us and the peace they seek. Perhaps it is not too late.

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

Spiritual But Not Religious

There is the old adage that denominations survive either by procreation or conversion. Given our demographics the first is not likely to help us much.

I attended UU University in the day before General Assembly began. I thoroughly enjoyed the program and was impressed by the intelligence, commitment, and enthusiasm of my fellow UUs. However, I had one nagging thought – where were all the UUs who are in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. I have noticed in my own church that these people tend to cycle through our church fairly quickly – they come to check us out and then leave after awhile. For whatever reason, they are not finding what they are looking for. Why not? What is missing?

The report American Piety in the 21st Century: New Insights to the Depths and Complexity of Religion in the United States may shed some light on this issue. As it turns out 18.6% of people aged 18-30 have no religious affiliation. The figure for those between the ages of 31 and 44 is 11.4%. Even though these are not affiliated, 63% believe in god or a higher power. Nine out of ten of these report never having attended religious services. Only 11 percent of the religiously unaffiliated believe that Jesus was the son of God. Americans who think of God a cosmic force as opposed to an active diety comprise a remarkable 25% of the population.

To my knowledge the UU church has not done demographic studies on visitors in these age groups who visit our churches. My suspicion is that they very much fit the profiles outlined above.

It may be important that those people who are 40 or younger came of age in the aftermath of the 1960s. Many of the great political issues that defined the vast majority of our members (who came of age in the late 1950s and 1960s) were largely quiescent when these cohorts were hitting their teen years. These younger folk grew up in the ages of disco, Wall Street, Reganomics, and Bill Clinton. Those with liberal leanings seem to struggle with issues of materialism, meaning, childrearing and finding community. To the extent they have political agendas, those interests tend to focus on issues of globalization and planetary ecology rather than domestic social justice – a battle they largely (though not completely) see as a sort of mop-up operation. Religiously, it seems that this rather large cohort of people has been strongly influenced by the general dissemination through our culture of religious beliefs and practices derived from Eastern and esoteric traditions.

In short, these people (who are the very future of the UU church) may best be described by the phrase “spiritual but not religious”.

Those who cross our threshold may be looking for a place of likeminded people but they are not finding it. They would be a natural fit for our communities if only we knew what to do with them. They are also the future of our movement if it is to survive.

For a fascinating look at this demographic and what they are looking for, Robert C. Fuller's article entitled "Spiritual But Not Religious" is well worth reviewing. As Fuller notes in his article:

Forsaking formal religious organizations, these people have instead embraced an individualized spirituality that includes picking and choosing from a wide range of alternative religious philosophies. They typically view spirituality as a journey intimately linked with the pursuit of personal growth or development. A woman who joined a meditation center after going through a divorce and experiencing low self-esteem offers an excellent example. All she originally sought was a way to lose weight and get her life back on track. The Eastern religious philosophy that accompanied the meditation exercises was of little or no interest to her. Yet she received so many benefits from this initial exposure to alternative spiritual practice that she began experimenting with other systems including vegetarianism, mandalas, incense, breathing practices, and crystals. When interviewed nine years later by sociologist Marilyn McGuire, this woman reported that she was still "just beginning to grow"
and she was continuing to shop around for new spiritual insights.

McGuire found that many spiritual seekers use the "journey" image to describe a weekend workshop or retreat-the modern equivalents of religious pilgrimages. The fact that most seekers dabble or experiment rather than making once-and-forever commitments is in McGuire's opinion "particularly apt for late modern societies with their high degrees of pluralism, mobility and temporally limited social ties, communications, and voluntarism."

Finally, we also know a few things about today's unchurched seekers as a group. They are more likely than other Americans to have a college education, to belong to a white-collar profession, to be liberal in their political views, to have parents who attended church less frequently, and to be more independent in the sense of having weaker social relationships. So what do we as a church with this information.

There is a tremendous opportunity lying our doorsteps and indeed one could argue that we have a moral imperative to seek to meet the needs of this population. Can we as a church begin to address the needs of these people? Should we? Is this the future of our faith?

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