On Being a "Birthright" Unitarian
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island.
Sunday September 29, 2002
***
There's an intriguing statistic floating around our denomination which indicates that out of all adult Unitarian Universalists, only about 10% were actually reared within our religious tradition as children. The other 90% are what we sometimes refer to as "come outers:" that is to say, folks who were reared in a different religious faith, and who, at some point in their lives, chose to identify themselves as Unitarian Universalists instead. I have no idea why these numbers are the way they are, nor even how they compare to similar ratios for other denominations, but the obvious question one hears raised whenever this topic comes up is "What happened to all the kids?" It's almost as if there is a generation missing from our churches, and everyone wants to know what became of them.
I've heard a couple of explanations for this phenomenon, which I thought I'd just share with you this morning. The first is that we UU's simply don't do a very good job of raising our children "in the faith" as it were -- instead we tend to shuffle them off, "out of sight, out of mind," without really giving them a sense of identity as members of a religious community. Church is for grown-ups, and when our kids have grown up they can decide for themselves whether or not it’s good for them. Conversely, the second explanation is that we do too GOOD a job of educating our young: that after 16 years of instruction regarding individual responsibility, values clarification and anticipating the “natural consequences” of personal choices, the importance of cultural diversity and religious pluralism , as well as the validation of their own self-worth and the “inherent worth and dignity of every person,” we've pretty much "cured" our kids of many of the traditional motivations for attending church, such as guilt and shame and fear, and therefore as adults they find something more interesting to do on Sunday mornings.
I suspect that both of these explanations are to some extent true, and that behind them lies a much larger truth about the nature of our religious faith itself, which is that Unitarian Universalism is, in its essence, fundamentally a religion of choice -- that even for those who have been born to the faith, there comes a moment when one must decide of their own free will whether to "own the covenant" and become a member of the community, or to go their own way and fend for themselves. Perhaps it is just that those who have lived with the assumption of this freedom all their lives tend to take it for granted; there's no great pressure to become a member of the community, because they've never truly been alone, without the support and nurture it provides. Like Thomas Jefferson, they instead are "content to be Unitarians by themselves.” There is no great need to choose, because they have never had to confront the alternative of a life without that choice.
I've always considered myself a birthright Unitarian, although strictly speaking this is not exactly true. In 1956, the year that I was born, my father was a student at the University of Washington; and he happened to hear Aaron Gilmartin, who was then minister of University Unitarian Church in Seattle, speak on behalf of presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson at a campus Democratic rally. My father has always traced his identity as a Unitarian to that moment, but it was actually not until two years later, when my brother Kurt was born, that my parents formally became members of University Church. I don't really remember very much about that time; although it was rather strange, some twenty years later, to walk into the preschool room at University Church in the role of Intern minister and immediately recognize that I'd been there many times before. I have much more vivid memories of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto, California, which my family began attending when I was a fourth grader. I can still recall some of the lessons I was taught in church school there, as well as wandering around the crowded coffee hour looking at grown-up people's legs, and particularly the bookstore, which contained so many interesting volumes not found in elementary school libraries; in fact, the Palo Alto church was where I bought my first copy of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which remains one of my favorite books to this day.
But my parents stopped attending that church in 1968, when, like so many of the more conservative Unitarian Universalists at that time, my father became uncomfortable with the church's vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, and, perhaps more tellingly, with the increasing presence of long haired, unwashed, bare-foot "hippies" at Sunday Services. This probably says as much about my Dad as it does about the UU church of that era; but the interesting insight for me today is that while it was the ideas that initially attracted my parents to Unitarian Universalism, it was their need for the community which ultimately inspired them to join the church, to become active in the church, and eventually to leave the church when it got to be more than my Dad could handle. Yet to this day I suspect both of my parents, and possibly both of my brothers as well, still consider themselves, intellectually at least, to be Unitarian Universalists. But only my mother actually attends services on even a semi-regular basis.
The circumstances of my own family are in some ways paralleled in American culture. There’s another interesting statistic floating around, based on the City University of New York Sociology Department’s periodic survey of Religious Identity, which suggests that there are approximately 628,000 Americans who identify themselves as Unitarian Universalist -- a 25% increase from a decade ago. Yet only about of third of those folks, 151,000 adults and another 61,000 children, are actually formally affiliated with a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Never mind the old advertising slogan which asked “Are you a Unitarian without knowing it?” -- there are 400,000 people in this country who know perfectly well which church they are staying away from on Sunday morning, who for one reason or another identify spiritually and intellectually with our faith, but are not an active part of any organized Unitarian Universalist community. That’s the bad news; the worse news is that even at 600,000+, Unitarian Universalists represent only about two-tenths of one percent of the general population. So much for Thomas Jefferson’s prediction in the 1820’s that within a generation Unitarianism would become “the general religion of the United States.” We can’t even figure out how to reach out and include the majority of the people who already know they are “one of us.”
My friend John Buehrens, who until recently served as President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, has several ideas about why this is so, and our short-sighted “less is more” attitude regarding the religious education of our children is only part of the equation. The freedom to believe what your reason and your experience tell you to be true is an easy discipline; the challenge and responsibility of being a member of an organized religious community, even a democratically governed one, is far more difficult. Likewise the challenge of creating quality programs and worship experiences equal to our often extremely high intellectual and spiritual expectations. There’s a quantitative challenge as well; with only a thousand congregations, give or take, on the entire continent, there remains some four hundred communities with populations of 75,000 or more where there is no organized Unitarian Universalist presence whatsoever.
Finally, because UUs tend to be highly educated, we also tend to be highly mobile; some 15% of all UU households change addresses every year, many of whom are young adults between the ages of 18 and 35, who are typically in the process of pursuing their educations, beginning families, and establishing themselves in their careers. When you look at all these factors in combination: high mobility and its corresponding “frictional” attrition, too few congregations to adequately serve a growing population, the challenge of creating high quality programs in the face of limited resources and demanding expectations, and the basic cantankerousness of intelligent, free-thinking individualists, it sometimes seems like a miracle that we are doing as well as we are. Yet I also know, in my heart of hearts, that we could be doing a lot better when it comes to reaching out and serving those who already share our core values and beliefs, but are not now active members of a Unitarian Universalist congregation.
For my own part, my parents' decision to leave the Unitarian church in the sixties left me, as a teenager, at once both intellectually and emotionally alienated from the Evangelical Christian groups like "Young Life" that I saw all around me, yet without any viable religious community of my own. I knew that I was a Unitarian, but I wasn't really sure what it meant to BE a Unitarian; and so, to make a long story short, I eventually ended up enrolling at the Harvard Divinity School, in many ways simply to figure it out. This may strike you as kind of a radical step in order to discover something that I might just as easily have learned in a Sunday School class, but on the other hand, what other options did I have? And, of course, an expensive seminary education was really just the beginning of what has turned out to be a life-long learning process. Once again, it was the ideas of our religion which originally drew me into the ministry, but it has been the community of the church which has kept me here, and which has truly made me into a real minister.
The distinction between 212,000 “practicing” Unitarians, and 628,000 “ideological” Unitarians may or may not seem important to you, but there’s another factor to be considered here. The demographers Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson have identified a population of some 50 million adult Americans, approximately 26% of the general population, whom they characterize as “Cultural Creatives.” Cultural Creatives “love nature, and are deeply concerned about its destruction.” They place a great deal of value on “the importance of developing and maintaining...relationships,” as well as “helping other people and bringing out their unique gifts;” they often “do volunteering for one or more good causes,” and “care intensely about both psychological and spiritual development,” are “concerned about the role of the Religious Right,” strongly supportive of “equality for women” and want to see “more women leaders in business and politics.” They “dislike all the emphasis in modern culture on success,” wealth, and conspicuous consumption, and are vitally “concerned about what the big corporations are doing in the name of making more profits;” instead, they would like to see our government “put more emphasis on children’s education and well-being, on rebuilding our neighborhoods and communities, and on creating an ecologically sustainable future.” Above all, they “want to be involved in creating a new and better way of life in our country.”
Does any of this sound familiar?
The emergence of these so-called Cultural Creatives as a significant demographic force in our society represents both a profound challenge and a profound opportunity for organized liberal religion. I’m not suggesting that every one of these folks is potentially a Unitarian Universalist, but I don’t see any inherent reason why a lot of them shouldn’t be. Look around you. Your typical Unitarian Universalist church is full of folks who march to the music of a different drummer: people who have rebelled against the authoritarian religious teachings of their childhood, who have chosen to believe differently than their parents and their neighbors, who perhaps even have become outcasts because of their religious views, and who are looking for a place where they can be accepted and supported in their beliefs and values, and, more importantly, empowered in their efforts to put those beliefs and values into action.
This church, and others like it, exists to serve this type of individual in precisely this way: to create a space, a sacred space, for those who wish to practice a style of religious life which emerges authentically out of their own religious experience, and is not just a fading echo of the religious opinions of others. It is an extremely personal type of commitment: a faith which is truly hand-crafted and custom-made rather than merely mass-produced in a "one size fits all" fashion.
And this is true as well, I believe, for those of us who were born into this faith, and who can claim as our heritage and birthright membership in a free religious society, a community which is based on the assumption of choice, and not merely the possession of the "one true answer." Given this assumption, perhaps it is unavoidable that many of the children who were raised in this faith, must, for a time at least, look elsewhere first to test their religious views, before the significance of the choice they make can become fully apparent to them. It's one thing to be able to repeat an idea, or even to embody it, and quite another to be able to appreciate the significance of life in a religious community, and what it means to choose to become a part of it.
And yet, it seems to me there is one thing that we can teach our children here, while they are young, beyond values clarification, and respect for pluralism and diversity, and the validation of their individual self worth. And this is that they will always have a home here among us as members of this community, a legacy which they can not change or trade away, and which will be here for them anytime they choose to claim it. But the choice invariably remains with them, for without that choice, freely made and with a full understanding of all the alternatives, the commitment itself remains essentially meaningless: an exercise in compliance rather than conviction, a mere shadow of the true substance of our religion.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island.
Sunday September 29, 2002
***
There's an intriguing statistic floating around our denomination which indicates that out of all adult Unitarian Universalists, only about 10% were actually reared within our religious tradition as children. The other 90% are what we sometimes refer to as "come outers:" that is to say, folks who were reared in a different religious faith, and who, at some point in their lives, chose to identify themselves as Unitarian Universalists instead. I have no idea why these numbers are the way they are, nor even how they compare to similar ratios for other denominations, but the obvious question one hears raised whenever this topic comes up is "What happened to all the kids?" It's almost as if there is a generation missing from our churches, and everyone wants to know what became of them.
I've heard a couple of explanations for this phenomenon, which I thought I'd just share with you this morning. The first is that we UU's simply don't do a very good job of raising our children "in the faith" as it were -- instead we tend to shuffle them off, "out of sight, out of mind," without really giving them a sense of identity as members of a religious community. Church is for grown-ups, and when our kids have grown up they can decide for themselves whether or not it’s good for them. Conversely, the second explanation is that we do too GOOD a job of educating our young: that after 16 years of instruction regarding individual responsibility, values clarification and anticipating the “natural consequences” of personal choices, the importance of cultural diversity and religious pluralism , as well as the validation of their own self-worth and the “inherent worth and dignity of every person,” we've pretty much "cured" our kids of many of the traditional motivations for attending church, such as guilt and shame and fear, and therefore as adults they find something more interesting to do on Sunday mornings.
I suspect that both of these explanations are to some extent true, and that behind them lies a much larger truth about the nature of our religious faith itself, which is that Unitarian Universalism is, in its essence, fundamentally a religion of choice -- that even for those who have been born to the faith, there comes a moment when one must decide of their own free will whether to "own the covenant" and become a member of the community, or to go their own way and fend for themselves. Perhaps it is just that those who have lived with the assumption of this freedom all their lives tend to take it for granted; there's no great pressure to become a member of the community, because they've never truly been alone, without the support and nurture it provides. Like Thomas Jefferson, they instead are "content to be Unitarians by themselves.” There is no great need to choose, because they have never had to confront the alternative of a life without that choice.
I've always considered myself a birthright Unitarian, although strictly speaking this is not exactly true. In 1956, the year that I was born, my father was a student at the University of Washington; and he happened to hear Aaron Gilmartin, who was then minister of University Unitarian Church in Seattle, speak on behalf of presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson at a campus Democratic rally. My father has always traced his identity as a Unitarian to that moment, but it was actually not until two years later, when my brother Kurt was born, that my parents formally became members of University Church. I don't really remember very much about that time; although it was rather strange, some twenty years later, to walk into the preschool room at University Church in the role of Intern minister and immediately recognize that I'd been there many times before. I have much more vivid memories of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto, California, which my family began attending when I was a fourth grader. I can still recall some of the lessons I was taught in church school there, as well as wandering around the crowded coffee hour looking at grown-up people's legs, and particularly the bookstore, which contained so many interesting volumes not found in elementary school libraries; in fact, the Palo Alto church was where I bought my first copy of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which remains one of my favorite books to this day.
But my parents stopped attending that church in 1968, when, like so many of the more conservative Unitarian Universalists at that time, my father became uncomfortable with the church's vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, and, perhaps more tellingly, with the increasing presence of long haired, unwashed, bare-foot "hippies" at Sunday Services. This probably says as much about my Dad as it does about the UU church of that era; but the interesting insight for me today is that while it was the ideas that initially attracted my parents to Unitarian Universalism, it was their need for the community which ultimately inspired them to join the church, to become active in the church, and eventually to leave the church when it got to be more than my Dad could handle. Yet to this day I suspect both of my parents, and possibly both of my brothers as well, still consider themselves, intellectually at least, to be Unitarian Universalists. But only my mother actually attends services on even a semi-regular basis.
The circumstances of my own family are in some ways paralleled in American culture. There’s another interesting statistic floating around, based on the City University of New York Sociology Department’s periodic survey of Religious Identity, which suggests that there are approximately 628,000 Americans who identify themselves as Unitarian Universalist -- a 25% increase from a decade ago. Yet only about of third of those folks, 151,000 adults and another 61,000 children, are actually formally affiliated with a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Never mind the old advertising slogan which asked “Are you a Unitarian without knowing it?” -- there are 400,000 people in this country who know perfectly well which church they are staying away from on Sunday morning, who for one reason or another identify spiritually and intellectually with our faith, but are not an active part of any organized Unitarian Universalist community. That’s the bad news; the worse news is that even at 600,000+, Unitarian Universalists represent only about two-tenths of one percent of the general population. So much for Thomas Jefferson’s prediction in the 1820’s that within a generation Unitarianism would become “the general religion of the United States.” We can’t even figure out how to reach out and include the majority of the people who already know they are “one of us.”
My friend John Buehrens, who until recently served as President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, has several ideas about why this is so, and our short-sighted “less is more” attitude regarding the religious education of our children is only part of the equation. The freedom to believe what your reason and your experience tell you to be true is an easy discipline; the challenge and responsibility of being a member of an organized religious community, even a democratically governed one, is far more difficult. Likewise the challenge of creating quality programs and worship experiences equal to our often extremely high intellectual and spiritual expectations. There’s a quantitative challenge as well; with only a thousand congregations, give or take, on the entire continent, there remains some four hundred communities with populations of 75,000 or more where there is no organized Unitarian Universalist presence whatsoever.
Finally, because UUs tend to be highly educated, we also tend to be highly mobile; some 15% of all UU households change addresses every year, many of whom are young adults between the ages of 18 and 35, who are typically in the process of pursuing their educations, beginning families, and establishing themselves in their careers. When you look at all these factors in combination: high mobility and its corresponding “frictional” attrition, too few congregations to adequately serve a growing population, the challenge of creating high quality programs in the face of limited resources and demanding expectations, and the basic cantankerousness of intelligent, free-thinking individualists, it sometimes seems like a miracle that we are doing as well as we are. Yet I also know, in my heart of hearts, that we could be doing a lot better when it comes to reaching out and serving those who already share our core values and beliefs, but are not now active members of a Unitarian Universalist congregation.
For my own part, my parents' decision to leave the Unitarian church in the sixties left me, as a teenager, at once both intellectually and emotionally alienated from the Evangelical Christian groups like "Young Life" that I saw all around me, yet without any viable religious community of my own. I knew that I was a Unitarian, but I wasn't really sure what it meant to BE a Unitarian; and so, to make a long story short, I eventually ended up enrolling at the Harvard Divinity School, in many ways simply to figure it out. This may strike you as kind of a radical step in order to discover something that I might just as easily have learned in a Sunday School class, but on the other hand, what other options did I have? And, of course, an expensive seminary education was really just the beginning of what has turned out to be a life-long learning process. Once again, it was the ideas of our religion which originally drew me into the ministry, but it has been the community of the church which has kept me here, and which has truly made me into a real minister.
The distinction between 212,000 “practicing” Unitarians, and 628,000 “ideological” Unitarians may or may not seem important to you, but there’s another factor to be considered here. The demographers Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson have identified a population of some 50 million adult Americans, approximately 26% of the general population, whom they characterize as “Cultural Creatives.” Cultural Creatives “love nature, and are deeply concerned about its destruction.” They place a great deal of value on “the importance of developing and maintaining...relationships,” as well as “helping other people and bringing out their unique gifts;” they often “do volunteering for one or more good causes,” and “care intensely about both psychological and spiritual development,” are “concerned about the role of the Religious Right,” strongly supportive of “equality for women” and want to see “more women leaders in business and politics.” They “dislike all the emphasis in modern culture on success,” wealth, and conspicuous consumption, and are vitally “concerned about what the big corporations are doing in the name of making more profits;” instead, they would like to see our government “put more emphasis on children’s education and well-being, on rebuilding our neighborhoods and communities, and on creating an ecologically sustainable future.” Above all, they “want to be involved in creating a new and better way of life in our country.”
Does any of this sound familiar?
The emergence of these so-called Cultural Creatives as a significant demographic force in our society represents both a profound challenge and a profound opportunity for organized liberal religion. I’m not suggesting that every one of these folks is potentially a Unitarian Universalist, but I don’t see any inherent reason why a lot of them shouldn’t be. Look around you. Your typical Unitarian Universalist church is full of folks who march to the music of a different drummer: people who have rebelled against the authoritarian religious teachings of their childhood, who have chosen to believe differently than their parents and their neighbors, who perhaps even have become outcasts because of their religious views, and who are looking for a place where they can be accepted and supported in their beliefs and values, and, more importantly, empowered in their efforts to put those beliefs and values into action.
This church, and others like it, exists to serve this type of individual in precisely this way: to create a space, a sacred space, for those who wish to practice a style of religious life which emerges authentically out of their own religious experience, and is not just a fading echo of the religious opinions of others. It is an extremely personal type of commitment: a faith which is truly hand-crafted and custom-made rather than merely mass-produced in a "one size fits all" fashion.
And this is true as well, I believe, for those of us who were born into this faith, and who can claim as our heritage and birthright membership in a free religious society, a community which is based on the assumption of choice, and not merely the possession of the "one true answer." Given this assumption, perhaps it is unavoidable that many of the children who were raised in this faith, must, for a time at least, look elsewhere first to test their religious views, before the significance of the choice they make can become fully apparent to them. It's one thing to be able to repeat an idea, or even to embody it, and quite another to be able to appreciate the significance of life in a religious community, and what it means to choose to become a part of it.
And yet, it seems to me there is one thing that we can teach our children here, while they are young, beyond values clarification, and respect for pluralism and diversity, and the validation of their individual self worth. And this is that they will always have a home here among us as members of this community, a legacy which they can not change or trade away, and which will be here for them anytime they choose to claim it. But the choice invariably remains with them, for without that choice, freely made and with a full understanding of all the alternatives, the commitment itself remains essentially meaningless: an exercise in compliance rather than conviction, a mere shadow of the true substance of our religion.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:07 PM
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