A Brief Description of Unitarian Universalism & Liberal Religion, With a Small Aside For Buddhists in the West

Last updated on: November 1, 2011 at 3:01 pm by James Ford

A Brief Description of Unitarian Universalism & Liberal Religion, With a Small Aside For Buddhists in the West 2011-11-01T15:01:52-07:00 James Ford

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Here’s something I wrote for my next book, Field Notes From a Zen Life, due sometime in 2012 by Wisdom Publications, from the front matter…

I am a Zen priest, but I am also a UU minister and have spent twenty years serving in UU congregations. Accordingly, I think it important to offer a brief comment here on my perspective regarding Unitarian Universalism.

This emergent Western tradition is probably best called liberal religion. Western liberal religion has two hallmarks. One is a deep respect for reason and rationality. And the second is bringing a broadly humanist perspective to the matters of spirit, acknowledging whatever else may be true of other worlds or realms, the work of religion is ultimately always here in this world. The great struggle for liberal religion is how best to manifest the broadest individual liberty while knowing that in the last analysis we exist only within relationships.

This tradition and its struggles have proven a congenial home for many Western Buddhists, particularly through its comprehensive and open religious education programming, Western Buddhists with children. Though historically rooted in Christianity, Universal Unitarianism is not itself a form of Christianity. In way, I think that it has, through an independent evolution, come to stand in a place roughly between Taoism and Confucianism.

There’s more I did not include in the book as it is too far afield for something concerned primarily with the manifestation of Zen Buddhism in the west and not particularly with the travails of that small subset who embrace both Zen & the UU ways.

Of course that’s just exactly what this blog is for…

Within Unitarian Universalism there has been since the dawn of the twentieth century a tension between those who advocate for the mind and those who advocate for the heart. A popular dichotomy adapted at times by advocates for both sides has been to say the nontheists, rationalists are following the Unitarian aspect of the tradition, while those who are more heartful and perhaps “mystical,” were following the Universalist aspect of the tradition. This has sometimes been a split between those who identify as theist and those who identify as nontheist.

For most of the twentieth century the rationalist nontheists had the upper hand.

Then in the last two decades of the twentieth century I saw the decline of historic rationalist pulpits who increasingly were having trouble attracting the “best and the brightest” among younger UU ministers. It seemed pretty obvious to me the “juice” was moving to the spiritual edge of the spectrum. For the last quarter of the twentieth century this “spiritual” was quite broadly interpreted. And this is when many of us who are Buddhist entered the tradition.

Now, a working definition of spiritual might be in order. Here I think etymology can help, with spiritual being concerned with the “breath” of life, or, that which gives us life. In practice this is more a concern with interior matters, of mind and heart. Often it includes an inclination to meditation or prayer. Those who don’t understand what this means might be considered those who are non-spiritual. Often they identify as humanist, at least in a narrow use of the term as many, maybe most of the spiritual types within Unitarian Universalism would also consider themselves humanist in that sense I used in the book I cited above, as feeling the matters of spirit are best, maybe only to be encountered here and now. And many nontheists, particularly we Buddhists, by this definition would consider ourselves spiritual. Although I hope it would be obvious how we would be sympathetic to the rationalist part, as well.

For all the above some sense that this needs to manifest in the world has led to a unified concern with matters of justice, although precisely how is debated, sometimes bitterly. Nonetheless ethics and justice seeking have become hallmarks of contemporary Unitarian Universalism.

And, all things are in flux, and all things change and I would say among the varieties of spiritual, those who identify as theists are now quickly assuming the upper hand. And, I’m afraid there’s a bit of pay back going on for hurts real and imagined that had been inflicted upon them when in the minority. So far more in the range of insult than in actions. But I have some worries.

As someone with a dog in this hunt, perhaps two, as I consider myself a nontheist and spiritual, and someone who has been, how do the kids say it, disprespected here and there for my faith by co-religionists, more these days from those of the theistic flavor, I nonetheless believe for the most part we’re simply witnessing the manifestation of a continuing and for the most part healthy tension, and that there continues to be and will for sometime at least continue to be a place for Buddhists and other nontheist spiritual types within the Unitarian Universalism of the twenty-first century. At least as far out as I like to think I might be able to see…

I fear a bit more for the non-spiritual heavily rationalist, humanist in a more narrow understanding of that term, among us. In fact mostly they appear to be aging out. The newcomers among us are nearly all spiritual, and laregely, it seems to me, theistic.

So, there it is.

Here it is, reason and a broad humanism, manifesting a questing spirituality, and a continuing concern with concrete expressions of that spirituality as justice seeking and justice making.

Sound interesting?

In my opinion one of the people most clearly expressing this liberal religion today is Peter Mayer. Here’s a pretty darned good example of what it looks like, at its best, in practice.

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