Mixing Feeling and Reason: On Religious Liberalism and Why the UUA is in Good Hands

One of the current claims of the gadflies is that the UUA and, by extension, many Unitarian Universalist ministers and congregants, have abandoned the liberal roots of our faith. For example, UUA Board petition candidate Beverly Seese, at the June 2, 2022 forum sponsored by the Fifth Principle Project, says:

My position is all about preserving freedom of thought, and tolerance or openness to others’ perspectives. The heart of our liberal religion is about bringing people back to our congregations that have left in the last few years, bringing them back to the work of welcoming all and welcoming many different perspectives. It’s about giving everyone a voice, a vote, an opportunity to contribute and be heard. It’s s about the preserving a congregational self-determination. congregational polity. It needs to be remembered that the UUA is the servant. They are there to assist all of the member congregations.

Paul De Moor, a Unitarian Universalist lay person, says in a now deleted response to my article on Beverly Seese’s campaign:

I agree that the people who supported the civil rights movement were on the side of right but the CRT based approach to antiracism now favored by the UUA is a departure from the traditional civil rights approach as Richard Delgado explains in his book “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction”. CRT is essentially an attack on the liberalism of the civil rights era. This is the root of the dissident movement within UUism which you refer to as “gadflies”. I consider myself an old school

Liberal, not a radical leftist, but to each his own.

And both Seese and Rebecca Mattis are calling themselves “Candidates for UU Liberal Values” at their General Assembly exhibitor booth.

Their contention, as I understand it, is that the UUA has fundamentally abandoned the liberal values our congregations are based upon.

Is this the case, though?

“Liberal” is one of those words that everyone seems to think they know what it means, but few ever explicitly define it. For many, it’s become a buzzword, either a point of pride or an attack label.

Conservatives and the far right in the United States use it to attack anyone left of Lindsay Graham, an indication of everything they see wrong with America.

Leftists use it as a label to attack those they see as supporting the status quo while simultaneously wanting to appear more tolerant, such as mainstream Democratic Party leadership.

Hell, I was called a liberal because I dared to wonder whether Trump supporters might be something to worry about in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The person who called me a liberal thought I should be using all my energy to attack Biden, a person I’ve had plenty of criticism about. The very fact I was thinking about Trump apparently indicated that there was something wrong with my political values.

That was in November of 2020, two months before a group of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Liberals self-identify as such because they see their values and accomplishments as something to be proud of.

I hope this shows that we’re going to have to define our terms if we hope to get anywhere in this discussion. To complicate matters, there are, historically, different types of liberalism with different focuses.

There’s classical liberalism with its emphasis on the laissez faire market, a position mostly held by the far right and right wing libertarians in the United States.

There’s social liberalism, which combines a free market with an expansion of individual and civil rights, a position now championed by the Democratic Party and a few dissidents of the Republicans.

There’s conservative liberalism which combines free market ideas with an emphasis on conserving a traditional social order.

There’s national liberalism, which takes elements of liberal policies and adds them to a sense of nationalism.

There’s neoliberalism as well, the resurgence of nineteenth century ideas about the free market that arose in the 1980s as an attempt to revive classical liberalism.

What will surprise most is that every president of the United States has been a liberal of some sort. I would argue that every president since 1981, both Democrats and Republicans, have been neoliberals.

In fact, for much of our nation’s history, most people in the United States have been liberals of some sort. A result of McCarthy-era post-World War II propaganda is a solid left wing political ideology never emerged.

The type of liberalism I want to talk about is not a political at all, but religious liberalism. Now it should come as no surprise that the majority of religious liberals are also political liberals, and, in more recent times, religious liberals tend to also be social liberals.

It is true that religious liberalism emerged from the same currents that produced its political sibling. However, religious liberalism, in and of itself, says little about the political beliefs one must have to be a part.

Religious liberalism, as a philosophy of religion, emerged in the nineteenth century in Christian circles as an antidote to the fundamentalism that was emerging on the religious right.

In 1936, Disciples of Christ minister Edward Scribner Ames wrote in his article “Liberalism in Religion”:

The term “liberalism” seems to be developing a religious usage which gives it growing significance. It is more sharply contrasted with fundamentalism, and signifies a far deeper meaning than modernism. Fundamentalism describes a relatively uncritical attitude. In it custom, traditionalism, and authoritarianism are dominant…There is no doubt that the loss of the traditional faith has left many people confused and rudderless, and they are finding that there is no adequate satisfaction in mere excitement or in flight from their finer ideals. They crave a sense of deeper meaning and direction for their life. Religious liberalism, not as a cult but as an attitude and method, turns to the living realities in the actual tasks of building more significant individual and collective human life.

In other words, religious liberalism applies a critical attitude towards the religious arena. Religious liberalism is opposed to religious traditionalists who do not believe that religion should be looked at critically.

It is beyond the scope of this article to get into the deeper conflict between religious fundamentalism and religious liberalism. Suffice it to say, religious liberals were happy to use the tools of modernity as a way to understand their religious faith, while traditionalists advocated for a more uncritical view of faith that maintained faith in God and God’s words as supreme to their understanding.

In the Untied States, religious liberalism spread to and effected Protestantism, Catholicism, Humanism, and Judaism, although it has since spread to more faiths. Of course, not every denomination of every one of these faiths are religious liberals, but liberal movements found their way to each.

As a movement, religious liberalism tends to emphasize personal and group liberty and rationality.

Let’s look at each of these.

Personal and groups liberty was important to early religious liberals because more traditionalist formulations of religion had emphasized adherence to group doctrines. Emphasis is given to the right of people to makeup their own minds regarding what is true in religion.

One interpretation of this could be that you can believe anything that seems true to the person. Under this interpretation, the group should simply accept the person regardless of their beliefs. By extension, every belief should be given equal time.

However, it doesn’t take much investigation to realize this is a mistaken interpretation. The United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, Reform Jews, and Reconstructionist Jews are all liberal religious denominations that require some belief, even if it’s a basic belief in Jesus (in the cases of UCC or the DoC), or belonging to the Jewish faith (in the case of the Reform and Reconstructionist Jews).

Liberal religion does not imply that anything goes; rather, it emphasizes that, when a person does believe something, it must come because you believe it, not because an authority tells you to. Though religious liberals would fight for the freedom of belief of people they disagree with, that does not mean they would just throw their membership rolls open to everyone.

This is true even of Unitarian Universalists. Many of my colleagues and I cringe when someone says you can believe whatever you want and be one of us. This is problematic and mistaken to say the least. I think a person who does not adhere to our seven principles, for example, would have a hard time being a Unitarian Universalist. The inherent worth and dignity of all people is fundamental to our way of being religious, as is the rest of our principles.

I describe our faith as one that recognizes the importance of what you believe, but sees how you take action in the world as more important. The two aren’t unrelated, of course, but it does mean that differences in belief, while important, need not divide us.

What you believe matters, but not so much that we can’t come together in common worship and fellowship as we strive to make the world a better place for the generations that come after us.

I will only briefly here consider rationality in religious liberalism, because it’s a subject highly misunderstood. The revolution in religious liberalism was in individual believers using rationality in critically examining the tenants of religion, whereas previously much religious doctrine was based more on the tradition and authority of the church.

This does not mean that religious liberals see rationality as the only valid source of knowledge. Friedrich Schleiermacher, often considered the father of liberal religion, argued that God could only be experienced through feeling, not reason, and that faith is experienced in a faith community, never in isolation. As such, religion is always contextual, reflecting the place where the religious person is.

This is not out of line with Unitarian Universalism. Though reason and the results of science are enshrined in the sixth source, our first source reads:

Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.

This is a recognition of direct experience as a source of faith, as Schleiermacher affirmed. Both are important and both are ways of understanding the transcendent. I would argue that our faith would be very different without either.

So why do the gadflies believe the UUA and many Unitarian Universalists have abandoned religious liberalism?

I think it’s at least somewhat a conflation between religious and political liberalism. The gadflies frequently cite political liberal values such as democracy and freedom of speech as ones that are being violated. But religious liberalism doesn’t have anything to say about freedom of speech, the right to speak your mind without fear of political retribution. What they’re doing is mixing freedom of thought with freedom of speech and not understanding either.

It is also true that many recognize that political liberalism has often been complicit in the oppression of other people. There has been a growing call for more radical approaches in America.

The essential problem is that reason is a tool that can be misused. Reason doesn’t tell us what is true but helps us discover truth based on the assumed validity of the premises our argument is based on.

But a completely unreasonable argument could be constructed if our premises are not true. For example, if I believe it is true that Black people are inferior to white people, I can construct a reasonable sounding argument for why their oppression is justified.

What is needed here would be the testimony of Black people, their direct experience as to what their suffering is like. By listening to their stories, I could, if I am a reasonable person, adjust my beliefs.

In this way, I think the UUA is very much in-line with the spirit of religious liberalism.

The greater argument is that we have abandoned religious liberty. The gadflies would argue they don’t like certain antiracism efforts and find them to conflict with their own values. Because their beliefs generally don’t receive as much attention in our faith, their religious liberty is being violated.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding in what religious liberty means. I can support their right to their individual quest for truth and meaning while also affirming that our faith movement places the inherent worth and dignity of others first. I can believe people have the right to their own beliefs while not agreeing with them.

For instance, I am not a Jew and I’m not sure I ever will be. This doesn’t automatically make me antisemitic, nor does it make Jewish people prejudiced for not admitting me to their ranks or not allowing me to preach in their synagogues. Yet we can come together in common action while acknowledging our differences.

Religious groups have a right to define their boundaries, but this does not prevent other groups from defining their own boundaries in different ways. This is why there are a multiplicity of religious options today and not simply the Roman Catholic church.

There are examples of this even within Unitarian Universalism. King’s Chapel in Boston is one of the most Christian congregations in our movement, using a modified Unitarian version of the Anglican liturgy and explicitly identifying as a Christian Unitarian congregation. On the flip side, First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis is one of our most Humanist congregations, identifying explicitly as a non-Christian congregation.

Are either King’s Chapel or First Unitarian Society in violation of the principle of religious liberty? No, I would argue they have chosen to draw their boundaries differently, and this is strengthened by the fact that both are in major metropolitan areas surrounded by other Unitarian Universalist congregations who have also structured themselves differently, ready to embrace those who would feel more comfortable with a different style of church.

Just so, not everyone should be a Unitarian Universalist. There are a lot of evangelicals who I believe would be uncomfortable in our congregations. Just because I value their right to practice their own religion in their own congregations does not mean I need to grant them a pulpit to talk about the “sinfulness” of queer and trans people. Nor will I cease to try to convince them of how harmful their beliefs are.

Religious liberty means I don’t coerce people into agreeing with me. It does not mean that I believe we’re all the same or that we even agree on the fundamentals. It does mean that I believe they have a right to define their religion for themselves, just as I have the same right.

If Unitarian Universalism were to define ourselves by our antiracism efforts (which, I believe, is more than a little hyperbole), that would not mean we don’t support religious liberty. It’s just a definition of the boundaries of our faith.

As those in the political sphere point out how political liberalism has not been enough to overcome the marginalization of BIPOC and other oppressed people, we should not be surprised when we seek new ways of overcoming this systemic oppression. This is no less surprising than social liberals changing their tactics as abolition and reconstruction were swallowed up by segregation as a new tactic.

A lot of the gadflies’ accusations boil down to their interpretation of how they think supposed dissidents have been treated, or vague baseless accusations about election integrity or letters to the editor which, even if true, prove nothing since religious liberalism says that religious experience is contextual and this means we are not “anything goes.” But I will repeat: no person has been removed from fellowship with the UUA for their beliefs. Their behavior has factored in every time.

It is true I do not consider myself to be a political liberal. But that’s a whole different arena to unpack, since leftism is a vast spectrum that includes everything from anarchists to authoritarian communists, those who think we should return to times past, such as anarcho-primitivists, to those who would seek reform for the current system, such as social democrats.

I am a democratic socialist. I believe that the best way to achieve equality of outcome is to share what we have until we have the material resources we need to not just survive, but thrive. I also believe the best way to achieve this is through democratic consent, finding ways to work together to bring ourselves into community.

This does not mean I have abandoned values like liberty and rationality; that would be foolish, like the proverbial throwing the baby out with the bath water. Just because I think political liberalism doesn’t go far enough doesn’t mean I fail to recognize the good it has done in the world.

But I can think of nothing more in line with the liberal spirit of Unitarian Universalism than being willing to question even the basis of liberalism itself. I refuse to adopt a fundamentalist form of liberalism just to make some comfortable or just because that’s the way it’s always been (especially when it’s not always been that way); that would be the opposite of our liberal spirit. Instead, I want a both/and, a recognition that both good and bad have come from liberalism, and a continued search for ways to create the Beloved Community we dream of.

This does not mean that I believe every person’s belief has inherent worth and dignity. It does mean I believe we can’t force people to adopt beliefs and actions that would create a more just world.

In this way, I think I’m fully participating within the long tradition of religious liberalism, and I see no contradiction between this and my radical politics, because, as the definition of radical is getting to the root of a problem, I am proud to be a radical. I think the UUA is as well.