What does it mean that Unitarianism does not start with an experience of revelation?

Last week on the way back from a few days in the Lakes I stopped by in Kendal to visit the Quaker Tapestry.

I found some inspiration in the history of George Fox and the early Quakers, as depicted in the various panels. I was struck by George Fox seeking answers to his questions until his inward revelation that "there is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition."

As I pondered this I reflected on the differences between Quakers and Unitarians. Quakerism has a more definite and clear story of its beginnings - and I think significantly, Quakerism started with an experience of revelation.

In fact most religious paths start with an experience of revelation, major religious traditions, like Islam, and often divisions of religious traditions like Methodism or Zen/Chan Buddhism, begin with some formative, experiential experience of revelation/truth.

What does it mean that Unitarianism does not start with an experience of revelation? How does it affect the way we tell our stories or understand who we are? What would it mean if we could point to an experience of revelation at the beginning of our story?

Universalist history does include some instances of revelation of the truth of the universal love of God, but Unitarianism seems not to. (Am I wrong?)

I wonder if this is something we're missing? 

LOVE IS ... [censored]

OK, this is a weird one, folks.

I was wandering around Google street view, as you do, and checking the street view of my church.

I could see that is was a relatively new shot as it has our (relatively) new noticeboard on. I zoomed into the noticeboard to get a better look.

I recognised that it had the temporary sign up that said, "LOVE is the doctrine of this church" - but what was weird was that everything but the first three words were blurred out. Take a look:

Everything else is clear enough on the noticeboard. You see "LOVE is the..." but rest of that looks like it's been deliberately edited out like they do with everyone's faces on Google street view.

I can't think for the life of me why anyone would do this. How curious. 

Disappointed in Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams has always seemed like he has the potential to be a great Christian leader. There's a lot of great things about him. But he has disappointed me.

He spoke recently about whether he had let down GLBT people in his time as Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. But it actually wasn't this issue that has disappointed me. It was only reading about this talk in an article recently that I realised something that happened several months ago: he has become a member of the House of Lords.

I'm quite disappointed in that. A few years he spoke at the University of Manchester and his talk was, of course, excellent. He spoke about the place of the Christian community as offering a radical alternative to the mainstream society - witnessing to a different set of values than the materialism, hierarchy etc of society (this is from memory so I'm just recalling a rough impression of what he said).

I got up at the end of the talk and asked a question. I said that I totally agreed with everything he said - it's just that I didn't see the leadership of the Church of England living it out. It seemed to me, I said, that unelected bishops sitting in the House of Lords "lording it over" the country was in direct contradiction to everything he had just talked about for the last hour.

His answer was equivocal. He just sort of shrugged and said, "well this is the system we've inherited and we've got to work within it." It seemed bishops in the House of Lords was something he didn't want to defend.

But to find out he has accepted his own seat in the House of Lords, again seems like a betrayal of the values he can and does articulate so well. As Archbishop of Canterbury of course he had a seat, which you could argue just comes with the job; but to accept a personal seat to this unelected illegitimate chamber seems like another betrayal of those Christian values.

All political parties agreed in principle to reform the House of Lords and this government has not only failed to do so, but stuffed the house with more and more and more peers. Rowan Williams has come in as part of a wave of unelected peers that is making the House of Lords even more laughable in a modern democracy. There are currently about 750 peers with a chance under the current system of this going up to 2000. This is not only clearly impractical as a way to run a Parliament, it is also a system based on party patronage, privilege, and unaccountable power.

How I wish someone as respected and well known as Rowan Williams could have witnessed to Christian values by refusing to be a part of such a system.

For every child born yesterday

For every child born in Britain yesterday, I wish them a happy, long and meaningful life.

I wish them the right to grow up with all the joys of childhood and a stable and happy family life.

I wish them the right to privacy as a child and as an adult.

I wish them the right to marry whomever they happen to fall in love with.

I wish them the right to choose their own religious or spiritual path. The right to be an atheist, a Catholic, a Muslim, a Buddhist or anything else.

The right to choose their own vocation, based on their own individual skills and inclinations, to contribute to the world in their own way.

The right to choose their own political opinions and the right to vote.

The right to choose to be a solider or an anti-war protester.

The right to become the Head of State, if they have the skills for that role, and the people agree and vote them in.

Is it so crazy to wish that for every child born yesterday?

Isn't every child born equal? Shouldn't every child be born equal?

http://bornequal.org/

Sexuality, Religion and the Sacred: Bisexual, Pansexual and Polysexual Perspectives

Although it's already been out for about eighteen months, I've only just found out I've been published in a book.

Sexuality, Religion and the Sacred: Bisexual, Pansexual and Polysexual Perspectives edited by Loraine Hutchins and H Sharif Williams is a reissue of an special edition of The Journal of Bisexuality. It contains my essay, "Bi Christian Unitarian: A Theology of Transgression."

If you've got a spare 85 quid (I know) you can get it from Amazon here.

Reason needs tradition

This is partly a second part of my review of William Murray's book on Religious Humanism, partly an ongoing set of thoughts I've been having for a while.

Murray's chapter "The Responsible Search for Truth" talks about the important place of reason in humanism. He writes, "The important thing is to be a reflective and reasonable person who does not accept beliefs as true simply because they are taught or because someone or some group believes them. On the other hand no one can possibly verify everything, so we are all dependent on the results of the work of others." (99) I agree with this entirely but I'm not sure we Unitarians, or religious liberals, have thought about it enough.

About 100 years ago some liberals talked a lot about "scientific theology" - and I think there's something to be said for this. So often liberals look to science as a symbol for what they want to do in religion: not rely on received dogma but encourage experimentation and independent thought.

The image is of the lone brave scientist carefully measuring and observing things for themselves and coming to their own conclusions - often against received wisdom and dogmatic conservatism. This is the way progress happens we think.

Except it isn't. This struck me recently as I was reading a book about the history of science.

Science really got going when scientists began to effectively communicate with one another. When they were lonely practitioners in their isolated laboratories science didn't really make much progress. What really created scientific progress was when scientists formed organisations like the Royal Society and regularly met and presented ideas to each other. They would spark off each other and one scientist could build on the work of others.

Science needs independent thought. But it only functions if there is also dependent thought. Thought that is dependent on engaging with other scientists, learning from them and taking the next step. Science needs institutions, science needs journals, science needs conferences, science needs universities.

This is often what religious liberals fail to understand and apply to the world of religion. We can revel in our ignorance of religious thought, religious history and separation from religious institutions.

In fact religious liberals are often unreflective and irrational postmodernists. We can hold "personal opinion" as infallible and unassailable even when it is ignorant of millennia of religious thought and practice.

Religion, just like science, needs institutions, publications, human meeting. Religion, just like science, needs people to take time to study the work of others before you can jump in with your own theories. Anything else is just a free-for-all and does not get us anywhere near truth. Such an approach does not deserve to be called rational religion.

In other words religion needs tradition. Liberal and rational religion needs tradition. Not to simply repeat the past, but rather to understand the past to be able to ask "where next?"

Some still doubt this. Some people ask, for example, whether Unitarian ministers really need to be trained in biblical studies, or Christian theology and tradition. They certainly do. Ministers need to be the educators, facilitators and pioneers of religious thought.

Of course science and religion cannot be perfect analogues. Science deals with the almost infinite complexity of the physical world. Religion deals with the problems of the human condition. I think this means the past is even more relevant. Our understanding of the physical world has been revolutionised in past centuries, but our understanding of the human soul is not that different. I wouldn't look to a thinker from three thousand years to tell me much useful about how a flower works as a biological phenomena, but I would still look to a thinker from three thousand years ago to tell me about its beauty.

I think Unitarianism is only truly powerful when it understands the power of the tradition that it is a part of.

“Reason and Reverence” – A Ponderous Book Review

The last time I was in the States, five years ago (almost to the day in fact) I bought this book from the Unitarian Universalist Association bookshop on Beacon Hill, Boston:

Reason and Reverence: Religious Humanism for the 21^st Century by William R Murray

I glanced at it sunbathing on Boston Common, and have not really looked at it since then, until about a month ago when I started reading it in preparation for a class I was teaching on humanism at my church.

So this is just some ponderous thoughts I’ve had while reading it, in reaction to some of the ideas.

I have previously on this blog been a bit critical of humanism within Unitarianism, so it was about time I gave it a good hearing.

It was helpful to understand how humanism began and grew with American Unitarianism, but I’m still puzzled by how it came to British Unitarianism, there’s a lot I don’t understand about the development of Unitarianism in Britain in the twentieth century.

What interests me most is not secular humanism but religious humanism. Secular humanism makes sense to me as a non-religious philosophical and political position. What interests me is a humanism that claims a place within religious liberalism, that wants to remain within Unitarian communities, in communion with more traditional positions.

Religious humanism does beg the interesting question “what is religion?” How can humanism be religious? William Murray provides an intelligent response to this question, though I have some problems with some of his points.

He writes “Every religious vision needs to be anchored in a story” (66)  – and I absolutely agree with him. A point I have made numerous times on this blog is the that Unitarianism has not yet learnt how to be truly non-creedal, and that we’re still overly-obsessed with “beliefs” and “creeds” – and we need to find a religious centre in stories and practices rather than personal credos. Stories matter, stories are vital in religion.

Murray goes on to say that “modern science has given us a new story with multiple layers of rich meaning.” (66-67). I’ve heard this before in American UUism, that science and particular evolution provides us with a “religious” story.

Now, I love evolution. I studied evolutionary biology for many years, and I’m absolutely fascinated by it. BUT I don’t think this is a religious story, I don’t think it’s a good enough story.

I love evolution – but I have to confess I watch many more dramas on television than documentaries. Don’t you? Aren’t we all more interested in human stories ultimately? Because we’re humans. Can a non-human story really provide us with ultimate meaning?

The Israelites escaping from Egypt is a story, as we can identify with this story when we are oppressed and need liberating (African American history shows the power of this story, inspiring a new story of liberation).

Jesus’ death on the cross is a story because we can identify with this story when we are broken, lonely, betrayed.

Socrates’ execution is a story because we can identify with this story when our integrity and truth-telling brings us persecutions.

Does evolution, the development of the cosmos and life, really compare to these stories? Does it offer a compelling narrative that speaks to the human condition? Honestly, I don’t think it does. Or if it does, it only appeals to the most intellectual among us who think deeply about these things. Such a religion only appeals to an intellectual elite, and I’m not interested in that.

As much as I appreciate a religion rooted in nature – I think religious humanism needs a human story or stories.

The other thing I’m unsure of is the relation of ethics to nature and evolution. Murray doesn’t really get into this, but it seems to me that evolution can be used to justify some practices that we might consider unethical. You can easily conclude from evolution that the world is about “the survival of the fittest” and that we should let the weakest go to the wall to create the progress of humanity.

This is a profound question that needs wrestling with. To what extent are ethics in fact unnatural? In being ethical are we in fact rebelling against the natural order of the universe? I have no glib answers to these questions, I just point them out to make the point that having a religion based on biological evolution may lead in fact to the opposite of a humane, ethical world.

As I say, what interests me most is the question of what makes religious humanism religious. Murray answers this question in a chapter on “The Religious Dimension” and “Growing a Soul.” These chapters were the most compelling to me, and I would have preferred to have seen these topics expanded upon; I could have done without some of the other chapters.

Murray expands the religious/spiritual dimension as being about “mystery,” “oneness,” “values,” “meaning and purpose,” “community,” “gratitude,” “depth,” “beauty,” “peak experiences,” “love of the universe,” and “connectness.”  

I like these ideas, and I completely agree that a faith position can be rooted in these things and be non-theistic and non-dual. This is an approach that values the mystical and spiritual. And it’s certainly possible to have profound mystical experiences that are felt as a deep oneness with all that is, and these need not be theistic in any way.

I would have liked to have seen these ideas further developed though. How do these things link together? Where is the ecclesiology? How do communities cultivate gratitude, mystery, connectedness? I think the answer to that should be “worship” but that’s not really explored here. For religious humanism to be effectively religious it needs a worship practice that opens the soul to mystery, depth, beauty, love and connectedness; worship that is more than rational exposition of words. It also needs to teach personal spiritual practices that cultivate these experiences. There is also a question of how these things link with ethics, activism and justice-making. Murray states some basic liberal positions, but doesn’t really provide a convincing systematic system that says, exactly why religious humanism is (for example) pro gay rights or pro-choice.

Overall I wish Murray had spent more time exploring these religious dimensions and less time “arguing” with theism or orthodoxy. Religious humanism (like much liberal religion) to me is still much too co-dependent on conservative religion. There’s a lot of defensive rhetoric about arguing for humanism and against forms of theism, and I’m not sure it’s useful (is it a coincidence that the author is a former Southern Baptist?). There’s too much negative definition against other forms of religion, and for me that points to a kind of an immaturity in humanism. If you can’t write about humanism without mentioning God, then is humanism a thing or simple the negation of a thing?

If humanism, and especially religious humanism, seeks to be a coherent thing in itself, then it needs to be a lot more than atheism. Buddhism is non-theistic, but the Buddha didn’t spend ages teaching why the Hindu religion was wrong, he taught a positive, practical, existential path to the good life. That’s what any religion has to do.

Religious humanism certainly seems possible, but after reading this book, I feel like it is has a long way to go to be a coherent spiritual path.

It does make me wonder whether religious humanism is a thing in itself, or simply a “phase” that liberal religion goes through, before grasping a positive path. That does seem to be what has happened to a lot of American Unitarian Universalists. Is there a path from Christianity to humanism to something like Buddhism and paganism? Is religious humanism a thing or is it simply a gap between the rejection of the old and the embracing of the new? 

3,468

The Annual Report is out. And for the first time it includes the total number of members of Unitarian churches in Britain.

The number is 3468.

This number is both small and declining. It's down from 3560 last year. That's a down 92 people, 2.5% in one year. And a drop of 7.5% in the last five years.

The membership numbers are not a completely accurate count of Unitarians. One congregation, for example, seems to have failed to report membership numbers this year. The number of Unitarians is probably a bit more than this. But the overall direction is what's most important.

Here are the numbers over the last few years:

2005: 3952

2006: 3754

2007: 3711

2008: 3642

2009: 3658

2010: 3672

2011: 3560

2012: 3468

Of course this only tells some of the story. Not every congregation is declining. In fact looking at the numbers 38 congregations are in fact growing, 78 are static and 50 have declined in the last year.

It would be more meaningful to look at those numbers over five years, rather than one year. And then ask the questions of what growing congregations have in common and what declining congregations have in common.

This is the sort of empirical work that needs doing.

Are Christians being persecuted? No.

Yesterday saw what was, I think, a pretty sensible ruling from the European Court of Human Rights on the "Christian discrimination" cases. It seems reasonable that people should be able to express their faith, but in a way that is moderated by other issues, such as health and safety. If I say my faith means I have to constantly juggle knives doesn't mean I should be able to do that while being a nursery teacher.

Of course some Christian conservatives have been pushing this agenda as part of a "Christian persecution" narrative that bares no relation to reality, but seems to fit with their worldview. It is, though, a bit of an insult to people in other parts of the world who are genuinely persecuted for their beliefs.

The attitude, I think, comes from a place of entitlement and privilege. Take the case of a registrar who does not want to perform civil partnerships. Even if you accept the idea that civil partnerships are incompatible with Christian faith (which I don't) I think you have to accept the reality that doing civil partnerships is a core duty of a registrar. You can't expect to continue to be a registrar while not doing civil partnerships.

In the early days of Christianity this issue related a lot more to soldiers who became Christian. Killing was seen as incompatible with Christian faith (and there's a lot more Biblical warrant for this position than opposing same sex relationships and wearing jewellery). So becoming a Christian involved putting down the sword and refusing to kill. But, as carrying a sword and killing is part of the core duties of being a soldier, it was necessary to conclude that being a soldier was incompatible with Christian faith. This was something that had to be accepted. They couldn't demand that they continue to be employed as a soldier while refusing to go to war. The two could not go together, and so you had to choose one or the other.

I basically still agree with this position. Being a soldier would be against my religious principles, so I choose not to be a soldier.

If you consider being a registrar as incompatible with your faith, then I think you have to accept that and accept the consequences. You can't demand that the job works around you to uphold your principles. If the job is against your principles, then don't have the job.

What depresses me is that solemnising and counselling relationships is seen as what is wholly incompatible with Christian faith. And yet no one seems to think too deeply about jobs based on the accumulation of wealth, the exploitation of others, or violence as being against Christian principles. How do we get so far away from the way of Jesus?

"Sharp fall in young ministers"?

That was not the headline yesterday.

The headline yesterday was "Sharp fall in young police officers." And it was about the freeze in police recruitment which has meant, not surprisingly, that there are a lot fewer police officers under 26.

What interests me is the assumptions behind this investigation. The assumption is that this is notable, if not regrettable, that we have fewer young police officers.

Some people will often say "aren't police officers looking young?" as they will often say to me "aren't you rather young to be a minister?" And yet it seems to be seen as a good thing to have young police officers.

My question to the Unitarian community is: when did we see a headline that said, "Sharp fall in young ministers"? There very clearly has been a fall in young ministers, perhaps not sharp, but nevertheless significant. When did anyone notice this? When did anyone think this was worth noticing or regretting?

The evidence is that younger ministers are vital to the health and growth of a denomination. And yet when have we noticed this fall, taking stock of it, analysed it and decided to do something about it? When have we decided to actively recruit younger people to the ministry?

We haven't, and I think it's time we did.