Direction of UU

With the short chill days, the frigid darkness, and the holidays approaching, a colleague and I had long been talking about going to the Tabard Inn after work to sit by their fire and enjoy a warm drink. Tonight we finally made it.  I had never been before.  It was a strange place - the kind of place that can claim "Washington slept here," serving as a backdrop to the conversations of the mid-level power brokers of DC.  Yet also homey.

Out of the many things that we talked about that were interesting and worthy of further thought, the one that most struck me is a comment about the future of UU. I was talking about our religious diversity - encompassing everything from atheists to liberal Christians to New Agers - and how difficult it was as a result to have a strong UU identity.  I was preoccupied with how to draft a definitive statement of our identity and yet keep everyone on board.  My colleague, otoh, gently brushed all that aside.  As I understood it, she essentially said that we would have to outgrow the hyphens.  There are other places for liberal Christians.  There are other places for religious atheists.  There needs to be a place for UUs to be UUs.

I am wrestling with this.  One the one hand, the UU that I was just a short couple of years ago would have been appalled at the idea.  If a core part of our identity is freedom of conscience, how can we have anything other than the diversity that we have now?  When we talk of bringing racial/ethnic diversity to our congregations, we talk of the spiritual benefits of celebrating difference, how it augments us all.  Isn't this true for religious identity as well?  Don't we serve as a place where people of different religious backgrounds can learn from each other - a sort of perpetual interfaith dialogue?

Otoh, having our own identity would not prevent us from learning about other faiths.  (And one might argue that we'd be in a better position to do so.)  Having studied our historical and theological roots, the UU that I am now believes that we are a religion, not just a "United Nations" of other religions.  I know that our religion incorporates elements from many faith traditions. It has from the start, not just as a PC way of "collecting" representations from them.  We have a theology that is compatible with many other faith traditions, but it is our own, born of our unique history.

My colleague is not one to just steam-roll through dissent, so I take her comments seriously. And if I am to be fully honest, these days when I speak about UU, I speak from that unified perspective, rooted in our history and theology.  I no longer think of us as a religious United Nations.  The question is, how many other UUs feel the same way.  How many UUs are we excluding?

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