a service presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on October 13, 2024
Opening Words
The opening words are from the surgeon general’s report
“Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Social Isolation”.
"Even when they couldn’t put their finger on the word ‘lonely,’
time and time again,
people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds,
from every corner of the country,
would tell me, ‘I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,’ or ‘if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice’.
"[Social isolation] is associated with
a greater risk of cardiovascular disease,
dementia, stroke, depression,
anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected
is similar to that caused by
smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that
associated with obesity and physical inactivity."
Reading
A little over a year ago, Perry Bacon,
a 42-year-old Black political reporter for the Washington Post,
published a very different kind of article,
one about his personal religious journey,
and his longing for what he called
“a church of the Nones”, i.e.,
a church that doesn’t require believing any specific dogma. The article is long enough to be a sermon on its own,
so I’ll summarize.
Bacon grew up as the son of an assistant pastor
and continued participating in Christian churches
through his 20s and early 30s. Despite his theological doubts about Christianity,
he stayed faithful because
he believed in the values his churches promoted.
“I didn’t leave church for any one reason,” he writes. But partly it was politics. “I couldn’t ignore how the word ‘Christian’
was becoming a synonym for
rabidly pro-Trump White people
who argued that his and their meanness and intolerance
were in some ways required to defend our faith.”
A final straw came when Bacon discovered
that although his church allowed gays and lesbians to participate in church activities,
his gay friend was barred
from even the most minor leadership roles. By 2020, Bacon was church-shopping,
and dissatisfied with what he was finding. When the pandemic cut off his search
by closing most churches, he felt relieved.
He found he didn’t want to raise his daughter
in a church whose doctrines and worldview he didn’t believe. “What has kept me away is having a child. If I were childless,
I think I would join a church to be a part of its community,
and I would ignore the theological elements I’m not sure about. But my 3-year-old is getting more inquisitive every day.”
He knows about Unitarian Universalism, but “Unitarian churches I have attended
had overwhelmingly White and elderly congregations
and lacked the wide range of activities for adults and kids
found at the Christian congregations that I was a part of.”
He’s thought about starting his own church,
as his uncle did for other reasons a generation before,
or recruiting like-minded friends to join a UU church together
to “make it younger and more racially diverse. But I’ve not followed through on any of these options.”
Instead, he has drifted into other forms of weekly community:
his neighborhood’s farmers’ market
and a happy hour for local journalists. Those activities allow him to meet people,
but he still senses a “church-sized hole” in his life,
and in the larger society as well.
“Kids need places to learn values such as forgiveness. Young adults need places to meet a potential spouse. Adults with children need places to meet with other parents. Retirees need places to build new relationships,
as their friends and spouses pass away. Our society needs places that integrate people
across class and racial lines. Newly woke Americans need places
to get practical, weekly advice
about how to live out the inclusive, anti-racist values
they committed to during the Trump years.
“There are lots of organizations trying to address those needs. But strong churches could address them all. It’s strange to me that America,
particularly its left-leaning cohort,
is abandoning this institution,
as opposed to reinventing it to align with our 2023 values.”
Talk
You may be familiar with the classic distinction
between the fox and the hedgehog. The fox, the adage says, knows many things,
but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Ordinarily, I give hedgehog talks: I’m building towards one central point,
and I want to hold your attention until I get there.
This is a fox talk: There are a number of ideas
that may send your thoughts down a side track,
and that’s OK. I’ll try to call you back near the end. This talk is also different
in that I don’t really answer anything. Instead, I want to lay out a paradox I’ve been thinking about,
to see if I can get you thinking about it too. The paradox has to do with
the future of churches generally in America,
and of Unitarian Universalist churches in particular.
On the one hand,
this ought to be a time
of unprecedented opportunity for churches. As Perry Bacon noted in the reading: Churches offer precisely the kind of community and connection
that America is lacking as a society,
and that many individuals say they are yearning for. And yet, while some churches are doing well,
nationwide the institution is in decline: Churches are closing,
church membership is dropping,
and the percentage of the population
that says religion is personally important to them
has been falling for decades.
If you listen to why people are leaving their churches,
or never showed any interest in church to begin with,
a lot of those reasons don’t seem like
they should apply to Unitarian churches. We aren’t bound to ancient dogmas about sexuality and gender. We aren’t in conflict with science. We don’t consign people to hell
if they think or live differently than we do. We focus our attention on the issues of life today,
and discuss them in terms that are meaningful today,
rather than try to shoehorn our moral intuitions
into elaborate interpretations of scriptures written thousands of years ago.
And yet, all those people
who need what a church can offer,
but can’t seem to find one they can live with — most of them don’t find us either. Maybe they never hear about us. But even if they do,
even if they show up to check us out,
many of them run into barriers to entry
that we may not even see and certainly never intended to put there.
So that’s the paradox: There are crying needs in today’s society,
and there are institutions
that seem perfectly designed to fill those needs. And yet it’s not happening. What’s going on? What can we do about it?
Let me back up and support some of those claims I just made. In America today
there is a cluster of needs
that different professions see from different angles,
and have been reporting on for decades.
In the opening words,
you heard the surgeon general
diagnose the medical problem of social isolation.
Sociologists see something similar from their own perspective. As far back as
Robert Putnam’s turn-of-the-millennium book Bowling Alone
they’ve been reporting a decline in what they call “social capital”. Community organizations of all sorts,
from bowling teams to labor unions to churches,
have been losing significance,
and the result is a less cohesive society. People are less trusting. Communities that need to act together
have a harder time reaching consensus,
largely because it has become easier for us to demonize each other.
A bowling team may not seem like it knits society together, but something about relying on an immigrant, a lesbian, or a Republican to pick up your spare helps you appreciate what wonderful people they can be.
Francis Moore Lappe' wrote:
“A culture of democracy can be defined as one that builds trust.” Sadly, the same logic works in the other direction: A culture that has trouble building trust
will also have trouble preserving its democracy.
Psychologists talk about how hard it can be
to establish a unified or coherent identity in a world where you may have a thousand Facebook friends,
but no one who sees your whole life. Back in 1991,
well before the Internet as we currently know it, Kenneth Gergen wrote a book called The Saturated Self. In it, he described
the stress caused by modern communications technologies,
which give us easy access to far more communities
than we can effectively participate in. Each community has its own ideals,
and its own vision of how a good person lives. Beset with all these conflicting goals,
the postmodern individual feels perpetually inadequate.
Fast-forward 33 years,
and individuals have become more and more atomized. It’s no longer just that you’re
one person at home and another at work. Your work persona itself may have become narrower and have shallower relationships. When you meet primarily over Zoom,
you no longer share coffee breaks with your colleagues
or get a beer together on your way home.
Online communities are even more fragmenting: One community knows your political views,
another your hobbies,
and a third your taste in books or movies. Another group of acquaintances knows you
only through your dating profile,
which may not be entirely accurate. So does anyone really know you? And if not, who are you anyway?
If we were social planners,
looking at all these phenomena together,
we might be tempted to design some completely new institution: one that holds regular face-to-face events
that don’t require an invitation. People could show up alone,
or with their full household. Come regularly or only once in a while. At these gatherings,
people might do simple things together
— maybe sing songs or listen to music or a short talk. These communal events could conclude
with a chance to chat over coffee and cookies.
Our new institution
would be even better if it encouraged you to show up as your whole self,
and not just as some narrowly focused set of interests or beliefs or attitudes. And better still if it fulfilled all those needs
Perry Bacon listed, and helped you teach your children values
that run deeper than making money or getting famous
or buying the latest products?
Wouldn’t it be great if there were such a thing? Somebody should invent it.
And yet … In their book Beyond Doubt: the secularization of society
sociologists Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman and Ryan Cragun say that “somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 churches
close down every year”. In 1998, 62% of Americans answering a survey
said that religion was very important to them. In 2023, only 39% did.
And it’s not that people don’t know churches are out there. The Christian pastors who authored The Great Dechurching
estimate that 40 million Americans
used to attend church at least once a month
and now go less than once a year. The study they commissioned found that
“no theological tradition, age group, ethnicity, political affiliation,
education level, geographic location, or income bracket”
has been immune to this trend.
The Great Dechurching goes into some detail
about why people are leaving churches
— again, from a survey,
and not just reflecting the authors’ possibly biased intuitions.
Some reasons are specific to particular denominations. The Catholic Church’s clergy sexual abuse scandals
disillusioned a lot of members. Young people have been leaving Evangelical churches
for largely political reasons,
as Perry Bacon described: They can’t reconcile the message of Christian love and compassion
with the harsh and often hateful positions
their churches take in the culture wars, or understand how loving Jesus can lead to voting for Trump.
We may not feel that those issues apply to us,
but there is a more general lesson: Members begin to fall away
when they sense hypocrisy in their churches,
when what the church teaches doesn’t match
what the church does
or how members are treated.
One challenge many churches face
has become known as the Rise of the Nones: The percentage of the population
reporting their religious affiliation as None
has grown from 6% in 1991 to almost 30% in 2022.
Many churches don’t know what to do with that trend. The whole point of a Baptist or Catholic church
is to gather up all the Baptists or Catholics in a town,
not to socialize seekers who balk at reciting a creed.
UUs, though, tend to see the rise of the Nones
as an opportunity rather than a problem: "Not sure what you believe? Believe something you can’t put a label on? Welcome! You’ll fit right in."
But Nones present a challenge for us too. We know what to do with Nones like Perry Bacon:
people who were raised in another faith, got disillusioned,
and now report a church-sized hole in their lives. Lots of us got here that way: I used to be Lutheran. My wife used to be Catholic. That kind of journey is familiar to us.
But as more and more parents leave
the churches they were born in,
more and more children are growing up without a church. As adults, those children may discover
exactly the same needs in their lives as Perry Bacon,
but to them it won’t look like a church-sized hole. To them, church is an old-timey thing Gramma and Grandpa did,
not a plausible solution to their own social isolation.
So lifelong Nones won’t walk in our door church-shopping. Someone will need to meet them where they are
and communicate to them
that church is a reasonable thing to do. We’re not used to making that case.
And even if they do walk in the door,
even if they join, they may be slow to grasp how all this works. Not just the when-to-stand-up and when-to-sit-down
of the Sunday service, but the constant give-and-take
of being in community with a diverse group of people.
UU minister Kimberley DeBus put it this way in her blog: “Understanding what it means to be a member,
to be in covenant,
to support the common endeavor. That means things like supporting a decision
[that was] fairly and honestly made,
even if it wasn’t your preference. It means looking to the future and trusting those with vision,
even if it wasn’t your vision. It means teaching others and helping them along
even as you were helped along when you first arrived. It means doing the work to support the congregation
- helping out, taking on leadership roles,
being engaged with each other.”
Most UU churches aren’t set up to be an adult’s first church. When adults walk into their first church,
everything seems to happen by magic. It takes a while to understand
that nothing happens unless someone does it,
and nothing is paid for unless someone contributes. If you express a need and it isn’t instantly satisfied,
that doesn’t necessarily mean people don’t like you
or don’t want you to feel welcome. No one is born knowing this stuff. More and more, we will have to teach it.
And then there’s the problem that Bacon himself exemplifies: People like him aren’t joining our churches
because people like him aren’t joining our churches. Many, many UU churches have a bootstrapping problem
— racially, generationally,
and across divides we may not even be aware of. Waiting for Perry Bacon to show up
and bring his community with him
is probably not a viable outreach strategy
— but I’m not sure what is.
And if he did show up with a cohort of friends --
younger, darker,
hoping to change the church to better serve their needs --
what then? Would we see them as an opportunity, or as a threat? We come here now because we’re happy now. And new members,
especially members different from us,
might change things. How will we preserve what we need
without sending away
people whose needs are different?
And then, there’s the challenge churches always face,
whether they’re growing or shrinking: How do we make the cost/benefit balance work? How do we reach out to more people
without burning out the people who are already here?
Having raised the cost/benefit issue,
I have to mention a challenging question
Christian writer Jake Meador posed in The Atlantic: In our busy 21st-century lives,
we may think we need a church
that asks less of us. But what if what we really need
a church that asks more of us,
one that calls us to transform our busy life
rather than just squeeze church into it?
“Contemporary America,” he writes,
“simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment
as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy
for forms of community
that don’t contribute to one’s professional life. Workism reigns in America,
and because of it, community in America,
religious community included,
is a math problem that doesn’t add up."
He continues: “The problem in front of us
is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society
that doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans
have adopted a way of life
that has left us lonely, anxious,
and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.”
I know how exhausting church responsibilities can be,
so I don’t want to press the ask-more idea too hard. But think about it. Chew on it for a while.
So I’ve described a lot of challenges,
but not all churches are failing. I only stop by a couple times a year,
but everything I’ve seen at this church lately looks encouraging. My own church in Massachusetts
recently came out the other side of a rough patch: Our minister of 31 years retired just as Covid was hitting. A lot of members decided this was a good time
to take an extended vacation from church,
and we wondered if they would ever come back. But our search committee did a good job of finding a new minister,
and the congregation seems to be on the upswing again.
[Here I have edited out a couple of stories about churches I know that are struggling, for fear the churches are a little too recognizable.] One of my friends ministered to another UU church
a little over an hour from Boston. I spoke there a few times. They have a lovely sanctuary
that decades ago would hold hundreds, but they can’t afford to heat it in the winter,
so we met in a side room with a couple dozen chairs.
In short, the future could go either way. Having invoked Emerson,
I have to pass on one of my favorite Emerson quotes: “This time, like all times, is a very good one,
if we but know what to do with it.”
So why am I bringing this up today? What am I hoping you take away from this talk? (This is that point where you might come back from your side track.)
I’m sure I’m not the first person to say
it would be good if this church grew. I’m not the first person to try to sell you the vision
of a congregation that becomes more racially diverse,
and that renews itself by pulling in a new generation of young families. The UUA is full of consultants who will tell you that.
But even if we agree with that vision,
too often we repeat those statements
in the same tone of voice we use when we talk about cleaning out our garages or starting an exercise program. Of course it would be nice,
but where are we going to find the time and energy to do it?
What I’m trying to do today
is throw another coin on the motivation side of the scale: We don’t need to do this just for ourselves. In fact, our individual motives sometimes pull the other way: If my friends are here already,
how much bigger does the church need to be? But growing Unitarian Universalist churches,
and changing them so that they’re better equipped to grow,
is something we need to do for the world. The world needs the kind of institutions we could build.
Many years ago,
my church held a brainstorming afternoon
to compose a new mission statement. The goal was to have a concise answer to the question:
“What are we trying to do here?”
so that every proposed project
could be judged by how well it helped us do that thing.
I drew a complete blank that afternoon,
and contributed almost nothing. The mission statement we came up with
was one of those multi-subordinate-clause paragraphs
that was all very well-intentioned. But I don’t remember it
and I never hear anyone quote it.
A few months later I was out for a walk
when what I should have proposed popped into my head: Becoming the people the world needs.
That’s what we ought to be doing. The world needs thoughtful, committed, compassionate, truth-seeking people. Right now, we may not always be those people. But we aspire to become them,
and we come together as a community
to help each other work on that aspiration.
Lately, though, I’ve been realizing that
“becoming the people the world needs”
isn’t quite good enough, because it only covers our individual growth. I think we also need to care about
building the institution the world needs.
And so that’s the question I’d like to leave you with: Right here, right now,
what church-resembling institution does Quincy need? And how could this church move
in the direction of becoming that institution?
Closing words
The closing words are by William Wordsworth: “What we have loved, Others will love; and we will teach them how.”
