a talk presented May 31, 2026 at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois
READINGS
The first reading is from the Theological-Political Treatise by the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
[E]ach man – seeing that he is the best judge of his own character – should adopt whatever [beliefs] he thinks best adapted to strengthen his love of justice. If this were so, I think there would be no further occasion for controversies in the Church.
The second reading is by the podcaster Robert Arnold, who wrote a commentary on the Thomas Paine quote “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
If your country is the world, then every hungry child is your problem. Every unjust war is your problem. Every law that cages instead of shields is your problem. Every lie told in the name of power becomes a stain you cannot pretend is foreign.
And if your religion is to do good, then belief is no longer a performance. It is no longer a Sunday costume. It is no longer something you inherit like a family heirloom and polish just enough to show guests.
It becomes a burden. A beautiful, unavoidable burden. …
That kind of care is inconvenient. It disrupts the neat little narratives we build about “us” and “them.”
TALK
A year and a half ago, I talked here about the future of churches, and in particular about Unitarian Universalist churches. I made the case that (whether they realize it or not) church membership is exactly what many Americans need right now.
During the Biden administration, the surgeon general put out a report saying that the country was experiencing “a crisis of loneliness and social isolation”.
Around the same time, Washington Post reporter Perry Bacon described his own search to fill
what he called the “church-sized hole” in his life. He wrote:
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.
I found it interesting that none of the needs Bacon listed were “religious” in the sense that I was brought up to interpret that word. He wasn’t describing a hunger for God, guilt about a sinful life, or a yearning to believe that things will be OK after we die. What he felt lacking in his life, and in the lives of many people he knew, wasn’t some kind of theology.
Instead, he pictured people who already shared many basic intuitions about what a good person or a good life is. What they needed was an institution that allowed them to come together in community and encourage each other to be those good people and live those good lives.
In short: a church.
But of course, churches come with baggage. Some have aligned themselves with the current political regime. Others may want you to reject friends and relatives who are just trying to live their lives and doing no apparent harm. But they are gay or trans or different in some other way
that you can accept, but the church can’t. Or perhaps a church might pressure you
to accept a subservient role because of your gender. Or a church might require you to believe — or at least say that you believe — things that you may find absurd, or at best unpersuasive. Like models of the universe that science rejected centuries ago, or retellings of history that don’t match the currently available facts, or a series of improbable excuses for an all-powerful, infinitely loving God to allow plagues and earthquakes and genocide.
Perhaps the church devalues the world you actually experience in favor of a world to come that can only be seen through the eyes of faith. And for this reason, it may try to divert your attention from poverty or injustice or the looming consequences of our abuse of the physical environment.
So a church is more than just friends and camaraderie and people to support you through the crises of your life. Those benefits come with baggage.
But then there are Unitarian Universalist churches, which have done their best to be as baggage-free as possible.
Now, of course, none of them completely succeed. Many UU churches, including my congregation in Massachusetts and this one here, have bootstrapping problems: In the article I quoted, Perry Bacon tries a local UU church and finds its congregation too old and too white for him to feel completely comfortable. However, in a later article he mentions attending that church again and recommends UU churches to readers who are looking for ways to meet the challenges of the Trump era.
But still, it’s a barrier: From the church’s point of view, it’s hard to attract people who differ in some obvious way from the members it already has. And from a prospective member’s point of view, it’s always uncomfortable to be the only person like you in a congregation, whatever “like you” means in your particular case.
I wanted to mention that bootstrapping problem because it’s important, but it’s actually not what I plan to talk about today. Instead, I want to focus on another reason UU churches are not booming the way they should be, or the way American society needs them to: We tend to do a very bad job explaining ourselves to people who don’t already understand us — even people who are genuinely curious and would fit in quite well.
Several ministers have told me more-or-less the same story: Some new member who came to Unitarianism late in life says to them: “Why didn’t anybody tell me about this years ago?”
We all know some of the reasons. We don’t want to be one of those pushy religions that stop strangers in shopping malls and ask them if they’re saved. And we’re modest enough to understand that some people may be doing well enough without us. People may practice religions we consider ridiculous, or no religion at all, but if they’re happy and aren’t hurting anybody, we’re usually content to leave them alone.
Like Spinoza said: If someone’s beliefs inspire them to love justice and do good in the world, we don’t need to change them.
However, just about all of us at one time or another find ourselves in some casual conversation where someone asks, “So you’re a Unitarian. What is that?”
Most of us, myself included on occasion, go tongue-tied. When we do that, we might give the impression that we’re embarrassed to be Unitarian Universalists. Or perhaps that there’s some secret teaching we’re not supposed to let out.
Many of the responses we do give aren’t very useful. Sometimes I’ve explained the history of the name — how Unitarians rebelled against the doctrine of the Trinity and Universalists preached universal salvation, and then they merged in 1961. All true, but saying essentially nothing about who we are today.
Other responses, in my opinion, are counter-productive. For example, one thing other people say about us, and that we often repeat about ourselves, is that UUs can believe “anything we want”. I stopped saying this several years ago, but I know it’s still common because I recently heard it from someone who had been checking out her local UU church and had even been to a new-UU orientation. I suspect the minister said it.
So I’ll take a couple minutes here to explain what’s wrong with that line and what I would like to get people saying instead. The problem with “You can believe anything you want” is that it points to something true, but frames it in a way that undercuts everything we’re about.
The true thing is that there is no UU authority who regulates what we can and can’t believe. There is no creed we have to repeat. There is no infallible UU pope who can excommunicate you if you disagree. And while there are statements that summarize common beliefs — the UU Principles, the six values with Love at the center, and so on — you can argue vociferously with any of that and still be a member in good standing.
Many people do.
Many people do.
But characterizing that as permission to believe “whatever you want” makes our beliefs sound flighty, like we’re just not serious about them. It’s like “Today, maybe I’ll believe in fairies. They’re cute; I enjoy believing in them. I think I’ll do that, at least until something even more engaging pops into my head.”
Worse, though, is that “whatever you want” buys into the framework of authoritarian religion. Authoritarian religions teach that we are all essentially children who need discipline. Without a creed or a sacred scripture or a powerful clergy to keep us in line, we would all lead horrible lives and rationalize them by professing some self-serving nonsense.
In fact, that’s pretty much the opposite of what Unitarian Universalists do.
If you want to lead a horrible life and justify it with self-serving beliefs, a UU church is not your best choice. If that’s what you want, I’ll tell you exactly what you should do: Find a church that already teaches your self-serving nonsense and go join it.
Do you want to believe that you’re better than other people because you’re white or rich or have some other privilege? There are churches that teach that. Are you a man who wants to dominate the women in your life? There are churches that teach that. Do you hate gays or trans people and want to be nasty to them? Plenty of churches will justify that for you. You don’t need to come here.
This lack-of-discipline criticism goes way back. The Universalists were facing it 200 years ago. Universalists were originally a heretical Christian sect who taught that Jesus’ death had brought salvation to all people, and not just to those who believed a certain way. There was no Hell, in other words.
But without the threat of Hell, critics said, wouldn’t we all be terrible? Wouldn’t we all go out and murder and rape to our heart’s content?
And a Universalist might answer: “Yes, I already commit as many murders and rapes as I want, which is zero. That’s not what would make my heart content."
The Universalist vision, which still echoes in Unitarian Universalism today like background radiation from the Big Bang, was about opening up to the love streaming down from Heaven and reflecting it outward into the world. That’s the kind of belief that might strengthen your love of justice.19th-century Universalists like Hosea Ballou did not yearn for lives of unpunished crime. And we still don’t.
So if UUs are not people who believe “whatever we want”, what are we? We are a self-disciplined people who take responsibility for our own beliefs.
So if your beliefs harm other people, if they make you complicit in oppressing other races, other genders, other social classes, future generations, or anyone at all — we won’t justify that for you. The consequences of your beliefs are on you. You can’t launder them through this church.
Maybe you’d like to say, “I’m not a sexist jerk. God is a sexist jerk, and I am just His humble servant.”
But nobody’s going to buy that here. It’s on you.
Other well-known short characterizations of what UUs stand for are similarly true up to a point,
but they’re incomplete. Typically, they were created by people who were escaping from some other religion, and they say more about the churches people were leaving than about the UU church they joined.
When you think about it, “believe whatever you want” is like that. If you are rebelling against someone who claims the authority to tell you what you have to believe, being free to believe whatever you feel in your heart has a powerful attraction.
Another historically significant characterization of UUism is only three words long: “Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance.”
Freedom, again, points to that lack of a controlling authority. Reason is another value that goes back. William Ellery Channing, the minister whose 1819 sermon “Unitarian Christianity” gave the movement its name, wrote "I am surer that my rational nature is from God than that any book is an expression of his will.”
Tolerance means extending to others the same freedom of thought and expression that we want for ourselves. In Channing’s day, it just meant tolerating divergent Protestant interpretations of Christian scripture. From there it grew to tolerance of Catholics and other Christian sects. Then to any kind of theistic religion, and eventually to humanistic paths that don’t postulate a god at all.
So there’s nothing inaccurate about “Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance”, but there’s a lot it leaves out: community and the common good and social justice. It also leaves out any notion of spiritual growth or of transformation — the idea that we’re here not because we are perfect people or think anybody else is perfect, but because we want to become better people, live better lives, and help each other lead better lives.
And tolerance is far too weak an expression of how we feel about each other’s spiritual paths. Jews or Buddhists or Pagans who brought the wisdom of their traditions with them when they came — we don’t just tolerate them, we celebrate them. We’re glad and grateful that they have joined us.
Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance is typical of many UU summaries, in that it comes from a particular era and takes for granted what UUs of that era took for granted.
Not so long ago, UU converts were nearly all escaping from more conservative churches
where they no longer fit. They understood what a church was and they knew the value of having a spiritual home and a moral community.What they needed to hear was that they could still have all that without compromising their honesty and intellectual integrity. “Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance” promised them that.
But today, many of the people who need to be here (but don’t realize it) were brought up without a church, or are familiar with churches only as something their grandparents do for the kinds of mysterious reasons grandparents have.
They need to hear the good news of community. They may feel the lack of community, but they look to fill it in ineffective or counterproductive ways — at the gym, or the bar, or in the kind of communities that form online around UFOs or conspiracy theories.
What they don’t lack, though, is the freedom to use their reason, or to be tolerated for the conclusions they come to. When you stay home and drink coffee on Sunday mornings,
you are free to think whatever you like, and the people that you don’t meet never judge you for it.
So what is the summary of Unitarian Universalism they need to hear?
When you’ve made many attempts to explain something and have repeatedly been dissatisfied with the sound of your own voice, it’s tempting to imagine that there’s something difficult or tricky about the concept. You might think that you need more time to make a more exact or more nuanced explanation.
But sometimes, the problem is that what you’re explaining is so simple. You’re missing the mark because you’re making it too complicated. Yes, there is nuance, there is history, there are details to explain. But all that would spill out easily if you just got the basic idea right.
Let me tell you why I think that’s the case here. Sometimes, when I’ve tried to tell people what UUism is about, I’ve quoted the Principles you can find at the beginning of the hymnal — the value of all people; compassion; searching for truth; conscience; a world community with liberty and justice; and so on. And one typical reaction has been: “That doesn’t define a religion. Everybody believes that.”
Now, if you look at the state of the world these days, it’s pretty clear that not everybody believes the UU Principles. But think about the people who do. Most of them acknowledge these values, and then make their religion about something else — about the nature of God, or what happens after we die, how God feels about various foods or sexual acts, the right way to do certain rituals, or which prophet was hearing God correctly.
In other words: stuff that nobody really knows. Questions where you can pick an answer, and then define the people who agree as Us and the people who disagree as Them.
What if you just didn’t do that?
What if, rather than speculative answers to esoteric questions we can argue about, you centered your religion on the things we all know in our hearts? Love, honesty, integrity,
generosity, justice, and things like that?
What if, rather than facing the world alone or in twos and threes, rather than forming groups of Us united in spiritual warfare against Them, what if we built communities of people dedicated to facing the world together, facing it in all its complexity and uncertainty?
What if those communities covenanted to help each other become better people and live the best lives they can?
That’s Unitarian Universalism. It’s really that simple.
