A Call for Real Change in Unitarian Universalist Religious Expression
There is no pendulum. Donald Trump has more in common with the worst ethical qualities of Thomas Jefferson than most of the presidents of the previous 100 years. This is exactly who the United States has always been.
The new Unitarian Universalist “values” are primarily concerned with what it means to be “free” and less concerned with spelling out a religious commitment to being “human” in plain language. In UU space, the priority is always assuring that one has the freedom to interpret, to pick and choose and to apply values as one sees fit. One also has the freedom to opt out entirely as evidenced by the number of congregations and leaders who still insist on using the “old” Seven Principles. This obsession with freedom goes back to some of the history of liberal Christianity and the “free church” where the primary concerns for leaders in the early 19th century was establishing a religious expression that mirrored the still recently liberated United States. The hallmark of early Unitarianism that survives in modern Unitarian Universalism today is this centering of freedom and how freedom is assumed to be an essential element to participation in society.
Unless you were/are black. It is not my intention to leave anyone out of this initial framing, it is simply that my research focuses explicitly on the exchange between blackness and whiteness. My research demonstrates that it is an unquestionable, historical fact that “freedom” in the United States has always been and continues to be more accessible to someone if they possess some combination or confidence of whiteness, maleness, (see the recent pardons of January 6 criminals), heterosexuality and a fully able body. But the unique tension between blackness and whiteness, while representing only one tension among many in the United States, informs all the other tensions because of its global breadth, economic impact, and model for violence. Case in point, the N-word (a word that originated as violence in the Americas[1]) exists in every language on this planet.
Unless you were/are black…while many Unitarian Universalist scholars are quick to point to antebellum abolitionists and Civil Rights Era allies, the vast majority of Unitarians and first gen Unitarian Universalists in congregations were not marching or protesting or in the streets. They sat and listened to their highly educated ministers in their comfortable paid-for pews and de-facto segregated communities. This was true even with Black Lives Matter in 2015; the overwhelming response was to hang signs…not to put bodies on the line. To be clear, this way of being was not because people didn’t care. Many people in UU congregations have cared deeply and passionately throughout all the struggles between whiteness and blackness for a few centuries. But UUs were always free to express their solidarity, rage and compassion only as far as they felt comfortable doing. They had agency. The way they expressed caring about the bodies of black people being enslaved, lynched, mauled by dogs, or beaten by police for peacefully protesting, has always had to be processed through the great organizational expression of Unitarian freedom: congregational polity. Freedom in process has regularly taken center stage before action. Because Unitarian Universalists are always looking through a freedom lens, freedom is also projected as the priority on to those being oppressed. Neither Unitarians nor Unitarian Universalists will dictate that people show up or believe in a certain way, or idea because when Unitarians moved, creed, dogma, Jesus and God out of the building, they gave those seats to the lofty goal of “universal freedom.”
Unitarian Universalism needs to stop operating from a place of intellectual safety and find itself in the vulnerable spots between harm and the actual bodies who are most in danger.
But Unitarian Universalists do not understand the complexity of what it means to speak of “freedom” beyond a patriotic, liberal label. The Unitarian Universalist focus on freedom makes the same assumption and speaks a shockingly similar language to the most conservative ideologue: that “everyone” has access to freedom. Freedom is the foundation of the meritocracy argument. No one wants to argue with freedom as a principle. This means that the foundational assumption behind UU “values” is the same assumption that is cancelling DEI. But sadly, making an assumption about a universality of freedom as either a reality or a goal, has the potential in our current climate to be more than just naïve…it could be lethal.
What Unitarian Universalists continue to miss is that freedom in the United States context is the ultimate “master’s tool”[2]; freedom is embedded in and fueled by the assumption of whiteness. This is what the history of Western “liberalism” tells us. Freedom within the nascent “liberal” United States was never about inclusion or difference. It was about the freedom to be considered “normal”, and in the case of the United States, the measures of normality were established as one having a proximity to whiteness, maleness, wealth and Christianness. The legacies of the last 250 years of immigration policy are the most striking examples of this. The United States has always been hostile to anyone or any group that was perceived as being incapable of assimilation…even within whiteness. This is why we speak of an amalgamating melting pot and not a stew.
Unless you were/are black…
Right now, and going forward, Unitarian Universalism needs to be more than a pseudo-theological representation of a (not-so) invisible whiteness empowered by universal freedom. Even the rhetoric about “liberation” is failing us. Unitarian Universalism needs to stop operating from a place of intellectual safety and find itself in the vulnerable spots between harm and the actual bodies who are most in danger. Unitarian Universalism can do this by adopting an Embodiment and Humanity Agenda as part of its religious framework. Ironically, because of the same polity that obscures decision making behind white freedoms, the congregations and organizations of the Unitarian Universalist Association have the power to tell each other that they are willing to declare that it is impossible to have freedom without first having humanity. Again, to the example of blackness as the canary in the coal mine, the greatest crime of African enslavement and segregation and the extrajudicial killing and imprisonment of black people over centuries has been that before any freedom was/is usurped, the affirmation of black people as fully human beings has been constantly denied. Before any kind of liberation, black humanity must be acknowledged. Liberation frameworks, while useful, can also reinforced the power of oppressors. Black people, women, people with disabilities…and yes, white people…are first and foremost fully human. It is humanity that becomes free…not freedom that becomes human. It may seem like foolishness that this needs to be said, but in a world that is literally willing to attempt to erase the fact of transgender humanity, obviously, it does.
This is a crisis moment where bold actions could save lives. As a religious institution, with all the rights and privileges of such an institution in the United States, Unitarian Universalists have the ability to make human embodiment (woman, trans, black, disabled, etc.) a non-negotiable and explicit part of our religion. As was trying to be done with the 8th Principle, language needs to be focused; Unitarian Universalists need to state their commitment to human embodiment plainly without the shroud of academic, word salads and over-intellectual jargon. If it is what we are thinking, now is time to say it plain:
Unitarian Universalist religious belief begins with the full and unquestionable humanity of all people regardless and inclusive of how they are embodied.
As an institution with roots in the colonial founding of the United States, no one can question the religious pedigree of Unitarian Universalism. Clarifying the religious commitment to embodied humanity gives Unitarian Universalism a way to make any anti-embodiment legislation a violation of religious rights. If a high school can put in place a policy based on the “religious freedom” of an instructor to not use someone’s given pronouns, it needs to be made crystal clear that misgendering someone can be an even more direct violation of the student’s and parents’ religious freedom. Above all, it is a violation of that child’s right to humanity. This should be the work of Unitarian Universalism today.
–ALD
[1] Randall Kennedy, Ni**er: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Revised edition. Twentieth-anniversary edition (New York: Pantheon Books, 2022).
[2] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press Feminist Series (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007).
