What Is a Unitarian?

This Sunday, I and my family are heading south to participate in a service of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Mankato. We have a Muslim foreign exchange student named Farzad living with us until June. Although church attendance is generally considered strictly voluntary in our household, I informed our student that this excursion was required. Why? Because I feel one of our duties as foreign exchange hosts is to give our exchange student some opportunities to learn about different cultures and also to learn something about American history. When we were visiting family in Iowa for Christmas, he was also required to come with us to a Christmas Eve service at the conservative Evangelical Church Göran's step-dad has been attending lately. I felt that the UU Fellowship would expose him to yet another unique religious perspective in America, and I also wanted to take him to see the Buffalo Monument, and educate him a little bit about Native American history as well.

Farzad was born in Afghanistan. His family spent a few years in Iran and they are currently living in Finland. So when Farzad asked me to explain exactly what a UU was, I found myself a bit at a loss. How do you answer that question for someone who has almost no context for understanding American religion? As it is, I've struggled to explain Mormonism to him in terms that might be meaningful to him. The temptation is always to tell too much, or to start with details that -- while significant to you personally -- have no meaning for someone who still has some pretty distorted notions of what Christianity is. And I had to do it in fairly simple English. This is harder than it sounds, folks!

My best stab at it was to ask him if he was familiar with the Christian concept of the Trinity. "No," he said, "What's that?"

"That's this notion that God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are all Gods, and that they are one God," I explained.

"Oh, yeah, yeah," he said. I wasn't completely sure he had the faintest idea of what the Trinity was, but I didn't doubt that he'd at least heard of it.

"OK," I said. "Unitarians believe there is only one God who is above all things." (That was my best stab at including the notion of transcendence in my explanation of the Unitarian notion of God.)

His eyes lit up, and he nodded. "Oh, OK!" he said. I could tell that, as a believing Muslim, he approved.

"OK," I said, feeling I was getting somewhere. "The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship is also known for being a very liberal church."

"What does this mean, 'liberal'?" he asked.

I was surprised, but not surprised, at having to explain this to an Afghan Muslim 18-year-old! I really, honestly found myself at a loss having to explain this from scratch. Sometimes it's the most basic terms -- the ones we take for granted the most -- that we have the hardest time explaining. This was turning out to be a good exercise for me!

"They believe that free thought and free expression is very important. They also believe that the church should be about striving for social equality. They are against racism. They believe in equality for women and for gays and lesbians. There are lots of gay people who are members of this congregation. And they believe in helping the poor."

"Oh," said Farzad, "They are very good people then."

"Yes," I said, "They are very good people." I was satisfied that this was the take-away point.

I could tell he was anxious to play the FIFA World Cup Soccer video game we gave him for Christmas, so I figured the Unitarianism 101 lesson was over. He'll hopefully learn more when we actually go there on Sunday!

Did I do a good job? I don't know. How would you explain it?

True Religion

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. (John 10: 27)

African slaves in America embraced Christ despite whites' best efforts to prevent it. At first, white slave-owners feared that if they permitted their slaves to be baptized, Christian law might require that they be freed. That, in itself, says a lot about what whites actually knew about Christianity. That fact alone ought to raise at least a shadow of doubt about the sincerity of later, popular Biblical exegesis arguing that chattel slavery was condoned by the Bible.

It wasn't until colonial governments began to enact legislation explicitly prohibiting the manumission of baptized slaves that slave-owners came on board with the idea of allowing Christian missionaries to teach and convert their slaves. Even then, they permitted missionary efforts among the slaves only reluctantly. Even then, they didn't allow evangelization of the slaves until white Christian missionaries had struck a kind of devil's bargain with them.

The missionaries promised slave-owners that Christianizing the slaves would make them more submissive, more obedient, harder working and more honest. Christianity, they promised, would make better slaves. That's the bill of goods they sold slave-holders in order to be allowed access to the slave quarters on the plantations. But missionaries knew that in order to deliver on that bill of goods, they had to preach a kind of truncated gospel to the slaves, something a little bit less than the full Gospel saints and martyrs had died for. There were certain Bible verses you had to be careful about bandying too much, such as, "There is neither bond nor free... for ye are all one in Christ Jesus," and, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage."

Very careful provisions were made to ensure that when slaves went to Church, they heard only a certain kind of preaching. And though Protestants had fought and bled for the right to have Scripture translated into the vernacular, and had democratized literacy in the belief that true faith could not be possible without the right and the ability to read the sacred writ for oneself, literacy among slaves was made illegal.

Whites knew at bottom that the form of Christianity they were trying to foist over onto the slaves was an apostate, man-made mockery of the Gospel they claimed to love. As Alfred Raboteau points out in his classic study, Slave Religion, many wrestled with guilt over what they were doing. What they perceived perhaps less clearly was that in the process, they had not only denied the full Gospel to the slaves, they had ceded it for themselves as well.

White Christians failed to appreciate what they had lost I believe in part because of a tendency that had been growing since the Enlightenment to characterize true religion in terms of profession of correct creeds. Ironically, it was the slaves who learned -- despite whites' best efforts to prevent them from learning it! -- that true religion had always actually been nothing more nor less than a relationship with the living God.

Even without literacy, even with an abominable mock gospel being preached to them over white pulpits ("servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh," etc.), the slaves understood the core of the gospel message. When master wasn't looking, they'd "steal away" to some quiet place, where they could sing the songs of redeeming grace, and hear real preaching, and find real salvation. Many slave preachers carried around with them an oral Bible. They knew that when God gets involved in human history, he does so for the purpose ruining Pharaoh's plans and delivering slaves out of bondage. And they knew that Christ would soon be "trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored."

Much has been made of the form of Christianity practiced by the slaves. Much ink has been spilled trying to explain why slave worship tended to be "ecstatic," why people would shout out in worship, leap up and fall to the ground, why they would weep, or laugh, or spontaneously sing. Did that come from their African roots and heritage? Was it cultural? Or was it a by-product of their oppression? Was it psychological?

But if we listen to the slaves themselves, if we pay attention to the accounts we have preserved of their own explanations of what precisely was going on, what they tell us is that the slaves' worship was ecstatic because they had God in their midst. Through the Holy Spirit, Christ was walking among and ministering to his people. He was caring for them, tending and healing the awful wounds of wicked slavery, poverty and race hatred. If you got that kind of healing, wouldn't it make you want to shout?

The terrible, beautiful truth was, the slave-owners couldn't keep the truth from their slaves. Terrible for the slave-owners, if God is just and if he is real. And beautiful for the slaves, who learned first-hand that God is real and that God is love.

Indian Prophecies

Anyone familiar with the Native history of the American southwest knows of the impressive ruins left by an ancient American civilization known most commonly today as the "Anasazi." That's the Navajo word for the people who once occupied those ruins. We don't know what the Anasazi called themselves because they are long gone, having disappeared seemingly abruptly, without a trace, centuries ago. Historians and archaeologists are still debating who they were and what became of them.

David E. Stuart, in Anasazi America (University of New Mexico Press, 2000), takes a stab at solving the mystery of the "vanished" Anasazi. He argues that the Anasazi were, in fact, the ancestors of today's Pueblo Indians, and he presents a particular, very interesting ecological explanation for their sudden abandonment of Chaco Canyon and other similar sites. Stuart argues that the impressive structures built in Chaco Canyon were a religious complex that was made possible by a specific type of social organization. The Anasazi, Stuart argues, would have relied upon intensive agricultural techniques that put increasing ecological stress on the land. Dependent as they were on ever-increasing agricultural output, the Anasazi suddenly found themselves in trouble when an extended drought left them incapable of sustaining the concentrated population that had built the Chaco Canyon complex and other impressive Anasazi settlements in the region. Famine would have led to social instability and violence, starvation, and, not long after, the rapid dispersal of the population.

As evidence for this provocative thesis, Stuart draws on the folkways and practices of the Pueblo Indians. He sees -- built into their way of life -- an awareness of the potential dangers of over-development, and signs of some collective memory of the disaster that took place in Chaco Canyon, as well as some wisdom about how to avoid similar disasters in the future.

Stuart draws some interesting comparisons between the collapse of this ancient civilization and the dominant Euro-American society that now holds sway over the lands once cultivated by the Anasazi. Like the old Anasazi, he argues, U.S. society has also built itself on an unsustainable ecological foundation, one that is in the process of leading to ruin on a global scale. The Pueblo Indians, who have lived continuously in the lands of the American Southwest for thousands of years, have always tended to assess the American experiment with skepticism. The Pueblo were here millennia before the arrival of the Europeans a mere three centuries ago, and they expect to be here millennia after American society has crumbled into the dust and become the fodder for future archaeology.

It gives one pause, especially when one considers the failure, in recent years, of the American ideology of "progress" and the blithe optimism that has accompanied it from the founding of the Republic until somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. Until about the 1950s, Americans believed that in Calvinist Christian, Democratic, Capitalist Civilization, they held the key to the redemption of the planet. This was melded to an ideology of Manifest Destiny Americans relied on to excuse the wholesale obliteration of Native societies -- all of whom had a pretty good idea of how to live in harmony with the planet. Natives were swept aside in the name of progress and economic development. Now, at the outset of the twenty-first century, after two brutal world wars and a cold war that took us to the brink of total nuclear annihilation, we are caught in the grip of an unending "war on terror" that is accompanied by economic stagnation and the prospects of the depletion of the world's oil supply and the melting of the polar ice caps. We live in a society that is increasingly polarized and fragmented, and we grasp in vain at the kind of social consensus we once enjoyed in more prosperous times.

Americans themselves are starting to wonder if they can see the handwriting on the wall: YOU HAVE BEEN WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE, AND ARE FOUND WANTING. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of American civilization as we know it? And if so, how will we go out?