I have never met a UU that didn't care deeply about issues of discrimination. The UUA website has a page devoted to resources on "Anti-Racism, Anti-Oppression, Multicultural (ARAOMC) Resources" which interestingly is not found under "Members" but "Leaders--Identity Based Ministries--Multicultural." Anti-racism workshops and ministries are plentiful, I believe. [ http://www.uua.org/leaders/idbm/multiculturalism/araomc/index.shtml ]
Yet, consider the uuworld.org article by Paul Rasor Spring 2010 2.15.10 :
If you were asked about the racial and ethnic diversity within Unitarian Universalism, what would you say? If you wanted to verify your impression or discover how much we have changed over the past decade, where would you look? Whom would you ask? I tried to find out, and I discovered that nobody really knows. The UUA simply does not collect the data that could tell us how we are doing. When it comes to our own racial and cultural identity, our policy seems to be “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I find this both troubling and puzzling in light of our commitment eighteen years ago to create a “racially diverse and multicultural Unitarian Universalism.”...
In 2008, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey generated demographic information about even small religious groups like ours from interviews with 35,000 adults. ... Its weighted numbers show that 89 percent of UUs identified as white in 2007, 3 percent as Asian, 3 percent as Latino/Latina, 1 percent identified as black or African American, and 4 percent as “other/mixed.” ...
the UUA’s Mosaic Project Report, published in 2009, tells us that 42 percent of UU youth of color are the only ones in their congregations’ youth groups, and another 44 percent are in groups that have only two or three. In other words, UU children and youth for the most part attend religious education classes and youth groups that are far less diverse than their school classrooms. The Mosaic Project concludes:
The Unitarian Universalist culture [our Youth and Young Adults of Color] experience may not be relevant to their life experiences. Even though many of [them] have been UUs from birth, feelings of being an outsider are prevalent.
The UU goal is not just to be anti-racist, but to be multi-cultural and multi-racial.
Recently, a visiting minister was giving a program at our church and about a dozen of us were helping set up the program, provide coffee service, etc. Of all of us helping out, I noticed the visiting minister stopping to talk to only one of us and thank her for helping out. What was so different about this one person? She was African-American.
Was the minister anti-racist? Clearly, yes. Was the minister post-racist? Clearly, no.
So my question is: What can we do as UU's to move beyond racism, to a place where being African-American or non-white in a UU church is not special, but just is?
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
UU's are not "agin" tradition
Most outsiders apparently believe that Unitarians are always, under all circumstances, opposed to anything that can be called traditional. They assume that when a Unitarian runs into a tradition he will automatically be "agin" it, as Calvin Coolidge's preacher was "agin" sin....a good case can be made for the proposition that Unitarians are more concerned to maintain traditions than their critics are.
--Frederick May Eliot, "We Have Enormous Resources in the Treasury of the Spirit," Christian Register, 1936.
Rev. Eliot was, of course, not referring to the tradition of merging (or mingling) of the waters or the water communion (or ceremony), since the ritual is only 30 years or so old. But, I think he is right that UU's understand and value tradition. It's what connects one generation to the next, and one person to something larger. "Rank by Rank Again We Stand" celebrates tradition.
Rank by rank again we stand,
from the four winds gathered hither,
Loud the hallowed walls demand
whence we come and how, and whither.
From their stillness breaking clear,
echoes wake to warn or cheer;
higher truth from saint and seer
call to us assembled here.
If you are soon to celebrate the water ceremony, may you find joy in the tradition of standing together for higher truth.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
IS AMERICA ISLAMOPHOBIC?
This question on the cover of Time magazine* seems irrelevant to me. The question really is: IS AMERICA FOR FREEDOM OF RELIGION OR NOT?
Thomas Jefferson said, "If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, then and only then will truth, prevail over fanaticism.”
Phobias and -isms in all their human forms have been a part of America since Europeans landed. Thomas Jefferson surely knew it. That we still have them several hundred years later is sad, but not surprising.
But is anyone else the least bit surprised that there is any question that Americans should be able to build an American religious building of any kind in America? and that there is vehement protest against this?
Yet, even some of the most liberal among us have said, "Yes, but it's ground zero, sacred ground."
No, it's really not about ground zero. If it was just about ground zero, then protests and attempted blocking of religious building wouldn't be happening all over the country in places like Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, and they are.
Is there someway we can help the debate get real? The thinly disguised opposition to Islam needs to be exposed for the real issue, which is constitutional. It's just one of those quirky little things in the constitution that does not allow one group a freedom that another is denied. The question is, "Are Americans going to follow the Constitution or not?"
That people say they believe in the right to build a religious structure, just not a Muslim one, is a thinly disguised way of arguing against the Constitution, whether they understand that or not.
Why should we care--has the building of any UU structure ever been blocked? No, but religious freedom denied anywhere diminishes freedom everywhere (excuse my butchering of Dr. King's quote).
Now, debate is a good thing, it's repression that is not. This particular debate about the rights of American Muslims has the potential to strengthen America's dedication to religious freedom, and perhaps even unite the seemingly least unite-able of us behind one of the most basic American values.
In our own history, the foundation of Unitarian principles did not happen without struggle and vehement debate. Dissenters of orthodox Calvinists were thought to be hypocrites and and not Christian, about the worst thing one could be named in 18th - 19th century America.**
Then William Ellery Channing happened. (Many claim Channing as the father of UU even though he refused to align with any organized religion, even Unitarianism) That debate served to help religious liberals better define what they felt liberal about. But Channing shaped the debate into something more. Instead of arguing against the argument against liberal religious principles, he espoused a different strategy.
The most effectual method of expelling error is not to meet it sword in hand, but gradually to instil great truths with which it cannot easily coexist, and by which the mind outgrows it.
Is there a lesson for us here for today?
Sources:
*Is American Islamophobic? Time magazine, vol. 176, no. 9, August 30, 2010
Thomas Jefferson said, "If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, then and only then will truth, prevail over fanaticism.”
Phobias and -isms in all their human forms have been a part of America since Europeans landed. Thomas Jefferson surely knew it. That we still have them several hundred years later is sad, but not surprising.
But is anyone else the least bit surprised that there is any question that Americans should be able to build an American religious building of any kind in America? and that there is vehement protest against this?
Yet, even some of the most liberal among us have said, "Yes, but it's ground zero, sacred ground."
No, it's really not about ground zero. If it was just about ground zero, then protests and attempted blocking of religious building wouldn't be happening all over the country in places like Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, and they are.
Is there someway we can help the debate get real? The thinly disguised opposition to Islam needs to be exposed for the real issue, which is constitutional. It's just one of those quirky little things in the constitution that does not allow one group a freedom that another is denied. The question is, "Are Americans going to follow the Constitution or not?"
That people say they believe in the right to build a religious structure, just not a Muslim one, is a thinly disguised way of arguing against the Constitution, whether they understand that or not.
Why should we care--has the building of any UU structure ever been blocked? No, but religious freedom denied anywhere diminishes freedom everywhere (excuse my butchering of Dr. King's quote).
Now, debate is a good thing, it's repression that is not. This particular debate about the rights of American Muslims has the potential to strengthen America's dedication to religious freedom, and perhaps even unite the seemingly least unite-able of us behind one of the most basic American values.
In our own history, the foundation of Unitarian principles did not happen without struggle and vehement debate. Dissenters of orthodox Calvinists were thought to be hypocrites and and not Christian, about the worst thing one could be named in 18th - 19th century America.**
Then William Ellery Channing happened. (Many claim Channing as the father of UU even though he refused to align with any organized religion, even Unitarianism) That debate served to help religious liberals better define what they felt liberal about. But Channing shaped the debate into something more. Instead of arguing against the argument against liberal religious principles, he espoused a different strategy.
The most effectual method of expelling error is not to meet it sword in hand, but gradually to instil great truths with which it cannot easily coexist, and by which the mind outgrows it.
Is there a lesson for us here for today?
Sources:
*Is American Islamophobic? Time magazine, vol. 176, no. 9, August 30, 2010
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