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I’m a Universalist at heart, and Universalism is a hope-filled faith, so as I look ahead to 2011 I can’t help but seek out signs of hope within Unitarian Universalism. Here are some of the things that give me hope for the coming year:

Community ministry: Most of our local congregations continue to stagnate and even decline, and they are not very good advertisements for our faith tradition. But our Unitarian Universalist community ministers are out doing all kinds of good work in the world; they serve as hospital chaplains, military chaplains, directors of non-profit organizations, social service providers, etc., etc. These are the people who are out there letting people know who we are. We have to figure out how to support these people without locking them into the weird narrow conception of congregational polity that now dominates us.

Three experiments in new congregation starts:

This coming year, I’ll be watching three very different approaches at starting new congregations. Each of these three new congregations does not fit the typical model of new congregation starts within Unitarian Universalism — no fellowships here, no existing congregation supporting a new congregation, no extension ministry, no support from the Unitarian Universalist Association. One is a project to revitalize a moribund church; another focuses on serving the wider community rather than members and friends; and one an entrepreneurial church start common in other denominations but not within Unitarian Universalism.

1. Scott Wells is thinking about how to do a new church start in Washington, D.C. While there are plenty of UU congregations on the Beltway, it’s clear the District could use another UU congregation (or two, or three). Scott has a good day job, so he doesn’t need to earn money from this project. He doesn’t have a church Web site up yet, so the best way to follow Second Universalist is via Twitter.

What I like best about what Scott is doing is this: he has recognized that many of our major metropolitan areas are grossly underserved by Unitarian Universalist congregations. In many metropolitan areas, we Unitarian Universalists have saturated the suburbs with our congregations, but have ignored the city. I will be curious to see what kind of congregation emerges from Scott’s effort. Although I’d love to see him create another big congregation, I’d be just as happy if the outcome was a house church or a family size church (under 50 average attendance) because I’d love to see him spark the creation of lots of UU house churches in major metropolitan areas.

2. Ron Robinson has been working away in Turley, Oklahoma, for some time now, building up what he calls “A Third Place” — I’ve been reading his blog, formerly titled Progressive Church Planting and now titled The Welcome Table: A Free Universalist Christian Missional Community. Robinson has a different conception of what a congregation can be. In a recent online UU World article, Don Skinner writes: “Robinson identifies A Third Place with the growing ‘missional’ movement in evangelical and mainline Protestant Christianity, which focuses a church’s ministries externally rather than internally.”

Not surprisingly, Robinson doesn’t draw a salary at A Third Place; his wife, a medical doctor, is the primary breadwinner; Robinson also earns some money from a couple of part-time gigs. This allows him to work within a very unconventional organizational structure, and to build a community that isn’t a typical Unitarian Universalist congregation. As Robinson has written on his blog: “The world needs all kinds of churches, or varying manifestations of the church.” I’m watching Robinson because he is willing to think outside the box. We need more people who are willing to try things that are this well thought-out, and this radically different.

3. The new congregation start that I’m most interested in is in Norton Massachusetts. The old Unitarian Universalist congregation in Norton had almost died out when they decided to use their beautiful building and their substantial endowment, and start all over again. Here’s how their minister, Christana Wille-McKnight, describes what they’re doing:

“This church has been around for literally 300 years. But over those years, the congregation has essentially died out. The few remaining members dream that the church will one day grow and thrive again. They have hired me as their full time minister to restart the congregation with a new mission, vision and practice, while still retaining the ideals of Unitarian Universalism.”

If the Norton congregation succeeds in this venture, I hope they will inspire dozens of other essentially moribund congregations to think outside the box, and start something new and vibrant and alive.

Unitarian Universalism overseas: Again this year, I’ll be watching the ongoing emergence of Unitarian Universalism in Africa. Uganda Unitarian Universalists have been standing up for gay rights in a very hostile environment; Kenyan Unitarian Universalists are somehow managing to survive the political chaos in their country; and movements in other countries seem to be hanging on or doing well. There is good stuff happening in African Unitarian Universalism. I just hope that we U.S. Unitarian Universalists can manage to help support the Africans without taking them over. Eric Cherry, Director of International Affairs at the Unitarian Universalist Association, seems to be doing an excellent job of keeping that balance of helping out without taking over, and his office will be well worth watching in the coming year.

The rise of the “nones”: “Nones” is a term popularized recently by sociologist Robert Putnam, and refers to the increasing number of people who, when asked what their religion is, reply “none.” The “nones” tend to be younger. They also may have an interest in religion, but they equate all religion with stereotypical American Protestant evangelical religion, and so decide that all churches are bad.

Every once in a while, I see one of these “nones” come into our congregation here in Palo Alto. Some of them, when they realize that they don’t have to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, actually decide to stick around — and although some of them remain extremely wary of the whole idea of organized religion, others decide to jump in with both feet. Some of them are humanists, but some of them are unconventional Christians or Buddhists or syncretists or something you can’t really name. This coming year, I’m going to be paying increasing attention to the “nones” and trying to figure out how to welcome them in when they show up in our congregation.

More social networking: Already, some ministers are saying that they are more likely to connect with people in their congregations via Facebook than via email. This doesn’t mean that email is going away, but it does mean that communication channels are getting increasingly fractured.

My real question is how are we going to use social networking most effectively? Yes, I use Facebook, and email, and even the phone and paper letters. Yes, I post my sermons on the Web before I preach, and embed links and footnotes into them, so that if you listen and read online at the same time, you get an enhanced sermon. But how can social networking enhance the growth of face-to-face community? — I’ll be watching this year to see how we address this question.

The year in Unitarian Universalist growth initiatives may be summed up quite simply: there continue to be fewer Unitarian Universalists, few local congregations seem to have any interest in taking the simple steps necessary to grow, and hardly anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit is stepping forward to start new and innovative Unitarian Universalist communities.

As an extreme example of Unitarian Universalism’s lack of initiative, let’s look at the San Francisco Bay area, where I live. The San Francisco Bay area comprises nine counties, 7,000 square miles, and 7.4 million people. A poll by the Pew Forum in 2008 determined that 0.3% of U.S. adults call themselves Unitarian Universalists, and therefore we’d expect there to be at least 22,000 Unitarian Universalists in the Bay area. Since the Bay area population tends to be liberal, well-educated, and open-minded, however, I would expect there to be more Unitarian Universalists than the national average. Conservatively, I’d guess there should be something like 30,000 to 40,000 Unitarian Universalists in the Bay area — yet there are fewer than 4,000. In all of California, the most populous state in the U.S. with a population of more than 37 million people, there are only 16,089 Unitarian Universalists (according to the 2010 UUA Directory).

If this isn’t bad enough, there is only one so-called “emerging congregation” (that is, a relatively new congregation not yet admitted as a full member of the Unitarian Universalist Association) in the Bay area, and that one new congregation is actually a group of people who left the Oakland church in the middle of a conflict over whether or not the music director should be fired. Because conflicts typically drive some people away from religion entirely, I’d guess that this emerging congregation actually represents a net loss of Unitarian Universalists in the Bay area.

And if that isn’t bad enough… …from what I see here in the Palo Alto congregation, there is in fact a large number of people in the Bay area who would seriously consider attending a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I estimate that our congregation alone sees well over a hundred newcomers each year — and this with essentially no marketing on our part. Yet our estimates are that we retain only about a fifth of these newcomers over the long term.

If you think the picture can’t get any more bleak, you’re wrong — it can get more bleak. Unitarian Universalism is in decline, but we are unable to focus our attention, energy, and limited resources on growth. A perfect example of this is religious education for children. The U.S. birth rate in 2007, just before the Great Recession, was the highest it had been since 1961, at the peak of the Baby Boom. Yet enrollment in Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools has been dropping since before 2007. Denominational authorities have finally begun publishing a new curriculum series, but it is less than inspiring — much of it is a rehash of older curriculum ideas dating from 70 to 25 years old, recast in “teacher-proof” curriculums, with a veneer of multiculturalism. It has little to attract or excite newcomers with children, especially in an era when religion is increasingly optional. Nor is the situation any better at the level of the local congregation, where we see the same old tired Sunday school programs of twenty and thirty years ago.

In another example of our inability to confront the real issues that face us, we Unitarian Universalists focus our social justice efforts in areas that are not attractive to the kinds of people we need to attract. A few Unitarian Universalists went to Arizona once in 2010 to get arrested in what turned out to be a fairly inconsequential immigration protest, a protest to which basically no one paid any attention but for a few other Unitarian Universalists. But mostly our local congregations continues to focus their local efforts on social justice issues that appeal to the individualistic educated middle class white people who are already members. Thus we put lots of energy into middle class environmental issues like solar energy and hybrid cars — concerns typical of our current members and friends — while ignoring the real distrust that communities of color have towards white middle class environmentalism, and ignoring environmental issues like toxics in the environment, food security, etc., that are of interest to people who aren’t educated individualistic middle class white folks.

I’d better take a deep breath and stop there. I could rant on for hours about the many ways Unitarian Universalism is following a path to irrelevancy. I’ll just mention in passing the way we emphasize social justice to such a great extent that we tend to ignore what many people outside our congregations crave: guidance and support in living sane and humane personal lives that are in accord with principles of goodness and truth. I’ll barely mention the fact that our theology is practically moribund, and many of our religious leaders don’t seem to be aware that we have a serious theological tradition of our own, a tradition which predates the so-called “seven principles,” and (unlike the “seven principles”) contains some real intellectual content.

At all levels — denomination, districts, local congregations, independent UU groups — the trend in Unitarian Universalism continues to be one of digging in our heels and refusing to change, even though by now it’s obvious that if we don’t change things Unitarian Universalism will die off.

More bad news tomorrow — Year in review: Unitarian Universalism in general

The phrase “liberal religion” continues to provoke unbelieving stares from the many people who believe that religion is, by definition, conservative. And that sums up the state of liberal religion in 2010. Much of the U.S. population still believes that in order to be religious, you must doubt scientific knowledge, believe in things that are difficult to believe in, and at least pay lip service to an ethical system that is at odds with mainstream U.S. culture.

Most U.S. media (including news outlets, movies, television, etc.) continue to portray white Protestant evangelicals as normative when it comes to religion; Catholics, Jews, and Mormons are thrown in as amusingly eccentric variations on white Protestant evangelicalism (the Jews are practically Protestant in U.S. pop culture, except that they don’t believe in Christ). The Black church is rarely noticed, except in media offerings aimed squarely at the African American market; other ethnic Christians, including Hispanics and various Asian Christians, are mostly ignored by the media.

As for liberal Christians, Reform and Reconstructionist Jews, and liberal Muslims — U.S. media and U.S. pop culture basically pretend they don’t exist, except when news outlets decide to run yet another story about how mainline Christian churches are declining in membership. Neopagans, many of whom are religious liberals, get even worse treatment by U.S. media — they are portrayed as if they are something out of a Stephen King horror novel. The only religious liberal group that gets some positive mention by U.S. media are liberal Buddhists, probably because the media like the saffron color of the Dalai Lama’s robes.

And Barack Obama is not helping increase understanding of religious liberalism. Here at last we have a liberal Christian occupying the White House, but he doesn’t show much public evidence that he lives his faith; he could at least join a church. And when he calls up a prominent pastor to talk over spiritual matters, he tends to call the same old tired Protestant evangelical types that his white Protestant evangelical predecessors called.

For me, Obama embodies much that is wrong with religious liberalism: he is unwilling to publicly claim his religious liberalism; he seems to think that religion is something you can do in private without being held accountable by a religious community. He went to a Unitarian Universalist Sunday school in the 1960s, when we Unitarian Universalists were mostly teaching kids that religion was private, optional, and not very important — and it looks like he learned his lessons well. Thus it is not surprising that an August Pew poll found that 43 percent of Americans don’t even know that he’s a Christian. Perhaps in response, Obama seems to be fleeing even farther from liberal Christianity towards Protestant evangelicalism by choosing to attend the nondenominational Evergreen Chapel at Camp David, a military church rumored to be steeped in the military version of Protestant evanglicalism.

It’s too bad that mainstream media are ignoring liberal religion, and that Barack Obama seems to be disavowing it. There are some exciting things going on in the liberal branches different religions. Among liberal Christians, I’ve read a couple of interviews of the new president of the United Church of Christ, Geoffrey Black, and have been impressed by his thoughtfulness. I’m interested in what Reform Jews are doing in sh’mirat ha-adamah — their version of religious care for the environment — connecting religion to environmentalism through Torah readings, summer camps for kids, webinars on religious sustainability, etc. I’m also interested in the ways liberal Jews are adapting their religious traditions to the postmodern U.S., and it almost feels as though there’s something of a creative religious renewal going on. Thich Nhat Hanh continues to teach us all about peace from his perspective in engaged Buddhism. I continue to be inspired by the way liberal Neopagans are reaching across class boundaries in their communities.

Religious liberals have gotten pushed so far to the margins of U.S. consciousness that we really can’t go any farther. I’ve begun to wonder if the margins might be a good place for us Unitarian Universalist to be for a while. Acknowledging that we’re in the margins just might jar us out of our complacency and force us to define ourselves more clearly. If we respond by defining ourselves more clearly in religious terms — not in political terms, not in the causes we support — if we can define in a positive way who we are and what it means to be one of us, if we can offer a positive religious alternative to normative Protestant evangelicalism, I think quite a few people will find that our little corner of liberal religion is quite a wonderful place to be.

Tomorrow: Year in review: Unitarian Universalism

I’ve been trying to read the new sociological study of U.S. religion by Robert Putnam and David Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). But I’ve gotten stalled on page 18. That’s where Putnam and Campbell define a scale of religious intensity, or religiosity. They measure religiosity “with a series of questions that tap into different ways of being religious, including both behaving and believing.” And here are the six questions they use to measure religiosity:

How frequently do you attend religious services?
How frequently do you pray outside of religious services?
How important is religion in your daily life?
How important is religion to your sense of who you are?
Are you a strong believer in your religion?
How strong is your belief in God?

Using this scale, I automatically cannot rate at the highest level of religiosity. Why? Because I don’t pray (outside of the pastoral prayers I may say in Sunday services). I also get knocked down the scale because, depending on how you define “God,” I don’t have a strong belief in God. Indeed, if I have to use the word “belief” to express how I know God, then as a non-Cartesian empiricist I would have to say I don’t “believe” in God any more than I “believe” or “disbelieve” any sensory impression.

Putnam and Campbell admit one could raise some possibly valid objections to the way they measure religiosity. In particular, they admit that “readers may wonder whether these particular questions favor one religious tradition over another….” This is an objection that anyone who is a Unitarian Universalist would raise, since probably half of us don’t believe in God, including some of our most religious Unitarian Universalists. Putnam and Campbell go on to say:

…This is a common concern when social scientists study religion, as religiosity is sometimes measured with questions that are normative within Protestantism, specifically for evangelicals. …we acknowledge the concern that perhaps this particular religiosity index is inadvertently biased toward evangelical Protestantism, or some other religious tradition.

From my point of view, their measure of religiosity is clearly biased toward evangelical Protestantism. Which doesn’t make me eager to read the rest of the book. Which also makes me realize the extent to which evangelicals dominate the public conversation about religion in the U.S. And which also makes me want to force Putnam and Campbell to spend some time reading the work of linguist George Lakoff.

It was warm all day today, with occasional rain showers. By the time I got home from work, and Carol and I got out to take a walk, it was ten o’clock. We stepped out on to the front porch. “Let me grab a hat,” said Carol, and went back inside for a moment. “Boy, it got chilly,” I said. “This is the way it should be,” said Carol. I agreed with her. I don’t miss snow, but I do find it disconcerting when it gets too warm in the middle of winter.

Some tired Beatles song was playing on the television. I think it was a program on the local public television station. Carol let out a pointedly critical remark to the effect that she could not understand why anyone would want to hear that tired old Beatles song for the sixty-fifth thousandth time.* I agreed with her. The first time I heard that recording of the Beatles chanting about some sergeant named “Pepper” I thought the song was a mildly entertaining song; not one of their best, but good enough. The one thousandth time I heard that same recording of that same song (it was probably in a shopping center, for the Beatles have become the soundtrack of consumerism) I still thought the song wasn’t bad, but I was tired of hearing that same performance over and over and over again. Too much repetition will make anything seem dreadful, and by the sixty-fifth thousandth time I had heard that same recording of that same damned song, I hated it. With jazz and classical and folk music, it is considered a virtue to re-interpret a song or a musical composition in a new and fresh way; but with rock and rap and pop music, we are supposed to make the song sound exactly like the hit recording of it. Thus when you have to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in a Sunday service, all the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers are trying to sing like John Lennon’s hit recording of that song. It’s really boring.

* This is an indirect quote because Carol told me I am no longer permitted to quote her directly, adding, “You always misquote me.”

Anyone who knows the Christmas story knows about the inhospitable innkeeper who wouldn’t allow poor pregnant Mary to stay in the only inn in town. Unfortunately, that’s not what the story originally said in the ancient Greek, according to Stephen Carlson of Duke University in The Accommodations of Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem: Καταλυμα in Luke 2.7, New Testament Studies 56 (2010), pp. 326-342.

This apparently is a scholarly argument that has been going on for centuries, and at least one Renaissance scholar was reprimanded by the Inquisition for daring to show that “καταλυμα” in this context does not mean “inn.” Carlson summarizes his thesis as follows:

Putting these exegetical conclusions together, the entire clause should be rendered as ‘because they did not have space in their accommodations’ or ‘because they did not have room in their place to stay’. This clause means that Jesus had to be born and laid in a manger because the place where Joseph and Mary were staying did not have space for him. Luke’s point is not so much any inhospitality extended to Joseph and Mary but rather that their place to stay was too small to accommodate even a newborn.

Rats, there goes this Sunday’s Christmas pageant.

I found the following in the executive summary of Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, prepared by the “Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America,” Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. This paper seems to indicate that many of the things I value most — social equality, racial diversity, breaking down class distinctions, changing the world, etc. — are positively associated with just being a part of a religious community. Note that the paper is silent on the matter of specific beliefs. I’d hypothesize that what’s most important about religious community is not specific beliefs, but rather the fact that a religious community is organized around high ideals with ethical implications.

What is the impact of this religious engagement? Involvement in communities of faith among all goers collectively is strongly associated with giving and volunteering. Indeed, involvement in religious community is among the strongest predictors of giving and volunteering for religious causes as well as for secular ones. Religious communities embody one of the most important sources of social capital and concern for community in America. Religious people are great at ‘doing for.’

Moreover, religious involvement is positively associated with most other forms of civic involvement. Even holding other factors constant (comparing people of comparable educational levels, comparable income, and so on), religiously engaged people are more likely than religiously disengaged people to be involved in civic groups of all sorts, to vote more, to be more active in community affairs, to give blood, to trust other people (from shopkeepers to neighbors), to know the names of public officials, to socialize with friends and neighbors, and even simply to have a wider circle of friends. Interestingly as well, Americans are more likely to fully trust people at their place of worship (71%) than they are to trust people they work with (52%), people in their neighborhood (47%) or people of their own race (31%).

Another distinctive feature of religious involvement is that it is less biased by social standing than most other forms of civic involvement. Poorer, less educated Americans are much less likely to be involved in community life than other Americans, but they are fully as engaged in religious communities. Conversely, religiously engaged people have, on average, a more diverse set of friends than those who are less engaged in religion. Holding constant their own social status, religiously engaged people are more likely than other Americans to number among their friends a person of a different faith, a community leader, a manual worker, a business owner, and even a welfare recipient.

I cannot resist adding a caveat: As always, it’s wise to remain skeptical of such studies; it’s especially important not to confuse correlation and causation.

Our Web host underwent an attack on one of his servers. (For you geek types, the attacker exploited a vulnerability in the cPanel interface, and did enough damage to the systems files that our Web host had to reinstall the operating system and cPanel.) This caused a cascade of other problems, resulting in my Web site and blog being down off and on over the past 24 hours. The Web host is still reinstalling backed-up files, so everything is not yet fixed.

End result: Some posts are now missing. Some of your comments may be missing. I hope all the missing material will reappear soon, but no promises.

Replaces post that disappeared during Web host problems.

We were in a meeting talking about how our congregation makes decisions. And engineer told us what happened after they made decisions in her for-profit workplace. She said, “We used to have a saying: Agree and commit; Disagree and commit; or, Get out of the way.”

In congregational life, as in the for-profit world, there’s usually a fourth option: Disagree and sabotage. A decision is made by a duly constituted authority, or through an established democratic process, and a small group of people who disagree with the decision start to sabotage it. And why wouldn’t we behave in this way? That’s the way democracy in America works: once a decision is made, many politicians (both Democrats and Republicans) go out of their way to sabotage the implementation of the decision. Ordinary citizens like us unconsciously follow their example.

But I think our congregations should be countercultural; we should not do democracy the way many U.S. politicians do democracy. We shouldn’t blindly adopt the standard from the engineering world, but it might be a good starting place:

Agree and commit;
Disagree and commit; or
Get out of the way.

Replaces a post lost during Web host problems.

The subject for today’s lesson in the fourth and fifth grade Sunday school class was Noah. While the lesson plan in the Timeless Themes curriculum was pretty good, I knew immediately that I was going to scrap it — I knew I had to figure out a way to incorporate Bill Cosby’s comedy routine on Noah.

After taking attendance, we started out with some pre-assessment: “What do you know about Noah?” Some of the children knew quite a lot, and told what they knew in some detail and with pretty good accuracy. “So you pretty much know what the Noah story is,” I told them, “now let’s look at a video.”

The children loved the fact that I brought a laptop into class. “My dad has one of those!” “So does my mom, but I think hers is bigger. Do they make a bigger one?” With a group of this size — we had six children today, though sometimes we get ten — I much prefer having the children cluster around a laptop, where they have to deal with each other’s physical proximity, than sit back and stare at a big screen. I brought the video up. “My mom doesn’t let me watch Youtube.” I told the girl that her mom was wise because most of the stuff on Youtube was crap. “Make it full screen!” said several of the children in a chorus.

The children laughed at all the right places — they got almost all the jokes (except the reference to the 1960s TV show “Candid Camera”).

After the video, we did our usual check-in. Several of the children had a lot to say: what happened with their sports team, too much homework, what’s going with their friends. They had so much to say that we had to go around the circle twice. I didn’t time it, but we could have spent eight to ten minutes on check-in — which is fine with me, since it helps us reach one of our four big learning goals, viz., to have fun and build community. While the children were checking in, I was both listening to them and mentally assessing how much of a sense of community they have developed: they are doing quite well given their age and the amount of time they get to spend together. It helps that this is an easy-going group of kids, and it also helps that we have a really top-notch teaching team.

Then I pulled out my copy of the Harper Collins Study Bible, and began reading them the Noah story beginning in Genesis 6. I pointed out that there are two different Noah stories in the Bible; thus Genesis 6.11-22 repeats some of the material in Genesis 6.1-10 (7-8 is pretty much the same story as in 13-14). I pointed out that one way to tell the difference between the two stories is that one writer refers to “the Lord” and the other writer refers to “God”; these are translations of the Hebrew Elohim and Adonai. “Oh I know Elohim,” said one girl, “I went to summer camp at the Jewish Community Center and they said Elohim instead of God.”

We kept reading the story, and I asked if anyone knew what a cubit was; one boy did (fourth and fifth graders tend to know lots of things of this sort): “It’s from the tip of your finger to your elbow.”

Is this story really true? I asked them. “No!” came a chorus. One boy said that he had read a book that tried to demonstrate that it could really have happened, and explained in some detail, but said he doubted that it could be true. I expressed my skepticism of that theory, too. But even if the story isn’t literally true, it’s still a good story, I argued. They kept wanting to argue about whether the story was literally true or not. I asked them if they thought TV shows were literally true. “No! Of course not!” But you still watch them? “Yes! They’re fun!” So why couldn’t we say the same thing about the story of Noah. It’s pretty weird in places, but it’s a good story. I said that I thought that some of the people who originally wrote the story didn’t think it was literally true, but that it was a powerful story nonetheless. Having seen the Bill Cosby routine helped them move this discussion forward — this Bill Cosby guy had thought the story was good enough to put on TV, and even if he played it for laughs you can tell that Cosby actually has a lot of affection for the story.

The children remained remarkably engaged. The curriculum book provided a shortened version of the Bible story, but I kept reading straight from the Bible. The children were quite willing to listen to bits of the Bible, as long as the bits weren’t too long, and as long as they could talk about them as we read. Some of the children were more engaged than others — the boy who knew about cubits was really interested in the whole story, and kept asking really good questions and making really good comments — but they were all engaged at some level.

We kept going right up until five minutes before the class was scheduled to end. The children had been watching the clock, and asked when they were going to get snack. I had completely forgotten to bring a snack — I never remember to bring a snack — but some of the other teachers on this teaching team are really good at bringing good snacks and the children have come to expect them. Fortunately Christi, my co-teacher, found that the religious education assistant had left us some chocolate-flavored mini-rice cakes. The children were thrilled to eat them even though they were probably a little stale. Never underestimate the power of snacks.

As they were eating snack, I read them the last, and most problematic, bit of the Noah story — Noah’s drunkenness and nakedness. I explained how this may have been a way to explain why the people of Israel were allowed to conquer the land of Canaan, and some of the children understood that — but most of them understood the other things I was trying to get across, that the Bible is a complex and often very strange book, and that it is worth their attention. Perhaps I even piqued their interest a little.

While they were still eating, I did some quick review. “What happened in the story? What did Noah do? What’s a cubit? What’s a covenant?” — all questions on topics we had covered in the course of the lesson. Then the children’s choir director appeared outside our door — the children’s choir rehearses in the room as soon as we get done — so I had to end the lesson. “It was good to see you all!” I said as they left in a mad scramble to find their parents, and it really had been good to see them all.

Middle-class American religion sometimes goes out of its way to provide very comforting interpretations of the Bible. And yes, I include Unitarian Universalists in this sweeping generalization, for reasons I will outline below. However, comforting American middle-class interpretations of the Bible sound forced and it is pretty hard to take them seriously, as Diana Butler Bass suggests in this passage from her 2009 book A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story:

At the height of the Liberation Theology movement in the 1980s, my friend Brad lived in Latin America, where he participated in a base community, a kind of radical Biblical study group in an impoverished village. Lay members rotated leadership, each week reading a text, offering an interpretation drawn from their own experience, and trying to relate scriptural stories to their own lives in order to inspire justice and social change.

One week the story was from Matthew 19, in which Jesus commands the rich young ruler to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor to find eternal life…. Brad, an American evangelical, had grown up in a middle-class family and attended a good college. “It was fascinating to hear my new friends interpret this passage in such a different context,” Brad said. “They were very poor and they understood it very literally. They were comfortable with Jesus’s rejection of wealth.”

Brad admitted that he felt uncomfortable, however, especially when one person turned to him and asked how “our brothers and sisters in America” interpreted the story. Brad explained that Americans do not read the story literally. Rather, evangelicals take the direction spiritually. “Jesus insists that we give up whatever means the most to us in order to follow him, not necessarily our possessions. The story isn’t about money.”

The group fell silent, and Brad was unsure of what he had said. Finally, one of the leaders asked how they could trust that Brad was really a Christian since it was obvious that he did not “take the Bible seriously.”

As for Unitarian Universalists, we are more likely to spend our time arguing about the validity of standard middle-class American Christianity, which means we don’t have to face up to the really challenging implications of Jesus’s social message, implications that might challenge our comfortable middle-class existences. It is more convenient for our generation of Unitarian Universalists to dismiss Christianity with the argument that the Christianity we see around us, or in which we were raised, is puerile and shallow.

Similarly, what Unitarian Universalists think of as Buddhism too often is an American interpretation that reduces Buddhism to little more than a self-improvement program, one which doesn’t seem to me to have much in common with the challenging philosophy of Siddhartha Gotama.

Worried about all those extremists out there trying to blow things up? We already know that TSA is fairly ineffectual. So what can a citizen do? Strengthen your local congregation:

“Externally, voluntary associations, from churches and professional societies to Elks clubs and reading groups, allow individuals to express their interests and demands on government and to protect themselves from abuses of power by their political leaders…. Internally, associations and less formal networks of civic engagement instill in their members habits of cooperation and public-spiritedness…. Prophylactically, community bonds keep individuals from falling prey to extremist groups that target isolated and untethered individuals. Studies of political psychology over the last forty have suggested that ‘people divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism’.” [Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 338.]

OK, so saying that going to church fights terrorism is an exaggeration. But it is not an exaggeration to say that civic disengagement — lack of participation in all kinds of voluntary associations and democratic institutions — is correlated with terrorism. The more we can drag people away from their television and computer screens, and into social institutions, the more secure we will be.

Metrical hymns are out of fashion these days in favor of praise songs and pop-influenced worship music. But rhymed metrical hymns are easy to memorize, and they’re actually a really efficient way to give people of all ages a basic introduction to discrete religious subjects. And every metrical hymn provides a theological interpretation of to its subject matter, so it is doubly useful: you get the basic topic, and an interpretation of that topic.

So I’ve been thinking how post-Christian Unitarian Universalists might use metrical hymns to teach post-Christian topics. I’ve been reading about the birth of Buddha in the Jataka-nidana, and I was captured by the story of the Four Omens. This would make a good metrical hymn: it’s a concise story about two paths open to a baby, one path leading to worldly success and another path leading to a life on contemplation. The baby’s father of course hopes for worldly success, but learns that if the boy ever sees a dead person, an ill person, a mendicant monk, or an old person, then the boy will grow up to be, not a king, but the Buddha. What a thought-provoking story!

Anyway, an early draft of such a hymn appears after the jump.

1. Queen Maya bore a baby boy
In the Lumbini grove
The King rejoiced; the baby lived
With both his parents’ love.

2. They chose Siddhartha Gotama
To be the baby’s name.
Eight Brahmins came to tell the king
The baby’s future fame.

3. “A Universal King he’ll be,
As long as he remains
A householder,” the Brahmins said,
“By household life constrained.”

4. But Kondanya, the youngest, said,
“A Buddha he’ll become,
He will renounce the household life
And be th’Enlightened One.”

5. “And why should he renounce his home?”
“If he should ever see
Old age, ill health, a monk, or death,
A Buddha he must be.”

This is still a work in progress. It needs a last verse to wrap things up — which means I’ll have to drop one or two other verses, given that we never sing more than four verses of any hymn.

So you’ve probably already seen the Youtube video where two cats are playing pattycake, and a couple of guys provide voice-overs (“Patty cake, patty cake… Dude, what was that? You bit me!…” etc.). I mean, it’s already had over 4 million views, and since you’re one of the hip people you were probably one of the first ten thousand who saw it.

What interests me about this video are the opening and closing credits: very briefly, six words appear on the screen: “Exodus First Baptist Sr. High Ministry.” Nothing more. No proselytizing, no heavy-handed message. This is what mainline Protestants historically have done best (and sociologically speaking, Unitarian Universalists look exactly like mainline Protestants): we sponsor cultural production that is not explicitly religious.

You mean you haven’t seen the video yet? Hey, I didn’t see it until today when Carol sent me the link. Dude, you have to see this….

Sociologist Robert Putnam, known for his sociological study Bowling Alone, and co-author Chaeyoon Lim have an article on the effects of religion on life satisfaction in the December issue of American Sociological Review [ASR]. The full article is hidden behind a paywall, but there’s an abstract of the article available on the ASR Web site:

Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction
Chaeyoon Lim and Robert D. Putnam
Abstract: Although the positive association between religiosity and life satisfaction is well documented, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how religion actually shapes life satisfaction. Using a new panel dataset, this study offers strong evidence for social and participatory mechanisms shaping religion’s impact on life satisfaction. Our findings suggest that religious people are more satisfied with their lives because they regularly attend religious services and build social networks in their congregations. The effect of within-congregation friendship is contingent, however, on the presence of a strong religious identity. We find little evidence that other private or subjective aspects of religiosity affect life satisfaction independent of attendance and congregational friendship.

Science News provides a little more detail in an online article today, which you can read here.

The research by Putnam and Lim is an interesting addition to the 2004 research by sociologist Mark Chaves (Congregations in America, Harvard Univ.). Chaves found that although congregations were not very effective at providing social services or engaging in political action, congregations were good at producing “worship events,” religious education, and facilitating artistic activity: “If we ask what congregations do, the answer is that they mainly traffic in ritual, knowledge, and beauty through the cultural activities of worship, education, and the arts….” Now we can add that congregation provide an increased sense of life satisfaction when individuals regularly attend services and build social networks in the congregation.

• Church people know the value of face-to-face contact.
• On average, church people tend to be more courteous, and more interested in others, than the general population.
• Church people like books.
• Church people know that showing up is crucially important.

All of the above are also true of synagogue people.

Ms. M and Oz let us know that they were going to hear slack-key guitarist Patrick Landeza play Hawai’ian Christmas music at the San Leandro Public Library, and would we like to meet them there? I found out that Herb Ohta Jr. would be playing too — Herb Ohta Jr., son of Ohta-san himself and one of the best ‘ukulelists alive! — and told Carol that we had to go.

We arrived in time to eat the Hawai’ian dinner plate (rice, chicken teriyaki, macaroni salad, but no spam). The hall was filling up, and it was a nice crowd — older people, middle-aged people, young parents, kids. Haoles were definitely a minority. By the time Ms. M and Oz showed up, there were some two hundred people in the hall and we could not find seats together.

Carol entered us in the raffle, and before the music started Patrick Landeza raffled off several items. A young girl got a bag for wine bottles. Next to be raffled off was a little bag with a bright floral pattern, obviously perfect for a young girl. Landeza joked that it was a “man purse,” then started laughing when he pulled out the name: “It’s going to a man: Dan Harper!” I went up and claimed my little floral purse. And against all odds, Carol also won something in the raffle: a little Hawai’ian wreath for a Christmas tree ornament.

The music was perfect Christmas music — what could be better than traditional Hawai’ian songs at Christmas time? What could be better than hearing a master like Herb Ohta Jr. play “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” on the ‘ukulele? What could be better than hearing “Silent Night” sung in Hawai’ian, and interpreted by a hula dancer? And to top it all off, I got my man purse signed by Patrick Landeza and Herb Ohta Jr.:

As a religious person, my primary political goal is reducing poverty. With that as my main criterion for judging U.S. political parties, I generally consider both the Democratic party and the Republican party failures. While Democrats are somewhat willing to provide expensive programs to alleviate poverty, these days they seem unwilling to address the basic structural problems within the United States that lead to poverty. While many individual Republicans are very devoted to reducing poverty, not least because many Republicans are devoted Christians for whom reducing poverty is a requirement of their religion, as a whole the party still seems mired in trickle-down economics, which is really a form of Social Darwinism: let the rich thrive, and the poor may eat the leavings from their tables.

Given that both Democrats and Republicans pay at least lip service to the goal of reducing poverty, why have they both been so ineffectual on this issue? Probably because both parties have gotten important things wrong. Ron Sider, in a review of Lew Daly’s new book God’s Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State in the Christian Century magazine, says this about George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative, which has also been embraced by Barack Obama:

Bush was right in rejecting the dominant Reagan-Republican push to abandon governmental responsibility to alleviate poverty. (Liberal critics who said that government abdication of responsibility was the real goal [of Bush’s initiative] were wrong.) Bush was also right to embrace a much wider role for nongovernmental, including religious, organizations in the delivery of government-funded anti-poverty programs. (Liberal critics who charged that is was discriminatory to protect the freedom of religious organizations, especially their freedom to hire staff who share their faith commitments, were wrong.) Tragically, Bush failed to provide enough funding to combat poverty and failed to how an unrestrained market economy threatens families and communities just as much as an all-powerful government does. (Liberal critics were on target here.)

This is an interesting argument, and I’m going to have to read Daly’s book. Perhaps there is a way to make Bush’s and Obama’s faith-based initiative work. However, I remain skeptical of the faith-based initiative for at least four reasons. First, the rapid rise of those who have no affiliation with organized religion seems to augur a decline in the size and vigor of organized religion. Second, sociologist Mark Chaves has shown that most congregations are not good at delivering social services. Third, rapid changes in the nonprofit sector such as the rise of social entrepreneurship are blurring the distinction between the nonprofit and for-profit sectors — think of the rise of microcredit institutions, which were begun to reduce poverty — thus introducing new ways for nonprofit anti-poverty programs to fund themselves. Fourth, while capitalism has done an excellent job of raising standards of living in many places, it looks to me as though capitalism has reached the limit of what it can do to reduce poverty.

Of course, bringing this subject up on a blog devoted to Unitarian Universalism is a little bit quixotic. Unitarian Universalists have a long history of mostly ignoring poverty, except to partially fund the occasional soup kitchen or homeless shelter. And for most Unitarian Universalists, the Democratic party represents an adequate expression of their religious convictions in the political arena. If you choose to comment on this post, please do try to stay away from conventional partisan politics; and though it seems a lot to hope for, I would really value serious reflection on how Unitarian Universalists might address the problem of poverty from within our unique religious perspective.

This evening, Carol and I went out to dinner at our favorite cheap Chinese sushi place. I kind of prefer going to Asian restaurants in December, because there’s a pretty good chance that I won’t see any holiday decorations, nor hear any holiday music. My hopes were fulfilled: no holiday decorations, no Christmas carols for background music. But the woman next to us was talking about making latkes. And then we went out after dinner and heard holiday music coming from the street: “Later on, we’ll conspire / As we dream by the fire / To face unafraid the plans that we’ve made….” It was the Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony in downtown San Mateo. There was a firetruck. There were lots of families with children. There was a countdown, and Santa climbed up the ladder of the fire truck and flipped the switch to turn on the Christmas tree lights. An amateur choir sang “Silent Night,” accompanied by someone strumming a guitar. The kids were singing, but it wasn’t just kids singing because Carol said she saw one middle-aged woman standing by herself and singing along. I guess I might have hummed along a little bit; it was all kind of nice.

Kari Kopnick over at the blog Chalice Spark is concerned about Directors of Religious Education (DREs) who are resigning from Unitarian Universalist congregations due to burn out and poor working conditions, and she offers some very practical tips for retaining DREs — pay for professional expenses, give adequate time off, provide sabbaticals, etc. The sad truth is that most Unitarian Universalist congregations provide inadequate pay and tiny professional expenses budgets for their DREs, they provide punitive rather than supportive supervision, congregations expect more hours of work than they pay for, and they believe that it’s cheaper to hire a new DRE every three or four years than to provide sabbaticals.

Every year, I get a call or two from a DRE who is resigning from her job because of the way her congregation is treating her (I use the feminine pronoun because about 95% of all DREs are women, and yes part of the reason DREs are treated poorly is because the work is seen as women’s work and is therefore devalued). If your congregation’s DRE tenders her resignation this year, you might wish to challenge your minister and lay leaders to take an honest look at working conditions and compensation.

And thank you, Kari, for raising this issue.

P.S. Every time I write a post about how DREs are treated poorly, I get an email message or two from an angry lay leader or minister who thinks I’m talking in public about what’s going on in their congregation. If you think I’m specifically referring to your congregation’s treatment of your DRE, I’m not. However, you may wish to examine your conscience to figure out why you’re feeling guilty about this issue.

Mr. Crankypants is tired of these Christmas lies that we are feeding to children. So it’s time to tell the truth. No, Virginia, there is no —

—wait, what’s that sound? Who’s that over in the corner? What’s— It sounds like the pitter-patter of little feet—

—oh my God! The elves! The elv—

Fourth and final lecture for a class on UU humanism

For me, it is a basic axiom that religion is lived out in human communities. In the culture wars of the past half century, our society has somehow gotten the mistaken notion that religion can be boiled down to irrational beliefs; that is to say, religion has become equated with a certain narrow subset of ontotheology. From my point of view, however, religious practice comes first, and the explanations come along later to try to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing. Praxis antedates theoria; liturgy and practice trump ontotheology. That being said, I think it is worth examining some religious humanist practices in order to better understand the religious side of humanism.

Let’s start with the stereotype of a religious humanist community. According to the stereotype, religious humanism is a religion of the head, not the heart and body. Therefore, religious humanist communities spend their time in endless debate about intellectual matters. Because intellect is highly valued, and because intellect is somehow equated with the possession of college and graduate degrees, status in this stereotypical community is determined in part by an individual’s level of academic attainment: post-docs rank far higher than bachelor’s degrees, and if you only have a high school diploma you’ll be expected to keep your mouth shut. Furthermore, the sciences outrank the humanities by at least two degrees, so that a bachelor’s degree in science trumps a doctoral degree in English literature. This stereotypical religious humanist community vigorously roots out anything that looks, sounds, or smells like more traditional Western religions, so there are no sermons (though there may be lectures and talks), no candles nor much in the way of visual interest, no hymns or psalms (though songs might be allowed), and no reading from scriptures.

Now obviously I have drawn a caricature of religious humanism here. I didn’t just make this up; there are people who believe that this is what religious humanists are actually like. But let’s contrast this with a real-life religious humanist community, to show how far wrong this stereotype can be. The real-life community that I’d like to compare this to is the Charles Street Meeting House under the leadership of Kenneth Patton. Patton was both a humanist and something of a liturgical genius, and he thought long and hard about what a truly humanist religious community might look like. He believed that human beings like to have rituals and symbols, and so he created rituals and symbols that were aesthetically pleasing and true to religious humanism.

Thus he lit a flame at the beginning of each Sunday service — the flame came out of a vessel that resembled an ancient Greek lamp, and he thought of this lamp as a lamp of human wisdom.* He had the congregation sit in a sort of theatre-in-the-round setting, so that people in this human community faced each other. He incorporated readings from the great religious writings of many different world religions — thus he was not a humanist who rejected other religions, he embraced all religions as aesthetically pleasing human productions, each worthy of being appreciated by any human being. A poet of some skill, he wrote many hymn texts; believing that ancient Chinese pomes offered great inspiration to today’s humanists, he cast translations of Chinese poems into metrical English verse — and then in a moment of real inspiration, he matched these humanist texts, not with the standard European hymn tunes we all know and are bored by, but with vigorous American hymn tunes from the Southern shape note tradition.

In the Charles Street Meeting House, religious humanism was driven by Patton’s artistic creativity. It was aesthetically pleasing, it pleased body, mind, and spirit (whatever we might mean by “spirit”). It was not dry and lifeless, but alive, and curious, and willing to explore not just science but the arts as well; for after all, if we’re going to call something “humanism,” shouldn’t it incorporate everything that makes us human?

So that’s one vision of religious humanism. With my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, I like to call this “high church humanism” — rather than the austere and plain Puritanism that we stereotypically associate with humanism, high-church humanism embraces sensual beauty. In my view, any movement that is going to call itself “humanism” must embrace the whole of being human — intellect and sensual beauty, science and the arts, head and heart and body too. Humanists will not just sit around and talk, they will also dance and make music and read poetry and eat fabulously delicious food. I will even go so far to say that humanism must embrace the non-rational part of being human, for that is as much a part of being human as rational thought.

Another vision of religious humanism might focus more on how religious humanist communities make decisions, how they govern themselves. Most religious humanists pay at least lip service to democracy. But democracy can take on many different forms. Which form of democracy makes sense for religious humanist communities?

Probably the most common ideal for democracy I’ve seen in religious humanist communities is explicit or de facto consensus decision-making. It is not clear to me why this is so. Consensus has proven itself to be an extremely inefficient method of making decisions. Furthermore, consensus is preferred by upper middle class and educated white people who are articulate and self-empowered enough that they can dominate the consensus process; or to put it another way, most consensus processes that I have seen firsthand are full of class and racial bias. Thus, in actual practice consensus would seem to conflict with the ideal of humanism that holds every individual human being is of significant worth.

In choosing a democratic governance process, it seems to me that religious humanists should be empiricists — they should examine what works best. Curiously, this is exactly what the Christian evangelicals did about forty years ago. They realized that books like Peter Drucker’s Managing the Nonprofit Organization, found lots of solid information on how to run an incredibly successful and growing nonprofit based on empirical observation, and the ones who applied this information to their churches found their churches grew like crazy.

In the past forty years, we have continued to learn a great deal about all aspects of nonprofit governance — such as scalability, and improved financial structures, and social entrepreneurship, and marketing, and on and on. Yet it appears to me that religious humanists have, by and large, ignored this wealth of practical, empirically-based information. Thus I cannot point to any religious humanist organization that I feel embodies the ideal of democracy, and valuing human beings, and empiricism — usually you get the first two, but not the last one.

I firmly believe that major problem with religious humanism today is not what most humanists think it is — the problem is not one of convincing people of the theories behind humanism. In fact, I’d be willing to bet there is a huge number of people in this country alone who are basically religious humanists right now, except that they won’t call themselves by that name. I firmly believe that the real problem facing religious humanism today is that most self-professed humanists can’t organize their way out of a wet paper bag. Religious humanists appear to know little about effective marketing (especially marketing to people under the age of 50), nothing about social entrepreneurship, nothing about scalability, little about effective nonprofit governance, and nothing about how to raise lots of money. In short, religious humanists seem to know next to nothing when it comes to the basic knowledge on how to grow larger and more effective human institutions.

I issue this as a challenge to those of you humanists who are taking this class. I believe that if religious humanists are willing to be flexible and creative, if religious humanists were willing to be institution-builders, we could double the number of self-professed religious humanists within five years. Of course, I could say the same thing to almost any religious liberal — to liberal Christians, liberal Muslims, liberal Jews, and so on — though I could not say this to the Neopagans, who are the one liberal religious group that has grown significantly in the past half century. So my challenge is simple: religious humanists, go out and learn effective organizational strategies, apply them, and see if you can double the number of self-professed religious humanists within your area in the next five years.

———

* Some people believe Patton’s lighting of this flame evolved into the current Unitarian Universalist liturgical tradition of lighting a flaming chalice.

Link to first lecture.

This lecture is copyright (c) 2010 Daniel Harper. This lecture may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes only, provided this copyright notice accompanies all copies.

Against all my better judgment, I’m presenting the following hymn, a metrical rendering of 2 Maccabees 10.1-7 in the KJV — just in time for sunset of the first night of Hanukkah. You can sing it to any Common Meter tune, although it goes well with Consolation (no. 53 in Singing the Living Tradition).

I tried to keep my interpretation of the KJV text to a minimum. So before you ask, yes, the original text mentions boughs, branches, and palms, and the fact that they remembered their last feast which they spent hiding out in the mountains. It’s easy to forget how weird some of these Bible stories are. I did add the references to freedom and to tyranny, though I feel they are implicit in the story; ditto the reference to the curséd idols.

1. When Maccabeus and his band
Did free Jerusalem,
When they did cast the tyrant out,
‘Twas God who guided them.

1. Good Maccabeus and his band:
They freed Jerusalem.
They cast the wicked tyrant out,
For God was guiding them.

2. The altars which the heathen built
Out in the public square,
They pulled them down, and then destroyed
The curséd idols there.

3. They cleansed the temple, kindled flame,
Gave thanks they now were free.
They then besought God keep them safe
From barb’rous tyranny.

4. They celebrated eight glad days,
Rememb’ring their last feast,
Which they had held in mountain dens
Where they had lived like beasts.

5. Therefore they bore fair branches forth,
Green boughs, and also palms.
They praised the strength that set them free:
To God they raised their psalms.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108055057/http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/MIDI/King_Shall_Come_196.mid

The story of Hanukkah comes from the Talmud and the Mishnah, although there are references to a very similar story in the Apocrypha. 2 Maccabees mentions a Hanukkah-like festival in a passage beginning:

Therefore whereas we are now purposed to keep the purification of the temple upon the five and twentieth day of the month Casleu [Kislev], we thought it necessary to certify you thereof, that ye also might keep it, as the feast of the tabernacles, and of the fire, which was given us when Neemias offered sacrifice, after that he had builded the temple and the altar. [2 Maccabees 1.18, KJV]

There’s another, more interesting, description of a Hanukkah-like purification of the Temple at 2 Maccabees 10.1-8. I love this story; besides which, the successful fight against the tyrant who prevented the Jews from practicing their own religion has a certain poignancy today when it is dangerous for Christians to practice their religion in some parts of the world, dangerous for Muslims to practice their religion in many Western countries, and still dangerous for Jews to be Jews in many places in the world.

I’d love to have the talent to take the gorgeous prose of the King James Version of 2 Maccabees 10, and turn it into a metrical rhyming version of this story. I’ve been working on this, and have several partial verses, like “When Maccabeus and his band / De dum de dum de dum / De dum invader’s heavy hand…”; and “…public square, / De dum de dum, and then destroyed / The cursed idols there.” I’ve also got one whole verse:

They cleansed the temple, kindled fire,
    Gave thanks that they were free;
And asked the Lord to keep them safe
    From barbarous tyranny.

Or maybe it should be “blasphemous tyranny” — the passage at hand offers both possibilities.

Of course, if I ever did manage to write such a hymn, it would be unusable in any Unitarian Universalist congregation:— the term “Lord” (which is the way the translators indicate “Adonai,” as opposed to “God” for “Elohim”) would not be acceptable; it would be a hymn by a non-theistic Unitarian Universalist interpreting an apocryphal Christian text which we ordinarily ignore and which doesn’t really tell a Jewish story which means it’s probably cultural misappropriation; and it would be filtered through my liberation theology but Unitarian Universalists don’t really like songs and hymns that talk about freedom unless they’re African American songs or unless we’re talking about freedom to think what you want as opposed to literal freedom from bondage and oppression.

This is my main failing as a hymnodist. It’s bad enough that I can’t write good rhymed metrical verse, but it’s much worse that the hymns I want to write are hymns no one would ever want to sing.

Our Web hosting service had a server go down, and of course all our Web sites were on that server. It took most of Monday and part of today to install a new server, transfer the data over, have it go down, and bring it back up again. This is the worst failure we’ve had with this Web hosting service. It’s not a problem for me, but Carol’s businesses depend on her Web sites, so she is thinking about migrating us to a new Web hosting service. We’ll see what happens.

Thank you to those of you who sent me email letting me know that you couldn’t access this site — I do appreciate it!

‘Tis the season to hate Christmas, and your pal Mr. Crankypants is right out there in front of the crowd of Christmas-haters. The two different stories you can read in Matthew and Luke are just fine (though it does irk Mr. C. that Christmas-lovers continually get their angels mixed up with their magi, and their basic Christmas holiday mixed up with their Epiphany holiday). The consumerist Christmas, on the other hand, has no redeeming value, unless you’re a retailer with a heart of black ink.

Into the Christmas consumerist fray steps a brave economist, Professor Joel Waldfogel of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In his book Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Give Presents for the Holidays, Waldfogel “looks at decades of retail spending data to make the case that buying gifts destroys wealth and happiness — and in many cases it would be better to not buy presents for the holidays at all. So put down that credit card and think before you use money you don’t have to buy things that recipients don’t really want.”

Now, repeat after Mr. Crankypants: “Bah! humbug! Christmas humbug!”

Thanks to Carol for the tip!

Back in October, the Wall Street Journal reviewed Sam Harris’s new book under the title “What the Unitarians know (and Sam Harris doesn’t).” It’s well-written, as you’d expect of something in the Wall Street Journal, and gets at many of the blind spots of the New Atheists and those who think religion, morality, and ethics can be based on science. You might not agree with it, you may not like the mildly dismissive reference to the “Unitarians,” but definitely worth reading.

Thanks to Dick D. for pointing this out to me!

Carol came to the church last night at about quarter to ten to pick me up. We got in the car, and we both suddenly realized the headlights weren’t on. “I was sure I put them on,” muttered Carol, and sure enough, she had put them on — but both bulbs were burned out. She backed up, back to the bright outdoor lights near my office. I rustled around in the glove compartment, hoping against hope that I had a spare bulb for at least one headlight, but there wasn’t one. I fiddled around under the hood of the car, wishing I had replaced that one headlight as soon as it had burned out a week or so ago. But there was nothing to be done now; we were stuck.

“Let’s drive back anyway,” said Carol, but I wasn’t brave either to drive on brightly-lit roads with no lights, or to leave my high beams on all the time. We found the train schedule on the Web, and had just enough time to walk over to the station and catch the last train home that night.

The train was packed, but we managed to find two seats together. “Was there a game or something?” Carol said. “I heard someone say it was the Sharks game,” I said. Two guys wearing hats with Sharks logos walked into the car and stopped to say hi to some other guys. They jammed themselves into some seats and all opened beers. In Boston, if you’re on a train after a hockey game and a bunch of guys open up some beers, you’d expect things to get loud and you might even worry about fights breaking out; but this being California, all the guys did was stand around and talk quietly and happily to each other about the game.

A thin, young-looking man walked into the car. He was wearing an elaborate headdress made out of balloons. He stopped just inside the door, next to a seat with two children and their parents, and started making a little tiger out of balloons. He talked to a couple of guys standing at the end of the car, talked to people walking by, talked to the children, all the while pumping up balloons and rapidly twisting them and shaping them into a tiger and a turtle. One of the parents gave him some money. He gave each kid a high five, and walked on.

Two young women sitting across the aisle from us stopped him to talk. “I’ll make you a tiger bracelet for three dollars,” he said. One young woman said she guessed she wanted one. “Two for five dollars,” he said, and the second young woman said she guessed she’d take a turtle bracelet. “Put them in the freezer and they’ll last two or three months,” he said. By the time he was done with theirs, someone else wanted a big turtle for his daughter. The man asked him if he did events. “Call my agent,” he said, “that’s my mom. My mom does all my bookings.” How long had he been making things out of balloons? “Since I was six,” he said, “for five years now…” — a pause while he waited for the laughter, then he smiled, all the while twisting balloons together.

At last he left and went on to the next car, and somehow he left some of his cheerfulness behind. Carol said, “He’s good.” I agreed. Carol said, “This was the right train to take.” I felt the same way, and was just as glad that the headlights had burned out so we had had to take the train.

Epilogue: We found an auto parts store open today, got two new bulbs, and everything is back in order now.

I remembered reading somewhere that the Pilgrims liked the tune to “Old Hundredth” because it was lively — not the modernized, plain vanilla, 4/4 version found in most hymnals these days, but the original version that trips up modern singers on the last line because of the change in rhythm. I convinced Amy that we should sing the original version in the intergenerational Thanksgiving service this past Sunday — sure enough, at the 9:30 service all of us (including me!) got tripped up on the rhythm of the last line. At the 11:00 service, I was smart enough to warn people to watch out for that last line, and we sang it without a hitch.

Later I realized I should have created a half-sheet insert of the sheet music for the order of service. Even though fewer and fewer people read music these days, there are still enough music readers that they could have helped keep everyone else on track. (Plus when you provide an insert, it can serve as a teaching and outreach tool — music readers might take it home and learn one of the harmony parts to the music.) Since someone else might actually use such an insert, below is a link to a PDF. The text is a common humanist version of words by Isaac Watts: “From all that dwell below the skies, / Let songs of hope and faith arise, / Let peace, good will on earth be sung, / Through every land by every tongue.”

Old Hundredth (original form).

The Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois, sings their doxology to Old Hundredth every week — but they use different versions of the tune, including the original version above, and a version by Susan Conant with more modern harmonies and even more interesting rhythms. If you’re going to sing the same thing every week, you might as well make it interesting! In that spirit, here’s yet another version of Old Hundredth — William Walker’s arrangement of Old Hundredth from The Southern Harmony (1835), laid out in classic shape-note fashion on a half-sheet size suitable for an insert into an order of service:

Old Hundredth arr. by William Walker.

Q: How do you make a turkey float?
A: One turkey, two scoops of ice cream, and root beer.

Q: Why did the turkey cross the road?
A: It was the chicken’s day off.

Q: Why did the Unitarian Universalist turkey cross the road?
A: To support the other turkey on its spiritual path.

Q: How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to stuff a turkey?
A: One, but you have to push really hard to get him into the turkey.

I was supposed to have Thanksgiving with my Unitarian Universalist relatives, but I couldn’t take it. I left early. I didn’t mind having to join the Committee for the Implementation of Roasted Foodstuffs. I didn’t mind deciding not to have turkey so we could protest the poor working conditions of poultry workers. But after five hours of sitting in a circle trying to reach consensus on how to make stuffing for the turkey we weren’t going to have, I gave up and went to MacDonalds.

Told you they were stupid jokes.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about possible reasons behind congregational decline, or at least the reasons behind congregations surviving but not thriving. Peter Stienke, a respected expert in congregational dynamics, has an article in the latest issue of Christian Century magazine titled “Buckle Up: Congregation Change Isn’t Easy.” In this article, Steinke defines what he calls “mission drift:”

…Some members say their congregation has a sense of mission because they have a mission statement. Sad to say, few know what it is.

Limping along without a focus is called mission drift. It is what happens when people have forgotten what their objective is and are just going through the motions. To judge from my experience, congregations in mission drift will at some point:

• engage in conflict,
• suffer a malaise of spirit
• decline in some statistical manner
• adapt to their most immature members
• fail to mobilize people’s gifts and energy
• surrender to apathy or complacency
• do little planning
• become turned in on themselves
• blame outside forces (or perhaps one another) for their depression, and/or
• be unable to make effective appropriate changes.

Interestingly, I’d say that this list of symptoms also applies to congregations that are in a stalled transition from a pastoral-size congregation (average attendance of up to 150) to a program-size congregation (average attendance of over 200). This suggests that there might be some correlation between mission drift and a stalled size transition. I say “correlation” because I’m not willing to assign a causal connection between the two. While it seems possible that mission drift could stall a size transition, wouldn’t there be some kind mission in place to prompt growth before the stall happened? And it’s hard to imagine how that a size transition somehow magically makes a congregational mission disappear. Perhaps there’s an underlying cause, e.g., perhaps when a congregation gets up past an average attendance of 150, the old informal communications network breaks down — where everyone just knows what they need to know — and there is as yet no formal communications network in place to effectively pass on the mission statement to newcomers, and to repeatedly remind old-timers.

Today, I went on the Powell’s Books Web site and ordered Mark Twain’s Autobiography, published on November 15, 100 years after Twain’s death. Coincidentally, today Dick D. from the Palo Alto church sent me this passage which he found in Twain’s Autobiography:

The multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould — that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died — have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are worthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have always been so proud of — not to say vain of — is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy; that we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples struggling for life and liberty; that when we are not coldly indifferent to such things we sneer at them, and that the sneer is about the only expression the newspapers and the nation deal in with regard to such things.

As Dick said, plus ça change….

In an article in Christianity Today titled “The Leavers,” author Drew Dyck informs the fairly conservative Christian readers of that periodical that young Christians are leaving religion behind:

At the May 2009 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, top political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell presented research from their book American Grace, released last month. They reported that “young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of five to six times the historic rate (30 to 40 percent have no religion today, versus 5 to 10 percent a generation ago).”

There has been a corresponding drop in church involvement. According to Rainer Research, approximately 70 percent of American youth drop out of church between the age of 18 and 22. The Barna Group estimates that 80 percent of those reared in the church will be “disengaged” by the time they are 29….

This is not a new trend for us Unitarian Universalists — at a rough estimate, only 15% of the people raised as Unitarian Universalists stay with it as adults. Welcome to the club, conservative Christians! (Oh, and by the way, could you please send the folks who leave your churches our way? — some of our best Unitarian Universalists are people who were born into conservative Christian churches, and left as young adults.)

Fourth and last in a series | First post in the series

There are two common threads running through the first three post in this series on growth. While I never stated the first of these threads explicitly, attentive readers will have noticed that whether you want your congregation to stay the same size gracefully, or decline gracefully, or perhaps even grow gracefully, I believe you must (1) know what your congregation stands for, and (2) provide steady and consistent management for your congregation.

While some Unitarian Universalist congregations have a clear sense of what their congregation stands for, in my experience the vast majority of Unitarian Universalist congregations do not provide steady and consistent management over a period of years and decades. This is half of the reason why most congregational surveys are a waste of time — you go through all the work of doing a survey, and within months lay leaders have gone on to other things. This is also why it’s often a waste of time to bring in an outside consultant — you spend all that money on an outside consultant, and a year later the consultant’s recommendations have been essentially forgotten. More than once, I have found myself in a situation where, as a staff person, I’m still trying to implement the recommendations that came out of a survey or a consultant’s visit a year before, only to find myself taken to task by lay leaders and other staff people who want to move on to something new. “That old consultant was a waste of time,” they’ll tell me, “and his recommendations didn’t work. We need to do something new.” That old consultant’s recommendations didn’t work because no one actually did the long-term work to implement them.

This reality — for it is a reality in most Unitarian Universalist congregations — has to be faced before long-term, consistent, and graceful growth can take place. So why are Unitarian Universalist congregations unable to provide steady and consistent management for graceful growth (or for graceful decline, or graceful steady-state, if that’s the way you need to go)? I can think of several reasons:

1. Poor or non-existent leadership development strategies, so that frequently someone brand-new to the congregation is thrown into a leadership position with no orientation to the long-term goals and strategies of the congregation.
2. Lack of clearly articulated, well-defined goals and objectives based on a firm sense of what the congregation stands for. (To state the obvious, this of course hampers leadership development.)
3. Unitarian Universalist congregations are often filled with bright, creative upper-middle class people who are accustomed to being the boss in the rest of their lives; these people find it difficult to be good followers and serve under someone else’s steady and consistent management.
4. Unitarian Universalist congregations are often filled people who are extremely accomplished in their own professions, and they try to bring management strategies from their own field. All at the same time, you’ll have some lay leaders trying to apply management strategies from small businesses, some trying to apply management strategies from large corporations, some trying to apply management strategies from the public sector, and some trying to apply management strategies from the world of large nonprofits. (I have yet to run in to lay leaders who work in tiny nonprofits, probably because if you work in a tiny nonprofit you don’t have any spare time to devote to volunteer work.)
5. Very few lay leaders, and all too many ministers, don’t read the literature on church growth — they don’t seek out information on what has actually worked in growing churches elsewhere.

Given all this, it really isn’t surprising that most Unitarian Universalist congregations don’t provide steady and consistent management over a period of a decade or more!

Case study: Steady and consistent management

What would steady and consistent management look like? I watched as my home church, First Parish of Concord, Massachusetts, experienced steady growth (as measured by average worship attendance) over a period of two and a half decades, from 1970 to 1995. In 1970, average attendance was under a hundred; by the end of that period, average attendance was somewhere around 800.

In 1970, the congregation called a new minister, Dana Greeley. Greeley, who had just finished a term as denominational president during a very contentious eight-year period, and who had prior to that spent more than two decades running a large and influential congregation in Boston, had the skills and experience to provide steady and consistent (some would say autocratic) management. More specifically, he knew how to manage congregations; not businesses or nonprofits, but congregations. As a lifelong Unitarian and a skilled preacher, Greeley was also able to clearly articulate what the congregation stood for.

Greeley faced regular opposition from lay leaders who had their own, new, ideas of what should be done; or who wanted to import management techniques from business; or people who were bright and intelligent and who just wanted to try something different. Since Greeley had gotten both his undergraduate and graduate degree at Harvard, and since he had great force of personality on his own, he was willing and able to brush off such challenges. He was also charismatic enough to prompt an even larger number of lay people to follow his leadership, and submit to his management. Equally important, Greeley shaped the organizational structures of the congregation to provide a more centralized, streamlined, and efficient power structure.

When Greeley retired in 1986, following a two-year interim period the congregation brought on a relatively unknown minister named Gary Smith. Smith had as much force of will and charisma, albeit of a quite different type, as did Greeley. Some dissident factions perceived him as too strong a boss, but he provided steady, consistent, and graceful management in spite of such opposition. He was also had the charisma and talent to attract lots of talented lay leaders who felt privileged to follow his leadership (although I only filled minor volunteer roles in the church, I can attest to the fact that it was very satisfying to serve under his leadership). While Greeley’s vision of the congregation was fairly broad — he simply wanted a strong Unitarian Universalist congregation — Smith focused carefully on attracting unchurched people, especially Baby Boomers, and especially families with children.

Under Smith’s leadership, the congregation has continued to grow, to the point where it is now one of the top ten largest Unitarian Universalist congregations. This growth has happened for the most part steadily and gracefully, and with the recent completion of a major building project, there’s now no reason why the growth can’t continue for another decade.

It’s all about good habits

What’s clear in this case study is the role of a long-term and powerful minister as the key ingredient in growth at First Parish of Concord. A minister of this type can both clearly articulate what the congregation stands for, and can provide the steady and consistent management that is necessary for steady and graceful growth. (While I’m focusing on growth here, it should be obvious that steady and consistent management of exactly the same type, which involves the self-discipline to make hard choices, is also the way to achieve a graceful steady state of no growth — or, for that matter, graceful decline, if that’s what’s needed.)

A long-term and powerful minister is not essential to steady growth, although this is certainly the most obvious way to grow. An empowered and skilled cadre of long-term lay leaders, who remain clear about their goals and remain consistent with their management approach, can also lead a congregation to grow steadily over the long term.

Whether it is provided by strong lay leaders or a strong minister, steady and consistent management is a set of habits that must be acquired. If your congregation has a large percentage of people in the managerial class, you have to get in the habit of educating new lay leaders in the basics of congregational management, and how it differs from for-profit and public sector management, and management in large non-profits. No matter who your congregants are, you have to get in the habit of thoroughly educating new lay leaders about current management strategies. Above all, you have to get in the habit of thoroughly finishing and evaluating existing tasks, not abandoning them because someone has a new idea or something new and attractive comes along.

And then there’s the most important habit that must be acquired by the whole congregation — you have to stop undermining and tearing down and second-guessing leaders. Most Unitarian Universalist congregations are filled with people who are bright and creative and who probably could do a better job of it than existing leaders. But — and this is the key point — it’s more important to stick to one good idea over the long haul, than drop the old, merely good idea for a new idea that happens to be brilliant. What hamstrings more Unitarian Universalist congregations than anything else is our tendency to flit from one brilliant idea to another, year after year, never getting anywhere because no brilliant idea lasts more than a year. We have to learn to let our congregational leaders lead (even if that congregational leader happens to be a minister or layperson whom you think is not as bright as you are); we have to learn to be good followers.

Brilliant new ideas do not grow congregations. Steady, consistent management — dogged perseverance year after year — serious self discipline that allows you to not adopt all the brilliant new ideas that come along — constant repetition of what you stand for — steady focus on unvarying ten- and twenty year goals — these are the habits that grow a congregation.

It’s all about the habits you adopt.

End of the series.

Third in a series | First post in the series

In two earlier posts, I talked about compelling reasons for a congregation to grow, and I talked about strategies to not grow and remain about the same size. But what if you’re convinced that your congregation has no real possibility for growth? What do you do then? (And even if you’re all for growth, please read this post anyway — because by the end of the post, you’ll have even more reasons to grow.)

I can think of three types of congregations that are truly in decline: (1) The congregation is in a place that has seen declining population for some years, and all forecasts point to continued decline. (2) The congregation shares its service area with another Unitarian Universalist congregation that is growing, but the surrounding population is stable so the congregation faces ongoing loss of market share. (3) The majority of people in the congregation don’t want to change the way they do things in order to respond to changes in society around them. (You will notice that the second type of congregation could be considered a subset of the third type of congregation.) Of these three types of congregation, the third type is the most common, followed by the first type.

How do you determine if your congregation is truly in decline? It can be difficult to determine if your congregation is truly in decline, so it pays to study the matter carefully. Here are some ways to determine whether decline is actually taking place:

• The first thing to do is to study census data for your congregation’s service area, and see if population is declining in the area around you.
• The second thing to do is to look at ten year trends for the following: (a) year-round Sunday morning attendance; (b) pledge income adjusted for inflation; (c) number of non-zero pledge units; (d) dollar amount of deferred maintenance adjusted for inflation. The last item is very difficult to determine, but I include it because declining congregations usually hide financial decline by funding current operating expenses through underfunding maintenance. (Because criteria for membership often varies widely within one congregation from year to year, I do not believe that looking at membership provides any real insight into the numerical strength of a congregation — better to look at total number of non-zero pledge units.)
• The third thing to do is determine if your congregation might be in the middle of a stalled size transition. If your average annual year-round worship attendance, including adults and children, has been between 150 and 200, you are probably in a pastoral–to-program-size transition; if your attendance has been between 40 and 60, you are probably in a family-to-pastoral-size transition. If you have been there for more than five years, you are probably in a stalled transition. If you are in a stalled transition, you may find numbers that indicate slow but steady decline for as long as twenty years. However, a stalled transition cannot be said to be true decline until your average attendance drops below about 150, or below about 40 (depending on the transition). One of the characteristics of stalled transitions is a pattern of increase and decline that stays within either 150 to 200, or 40 to 60 average attendance. A stalled transition requires a very different strategy than true decline, so make sure which one you’ve got.

Planning for decline

If you have gone through the three steps above, and are quite sure that your congregation is in decline, you can now begin planning for graceful decline. You now have enough data to determine the rate of decline, and you can probably make a fairly good prediction of where you will be in five years. Then you can estimate pledge income for the next five years, and plan where you will cut your budget. (Note that if your congregation is in a stalled transition, but you plan for decline, your plans for decline could drive the congregation out of a stalled transition into a decline — so do your homework carefully to see if you’re truly in decline or not.)

Since staff salaries usually take up about 60% of a congregation’s operating budget, if you are going to cut expenses to meet declining revenues you will obviously have to figure out which staff positions to cut. Most church growth experts believe that a minister is the most important staff member; second most important is probably custodial staff and bookkeeper. There is debate about the third most important staff member, with some experts advocating for a music director and others advocating for a religious educator; if your demographic researched showed more families with children in your area then you’d probably lay off the music director before the religious educator. Based on these priorities, you can begin planning which staff positions to cut.

Since the next greatest expense for most congregations is building maintenance or rent, you will also have to figure out how to cut this expense. If you own your own building, deferring maintenance is a terrible way to try to cut expenses in a declining congregation:– when you defer maintenance, the cost of eventually fixing a maintenance problem generally increases in cost much faster than inflation, so deferring maintenance means passing higher costs on to a future when you anticipate lower revenues. Therefore, a plan for graceful decline must anticipate at what point the congregation will either have to sell the building, or lease significant portions of it to someone else. If the congregation decides to lease, you absolutely must be honest about the costs of leasing — too many congregations get less rent from the lessor than it costs in administrative time, maintenance costs, and custodial time. (Note that if you’re in a stalled transition and you start leasing your building, because leasing can lower the capacity of your building for your own purposes this can actually drive you out of the stalled transition and into decline.) All declining congregations should make long-term plans for selling the building — it can be incredibly difficult to sell a church building, so best to start planning now.

Having considered all the above, the key ingredient in a graceful decline is careful and consistent management over a period of many years. However, decline can be depressing, and it can be extremely difficult to stick with long-term consistent management that allows for graceful decline. You simply have to get in the habit of steady and consistent management, and never give that habit up.

Why you should know all this if you want your congregation to grow

If you have read this far, you should realize by now that it is more difficult for a congregation to decline gracefully than it is for a congregation to grow. If the only reason your congregation is in decline is because the majority of people in the congregation don’t want to change the way they do things in order to respond to changes in society around them, it will be easier to change to majority of the people than it will be to manage a graceful decline. On the other hand, probably the most difficult task is gracefully maintaining a steady size — that requires an amazing amount of will power.

Congregational growth is difficult and tiring, but it’s a heck of a lot easier than congregational decline — and far, far easier than gracefully maintaining a steady size.

Next, and last post in the series: The habits of graceful growth (and decline)

Third lecture in a class on humanism.

I have said that one problem with religious humanism is that there hasn’t been any systematic account of what it means to be a religious humanist. I should state that more precisely: I want to see a systematic account of religious humanism in a style that is popular enough to capture the attention of a wide audience, while scholarly enough to satisfy scholars. 19th century Unitarianism had William Ellery Channing, a good writer who managed to capture a wide audience; Unitarians can also claim Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose prose and poetry continue to shape Unitarian Universalism today. Now maybe it’s a little bit much to ask for another Emerson, but at least humanism could wish for the equivalent of Hosea Ballou, the early 19th century Universalism whose Treatise on Atonement commanded a wide popular audience in its day.

To take a more recent example, the rapid growth of Neopaganism in the last twenty years has been propelled by popular writers like Margot Adler and Starhawk. Now maybe you haven’t heard of Margot Adler and Starhawk, but hundreds of thousands of people have heard of them, and have read their books, and have become Neopagans as a result. Let me put this another way: I see teenagers reading Starhawk, and I see teenagers reading Emerson, but I don’t see teenagers reading anyone who espouses religious humanism.

But it won’t be enough to have a writer who’s popular. Starhawk has convinced a lot of people to become Neopagans because she has offered a comprehensive and systematic account of what it means to be a Neopagan. She has written about how Neopagans can raise their children, how Neopagans can try to make the world a better place, she has outlined a Neopagan ethics, she has shown how Neopagans can create viable and nurturing religious communities. In a sense, Starhawk is even better than Emerson, who may have given us a lot of inspiration for our individual spiritual lives but who didn’t write much about how to create viable and nurturing religious communities. Starhawk is also enough of a thinker that she can be taken seriously by scholars and intellectuals. The general point here is that we need a writer who is popular, and who can be taken seriously intellectually, and who shows people how to live life as a religious humanist.

The closest that I’ve seen humanism come to this ideal has been Bill Murry’s book A Faith for All Season. Although that book is ostensibly about Unitarian Universalism, it is really about humanist Unitarian Universalism. Bill is both intellectually respectable, and covers how one actually might live out one’s humanist faith. It’s not quite the kind of book a teenager would pick up and peruse with pleasure, but it’s written in a fairly popular style. A Faith for All Season comes closest to the kind of systematic account of humanisms that I want to see — unfortunately, as I said it’s not really about humanism.

Let’s do an imaginative exercise, and think together about what might go into a good systematic account of humanism. I’m not going to write such a book, and maybe none of you will either, but I think it’s worth imagining what we might want to have in such a book.

The first thing I’d want in a systematic account of religious humanism would be a compelling history of humanism. I’d want to see a narrative account of where humanism came from, and who its major figures are — who are its heroes and heroines. (Parenthetically, Starhawk did precisely this for Neopaganism when she claimed to trace Neopaganism back to medieval European witches who were essentially exterminated in what she and others call “The Great Burning,” a period in European history when most of the witches were burned.) So, for example, one possibility is to trace humanism back to Renaissance Europe and the rise of reason and rationality; to claim figures like Erasmus, David Hume, Mark Twain, and other religious skeptics; to move forward to institution builders like john Dietrich and maybe even Bill Murry; and to include recent thinkers like Sharon Welch and Anthony Pinn, thinkers who are not well known but whom every religious humanist should know something about. Along the way, such a history of humanism could mention self-professed humanists who are a little better known like Emma Goldman and Kurt Vonnegut.

There is one historical account of one branch of humanism that could serve as a model for such a history. Back in 2001, humanist theologian Anthony Pinn published the book By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism [New York University Press]. In this anthology, Pinn includes writings by some famous and not-so-famous African Americans whom he claims were humanists. So there’s a letter by Frederick Douglass, there’s a section on African American folk expression including blues songs, there are of course selections by Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. DuBois, Amiri Imamu Baraka, and Alice Walker. I remember the first time I read that book, I was very excited to think that Frederick Douglass came to a humanist position late in his life! While I don’t consider myself a humanist, knowing that Frederick Douglass was a humanist, and that W. E. B. DuBois was a humanist would certainly make me feel very much closer to humanism. So that’s one step towards a systematic account of humanism.

A second step towards a systematic account of religious humanism must be a compelling account of what a religious humanist community looks like. I’d define the difference between religion and spirituality this way: spirituality is what you do by yourself, and religion is what you do with other people. In a Christian context, solo prayer is spiritual; going to church is religious. Thus, we need a compelling account of the social side of humanism. When you are part of a humanist group, what does that mean? What are the religious practices of humanist groups?

Another way to frame this issues is like this:– So much of humanism revolves around criticizing other religious traditions, particularly saying how stupid Christian practices are. But I don’t want to know why not to follow other religions — I can figure that out on my own — I want to know why I should be a part of a religious humanist community. What do religious humanists do when they’re together? What organizational principles do they use? How is the way they organize their communities rooted in their philosophical and theological notions? I want to know what a community of religious humanists looks like.

A third step towards a systematic account of religious humanism must be a serious ethics. One of the most important religious questions is, “What ought I do?” and one of the most important tasks of a religious community is to give communal ethical guidance to individuals. Sharon Welch, whom we will discuss later in this class, is one example of what a humanist ethics might look like. I especially like that she links aesthetics and ethics. I once saw her give a lecture on ethics, and she was accompanied by a jazz musician — this was surprising, creative, and compelling. She does not write in a popular style, which is unfortunate for religious humanism, but she has some interesting things to say about ethics.

Ideally, though, what I’d like to see is not a stand-alone book on ethics, as written from a religious humanist point of view. What I’d really like to see is someone who integrates a religious humanist ethics with a vision for religious humanist community, and with a history of religious humanists. So, for example, if we’re going to claim Frederick Douglass for religious humanism, why not take the next step and show how Douglass can serve as an ethical inspiration for all of us — and then go one to show how a religious humanist community can help me act more like Frederick Douglass, and less like the weak-willed schlump I actually am.

Along with a religious humanist ethics, I also want to see a religious humanist politics. Some years ago, two liberal Christian theologians, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, wrote a book called Resident Aliens, in which they argued that Christian ethics are going to keep Christians somewhat separate from contemporary U.S. political culture. Their reasoning was that Christians had to adhere to an ethical standard that was at odds with today’s U.S. politics — so, for example, Christians are called upon to help the poor, but the U.S. political system does not exactly make helping the poor a top priority. Now humanism’s political strategy has mostly been to convince us that politics should be run along humanist lines. But what I take away from Hauerwas and Willimon’s book is that religion is always going to be in tension with U.S. politics. How is religious humanism in tension with U.S. politics? How is religious humanism holding politics accountable to a higher standard? Those are the questions I want answered.

A fifth element of a systematic account of religious humanism will have to be an acknowledgement that religious humanism is essentially a Western tradition. Yes, I know about so-called Buddhist humanists, but I seriously wonder if calling someone a Buddhis humanist is merely imposing a category from Western theology onto a religious system that is neither humanist nor theist. My point here is that humanists have to acknowledge that their roots are Western. Once they acknolwedge that religious humanism is a Western tradition, they can move forward towards figuring out their true place in a globalized world.

So those are some of my ideas of what might have to go into a systematic account of religious humanism. I’d like to see a compelling history of humanism; I’d like to see a serious discussion of what it means to be in a religious humanist community; I’d like to see an account of religious humanist ethics, and of religious humanist politics; and I’d like to see some exploration of the relationship of religious humanism to the Western tradition and to other world religious traditions.

Link to first lecture.

This lecture is copyright (c) 2010 Daniel Harper. This lecture may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes only, provided this copyright notice accompanies all copies.

Second in a series | First post in the series

Let’s say you’re part of a congregation that has an annual year-round average attendance of about 150 adults and children. You and most everyone else likes your congregation at that size, and you don’t want to grow any bigger. What do you do?

1. Growing while not growing

Let’s further assume that your congregation, like most Unitarian Universalist congregations, has a steady stream of visitors, and if you retained even half of them you’d grow at a rate of better than 10% per year. But you don’t want to grow. So how can you stay the same size gracefully?

The first thing to remember, if your congregation has a steady stream of visitors and you don’t want to grow, is that it is actually difficult to turn people away. Emotionally, it can be kind of depressing when someone you kind of like shows up at church and there isn’t room for them. It’s also hard to turn away just enough people so you don’t grow, but not so many people that you start to shrink. It’s also difficult to turn away the correct people — the angry people, the dysfunctional people, the destructive people, the dishonest people — while letting in the right people — the people who will give freely of their time and money, who will make talented lay leaders, and who are caring loving people.

Without careful planning, congregations will come up with strategies for turning people away that don’t serve them well. The classic strategy to turn people away is to make it hard to find the congregation — you hide the building behind a lot of bushes, you make sure the sign is invisible, you have a crappy Web site, etc. While this is a fairly effective strategy, it can be difficult to find just the right degree of hiddenness that keeps out just enough people to prevent growth but not so many people that the congregation heads into decline. Another classic strategy is to ignore or be rude to visitors and newcomers. Unfortunately, what happens with this strategy is that too often a greater percentage of nasty, dysfunctional people find their way past all the barriers erected to keep people out. Another class strategy is to make sure there isn’t enough room, but that runs the risk of inconveniencing everyone; and (speaking from experience) overcrowding also tends to promote behavior problems.

In short, it’s actually quite difficult to develop a good strategy for keeping just enough people out that your congregation doesn’t grow. You run the risk of keeping out too many people, or letting in too many of the wrong kind of people, or making the whole experience unpleasant for everyone.

A better strategy to keep from growing is to spin off new congregations when you get too big. One way to implement this strategy:– when your congregation starts getting too big, a new group starts meeting in a new location while using the staff and volunteer resources of the parent congregation. Thus, the new group uses the parent congregation’s administrative staff, consults with the religious educator, and perhaps even meets at a time when the preacher can come and preach to them. The goal is to spend a couple of years growing the new group to the point where they can afford to support themselves financially.

There are many variations on this theme, but the basic principle is the same: a parent congregation nurtures a new congregation until it is self-supporting. It is not an easy process, and requires careful management and planning, but it avoids the negative aspects of the earlier strategies for not growing. It’s also less depressing than the other two methods I mentioned earlier — it’s depressing to be rude, and it’s depressing to turn people away without coming up with an alternative UU home for them. It’s even more depressing to let in too many nasty, dysfunctional people.

Whichever strategy your congregation chooses, I suspect what’s most important is careful planning and management. If you hide your congregation, planning and constant attention to management can allow you to increase your visibility when you see a significant drop in attendance, and hide yourselves more when too many people start showing up. If you choose the strategy of being cold to visitors, careful management can allow you to become a little warmer when you see a drop in attendance, and a little cooler when too many people start showing up. And of course splitting off new congregations requires careful planning and management all the way through.

But in each case, steady and consistent management is the key to success.

Next: When growth isn’t an option, how can you shrink your congregation gracefully?

The tomato plant that is growing in the container on the little second-floor deck outside our kitchen window has suddenly started to grow like crazy. This summer, it got some kind of leaf wilt, most of the leaves turned light brown, and we thought it was going to die. In September, I trimmed off the dead leaves so it would look more attractive, and hoped that the few remaining green tomatoes on it would eventually turn ripen and turn red.

Through the month of October, the tomato plant just sat there, not doing much. It didn’t get any worse, so I didn’t have the heart to uproot it and throw it in the compost pile; but it didn’t get any better, either. And then when the rains began, the plant suddenly started growing. At first there were a few new green leaves. Now, in the past week or so, it has really started growing again: several entirely new stems have started to grow, and there are even lots of new little yellow flowers. Whatever caused the leaf wilt hasn’t gone away — some of the new little leaves have already started to turn brown — but for the moment the plant is able to grow faster than the wilt can attack it.

First in a series of four posts

Let’s define a really small congregation as having an average annual attendance at services of less than 50 adults and children, and a small congregation as having an average attendance of between 50 and 200, and a mid-size congregation as having an average attendance of between 150 and 500, and a large congregation as having an average attendance of more than 450. The overlap between the various sizes is deliberate, because these are not exact numbers, but approximations based on the ways human beings interact with each other in various size groupings. We could add two more size categories: a house church, with about a dozen people, and a mega-church with over 2,000 attendees each week. I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of Unitarian Universalist congregations are small congregations with an average attendance of between 50 and 200 people each week.

This small congregation is a very comfortable size of congregation for most of us. You can realistically know everyone in the congregation. Decision-making takes place informally and organically and doesn’t require a lot of formal organizational structure. And it’s the size of congregation that people are most likely to have experienced, so it feels familiar. (Ministers are mostly trained to serve this size congregation, so if a small congregation has a minister, the minister is also going to prefer this small size.)

Given all this, why would any congregation want to grow beyond an average annual attendance of 200 adults and children? To grow means you can no longer know everyone in the congregation. To grow means having to institute a formal organizational structure, which can be a lot of work. To grow means turning into a congregation that no longer feels familiar. (And your minister is likely to become far less effective for several years while s/he figures out how to serve a mid-size congregation.)

Given all this, if growth is going to be worth it, you’d have to come up with very compelling reasons to grow beyond a small congregation. Most small congregations that say they want to grow claim that the reason they want to grow is to have more people who can give money and volunteer time, and thus support more programming and better-paid staff — but let’s face it, this is not a compelling reason to grow, particularly not for potential new members who are thus perceived as mere resources to be exploited. But I think a few small congregations might actually come up with compelling reasons to grow, and here three I have heard real people mention:

(1) “We want to grow because we want to have more influence in the community.” One very specific example of this is Unitarian Universalist congregations that want to legalize same-sex marriage in their state; the bigger they are, the more political clout they will have to make this happen.

(2) “We want to grow because we know there are a lot of people out there who want to join our congregation.” It can be really depressing to continually turn people away from your congregation because there is no organizational room for them, or even literally no room for them in your building; sometimes it can take less energy (both psychic energy, and time and effort) to grow than to keep turning people away.

(3) “We want to grow because Unitarian Universalist has a saving message that the world is hungry for.” This reason is most often put forward by people whose lives have been changed for the better by Unitarian Universalism; for my money, it is the most compelling reason, because it recognizes that there is no essential connection between the size of a congregation and what Unitarian Universalism has to offer.

Can you offer any other truly compelling reasons why a small congregation should go through all the fuss and bother of growing to a mid-size congregation?

Next: How not to grow, gracefully

I’m in the middle of watching some gossip fly around a certain circle of friends and acquaintances. But before I go any further, I had better define what I mean by gossip. Of course “gossip” can mean nasty, ill-informed rumors, but there is also an older sense of the word, where a gossip is a friend that you’d hang out with and exchange gossip that is a sort of passing the time of day — as in this passage from Langland’s Piers Plowman, as “done into modern English by the Rev. Professor Skeat” [London: Alexander Morning Ltd., 1905]:

Now beginneth Sir Glutton to go to his shrift;
His course is to kirkward, as culprit to pray. (305)
But Betty the brewster just bade him “Good-morrow,”
And asked him therewith as to whither he went.
    “To holy church haste I, to hear me a mass,
And straight to be shriven, and sin nevermore.”
“Good ale have I, gossip; Sir Glutton, assay it!” (310)

In this older sense of the word, a gossip is a friend, and the everyday conversation that such friends have between themselves — talking about mutual friends, family, people they know, what’s happening in the village — is also called gossip. Considered in this sense, gossip is the talk between friends that lets us make sense out of our human relationships. Of course, as we talk about our friends and acquaintances, gossip can turn into rumor and speculation, and rumor or speculation can get nasty, and it is from this subset of gossip that gossip as a whole has come to mean something bad.

I’m watching this unfold right now: human relationships that have gotten a little strained, which has turned everyday conversation between friends into rumor and speculation. I’m lucky: this happens to be a good group of people, and they’re pulling themselves back from the rumor and speculation, proving that gossip can mean what it meant in Piers Plowman. (Now it will be interesting to find out how many people I hear from who think that I’m talking about them, and their gossip. The people I’m talking about don’t read this blog, so if you’re reading this, it’s not about you.)

These days, we mostly think gossip is bad by definition. But that is incorrect. Gossip is, in fact, essential to being human; having friends who are our gossips is also essential. As I said before, the primary way we sort through our many human relationships is to talk about them to friends — to gossip with our gossips. Just because some gossip is bad (and just because some gossips are nasty rumormongers) doesn’t mean we should stop gossiping — in the same way that just because I once happened to eat a piece of spoiled meat and threw up doesn’t mean I should stop eating. The art of gossip is knowing whom to choose for your gossips, and knowing how to avoid the nasty bits of gossip, the gossip equivalent of spoiled meat.

The usual panhandlers and street people stood here and there along Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley. One older man sat in half-lotus position; he wore an olive drab army jacket, had bare feet, and neither asked for money nor paid any attention to passers-by. A middle-aged man, self-contained and quiet, said, “Buy a newspaper to help the homeless?” One young man accosted passers-by in a loud and merry voice, saying, “Spare a quarter for a douche-bag?” No one gave him any money. From the sound of his voice, he thought living on the street was a big adventure.

This past Sunday, I read the version of Duddubha Jataka tale (no. 322) in From Long Ago and Many Lands by Sophia Fahs, for which Fahs supplied the title “The Nervous Little Rabbit.” We made simple puppets — drawings on cardboard which we cut out and mounted on popsicle sticks. One seven-year-old boy chose to make a puppet of “hundreds of rabbits”:

If you look at this puppet from the point of view of developmental psychology, you can look for ways in which this boy sees the world somewhat differently from adults; you’ll also look for how his fine muscle coordination is developing, etc. If you look at this puppet from the point of view of an artist, you might think this is a compelling design with satisfying organic shapes arranged in a pattern that implies movement. I’m most likely to look at this puppet from a teacher’s point of view and remember how involved the children were when we read the story again and had the puppets act the story out. The resulting puppet show wasn’t much to watch, but the children were drawn into the mythic world they helped co-create — even the fifth grader who read the story, and who was a little ambivalent about hanging out with younger children, got drawn in.

A gray day of rain,
a bright day of cool weather:
green shoots on bare earth.

One of the best short essays on singing in worship just went up at the Alban Institute Web site. In the essay, titled “Singing an Eclectic Repertoire,” authors Bruce G. Epperly and Daryl Hollinger point out that singing in church “is not about aesthetics — about what we like or dislike. It is about singing our faith in our local community while opening ourselves to new possibilities for singing and worship.” With that principle in mind, they offer some really great ideas for singing a wide-ranging repertoire that includes the following types of sacred song: early American, Irish folk, Hebrew traditional, African American spiritual, gospel, African, Latino, Asian, and contemporary musics.

For example, check out this suggestion for singing Irish folk melodies: “Most people don’t know that the origin of the song ‘Be Thou My Vision’ was an Irish folk tune. If you play it directly from most hymnals, it will sound more like a traditional Germanic hymn. When we simplify the harmonies and change chords primarily only once a measure, the mood changes drastically. The tempo can be lively. Adding a triangle, tambourine, and hand drum will enhance the Irish flavor.” Obviously, you could use similar ideas with English folk melodies as well.

Epperly and Hollinger don’t cover every type of music we sing as sacred song. They don’t cover Welsh tunes, medieval music, or contemporary North American chant, for example. But the authors don’t need to give us precise instructions on singing (and leading) every different type of sacred song. Once we realize that most congregations tend to make every song sound either like (a) old Germanic hymns, or (b) contemporary praise music — we can deal with that tendency, transcend our present narrow approaches, and become truly eclectic singers.

How about Tuvan throat singing in church? Would that be going too far? Umm, OK, I guess something like this might drive some people out of a worship service.

“God Talk Checklist,” which you’ll find below, is something I came up with for our Coming of Age group. The youth who are participating in the Coming of Age program will be writing a statement of religious identity to present during a worship service in the spring. So how do you get someone to come up with a statement of religious identity? Well, in our society, many people equate God and religion, so one good place to start figuring out your religious identity is to think about where you stand on the God question. That’s what the checklist is designed to do — get you thinking with some degree of precision about where you stand on the God question.

Because the youth and adults who were present tonight found this to be a useful tool for starting a conversation about the God question, so I thought I’d share it here. Remember that it’s designed to be used in a group setting, where you fill it out and share your responses with other people. The checklist starts below the jump.

“God Talk” checklist

This checklist is for you. Feel free to change the questions or the wording if you need to do so.

Part I

Circle any that are true for you. If you circle something, you’re not saying that’s something you actually believe — you’re just saying that you could not possibly conceive of believing in God if that statement were true.

Personally, I cannot believe in God if:

• if I have to believe that God is some guy with a white beard in the clouds
• if I have to believe that God can send people to hell after they die
• if I have to believe that God is three different beings all crammed into one being
• if I’m supposed to believe things that are just plain irrational or unreasonable
• if I have to believe that God is all-powerful, and yet still lets innocent children get hurt
• if I have to believe that God is pure goodness, and yet there is so much evil and hatred in the world
• if I have to believe that God is all-knowing, and yet God has not told us how to make the world a perfect place

Part II

Circle any that are true for you. If you circle something, you’re not saying that’s what you actually believe — you’re just saying that you could conceive of believing in God if that statement were true.

Personally, I could believe in God if:

• if God were a man with a white beard sitting on a cloud
• if God were a woman
• if God were something that gave me inner strength when I needed it
• if God personally answered all my prayers
• if God were the same thing as the scientific laws that run the universe
• if God preferred poor people, rather than people with enough to eat
• if God were Nature, animals and plants and everything else in the natural world
• if God included everything in the universe: all people, all animals, all the stars, everything
• if the word “God” really meant the highest and best of humanity
• if God means the same thing as love

Part III

1. Do you believe in God?

• (Yes)
• (No)
• (Maybe)
• (Don’t care)

2.
   a. If you checked either “Yes” or “No,” in three or four sentences describe the God you do or do not believe in.
   b. If you checked “Maybe”, describe both the God you can not believe in — and a God that you maybe could believe in if you thought it were true.
   c. If you checked “Don’t care”, in three or four sentences describe what you think is the most important thing in the universe.

I’ve been trying to write something. I’ve been trying to write it all day long. Sometimes, I think it’s getting better, but then I get it to a point where I realize that the whole thing is fatally flawed. So I scrap what I’ve written, and start writing again. And pretty soon run into another dead end.

I’ve given up on it for now — I put it aside, and maybe I’ll never pick it up again. But somehow I do think there’s something there that’s worth saving — if only I could figure out what —

“Here we walk in the verdant groves…” — all afternoon I’d been humming a Shaker song, attributed to the Shaker community in Enfield, New Hampshire; I couldn’t get the tune out of my head. Suddenly I realized why the tune seemed so familiar: the first phrase was exactly the same as the first phrase of the theme song to the old television show “Gilligan’s Island”: “Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…” Even though the Shakers sang it first, that spoiled the song and made me want to stop singing it. But I couldn’t, and now hours later the tune is still running round and round in my head — “Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…, Here we walk in the verdant groves…” — and I just can’t get rid of it. Maybe if I write about it, I can get it out of my head and make you start humming it instead.

Second lecture in a class on humanism.

If we’re going to do a serious study of humanism, one of the things we have to do is take seriously any serious critiques of humanism. What I’d like to do is go through and give you six possible critiques of humanism, critiques that I consider interesting and worthy of thoughtful consideration. I’m not going to resolve these critiques for you; I’m just going to lay out seven arguments against humanism, and let you do with them what you will.

(1) Critique number one is the critique that humanism is no comfort to persons in a time of crisis. In its crudest aspect, this critique takes the form of saying, Well if you’re a humanist and you get cancer, to whom can you pray? But do not dismiss this critique on the basis of that crude critique.

Jean-Paul Sartre raises this issue in a subplot in his short story “The Wall.” The protagonist in this story was fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. He is captured, sentenced to be executed, and spends his last night in a cell with some others who have also been sentenced to death. The protagonist, who has no apparent belief in God, watches as one of the other condemned prisoners who believes in God gives way to fear. Sartre’s protagonist faces his impending death with courage, and even finds himself relishing his last moments of living, as opposed to the believer who gives way to fear. But is this going to be convincing for most people?

This issue has been framed in other ways. For example, there’s the old saying: There are no atheists in fox holes. Part of what makes this such a powerful critique is that many humanists have not had to test their humanism in times of extreme personal crisis. What happens to the humanist in the fox hole? would he or she start praying, or not?

(2) Critique number two is the postmodern critique of humanism on the basis of excessive rationality and excessive individualism. Harvey Sarles has made one such critique of humanism. Sarles begins by pointing out that humanism is very much a product of the Enlightenment, that intellectual tradition that began in the 1700s in Western Europe. Sarles says, in part: “The story of the Enlightenment, calculated and effective in killing off the myths of transcendent deities, fighting off the realities and claims of monarchy, has also of late been producing a lot of garbage. We live longer but don’t think much about living well; save time with all of the modern conveniences but seem to live breathlessly with less and less time. … The skepticism of the Enlightenment concerning facts of nature has entered our thinking, leading to skepticisms about the very possibility of knowledge, sliding to various cynicisms, and the meaning-destroying nihilisms of frantic modernists.” [Sarles, Harvey, and Andreas Rosenberg, “An Epistolary Exchange,” Humanism Today, vol. 8, 1993, pp. 31-61]

Part of the point here is that humanism is actually part of a political project — I’m sure you noticed how Sarles tied the Enlightenment in with the project to end monarchy. We could go further, and say that humanism seems to be allied with free market capitalism. It also seems to be allied with individualism. Indeed, if we wanted to point to one of humanism’s most powerful proponents, we could point to the novelist Ayn Rand — which will please some humanists, but even they should remember that there are serious critiques of Ayn Rand on the basis of her extreme individualism, and perhaps her lack of humane values.

Leaving Ayn Rand out of the picture, we can still imagine critiquing humanism because of its extreme skepticism — a core part of humanism for many humanists is disbelief in God. And we could critically ask: Where does skepticism stop? Let’s not believe in God, fine, but do we then believe in human ideals, or should we stop all beliefs that aren’t absolutely provable?

(3) Critique number three: There’s another postmodern critique of humanism, this one of the basis of sexism and racism and classism. Thus, some feminists will say that it’s all very well for men (and some women) to disbelieve any transcendent deity, but for many women it’s extremely important to believe in the Goddess. This point is made by prominent feminist theologian Carol Christ in an essay titled “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections.” [Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979, pp. 273-287] Obviously, not all women are convinced by this argument, but it’s still a powerful critique.

Others have been skeptical of humanism and atheism because so many of its public faces are middle-aged white European or Euro-American men. Sure, it’s easy for Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to be atheists — white middle-class men created the Enlightenment, and humanism has been created in the image of the Enlightenment, which for some non-white, non-male, non-middle class persons that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for them. And while there are groups like the African American Humanists, and feminist humanist groups, they don’t get a lot of publicity.

One way to address this critique is to allow for a sort of soft humanism; that is to say, it is possible to define humanism such that it does not automatically equate with atheism. However, doing this really annoys more hardline humanists, some of whom simply don’t want to face up to this critique.

(4) Critique number four: There’s a very subtle and interesting critique of non-theistic humanism in Harvey Cox’s most recent book, The Future of Faith. [New York: Harper Collins, 2009] In this book, Cox makes a convincing case that everything is changing right now. He suggests that “a fundamental change in the nature of religiousness is occurring. This change assumes different shapes, but some of them overlap.” Among other examples of this change in the nature of religion, Cox asserts that “many [religions] are becoming less dogmatic and more practical. Religious people today are more interested in ethical guidelines and spiritual disciplines than in doctrines.” [pp. 222-223]

Cox adds the following: “As these changes gain momentum, they evoke an almost point-for-point fundamentalist reaction.” Though Cox doesn’t mention humanist forms of fundamentalism, there are indeed humanist forms of fundamentalism, which are even now offering point-for-point rebuttals of progressive religion. I believe that humanist fundamentalists are still a minority of all humanists; however, the humanist fundamentalists are getting more strident, and the more strident they get, the more they will be noticed. So other humanists had better address this change in the nature of religiousness that Cox is talking about, for if it is as widespread as he claims, humanism runs the risk of encasing a worthy theological approach in a social construct that is outdated — I imagine the humanist equivalent of the Amish, where there are certain rules you must follow or you are expelled from the humanist community.

(5) There’s the social justice or liberation critique, which points out that self-professed humanists, and humanism as a movement, can point to few or no major accomplishments in social justice — humanism has no Martin Luther King, no Mahatma Gandhi. This is also the pragmatist’s critique.

Now this may be an unjustified critique, because there are probably lots of humanists in the not-so-distant past who hid their humanism for a variety of reasons, or who have been ignored by history. In a number of recent books, humanist theologian Anthony Pinn has traced the history of African American humanists, to make the point that there have been some prominent African Americans who could be considered humanists, and these are people with some pretty major accomplishments. For example, Pinn shows how Frederick Douglass appears to have come to a humanist stance late in his life.

But while this may be an unjustified critique, it’s really up to humanists to disprove it; I mean, nobody else is going to take the time. So the proper way for humanists to address this critique is for them to hold up moral and social justice exemplars of humanism.

(6) Which brings us to critique number six: This is the critique which says humanism is too vaguely defined, and doesn’t really mean anything. Or to put it another way, there’s been no major systematic treatment of humanism, no systematic theology as it were. Underlying this critique is the feeling that humanists spend all their time disproving God, and very little of their time coming up with a positive, constructive statement of their position.

Let me give a specific example of this. Christians have hagiography and Christology, that is, the description of saints and the study of the nature of Jesus Christ. Certain branches of Buddhism have their arhats and other moral exemplars, and all Buddhists tell the story of how Siddhartha Guatama found the middle way. But humanists have no equivalent study — they have no systematic way of holding up moral exemplars. (There actually is a name for such a study, aretalogy.)

In another similar example, while traditional theology has the study of theological anthropology, that is, the study of the nature of human beings and human kind, humanists seem to cede this study to natural science. But natural science really doesn’t tell us what it means to be an individual human being from the point of view of me, or of you — science is necessarily abstracted.

And where are the humanist equivalents of soteriology (well, William R. Jones has done some of that work), eschatology, ecclesiology, etc.? Where is the humanist version of liberation theology (well, maybe Anthony Pinn is working on that one)? Humanism seems to focus exclusively on ontology and metaphysics, and most people aren’t very interested in humanist versions of ontology and metaphysics, since humanists seem to rehash the same old philosophical arguments that go back to Plato and Aristotle. I’m not trying to be harsh here, I’m trying to be honest about this critique.

(7) Finally, here’s a seventh critique of humanism. If humanism is what its name implies, a religious attitude that places humans in the center of the universe, then we can critique humanism from an ecological point of view. Humanism is by definition anthropocentric. This might well imply that humanism supports the exploitation of natural resources for human needs without concern for other living beings. This critique is implicit in many deep ecological viewpoints.

Of all the critiques I’ve heard of humanism, I find this one most convincing. As much inspiration as I personally draw from humanism — and I draw a lot of inspiration from humanism — I have not found an adequate humanist answer to the ecological critique. If you want an anthropocentric religious stance, humanism is the one for you — but I don’t want that, and this I think is why I’m willing to call myself a religious naturalist but I’m not willing to call myself a humanist.

So there you have seven fairly interesting critiques of humanism. When I say they’re fairly interesting, I mean two things: (a) on the one hand they are not the same old unending arguments that can be summed up as: “God doesn’t exist”; “God does too exist”; “Does not”; “Does too” etc. and (b) on the other hand these are arguments that can’t be immediately dismissed out of hand. These strike me as fruitful areas for further conversation, both within humanism, and between humanists and non-humanists.

Link to first lecture.

This lecture is copyright (c) 2010 Daniel Harper. This lecture may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes only, provided this copyright notice accompanies all copies.

This morning, I was a guest in an online course on youth ministry, taught by Megan Dowdell and Betty-Jeane Rueters-Ward, and offered through Starr King School for the Ministry. Megan and Betty-Jeane invited Lane Campbell and me to participate in a conference call, and answer a few questions about spiritual development for teenagers. I took notes on what I said, and below you’ll find my re-creation of my answers to Megan’s questions on spiritual development.

Question 1: How is spiritual development for youth different than for adults or children?

My answer: If we’re going to answer this question within the context of a religious community, I want to begin with theology. We have to go back to theological anthropology, and ask ourselves: What is the nature of human beings?

Within my own religious upbringing — my family has been Unitarian for generations, and we’re now Unitarian Universalists — I always heard a lot about Ralph Waldo Emerson, who saw a divine spark within every human being, no matter what age. If the nature of human beings is that they have have some divine spark within them, then we are probably going to say that this divine spark doesn’t develop at all. I’d pretty much agree with Emerson on this point, although I’d probably argue with him about the nature of the divine spark. So I’m not convinced there’s much spiritual difference across ages; certainly, from the standpoint of theological anthropology, there’s no real difference between teenagers and adults.

This theological understanding played out in my own religious community. I was invited to become a full member of my church at age 14 — and there are many religious traditions where a religious community welcomes young persons into the adult community at about age 13 or 14 (think of confirmation, or bar and bat mitzvah, etc.). For my religious community, then, I find it to be theologically ridiculous to say youth differ spiritually in any significant way from adults. I’m willing to go further, and even say that children are spiritually the same as all human beings.

But — in reality, the norms of our society have made it so that today teenagers are different from adults. This is a change from a hundred and fifty years ago, when one of my great-great-grandfathers was working as a butcher at age 16, was married at age 17, and had a child at age 18. Today he’d be considered a mere teenagers, but back then he was acting like a responsible adult, with a job and a family. But then in the 20th century, Western society created the state of adolescence, which while it is a social construct is nonetheless real. Given today’s North American culture, many teenagers wind up acting quite differently than adults — they have fewer responsibilities, they are expected to act in certain ways, and so on — and the same is true of their spirituality — less responsibility, they’re supposed to act in certain ways, etc.

(One additional point I did not make in today’s conference call: from the standpoint of cognitive development, developmental psychologist Jean Piaget argued that cognitive development is essentially complete at age 14 or so, with the onset of formal operational thinking. For religious traditions based on reason, like Unitarian Universalism, we could say that a person reaches full spiritual development with the onset of formal operational thinking, because when the individual can reason s/he can participate fully in the religious community. This helps us understand why many Unitarian Universalist congregations don’t allow children to become full members of the congregation until they are at an age where they can reason for themselves, and make an informed, reasonable, rational decision about congregation membership.)

Question 2: What is the role of adults in promoting the spiritual development of youth?

My answer: To state the obvious, different adults will have different roles in promoting the spiritual maturity of young people [note that I prefer to talk about “spiritual maturity” rather than “spiritual development]. Which makes me ask a clarifying question: Which different adults have a role in helping teenagers move towards spiritual maturity?

• Obviously parents, guardians, and other close adult family members are likely to have the central role in promoting spiritual maturity in teenagers.
• If the youth belongs to a religious community, then the leaders of that religious community — clergy, youth workers, lay leaders, and so on — are also going to have an important role.
• Teachers, coaches (never underestimate the influence of coaches in our sports-besotted culture), cultural icons like musicians — all these are going to have a role in promoting, or perhaps blocking, a youth’s spiritual development.

Once we start realizing that many different adults in society play different roles in moving young people towards spiritual maturity, I can point to a central insight of developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who made it clear that there is a strong communal aspect of human development. I’d also want to point to Maria Harris’s book Fashion Me a People in which she demonstrates how the whole church is the curriculum. As we begin to understand the communal nature of human development and learning, we begin to understand that it is critically important to talk about the role of organized religion and religious communities in moving persons towards spiritual maturity.

When you start thinking in communal terms, then you are going to pay less attention to the role of individual adults in the lives of individual young persons, and more attention to the whole congregational system and how it impacts teenagers. When I started thinking that way, my effectiveness as a youth minister increased enormously. I learned how to shape the whole congregation so that the congregation can become a place where teenagers are nurtured into spiritual maturity by everyone in that congregation.

Question three: What are components of meaningful, youth-engaging worship? Please offer up examples of successful/effective spiritual development experiences or unsuccessul examples as well.

My answer: Let me start with unsuccessful examples. Within Unitarian Universalism, back in the late 1960s youth worship took on all the trappings of second-wave feminism and encounter groups: people sitting in circles, people engaging in deep intimate sharing, people giving lots of hugs and body contact, and so on. Nearly half a century later, we’re still doing the same old stuff, to the point where it has become almost a fetish, an idol. As a leftist, what immediately strikes me is how much this worship format is based in middle- and upper middle class American values. As someone who takes theology seriously, I am also struck by how little theological depth this worship format has (because those who do this worship have ignored the theological reflections of people like Starhawk and Letty Russell, and have ignored the critiques of third-wave and other post-second-wave feminist theologians). And you could make a similar critique of some of the quasi-worshippy antics that occur under the guise of youth ministry in mainline and evangelical Christian churches: fetishized formats with little or no theological depth.

As a contrast, some of the Buddhist communities I’m aware of here in the Bay area take their young people far more seriously. They begin treating young people as adults, and teens and pre-teens are expected to engage in the serious practices such as meditation, chanting, bowing, etc., in which the adults engage. These communities don’t dumb down religion for teenagers — they “smart up” teenagers and integrate them into the religious community.

In the Unitarian Universalist church of my youth, we had a youth group for teenagers, but personally I also got welcomed into the adult community. I sometimes went to the Sunday morning service, and didn’t listen to the sermon, but then I went down to coffee hour and several men in the congregation talked to me seriously — this was really important for me. Additionally, my father was an usher, and when I was old enough I’d help him out, and I still vividly remember a couple of conversations I had with a couple of men who were ushers with us. Thus I had time with my peers, which was critically important, but as a teenager I was integrated into the corporate, communal worship life of the congregation.

To me, the most effective spiritual development possible is inviting teenagers into adult worship. That’s where they are going to find spiritually mature adults to serve as role models. And, to be blunt — when you tell the teenagers to go off and do worship separately from everyone else, when they get to be adults they’re liable to keep on being separate, and never come back. So if you want to get rid of your teenagers, make them do youth worship that is very different than adult worship.

Question 4: Both of you offered us material on Fowler — how has his work been foundational for you as a religious educator? Is there anything you want to emphasize from the readings.

My answer: Personally, I think Fowler is full of baloney. His original research methodology is questionable, which makes the conclusions he draws very problematic. His definition of “faith” is vague, and it’s also problematic because he seems to define “faith” primarily in cognitive terms (in which case, why not ignore him and go read Jean Piaget, and read the work that the cognitive scientists are now doing?). Basically, I don’t feel Fowler passes the smell test.

This is not to say that I don’t rely on developmental psychology. Piaget’s work is absolutely foundational for my praxis as a religious educator. Reading Lev Vygotsky completely changed the way I do religious education. I still find Erik Erikson to be stimulating, and recently I’ve been re-reading him yet again. Robert Kegan’s perspective [in both The Evolving Self and in In Over Our Heads) has been very helpful to me, in part because he approaches human development both as an educator and as a psychotherapist.

And I still have to deal with Fowler, because he has such wide influence. If you’re going to work in a mainline church (and for this purpose Unitarian Universalism looks just like a mainline church), you have to know about James Fowler. Just as many of 19th century Protestant ministers were supposed to know something about phrenology, today you have to know about Fowler. So you learn about Fowler as a sort of defensive response, and then go out and learn some real developmental psychology. I started with Jean Piaget and his school, and now I’m trying hard to keep up with all that the cognitive science people are finding out.

But those doing youth ministry also had better work through theology, and have a good grasp on the issues of theological anthropology. (As an aside, I’d just like to say this to those who are in my own tradition of Unitarian Universalism:– We Unitarian Universalist religious educators and youth ministers are notoriously weak on theology. If you can’t take a course with Paul Rasor, you’re best off taking a good rigourous course in systematic theology at a liberal Christian school, then working your way through most of James Luther Adams, Sharon Welch, and William R. Jones. And then go read up on Piaget and cognitive science.)

Question 5: Is there anything else you would like to share as parting thoughts for our time together?

My answer: Yes. Here are two things for those doing youth ministry:

(1) Based on the insights of Erik Erikson and Robert Kegan, I’d say this: If you’re working with teenagers and you haven’t worked through your own adolescent issues — something that is true of most of us — then go out and get yourself a shrink, or a youth ministry mentor who isn’t afraid to kick your butt. Do it now, before your own internal crap screws up some perfectly healthy kids.

(2) Take theology seriously.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew it, Horatio; a cell phone of infinite jest, of most excellent reception; it hath borne my conversations a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! A new cell phone to buy! My gorge rises at it.

Church consultant Mike Durrall has proposed an interesting idea. Why not figure out how much money you’re going to spend on Christmas presents this year, and budget that same amount of money to give to your congregation’s social justice programs? Wouldn’t that be a great present to give to your congregation, and to the wider world?

This makes sense to me from a religious perspective. Christmas has not been completely secularized, and from my Unitarian Universalist perspective the Christmas story does have some interesting religious themes: the hospitality of the stable, and the lack of hospitality at the inn; and the magi giving expensive gifts to a family that is not particularly well off. And thinking about this gives me a specific idea of how we could donate money for social justice uses to our congregations at Christmas.

The minister’s discretionary fund in most congregations is used (at least in part) to provide confidential financial aid to people who need money right now. If, for example, a young couple were traveling and suddenly discovered that they had no money to rent a room at the Best Western Bethlehem, they could stop at the Bethlehem Unitarian Universalist Society and get money from the minister’s discretionary fund. However, in the present state of the economy, most minister’s discretionary funds have been sadly depleted. Often that money goes to members and friends of the congregation who are financially desperate, some of whom may have no other place to turn.

Why couldn’t we all budget some Christmas money to give to the minister’s discretionary fund of our local congregations? We can take a tax deduction, people who need it will receive confidential help, and we’ll feel good about giving one of the best Christmas presents ever. What do you think? Would a minister’s discretionary fund be a reasonable destination for this kind of Christmas giving?

P.S.: It occurs to me that if you don’t belong to a local congregation, or are a member of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, or if your local congregation doesn’t have a minister’s discretionary fund, you could give money to CLF’s prison ministry (PDF flier on how to sponsor a prisoner) as a sort of equivalent idea.

I am not watching the Giants game right now. I should be, but there’s no real point.

You see, if you grew up outside Boston as I did, baseball is all mixed up with Calvinism. I don’t have to watch today’s game, because the winner of this World Series was determined at the beginning of time, and nothing the players or fans do today can affect the final outcome. Just as Calvinists knew who the saints were (they were the ones who went to church), we know who the saints are in baseball (they wear pinstripe suits). However, a few baseball teams with long-haried weirdos — like this year’s Giants, and like the 2004 Red Sox — may occasionally win the Series because God likes to keep us mortals guessing.

So I am not going to watch today’s game. I mean, why bother watching if the outcome is predetermined?

The coverage of Jon Stewart’s sanity rally in Washington, D.C., has been decidedly spotty thus far. Thinking they were only providing some journalistic color, USA Today managed to touch on the real reason any of us reads coverage about such rallies: “The audience came prepared to play along. Many brought signs to underscore the message of reasonableness, or just to be funny.” And then USA Today actually quoted three signs:

I’m somewhat irritated about extreme outrage.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — and spiders.
Stand united against signs.

The New York Times, in order to prove they are more serious than USA Today, deigned to report on only two signs:

Shrinks for sanity.
I can see the real America from my house.

The Washington Post, trying to be just as serious as the New York Times, reported just two signs, except one of the signs was two-sided so they actually reported on three signs, proving they are not as serious as the Times:

Decaf Party.
This is my comedy channel. (with the Fox News logo)
    The reverse of the same sign:
This is my news channel. (with the Comedy Central logo)

Fox News tried to be twice as serious as the New York Times, by reporting on only one sign — which, coincidentally, also allowed them to report on none of the signs mocking Fox News. The one sign they reported on:

Tea Party rallies need more tea.

Fortunately, the Brits understand what’s truly of interest. The BBC reported lots of signs, thus proving they are far less serious than their American counterparts. No wonder the BBC is now my preferred source of news coverage. Here are the signs they reported:

We’re Moms — Life is Insane Enough Without Fox News.
God hates rallies.
God Hates Flags.
I’m a little annoyed, but I’ll get over it.
Palin/Voldemort 2012.
Ruly Mob.
I’m here from the internet to put captions on your rally.
Hyperbole is the antichrist.
Obama — re-open NY subway toilets now.
Look at my ironic hipster sign.
One nation under Aqua Buddha.
Birthers for Hawaii statehood.
Signs are an impractical medium for civil discourse.
I leave binary thinking to computers.

And the following signs were visible on BBC’s video coverage:

Stop yelling at me! That’s why I moved out of my parents’ house.
Hug it out: Kindergarten taught me well.
Muggles for sanity.

The Canadians get the humor, too. The National Post has lots of photos of signs, including:

Blame Canada — Kyle’s mom.
What do we want?!
  Respectful discourse.
When do we want it?!
  Now would be agreeable to me, but I am interested in your opinion.
If you don’t believe in government, perhaps you shouldn’t run for it.
I like tea, and you’re kind of ruining it.
I may not agree with U, but I’m sure U R not Hitler!
A wrap is not a sandwich.
I was told there would be Justin Bieber.
God Hates (or at least is totally unimpressed by) Ideologues.
I have no problem paying taxes because I’m an adult and that’s part of the deal.
I’m even-tempered as Hell.
I like protesting.

But it’s not just the Brits and Canadians. Left Coast coverage did the signs, too. The L.A. Times has lots of photos of text- and non-text-based signs. One of the signs with a visual punchline read “I’m with stupid”, and had an arrow pointing to heaven. The text-based signs included:

Millennials [sic]: You’d better be “nice” to us — We’ll be on your death panel!!
Stop this bickering — Partisanship is hurting us!

Thank you, L.A. Times. And thank God I live on the Left Coast, where people still have a sense of humor.

Yesterday’s New York Times carried a review of a lecture by historian James T. Kloppenberg, titled “In Writings of Obama, a Philosophy Is Unearthed.” According to the article, Kloppenberg contends that Obama is a true intellectual and a “philosopher president,” as were John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson.

If Kloppenberg is correct, it is astonishing that Obama was even elected in this age of anti-intellectualism. Kloppenberg identifies Obama’s philosophical stance as American pragmatism, which is not surprising given Obama’s predilection for Reinhold Niebuhr. But given that we live in an age dominated by ideologues, it is therefore also astonishing that this country elected a pragmatist, which is to say a sort of anti-ideologue.

I’m uncomfortable with Obama’s politics; he’s too far to the right for me. But I have been trying to figure out why I am so much more comfortable with Obama than I was with either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, and I suspect it’s because of his philosophical stance. George W. Bush was (and is) an ideologue, someone who believes in an ultimate truth regardless of contradictory evidence (his rigid morality is a result of being an ideologue). Bill Clinton has, as far as I can tell, no philosophy whatsoever beyond mere expediency (and he has no more morality than a stick). It’s not Obama’s politics with which I’m comfortable, but with his philosophy of pragmatism (and with his morals, which are solid while able to grow and mature). I may not like his politics, but Obama is neither an ideologue like George W. Bush, or nothing at all like Bill Clinton.

This has gotten me thinking about the extent to which ideologues and ideologies have taken over the civic space, from the national stage, to science fiction fandom. These days, we have ideologues on the right and on the left and in the center. What little common morality we have is rigid and based on ideology. Ideologues scare the $#!t out of me; now they’re dominating this country, and that really scares the $#!t out of me.

It’s a warm evening. I just got up to stretch my legs, and I walked around the church grounds. There are crickets singing in the rose garden in front of the Main Hall, and I stopped to listen for a minute. I’ve heard hardly any crickets this summer, perhaps because the weather has been too cool. When I got back to my office, I realized that there were crickets singing in the little garden outside my office. It’s a peaceful sound. I opened my door to hear them better.

Introductory lecture delivered tonight, in a course in UU humanism:

In this introductory lecture, I’m going to attempt to outline Unitarian Universalist humanism for you. My primary approach in this lecture is going to be based on an approach used by the humanist theologian Anthony Pinn in his book Varieties of African American Religious Experience. After pointing out the inadequacies of theological traditions which merely point towards some ultimate revelation, something beyond what we see and hear and experience in this life, Pinn describes his approach as follows:

“I want to suggest that the task of … constructive theologies … is more in line with [Gordon] Kaufman’s ‘third-order theology’ and Charles Long’s reflections upon the theology of the opqaue. That is to say, theology is deliberate or self-conscious human construction focused upon uncovering and exploring the meaning and structures of religious experience within a larger body of cultural production. It is, by nature, comparative in a way that does not seek to denounce or destructively handle other traditions.”

I find Pinn’s approach to theology to be incredibly useful for at least four reasons.

First, Pinn does not get bogged down in interminable arguments about metaphysical questions; thus while I have no interest in giving a final answer to the question “Does God exist?”, I am intensely interested in trying to understand how others have dealt with that question, and with lots of related questions.

Second, Pinn is quite clear that theology is a human construction. Too often, theological conversations are preemptively terminated by appeals to a “higher authority”; this “higher authority” could be an appeal to perfect and infallible divine revelation, but it could equally be an appeal to supposedly infallible and perfect scientific reasoning. Since we human beings are quite fallible and most imperfect, and since we’re the ones who do theology, Pinn’s approach is only logical.

Third, Pinn is looking at religious experience as a subset of a larger body of human cultural production. That is to say, theology rooted in human experiences and in human religious communities, and cannot meaningfully be abstracted from those human experiences and communities.

Fourth, and perhaps most important, Pinn’s approach is non-destructive. A theological position that is solely focused on disproving other theological positions is essentially destructive in nature, and is ultimately boring; either you disprove your opponent’s position, or you fail to disprove it, and in either case the conversation is over quickly, and to prolong it would be merely to prolong boredom. Thus Pinn takes a comparative approach, which he says will lead to a constructive theology. That is my goal in this class.

Another way of saying this is that we are going to do theology as if we’re having a productive and very interesting conversation. Indeed, I think of the field of theology as a conversation that has been going on in Western culture for at least three thousand years. And now, in this postmodern world, the Western theological conversation is coming into contact with similar conversations from other cultures around the world. This is an amazing and fascinating time to be doing theology, and given the long history of the theological conversation, and the world-wide scope of the conversation today, the more we can open ourselves to the wider conversation, the more interesting it gets.

So that’s an outline of the method we’re going to use in this class. Any questions before I go on to give a short history of humanism?

OK, let’s turn to a brief history of humanism.

In the Western tradition, we can trace the roots of humanism back to the Pre-Socratic philosophers. The ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras said, “Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are; and of the things that are not, that they are not.” [DK80b1, Kathleen Freeman translation] This statement is often summed up in the shorter statement, “Man is the measure of all things.” Making individual human beings the measuring stick of the universe tends to move us away from making firm metaphysical pronouncements. So, for example, Protagoras says this about the gods: “About the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for the factors preventing knowledge are many: the obscurity of the subject, and the shortness of human life.” [DK80b4, Kathleen Freeman translation] Protagoras’s approach must be distinguished from scientific method; scientific method tends to discount individual human beings, because it relies on the ongoing efforts of many many human beings to slowly come closer to the truth.

Humanism has remained an important strand in the Western tradition ever since the ancient Greeks, although it remained somewhat submerged through the middle ages. During the Renaissance, humanism became a prominent feature of Western culture. Renaissance humanists sought to revive ancient Greek and Roman learning, and placed the humanities — grammar and rhetoric, ethics, poetry, etc. — at the center of learning.

Now we jump ahead to 19th century North America. Beginning in the middle of the 19th century, various North American thinkers extended the Radical Reformation to the point where Gary Dorrien, a scholar of American religion, calls some particularly progressive thinkers “post-Christian” [see his The Making of American Liberal Theology, 1805-1900] John Weiss, a Unitarian minister and radical abolitionist, was one such thinker. Weiss was the minister in Watertown, Massachusetts, before he got ousted for his abolitionist beliefs, went to New Bedford where the Unitarian church was receptive to his abolitionism, and after the Civil War returned to Watertown. As a Unitarian, he already rejected the doctrine of the trinity, and understood humans to have free will. As a Transcendentalist, he followed the German advances in theology, such as the rise of the higher criticism, and moved to understandings of the divine that were so far from Christian understandings that Dorrien says we cannot class him as a Christian. Weiss’s successor in the New Bedford pulpit was William Potter. Potter was younger than Weiss, and just as radical. He studied in Germany in the late 1850s, and then returned to take the New Bedford church after Weiss. As time went on, he was influenced by his understanding of evolution, and he gradually came to a position where there wasn’t much God left in his theology.

These are just two examples of proto-humanists within liberal religion. Many of the women preachers in the so-called Iowa Sisterhood, a band of Unitarian and Universalist women ministers who held pulpits throughout the midwest, were equally or more radical. Indeed, from what I can learn, Eliza Tupper Wilkes, the first Unitarian Universalist preacher here in Palo Alto (she may be considered Unitarian Universalist by virtue of being in fellowship with both denominations), may probably be considered post-Christian, and maybe even tending towards humanist, though she did use God-talk.

In the early 20th century, a Unitarian preacher named John Dietrich made a name for himself by openly championing what he called humanism, as an alternative to theism or a belief in God. Dietrich was particularly concerned with the growth of fundamentalism, and preached more than once on the problems of fundamentalism. It was in the first three decades of the 20th century that both the Unitarians and the Universalists experienced open warfare between humanists and theists. Individuals at both extremes put forth thunderous pronouncements on the problems of their opponents. At the same time, there were plenty of people in the middle who were quieter and, to my way of thinking, more interesting. E. Stanton Hodgins was one such person: he was a humanist who was invited to sign the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, but refused because it seemed too much like a creed to him.

And that brings us to the Humanist Manifesto. In 1933, a couple of people put together a statement of what they saw as the core of humanist beliefs. 34 people signed this first Humanist Manifesto, of whom 15 were Unitarians, and at least one Universalist, Jew, and member of the Ethical Culture Society. The most famous of the signatories was the philosopher John Dewey. In its day, it was a radical document. Today, the first thing I notice is that it wasn’t signed by any women; this makes it seem far less radical to me.

Non-theist ideas spread quickly, far beyond the narrow little confines of people who called themselves humanists. In one example, a major theological movement in the mid-20th century was so-called death of God theology. At the same time, rising secularlism in the Western world seemed to some to herald the eventual death of religion. In 1965, the liberal theologian Harvey Cox wrote an influential book titled The Secular City, in which he talked about the rise of the secular world and the seeming decline of religion. All this had a big influence on the Unitarian Universalist Association, formed in 1961 from the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists.

But the really big theological change within the new Unitarian Universalist Association turned out to be feminist and black liberation theologies. Black liberation theology turned the new UUA upside down beginning in 1967 with the so-called Black Empowerment Controversy; unfortunately, the white-dominated UUA refused to have much to do with black liberation theology, and about half the African American Unitarian Universalists left the UUA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of the ones who stayed was William R. Jones, who continues to challenge us theologically.

Feminist liberation theology, unlike black liberation theology, had amazing success within the UUA. By the mid-1980s we can safely say that the dominant theology within the UUA was feminist liberation theology. Unitarian Universalist humanist theologies should have been poised to ride the feminist wave — from the humanist point of view, God should have been portrayed as the ultimate male chauvinist pig — but that didn’t happen. Instead, we saw a dramatic increase in goddess-worshippers, as well as liberal Christian re-interpretations of theism. Too many of the old humanists were mired in a sexist version of humanism, and they seem to have completely missed feminist theology’s challenge to humanism. Finally, by the late 1990s, a few feminist humanists began to reinterpret humanism from a feminist perspective. Two notable figures are Sharon Welch, whom we will be reading in a few weeks, and Carol Hepokoski, a Unitarian Universalist minister and former professor of theology who has been developing an interesting feminist and ecological humanism.

One of the critiques leveled against Unitarian Universalist humanists is that they tended to be pretty cold-blooded. Bill Murry, a long-time humanist minister and experienced giver of pastoral care, became an influential voice for the pastoral side of humanism during his tenure as president of Meadville Lombard Theological School in the early 2000s. Also at Meadville Lombard during that decade was philosopher and scholar of religion Jerome Stone. Jerry began redefining what he called “religious naturalism” as something of an alternative to humanism. Religious naturalism turns out to be somewhat easier to define than humanism — religious naturalism is defined as rejecting supernaturalism in religion in favor of a more empirical, naturalistic approach.

And that brings us more or less to the present moment in Unitarian Universalism. Today, it is fairly pointless for a Unitarian Universalist to proclaim, “I don’t believe in God.” Such a bald statement will cause Neopagans to proclaim that they don’t believe in God either, they believe in the Goddess, or Goddesses, or multiple deities of whatever gender. Religious naturalists will challenge such a statement by saying, Define the God that you don’t believe in, and then saying that they don’t believe in that God either but some would say it is possible to define a God that they might believe in. There are the pragmatists like me who will challenge the statement of “I don’t believe in God” with the rejoinder, “I want to know what results in the real world come from such metaphysical inquiry (which, parenthetically, seems to the pragmatist to be fruitless inquiry).” And there are those upholding feminist theologies, liberation theologies for people of color, queer theologies, ecological theologies, and so on, who like the pragmatists want to know how the humanist is going to solve real-world problems.

So the theological conversation continues. The key thing from my point of view is to engage in the conversation as it exists today, and to make positive contributions. What I hope to do in this course is to introduce you to some Unitarian Universalist humanist thinkers of the past fifty years, so you know where the conversation has been — so you can engage in the conversation as it exists today. And if we’re really good, we will start making some positive contributions to the ongoing theological conversation — that is, we will begin to do some constructive thinking together, and maybe, perhaps, move the conversation forward to confront the realities of our moment in history.

Lecture 2

This lecture is copyright (c) 2010 Daniel Harper. This lecture may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes only, provided this copyright notice accompanies all copies.

———

For reference, here’s the course reading list:

(1) For October 23: “Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows,” William R. Jones, on reserve in the library of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, or available online at:
www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1874

(2) For November 3: “Living with Death” and “Being Honest with Death,” pp. 121-142 in A Faith for All Seasons by William R. Murry (Bethesda, MD: River Road Press, 1990); on reserve in the library.

(3) For November 17: “Ethics without Virtue,” pp. 119-136 in Sweet Dreams in America: Making Ethics and Spirituality Work, by Sharon Welch (New York: Routledge, 1999); on reserve in the library.

(4) For November 24: “What Is Religious Naturalism?” by Jerome Stone, on reserve or available online at:
www.meadville.edu/journal/2000_stone_2_1.pdf

Dana Greeley, the first president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, wrote the following in 1970:

“I once preached what I thought was a pretty good sermon on ‘The Methodological Conservatism of Theological Liberals.’ We have to be as inventive with our money as we are with tools or medicine or private enterprise. And to me it is more important, and more natural, for liberal religion to be bold, and to grow, than for IBM or some new computer company to be bold or grow. The worst complacency in the world is religious complacency.”

In a recent comment, Joe C. asks some very good questions, saying: “I agree that increasing worship attendance is a worthy goal and is likely to have good side effects. The questions then become: how do we increasing worship attendance? what kinds of worship service satisfy the needs of current and future members? what is the purpose of worship services in the UU context and how do we know if we achieved this purpose?”

All very good questions. Every local congregation is going to have to answer these questions to meet their local situations. A general principle seems apparent, though: one increases worship service attendance by directly addressing the hurts and hopes of present members and friends — and this is likely to address the hurts and hopes of potential members and friends, who may then begin attending worship services.

In this context, the purpose of UU worship services is to put individuals in touch with something larger than themselves. Some Unitarian Universalists (a minority these days) might say that it is God which is larger than ourselves, and the rest of us will not wish to put God in that place. But whatever our stand on the God question, all of us will say that there are larger moral and ethical principles that should govern our lives; there is the interrelationship of all life; etc. However we name that larger principle, one primary purpose of Unitarian Universalist worship services is to remind people that there is something larger than ourselves.

A second purpose of Unitarian Universalist worship services is to put individuals in touch with a living human community. This community is literally the immediate and present community of that Unitarian Universalist congregation. More figuratively, it is the worldwide community of Unitarians, Universalists, Unitarian Universalists, and other religious liberals; and it is the historical community to which the local congregation traces its roots. It is to our living human community that we can bring our hurts and hopes. It is from this living human community that we can draw strength to get through the hurtful and difficult times in life; furthermore, we can draw strength from this living human community, and take that strength out into the world to make the world a better place, i.e., to make our hopes come true.

Thus, when we say our goal is to increase worship service attendance, we are actually inviting people to join us in connecting with something that is larger than our individual selves, and we are inviting people to share their hurts and hopes with us as we share our hurts and hopes with them. When we talk about increasing worship attendance, we are implying that there are larger ends contained within that simple numerical goal.

How do we know if we have achieved these larger goals? In my experience in congregations that have lived out these ideals, there aren’t specific metrics we can look to (unlike some Christian churches that point to how many people have been saved). Instead, what we look for is anecdotal evidence that people’s lives are being changed, both by staying in touch with something larger than themselves, and staying in touch with a living human community. This anecdotal evidence can be reflected back to the congregation in a variety of formats: some UU congregations ask members and friends to give one or two minutes “testimonies” of how the congregation has changed their lives; some UU congregations reflect these stories back through the sermon (having asked permission from those concerned, of course); some UU congregations find that “Joys and Sorrows” (or as we call it here in Palo Alto, “Caring and Sharing”) is the time when persons reflect this back; some UU congregations may find this happens during a pastoral prayer; in some congregations, this occasionally may also take place outside of worship, e.g., in the newsletter.

In light of growth initiatives here in the Palo Alto congregation, I’ve been considering the following passage from Twelve Keys to an Effective Church by Kennon L. Callahan, the classic congregational growth book:

“…It is worth noting that there is a direct correlation between worship attendance and membership growth and income. Those churches that have increased their worship attendance tend also to discover that their membership grows and their financial resources increase as well. Frankly, those churches whose primary objectives are increasing their membership and improving their giving are working on the wrong strategic objectives. As a matter of fact, they would do better to work on the objective of increasing worship attendance. The by-products of that alone would be an increase in membership and an increase in giving. … We do not work to increase worship attendance as a means to the ends of more members and more giving. Rather, we genuinely and thoughtfully share corporate, dynamic worship in outreaching and outgoing ways for the help and hope it delivers in people’s lives….” [p. 32]

In my experience, Callahan is generally correct: an increase worship attendance correlates to an increase in membership growth and giving. I once saw growth in worship attendance that was couple with a decline in membership, but that was in a congregation where there were many members who were members on paper only and had no real connection to the congregation; since that increase in worship attendance led to an overall gain in giving, I did not worry about the decline in membership.

I believe Callahan is also correct in saying that increasing worship attendance is a worthy strategic objective, but increasing membership and giving are not good strategic objectives. Over and over again, I have seen congregations state that they are going to increase membership and giving — and then fail to do so, because increasing membership and giving are not worthy ends in themselves. But when we say that we’re going to increase worship attendance, it’s immediately clear why we want to do so: we know in our guts that having more people at worship will feel better, not only because there will be more energy in the room, not only because attending religious services makes me feel better and I want to share that with other people — but also because if there’s hardly anyone at the worship service I attend, I feel like a chump for having gotten out of bed on Sunday to go to something that no one else is going to.

Having more people at worship makes me feel like I’m not a chump. Having more people at worship makes worship more exciting for me. Having more people at worship makes me feel good because I know more people are sharing in something I think is worth sharing in. It is a worthy end in and of itself.

Follow-up post: “The purposes of UU worship services”

Carol and I went out for a walk. It was dark and drizzling rain. A few cars whizzed by on the wet pavement, and aside from that it was quiet. Then I heard fireworks somewhere off to our right.”I wonder who’s having fireworks tonight?” I said. Then we heard fireworks in front of us. “Maybe it’s the Giants game,” said Carol. “Of course,” I said, “they must’ve won.” Later, a car full of people drove past us, the windows down in spite of the rain. The people in the car shouted something that sounded like “Wa waba!” A few minutes later another car drove by, an orange and black piece of cloth flapping out a rear window. When we got to downtown San Mateo, we could hear blaring horns and people shouting down along Fourth Avenue.

The Giants are going to the World Series, and people on the Peninsula are celebrating.

It rained today; usually not much more than a drizzle or a mist, barely enough to feel on your face, but a few times I could hear the rain pattering on the roof. It didn’t rain all day, nor even the majority of the day, but it felt like a rainy day. The air is humid, and outdoors the smells are more intense: the smell of the pine tree near our house, the smell of the big Dumpster we walked by, the smells coming up out of the storm drains, the smell of some flower we walked by. Everything feels damp, and the bath towels we used this morning still haven’t dried out. This feels like the real beginning to this year’s rainy season.

One of the other subcultures I belong to, science fiction fandom, is currently being racked by a major controversy: prominent author Elizabeth Moon has just been dis-invited as the guest of honor at Wiscon, the preeminent feminist science fiction convention, because of this post she made on her blog. Many people within the science fiction community, mostly political leftists, decided on the basis of one post that Moon is anti-Islamic. So, to make a long story short, she is no longer the guest of honor at the preeminent feminist science fiction convention.

I remember talking to my friend Joan some years ago. Like me, Joan is a science fiction fan, a Unitarian Universalist, and a leftist. Joan and I were talking about our early science fiction reading. She said that she discovered one of Robert Heinlein’s novels during her adolescence, and after reading that one, she went on and read all the others she could find in the library. She completely disagreed with most of Heinlein’s political and moral philosophy, but she read his novels anyway. Why? Because he took ideas seriously, and because she enjoyed arguing with him while she read his books, and perhaps because almost no one else in her life wanted to discuss such topics.

This is precisely why I am a science fiction fan. This is why I have lunch every couple of months with Mike, my science fiction buddy since high school: we get together to talk about the books we have read, and the ideas in them. This is why I go to the occasional science fiction convention even though I dislike crowds and dislike being indoors for entire days: science fiction conventions are full of people who are very smart, and who affirm widely varying political and moral philosophies, and who love to talk about books and ideas. I love talking with smart articulate people who hold very different opinions and ideas than I do. (This, of course, is also why I am a Unitarian Universalist: although we are too homogeneous politically, I do love being able to argue with smart articulate people who are Deists, atheists, humanists, liberal Christians, Neopagans, mystics, etc., etc.) Wiscon was wrong to dis-invite Elizabeth Moon. Their action violates what to me is a basic precept of science fiction fandom, the lively exchange of ideas and arguments with people who hold very different ideas from oneself. It makes me sad.

It’s as if some Unitarian Universalist humanists didn’t allow people to say “God” in a worship service because that word bothered them; or as if some liberal Christian Unitarian Universalist refused to become part of a congregation that was “too humanist.” Oh wait, that does happen within Unitarian Universalism. Which also makes me very sad.

Thanks to Will, who posted about this same topic earlier today.

I had a long talk about theology with a Calvinist friend the other day. While we disagreed on some really basic points — he doesn’t accept universal salvation, I don’t accept the need for belief in God — we really had quite a bit in common. As the descendant (both literally and religiously) of the Puritans, I’m quite comfortable talking with Calvinists. They believe human beings are fallen beings who are made in the image of God; I’m quite sure that human beings are utterly fallible and basically irrational beings who are also capable of astonishing goodness. Calvinists believe that God elects some persons for salvation regardless of what those persons do with their lives; as a Universalist I’m quite sure that if there is a heaven, we all get to go there regardless of what we do with our lives because love will overcome all obstacles (Universalist compost theology refines this point by saying we all get to break down into our constituent organic components and re-enter the ecosystem after death).

I think most of all I’m comfortable with Calvinism because of Calvin’s ideas of worship. He believed in simplicity in worship in order to emphasize what it is most important. and to remove extraneous distractions. He believed that everyone in the congregation should be able to see and hear everything in the worship service. He insisted on congregational participation in worship, e.g., congregational participation in singing rather than just having worship leaders sing. None of this came up in the discussion of theology I had with my friend, but in my mind it was always in the background.

Another way of saying all this is that Unitarianism and Universalism began as reformations of the Reformed tradition that traces its roots back to John Calvin. We have gone off on our own, but there’s a clear family resemblance.

The young man hailed me as I was about to go into the church kitchen to fix my dinner. He wondered if we had money we could give him; he was out of work; and so on. He didn’t seem like a con artist, or an addict, and I didn’t recognize him as one of the regulars who come back every few months with the same threadbare story. I told him we didn’t have money to give out, that what little money we got went to members of friends of the church. We talked a little about his specific problem. When I finally let it slip that I was close to someone who had been looking for work for a long time, he began to give me advice to pass along: here’s the best approach to use in interviews these days; here are the current hot Web sites for job searches; here’s the advice he gives for structuring resumes; and so on. It was really good advice. It was clear that he was dead serious about his job search. Just then Amy, the senior minister, happened to walk by. I asked if she had any money in her discretionary fund. She said someone had just given her some money back. She gave the money to the young man. Do I have to pay it back? he asked. No, no, we said, if you want to that’s fine and we’ll then give it to someone else, but just take it. He took the money, and I told him that if he was going to get the rest of what he needed by tomorrow, he’d better head off. He wrote down the best job search Web sites for me to pass on to the person I knew who is looking for work, and then he went on his way.

Update: He came back and repaid the money.

How important is the size of a congregation’s membership? Here’s Kennon Callahan’s response:

“Regrettably, in many of the churches in our country there is a preoccupation with membership. A simple illustration will suffice: Two ministers meet at a conference. The one minister is in the process of moving to a new pastorate. The other minister, in an almost automatic way, asks, ‘How many members does your new church have?’ The more important question would be, ‘How many people is your new church serving in mission?'” (Kennon Callahan, Twelve Keys to an Effective Church, 1st ed., Jossey-Bass, 1983, pp. 2-3.) And what does Callahan mean by “mission”? He defines it thus: “…in doing effective mission, the local congregation focuses on both individual as well as institutional hurts and hopes.”

Of course it’s more complicated, and more nuanced, than these bald statements would imply. For the complex, nuanced version, you’ll have to read the first chapter of Callahan’s book yourself.

A friend of mine who’s headed towards liberal ministry told me that she hopes to do more innovative worship when she finally gets into a local congregation. I would tend to agree with that feeling. But over the years, I’ve seen many attempts at innovative worship either founder on the rocks of reality, or drift into blandness and puerility. Perhaps it is possible to chart out a better course.

Here is my attempt at listing some of the criteria we might use when creating seriously innovative worship — in a liberal religious context:

Criterion 1 — Seriously innovative worship has to encompass multiple theological stances. Circle worship is too often grounded either in a limited Neopagan theological stance (e.g., in Starhawk’s Wiccanism), or in a limited liberal Christian stance (e.g., in Letty Russell’s “church in the round”). Like conventional liberal religious worship, seriously innovative worship will work well with humanism, liberation theologies, contemporary liberal Christianity, Neopaganism, feminist theology, etc.

Criterion 2 — Seriously innovative worship must be scalable. A big problem with many circle worship and alt.worship approaches is that they work best for small groups (under a hundred people). If we’re going to be seriously innovative, we’re not going to limit ourselves to a certain size of worship service.

Criterion 3 — Seriously innovative worship cannot require additional worship planning time. Both paid clergy and volunteer worship leaders tend to have inelastic schedules that cannot accommodate even another two hours of worship preparation a week. Seriously innovative worship will be practical, and fit in real world time constraints.

Criterion 4 — Seriously innovative worship should be radically inclusive, allowing first-time visitors to participate fully. Seriously innovative worship, in the best tradition of liberal religion, will invite everyone to participate: children may stay for the whole service if they choose; all elements of the service are understandable; all may participate in communion (traditional communion, flower communion) or similar rituals when offered; there are no bits that only worship leaders see and hear because everyone can see and hear everything; and so on.

Criterion 4 — Seriously innovative worship should always have something for the person who has come that day in sadness or sorrow, or joy, looking for a place and a community to support them in sadness or joy. Seriously innovative worship will support us through real human hurts and hopes.

Criterion 5 — Seriously innovative worship for liberal religion cannot discard intellectual content. A defining characteristic of religious liberals is that we are thinkers; while we probably want to encourage more feeling in worship, that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of thinking. We will come out of seriously innovative worship with something to think about for the rest of the week.

Criterion 6 — Seriously innovative worship for liberal religion will remain connected with the historical roots of liberal religious worship. All innovation requires a deep understanding of, and feel for, an existing tradition. Seriously innovative worship won’t be widely adopted unless it grows out of a common experience most religious liberals share, bringing new life and energy to our existing tradition.

The next step is to take these six criteria, and start applying them to our current attempts at innovative worship….

Mt. Shasta in the distance, as seen from a rest area off Interstate 5 near Gazelle, California.

On the drive up to Portland, we listened to the end of the audiobook we had started the day before, A Damsel in Distress by P. G. Wodehouse. We got to the place where I was going to attend a Sacred Harp singing convention, and the book wasn’t quite done yet. We sat there in the car and listened for ten minutes, and the book wasn’t quite done yet. “The final chapter,” said the narrator, and Carol said, “Let’s listen to the last chapter on the drive home.” So we stopped the recording, and I got out to go sing for a few hours.

Carol came to pick me up at three, and we went for a walk with two friends, A— and N—. We took a walk in a park, and A— and I talked about Unitarian Universalism while N— and Carol talked about ecological pollution prevention.

From there, Carol and I drove across the Broadway Bridge and parked near Union Station, a big McKim, Mead, and White building. We walked into the station to use the bathrooms, and it is still quite grand, with big wooden benches (Wikipedia has a nice panoramic photo), and a dozen trains a day passing through or terminating there.

We walked around, and wound up at Powell’s Books. Of course we wound up at Powell’s Books; it’s the kind of place that exerts a gravitational force on people like us. Powell’s exerted a gravitational force on a great many people this evening, and I was almost distracted from the books by the truly excellent people watching. But I exerted self discipline, went and found half a dozen books to buy, and went to have a cup of coffee. The coffee shop in Powell’s was packed, but Carol had saved me a chair. Next to me, a young man studied for the Graduate Record Exams. Across the table, a middle-aged man read some obscure book and barely sipped a cup of coffee. On the other side of Carol, two older men played speed chess.

I half-watched the chess players for a while: White played e4 and bam! hit the button of the clock. Black played e5 and bam! bam! bam! hit the clock three times (he favored the three bam clock gambit). White unwrapped a sandwich as he brought his knight out to f3 and bam! hit the clock. Black immediately played his knight to c6 and bam! bam! bam! White shot his bishop out to b5 and took a bite of sandwich, then remembered that he had to hit the clock and bam! But I don’t play chess any more, and my attention wandered back to the book I was reading.

We walked back to the car, and as soon as we got back on the freeway we played the last chapter of the audiobook. It all ended satisfactorily, as we knew it would, but it was funny enough, and unexpected enough, to keep us listening to the very end.

We left San Mateo at eleven o’clock, and not long after noon we had left behind the crazy traffic and dense population of the Bay area. We got off the freeway, drove through orchards of walnut and pomegranate trees, and stopped for lunch in the small town of Winters. Carol had a perfect food experience: shrimp salad served on fiesta ware on a cheerful Mexican tablecloth.

I had ever driven through the far northern part of California. The freeway left the flat agricultural lands of the Central Valley, wound up through savannah with live oaks and grasses so dry they were whitish-gold, and into the foothills of the Cascade Range. And there was Mount Shasta, impossibly high, its peak hidden in a cloud. The freeway wound past and over Lake Shasta; but I was driving and decided I had better not look too much or we would be down that steep slope and in those blue lake waters way down below the roadway.

At dinner time we stopped in Grants Pass, Oregon, and ate at Shari’s, a restaurant chain of the Pacific Northwest. I have learned to be skeptical of pie purchased near interstate highways, but Shari’s served astonishingly good pie: Marionberry pie with no sugar added, a crust that was light and flaky.

We arrived in Salem at eleven o’clock, twelve hours after leaving home, with no energy for anything except going to bed.