…it’s not the same as the new blog. You have reached the old version of this blog, which was updated from February 23, 2005, through December 31, 2010.

Click here for the current version of Yet Another Unitarian Universalist.

There is no longer a redirect on the old address to this blog. Therefore, if you haven’t updated your bookmarks or your RSS reader, or if you’re following an old link, you’ll wind up at the old blog. So please update your bookmarks, etc.

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.