Unitarianism Redux

I've written on Unitarianism in a previous blog, but sometimes you have a flight of inspiration to make a few more comments.

The biggest problem with Unitarianism is that it takes liberal social values and turns them into a matter of theological certainty. That is not something Unitarians themselves would like to hear, as they pride themselves on forsaking any claims to absolute knowledge in matters of theology. The problem, however, is that often times dogmas exist not primarily due to contrived indoctrination of this or that orthodoxy, but because of the prejudices developed in the course of familiarity to a particular community. That is, the church organization itself has a tendency to inculcate dogma via groupthink. As a matter of fact, this is actually worse than traditionally conceived overt dogma as it is not even out in the open and available for scrutiny.

Unitarianism is geographically strongest in Massachusetts (approx. 35,000 members), and with Episcopalism shares the distinction of being a religion of Blue Bloods and Boston Brahmins. The Unitarian population is also somewhat larger in the Seattle metro area, but outside of those areas the Unitarian community does not extend beyond a few thousand per state, usually varying with how liberal that particular state is. At least in America, it grew out of the influence of Enlightenment ideas in the already notoriously independent Congregational churches of New England.

In other words, it is primarily a northeastern WASP religion with enclaves of social liberals elsewhere that move in and out of the church in revolving-door fashion. According to one study, it has a higher percentage of members with incomes over $100,000 (21%) than any other historic American religion except Judaism (with 29%). It is fair to characterize UUs as bourgeois liberals.

This is important because there is a sort of faux magnanimity that pervades Unitarian culture. Any multicultural gesture or nod to social progressivity is welcomed with praise. And there are even a few middle-class posterchildren for such causes that are warmly embraced by the church. It is rare, however, to find tolerance that which falls outside the tacit morality of the privileged environment in which UUs operate.

For instance, Unitarians have been strongly associated with the civil rights movement in the past. They appear, however, to be unsympathetic to both the social conservatism of the black community and to its more extreme expressions of militant radicalism, favoring instead cool-headed reformism. Both black conservatism and radicalism come from the same necessity of negotiating underprivileged status, the first in desiring what little social cohesion can come through moral uprightness alone, the second in sheer desperate reaction to the conditions of urban poverty. In either case, it goes beyond the scope of UU respectability.

It's easy enough to point these things out to UUs and allow them to go through a bout of critical self-reflection. At the end of the day, however, there is only a new strategy developed to attempt to make the church appear more accessible to this demographic or to be more deferential to that alien attitude. Nothing can ever fundamentally question the Unitarian disposition in the first instance. There is a cozy yet superficially thoughtful and earnest sense of superiority.

This is the kind of thing to which I refer when speaking of Unitarian dogmatism. It is especially grotesque when examing cultural trends. Any leftward shift in popular sentiment is not perceived on the terms in which the average American experienced it, but rather as a groping towards the prior existing wisdom possessed by the small vanguard of enlightened religious liberals.

It can almost be likened to the gay-dar gone berserk of some in the gay community that sees homosexuality or the seeds of it in anyone and everyone. Which makes me think, can we speak of "U-dar"? Hmm, perhaps it could stick...