Why I Am Not A UU With A Prelude About Advent

Making plans for doing an Advent series I was tempted to go back to the one I attempted and botched for reasons of illness and politics last year based on Walter Brueggemann's Gift and Task, a fine book of commentary on a Protestant lexicon LECTIONARY for "year 2" of their liturgical cycle, if I have the terminology right. It was written for the year 2017 and, aside from the peculiarities of the misfit between the liturgical and civil calendars, more or less matches the church year that begins on Sunday.

But I decided to go with a multi-denominational Advent this year, one based partly in Catholic resources, the commentary on the readings for Sundays and partly on Protestant sources. I'm no longer satisfied with only one denomination, good things having been said in so many of them. I should have started before Thanksgiving as one of the resources I'll be using does. Fr. Scott Lewis a Toronto based scholar, whose excellent online comments on the Catholic Sunday liturgy is posted a week ahead which gives you a whole week to read the readings and think about them. For beginners like myself, we might get more from a go-slower approach. I hope to, as well be using the excellent commentaries of the late Sr. Verna Holyhead from her commentary on the Year B lectionary, Welcoming The Word in Year B.

At least that's the plan. I will post other online resources from the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church and others, as I look around.

 

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Not related, in looking around I came across an old article, Why “Unitarian Universalism” is Dying by David Loehr. an interesting and rather devastating criticism of Unitarian-Universalism that I think has things that mainstream American liberalism could learn something from.  As Loehr ministered a UU congregation I might have called it an internal critique but Loehr disclaims Unitarian Universalism, calling himself a "religious liberal".  He was also a member of the "Jesus Seminar".  

While I very much encourage people to read his essay because he raises many excellent points,  I don't agree with everything said in it about liberalism.  For a start I reject the assumption that the tradition that comes down to us from late 18th century secularism, scientism, etc. is the same thing as the far more radical though often intersecting tradition that was an outgrowth of Christian social thought out of a much earlier and much more explicitly Scriptural inspiration which has been in line with much we consider "liberal" since the early centuries of Christianity and, before, in Christianities older sibling, the Mosaic faith. I think to mistake the two is not only to get it wrong but it also leads to getting more wrong. The "enlightenment" tradition was already counter-productive for the struggle for social-justice by the end of the 18th century, the most appaling features of the United States Constitution, placed there by rational people, devotees of secular scientism, many of them early American Unitarians. It continues to sap the life out of the far more consequential and productive religious struggle for equality and the sustainence of life.

I don't share Loehr's belief in the impossibility of rational, informed people to believe that there is a divinely sourced aspect of life as we experience it because that is how it really is. There is the flavor in that which discounts the fact that many, even some of the most accomplished mathematicians and scientists, have been able to both say the times tables and to pray, despite what people believe Clarence Darrow claimed. Certainly you could contrast the failure of, for example, the Catholic Church to peter out the way that Loher bemoans the, probably, by now, decimation of the Unitarian Universalist sect. I doubt there has been any Unitarian who has been a greater and more exigent intellectual than the thoroughly up-to-date, informed intellectuals such as Hans Kung and Karl Rahner, I've read more of the trinity of those 19th century UU thinkers Loher rightly mentions, Channing, Emerson and Parker that I'll bet most UUs have and none of them could hold an intellectual candle to many modern Christian, Jewish, Islamic intellectuals. That as, for example, The Catholic Church fully participates in rational thought and the promotion of learning, scholastic, academic, scientific, etc.  - it's servicing of elite education is, in fact, one of the most scandalous things about it just now. But the article is very full of hard questions and points to consider.

One of his points around the issue of abortion is something I had been thinking of writing about at length, I do think his points are some that need to be addressed. Though that I have to use the masculine pronoun to describe either of us points to the fact that as males, we can hardly be thought to have the primary right to consider the issue. THAT WOMEN ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN BECOME PREGNANT AND DEAL WITH THE ISSUE OF BEARING A CHILD TO TERM MEANS THAT THEY,NOT MEN, HAVE THE PRIMARY CREDIBILITY TO ADDRESS THAT ISSUE. Which is why I'm reluctant to talk about it more than I do.  That inescapable quality of its appurtenance to women and not to men is not a negotiable or dismissible part of the issue.

This passage is a good example of both the good and the bad sides of the article:

Good social critics —both conservative and liberal ones —have written about the narcissism of the biases reflected in the Seven Principles/Banalities/Dwarfs. But you will seldom hear them from UU pulpits, and never read them in the movement’s guardian of orthodoxy, the UU World. Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Jonathan Rauch, Jim Sleeper, Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia and Todd Gitlin come quickly to mind as among the many authors who wrote widely-read critiques of the racism, sexism and narcissism of the liberal culture.

First, the "Seven Principles" are the often given banal set of "principles" that was meant to give the UU sect something, something, perhaps anything to stand for while studiously avoiding any "supernatural" commitment. As Loher notes they are indistinguishable from vague platitudes of conventional mid-20th century secular liberalism. I would note that they're something that "moderates" wouldn't have much trouble with,which is to say that there is little in them that would fuel something like the Civil Rights movement or a successful abolition struggle. I think they could never fuel much of anything because to be credible and effective you need more than a vague feeling of niceness to make a real committment to the difficult, hard and dangerous means to really change the universal habit of human selfishness in a better direction. The utopian political ideologies of the secular, scientistic type prove that an attempt to do that out of scientific assertion produces genocide and doesn't really change anything.

I do think his criticism of the attractiveness of seeing Black people who are subject to racism as hapless victims instead of survivors is one that white men must also take a secondary role in discussing. But I think his list is rather a disaster. There were plenty of religious critics of that condescending, disgusting and disempowering attitude whose criticism was more apt and effective, as exigent internal criticism can often be. And the subsequent reviving of extreme and widespread racism and sexism under the political movement that Sowell, Steel, Sommers etc. have been associated with is even more discrediting of their ideas. Loher may not realize it but the list he gives is as much a part of the secular, scientistic tradition that accounts for the moribundity of the UU movement as secular, scientistic flowing from the liberalism of the 18th century type. 

 

I utterly reject any assertion that Camille Paglia belongs on any such list.  I have no idea why he put her on it except that she's a foolish cultures concept of what an intellectual is, and modernism has produced one of the stupidest excuses for a serious intellectual scene in the history of human culture.

There has been plenty of such internal criticism, certainly in overtly theistic and scriptural liberalism, I don't think anyone is more exigent a critic of that kind than the Black Liberation theologians, other liberation theologians, Feminist theologians, etc. Walter Brueggemann's critique of mainstream Christian liberalism is extensive and unflinching.  That the devotees of respectable niceness is unaware of that doesn't surprise me and if the  UUs of Austin are anything like those I've known in Northern New England, that's what it is.  When the minor and, I expect, about spent movement of atheists' playing church started I wondered why they didn't just go to the UU church, it was pretty much the same thing.  What that most effective critic of Unitarians, Garrison Keillor noted as "the church of the brunch" was a replacement for religion that was ever going to do anything. 

I could go on.  I do think David Loher's criticism of American secular, scientistic, moderny liberalism has much to ponder, I think he'd have done better to consider the internal criticism of Christian religion as perhaps the more effective and proper criticism of it because a lot of it is the same problem.   But, then, that started as soon as the Children of Israel started back sliding early in Exodus.