Peacebang, you made a good distinction I didn’t make clear in my comments. You differentiated between the public forum and our congregations. I 100% agree with this forumlation and definitely feel that our congregations should not be places where ANY religion is actively mocked. If I hear or see Christianity being rudely mocked in church I will loudly state my displeasure. We should be better than that. If I didn’t bring up the idea of free AND responsible, it’s because I thought that was just obviously understood. I would hope that anyone old enough to drive themselves to church in the first place would understand the need for respect and responsibility in religious conversation and exploration.

What I am asserting here is a particular cultural right to alter and interpret Christianity that derives not from being a professing Christian, but from Christianity being an inescapable part of our cultural heritage and everyday experiences. When religion is pushed into the realm of common culture, it becomes the property of every member of that culture, for better or for worse. Christianity in America isn’t just religion, it is also literature, cinema, politics, law, architecture, music, comedy, food, business, language, and so much more. It is too omnipresent and exerts too much power to be a sacred cow. This isn’t the same as saying that we should be rude toward Christianity or Christians.

What I’m really looking for here is an acknowledgement that the “UUs dabble in other religions and that’s troubling” debate needs to be more complicated than it has been. There is Christianity, and then there are all the other religions of the world. American UUs have a right to dabble in Christianity not simply because Christianity is by nature universally inclined as Scott suggested, but because a) our roots are directly Christian and b) we are force-fed Christianity and made to actually participate in Christianity anyway. Like it or not, Christianity is a special case. It’s far more troubling when UUs appropriate non-Christian religions that a) are not part of our heritage and b) are not directly impacting our lives with serious social and legal consequences. We fundamentally can’t misappropriate Christianity in the same way that we can misapporiate religions that lie outside our common experiences, especially religions that our society has historically held exploitative power over. I don’t think we can work through these issues without dealing with this fact of the basic difference between UU interactions with Christianity and UU interactions with non-Christian religions.

And let me say one more time for the record: I’m not encouraging anyone to diss Christianity nor personally intending to do anything disrespectful with Christian theology or ritual. I hope that those who know me realize how unlikely such behavior would be, and that those who don’t know me can tell that I’m not writing a manifesto about how yucky it is to be made to participate in Christianity because I’m an American. That’s not how I feel. Plus, it would be really tacky to do that on a Christian’s blog, and I’m taste-challenged enough as it is that I can’t afford to go flouncing about being actively tacky.

I have to disagree with you when you say the the Partner Church is cooperation (not really dialogue, at least I’ve seen scarce dialog at work) between denominations “with a shared theological orientation.” That sharing is only with UUCF at most, or would have been with pre-Humanist American Unitarianism, but certainly not with the current UUA. Transylvanian Unitarianism is 100% Christian and Bible-based, no mistakes about it. But certainly it is not a mother-daughter connection It is more of a sister-sister connection –and that was the original name of the program, if you remember this. However, despite all that and that theological orientations are widely different nowadays, cooperation is still there and there are more and more UUs who travel for tourism or pilgrimage to Transylvania. So there is more than a name in this connection, and that was my point all the time.

Why? Because we have more integrity than to do otherwise. And because when you talk about power — and I appreciate that you raised the issue — I had hoped that you might conclude that Unitarian Universalists, while well “outside” the power structure of orthodox (or even “state-approved”) Christianities, nevertheless have access to the greatest power source of all: Freedom. Personal and institutional freedom.

What greater power is there?

Who has more power: the one who holds the prison key and the torturing implements and wields the blazing torch over the bound heretic and his books, or the one who holds the freedom of their conviction that what God has granted each human person by virtue of their birth can never be destoyed by the captor’s threats and torments?

I think most UUs would heartily agree with Mr. Jesus of the Christ Family that the latter is true (while disagreeing about the source of freedom, but that’s beside the point). And yet the ostensibly Christian power-brokers in our culturally Christian nation behave as though the former is true. It is for this reason among others that we owe Christian religion more respect than Oreos communions.

In short, I rail against and scorn cultural Christianity all I want, but when it comes to the church, a different ethic is in play. While we are in the church, a community of memory, hope and reverence, we hold to the vision of what ought to be; we do not merely succumb to the despair of what is.

And… Biblical porn!!!?? LOL!

My point is only that the English and American Unitarian movements — the strongest ones surviving today — were primarily products of the Enlightenment rather than of the first wave of the Reformation. They revived ideas from the earlier Reformation-era antitrinitarians, and developed them further, but they did so de novo and did not belong to or descend from any older Reformation-era church or tradition.

The Partner Church program is a dialogue between two independent denominations with a shared theological orientation, not unlike the relationship among the Reformed and Presbyterian and UCC churches, or the relationship between the Episcopalian and Lutheran churches, in the US. It is not a relationship between a mother church and her dependent daughter, as is (for example) the one between the Church of England and American Episcopalians. The Unitarian denominational identity and doctrinal character in England and America had been long established before any meaningful direct dialogue with the church in Transylvania began.

You are right that there is only institutional continuity in Transylvania. But, since when are we institutionalists? :-) Is a religious tradition defined by institutions? There was no Christian Church until the 4th century, and there was no Unitarian denomination in the US until the 20th century (being the original AUA just an association of individuals). Religious currents of thought exist beyond organizations. But yes, you are certainly right. The connection is feeble, even unlikely. It seems like a miracle to me! Several times the Churches thought that they had destroyed Unitarianism. They burnt a person and his books in Geneva and thought they had won. They exiled and forced conversion on thousands in Poland and thought they had won. And Unitarianism always survived under the most unlikely circumstances and reappearing always as a stronger and more vital religion, easily adapting to new places and new eras because it did not depend upon an organization or a leadership, but upon a spirit. I call it the “golden thread of Untiarianism”, the incredibly thin but surprisingly enduring line that connects different peoples, times, and places together. And 500 years later, here we are, still standing!

And finally, if there is really no connection at all between American UUism and Transylvania, why is there a Partner Church program? Just because of a name? A big misunderstanding? A mistake? Should it be reconsidered? I mean, if there is nothing in common but a name, why keep it? Why caring about those guys when there are so many who need us more?

I’m not going to back down from saying that Christianity is a cultural commodity foisted on most Americans, and therefore it’s in play as a resource for them to appropriate as they see fit. I don’t think anyone can call it misappropriation: you can’t misappropriate what you yourself own. Christianity’s omnipresence in this culture has made us all its heirs; if contemporary Christians don’t like that, they’ll need to build a time machine and go have some stern conversations with the Puritans. The day that Christianity and Christian-derived influence ceases to be a basic part of the education and experience of the average American will be the day I stop believing that Americans are entitled to use it as they see fit.

That said, I’m hardly advocating disrespectful behavior. It’s not like I have Biblical porn on my shelf (heck, unless there’s something out there I don’t know about, I just made this concept up a couple of hours ago). Most of my blog posts at Transient and Permanent seem to have been about how we UUs need to more intentionally engage with our Christian roots, something that I definitely think requires both respect and responsibility. But I do think that one can’t answer the question which Scott was asking without dealing with the stark power dynamics of American religion and culture, and I didn’t see anyone else bringing it up. He suggested that we’re entitled as UUs to a little careful dabbling in Christianity because the nature of that religion invites us to check it out for ourselves (if I’m mischaracterizing you position, Scott, please call me on it). I’m suggesting another side of the issue, that many of can’t escape engaging in Christianity because it’s practically in the food and water. I don’t have to viscerally know Christianity as a Christian: I know a hell of a lot of it by the simple fact that I was made to know it and participate in it by all the freaking Christians around these parts. Again, I feel the Native American thing is a red herring, because there could hardly be a situation of more different power dynamics. Engagement with Christianity by Americans isn’t optional–the privilege of a majority is that it gets to set the agenda and doesn’t have to learn about minorities if it doesn’t want to.

That’s all true, but the influence of the early antitrinitarian Reformers on English-speaking Unitarians in both Britain and America was indirect only. Through the lens of Enlightenment rationalism the English speakers revived and expanded upon earlier ideas, but they were never the heirs to an older, unbroken religious tradition. Servetus never founded a church, Socinus’s church was suppressed and extinguished before “Unitarianism” was ever preached in England or America, and David’s church never exerted its influence beyond Transylvania and Hungary.

Note that “free” is only half the charge; the other half is “responsible”. I don’t hear Jeff honoring that obligation of responsibility when he says things like “I feel perfectly entitled to do whatever I want with Christianity; I can take communion with milk and cookies; I can write Biblical porn; I can cherry-pick quotations from scriptures to support my own interpretations of religion.”

There are some elements of both orthodox traditional Christianity and of more recent evangelical conservatism that we UUs have never embraced, nor do we now. However, we have always dissented respectfully from those aspects of Christianity that we do reject, and observed respectfully those aspects that we choose to retain. We UUs may have no duty to embrace those aspects of Christianity we find meaningless, but actively mocking and corrupting Christian sacraments, and debasing or abusing Christian holy scripture, are inauthentic practices within both the broader Christian and narrower denominational UU traditions, and therefore do constitute misappropriation.

I agree that I’m treating the majority religion as if it were part of the public culture: it is. Christianity isn’t a universal religion in America, it is an ethnic one. By being ethnically American, I’ve been immersed in the ethnic religion, as any foreigner who comes to America can tell you we have (even foreign Christians will readily point you to the ethnic peculiarities of our local brand of Christianity). Heck, even the idea that we could opt out of the ethnic national religion is just one tenet of our local, shared version of ethnic Christianity: a great many Christian societies would consider the possibility of such an opting out absurd. It is part of the American (especially Protestant) Christian way of thinking to believe that religion has to do with whether one somewhere deep inside individually believes in certain core tenets of a religion; many others might argue that participation in the rituals and myths of a religion (voluntarily or otherwise) demonstrates the fact of shared owner/membership on some level.

Although my list might look like a lament at vicitimization at the hands of a Christian culture, it isn’t. I’m not claiming victim status here. I’m just calling things as I see them: Christians are everywhere in America and Christianity oozes from every aspect of the culture; I grew up in this culture; therefore I have a certain right to Christian things, a right that personally I don’t intend to abuse. I don’t hate America for making me grow up in constant contact with Christianity–I don’t even feel afronted. Maybe a little inconvenienced at times? But then I’ve benefitted greatly from my contact with Christianity. If I harp on its faults sometimes that doesn’t mean I don’t have a deep abiding affection for much of it, that I don’t feel grateful for the gifts I’ve received from it, that I wish I hadn’t grown in the shadow of such a beautiful tradition. I’m not perfect but overall I like myself, and if you could somehow magically remove all the Christian culture from me I just simply wouldn’t be who I am, I’d be someone else entirely.

I’m not sure what you mean by your comment on UUism and vanity, so I can’t reply to that one.

This isn’t just a discipline over simple willfulness; there’s a serious social and church-state issue here. Treating a majority religion as if it were a public service (”I can do what I want with it”) is hand-and-hand with its public establishment. There’s also a whiff of vanity, too, because Unitarian Universalism is immune to outside influence becuase it is so small.

This is getting into my second installment, but I think there are good reasons to treat religions that one does not belong to with distanced respect.

I can prove with texts that many of the ideas that are prevalent now in contemporary UUism, such as individual freedom of conscience and independent investigation of truth, diversity of opinions in the church which must be openly and freely confronted to reach a higher understanding in religious matters, positive evaluation of and interest in non-Christian faiths, tolerance to differing theological views, etc. may be traced back to Servetus. My Religious Studies thesis is around Servetus’s influence in both Poland and Transylvania, which is undeniable and more present than it was previously thought. The Polish Socinian connection with the beginnings of dissenting Unitarianism in England through Locke and Biddle has already been shown by other authors. And the link from Socinianism to American Unitarianism comes from England and through Deists and freethinkers such as Jefferson, as Dr. Marian Hillar has recently shown in his books (see his website http://www.socinian.org). So yes, there is a connection. But if American Unitarians prefer to be related to the New England Puritans rather than to the Enlightenment, it’s up to them and their interpretation of history (or their interest in underscoring covenantal theology rather than individual freedom and the use of reason in religion).

None of this comes by choice. I didn’t seek Christianity out, and have never explicitly identified myself with Christianity. But to be an average American is to be Christianized by the culture, even if one doesn’t “own the covenant.” Therefore, I feel perfectly entitled to do whatever I want with Christianity. I can take communion with milk and cookies; I can write Biblical porn; I can cherry-pick quotations from scriptures to support my own interpretations of religion; I can argue about what the Holy Spirit is or what “I am that I am” means; I can claim that Paul was a misogynist who distorted the true teachings of Jesus. Not that I necessarily do any of these things, but I would feel comfortably within my rights. I could also call myself Christian if I wished, without making much more in the way of committment to Christianity. That I don’t tend to do such things comes from a combination of lack of interest and a desire to respect the feelings of others, even those who haven’t respected my own.

I feel this same way about other religions, not just the so-called “world religions.” Someone who grows up in Israel is entitled to do whatever they want with Judaism, whether they are Jewish or not. A non-Buddhist from Thailand can appropriate and change whatever bits of Buddhism she wants to. If you were raised on the reservation you are entitled to whatever you want from the community beliefs, even if your personal orientation is Islam.

The analogy of appropriation of Native religions and Christianity is false. I haven’t been surrounded by a sea of Native religion for my entire life; no Native American has tried to convert me or used his/her religion to adversely affect my political/legal rights; I haven’t been dragged to Native ceremonies dozens of times a year; I don’t have Native stories and mythology projected at me on TV, movies, radio, newspaper, novels, English lit class, and as the crypto-basis of innummerable “non-religious” stories told in these media (everything from Lord of the Rings to The Matrix); I haven’t been made to pledge myself repeatedly to the Corn Mothers; there aren’t glowing neon dream-catchers atop hills nearby; no one passes out Native literature on the street corner; shops are open and I can buy alcohol on the Native Sabbath; my school or workplace never shut down for Lakota holidays; etc, etc, etc. Thus when I decide that my totem animal is a fox and I set up a sweat lodge and especially when I start claiming to speak for Native Americans, I am unjustly appropriating the sacred ways of a foreign minority group who has been systematically exploited by people of my ethnicity and nationality (we’ll leave aside that I actually have some Native ancestors, since I didn’t learn of this until I was an adult and no discernable cultural influence came down to me). On the other hand, when I appropriate Christianity I am only using the cultural tools provided by my own society, thrust into my hands (and down my throat, literally) at every stage of my development. Just as I can do whatever I want with the story of Jonny Appleseed or the singing of the National Anthemn, I feel that Christianity is part of my heritage and therefore something I own sufficiently to change or use as I see fit. I extend this same right to virtually all Americans at the same time that I decry the plundering of other religions which results in piracy and hurt feelings.

I say all of this without bringing up the heavily Christian elements of my home UU church, which probably entitle me to Christianity in a simple direct way, because my point is that power can’t be left out of these discussions. Isn’t our queasiness at the stealing of Native culture due primarily to the awful power disparity that has always existed in these cases? So why hasn’t power been raised before in this conversation? I don’t feel like Christians are victimized by anything I choose to do with Christianity; I couldn’t say the same about what I might choose to do with Amerindian culture/religion.

I would say they shared some theological concepts, but our “tradition” really only began during the Enlightenment.

Despite my chosen moniker, I would even say that the Reformation-era antitrinitarian theologians like Servetus, Socinus and David were unrelated to English-speaking Unitarianism, except perhaps in the sense of providing some intellectual fertilizer. Servetus was an idiosyncratic loner whose lousy political and social instincts got himself universally shunned and eventually killed, Socinus founded a Protestant church in Poland that the Catholics promptly wiped out, and David’s Transylvanian church survived alone in obscure isolation until long after the English-speaking movement had found its head of steam. (Does modern UUism resemble Servetus more than the other two? That could be an interesting discussion.)

In my UU congregation, which was founded in 1678, we still take Communion from a silver chalice given to us over 300 years ago for that purpose by a prishioner who also happened to be a justice at the Salem witch trials. We have more naming ceremonies than we have baptisms these days, but we still do have baptisms on occasion. (Did you know that the proper form for a Unitarian baptism is, as everywhere else in Christendom, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”? I didn’t until I saw it done, and only then did I realize that the invoking of those three archetypes does not necessarily also constitute an affirmation that they comprise a triune Godhead. Duh.)

Our newly ordained UU ministers of today stand in a direct, unbroken line of succession from past Christian stalwarts such as the Pilgrims, John Cotton, John Winthrop, John Eliot, the Mathers, Charles Chauncy, John Murray, the Ballous, and Frederic Hedge, and not only the more frequently named boundary-stretchers such as Channing, Parker, Emerson and Frothingham. In fact, few other contemporary Protestant denominational traditions are older or more authentic than ours. Our Christian authenticity, however orthodox or heterodox, is there for the claiming by any UU minister willing to own and practice it to whatever degree seems appropriate to the circumstances.

I am a former Christian. I was a very, very dedicated evangelical Christian who was “on fire for the Lord,” and knew all the good cliches. If you wanted to find me back then, you needed only look between the church platform (stage) and the first rows of seats. I was usually somewhere between these “dancing in the spirit.” If I wasn’t there I was roaming the streets of Phoenixville, PA trying to get people “saved.” I was as Christian as one could be. In fact, I was so over-zealous for the “Gospel” people often had to ‘reel me back in.’

So, now, after 10 years of theological study, I am no longer that Christian. I am a Unitarian. I am not ashamed to say that I know more than average believers about Christianity itself. I am very familiar with the original language, the primary texts, and the historical developments (Donald’s academics). I also am not ashamed to say that I really have “been there,” as a willing devotee, who experienced Christianity as an applied tradition. I earned my Theology B.A. from a private evangelical Christian College, with a heavy faith formation concern (Scott’s applied).

That being said, I feel as though I can respectfully comment, write, read, and/or observe Christianity from the outside in an authentic manner, without misappropriation. What is to be said, in the conversation, about those of us who have lived applied Christianity and have left it behind? We can speak about it without misappropriation, can’t we?

On the second point, I went to the UU Christian Fellowship communion service at GA and am not really sure how I felt about it. I wasn’t really sure if I should just not participate as if I were visiting a Catholic church. The ritual itself did not really speak to me. But I think that was as much a matter of style/aesthetics as theology.

I don’t think it would be wrong for me to perform a Christian wedding service if Christian friends asked me, and I will certainly give a Christian table grace when my relatives ask (even if it is politely Unitarian and Universalist) When I use the lectionary in a sermon and do some exegesis I think, much as Clyde said in a comment to my original post, that I am just participating in the Christian roots of the UU tradition. I would not however try to tell any “real” Christians that they are wrong in their exegesis even when I disagree.

On some level, I wonder what the line is between being an oddball atypical Christian with a low christology and being a Buddhist influenced panentheist inspired by Tillich and Paul.