Roots of Unitarian Resistance

Welcome to Resistance, part 3

The Unitarians and Universalists got into the 20th century and neither tribe was much for resisting war and injustice. Rev. John Haynes Holmes courageously stood against World War I, but he was roundly denounced by pretty much all the rest of the Unitarian establishment.

Then we hit the 1920s and that’s where we see the beginnings of the shift that would lead to the way we see ourselves today. The 1920s and 30s saw the humanist movement burgeon within Unitarianism and, to a lesser extent, within Universalism. Humanism dropped God out of the picture altogether, and, in order to do that, it emphasized the scientific method. Religious concepts were redefined “into human, non-magical, understandings."

"Where is our holy church?
Where people unite in the search for beauty, truth and right.
Where is our holy land?
Within the human soul, wherever free minds truly seek with character the goal.”

By the middle of the 20th century, in most Unitarian and Universalist congregations, the crosses had been taken down and the communion silver stashed in a remote basement closet.

Now we were becoming the resistors. We weren’t just a lower-demand version of the prevailing Christianity.

In the 1950s, business interests were combining with mainstream Protestantism to emphasize pro-business values and fight the Cold War. Prayer breakfasts swept the country, bringing together business leaders and church leaders to praise God and denounce communism. The 1950s so thoroughly conflated patriotism and religion that the words “under God” were added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954. It was no longer enough to be “one nation, indivisible.” We had to be “one nation, under God, indivisible” – because the enemy of both the business establishment and the religious establishment was Godless communism.

1959, the year that we Unitarian Universalists of White Plains moved into our current building, was the year church attendance in the US hit its peak. Just about everybody was in church on Sunday morning, and what was preached there was a theology of God, country, and General Motors -- albeit rather less so in Unitarian and Universalist congregations.

The 1950s were the time that we began to find ourselves in a counter-cultural place. When a plan was advanced to let kids out of public schools on Wednesday afternoon so they could attend religious instruction in their churches, it was a coalition of Unitarians and Jews that resisted.

The advertisments that Unitarians began running in the papers in the 50s and 60s had a distinctly resistant feel to them: For example:

“What's your idea of true religion? Unitarianism is a way of life, life of vigorous thought, constructive activity, of generous service -- not a religion of inherited creeds, revered saints, or holy books. Unitarianism is not an easy religion. It demands that people think out their beliefs for themselves, and then live those beliefs. The stress is place upon living this life nobly and effectively than on the preparation for an after-existence. If you have given up 'old time' religion, Unitarianism has the answer for you.”

Another advertisement proclaimed:

“Freedom is our Method
Reason is our Guide
Fellowship is our Spirit
Character is our Test
Service is our Goal.”

What kind of people, in the context of the prevailing buttoned-down “God and country” anti-communism would be attracted by ads like that? Clearly Unitarians weren’t the establishment any more. We weren’t even the slightly more skeptical wing of the respectable elite. We had evolved into centers of resistance to the prevailing conventional opinion.

Yes, the Unitarians and the Universalists go back 200 years in this country – and 400 years in Europe – but we were formed into what we are today during this phase of massive cultural conformity. The humanism that we moved into in the 30s put us in a position of cultural resistance in the 50s. Our humanism shifted us from insiders to outsiders. And that paved the way for the further cultural resistance that showed up in large-scale UU involvement in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, which set us up to be ready to resist a range of injustices.

But today another social trend has set in: people that want to resist mainstream or conservative religion feel a lot more free to just stay home. We still have the vestiges of our history of being the elite and the comfortable. And, in addition, some of the more activist inclined – people like Whitney Young, the leader of the Urban League, the type of folks that used to sit in the chairs at Community Unitarian Church when those chairs were new – now stay home.

So it’s an open question: How many of our congregations today are outposts of a culture of resistance to the mainstream culture? Here at Community UU, it is indeed our mission to engage in service to transform ourselves and our world. The world, of course, is constantly changing, but it doesn’t seem all that keen in changing in the ways we would like to see. There’s resistance to the spread of a more inclusive fairness and justice. It’s our job to resist that resistance. That’s what Unitarian Universalists do. We haven't always. We do now.

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(For this angle on Unitarian and Universalist history, I have drawn on Rev. Tom Schade's blogpost, "Humanism in Context," which provides much more detail.)

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Welcome to Resistance"
See also:
Part 1: Resistance
Part 2: Personality Shows Up When You Don't

Personality Shows Up When You Don't

Welcome to Resistance, part 2

Comforts and familiarity are not bad things. The challenge is to being intentional about when we opt for change and when we stay with the familiar and comfortable. It’s about living on purpose. If at a given time in your life, you need relaxation and comfort more than exhilaration or new learning, that’s fine. But are we pulled along by unconscious preferences, by habit or inertia? Or are we consciously choosing?

Habits, of course, are a very handy thing. It would take a lot of time and energy to think through everything from scratch. Habits of thought are shortcuts that allow us to continue to be guided by conclusions we have reached without the effort of having to remember how we reached that conclusion.

Personality

Because habits are so useful – they formed because they served us well in some way – they are hard to break. Constellations of habits of thought gel into a personality. Our personalities are classifiable into a set of categories. The Myers-Briggs system has 16 personality types. According to the Enneagram, there are 9 basic personality types. They have to do with your default ways of reacting, your habits of mind. (Neither of these popular personality typologies are worth more than parlor conversation. On problems with Myers-Briggs, SEE HERE. For analysis of the Enneagram, SEE HERE. Other personality assessment instruments -- perhaps better -- include: Neo Pi-R, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, 16PF, and Eysenck Personality Questionnaire.)

Here’s the thing, though: your personality is what shows up when you don’t. You see, when you’re fully present to a situation, creatively engaged with it, then you aren’t just deploying your usual, predictable habitual reactions – and what comes out isn’t classifiable into category. It’s unique. It bears the stamp of your individual style, but it doesn’t fit into any personality pigeonhole that can predict what you’ll do. Think of Picasso’s paintings or Beethoven’s symphonies. They have a recognizable style but not a predictability. If these artists had lived and been productive for an additional year, there's no way any one could predict what additional work they might have created -- but when we saw or heard it, we'd recognize its style.

Personality surveys ask a long list of questions about how you usually do things, what you do in various situations – and from your answers you can be identified as fitting within one or another pigeonhole characterization of your traits. What we find is that people who have engaged in a long, deep, and intentional spiritual development – whether Catholic monks or Sufi adepts or Buddhist practitioners – are harder to peg. The survey results are ambiguous. Such people can’t be categorized by habitual reactions, usual ego defense strategies, because they’ve trained themselves to be attentive to the details of each situation rather than categorize situations according to the features deemed most relevant. Such spiritually mature people each have their unique style, but, since they tend not to categorize their experiences, they don’t have categorizable responses to them. In other words, they are more often fully present. The whole self shows up, not just the personality type. Your personality is what shows up when you don’t.

When you do show up, your usual patterns of resistance are disrupted. When we really show up, we might find we have indeed been resisting something it’s time to stop resisting. And when we really show up to the wider world around us – stop ignoring injustices and cruelties that aren’t directed at us – we might find we have been complicit and complacent about some things it’s time to start resisting.

UU Resistance

We Unitarian Universalists are typically proud of our resistance. Our congregations often have an air of social rebellion. We like to think of ourselves as standing against the status quo and the powers that be. We have members that are active in social justice, and we sing songs like “Standing on the Side of Love” and “We are a Gentle Angry People.” Our version of our history highlights our activists, our slavery abolitionists, our women’s suffragists, our marchers at Selma, our anti-Vietnam war protesters, our congregations’ early open-ness to same-sex marriage, our welcoming of LGBT ministers into our pulpits. What a bunch of righteous, resistant, radicals we are!

The truth, of course, is that our history is, as history tends to be, a mixed bag. For most of our history, Unitarians have been the denomination of choice for the economic elite. We are known for making the least demands on our members. We don’t tell you what to think, don’t tell you what to do. For 200 years now, anyone wanting a church that would leave them alone has found the Unitarians the place to be.

Nor have the Universalists, during the time Universalism was a distinct denomination, before consolidating with the Unitarians in 1961, had much inclination to rouse any rabble. In the 19th century, the Unitarians and the Universalists did have some abolitionists, and we did have some women’s suffragists. But they were in the minority of our membership, and their activities tended to not have the support of the congregations. From our beginnings in the late 1700s up until the early 1900s, the Unitarian attitude may be characterized as: God doesn’t tell me what to do. The Universalists attitude may be characterized as: God does have suggestions for me, but I'm not going to hell if I disregard them, so God's guidelines are not altogether mandatory.

Next: So how did we get from there to seeing ourselves as cultural radicals?

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(For this angle on Unitarian and Universalist history, I have drawn on Rev. Tom Schade's blogpost, "Humanism in Context," which provides much more detail.)

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This is part 2 of 3 of "Welcome to Resistance"
See also:
Part 1: Resistance
Part 3: Roots of Unitarian Resistance

Resistance

Welcome to Resistance, part 1

Resistance. When is it time to stop resisting? When is it time to start resisting?

Resistance. If we can see it more clearly, name it more accurately, we are then in a position to decide what to do with it. Sometimes resisting is just what we will decide we want to be doing. Other times we’ll decide it’s time to let go of resistance.

But to live intentionally rather than pulled along by unconscious impulses, to live with integrity rather than the reactivity of the moment, is no easy thing. That is why, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “We shall not cease from exploration – and the end of all our exploration will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Resistance can take the form of confrontational energy: “Oh, no, you don’t. I’m not having it.” Or it might take the form of withdrawal: “Oh, forget it. Whatever.” And I understand. Protective resistance protects us against change.

Everybody says change is a good thing. “Status quo” has become a bad word. The left and the right both want to get rid of the status quo. They have different ideas of how, and what to replace it with, but these days the poor old status quo has no friends. Everybody is in favor of change.

The business world is all abuzz these days with talk not just of innovation, but of disruptive innovation. If your innovation isn’t disruptive enough, well, go back and try again. The more change the better.

Think outside the box. Whatever the box is, think outside it. Make a new box: which, of course, will compel you to think outside of it as soon as possible. Be a change agent. The highest aspiration a human being can have these days is to be someone who makes change happen.

And I get it. Change is a good thing. I’m down with that. Life is a process of continuous learning, continuous growth – at its best, it is continuous flourishing. Whatever is static, stunted, stultified is deadening – or dead.

Yet for all the championing of change, there’s still this resistance thing. This is not because some people just haven’t yet clued in to how great change is. If you want to create change by having more of something and somebody else wants to create change by having less of something, you each see yourself as working for change, and you each see the other as resisting change. So resistance is not just a matter of being pig-headed or dim.

Resistance is the voice that says, no, not THAT change. There really is a lot that’s good about the way life is right now. And if you’re wondering why people resist your brilliant ideas for new ways to do things, it’s because they sense – as we all sometimes sense – that change is spelled L-O-S-S. What one person wants to change is what somebody else can’t bear to lose.

Learning and growing – transformation – does mean loss. The butterfly has to leave behind what was great about being a caterpillar.

The question of resistance is always those two questions. Is there something you’re resisting, and it’s time to stop resisting it? Is there something you haven’t been resisting, and it’s time to start resisting it?

Doctor Seuss’s most famous story is a story about resistance: Green Eggs and Ham. "No, no, no. No green eggs and ham. Not in a house, with a mouse, in box, with a fox, here or there or anywhere." Why such resistance? If he were resisting the mass-scale cruelty to pigs and chickens that industrial production of ham and eggs entails, that would be a worthy resistance indeed. But that’s evidently not the ground of this resistance. It seems he’s just not used to that color.

It’s natural to not like what we aren’t used to, and Dr. Seuss’s little story has helped generations of children be just a little more open to a new experience. As adults, too, we sometimes can use a little reminder that it’s often worth it to set aside the comforts of what we’re used to for the sake of open-ness to a new experience.

Next: Being intentional about choosing familiarity or choosing change
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This is part 1 of 3 of "Welcome to Resistance"
See also:
Part 2: Personality Shows Up When You Don't
Part 3: Roots of Unitarian Resistance