"Alone our Vision is Too Narrow: Unitarians and Universalists in Association"
Beth Lefever, Student Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Muncie
Association Sunday, November 8, 2009

I took the title for this morning’s sermon, "Alone our Vision is Too Narrow," from a quote by Mark Morrison Reed, one of the few African American ministers in our denomination. The fuller quote is this: "The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen. Together, our vision widens and strength is renewed."

This morning I will be speaking about the togetherness of our religious movement, within which resides the potential for ever widening vision and ever renewed strength. But let me begin by telling you of a cartoon I saw some years ago.

There are two frames in this cartoon. In the first, a woman is getting ready to set a dish of food down for her dog. The dog is gazing up at her adoringly, and the balloon over his head shows him thinking: she feeds me, she pets me, she meets my every need; she must be god. The second frame shows a woman preparing a bowl of food for her cat. The cat is looking up at her wonderingly and thinking: she feeds me, strokes my fur, meets my every need; I must be god!

It strikes me that this is somewhat in keeping with the differences between those two distinctive parts of our denomination which merged in the 1960s, the Unitarians and Universalists, the latter of which is said to have thought god was too good to damn them to hell, and the former of which, it is said, believed that they were too good to be damned. And though we have pretty much come together in the almost fifty years since the merger, it should not be forgotten that the Unitarians and Universalists were quite different from each other in the beginning, differences which ultimately strengthened our combined movement – or which yet may do so.

These differences manifested not so dramatically in the theology, but rather in the people the churches served, and in those who served the churches.

Universalism was more evangelical than Unitarianism, sending ordained circuit riders across the country to proclaim the good news of universal salvation. They were fast on the heels of Calvinist preachers who were hell-bent (excuse the pun) on spreading the doctrine of "the elect," declaring that god had fore-ordained whom would be saved, and that all others would suffer eternal damnation. (I truly don’t understand how that doctrine ever caught on!)

The Universalists tended to attract farmers and workers, and people who often had limited educations.

They tended, as well, to attract the marginalized, having, for instance, become the first denomination to ordain a woman, Olympia Brown, in 1863, and boasting a freed slave as among the charter members of one of their churches, the Gloucester, Massachusetts church.

Universalism was not so much a faith of the intellect as of the emotion, and of a joyous emotion, at that, in its exuberant proclamation of, as John Murray put it, hope rather than hell.

Unitarianism, on the other hand, was an intellectual tradition having arisen, in its earliest manifestation, out of a determined course of study, reason, and discussion, which ultimately concluded that the Bible did not support Trinitarian doctrine. Hence, of course, the name Unitarianism.

Though the term Unitarian was often used by Calvinists and Trinitarians as a pejorative epithet, Channing gave it definition and a measure of credibility with his address on "Unitarian Christianity" in the early 1800s. In this address Channing emphasized, among other things, the centrality of Jesus’ moral message, an emphasis advanced in the late 1800s by the writings of scholar Adolph Harnack who differentiated between the religion "of" Jesus, and the religion "about" Jesus.

A religion "of" Jesus was one based more on the teachings of Jesus, while a religion "about" Jesus was based on Jesus as sacrificial savior. Built into this distinction is a core difference. A religion "about" Jesus would not particularly necessitate much study, relying more on simple faith. A religion "of" Jesus, such as Unitarians tended to embrace, would be one that required a sound study of Jesus’ teachings – right up the Unitarians’ intellectual alleys.

This was a tradition that attracted the privileged, the wealthy, and the educated, a religion more of reason than passion – or maybe one of passion about reason!

While I think of the early Universalists as a reverent but rowdy sort of rough and tumble bunch, I think of the early Unitarians as more a parlor sort of people, folks who sat around sipping tea as they discussed the issues of the day. (Okay, coffee!) It is stereotypical of course, and thus, not fully accurate, but it does somewhat capture the early characteristics of each denomination. And though I speak of these differences as fairly well defined, they were not; there was much overlap, especially as time progressed.

What they very much held in common was that both branches were historically left-wing, politically, and highly invested in social justice. The Universalist belief that god embraced all people underscored their strong social justice stance, and quickly evolved into a belief that truth therefore must abide in all religions, a core concept of our current tradition. The Unitarian tendency to believe in the religion "of" Jesus, effectively called them to Jesus’ model of love, justice, and service.

Both branches also entertained a growing interest in diversity, although this was likely a more slowly evolving interest for the somewhat elite Unitarians than for the, perhaps less presumptuous, Universalists.

In fact, the Unitarian historical record regarding issues of race is a painful one for those of us who now long for more diversity in our churches.

In one of my opening readings, I read about the beginning struggles of Egbert Ethelred (or E.E.) Brown.

Brown wrote of the Methodists’ response to his Unitarian aspirations: "The present of the church was withheld, and the prayers of the members were unuttered."

I wish I could say that was the end of his struggle with rejection and rebuff, but it was not. Let me tell you a bit more about his journey.

It was not until Brown was invited into further commitment to ministry within the black AME Church that he began to really struggle with his theological differences. He knew he was strongly Unitarian in his beliefs, but was unsure what to do about it. Finally, he mailed a desperate letter addressed "To any Unitarian Minister in New York City," seeking information about the possibility of entering the Unitarian ministry.

The letter found its way to the president of the American Unitarian Association, Franklin Southworth, of the Meadville Theological School. (Meadville was strictly a Unitarian school until 1930 when it merged with the Universalist Theological School of Lombard College, and became Meadville Lombard Theological School.)

Southworth responded that Meadville did not have correspondence courses and that, therefore, Brown would have to come to Meadville, which was then located in Meadville, Pennsylvania, to go to school. He further attempted to discourage Brown by saying, as Brown tells it, "…that as there was no Unitarian Church in America for colored people, and that as white Unitarians required a white minister, he was unable to predict what my future would be at the conclusion of my training." Still, after additional correspondence, Brown was accepted as a special two-year student at the Meadville Theological School.

Brown, with great enthusiasm, entered Meadville in 1910 and there, for the first time, felt he was among his own kind, religiously. He was the seventh black to attend Meadville. The first, Alfred Amos Williams, preceded him by forty years.

Brown was ordained in the Meadville Unitarian Church, and returned to Montego Bay, Jamaica to do the work of a Unitarian Missionary. However, support for this work, both from the American Unitarian Association and the British & Foreign Unitarian Associations, quickly diminished for a variety of reasons too complex to cite here. The withdrawal left an enthusiastic and impassioned Brown, discouraged.

He was further discouraged by his dawning awareness of the attitudes of executives of the AUA whom, unlike the Unitarians he had met at Meadville, actually seemed to view blacks as too limited to be able to grasp Unitarianism. Indeed, Samuel A. Elliot, president of the AUA, viewed blacks paternalistically, seeing them not as peers, but rather as fascinating children who needed supervision.

It is very telling that, regarding the blacks he met while staying with a friend who owned an orange grove in Florida, Elliot wrote (and let me warn you, this is offensive): "As to the darkies, I can’t get enough of them. Our men are above average for they can read and write; but such happy-go-lucky, merry, shiftless rascals as they all are! I never get tired of listening to them. I’ve seen a good deal of them for they work best with a white man bossing them all the while, and I have had that duty several times."

This was the president of the American Unitarian Association!

Around the same time, the then secretary of the AUA, Louis C. Cornish, also was revealing his racial prejudice, which Morrison-Reed writes, "pepper(ed) his correspondence with people who wrote inquiring about Rev. Brown’s work." To one such inquiry, Cornish responded, "Mr. Brown is a negro, and has the facility of speech and lack of foresight which sometimes go with the negro temperament."

Eventually AUA funds were withdrawn from the Jamaican movement, and Brown, financially unable to continue, moved to Harlem, New York, a Mecca for blacks in the 1920s.

His years in Jamaica, however, had created detractors within the denomination, and this was hampering his efforts in Harlem.            Again, these issues are too complex to explore here this morning, but it does seem that the crux of the problem stemmed from prejudice and misunderstanding on the part of denominational officials.

Antagonism between the Association and Brown increased as his home life unraveled. He lived largely in poverty, unable to devote himself full-time to his beloved ministry because he had to work at often menial jobs to support his family. His wife became mentally ill, his second son was institutionalized for alcoholism, his first son committed suicide.

Eventually he was disfellowshipped for soliciting funds from individual pastors when the Association would not help him. He was readmitted to fellowship with the aid of the ACLU, a move which, despite our liberal leanings, hardly endeared him to the Association.

Throughout all of this, in true Unitarian fashion, Brown, in addition to pastoring the Harlem church, was a community activist, both in Harlem and Jamaica. He wrote letters, he protested, he witnessed and he acted. These efforts, and the recognition he received because of them, as well as finally changing attitudes in the Association, began to turn the tide for Brown. He began to receive from the Association the financial and moral backing he had sought for so long.

When he turned 65, he became eligible for the minister’s service pension which helped sustain him the remainder of his life. Which is not to say he lived happily ever after. His life had been a hard life. His family suffered terribly from poverty and the prejudice he experienced as a Unitarian minister – from his peers, and those who should have been his advocates. The price he paid as a black pioneer in a white denomination, was a painfully high price to pay.

And we, too, have paid a high price, in that, as strong as we are, as idealistic as we are, we have never overcome those issues which keep us from achieving the diversity for which we long. Even as the two branches of our denomination merged, bringing together the reasoned, privileged Unitarians and the impassioned, working class Universalists (and I speak in generalities here) we have not become a diverse movement.

Indeed, many of the characteristics of the Universalists became swallowed up by the more powerful Unitarians after the merger (just as some Universalists had feared), and we have moved further and further away from our Universalist working class roots. We are neither racially, ethnically nor economically diverse.

It is no longer prejudice and gross ignorance that holds us back, though what, precisely, it is, I cannot say.

I suspect that it is a more subtle ignorance, if that can be said. I suspect that it is an ignorance about ourselves, and what we are like, and how that does or does not feed others who might long for a liberal religious church home but cannot find themselves here in our churches. It is an ignorance which presumes that because we vigorously welcome "the other" into our congregations, we have met our responsibility, and it is up to them to fit in. It is an ignorance around not knowing quite how to enfold those who are not like us into our religious community.

I recently heard Dr. Qiyamah Rahman, of Meadville Lombard, speak about her experience as a relatively recent convert to Unitarian Universalism. She spoke with passion about her experience as a person of color in our movement, and she talked of her anger. She told a story of confronting a church musician who had just, yet again, performed a piece of classical music. She told him how she was never given the jazz music which so fed her soul, but instead had to continuously endure the classical music she disliked, but which was favored by her largely white church.

This may seem a small thing to us, but it probably isn’t, really. It encapsulates for us, as it did for Qiyamah, igniting her anger, just how unaware we are of what speaks to those who are not white, educated, and largely privileged. It speaks, too, perhaps – and I want to be careful here amidst so many musicians – but Qiyamah’s story seems to speak to our reasoned orderliness as opposed to our messy emotionalism; our classical nature rather than our jazz nature; our Unitarianism as opposed to our Universalism.

I suspect we have gone out of the ideal balance a Unitarian and Universalist merger might have afforded, although strong, ropy roots are still there. The roots by which might be cast a seedling of that balance of Unitarian reason and Universalist emotion are still there, and if the seedling is cast – and well tended -- we will, as a movement, grow tall and full and wild and rich, replete with color and texture and scent.

But the tending of that plant will require work. It will require the occasional pruning of that which would otherwise keep the plant from its fullness – attitudes, preconceptions, anxiety. It will require a thorough weeding of the sprouts of sameness and comfort that spring up so insistently. It will require the frequent fertilization of new ideas and new ways of doing things.

But it is an important undertaking. Just as our history of racial divide and unrest does not begin with E.E. Brown’s story, it does not end there, either. There was, for instance, much denominational turmoil after the merger, amidst the broader racial unrest of the 1960s. And, there does, in fact, remain unrest today, which we may know from those among us bold enough to claim it, such as Dr. Rahman did in her sermon at Meadville, or which we may know only by the evidence of our inability to bridge the chasm of upper middle class whiteness that permeates our churches.

It is a worthy endeavor not only in that it uplifts the diversity we value, desire, and proclaim, and keeps us in integrity with ourselves, but in that it brings us closer to the richness contained within each of the separate strands that make up our movement – the Unitarian and the Universalist, the intellectual and the emotional, the classical and the jazz – a richness that can only enhance our religious experience and our way of being in the world.

E.E. Brown captured this dual need for the intellectual and the spiritual when he said, "Religion is ethics touched by emotion. If the intellect dominates and there is no hint of emotion, a cold and barren matter-of-factness results. Conversely, if emotion leads, unguided by intellect, we are doomed to a wild sea of fanaticism. Yet mind and soul united create one music, grander than before."

May it be so on this Association Sunday for which, in a moment, we will take a dedicated offering to further the cause of diversity in our congregations.

Before we do that, however, we have a presentation for you from the First Universalist Unitarian Church of Wasau, Wisconsin. This is a church eleven years younger than us, and of about the same size. We partnered with it for this Association Sunday, sharing Power Point presentations about our history and our people (they got one from us, which we will be playing during coffee hour) to emphasize the fact that our Association is an Association of congregations – not a hierarchy so much as groups of people just like us, striving for the same kinds of goals, embracing the same kinds of ideals. So sit back and enjoy.