It Matters What We Believe

John L. Saxon

Boone Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

July 19, 2009

How many of you have had someone ask you: “So, just what is it that Unitarian Universalists believe?”

How did you answer that question?

Maybe you said something like: “We’re a noncreedal religion. We don’t ask people to subscribe to any specific creed or statement of religious belief. We believe that everyone should be free to search for what he or she believes is true.” Or maybe you said: “We’re theologically diverse. We don’t all believe the same thing about God, reality, human nature, or life and death, so no one Unitarian Universalist can say what all Unitarian Universalists believe.” Maybe you said: “We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” or “We believe that deeds are more important than creeds: that what we do is more important that what we say we believe.” Or maybe you even said something like: “UUs can believe anything we want to believe.”

Unitarian Universalists may be theologically diverse, but, according to Warren Ross, we all agree on one thing: “We refuse to accept a creed, defining creed as a statement we must accept to be members in good standing.”

We are a noncreedal religion. Noncreedalism is an essential part of what it means to be religious liberals, reflecting the value we place on the right of individual conscience and freedom of belief, the right of every person to search for what is true and right in life and decide for herself, free from external authority or coercion, what she believes based on her own experience, intuition, imagination, conscience, and reason.

And yet, Ross says, while Unitarian Universalists “vehemently reject any creed, we seem to be forever searching for some verbal formula to which we can all (or at least most of us) say, ‘Yes, that’s what I (more or less) believe.’” As religious liberals, we Unitarian Universalists seem to experience a perpetual identity crisis—desperately wanting and needing to define who we are and yet terrified that any definition will exclude someone from our circle or morph into a dreaded creed that will infringe on the individual freedom and liberty that we hold so dear. And that presents a dilemma—the tension between conscience and creed that has been a part of our Unitarian Universalist history for the past two hundred years and is still an issue today.

Of course, for some UUs, there’s really no dilemma or problem. For them, it’s simple: conscience is good and creed is bad. The right of individual freedom of conscience is sacred and anything that even looks like it might be a creed or statement of shared belief (including, for some, the seven principles of the UUA) is a betrayal of our liberal religious heritage.

But I’m not sure that it’s really that simple.

I believe that Sophia Lyons Fahs was right. It matters what we believe. And I believe that it matters what we believe not only as individual religious liberals but what we believe collectively as Unitarian Universalists.

III

Some of you may have participated in the UUA’s Building Your Own Theology program. And if you did, you’ll remember that the focus of the program was writing a short credo statement expressing your beliefs about the “big questions” of God and the meaning of life. And that’s good. We need to be able to say what it is that each of us believes. And, as religious liberals, we respect the right of every person to decide for herself what she does and doesn’t believe.

But Unitarian Universalism is not, in the words of Angus MacLean, simply a “do-it-yourself” kit. And, according to Rebecca Parker, President of the Starr-King School for the Ministry, “it’s not enough for us to teach people to build their own theologies.” When we enter Unitarian Universalism, she says, we “enter a theological house that has already been built.” We inherit a theology: the theology of our Unitarian Universalism heritage and tradition, a theology that is the theology of a community and not merely our own theologies.

It matters what we believe. Because what we believe is, I believe, an essential aspect of our religious identity. Our beliefs define, in part, who we are. But the issue of belief or creed is not merely one of religious identity. Because, at a more fundamental, existential, ontological level, our beliefs shape our values and our values shape our lives. Our beliefs, both individual and collective, are what ground and give depth and meaning to who we are and everything we do.

I believe that UU minister Edward Frost was right when he said that a religion without a common faith cannot have any significant claim on its members or any significant influence in the world. Or, to paraphrase UU theologian Henry Nelson Wieman, a religion without a common faith is merely a talking club of individuals, not a religious community.

Indeed, it is almost inconceivable to think of a religion without beliefs. And, in this sense, no religion, including Unitarian Universalism, is or can be absolutely and truly noncreedal. All religions are, and must be, creedal in the sense of affirming at least some beliefs regarding the universe, the holy or sacred, human nature, life and death, good and evil, and other “religious” questions.

The question, therefore, is not whether Unitarian Universalism or any other religious faith is and must be defined, at least in part, by a set of commonly accepted beliefs, but rather whether and to what extent it is willing to identify, articulate, and publicly declare those beliefs, how “broad” or “narrow” those beliefs are, how “inclusive” or “exclusive” they are, how “tightly” or “loosely” it will hold onto the “truth” of those beliefs, how “open” or “closed” it will be to modifying those beliefs, and how those beliefs are lived in the lives of its members.

“A religion,” Edward Frost says, “needs to be able to say to the world what it is that its adherents believe.” And, in the words of my former teacher, David Bumbaugh: A religious “movement that is unwilling or unable to define what it holds sacred [surrenders] both its claim to religious significance and its ability to respond to the larger world ….” “If we are to respond to the needs of the world from a liberal religious basis,” he says, “it is critical that we be able to address and answer … [the question]: What do we believe?” We must do so because the answer to that question is the only thing that can provide a foundation for or make possible a vital religious vision. And if we ignore that question, our “response [as religious liberals] to the world [will be] … shallow-rooted, short-lived, self-serving, and episodic.”

It does matter what we believe as Unitarian Universalists. It matters to us and it matters to the world.

Our “Unitarian and Universalist forebears,” Edward Frost writes, “knew well enough that, [fear of creeds notwithstanding,] a religion needs to be able to say to the world what it is that its adherents believe.” “The difficulty for these free churches,” he continues, “lay in formulating what could be said [about the shared beliefs of their members] without usurping the freedom of belief [they] cherished …. They struggled from the beginning to express their beliefs in statements that might create the strength of unity while preserving the freedom and diversity [they] held precious.

Throughout our history, though, attempts by Unitarian Universalists to say what it is that we commonly believe have failed because of what some would say is the most fundamental tenet of our Unitarian Universalist faith: a belief in individual freedom and personal liberty, which, unfortunately, has too often morphed into an unhealthy ideology of individualism that, according to former UUA President Paul Carnes, is expressed in a sometimes irrational and dogmatic fear of “creeping creedalism” that frustrates any attempt to articulate a unity within our theological diversity.

One example of this fear of “creeping creedalism” can be found in the suspicion, and even hostility, of some UUs who believed that the UUA’s Commission on Appraisal decision several years ago to study the question “Where is the unity in our diversity?” was nothing more than a plot or conspiracy “to create or promote a common creed” that would “exclude one or another of the expressions of religious thought current among UUs.” And it can also be seen in the fear of some Unitarian Universalists that the UUA’s seven principles are being treated as if they were a creed and their dismay that “the children’s version of the principles begins with language that says: ‘We believe.’”

Many of us believe that saying “we believe” is inconsistent with the freedom of personal belief that we cherish. Indeed, many of us who came to Unitarian Universalism from traditional Christian churches became UUs because we could no longer say the words of the Apostles’ Creed or accept the beliefs required by the Southern Baptist Convention or the Catholic Church. And that makes it hard for us to say “we believe.” The words tend to stick in our throats. And that makes it hard for us to sing hymns, since we have to read ahead to see if we believe the words we’re singing!

I believe, though, that our problem is not really one of individual freedom of belief versus the imposition of a uniform and binding creed. The problem, I believe, is how to balance individual freedom of belief and the diversity of theological opinion that exists within our congregations, on the one hand, with the need to identify and articulate who we are as a religious movement, what defines or holds us together, what we believe, what we value, what we stand for, and what grounds and motivates us in the work we do and the lives we live.

The question is not one of individual freedom or common belief. It is not either/or, but both/and. It is about living with the tension between conscience and creed. It is about balancing the value that we place individual freedom of belief with the other values that we hold as religious liberals.

“Individual freedom of belief,” according to former UUA President Bill Schulz, “exists … in dynamic tension with the insights of our history and the wisdom of our communities.” And this fact, he says, “puts the lie to the oft-heard shibboleth that Unitarian Universalists can believe anything they like.” “It is true,” Schulz says, “that we set up no formal religious test for … membership [in our congregations] …, but it is not true that one can subscribe to views at variance with our most basic values.”

The problem in articulating what we believe is not our theological diversity but rather, in the words of the UUA’s Commission on Appraisal, our “inability to do the hard work of finding common ground to build a strong, effective religious voice.”

The question “what do we believe?” is, according to David Bumbaugh, “simple, but profoundly challenging.” It is challenging, he says, because it “drives us to consider what are the boundaries of our religious community … and what is so central to our identity that we must proclaim it, even at the risk of offending someone.” But it is also simple because there is, in fact, a unity that exists within our diversity. “Our diversity,” he says, “rests in a powerfully homogeneous core of shared beliefs and attitudes.”

Thus, as Bill Schulz says: “Regardless of [our] … differences, there are a whole host of faith affirmations with which the vast majority of [Unitarian Universalists] would be comfortable.” And one of those affirmations is written on the bronze plaque on the wall of this fellowship hall.

As Unitarian Universalists, it says, we believe “that creation is too grand, complex, and mysterious to be captured in [any] narrow creed. [And that] is why we cherish individual freedom of belief. At the same time, [though] our convictions about Creation lead us [to affirm] that the blessings of life are available to everyone, not just the Chosen or the Saved; that Creation itself is Holy—the earth and all its creatures, the stars in all their glory; that the Sacred or Divine, the Precious and Profound, are made evident not in the miraculous or supernatural but in the simple and everyday; that human beings, joined in collaboration with the gifts of Grace, are responsible for the planet and its future; that every one of us is held in Creation’s hand—a part of the interdependent cosmic web; that no one is saved until we all are saved, where all means the whole of Creation; and the paradox of life is to love it all the more even though we ultimately lose it.”

That sounds pretty good to me! And while some UUs might not like some of the words—like holy, sacred, or divine—I think it’s a statement that most UUs, including humanists like Bill Schulz, might be able to live with (as long as we don’t make it into our one and only official UU creed).

Of course, no single affirmation or statement of belief will ever capture the breadth of belief within Unitarian Universalism or be completely acceptable to every individual UU. But I believe that, as Unitarian Universalists, we could affirm the beliefs written on your plaque or other common, though often unarticulated, beliefs we hold as religious liberals if, by we, we mean the overwhelming majority of individual UUs, and if we’re willing to let go of our irrational fear of creedalism and do the hard work required to discover and articulate the unity within our diversity.

As Unitarian Universalists, we recognize that “truth can never be captured within the words of any single religion or creed” and that any statement of our common beliefs must always be subject to examination, critique, and change. And, because we are religious liberals, no statement of our shared beliefs should ever be used as a creed that limits the freedom of each UU to believe what he or she must believe as a matter of his or her own personal conscience, experience, intuition, and reason.