The seven principles of Unitarian Universalism are an attempt to express the values that we share. But even deeper than those are principles that we can access by asking “why are these seven principles important to us?” One answer, hinted in our fourth principle, is that Unitarian Universalism strives to be a reality-based religion.
We’re talking at church, last month and this month, about the spiritual issue of Identity.
Identity is one of the three, primary, issues of spirituality. The other two being Purpose. And Meaning.
I reflect on the three spiritual issues: Identity, Purpose, and Meaning, by asking three spiritual question: Who am I? What Should I do? And Why does it matter?
Framed as those three questions, the three spiritual issues are relevant to everyone. We all ask those questions. Whether you’re religious or not. A church-goer, or not. Whether you’re a theist, or atheist. Whether you think of yourself as spiritual or not.
We all ask the question, “Who am I?” That’s a spiritual question. Who am I really? What is the essential part of who I am, different, perhaps from the person that was formed by my genes, or by my parents, or by the cultural forces of the place and time I grew up in? Or perhaps you might concede that there is no essential “you” apart from what you were fated to be by nature and nurture.
But we ask. We wonder.
And we ask, What should I do? What should I do for a career? Where should I live? What’s the right thing to do when faced with a challenging moral dilemma? Who should I choose for a life-partner? Should I have children? What should I do?
And then, Why does it matter? The spiritual question of meaning. On a tiny speck of a planet floating in vast space, with billions of years of history behind us and a cosmic future that ends in cold, empty darkness, how do I reassure myself that my life has significance?
Whether you answer those questions strictly within a naturalistic framework, or if you answer them in reference to some mystical or supernatural framework, all of us ask those three questions. They are a natural part of our human experience in the world.
Who am I?
What Should I do?
And Why does it matter?
Identity. Meaning. And Purpose.
So we’re looking at Identity this month and last, because it is a fundamental work of the spiritual task to think about questions of identity. And we’re also looking at the issue of Identity because Identity is one of the five Developmental Tasks that the Unitarian Universalist Association ask congregations to work on during an interim period as a congregation searches for a new settled minister, which this congregation is undertaking now.
The issue of Identity is important for a congregation as you consider calling your next settled minister, because, obviously, you need to know who you are, in order to know what sort of minister would best serve you. And a minister who might consider applying for this pulpit also needs to know who you are in order to discern whether their particular personality, skills and interests might be a good fit for you.
Who are you? What is unique about this congregation? What do you care about? What are your personality quirks and wierdnesses? What are you strong at? Where are you hesitant? Where do you need a minister to help you grow? Where do you feel confidant you can take care of yourself? What are the ministry qualities that are must-haves, for you, and what are the deal-breakers where a ministry match would just never work?
So last month we looked at the individual dimension of the Identity question: Who am I? This month, I want to look at the corporate dimension of the Identity question: Who are we?
Two weeks ago, you may remember, I presented an outline of the components of a complete faith, arranged into a sequence that I call, the Faith Line.
Faith, as I said, comprises three elements: Beliefs, Values, and Actions.
Beliefs are everything we think about the world around us and ourselves in it. Your beliefs are your worldview, what you see when you look out at the world. Your description of reality.Values are the guiding principles that we hold to be important such as: equality, justice, liberty, compassion.
And actions are what you do with your faith. Your behavior. Your choices.
So Faith, is Beliefs, Values, and Actions, sequenced in that order. What you believe about the world, informs what you hold to be important. And what you value guides the actions you take.
Furthermore, our actions create our experiences in the world and our experiences then inform our beliefs. So the end of the faith line loops back to the beginning: Experiences define our beliefs. Beliefs form our values. Values guide our actions. Our actions create new experiences. New experiences, perhaps, redefine our beliefs. And so on.
Now most religions, at least in western culture, define their religion by their beliefs: what they believe, about God, or Jesus, or the Bible, or the afterlife, and so on. And in the west we want to define other religions, too, by what they believe, even when belief isn’t really the most important part of those religions. Many eastern religions, for instance are better characterized by a set of religions practices: meditation, or worship rituals at a temple, or holidays or food, or practices around dress and family relationship and so on. But in the west we want to ask, “But what do you believe?”
Christian churches, for instance, since early in their history, created creeds, statements of belief. The creed serves as a belief test that says you’re either in or your out, one of us, or not, based on whether you believe what we all say we believe in this church.
Unitarian Universalism broke from that Christian tradition of defining our faith by beliefs when we decided to be a non-creedal church. We don’t have a belief statement in Unitarian Universalism. Nor are we particularly defined by our religious practices (our actions). We don’t have a lot of prescribed rituals, or holidays of our own. Instead, our congregations are gathered around a set of shared values. We define our churches around the second step in the Faith line: not beliefs, not actions, but values.
Our statement of seven principles, is, for the most part a statement of our shared values. The reason, I think, that the 7 principles has become such a beloved, central, and useful, part of our Unitarian Universalist life over the last 30 years since they were written, is that they give eloquent language to this essential core of who we are.
These are our values:
The worth and dignity of each individual. Justice. Equity. Compassion. Acceptance of difference. Lifelong growth and development. Freedom. Personal responsibility. Truth. Every individual a unique and essential participant in collective action. Democracy. World community. Peace. Liberty. Respect of nature.
Those are the values that define us. That is our identity as Unitarian Universalists. We believe many things. Your beliefs may neatly contradict the beliefs of the person sitting next to you, or what you hear from the pulpit. But we are united in a strong congregation because all our various beliefs lead us to respect the same core values and to work together to support them in our lives and in the world we share. It is in those values that we find our corporate identity.
So this week and for the rest of this month, I want to look at a few of those values, and consider them a little more closely.
This week, in the time we have left, I want to start by looking at the value that’s named in our 4th Principle: “A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t be controversial for a religion to say that it values “truth.” Which religion doesn’t value truth? Which religion doesn’t imagine that it has the “truth.”
Well, actually, Unitarian Universalist doesn’t claim that we have the truth.
Our fourth principle, in fact, is careful to say that our value is not “truth” but “a free and responsible search for truth.” Did you notice? We don’t say that we have the truth. We say we’re looking for it.
I often describe Unitarian Universalism as a “reality-based religion” because we use the tool of science and trust in its findings, because we strive to respond to the world the way it actually is, not what we would like it to be, or what some thousands year-old text thought it was. But striving to be reality-based, and claiming that we know what reality really is, are two different things. Other religions claims they know reality. The value that is named in our fourth principle is not having the truth, but searching for the truth.
A few days ago, The New Yorker magazine published an interview with Sophia Rosenfeld, the author of a new book called, Democracy and Truth: a Short History.
The interview starts by expressing the fear that many of us share, that the recent assaults on truth coming from a President who lies pathologically and constantly, who assaults the free press with complaints of “fake news”, politicians who take positions based on what’s good for the base, rather than science (say around the issues of climate change or immigration) and of course the real fake news that gets spread by social media and photoshopped photos and so on, is undermining our ability to create a shared worldview based on facts, and thus undermining our ability as a country to make competent decisions through the democratic process.
Sophia Rosenfeld, though, while seeing the danger, also shares a comforting thought. Here is her answer to one of the interviewer’s questions:
Democracy insists on the idea that truth both matters and that nobody gets to say definitively what it is. That’s a tension that’s built into democracy from the beginning, and it’s not solvable but is, in fact, intrinsic to democracy. I think both things matter. We don’t want to have one definitive source of truth. Part of the reason ideas evolve and culture changes is that we’re constantly debating what is an accurate rendition of reality in some form. But, on the other hand, it makes for a lot of instability. That instability can be productive or unproductive at different moments and in different ways. You know, the aspiration for knowing more and getting closer to the truth is a really important one, because it lets us constantly rethink what we know to be true and often decide that what we know to be true isn’t.
Sophia Rosenfeld is saying that truth matters, but the fact that nobody gets to say definitively what truth is, is not a bug; it’s a feature. Who would you trust to have a definitive claim to the truth? Fox News? Franklin Graham? Yourself? No one, right? No one has a definitive claim to the truth, and the thought that some might claim it should scare you.
Truth changes. Truth evolves. Of course it does. Because the world is changing and evolving. If “truth” is an accurate description of reality, then truth must change and evolve along with reality. Truth must be flexible, supple. Truth must be adaptable. Truth must move. It’s not truth that matters, it’s the search for truth.
That doesn’t mean that there is no objective truth, as Post-Modernism would claim. It only means that truth is always a temporary truth: a process not a fixed position. Truth can be known, but not held. What is true for one moment cannot be assumed to be true in the next moment. That what you think is true and what I think is true are both contingent positions spiraling around a moving target and our debate is our way of keeping up with reality as it evolves. We are constantly on a search for truth, even for those facts that are most dearly cherished. We never arrive at truth.
Sophia Rosenfeld, in that same statement, admits that this constantly flowing nature of truth, creates anxiety, “a lot of instability”, as she says. It certainly does, as we well know in the currently anxious environment in which we live. But she points out that this instability can be both productive and unproductive at different moment and in different ways.
In other words, if we want the future to be different in some way than the present, then we have to welcome a certain amount of instability. A stable world isn’t going to transform into a future with more justice for the oppressed, with a better health care system, a compassionate response to asylum seekers at the border, with a rational energy policy that responds to the reality of climate change, and so on. Instability allows room to shift from what is to what might be. The instability can be unproductive, too, of course, as cherished goals we thought we achieved must continue to be defended from reactionary and destructive impulses. Again. Trump.
But the take away is that the instability is inherent in democracy, and not solvable. And we must cherish the possibilities created by that instability, even as we patch the wounds opened by that instability. What’s important then is that we don’t hold fast to a rigid sense of what “truth” is, even when we are pretty sure that we know reality better than the next guy. It’s only in “constantly debating what is an accurate rendition of reality” that we move ideas and the culture forward.
Our Unitarian Universalist value is not “truth” but the “search for truth”. A search that is both free, in the sense that we should let diverse opinions and contrarian ideas spill out unbounded, and also “responsible” in the sense that our debate must be in good faith and committed to the goal of an accurate description of reality, not willful disinformation, distraction, insult and snark.
But before we get too proud of ourselves, I think this value of the “search for truth” rather than “truth” itself, is also a reminder to Unitarian Universalists. It asks us to fairly and honestly examine, where have our “truths” become rigid and doctrinaire. When have we decided that we have the truth, personally, as a church, or as a denomination, and given ourselves satisfied permission to stop searching, or to stop listening to those views that might force us to keep searching? Where have we expressed an arrogant assurance that we know the truth ignoring our own human limitations? Where have we decided that the debate is over? Where do we no longer feel it’s necessary to include dissent, diverse opinions, or contrarian views?
As John Milton said, in our opening words, in a line that’s also appropriate for Super Bowl Sunday, “And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously to misdoubt her strength.” There should be no opinions, formed in service to our shared values, that are out of bounds in our churches.
As we sang in our opening hymn, “A mind that’s free to seek the truth; a mind that’s free in age and youth to choose a path no threat impedes, wherever light of conscience leads. Our martyrs died so we could be a church where every mind is free.”