Used to Be UU: The Systemic Attack on UU Liberalism, What You Need to Know, What You Need to Do, by Frank Casper and Jay Kiskel

“UU” means Unitarian Universalist, the faith I joined 30 years ago and which I have served as a minister for 23 years. The “Attack on UU Liberalism” is a danger the authors see in a series of statements and initiatives issuing over the last four years from the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association (the UUA, our denominational office) that they see as a threat to the liberalism of our liberal religion.

Liberalism, as in the term, “liberal religion”, does not mean politically liberal (although UUs typically are); it means classically liberal in the sense that truth is not the property of an authority, like a wise philosopher, or a King, or an authoritative text like a scripture, rather, truth is discovered when all the members of a community freely contribute their perspective, experience and opinion, and then engage in free debate, persuasion, and defense of their ideas using objective evidence. The truth emerges through the free action of the participants. Truth is what we come to know together. Every truth discovered this way is understood to be a provisional truth, true as long as it’s the best idea presented, but always vulnerable to be knocked down by another, better idea. This is the liberal system of democracy, and the free market, and science, and the liberal religion of Unitarian Universalism. We follow no Pope, or Prophet, or sacred text. Instead, each person, both clergy and laity, draws from their own experience, we hash it out and explore together in our congregations, we ask not only, “what do you feel?” but also, “what makes sense?” We learn from each other and approach the truth gingerly, and provisionally.

This book is published (self-published, I bought it on Amazon) by a group within our faith who have been concerned for several years about aspects of our denominational polity which tend to subvert our faith principle of democracy. The fifth principle of the seven principles of our UU faith is “The use of the democratic process within our congregations and in our society at large”, thus, this democratic watchdog group calls themselves, “The Fifth Principle Project.” The authors are the founders of the project, two lay people that I’ve never met. But their concern about the direction of our faith goes far beyond the erosion of our democratic process, rather, they see the erosion of our denominational democracy as a symptom of a wider erosion of our liberalism generally.

Much of the book is very particular to Unitarian Universalism, organized into three sections labeled History, Theology, and Governance. The authors criticize non-democratic aspects of our annual denominational meeting, called General Assembly, and the manner by which our UUA Board is elected. They worry that recent actions of the Board to analyze racial inequality in the denomination and to re-think the seven principles of our faith will result in recommendations that tend toward an idealogical orthodoxy which Unitarian Universalists have always rejected previously as a part of our creedless religious identity.

But they also place the critique of current trends in Unitarian Universalism within the context of a more general creeping abandonment of liberal principles throughout our culture. For this discussion they depend heavily on a book I read last summer and highly recommend, Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.

Used to be UU is a damning and somewhat despairing look at our Association. The sense of the title is not that the authors have abandoned the faith, but that the faith has abandoned them. The authors do make some recommendations for counter-action (the “What You Need to Do” of the subtitle) but I’m not optimistic for their success. Unitarian Universalism has always hailed itself as a “living tradition.” The faith changes. I don’t imagine the author’s views will be much regarded.