Phil's Little Blog on the Prairie

One of the things I love the most about visiting friends and family back home in Indiana is staying at the home of my wife Julia's father and step-mother. The reason I love it is because their house is filled with all of the magazines I wished I subscribed to and had time to read: The Atlantic, Harpers, Ode, New York Review of Books, and so forth. Since I'm usually only here for a week at the most, my modus operandi is to look at the feature articles from the last few months and pick the ones I want to read the most. At the top of my list this trip was this article from the August 2005 Harpers: The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong, by Bill McKibben. Here's a sample:

Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller number of Americans—about 75 percent—claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior of professed Christians. That’s what America is: a place saturated in Christian identity.

Reading this the week before Christmas has made me think about whether or not we're doing all we can to prepare our Unitarian Universalist children (whether their families identify as Christian or not) for the realities of a nation "saturated in Christian identity."

A few weeks ago I wrote about preaching at my son's dedication at a Mennonite church in Minneapolis, how I had to examine what raising him in "the way of Jesus" means to me. I think I agree with McKibben (and anyone else) who claims that all we really need to know about the gospel of Jesus is the response he gave to one of the Pharisees who asked Jesus what the core of the law was:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

If we teach our children anything about Jesus, it should be that. Unitarian Universalists come from a tradition that believes Jesus thought people should love God and each other. I know this may be a little simplistic, but I can't think of a better answer to someone who's badgering you (or someone you love) into accepting "Jesus" in order to avoid going to hell.
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I finally finished Penny Edgell’s book Religion and Family in a Changing Society, and there are a couple of things I’d like to comment on. One is the authority Edgell refers to when she talks about congregations doing radically innovative work in family ministry. She says that these congregations offer a “nurturing family schema drawn from religious discourses of social justice and caring.” This schema is none other than George Lakoff’s “nurturant parent” model. I bring this up because Edgell does not beat around the bush here—Lakoff’s model is the model for liberal religious family ministry. Unfortunately, many of the Unitarian Universalists with whom I’ve discussed Lakoff continue to ignore, discount, or completely misunderstand his work. As you’ll see in just a moment, if we are going to become a more family-oriented religion, we need to have a clear sense of the moral values that inform our definition of family. Lakoff gives us that. Really.

Here’s the reason it’s so important for us to understand the moral values that provide the foundation for our work with families: According to Edgell, innovative family ministry “can lead to thriving congregations and strongly committed members when it is organized around core values of the religious tradition and when it is offered affirmatively as a moral vision.” She goes on to say that

[Religious organizations] thrive when they offer religiously based visions of a moral good that are framed as a coherent expression of a religious tradition, when they offer people meaningful frameworks that are different from the more interest- or expediency-based frameworks they encounter in other institutions, and when they express important social identities.

Edgell’s reference for that statement is Christian Smith’s Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture. I’ve seen Smith’s work referenced before in a similar argument: that liberal congregations can thrive if the offer a clear identity that is somewhat in tension with the general culture. (There’s a quick summary of the article I’m referring to here at Spirituality & Health. You need register to access it, however.)

So here’s the deal. We do not need to reinvent this wheel. Lakoff has helped articulate the core liberal religious values in America for us. We need to claim and proclaim those values and we need to offer families a spiritual home that is an alternative to both the religious right and the market-driven consumer culture. In Edgell’s words, we must “balance an authoritative voice that speaks to ‘what is right’ and provide a strong moral vision of the good family while also acting authoritatively to achieve ‘what is caring’ and inclusive.”
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Last week I wrote about two different styles of religious involvement: a family-oriented rhetoric and a self-oriented rhetoric. And I asked these questions: What's your rhetoric of religious involvement? Why are you involved with a religious community? And what do you think is the rhetoric of religious involvement for the majority of Unitarian Universalists?

My guess is that most of us (a majority of the 90% or so of UUs who come out of another faith tradition into Unitarian Universalism) came because of a self-oriented rhetoric. We believe that "going to religious services is something you should do if it meets your needs," and "an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independently of any church or synagogue." (Quoted from Penny Edgell's Religion and Family in a Changing Society.) No surprise there, actually. The rub, however, is that religious traditions that retain a large number of their children and youth are family oriented. So the question for me really is this: Is it even possible for a self-oriented religion to retain a majority of their children and youth?

Probably not. Time and again I've run into parents of children in Unitarian Universalist religious education programs who've told me that while the reason they're here as a family is for their kids to get a moral upbringing, they really don't want to force a particular religious view on them. Our self-oriented rhetoric is what attracted them in the first place. Indeed, it's this self-oriented rhetoric that the UUA has been emphasizing in its latest media campaigns. (The material used in the recent Houston campaign features phrases such as "Imagine a religion for people who simply can't accept what they've always been asked to believe," and "Imagine a religion where people with different beliefs worship as one faith." Both highlight a self-oriented rhetoric, its suspicion of authority and its emphasis on individual beliefs.)

If we are going to retain a majority of our children and youth in our tradition, we're going to need to offer their parents something more than this self-oriented rhetoric. I'm not saying that we abandon it altogether--it's definitely part of who we are. But once these families are part of our liberal religious communities, it's time to offer them some family-oriented reasons for being a Unitarian Universalist family. Any idea what those reasons might be? I'd love to hear them!
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