Wise words for UUs from Phil Lung, author of Phil’s Little Blog on the Prairie:
We’re not at the point yet where we need to start talking like Bishop John Shelby Spong, whose most famous book is entitled Why Christianity Must Change or Die. No, if I were writing a similar book about our religious tradition today, I guess I’d call it, Why Unitarian Universalism Must Grow or Become Irrelevant, because that’s what’s at stake here, my friends. It’s not so much a matter of survival as it is a matter of relevance. We are rapidly becoming a footnote in the history of religion in America. While Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus have see growth rates of 109%, 170%, and 237% in the United States over the last fifteen years or so, the number of Americans who say they are Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Evangelical or other varieties of Protestantism have dropped from 63 percent in 1993 to 52 percent in 2002. Our 150,000 adult members are barely a bump on this changing American religious landscape, which means our traditional growth strategy of waiting for a few stray liberal religious fellow travelers to stumble over us is going to become increasingly ineffective.
Truth is, folks, even if we continue to grow at the same rate we have over the last 10 to 15 years, that .08 percent [of US population] Larry Ladd spoke of will become smaller and smaller and smaller until we will be an all-but-negligible religious movement. The general population is getting larger, and our feeder system (the Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Evangelicals or other varieties of Protestants) is shrinking. In that regard, I’d say we have less than a 50/50 chance of surviving as a force for good in the world. And that is something that I truly do not want to see happen.
It’s worth reading the whole article. Phil suggests we start with teen and child RE, retooling to grow them into lifelong UUs. (What’s the percentage on legacy UUs now—10%?) His suggestions are worth implementing yesterday.
I would add three things to his list. First, an aggressive (and fully funded) campus outreach program. (We’re working toward a five-year ramp-up for just that here in Atlanta.) Second, an aggressive (and fully funded) church planting program.
To pull numbers out of the air, these two programs should receive something on the order of 5% of the UUA budget. Each. If that mean’s laying off (or reassigning) Association bureaucrats or pruning our “social/political witness” programs, so be it. (Unless that’s not nice.)
Third, at the local level (or in the new church starts), moving toward a model of community-planned worship, probably along the “emergent worship” line. That’s probably just a high church UU speaking, but I think it would draw more people in and better reflect our principles.
I agree with all the proposals here and would be thrilled to see them implemented. But I can’t quite agree with the note of panic, as it seems rather decontextualized to me. Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus are not an adequate comparison to UUs, because 1) their growth rate is so astronomical in part because they were barely here at all in earlier time periods, ergo any significant change in numbers will register as a huge percentage increase, and 2) much of the growth is related to recent immigration trends, not conversion. Since UUism doesn’t come packaged with a particular foreign ethnicity, it can’t be expected to grow in the same way or for similar reasons.
Also, Phil seems to be overlooking the fact that we have ALWAYS been a small minority faith. Our relevance has never had anything to do with our numbers, which have always been tiny. Rather, UUism’s relevance has always been about the uncanny knack of Unitarians and Universalists to capture the minds of important people in society and to produce the movers and shakers of our country. The list of major leaders, scientists, thinkers, educators, activists, or other types of people who make an unusually large contribution to the direction of society has always been disproportionately packed with UUs, and that trend hasn’t particularly slowed down. So while I strongly agree that we need to do more outreach and work on retaining our youth, I don’t feel that way because of some sort of perceived crisis in our standing in society. We’re still unusually relevant, often as individual believers and sometimes as a denomation, and that will probably continue. Rather, we need to do more because we have a lot of qualities others could benefit from.
Jeff, you’re so right about the note of panic, and the importance of immigration to growth. But c’mon, “Boston Brahmin” is a foreign ethnicity to this Okie. ;-)
But I think there is a crisis waiting down the road (say, ten to twenty-five years away) if we continue to do the bulk of our recruiting from disenchanted mainline Christians. That group has been in decline for decades now, even if a part of that is due to demographics (particularly reproduction rates: mainlines simply have less kids than fundies). We must continue to pull from this group (I’m in it), but we must find other suitable target groups and go after them hard.
That said, if we could keep just a few more of our legacies during that adolescent-to-adulthood transition, we’d be looking pretty good. And, from a conversation with UU friends last night, being able to tell our story/make our case better would help a lot. Conservatives of all stripes do that so well. Even marginal improvements would lead to noticable growth in our membership and influence.
Yeah, Chutney, I agree with everything you’re saying here, and I think this is one way in which blogging as a medium of exchange for UUs is pretty promising, since it helps the put the issues out there and make us all struggle with them.
I want to make one more observation about the panic issue before I go back to address what I think are the very legitimate issues you raised. UUism (especially the Unitarian component), odd as it may seem to some, is a direct descendant of the Puritan tradition. This is a stream of religious thought which has from the very beginning been enamored of the Jeremiad, a form of sermon (less formally, an attitude of mind) that perceives the current situation as a devolution from something earlier and better, and predicts woe and disaster for the coming generation if things aren’t immediately turned around. Although they don’t usually recognize it as such, this is a part of the Puritan legacy that UUs have retained. Thus even as we have been an unusually optimistic denomination ever since Channing’s 1819 Baltimore sermon, we’ve also schizophrenically been sure that we’re on the edge of total destruction. Now, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, but with the Jeremiad as such a venerable part of our tradition, I have difficulty getting riled up whenever the latest UU Chicken Little comes along.
OK, back to your comments, which despite my contention that UUs rush to predict the end times of liberal religion, are still important and require some real consideration. I feel very, very strongly that we must find ways to retain our own kids rather than simply be content to continually grow/maintain our numbers by acquiring approximately 90% of our members from outgroups, often people who are religiously wounded by fundamentalism and bring very significant baggage into our congregations. I say this as a birthright UU, and here I want to be sensitive, because I in no way want to overgeneralize about people who grow up UU (who are hardly universally healthy folks) and people who convert into UUism (a great many of whom are a terrific addition to the denomination).
But it has been my observation based on the UU experiences that I have had, that many people who grow up UU are much better equipped to navigate the pluralistic religious world of modern America, and have little problem happily and non-aggressively promoting UUism to others. Many (and here I absolutely do not wish to paint in excessively broad strokes) people who convert into UUism, on the other hand, are fleeing from honestly shocking religious backgrounds, and need to spend considerable time nursing their wounds before they can again become healthy, optimistic, relaxed, and nonjudgmental about religion, especially more orthodox forms. These people, when they tell their stories, often have narratives that are primarily about how awful some more restrictive form of religion was, and the tale ends more or less when they join a UU church and don’t feel freaked out by religion anymore. While I want these folks to continue to find solace in UUism and value many of them as pew-mates, at root this is not an experience of UUism and an attitude toward religion that I believe is especially compelling or promotes the best aspects of UUism to others.
Rather, I think the more compelling, and therefore influential on the wider culture, image comes from the positive experiences of those, such as myself, who grow up in open-minded, supportive UU congregations, with Sunday Schools that promote reason, tolerance, and develop personal skills for evaluating religion for oneself, who go through important sex ed/relationship training like AYS or OWL, and end up as adults with a full insider’s view of how UUism works (as well as its weaker points). Growing up UU is among the greatest unearned blessings I’ve ever received (right up there with my amazingly normal and happy parents)–it set me out a path that I feel has so far been a success both in terms of how I relate to religion and how I conduct my inter-personal relationships, and didn’t come bundled with the guilt complexes, premodern worldviews, and charged us vs. them ideology I hear so many new UUs complain about. And it is that sort of joy at being a UU that I wish we could articulate better to the non-UU world. People should fellowship with us not simply because we aren’t as barabaric as some denominations, but because being a UU is an honestly wonderful, liberating thing which provides so many more opportunities for spiritual growth than most other forms of religion.
I’m curious what other groups you’d like us to pull from, other than disenchanted mainlike Christians (by the way, we may conceive of “mainline” differently, because I think–I could be wrong here–we often tend to pull more from the rightward end of the American Christian spectrum than the diminishing center). Should we be going after evangelicals, atheists, unchurched people, Buddhists? Sure, the answer may be all of the above, but it takes rather different strategies to reach each of these, and the chances for success are not equal between these different religious groups.
By the way, I think you exactly hit the nail on the head when you zeroed in on retaining UUs during the crucial adolescent-to-adulthood phase. We do an unbelievably crappy job of making UUism relevant to folks in this difficult transition, and it is here that we hemoragge most of our children whom we’ve spent so many years carefully raising and investing our resouces in. If UUs were really serious about making UU culture as healthy as possible, growing an indigenous UU population, and presenting the most positive face to others, they would put more energy into retaining those maturing youth than any other area. Currently, we’re growing healthy UUs and then turning them out into the world to wander and eventually join other denominations or drop religion altogether. Here again I think I’m a possible case study, since I left home as a committed UU, found absolutely no support during my college years and precious little understanding in the hard times in New York City afterwards, and ended up becoming a Buddhist. So while I retain my UU affiliation, the majority of my energy, efforts, and enthusiams goes into Buddhist, not UU, projects these days.
If we could supportively ease our young people through the college years and post-college pre-kids era, we’d be packing our churches with strong UUs at that critical ten-to-twenty-five years juncture you mentioned, rather than facing a crisis. It’s not like the problem isn’t obvious or the solution is impossible, there just seems to be a lack of will. And my hunch, which is not substantiated by any systematic collection of data, is that a major reason we don’t shepard our young adults better is because most UUs are adult converts whose concerns lie with post-college issues and therefore they (benignly) ignore the issues facing our young folks as they find themselves rather adrift once they’ve graduated from the church youth group.
OK, this is way too long, sorry for cluttering up your comments list like this.
Ack! Just wrote a long response and lost it to the spam filters! I’ll post again after I’ve kicked something.
Okay, patience restored. I’ll try to rewrite my post.
Jeff, no clutter at all. Please keep posting.
I wonder if we need some sort of curriculum/programming for those of us with bad religious baggage. Maybe not 12-steps exactly, but something with a “recovering fundamentalist” meme. Offer it regularly. Maybe even incorporate it into a special worship service every year. Could use “exodus” as a theme.
Another curriculum/programming idea is “how to organize a campus UU group” for junior and and senior high school students. Something like OWL maybe. It could be about community organizing and advocacy generally, with the campus UU group as the ongoing case study (or group project).
You’re right about the jeremiad, and it’s not just UUs—but we do have our own spin on it. I’ll be on the lookout now for it. The critique/optimism dichotomy is the heart of the prophetic voice. But when it becomes unhealthy I can see how your jeremiad/pie-in-the-sky schitzophrenia would pop up.
Thanks for the conversation. Let’s keep this going.