Matt Kinsi has a post up about UUs’ obsession with knowing (and insinuating that all UUs should know) the minutia of our history.
Philocrites mentions Forrest Church’s book in the comments. It’s been a while since I read it, but it helped fill me in when I was trying to make a decision about making the UU plunge.
I think I’m probably hearing a couple of complaints hidden behind Kinsi’s post, and they’re worth filling out.
The first is what fouralarmfire has talked about: “I’ve been a member since 1842” as the de facto conversation starter. As though length of membership makes you a good UU. But this just might be our particular congregation.
The second is why Garrison Keiler picks on us: our prosetylization of the dead. It’s nice to know who was a UU. But half (?) of the people we claim were at best “friends” of UUism, not card carrying members. Our doing this belies an insecurity in our movement. It shouldn’t matter if a Charles Darwin or Charles Dickens was UU. But apparently it does. A lot. Or we wouldn’t go on about it so much. And I don’t know why. Are we saying “we don’t know why we’re here, but the founder of the Red Cross was one of us, so it can’t be that bad?” I suspect it’s that we haven’t had any famous members for most of a century, and we’re in famous withdrawal. 1
Now to my own complaints. They are written for academic/seminary audiences.((I haven’t read the histories, and it’s been years since I read the Forrest Church book, so I might be wrong. But even if I am wrong, this will speak to the histories’ “branding.”)) Of course, we need academic books on our history. But the lack of histories written for a lay audience sends the message that Kinsi is picking up: you have to take an academic interest in these things to be a good UU. And that is a lie. And classist.
I wish there were a good twenty paragraph telling of the UU story. It would deftly summarize our movement without glossing over key moments. It would be written with some charm. It would be curious about the story it’s telling. And it would be the sort of thing you’d want to send on to a friend.
Writing this essay requires deciding what the key moments and figures are. I’m guessing part of the problem is a reluctance to make these pruning decisions, but not every historical moment and every historical figure is important. We need to quit worry about offending the dead. Telling every damn thing that happened is bad story telling.
If it’s going to be engaging, it can’t be a laundry list of splits and mergers and famous sermons. If that’s all we have for a story, our story sucks and we shouldn’t even try to tell it.
Perhaps the toughest part of writing this story is figuring out what our twentieth century story is. Maybe the book reviewed here does much of that work for us.
Who would write this story? I know who my first pick is.
- At least no one that famous. No, Frank Lloyd Wright and Adlai Stevenson do not count. [↩]
Most of the U-U-UU histories written are for lay audiences, certainly Unitarian Universalism: A Narriative History is – it’s even way too brief – how can one cover century in a handful of pages?
Charles Howe’s Universalist history book, THE LARGER FAITH, is also for laymen.
My experience with other denominations is that they spend a lot more time with their history than we do — and have been alot more sucessful in getting their names in the national culture, Bringham Young, Joseph Smith, John Wesley, John Calvin, Buddha, Paul, Jesus, Moses….even their second string guys sometimes make it.
why do we prosetylize the dead? Cleo Hogan has a great theory on that: we’re a relgion that noone has ever heard of, and to keep us from sounding like Unification Church of Rev. Moon, we pull up the list of great U/U/UUs of the past – as to say: see we’re semi-respectable, see? see? oh course, there are better ways to be semi-respectable……
how can one cover century in a handful of pages?
A good writer certainly can. (A better writer than me, that is.) That we seem to have no four to six page overviews of our stories makes me think we don’t have a good standpoint for looking at it. But I’ll have to check out the narrative history. How short is it?
The thing with the folks and religions you mention is that they each have one, maybe two, first stringers. And their stories are simply and briefly told to the unitiated. Joseph Smith found the golden tablets, translated them, and led folks West. After trying a legalistic approach to religion, John Wesley’s heart was strangely warmed and he led a revival among the poor in England and America. Buddha tried finding peace in extravagance and acseticism, but found enlightenment sitting under the bodhi tree. You can give a good synopsis of each one’s story in a sentence.
But who would our lead person or two be? Emerson, Channing, Servetus, Thereau, etc. are all candidates, and so are others. It seems we want to include every little part of the story, and that’s not good story telling—it’s chronicling.
Emerson is probably the best bet. But I don’t know what his story would be. And he certainly doesn’t encapsulate the movement as a whole, but he comes closer than anyone else, or at least what he stood for.
Maybe something like this? 1) Servetus burned at the stake by Calvin. 2) Emerson. 3) Ballou. 4) Humanism. Then the counterculture/post-merger story Philocrites is helping to highlight.
the problem we have with our good small soundbite is this —
— unitarian universalism is a combination of two former Biblically based churches.
the basis was that other churches werent reading the Bible correctly –
– even starting with Joseph Priestly or Benjamin Rush (so we can have social justice, scientists and relgion all in one) — Priestly did found the first Unitarian Church in the USA –
so we got:
they burned his house in England, so this well known scientist came to the United States, and continued to mix the sacred and the scientific…..
hmm, not too good….. oh well, i guess i never got a calling to blurb writing…
and UU: a narative history
In Europe: pp 7-94
Unitarianism in the US pp 95-140
Universalism in the US pp 141-183
Unitarian Universalists p184-200
right on, chutney, sometimes it reminds me of the creepy mormon obsession with genealogy — the need to “claim” their ancestors as mormons so the ancestors can be posthumously baptized mormon and gain access to heaven.
only, in our case, we’re claiming our ancestors to “baptize” *ourselves* into a respectable history and to validate ourselves as a legitimate religion.
even though we want to pretend that we don’t believe anything.
the lack of a history is NOT what is “holding UUism down.”
So who’s your first pick? The link didn’t work.
The link is fixed now (thanks!), but I’ll bet you could have guessed…
No one was a UU prior to 1961. They didn’t exist.
Paul:
If one wants to be a literalist: there was Unitarian Universalist before 1961! Richmond Va had an “Unitarian Universalist Association” back in the 1830s
(before it was renamed something else).
[…] So I've been chewing on this one for a couple of weeks. I posted that FlUUnking History post, and my pal Chutney posted an elaboration on his blog, which can be seen here. And its on his point about "our prosetylization of the dead." I absolutely love that wording. In my New UU class, for example, we had a worksheet scavenger hunt on old famous UUs. The whole New UU class was rather pointless, and this just reiterated it. He may wonder why we're obsessed with declaring important dead people to be UUs, and actively pushing the fact, but it seems somewhat clear to me in my relative New-UUness. It seems twofold to me, neither which seem pretty to me. We want to seem more important than we really are, and we are so desperate to communicate with people outside UUism that we want to use a historical figure to explain it. Since we can't quite look to Jesus, Abraham, Mohamed, etc. […]