Unitarian Universalism
Our religion focuses on how we will be together, rather than mandating what we must believe together.
Each week we speak a covenant, that is, a promise that well illustrates the difference.
“Love is the spirit of this church and service is its law. This is our great covenant. To dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.”
-James Villa Blake
Our ministers answered some common questions about Unitarian Universalism:
How long has UU been around?
Our religion is both very old and very new. Unitarian Universalism was formed when two formerly Christian denominations, the Unitarians and the Universalists, merged in 1961. But those two strains of Christianity have been around since the beginning of Christianity.
What did Unitarians believe about Jesus?
Unitarian Christianity posited that Jesus didn’t come to die and save us from our sins, but rather to show us how to live into our own divinity. That each and every one of us possess a spark of the Divine that we can live into.
What did Universalists believe about Hell?
Universalist Christianity rejected the idea of hell, saying that a loving God would never punish his children infinitely to atone for finite sins. And if there is no literal hell, then it’s WE as humans who create heaven or hell on earth, and the salvation we need – the salvation from unjust systems and unjust actions – is something we work toward in THIS lifetime.
How did Unitarian Universalism come to embrace many sources of wisdom?
These two theologies developed for a couple hundred years here in the US, both becoming more and more open to other sources of wisdom besides Christianity and the Bible – including other religions, modern-day prophets like MLK, and our own inner light and divinity. (Remember the Transcendentalists from school? They were all about Hindu philosophy and German Romanticism in aid of greater spiritual enlightenment. One of their founders, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a Unitarian minister before quitting because he found the structure of religion too narrow to experience the Divine).
What is covenant, and where did it come from?
It’s somewhat ironic that our Unitarian ancestors came out of the Puritans, but they did! The Puritans didn’t like the Church of England because they didn’t think its reforms to Christianity and rejection of Catholic traditions went far enough. Their form of religion took 150 years to produce Unitarianism, but they gave us something that has become the bedrock of our communities: covenant. When they received the Westminster Platform from the Church of England in the 1640s – a document that laid out both the Christian theology and the structure and organization of the church – they thought the theology was fine, but the organizational structure was wrong. They responded by writing something called the Cambridge Platform in 1647. In it, they agreed with the theology of the Westminster Platform, but laid out a different vision of how and where decision making authority should lie – i.e., not with the King, and not with higher up priests, either.
What does this mean for UU congregations today?
How denominations organize themselves is called polity. This document laid out what we now call “congregational polity” because the decisionmaking responsibility resides in each individual congregation. We get to decide as a community what we do and how our community is run.
And we get to create our own covenant to say how we will -act- together. We don’t need to believe exactly the same things, but we need to be able to agree to act within our shared values as we pursue our spiritual paths and work for justice. (If you want to learn more about our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors and the history of Unitarian Universalism, Rev. Jen will be offering classes on both Unitarian and Universalist theology and history this fall.)