Dondi said:
Why even call it a religion if anything goes? Or for that matter why call it a church if atheists and agnostics attend? What would they preach about? Certainly, not God? It might as well be a lodge meeting or something.
I'm coming in on this conversation one year late, but here goes:
Unitarian Universalist services usually go something like this:
- music while people gather
- a welcome by the minister or a member of the Board
- lighting of the flaming chalice, which has been a symbol used by UUs since WWII
- everyone sings a hymn
- there's a prayer or inspirational reading
- a short story or activity for children, who then go to Religious Education classes
- another song or instrumental music during the collecting of the offering
- a reading
- a time for prayer and silent reflection
- a sermon by the speaker, usually an ordained minister, sometimes a lay person. (K_Jo said her husband "became a UU minister online for $5" and got a little white collar. Most UU ministers attend Thomas Starr King School for the Ministry or Meadville Lombard theological School for a couple of years to get their degrees, and I've never seen a UU minister wear a white collar. They often wear a robe and a stole during service.)
- a closing hymn
- gathering in another room for tea or coffee, cookies, and conversation.
The sermons, like life, can touch on many things. They can indeed be about God. One sermon was about the gender of God: do you see God as male, female, both, or neither? One was on the Forgiving God of the New Testament vs. the Vengeful God of the Old Testament.
Recently at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Southern Maryland (
http://www.uufsm.org), there have been sermons on the nature of heroism, on the place of prayer in private life and in the public sphere, on how each of us can work for peace, on the morality of war and the moral decisions of warriors (veterans spoke at that), on the ideal of equality and how that impacts how we structure our society, on reading and understanding the Bible, on treating each other fairly, on redemption, on sacrifice, and on love.
While UUs believe that God is too vast to be defined or totally understood by humans and therefore don't attempt to do so or to dictate how (or if) individuals should see God, Unitarian Universalism is not a religion "where anything goes". UUs have firm principles about how to live a moral life.
People are expected to treat one another kindly and with respect. Bigotry is not acceptable. Neither is lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, or coveting.
In the UU religion, helping other people is seen as a moral duty. Just like people in other churches, UUs collect food for the hungry and clothes for the needy. Good works are strongly encouraged, and Unitarians and Universalists have been extremely active in social concerns, taking up (or starting) causes such as the abolition of slavery, women's rights, civil rights, health care, education, and the ethical treatment of animals.
Unitarianism and Universalism are both hundreds of years old. They began in the 1500s and 1600s from Protestants who read the Bible closely. Unitarians could find no mention of the Trinity in the Bible, and so they believed that God was a Unity, not a Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit. They believed that Jesus was holy, but not divine. (This point of view got some of them burned at the stake.)
Universalists read the Bible and saw a loving God, a God of infinite forgiveness. They believed in Universal Salvation, that everyone would (eventually, after some time of suffering, if need be) be saved and go to heaven. This was in contrast to the Calvinists and their doctrine of predestination, which said that most were doomed to hell, no matter what they did in their lives.
Like other religious groups, Unitarians and Universalists came to the New World to find freedom to worship. By the 1800s there were many Unitarian and Universalist churches established in the United States. (Most of the Unitarian churches were in New England. John Adams and John Quincy Adams were Unitarians, and Louisa May Alcott's father was a Unitarian minister.)
The two denominations had much in common, and in 1961 they consolidated to form the Unitarian Universalist Association. (They have nothing to do with the Unification church.) While both groups have their roots in the Protestant Reformation, in the 1900s people with other ideas of God began joining, and at this time about 20% or so of UUs identify themselves as Christian. Other people who attend UU churches identify themselves as Buddhist, theist, Wiccan, atheist, humanist, agnostic, Dianic, Jewish, Unitarians, Universalists, or Unitarian Universalists.
UUs have different ideas about the nature of God and about what happens to us after we die. What UUs share is a commitment to making earth as much like heaven as we can while we're here.
