Skip to main content

Unitarian Universalism

Submitted by Ken Watts on Tue, 06/19/2007 - 10:03

As regular readers will recall, I recently took the quiz on BeliefNet, designed to rank which religions I'm compatible with. You can see the results here.

So far I've written about Secular Humanism and Jehovah's Witnesses—my most likely, and least likely, matches. Today I'm looking at the second most likely for me, Unitarian Universalism.

I didn't expect a little on-line survey to be so insightful, but I must say I am impressed. Even the history of Unitarian Universalism matches my own journey.

The denomination is the result of a merger between two groups—Unitarians and Universalists—in 1961.

Prior to that, Unitarians were Christians who didn't believe in the trinity, but instead believed that God was a unity. Today, even some atheists are Unitarians.

Hence the old joke: A Unitarian is a person who believes there is, at most, one God.

When I was still a Christian I researched the doctrine of the trinity at length. While I never thought of myself, at the time, as rejecting the doctrine, I basically came to a point of view not far from Unitarianism.

Unitarianism went on "to stress the importance of rational thinking, each person's direct relationship with God, and the humanity of Jesus."

This could easily be a description of my own journey toward the end of my time as a Christian.

Meanwhile, Universalists had come to the conclusion that a loving God would not condemn anyone to hell—another conclusion I drew early on.

Although this belief is as old as Christianity (it's delineated by the early fathers of the church), Universalism only became a separate denomination in 1793, in the United States.

The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations affirms and promotes seven principles:

  1. The inherent worth and dignity of every person
  2. Justice, equity and compassion in human relations
  3. Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations
  4. A free and responsible search for truth and meaning
  5. The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large
  6. The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all
  7. Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part

I tried, out of a sense of fairness to the other groups I've written about, to find something to quibble with, even a little bit, in that list. But I failed.

I was particularly impressed that the words "truth" and "meaning" were uncapitalized. That says a lot.

If they are anything like their website, and if I were at all tempted to become religious again, I'd be tempted to be a Unitarian Universalist.