| As you may know, I often have a letter or short article in The Inquirer wondering if some aspect of radical religion is practical in present day Unitarianism. Someone who must be my mirror image at the opposite end of the church, Julian Smith, has been getting more visible in the same letter columns. And, at the General Assembly next week, Julian Smith and the church of which he is a lay leader, has this motions up for debate. It says: |
That this General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, while valuing our tradition as an open minded movement, nevertheless believes that in recent years pluralism has been emphasised to such an extent as to undermine our status as an historic Christian denomination. Accordingly, this General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches moves that all committees of the denomination should, as they determine:
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| The chances of this motion being passed is, I would have thought, are minimal. Pivotal Unitarian Christian opinion, such as that of Rev. Cliff Reed, has already said, in a letter of the same issue, that a plea for tolerance of Christians is unnecessary and that Julian Smith displays a less than generous spirit. A humanist non-active minister, Rev. Phil Silk, has also written how ironic is the suggestion that, in a year of interfaith co-operation, Unitarians cannot get along with other Unitarians, let alone those in other faiths, secularists and seekers. He hopes the GA will reject censorship and heresy in favour of healing. |
| The question I have asked myself is why Julian Smith wants to be a Unitarian. Clearly, only he could and should give an answer. He has claimed that he and other self-declared avowedly Christian leaders around him in London are not orthodox. But one wonders what he means by 1/4not orthodox1/2. I would suggest that his religion is considerably more orthodox than many in the mainstream today. My theory, for what it is worth, is that he, and others like him, really want to be conservatives in religion, but because they know they do not believe this or that in Christianity, they would feel condemned as relative unbelievers in the mainstream. Indeed, when some of them joined mainstream churches they felt very uncomfortable, and have since moved to or returned back to Unitarianism. Then they can play at being conservatives. |
| But I see myself as a mirror image of them. I want to be a radical in religion, that is to see religion as a way of stirring people into thinking again about what they believe, what they are doing and why. I am happy to use Christian language, but when I was in the Unitarian College I found that I could not use it if I wanted to keep a radical stance. In this movement Christian language has become the language of conservatism while that of humanism or paganism is the language of the radicals. The latter group want Unitarianism to be distinctive. |
| I think it should be distinctive, but my argument is that although the gentle but theistic and historical nature of Unitarian language may serve existing congregations the same is alien to many outsiders. As such language fails to serve that minority group of religious seekers out there, who are looking for distinctiveness and change, congregations decline and chapels are closed. |
| I do not think distinctiveness has to reject all Christian language. The problem is simply that a number of Unitarian Christians feel so threatened that they are aiming to conserve theistic language, reference to Jesus as some central figure and various practices as a matter of compulsion. This is what the Brixton motion is about at an official level. The result is that Unitarianism is neither Christian enough to satisfy the other churches that Unitarian Christians often so admire - after all, Unitarianism is excluded from the Council of Churches in Britain and Ireland - nor it is distinctive enough for those out there who reject mainstream churches. |
| When I have spoken to Unitarian Christians about my friend Don Cupitt, and with only a few exceptions I have got hostile responses. One ex-principal told me that someone told him that Don's writings were evidence of madness. Others have either sneered or condemned his ideas. And this from Unitarian Christians. Rather than see Don as trying to preserve and re-interpret Christianity for modern times, they dismiss him for not being theistic and maintaining a sufficient link between Jesus and a real God. |
| This is why now my principal religious involvement is Sea of Faith and that it functions for me in the way it does for others. It is a support network for those who defend their postmodern approach to religion against all institutions that attempt to squash it. Now I attend sympathetic Anglican services, where I also communicate to gain the full benefit of participation, as well as Unitarian ones. I find I have to be as non-realist about Unitarian belief in God and other beliefs as Anglican belief in God and its other beliefs. Indeed, from a post-Christian point of view, the Anglican trinity, where God and Jesus are equal in status, may be preferable to the Unitarian belief in God while having Jesus at, so to speak, a lower pegging. I was always disappointed on joining Unitarianism to find Jesus theologically demoted compared with God when, for my own preference, my own sense of modern humanism, I wanted God demoted in favour of Jesus. |
| I have my own religious phases and changes of course, and I always aim for a sense of newness and change. I think religious culture and symbolic actions are important anddo help us to orientate and reorientate ourselves. I do not think that belief in doctrines or even God is important. That is my belief, you may of course differ. |
| Don Cupitt too changes. After he took leave of God at the end of the seventies, he moved from an individualist belief in the void to a more collective language centred approach. Lately he moved on to Jesus, not a Jesus of history as such, for that would be to misread him, but a Jesus in the texts. We can only know this highly mysterious rabbi through inherited texts. But then, recently, Don was struck down by a loss of voice and then a brain haemmorhage. He has since been recovering, but it lost him a lot of his confidence. He is now, once again, stirring up, undermining certainty and looking at things in new ways. It is indeed a part of religion to be creative with a particular tradition. The effect of his haemmorhage is to add to the subject of his thinking. Judaeo-Christianity has always been a materialist faith, concerned with body, blood, bread, wine, sacrifice, resurrection in this world, and he now is looking at Jesus the anti-traditionalist in that context: in the context of sexuality and body fluids in I think, a very fresh and stimulating way for religion. |
| It is here that many Unitarian liberal Christian leaders, harking after a sort of pre Edwardian Victorian heyday, a subculture of preserved Unitarian theistic language, are certainly not reinvigorating the Unitarian denomination for the future. They are fossilising it. They think they are preserving the denomination, but I think by fossilising it they will destroy it. |
| Beyond the chapel walls no longer is a general belief out there that is recognisably theistic and Christian. Today people have all kinds of religious views, from the most superstitious to the most secular. No longer do children get a grounding in belief from Sunday Schools. Thus, to follow Unitarian conservatives is to become as separated and sectarian from society as any fundamentalist church. |
| Don is asking how can Christianity be intellectually viable and challenging. I usually like what he comes up with and I try to think around such questions myself. He recognises that much in the mainstream is likely to fossilise or be fundamentalist. What I am saying here is that, whilst Unitarianism has the potential for change, and from time to time shows it has, I think on the whole things are parallel to the mainstream. This is not to say that they are the same, rather there is a lck of the potential that exists. |
| I do not agree with my Hull friend Mike Tracey, when he wrote in a recent Inquirer, 6th March, that non-realist theology in the mainstream lacks integrity because it has to accommodate itself to the existing Christian framework. After all, the weekly diet of Unitarian churches is often just as restricted in terms of religious expression even if not as fixed as in the mainstream. It may be too that some non-realists want to use Christian language. Also, Unitarian nonrealism may be post-Christian because that language has been posssessed its conservatives. But, if he is right, if non-realist Unitarians do in general adopt a post-Christian theology, I hope that they will be heard and indeed all groups promote challenging religion. |
| I say this as someone on the margins of both Anglican and Unitarian religious institutions. My own unfinished business is relating myself to one, both or none of these institutions after my experience with Unitarian College. What I am trying to suggest is that if the Unitarian future is to be that towards the motion of Julian Smith and the Brixton church, even if the motion fails, Unitarianism will probably lose its way. I have no interest in that, I want Unitarianism to find its way, and I want to support a prosperous future for the denomination, whether I am inside it or outside it. Let's hope the General Assembly meetings next week are constructive. |
Adrian Worsfold
Pluralist - Liberal and Thoughtful