Freewheeling Faith : Unitarians: Oneness in Diversity

Diana King’s striptease during “show and tell” time at a suburban Houston church several years ago drew a sharp reprimand from church authorities.

But the North Texas Assn. of Unitarian Universalist Societies did not mind that it was in church that King, a Unitarian, had stripped down to her G-string.

The objection, said an official, was that the dance was “sexist”--an incident of publicity-seeking “sexploitation.”

That reaction was not surprising in the 176,000-member Unitarian Universalist Assn., the nation’s most liberal Protestant religion, where a service is often called a celebration rather than worship, the minister gives an address instead of a sermon and a church “happy hour” can substitute for the old-fashioned midweek prayer meeting.

Resist Formalizing

Free-thinking and resistant to the formalizing of religion, Unitarian Universalists have long been pace setters in the liberal stream of American social, literary and political life. Indeed, the non-creedal denomination, with parent bodies dating to the 18th Century, has exerted influence far greater than its numerical strength.

Over the years, Unitarian Universalism has boasted five U.S. Presidents among its adherents, and such notables as Alexander Graham Bell, P. T. Barnum, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Schweitzer, Adlai Stevenson, Whitney Young and Linus Pauling.

Yet, the church remains small. And current surveys show that 60% of Americans know little or nothing about it.

In essence, the founders of Universalism believed in universal salvation by God for all persons. The founders of Unitarianism believed in the unity, or oneness, of God, as opposed to the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity (God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit).

Free-Wheeling Group

The church today has broadened to a free-wheeling association of theists, deists, humanists, mystics and atheists. Beliefs include tenets from all major religious traditions and philosophies. A survey found that a majority of Unitarian Universalists believe in “God”--20% do not--but that the predominant view is that “God” is best used as a name for “some natural processes within the universe, such as love or creative evolution.”

This month, as the association observes the 25th anniversary of the merger of the Unitarian and Universalist denominations, association president William F. Schulz of Boston vowed to fulfill his preelection promise of last year: To make Unitarian Universalism “a household word.”

The 36-year-old clergyman, believed to be the youngest president of a major U.S. denomination, already has hired a new public relations manager, appeared on television talk shows and issued a public invitation--which he says so far has been unanswered--to debate well-known fundamentalist television preachers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on religious freedom issues.

Schulz raised $50,000 in campaign funds and spent two years on the road to win the hotly contested election last June for the Unitarian Universalist post, which pays $62,500 annually plus housing and benefits.

“Most basically, I see Unitarian Universalism at a crossroads,” Schulz, a six-footer with dark hair and a beard, said in an interview. “We need to make a decision theologically as to whether we are going to continue to be known basically for what we don’t believe, or whether we are going to articulate a positive theology for the 21st Century.”

Schulz believes that a new form of faith “in contrast to fundamentalism” is the next step “among those religious communities willing to look beyond the simplistic.”

By ending Unitarian Universalist obscurity, Schulz said, he hopes to attract those who “are yearning for a religious alternative to evangelicalism . . . blacks and Hispanics and Asians looking for a new religious home; young people looking for a meaning beyond materialism; women and men looking for a church which honors women’s spirit.”

Unitarian Universalists have been in the forefront of the civil rights, sanctuary and anti-war movements. The church has openly ordained homosexuals to its ministry since 1970, and in 1984 it became the first major denomination to hold religious celebrations for the union of homosexual couples.

The association’s recent decision to divest its South Africa-related stocks all at once--rather than gradually, as other church groups are doing--drew wide attention.

Challenge the Scouts

And last fall, Schulz made headlines when he criticized the Boy Scouts of America for expelling a scout who refused to define God as a “supreme being.” As a result, scout leaders dropped the requirement and the youth was reinstated and promoted.

Sharing a malaise that affected virtually all mainline and liberal Protestant faiths during the last two decades, Unitarian Universalism suffered a steep membership decline, from a peak of 250,000 in the mid-1960s, to a low of 166,000 in 1980.

The average age of members is 52; Many younger members and children of members have dropped out of religious life altogether, Schulz acknowledged in the interview. As the American religious climate tilted sharply toward political activism on the right rather than the left, others gravitated towards the rapidly growing conservative churches, he said.

On an upbeat note, Schulz pointed out that the church’s 17 years of steady decline ended in 1981; membership has since been edging upward at about 1% a year. Presently, there are 136,000 adults and 38,000 children and teen-agers in 1,000 congregations in North America, including 40 from San Luis Obispo to San Diego, 15 of them in Los Angeles County.

Another 2,000 people belong to the Church of the Larger Fellowship, a “church by mail” for geographically isolated religious liberals that was made popular by Africa’s Albert Schweitzer.

Outstanding Example

Schulz pointed to Los Angeles’ First Unitarian Church as an outstanding example of the denomination’s commitment to ethnic and social concerns.

The 109-year-old multiracial congregation, led by the Rev. Philip Zwerling, occupies a large Spanish-style building on 8th Street within a Latino neighborhood and a block away from an area that recently has become home for about 100,000 Korean Americans.

Each Sunday morning, separate meetings are held in Spanish and in Korean before the main service in English, which is simultaneously translated into the other languages for head set-wearing parishioners.

“Today we are stronger as a church than we have been in 15 years,” Zwerling said in a report to his congregation of 350, reminding them that the 100 bags of groceries the church gives weekly to feed the poor “is more than any other (Unitarian Universalist) congregation in the country.”

The church is active in women’s and minority rights issues, union organizing and the anti-nuclear movement and opposes U.S. intervention in Central America.

Join Police Lawsuit

The church was one of 144 plaintiffs in the celebrated lawsuit over spying by the Los Angeles Police Department’s now-defunct Public Disorder and Intelligence Division and won $3,000 in the settlement.

In 1982, the congregation was the first church in Southern California--and in the denomination--to declare itself a “sanctuary” for illegal Central American refugees. The Unitarian Universalist Assn. now lists 40 sanctuary churches.

Four months ago, the Los Angeles congregation completed an apartment in the church basement to shelter refugees. Earlier, the church community outreach director, Ricardo Zelada, a former El Salvador Congress member and union organizer, and his family were harbored for eight months in a First Church shelter while lawyers successfully battled efforts by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport Mrs. Zelada. Zelada and his family have since joined the church.

Like Schulz, Zwerling is a highly visible activist. He hosts a weekly radio show (Cambridge Forum West) on KPFK. He debates public figures on social and political policy issues; he often speaks at demonstrations (one of the most recent was at the Federal Building in West Los Angeles, where he protested the U.S. bombing of Libya); and he has written a book, “Nicaragua: A New Kind of Revolution,” approving of the Sandinista regime.

Sunday mornings at Zwerling’s church are lively, although attendance rarely exceeds 200. On a recent Sunday, for example, “Dear Abby” (advice columnist Abigail Van Buren) and Dr. Mervyn Silverman, national spokesman for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, spoke on the crisis caused by the deadly acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Topics Provocative

Zwerling’s own topics are provocative. Some recent samples:

“The Grenada Invasion: American Victory or American Shame?” “The Other Peace Movement: The Soviet People’s Struggle for Peace”; “Ruminations on Elections, Or, If I Were President. . . “; “Is Unitarian Universalism a Religion?” (It is, he said.)

Harry Freed of Monterey Park, a political activist member of First Church since 1954, said it is the “international affairs, legislative considerations, progressive and humanistic thinking” that attract him. “Because of this, the church became my life,” he said.

Parishioner Max Kagan of Los Angeles said he sometimes takes issue with the subjects, but always finds them stimulating--for instance Zwerling’s recent Sunday message on Karl Marx and religion.

Marx was “a prophet in the biblical tradition. He gave us a vision of a more just and humanitarian society. . . . If Karl Marx wasn’t a Unitarian, he should have been,” Zwerling said to loud applause.

“And if you haven’t read and appreciated Marx, you should.”

Ushers Disarmed

Earlier, at the time of taking up the collection, Zwerling facetiously remarked that it was only fair to also give gangster Al Capone, “that capitalist exponent,” his due.

“Capone said, ‘You can get a lot with a kind word. . . . But you can get more with a kind word and a gun,’ ” Zwerling said, looking out into the audience and pausing for effect.

Then, assuring his congregation that he would rely on persuasion rather than force, Zwerling added: “Our ushers have been disarmed.”

The Los Angeles congregation’s annual budget is $250,000, up more than $100,000 from 1979. Nationally, there are many affluent Unitarian Universalists; last year, for example, the 600 members of the North Shore Society in Plandome, N.Y., gave the national association $20 million in stocks and bonds--one of the largest one-time gifts to an American institution.

But Unitarian Universalists as a whole consistently fall near the bottom of major U.S. religious groups in per-capita church-giving--about $212 in 1984 contrasted with $743 for the first-place Seventh-day Adventists.

Identity Problems

The Unitarian Universalist Assn. also has identity problems; many in recent years have confused the Unitarians with the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon--whose Massachusetts headquarters is a block from Unitarian Universalist offices in Boston.

Although the earliest expression of Unitarian Universalist belief can be traced to the third century of the Christian era, the Unitarian religion was first established in what is now Romania by the king of Transylvania in 1568, when he issued an edict of religious tolerance and freedom.

The first Universalist church in America was founded in Gloucester, Mass., in 1779. The first Unitarian church was King’s Chapel in Boston, which broke from its Episcopal roots in 1785. The first new Unitarian church in the United States was established in 1796 in Philadelphia by Joseph Priestley, the English chemist who discovered oxygen.

Although they started talking about uniting in 1899, the two branches did not merge until May 15, 1961, in Boston.

Unitarians and Universalists were among the nation’s Founding Fathers (Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Universalist medical pioneer was a signer of the Declaration of Independence). And they have been prominent in the fields of government, science, literature and the humanities ever since.

Five U.S. Presidents

The five who have been U.S. Presidents were John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft.

(Although biographical data on Thomas Jefferson says that he was a deist and does not mention his affiliation with any particular religious group, Unitarian Universalists claim his allegiance on the basis of a letter he wrote from Monticello to a friend, saying that since there was no Unitarian or Universalist church in Charlottesville, Va., “I must therefore be contented to be a Unitarian by myself.”)

Nine Unitarian Universalists currently are members of Congress, including California Reps. Don Edwards (D-San Jose) and Pete Stark, Jr. (D-Oakland). Sens. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) and William S. Cohen (R-Me.) also belong to the faith, as do Govs. Richard D. Lamm of Colorado and James J. Blanchard of Michigan.

Other famous Unitarian Universalists, according to the association, include authors and poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, e.e. cummings, William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Greeley and Henry David Thoreau; U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; architect Frank Lloyd Wright and botanist Luther Burbank.

Unitarian Universalist tradition also includes many activist women, among them Louisa May Alcott, who wrote about the independent spirit of women in “Little Women,” Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross, and Julia Ward Howe, who founded Mother’s Day and wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Revises Language

After a seven-year process, the church eliminated what it called sexist and patriarchal language from its revised statement of faith implemented last year. But the document stopped short of endorsing “feminism” as a separate or special category of religious tradition.

Schulz said that recognition of parallelism between Eastern mysticism and Western physics is growing in Unitarian Universalist circles:

“There are significant shifts in how we understand reality and the universe. The most significant is . . . from the old Newtonian physics and the notion of the basic building blocks of life being the hard, isolated, atoms which are not in connection with each other, to the notion of the new physics coming out of quantum mechanics and relativity.

“Everything is . . . dependent and connected in an elaborate web of creation. A holistic view of creation is becoming more and more central to a sophisticated understanding of what being is all about.”

Unitarian Universalism, as defined by Schulz, thus shares much of the monistic world view of physicist Fritjof Capra and some “New Age” thinkers that all things are interrelated in a “deep ecology” of “the divine One.”

‘God-Talk’ Unnecessary

But Schulz said it is not necessary to use “God-talk” to describe the ultimate reality of creation, although “about half of us (Unitarian Universalists) use language that refers to theism and God.”

The kernel of Unitarian heritage, he added, is that history and the human future are “not in the hands of an inexorable fate or an angry God, but in human hands. . . . God’s blessings--the holy--doesn’t wait for the miraculous moment . . . but rather is manifest all around us in the ordinary, the simple, the precious and the everyday--if we have the eyes to see it.”

In recent years, the humanist-atheist influence within Unitarian Universalism seems to have waned slightly. According to a 1984 survey, 80% of association members affirmed the concept of God in some way, contrasted with 70% in 1967. It was this survey that found that the predominant view (50%) was that “God” might be defined as “love or creative evolution.”

Even within a denomination that is predominantly humanist, and which generally considers Jesus as a significant religious figure but not divine, there is room for a small group that calls itself Christian.

The Unitarian Universalist Christians, who have printed a journal, “So You Want to Be a Christian, but Your Church Isn’t,” have “an honored place in our midst,” Schulz said. “They help us relate to things like liberation theology and other developing issues.”