The Religious Counterculture
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A high school teacher of mine used to love to entertain his classes by rattling off lists of oxymorons: pretty ugly, jumbo shrimp, constant variable. Sometimes he would take the opportunity to editorialize a little: military intelligence, airplane food, liberal religion. Everybody would smirk and the class would go on. The joke, of course, was that liberal religion couldn’t really exist because liberals are not religious and religious people are definitely not liberal. As if everyone knows there’s an inverse correlation between religiosity and liberalism: the more liberal you are, the less religious you are. To the vanishing point. I was told recently (not as a joke) about a synagogue here in New York that’s so liberal that no one ever goes.
And, of course, as with most jokes and stereotypes, there’s some truth to it. If you look at any of the traditional markers of religiosity, we religious liberals are less religious. Religious Jews will keep kosher; religious Catholics will go to confession regularly; religious Muslims will stop everything they’re doing and pray 5 times a day. What do religious Unitarian Universalists do? Nothing. Nothing collectively, anyway. As religions have liberalized and modernized over the years, communal religious practices have simply fallen away.
I want to argue that, beyond just making us the butt of jokes, this has really cost us. It’s a well-known fact that religious congregations, especially liberal ones, have been hemorrhaging congregants. Theological updates have done nothing to help. Unitarian Universalism (arguably the most “updated”) has shrunk relative to the population for at least the last ten years and shrunk in absolute numbers every year for the last five.
Now I’m not saying that liberalization causes people to flee but it’s clearly not enough to keep them. Something else is missing. We keep trying to get more and more liberal, thinking that this is what’s needed to keep moderns engaged in religious life. But it’s not enough. The problem as I see it is not that liberal religion is not liberal enough; the problem is that it’s not religious enough. We’ve updated our theology but instead of updating our religious practices to match, we’ve just dropped them. I believe that if we had religious practices that reflected our theological ideals, we would become a force to be reckoned with.
And our lives would look quite different than they look now. Because our theology envisions a world that looks quite different from how our world looks now. Our Unitarian theology envisions a world where we are one with all our brothers and sisters of all species in a great interdependent web. Our Universalist theology envisions a world of boundless love and acceptance, where no one is excluded from the table of abundance, not based on how you look, not based on whom you love, not based on how much money you have. We envision a world where everyone’s worth and dignity is honored, where violence and hunger are relics of the past, where the powerful share their power, where compassion and love are the bottom line. If you compare this vision to the world we live in, our theology is deeply countercultural. Our religious practices ought to be as well. In response to our wounded world, we need to build a religious counterculture.
I’m not easily starstruck, but there is one minor celebrity whom I’m kind of dazzled by: Mayim Bialik. She plays Amy Farrah Fowler in The Big Bang Theory. I’ve never seen the show, but that’s beside the point. She is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath and keeps kosher. She is a vegan who says that she prepares vegan food for her family to teach her kids to care for the earth (so it has to be kosher vegan food). She adheres to Jewish modesty laws in her dress. This is no small feat for a woman who makes a living in Hollywood.
The modesty issue came to a head as she prepared to attend the Emmys for the first time a couple years ago. She needed to find a dress that covered her elbows and knees and collarbone and was not too tight, and, of course, was gorgeous enough for the red carpet. The quest for this perfect dress became very public as she wrote about it in her various blogs and columns. She called the quest, “Operation Hot and Holy.”
We may disagree with a tradition that requires this kind of modesty but you’ve got to admire someone who takes her religious values so seriously that she is willing to withstand substantial social pressure. If women in our culture normally feel pressure to dress in revealing clothing, the pressure must be a hundredfold at a big Hollywood event like the Emmys. But she did it – Operation Hot and Holy: mission accomplished – and afterwards the blogosphere was bursting with women, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, thanking her for her courage in so publicly contesting the cultural rules of how women are supposed to look.
Do we Unitarian Universalists similarly experience a tension between our religious values and the values of the secular world? If not, why not? It seems to me there should be enormous tension. We should feel it in every decision we make. We should feel it when we shop at the grocery store, when we go to work, when we speak to a child, and when (and if) we watch TV. Until our religious ideals are realized we should not be able to fit comfortably into this world. The questions of to what extent and in what ways we should participate in the dominant culture should keep us up at night. As Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted.”
This is a theme I return to again and again in my ministry. I preached a version of this sermon at All Souls in Manhattan, a version was published in Tikkun magazine and in UU World last year. I believe that the world desperately needs people who are both very liberal and very religious and who are therefore maladjusted.
Of course I didn’t invent this idea. Religious communities have almost always started out countercultural. Teachers across the millennia have taught us to renounce the false idols of the secular world. The early Christian community described in the Book of Acts is a perfect example. The story goes that people were so inspired by the teachings of Jesus that they completely broke from their social context. It says:
They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness. Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common… A great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.
This is Christian Scripture. Being a Christian was not initially seen as compatible with living a normal life, working a normal job, or even owning land. To be a Christian was to have an entirely different understanding of what it means to be a human. These early Christians were asserting an alternative vision of how people can live together in community.
Think of the kibbutz movement in Israel, ashrams in India. This same theme has reappeared repeatedly in different forms, through different religions, at different times throughout history. But, sadly, the trajectory of these movements is almost always one of decline – the commitment fades, the momentum fizzles, the teachings ossify. Over time, people find it too hard to stand so alienated from the lives they once knew. The sacrifices are too great. We want to be able to look fabulous walking down the red carpet at the Emmys. And so religion loses its radical edge as its institutions become ensconced in mainstream society.
James Luther Adams, the famous 20th century Unitarian minister, had harsh words to say about what he saw as our slide down this familiar slope:
The element of commitment, of change of hearts, of decision so much emphasized in the Gospels, has been neglected by religious liberalism, and that is the prime source of its enfeeblement. We liberals are largely an uncommitted and therefore self-frustrating people. Our first task, then, is to restore to liberalism its own dynamic and its own prophetic genius… A holy community must be a militant community with its own explicit faith; and this explicit faith cannot be engendered without disciplines that shape the ethos of the group.
Adams is saying that our failure to embody a religious counterculture is the primary source of our enfeeblement. In contemporary terms, this is why Unitarian Universalism is losing members and why the religious left doesn’t have the power that the religious right does. We’re liberal about our liberalism. We take our religious commitments too lightly, measuring them against a secular understanding of what’s “reasonable.” This, I believe, is our tragic flaw. It leaves us adrift. And our congregations dwindle.
There is another road, other than traditional religious observance on one hand and watered-down liberalism on the other: we can become religiously observant liberals. What would the world look like if religious liberals became observant? What if those of us who consider ourselves theologically liberal began joining liberal religious communities in droves? What if we began tithing to those institutions? What if we observed a Sabbath together and radically disengaged from social and economic structures every week? What if we engaged in serious study of our spiritual texts and heritage and applied their lessons to the issues of today? What if we began lobbying on religious grounds for environmental stewardship?
What if those of us who have high-paying jobs refused to accept a salary that was more than seven times what the lowest-paid worker makes in our organizations (and explained, “It’s because we’re really religious Unitarian Universalists.”)? What if we only ate food that was sustainably grown, humanely raised, and for which the farm workers were paid a living wage, even if that ruled out most of the food we currently ate (and explained to our outraged children, “It’s because in this family, we’re really religious Unitarian Universalists.”)? What if straight couples refused to get married until there was marriage equality for everyone (and explained to their disappointed parents, “It’s because we are really religious Unitarian Universalists.”)? What if we stopped to pray two, three, five times a day to keep ourselves oriented toward our highest ideals?
This is not a call for moral or spiritual perfection but rather for us all to think of our religion as central to our lives. We don’t need to retreat from modern life as much as live in counterpoint to it, continuing to embrace all that is good and joyful in it. There will be tension as we negotiate our desire to simply participate as normal people in this society. We’ll hear ourselves saying, “Can’t I just enjoy a friggin’ cheeseburger for God’s sake?!” We naturally want to succeed in this world. We want to make money, we want to have fun, we don’t want to be freaks, we want to feel accepted. We want to be not only holy, but hot too! Even Mayim Bialik wondered aloud whether God would mind so much if maybe just her left arm were exposed. The struggle is a holy struggle. The important thing is not that we be perfect but that we engage with the tension. This is why we need each other.
We’re not there yet, but I believe that by redeploying traditional religious disciplines in the service of our ideals, we will find our gravitational center. Our connection to our own God energy or spiritual core will deepen as our lives take on a religious orientation. We’ll build internal coherence and integrity. We’ll start to take ourselves seriously as religious people and everyone else will start to take us seriously as well. Our numbers will grow, our influence will grow. We have a unique opportunity right now. I believe that we could form a religious counterculture that changes the world. And my old high school teacher will just have to find a new oxymoron for his list because “liberal religion” will no longer be a joke.
