Religious “Tinkering” and Unitarian Universalism
Category: Unitarian Universalism - General
After waiting weeks to get it from the library, I’ve started reading Robert Wuthnow’s recent book, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion.
Wuthnow, a sociologist, examines recent trends in marriage and childrearing, career choices, information distribution, and other factors shaping the lives of young adults in America. He argues that young adults today have unique concerns, different in some respects from those that the Baby Boomers had as young adults. If religious leaders don’t understand these unique concerns, Wuthnow warns, religious engagement will decline accordingly (a decline that may have already started).
I don’t know yet if I agree with After the Baby Boomers’s major conclusions, but I am intrigued by a quotation from his first chapter. Wuthnow describes young adult’s way of being religion as “tinkering”:
We piece together our thoughts about religion and our interests in spirituality from the materials at hand. Ordinary people are not religious professionals who approach spirituality the way an engineer might construct a building. They are amateurs who make do with what they can. Hardly anybody comes up with a truly innovative approach to life’s enduring spiritual questions, but hardly anybody simply mimics the path someone else has taken either. Religion, we might suppose, is fundamentally a hedge against uncertainty. It offers meaning, as Clifford Geertz has observed, where there was no meaning. Yet its meanings are seldom final. They depend on faith, and faith implies the possibility of new insights, surprises and growth. A centuries-old creed may be a succinct statement of what a person of faith should believe. Making sense of the implications of that creed, though, is an act of tinkering. (Robert Wuthnow, 2007, pg. 14-15).
This quotation jumped out at me because it so aptly captures what is promising about Unitarian Universalism: the openness to people coming to religious life with diverse “materials,” and making diverse choices, even when claiming a shared tradition and faith community.
The assertion that individuals “make do with what they can,” is at first glance a truism. But it’s worth asking what are the “materials at hand” for young adults in America today? These materials may include exposure to many different world religions, as well as generalized spiritual resources without any religious affiliation, as well as personal experiences in their own families, friendships, educational institutions and other sites outside of church.
For people (young adult or otherwise) who see themselves as assembling their spirituality from a diverse set of experiences, Unitarian Universalism can offer encouragement and community. Unitarian Universalist congregations tend to be places where multiple faith traditions are explored. We describe our faith as having six sources, including the “direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder,” “wisdom from the world’s religions,” “Jewish and Christian teachings,” and “Humanist teachings.” And because we accept multiple sources as valuable, we also try to respect one another’s diverse beliefs.
Another strength of our faith is that we leave room for “the possibility of new insights, surprises and growth.” There is more than one right way to be a Unitarian Universalist. Because we don’t assume a foregone conclusion that all UU’s must arrive at, we can (and should) give one another space to grow and change over time. If you’re a Unitarian Universalist Buddhist, but over time you feel increasingly drawn to Christianity, that doesn’t make you any less a Unitarian Universalist.
Of course one of the challenges of our faith is that we don’t follow the kind of “centuries-old creed” that Wuthnow refers to above. However, we do lay claim to two centuries-old traditions: Unitarianism and Universalism. Both of these traditions have deep roots in American religious history, and offer theological insights that can still have meaning for us in the present.
If Wuthnow is correct that young adults today are spiritual “tinkers,” then Unitarian Universalism has the potential to be uniquely relevant and inspiring to this generation of young adults in America.
February 2nd, 2008 23:17
Sounds like a really interesting book…I think UUism as a philosophy is very appealing to 20-30 somethings. What I have a more difficult time in sharing with my friends is 1) the need for community at all (especially those without kids or who have never experienced a deep personal loss. It was birth of my child and loss of my dad that really pushed me through the doors at age 28…) or 2) the worship experience (still too dry and crusty sometimes!) –terri
February 3rd, 2008 21:29
Religious tinkering? The X-gens are to religion what gnomes are to clockwork? Sounds about right. :mrgreen:
I think of this as a natural out growth of the baby boomers first being ultra liberal in their world views and then later becoming much more conservative and religious. We’ve grown up with the mixed message of tolerance-but-not-too-much and making the best of what we’ve learned. Of course, that’s just my observation.
Namaste.
February 4th, 2008 11:07
Thanks to you both for commenting.
Terri, your story rings true to me; often people decide to check out church in times of crisis, or significant change. I also think you are right that our worship in many congregations needs work in order to appeal to newcomers (as well as members). There’s been an interesting discussion about this recently among UU ministers, which you can read glimpses of on the UU blogs “Monkey Mind” and “Ms. Kitty.”
John, I’m glad you mentioned the impact of the baby boomers, because this is also a key point in the book. Wuthnow argues that baby boomers strayed from congregational involvement, then returned to religious engagement when they married and had children. Some people might expect the same thing will happen with today’s young adults. But the flaw in this logic is that now young adults are waiting longer to marry and have children (if they get married and/or have children at all), and so the needs of young adults today are quite different than those of the baby boomers.
February 5th, 2008 11:08
You said, “…we do lay claim to two centuries-old traditions: Unitarianism and Universalism. Both of these traditions have deep roots in American religious history, and offer theological insights that can still have meaning for us in the present.”
I question, however, whether we still make any meaningful effort to affirm and teach either of those traditions authentically. They are still upheld to a greater or lesser degree in a few of our congregations, but only sporadically and spontaneously, and not in the same sort of co-ordinated or systematic way across all of our congregations that other principles and causes are promoted. Certainly, it has been a very long time since anything programmatic came out of 25 Beacon to aid congregations or individuals in traditional Unitarian or Universalist faith formation.
February 7th, 2008 00:42
Hi Fausto,
Thank you for commenting. Again, I think you raise a topic that really deserves its own post, so I’m going to write a response post in the coming week.
A few quick thoughts I have…I think most of us UU leaders bear a responsibility for the inadequate discussion of UU history in our own congregations (for that matter, I don’t discuss UU history very often on Looking for Faith).
My sense is that while the UUA could put out useful materials (maybe they already do, I haven’t checked it out yet), the responsibility for exploring and promoting our UU history lies with all of us UU’s. I think most of us don’t do that as much as we should due to a number of factors, not the least of which is a concern about how to relate our modern pluralistic UUism to the Christian theological issues that were so important to our forebearers.
It could also be that there’s been a recent dearth of serious historians of UUism, so that there isn’t enough fresh new writing about our history that illuminates its relevance to today. (I may be wrong on this point. If readers can recommend any scholars of Unitarian Universalist history who have published in the last fifteen or so years, please let me know).
February 14th, 2008 13:44
[…] As I wrote earlier, Unitarian Universalists can “lay claim to two centuries-old traditions: Unitarianism and Universalism. Both of these traditions have deep roots in American religious history, and offer theological insights that can still have meaning for us in the present.” […]