These comments were composed and presented by Mark Hamilton, but were reviewed and approved by all members of the Commission:

Freedom of individual religious belief is one of the central tenets of our faith. It's right there at the beginning of the UUA Bylaws, Section 2.4, after the celebrated "Principles and Purpose;" it's an essential part of our tradition. But it brings its own challenges. The joke goes, ask six UUs a theological question and you'll get seven different answers. There's considerable truth to that—that’s why the joke is funny. (Indeed, seven seems a bit low—I would say ten!) We have such diversity of beliefs and opinions that it's difficult, if not impossible, to find something about which you can say, “Unitarian Universalists believe such-and-such.” And even if we do say something like that, we will almost immediately add, “Of course, you don't have to believe that; most of us do, but some don’t.” This is well and good, but it can give the impression that we’re wishy-washy and can’t make up our minds. It brings up the question: In all our profusion of theological perspectives, is there a common core? Are we really ‘the church where you believe what you want?’ What is it that holds us together? To borrow a phrase from minister Katy Korb, What is the handle of the umbrella, under which all our theologies shelter? The Commission on Appraisal has chosen this for the topic of our current study. So far, the most common response seems to be: "Wow. Great topic. Good luck."

So far we have held several hearings and discussions on this topic, and we have been amazed at the quality of the conversations. Last year at GA we held a workshop on the topic, and had some 200 people try and pack into a room intended for half that many, and ended up sitting on the floor and spilling into the hallway. We seem to have touched a nerve.

Gordon McKeeman, former president of Starr King, commented that this issue in fact dates back to the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists in 1961. In the haste to get things organized, he says, there was no effort to merge the doctrines of the two denominations, only the organizational structures, and that has left us with a gap that remains unfilled to this day.

Is the Commission trying to fill this gap? That would be a pretty tall order, if not an impossible one, and we realize it. One of the characteristics of our living tradition is that it cannot be captured by any one statment at one time. But we feel that some answer to the question, however temporary and imperfect, is vital. And whatever our report ends up saying, we hope that in the process of doing the study we will provoke some of the dep reflection that is part of our mission.

I’ll begin with a passage from Martin Buber, which we quoted in the GA program:

The real essence of community is to be found in the fact — manifest or otherwise — that it has a center. The real beginning of a community is when its members have a common relation to the center overriding all other relations; the circle is described by the radii, not by the points along its circumference.... (Paths in Utopia, p. 135)

What is at the center of UUism? Do we have “a common relation to the centre, overriding all other relations?”

Historically, both the Unitarian and Universalist sides of our family tree were named for doctrines, doctrines which were considered heretical by the Christian mainstream. Returning to McKeeman, in a sermon from last year, he says:

In our haste to achieve a consolidation of these two heretical groups, we never did try to combine these doctrines into a Unitarian Universalist religious faith. Instead, we settled for inviting people to join us in “religious freedom.” There is much to be said for welcoming people to the religious journey in whatever condition they find themselves. But I find it deeply disappointing that we do not tell them that the journey does not end in freedom, but that it begins there. Freedom is not the last stop on the railroad. (This, and other quotes from McKeeman, are taken from “Could We Possibly Be Mistaken,” a sermon preached Aug 11, 2002)

So what does lie down the railroad from freedom? Where do we go next? McKeeman has an answer for that, too. He speaks of "using freedom to address the depths of what it means to be alive, how to achieve a sense of meaning and value that enriches our days."

It’s the fourth of our Principles: we covenant to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. But it’s important to realize we don’t stop with just searching. Perhaps, when we find a truth that works for us, we go more deeply into that truth rather than keep searching for still more different truths.

This is one place where I find my experience differs from that of many UUs, especially ones who came to UUism after rejecting some other faith of their childhood. For many newcomers, the experience of finding UUism is intoxicating enough. We’ve all heard the statements, perhaps made them: At last, a place where my questions are welcomed. Finally, I am free to believe as I see fit. (The image that comes to my mind is of a person throwing off a strait-jacket and running across a field, and it’s a good image, a good thing we offer.) But for some of us, like myself, the permission to question all matters of belief is not an earthshaking revelation, it is simply the way things are.

James Fowler, a psychologist who studies religion, suggests that beyond the questioning and rejecting comes a deepening of spirituality; not giving up our rationality, but gaining a greater appreciation of myth, symbol, and ritual, and finding new levels of meaning in them. And if a UU wants to do this, where do they go? We don't have a spiritual practise, we don't have a mystic tradition, and, with few exceptions, we don't have symbols or rituals or myths. I think that is our weakness. If you want to do deep spiritual work, you have to go outside the faith—that's why we have so many UU-dash-somethings, and, I believe, why we lose some of our most spiritual people

I can’t talk about this topic without also saying something about keeping our young people, because I also believe this is why so many of our young people leave the church, or go into minsitry. That seems like an odd combination, but sometimes it feels like if you grew up in this faith, you have two choices: either you leave, or you go to seminary. I feel like a rarity because so far, I have done neither. (And it has taken a lot of effort!) My personal theory is that these people are looking for this deeper spirituality — for which their upbringing has prepared them — and not finding it in the adult congregation. They either drift away, or go to seminary in hopes of finding it there.

So what does this have to do with unity in diversity? Personally, I wish we did have a Unitarian Universalist spiritual path, or practise. I wish we had a tradition to call our own, so that when people are hungry for deeper spiritual experience, we have something to offer them other than the practises of the church up the street. Some may say it’s a strength to be able to borrow from other traditions, and to an extent I agree. It is wonderful to be able to explore other people’s and other traditions’ truths and try them on for size, and it saves us from the deadly arrogance of believing that we have the One And Only Truth. But without a sense of identity ourselves, it can lead to what Forrester Church calls “the smorgasbord approach to religion: a little too much of everything, leaving us with a stomachache and a confused palate” (John Buehrens and F. Forrester Church, Our Chosen Faith, p. 88). Or, as one young adult accused, we can try to include so much that we become “a mile wide and an inch deep.” There’s nothing wrong with being inclusive; in fact, I think that is one of the greatest strengths of our movement. But in order to have depth, we need focus. To deepen our spiritual understanding, we need to know what it is we’re deepening into. To keep our place in all this borrowing, we need a sense of our own identity.

Perhaps if we knew what is at the core of our faith, we would have a place for this deep spirituality within our own tradition. Perhaps if we had an articulated theological centre, we could give our children something more definite to hold on to, and not hear comments like, “I went to that church for thirteen years. What do they believe?” Perhaps if we knew what we had in common, we would have a clearer evangelical message, and not have quite so much trouble attracting new members.

One of the things preventing us from having this conversation is the fear that, if we agree on something, that will make us exclusive. This is a reasonable fear--after all, one of our main characteristics is that we are a creedless faith. But we can take it too far, and be so afraid of excluding anybody that we won’t admit we agree on anything. There is a big difference between articulating what we have in common and excluding people based on what they believe; between saying “You need to believe x, y, and z to belong to this community,” and saying “This community is centred around x, y, and z, and we welcome you if you feel that you belong here.” It’s the difference between forcing people to comply with a creed, and allowing them to self-identify. We already allow people the freedom to choose whether to associate with us or not; being fuzzy about who we are only confuses the issue, and them, and ourselves.

Daniel O’Connell, minister from Connecticut, makes the same point in his paper on UU denominational theology. He writes:

While one solution to this problem is simply to avoid saying who we are, it remains uncomfortably insufficient and interferes with evangelism. There will always be a guess at what is commonly believed among us, and not articulating it doesn't make it go away. (Rev. Daniel O’Connell, Unitarian Universalist Denominational Theology 1993-1997, p. 8)

Unitarians, he says, have been debating this issue as far back as the American Civil War.

They weren’t afraid of expressing their boundaries, but their principle was: “If anyone should be found outside the boundary, it would be by his own choice, not by any official act of exclusion.” And that, I think, is the essential difference. We can be clearer about what we stand for without turning it into any sort of requirement.

Is there a unity to our diversity of beliefs? What might it be? What is it that binds us together? I don’t know the answer, even for myself. I believe there is some sort of unity underlying our theological hodgepodge, but I haven’t thought enough about it yet to say what I think it is. But we on the Commission believe that it is valuable, even necessary, for us to at least have a conversation about it, and that our faith can only grow and strengthen as a result.