On Sun, 16 Apr 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Michael Pollak once neatly summed up my view of religion: there's only one
> (Catholicism) and it isn't true.
Nah, that makes you sound too reasonable on the subject :o) And it also thumbs the scale in your direction, because the truth of religion is like the truth of poetry. That neither is literally true is both obvious and besides the point. And the deeper truth that either has, while certainly open to heated debate, is not an adjudicable matter of fact. Only a philistine or a zealot believes otherwise. And you're no philistine! :o)
My actual joke was that Doug is the archetypal ex-and-now-anti-Catholic. He believes there is only One True Church. And he hates it!
Apropos, this joke original came up in relation to Unitarianism. Because when Doug went to a Unitarian service with Liza's family -- who in are in many ways the liberal elite in the good sense, as seriously intellectual and open minded and kind hearted a family as you could hope -- he had to admit, This was not bad. This didn't rub him the wrong way. But -- This Was Obviously Not Religion!
Because? Because religion is defined as what he hates.
Once you change that premise, the answer to the original question becomes obvious. If Unitarianism is a real religion, then it's obvious why they need a church. It's only a puzzle if you can't accept that they're a real religion, because they're not hateful and they're not like Catholicism or worse :o)
But if you drop the premise that those two things disqualify unitarianism as religion (which of course stated like that is silly) it's possible to see Unitarianism for what it really is: a representative of one of the most profoundly American religious traditions that exist. It is religion of the American renaissance. It is the institutional inheritor of the pantheism of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman.
What Doug sees as "squishy" doctrine is actually no doctrine. It's Sheila-ism. It's the ability of every individual to decide the ultimate tenets of his or her personal faith. And the ingathering church is the ritual demonstration that a world of such infinitely individual religions creates a tolerant community, where the one thing we all agree on and celebrate is our interconnectedness.
The Unitarian solution to the problem of clashing doctrines is not the atheist solution that all doctrines are untrue and should be stamped out but rather the belief that all doctrines -- like all poems -- have a truth in them somewhere to someone. And that the way to make religion totally tolerant is to make it totally individualized. Because if every religion only has one person as its ultimate authority, none of us are ultimate authorities except for ourselves. And the one shared tenet of faith becomes the obvious fact that all these individual religions overlap -- just like individuals do. Because you can't have a truly private religion anymore than you can have a private language. But everyone can have an individual voice.
And that's why Unitarians go to church. To live for a couple of hours in the image of a world like that. To enjoy the feeling that there is no good reason why we can't all live together in peace. To induce it collectively by acting it out.
Which, it is true, is also what many people get out of demonstrations.
Once you put it like this, Unitarianism is simply the institutional essence of American liberal religion. Which is hugely widespread in this country in a whole panoply of churches in almost every denomination.
And once you take all the bad side out of churches, their good sides are clear. They are by far the cheapest form of family entertainment known to man -- the one place you can take your kids and totally not worry about them for a couple of hours while you interact with adults that doesn't cost you money. That, plus group singing and the feeling of community is so many people are attracted to it and enjoy making it part of their routine.
Michael