FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - This week it was comforting to read that a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study reports that Americans are more religiously tolerant than some leaders of organized religion would lead its citizens to believe.
Highlights from the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Ninety two percent of Americans polled believe in God or a higher power, and remarkably most Americans believe that the values of their faith groups are not the only way to salvation. Such a high level of tolerance is encouraging in a nation that is a thickening gumbo of Christians, Muslims, Jews and various East Asian religions. Of the 35,000 people surveyed, the largest faith groups identified were Evangelical Christians [26 percent]; Catholics [24 percent]; Mainline Protestants [18 percent]; the Unaffiliated [16 percent] and members of Historically Black Congregations [7 percent].
I'm here as a delegate at a religious convention, the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly. Often the mainstream media sizes up my faith group as new, New-Age radicals. The definition does not quite fit.
Indeed, Unitarians and Universalists merged only 47 years ago in 1961. At that time I was a kindergarten pupil and the Rev. Donald S. Harrington of my Community Church of New York wrote the governing document for the merged association.
Before the merger, Unitarians and Universalists had traditions with roots hundreds of years deep. Wednesday night, during a parade of hundreds of banners representing the congregations in attendance, a banner from a Boston church said it was founded in 1630.
The American idea of religious freedom and tolerance can be traced to the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is among five confirmed Unitarian or Universalist U.S. presidents. The others are John and John Qunicy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and William Howard Taft, who was also the only president to also serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
It is near impossible to read American history or biography, especially throughout the 1800s and well into the 1900s, and not run smack into a reformer, writer, feminist or scientist who belonged to Unitarianism or Universalism. The Rev. James Reeb died from injuries during the 1960s-era civil rights demonstrations in Alabama. The white, female civil rights martyr who was killed in Mississippi was a Unitarian from Detroit. Henry Hampton, the "Eyes on the Prize" filmmaker who captured the humanity of civil rights advocates and segregationists, learned his craft from working for the Boston-based UUA.
UUs are non-creedal. The lack of dogma gives us the heretic label from some so-called true believers. I wear that heretic label proudly.
As for the UUs, at 220,000 official members, we are a small American religious group. Yet the 1,000 UUA congregations grow slowly at a 1-to-2 percent annual rate, reported the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Those modest gains are exceptional when compared to mainline Protestant denominations that have shrunk and in other cases merged with others to slow the decline.
As one of the 10 percent of members who is a "cradle" UU because I grew up in the movement, I'm very interested in what pollsters call the "unaffiliated" religious folk who often share UUs free-thinking ways but are suspicious of organized religion, one form being "toxic Christianity," as a pastor told me a few years ago.
The UUA and its members should gently beckon these unaffiliated folks in. Say come in, it's safe. It's welcome. Come worship with us.
