Unitarian Universalist History

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Unitarian Universalist History
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Unitarian Universalist History
Merger versus Consolidation

• In 1961, the American Unitarian Association
  and the Universalist Church of America
  consolidated. There never was a merger. Why?
  This was a legal issue. If the two denominations
  merged, any two or three churches or intermediate
  organizations that refused to go along could go
  to court and say they were the true successors of
  the AUA or the UCA and claim all their respective
  assets. The change in terminology also pleased
  many Universalists who had feared that to be
  merged suggested being submerged.
  Consolidation, they felt, had more of a ring of
  marriage of equals.

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Unitarian Universalist History
One Hundred Years of Courtship

• Hosea Ballou joined the Unitarians in rejecting
  the Trinity, while the Unitarians shed concerns
  about eternal damnation in favor of moral
  striving in this life, often described as right
  conduct.
• Both groups made freedom of belief and conscience
  central to their religious convictions. Remember
  the liberty clause that we discussed in
  Universalists 1803 Winchester Profession. For
  the Unitarians the principle that every
  congregation was independent and self-governing
  was retained from their Puritan founders
  insistence on congregational polity. In
  comparing the Universalists and the Unitarians,
  Thomas Starr King made the statement that the
  one thinks that God is too good to damn them
  forever, the other thinks they are too good to be
  damned forever.
• In 1937 the two denominations cooperated in the
  publication of a new hymnal.
• In 1947, the two governing boards appointed a
  joint committee to explore union. Instead of
  union, both groups adopted a plan to set up the
  Council of Liberal Churches.
• In 1954, the two youth groups, the American
  Unitarian Youth and the Universalist Youth
  Fellowship formed a common organization called
  Liberal Religious Youth.
• In 1956, Universalist Church of America and the
  American Unitarian Association established a
  Joint Merger Commission an acknowledgement by
  both parties that it was time to form a united
  denomination.

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Unitarian Universalist History
What Took So Long?

• Given their convergence of beliefs, it wasnt so
  much theological as socioeconomic and
  organizational factors that were the major
  stumbling blocks to achieving the desired union.
  The Universalists had long felt that the
  Unitarians looked down on them since
  Universalism, with a few notable exceptions,
  developed as a more rural than urban, more
  working-class than elite movement.
• The Univeralists were little inclined to
  institution building.
• The Universalists didnt have a pool of
  well-trained ministers to provide leadership.
  Many Universalists were Baptist renegades, and
  like the Baptists, many boasted of the
  uneducated condition of their clergy. In their
  view, the Holy Spirit operated freely among men
  and needed not the trappings of schools. The
  Unitarians represented the Boston
  establishment.
• The two denominations differed in social status,
  in the role of the clergy, and in temperament.
• Unitarianism remained a self-consciously
  intellectual and elitist movement, proud of the
  academic credentials of its ministers and
  disdaining (with notable exceptions) the
  missionary zeal of their Universalist
  contemporaries.
• The Unitarians felt that the Universalists were
  too theologically conservative, too emotional,
  and essentially not like us.

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Unitarian Universalist History
Dana McLean Greeley

• First President of the UUA
• Groomed by the New England Unitarianism of
  Channing, Emerson and Parker, he became an
  internationally respected advocate for world
  peace and interfaith understanding.
• He was a fifth-generation Unitarian. He graduated
  from Harvard College in 1931 and from the Harvard
  Divinity School in 1933.
• He was called to the Arlington Street Church in
  Boston in 1935. Dr. Samuel A. Eliot had served as
  minister there for eight years following his
  service as president of the American Unitarian
  Association for twenty-five years.
• He had a twenty-three year ministry at Arlington
  Street Church.
• Befriending Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and
  involvement in the civil rights movement were of
  paramount importance to Greeley. His efforts in
  trying to help the association accept its own
  institutional racism were less successful.

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Unitarian Universalist History
The Syracuse Conference

• Held in 1959 in Syracuse, New York to approve the
  Plan to Consolidate a forty-four page
  document that became known as the Blue Book.
• Among other matters, the name of the organization
  had to be decided upon. We almost became known
  as the United Liberal Church of America. The
  people who favored that name thought that it
  would attract the Quakers and the Ethical Culture
  Societies.
• There were 600 Unitarians and 400 Universalists
  gathered in a joint meeting to adopt rules of
  procedure. Many participants called this meeting
  the Unitarian Council of Nicea.
• There were essentially three factions the
  traditional theists, who wanted a reference not
  only to God but to our Christian heritage the
  universalist theists, who preferred
  acknowledging the great prophets and teachers of
  humanity in every age and tradition and the
  humanists, who would just as soon do without
  reference to any deity.
• Here was a paragraph that caused considerable
  concern
• To cherish and spread the universal truths
  taught by the great prophets and teachers of
  humanity in every age and tradition, immemorially
  summarized in their essence as love to God and
  love to man.
• Those who valued the Christian tradition wanted
  which Jesus taught as love to God and love to
  man. That group was appalled when the humanists
  and those fearful of a creed succeeded in
  passing an amendment to delete the paragraph
  altogether.

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Unitarian Universalist History
Draft Cards, Sanctuary, and Civil Unrest

• While Greeley was working for peace at the
  highest level, a grass-roots anti-war movement
  was disturbing the peace in many UU
  congregations.
• Arlington Street Church in Boston became the
  focus for this movement, certainly as far as
  national media were concerned. Jack Mendelsohn,
  its minister at the time, recalls that the church
  was the scene of many anti-war demonstrations and
  rallies. There would be hordes of people outside
  opposing us and plastering the building with
  eggs. It required the Boston mounted police to
  maintain order.
• The most dramatic event took place in October of
  1967. Students in the various universities
  around Boston who had formed an anti-war
  coalition received permission to hold a service
  at the church. The church was absolutely packed
  with students and TV camera teams. Sixty or so
  young men burned their draft cards. That was
  shown on TV all over the country.
• Even more divisive was the sanctuary movement,
  which offered shelter to draft evaders and in
  some instances to AWOL servicemen. Arlington
  Street Church again led the way.

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Unitarian Universalist History
A Bitter Battle about Race, Background

• When people who have joined the Unitarian
  Universalist movement since 1969 hear that there
  was a major walkout at General Assembly they find
  it hard to believe. What? Among Unitarian
  Universalists? People seized microphones? Called
  each other unforgivable names? Spat in each
  others face? How could that be?
• A little background about that year is helpful.
  It was the year of the Woodstock Festival. It
  was the year of the police raid on the Stonewall
  Inn, a gay bar in New Yorks Greenwich Village,
  triggering the gay pride movement. It was the
  year of the largest ever anti-Vietnam war
  demonstration in Washington, D.C. It was the
  year of the trial of the anti-war demonstrators
  who had battled the police at the Chicago
  Democratic convention the year before. In the
  1968 presidential election following that
  convention, Richard Nixon and George Wallace
  between them won almost 60 percent of the vote.

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Unitarian Universalist History
A Bitter Battle about Race

• Another challenge came from those who pointed out
  that while we were indeed well represented in the
  struggle for civil rights, our congregations
  remained overwhelmingly white, and that only a
  handful of African Americans had ever been
  ordained as either Unitarian, Universalist, or
  Unitarian Universalist ministers.
• Starting in Los Angeles, some black Unitarian
  Universalists were losing patience with the UUs.
• In response to the turmoil, the Unitarian
  Universalist Commission on Religion and Race
  called an Emergency Conference on Unitarian
  Universalist Response to the Black Rebellion.
• In October of 1967, some 135 participants
  including thirty-seven African Americans gathered
  at New Yorks Biltmore Hotel. District
  executives had picked seventy-six of them
  twenty-six were UUA staff or committee members
  the rest were ecumenical observers or black
  theological students. Whether or not they fairly
  represented the denomination was hotly debated
  and still a matter of contention.
• Homer Jack was director of the conference.
• Almost immediately, however, at the call of black
  people from Los Angeles, thirty of the
  thirty-seven African American delegates withdrew
  to form a caucus closed to whites. There they
  developed a list of what they called
  non-negotiable demands that would have to be
  accepted or rejected by the conference in
  entirely for submission to the UUA Board of
  Trustees. The core demand was that the Board
  establish a Black Affairs Council (BAC), to be
  appointed by the Black Unitarian Universalist
  Caucus (BUUC), and to be funded for four years at
  250,000 per year.
• Two separate hostile factions developed BAC and
  the Black and White Action (BAWA). For some ten
  years, the factions signified the most heated and
  irreconcilable division in the denominations
  history. Which group was to lead (and get the
  money) the UU programs to improve race relations.

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Unitarian Universalist History
Call to Selma, 1965

• Black demonstrators were stopped by police using
  clubs and tear gas they tried to march from Selma
  to Montgomery, Alabama to petition for voting
  rights.
• Martin Luther King sent a telegram to religious
  leaders asking for support.
• Homer Jack, having just recently joined the UUA
  staff, immediately urged UU ministers to join him
  in Alabama.
• Roughly 100 UU ministers heeded Kings call,
  including Orloff Miller, Clark Olsen, and James
  Reeb. They were joined by some 100 lay Unitarian
  Universalists and 350 clergy and religious from
  other denominations.
• As a group of UU ministers were leaving a
  restaurant, they were attacked by a group of
  segregationist bigots. James Reeb was killed by
  a blow to his head by a club.
• A few days earlier, a local black demonstrator,
  Jimmy Lee Jackson had been killed.
• Also, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a Unitarian
  Universalist from Detroit, was also killed.
• For a very good account of the day to day
  miseries of the march, read Richard Leonards
  book Call to Selma, Eighteen Days of Witness

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Unitarian Universalist History
Robert West becomes UUA President

• Second UUA President (1969-1977)
• Robert West was not naïve about the financial
  situation of the UUA when he ran for president.
  West had spelled out in his platform his belief
  that our movement today is in severe crisis
  affecting programs, finances, attitudes, and
  identity.
• Key points of his platform
• To fund the Black Affairs Council not through the
  denominational budget, but through special
  voluntary campaigns.
• To improve communications by starting a newspaper
  to be sent to every UU member family.
• To strengthen district operations
• To address the financial crisis by asking, What
  are the essential functions of our continental
  organization? What does the UUA have to do? What
  are our priorities? Let us identify three or
  four and proceed to perform them well.

Robert West, left, and
Gobin Stair former Director of Beacon Press
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Unitarian Universalist History
Publication of the Pentagon Papers

• The UUA and Beacon Press played a remarkable role
  in publishing "The Pentagon Papers" in 1971.
  This was done despite government pressure,
  harassment, threats, and invasion of privacy
  which threatened to bankrupt the UUA and Beacon
  Press.
• The seven thousand page collection of documents
  and analyses had been released by Daniel Ellsberg
  and given to then-Sen. Mike Gravel, a UU member
  of Congress from Alaska.
• On October 10, 1971, the Pentagon rushed its own
  heavily censored version into print, stealing
  Beacons thunder by twelve days. So sudden was
  their effort that they produced raw, even
  illegible documents, skipping such editorial
  niceties as page numbers.
• On October 27, 1971, FBI agents appeared at the
  UUAs bank asking to see the Associations
  records. No one would have known about this
  snooping expedition if a bank vice president,
  acting on his own initiative, had not called the
  UUA treasurer. The government got a grand jury
  to order the bank to turn over all checks drawn
  and deposited in UUA accounts between June 1 and
  October 1. The next day, the FBI agents came to
  assist bank employees in responding to the
  subpoena.
• Relating to the publication of the Pentagon
  Papers, Gobin Stair states, It was a watershed
  event in the denominations history and high
  point in Beacons fulfilling its role as a public
  pulpit for proclaiming Unitarian Universalist
  principles.

Daniel Ellsberg, author of Papers on
the War
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Unitarian Universalist History
Veatch to the Rescue

• When Carrie Veatch was suffering from spinal
  arthritis and confined to a wheelchair, Reverend
  Gerald F. Weary called on her regularly from 1945
  to the year of her death in 1953. It is well that
  people know the story of her growing interest in
  The North Shore Unitarian Society, including the
  story of Carrie's life and that of her husband,
  Dr. Arthur C. Veatch, the noted geologist who
  left a legacy of royalty rights by which the
  Shelter Rock Society receives a percentage of the
  proceeds from the production of oil and natural
  gas in the North German Plain. I had asked Carrie
  Veatch whether she should be willing to leave her
  royalty rights to the church upon her death, and
  on receiving her agreement, got her notarized
  signature to a legal instrument that embodied the
  agreement.
• Over the next twenty years, the church had been
  receiving millions and millions of dollars in
  royalties. The church had granted millions of
  dollars to the Unitarian Universalist
  Association.
• Specifically, by the middle 1960's the royalty
  income was well over six figures after the
  imposition of a West Germany income tax of
  approximately fifty percent. It was my good
  fortune to be able to enhance Caroline Veatch's
  gift by persuading the United States Treasury
  Department to get the West German government to
  agree to change their Treaty on Taxation so as to
  exempt the church's royalty income from the
  onerous German tax scheme. When this was
  accomplished in the late 1960's, the royalty
  income began to exceed seven figures and
  eventually reach eight figures annually.
• As former UUA President John Buehrens has
  written, You have literally saved the UUA as an
  organization, revitalized our social witness,
  dramatically strengthened our efforts in
  ministerial training, made possible creative new
  programs, and funded much of what we have
  accomplished in recent years to grow and extend
  Unitarian Universalism.

Caroline Veatch
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Unitarian Universalist History
Introduction to the UU Principles and Purposes

• One thing we do agree on we refuse to accept a
  creed, defining creed as a statement we must
  accept to be members in good standing.
• However, we seem to be forever searching for some
  verbal formula to which we can all (or at least
  most of us) say, Yes, thats what I (more or
  less) believe.
• The original Principles and Purposes were adopted
  at the time of consolidation in 1960 after
  all-day, all-night negotiation and debate, the
  wording had come close to blowing up the whole
  consolidation process.
• The new version replaced them in 1984 has but for
  a single addition, had remained the same for
  almost 20 years. The single addition was the
  amendment to the sources section to include
  spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions
  which celebrate the sacred circle of life and
  instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms
  of nature.

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Unitarian Universalist History
THE INHERENT WORTH AND DIGNITY OF EVERY PERSON
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Unitarian Universalist History
JUSTICE, EQUITY, AND COMPASSION IN
HUMAN RELATIONS
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Unitarian Universalist History
ACCEPTANCE OF ONE ANOTHER AND ENCOURAGEMENT
TO SPIRITUAL GROWTH IN OUR
CONGREGATIONS
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Unitarian Universalist History
A FREE AND RESPONSIBLE SEARCH FOR
TRUTH AND MEANING
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Unitarian Universalist History
THE RIGHT OF CONSCIENCE AND THE USE OF THE
DEMOCRATIC PROCESS WITHIN OUR COGREGATIONS AND IN
SOCIETY AT LARGE
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Unitarian Universalist History
THE GOAL OF WORLD COMMUNITY WITH PEACE,
LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL
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Unitarian Universalist History
RESPECT FOR THE INTERDEPENDENT WEB OF ALL
EXISTENCE OF WHICH WE ARE A PART
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Unitarian Universalist History
The living tradition we share draws from many
sources

• Direct experience of that transcending mystery
  and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves
  us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to
  the forces which create and uphold life
• Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which
  challenge us to confront powers and structures of
  evil with justice, compassion, and the
  transforming power of love
• Wisdom from the worlds religions which inspires
  us in our ethical and spiritual life
• Jewish and Christian teaching which call us to
  respond to Gods love by loving our neighbors as
  ourselves
• Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the
  guidance of reason and the results of science,
  and warn us against idolatries of the mind and
  spirit
• Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions
  which celebrate the sacred circle of life and
  instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms
  of nature.