January 21, 2013
Was MLK Unitarian?
This past Civil Rights Sunday I decided to speak about gun violence. It seemed a clearer and more relevant topic than MLK, theology, race and identity. I am glad for my choice, but the matter of “where do we go from here” as UUs on matters of race still remain pressing and must be addressed.
So, I start publicly writing on that subject here to see if I get any good responses and to help clarify my thinking. Many UUs may be familiar with the fact that both Martin King Jr. and Barak Obama both attended Unitarian churches for a while. Both knew Unitarians, wrote and spoke about Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist people that they knew. In another world, either might might have become a UU. They both chose a more “Baptist” religious identity and community.
In brief, there are two centers to my thinking on this subject of why we are so far short of our vision on matters of race and a beloved multicultural community. These centers are our theology and our identity.
In King’s Doctoral Thesis he judged both the theologies of Lutheran (or Protestant) existentialist Paul Tillich and Unitarian Process thinker Henry Wieman as inadequate. He did this primarily on ‘Personalist’ grounds, insisting that God had to be a person as far as Christians were concerned or else God could not truly care for us or know us or be in relationship with us or choose to act on our behalf. Now, I don’t think he is correct in his thinking here (I think he is choosing a rather limited and narrow set of definitions) but I do think he showed his resonance with a more popular way of thinking. While King chose to align himself with a rather common and civic notion of a personal God he was certainly in line with Unitarians like Theodore Parker, but with not the majority of Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists. As a movement we chose a heavily Humanistic, Existentialist, and sometimes atheistic theology.
Likewise, Barak Obama did not get from the UUs he knew a sense that our faith was a powerful way to affirm individual worth and dignity, nor a movement dedicated to bringing justice, equity and compassion into human relationships. Though he has Lincoln’s and King’s paraphrasing of Rev. Theodore Parker preaching on his oval office rug, for Senator Obama (in Dreams of My Father) modern Unitarianism was merely a world-religions smorgasbord that practiced radical tolerance of belief. When he went looking for a source of spiritual solace and challenge, and a faith to sustain his political engagement, he did not look to us.
In terms of identity, to put it very simply Unitarian Universalists are aligned with an intellectual minorities, but not racial or ethnic ones. In American racism, the fact is that who you identify with determines who you hang out with and who sees you as “one of us”. Martin King Junior knew that if he was to be a leader in 1955 it would have to be as a Negro in the Black Church. Likewise Barak Obama came to realize that, though he would represent the needs of everyone as a politician, he would still have to do so as ‘a black man’. As Dr. mark Morrison-Reed pointed out, Unitarianism, Universalism and UUism all rose as part of a racialized and segregated society. In that context we developed a white identity. We have striven against that in the past two decades to some degree or other, but in the end we have not become truly multi-cultural as a community. Perhaps some day, but not yet.
So, that is the outline of my thinking. Is this the beginning of a good sermon yet?
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