Religion Redux Redux

As an unchurched Unitarian-Universalist I sometimes think about going back. There's a new congregation not far from us and we've even talked about visiting but never have.

There isn't a lot of glue in the denomination. There's no threat of eternal damnation. There's no promise of life hereafter in the sky, although what had originally distinguished Universalism and gave it its name was the belief in universal salvation. Not sure it ever meant what more fundamentalist denominations mean when they use the word, but there it is.

So there's no doctrinal drivers. There's a great effort to be inclusive however. Alas it doesn't quite work the way that some would have liked it to. The U-U church is predominantly white middle and maybe a little above middle-class. One urban church I belonged to wanted to recruit an African-American minister to be more attractive to members of the African-American community. At the time there were four in the whole denomination out of some few hundreds. They found one, hired him in a contentious process and then a few years later he left to become a Gestalt therapist. without changing the church's diversity more than a bit. So you could say even U-Us have a tough time practicing what they preach.

In the last church I was a member of there were a lot conversations about "community," and it seemed that "community" was something that was wanted. The same had been true in the previous U-U church I had been in, but both and the previous one tended to be riven from time to time around some issue that it seemed people could not be communal about. Sometimes it was politics. Yes, Virginia, there are politically conservative Unitarians. Sometimes the minister was not to some folks' liking. Sometimes it was an issue like the selection of an African-American minister. My wife belonged to one because she had found a "community" she could connect to, but left it rather quickly when her circumstances changed.

I've come to think that about the only glue that holds U-U congregations together is just that--community. And, interestingly, it is part of the glue that holds any congregation of any denomination together. A line is drawn around the periphery. Outside of that line is "them," and inside of it is "us." It is a yearning to be with someone like us, to validate ourselves by having others around us who agree with our beliefs and values. Quite human. But it also become the source of the contentions when it shows up that the agreement is not quite so thoroughly consonant as aspired to.

Given that beliefs and values can be radically different in a family (I've recently discovered that I am not the only Dad or brother with an immediate family member with oppositie social and political views), how can we expected a community of people drawn together in a church not to have differences?

And I guess what I want to ask is "why would we want that?" Its the differences we encounter that strike the growing edge and keep us vital. U-Us do try to be inclusive and welcoming of diversity, but I think fall short of even modest success. I end up wondering what the point is.