Moment of Silence stands

In Texas public schools, children observe a daily moment of silence. The Humanists of Fort Worth have lost a court battle against this practice. That group meets (or met) at the Denton, Texas UU Fellowship. A moment of silence seems non-sectarian enough to me, but I guess not to everybody. As one wag in our congregation opined.

The Quakers meet together, all of them silent, until one is move by God to speak.
The UU's meet together, all of them talking, until one of them is moved, by God, to shut up.

(Hat tip Religion Clause)

Universalist influences in all the strangest places

Horace Greeley was one of our own; a famous journalist and a committed Universalist. His influence was spread wide. How wide? Well, Adolph Hitler's first finance minister was Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. (Hat tip Krugman)

UUs as a slice of denominational church

This graph, from the 2007 UUA Financial Advisor's report (thanks Philocrites) shows the trend in on-the-book UU adults since merger. We went down by almost half in the 1968 - 78 decade, stagnant since then.

But this last week, a survey came out. It appears that, overall, the fastest growing religious affiliation is 'None'. I haven't been able to run the numbers yet, (still searching around for some figures) but I combining what I know about UU and what I read, I get the following insights (for the USA):

• On-the-books UU is growing, albeit slowly.
• UUs a percentage of all adults are falling off slightly (just as the figure shows.)
  
• UUs as a percentage of all church-attending adults are holding steady.
• UUs as a percentage of all denominationally affiliated adults are growing.

See, even the Baptists have a declining percentage of the US adult population. They grew in absolute terms, but they fell from 19.3% in 1990 to 15.8% today. Where did all those worshipers go?

• Largest growth was in the numbers of unchurched.
• Next were those who affiliated with non-denominational churches.

This doesn't solve UU's slow-growth problems, but it puts a different gloss on it. We aren't losing membership-percentage to other denominations (conservative, liberal, mainstream, new-age, whatever.) That percentage is either becoming unchurched or going to independents (especially the independent mega-churches.)

Moral Foundations of Unitarian Sermons

A word-frequency program characterizes moral-foundation words in UU sermons! (pdf, UU part starts at p 14.) They also analyze Southern Baptist sermons, and compare them. UUs were selected as the most liberal denomination, SBs as the most conservative -- based on previous research.

This is cool enough that it deserves several posts. And probably a sermon. Graham, Haidt and Nosek make several notable claims:

• UU sermons are much more political that Southern Baptist sermons; they cite studies that found UU sermons to be the most political across all denominations studied.
• As predicted, UUs praise fairness & equality, and care of the oppressed, more highly than SBs.
• SBs extol authority, loyalty and purity more than UUs. Indeed, when UUs mention authority, loyalty or purity, it is frequently to warn against it.
• This particularly shows up with 'Ingroup' words:
• "The words communit*, group, individ*, and nation* were used more frequently in liberal sermons, but analysis of these words in context revealed liberals were much more likely than conservatives to use these words in order to reject the foundational concerns of ingroup loyalty and group solidarity"

IMHO, this stuff is highly relevant to the 'exclusionary class issues' that Lizard Eater raises.

Source for UU stats? -- going way back

Where / who / how would I get the data on UU membership, going at least back to merger? I'd like it in computer readable form (I want to build some graphs). Ideally it would be broken down by state or district.

I don't even know who to ask.

Have a mission? Here, have another

The face we show our congregations should not be the face we show to the world.

When a stranger asks "Can you tell me about your UU church?" we need a quick paragraph. An elevator speech, to tell of our mission. It needs be understandable by someone who has never encountered us before.

Among ourselves, we also need a quick paragraph that encapsulates our congregation's identity and mission. But now we are among friends. Our language will be different. [Of course, I'm vectoring all this off a post at CUUMBAYA .]

Our statement needs to cover two things:

• Axiomatic – That which is true for us, just because we are a UU congregation.
• Unique – Our special gifts.

According to Alice Mann: Obviously, to create a mission statement, we must use heavily coded words that have a deep meaning for the members of the congregation.

Think on this. The mission statement we use for ourselves has to convey our identity. It has to cover our generic UU identify. It has to cover the special mission of this congregation. And it must be pithy. Thus, it will use a lot of code words.

Therefore, it will be rather opaque to newcomers to our church. So this isn't the elevator speech. This isn't the paragraph that you put front and center on the congregational home page. Instead, it's the statement that you spend an hour unpacking in a New UU class, or which the minister covers in a series of sermons.

But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
– Eliot

What UU history books would you put in a well stocked church library?

Over at Transient and Permanent, there's great thread about the history of congregation v. denominational polity among the Unitarians, circa 1870-1945. Great if you like that kind of thing, anyway. So about 10 comments down, Murfin says "Check the standard Unitarian histories."

So what would those be. More to the point, if you had, say, $200 to build up a congregational library's History section, what would you buy? Or if you were stocking the book-sale tables at a district event, what histories would you be sure to include? (I'm thinking of specifically UU history.)

I'll throw out a few to start with

• The Larger Faith: A Short History of American Universalism- Charles A. Howe
• The Premise and the Promise: The Story of the Unitarian Universalist Association - Warren Ross
• Stream of Light: A Short History of American Unitarianism - Conrad Wright