Last night about ten members of First U sat down together and walked through the draft Principles and Purposes language proposed by the Commission on Appraisal.
The document was found to be verbose and the general take away was that it offered no improvement on the current language and was in fact troubling in several areas.
The group felt the “identity” section might have been better named “history,” and wondered about the appropriateness of the term “heretic,” and the whole concluding sentence.
There appeared to be no objection to shifting the “sources” to a preamble to the principles themselves. But the laundry list style had an “everything including the kitchen sink” feel to it. And the sentence “Wisdom and beauty may be expressed in many forms: in poetry and prose, in story and song, in metaphor and myth, in drama and dance, in fabric and painting, in scripture and music, in drawing and sculpture, in public ritual and solitary practice, in prophetic speech and courageous deed.” seemed an exercise in self-parody. People at the table found nothing to disagree with, and no reason for the sentence to be there.
But the horned hoof entered with the next sentence.
“Grateful for the traditions that have strengthened our own, we strive to avoid misappropriation of cultural and religious practices and to seek ways of appreciation that are respectful and welcomed.”
At first this might seem a benign assertion of a generous heart. But in fact it raises some serious questions.
I have defended the Principles and Purposes from charges of being a crypto-creed over the years. I’ve done this through a distinction of proscriptive and descriptive. A proscriptive document is one that a person must assent to in order to be a member. Hence “creed,” as in “I believe,” or “We believe.” A descriptive document is one that attempts to describe the belief of the generality of a community, I would add within the confines of a specific time and place. The current P&Ps;, I felt, have been a pretty good attempt at that, acknowledging any number of troubling instances where people have held the document up as evidence someone or another wasn’t a good UU and the generally problematic habit of hanging calligraphed versions of the document in our congregations. (As we gathered around a table beneath just such a framed document.)
There is a feel to this draft document in several places where it seems to be telling us what we should believe, not describing what we do in general believe. These various spots also suggest “appropriate behaviors.” When it does that, it does indeed becomes a creedal statement. At least it seemed so to me. And most at the table seemed to share similar misgivings about this draft document.
The last sentence in this section provided the most glaring example. The introduction of the term “cultural misappropriation” into this document attempts to settle a question that has not been settled. Elsewhere I suggest alternative language, “Grateful for the traditions that have strengthened our own, we strive to engage them with humility and respect.”
But this whole thing also raised the question about what the point of this revision was supposed to be.
Once we entered the actual body of the proposed Principles two thoughts were offered.
The first was a question. At first blush the draft retains all the original seven principles in total. However they don’t. Two references to “congregations” were deleted. This raised questions about a document that is meant to be a statement of the gathered congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association. How were these deletions justified?
Second was the point of the commentaries enshrined within the Principles. With the exception of the comments on the seventh principle no one objected to the comments in and of themselves. Several people thought they could be useful in a religious education situation or part of a Small Group Ministry discussion. But for a brief statement of what we commonly believe, they didn’t seem necessary. In fact they tended to close conversation rather than open it.
The comments on the seventh principle were an exception to this view. This was generally seen as flattening a much larger statement about how we exist in the world to a bare assertion of ecological consciousness–raising. Together with a rather contextually bizarre assertion about “relinquishing material desires.” No one found this language helpful, or accurately representing what the seventh principle has come to mean to many of us.
Here again it seemed we were moving from a description of what we believe to a statement of what we should believe.
And it was unsettling.
The “inclusion” statement seemed another aspirational assertion. Perhaps appropriate in this document, perhaps not. We were not settled on this. Which itself suggests something…
Considering several assertions in this draft document affect how we are supposed to behave the traditional escape clause with its assertion of freedom of belief seemed mooted. Should this document become our Principles and Purposes we will appear to have rejected orthodoxy in favor of orthopraxy.
At the end of the conversation, as we were getting ready to return to our homes to watch the second Presidential debate, several questions were thrown out for our various considerations.
One, what happens when a congregation says they don’t buy into this document? Another is, what is the danger of having a document that many of us are going to find troubling, as an official statement? We discussed how a strong minority among us have little positive regard for the current document, but this seemed to open the possibility of a much larger community of dissent. It even raised the question of making the Association ever less relevant to the congregations it is supposed to serve than it is today. With a heavy hanging why? Particularly when the majority of UUs appear to be content with the accuracy of the current document as representing what they, we do believe, still, at this point…
And we returned to how this document seems to have a substantially different cast than the current document, particularly in its various assertions of how we should behave.
I didn’t have a sense any of us left that room feeling positive about this draft P&P; document.
I would suggest thanking the Commission for their work, and meaning it, they’ve worked long and hard; and suggesting we revisit the P&Ps; again in twenty years or so, and see what we think then…
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Any Unitarian Universalist who wishes to register their opinions regarding this document have until the 16th of October to do so by going here, where one can read the document, some supporting materials and get a link to the survey…
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