MLK & UU Timeline

For over twenty years, I’ve been a Unitarian-Universalist, and I didn’t know most of this stuff until I started researching MLK two years ago. If you haven’t listened to his speech “The Other America”, follow this link and do that instead of reading my blog post. 

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Burning Things with Meaning

starting a fire is magical

With SARS-CoV2 receding in Seattle, I threw the first yard party since fall of 2019, complete with a bonfire. Over the years, my guests and I have developed the practice of intentionally burning things in the fire as a little ritual. When our primeval ancestors danced all night around a fire, fire was literally at the center of human spiritual practice. Ancient Persian religion established the now-familiar pattern of a holy man (Zoroaster) and his holy book (the Avesta), and Zoroastrians have revered sacred fires ever since. Today, fire is still a potent symbol in people’s minds, and even Unitarian-Universalists have a flame as a symbol, in a slight nod to those ancestral fires. More prosaically, I have found the grownups and kids can both take joy in burning things up. 

In the latest fire, we had a chair to burn. Chairs are always welcome, as the first big item I purged many years ago was a dilapidated chair. Of special note this time was an original portrait provided by an old friend of mine. It was a portrait of her ex-boyfriend, and he had given it to her as a gift after breaking her heart. Into the fire with it! I contributed a bird nest, a literal empty nest to mark this part of my life now that my daughter has bought a home in Pasadena. It was fun to point out to other at the party-goers what the baby birds had left in the empty nest: crap. What a metaphor. Other party goers, young and old, wrote notes on paper and consigned them to the fire. Usually these notes document the negative things that people want to purge or have purged. They can also be love notes to the universe or whatever you want. For one party years ago, the theme was beautifying the world by burning ugly things, and ugly things are always a good addition to the fire. One friend brings old checks to burn, although I don’t know if he still uses checks. A couple I know burned stacks of old documents related to an online controversy that they had been embroiled in. Sometimes what gets burned is something well-loved but worn out, something too beloved to throw into a landfill but no longer worth keeping. 

big fires not allowed this year

Thanks to the heat and drought in the Pacific Northwest, there’s a burn ban across Washington state. Our next fire has to be a modest affair in a metal container. Stupid climate change. 

Other Posts about Ritual

Dance Church Seattle, 2017

Table Grace for Nonbelievers, 2016 

Land of Nice Atheists, 2014

Reading about Religion, 2014

Christmas Unitarian-Style, 2013

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man, 2013

Burning Man Temple, 2013

Family Climate Action Event

Kids made art and letters

A bunch of kids in my UU congregation decided that climate change is their biggest concern, so they contacted the climate action team, where I’m a co-chair. Together we came up with this plan for engaging several families in what we called the Family Climate Action Event. The main purpose of the program was to have the kids work together to take collective action and then to learn what more they can do. In addition, it helped families get to know each other and stay in touch during the pandemic. During the first of two zoom meetings, the families talked about environmentalism, and the kids made art and wrote letters for policy-makers. For the concluding meeting, a climate-oriented policy-maker met with the families to explain the current political scene. If intergenerational climate action is your thing, a Family Climate Action Event is easy to pull off. Here’s how it worked for us. 

First Meeting, Art and Letters

This meeting launches the project, it connects the kids’ actions to the community, and it helps families get to know each other. We had a couple climate-action folks from the congregation drop in, too. 

Welcome, Chalice Lighting, and Introductions: For Introductions, people took a minute to find something that reminded them of the interconnected web of existence and bring it back. When each family introduced themselves, they also showed their item and talked about it. 

Artwork: Got kids started on their art. The church provided blank postcards for the kids to put art on. 

Adult Fishbowl: Each adult recounted a personal experience with the environment, pollution, climate change, etc. Kids pretended they weren’t there. (5 min) 

Kids’ Fishbowl: Each kid said something about the environment. Grownups pretended they weren’t there. (5 min)

The 70s looked dire.

Speaker: I talked about my lifelong experience with environmentalism and how experiences at church have brought me to focus on collective action. The conclusion I shared is that personal behavior change is good but collective action is where the main action is. (5 min)

Letter Writing and Art: Kids started wirting letters or kept working on their art, and they chatted. The leaders provided names and addresses of policy makers that they could write to, including the policy maker they were scheduled to talk to. 

Screen Grab: Kids held up their art for a screen grab. Ideally you get an image that’s fun and safe to share. 

Closing 

Second Meeting, Policy Maker

For our Washington state congregation, we chose Rep Joe Fitzgibbon, who chairs the House Environment & Energy Committee. We arranged a half-hour block where he could meet with our families remotely. He spoke about his own passion for addressing climate change, and he answered questions prepared in advance by the families. As it turned out, he touched on some points that had come up earlier in the Art & Letters meeting, such as beef and acid rain. The families all changed their names on zoom so we could take a screen shot and not identify anyone. 

The families met for half an hour before the meeting with Joe and for half an hour afterwards. That was more than enough time, and the extra space led to a valuable converation about get out the vote efforts and the election. 

Rep Joe Fitzgibbon talked to us about his
passion for fighting climate change

Other Unitarian-themed posts: jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/search/label/Unitarian

2020

Unitarian University Church, Seattle

Virtual Church Gatherings

Last Sunday, my girlfriend and I attended a virtual church service and coffee hour. Churches across the nation are going virtual. They’re streaming sermons and music, and they’re hosting virtual meet ups. If you’re quarantined and looking for company, now would be a good time to check out local churches. Lots of people derive value and encouragement from the connection, and you might be one of them. 

It surprises lots of people that an atheist like me would recommend that people try out a church, but churches in the US are unusually practical as houses of worship go. Here, they serve as intergenerational community centers. In most other places in the world, places of worship occur in communities, ethnic groups, or nations that are predominantly one religion. As a result, the people who worship there don’t necessarily have a special relationship to each other. In the States, there are countless competing traditions, and one’s congregation represents a shared identity, turning it into a social hub of like-hearted individuals. Among liberal religious traditions, these social centers serve especially for Sunday school and political organizing. My childhood congregation was constantly working on issues like clean water, immigrant rights, and the Nestle boycott. 

Predictably, I might suggest that you consider a Unitarian Universalist congregation. An ex-girlfriend used to say that the UU tradition is “like religion, but only the good parts”. The UU congregation that I’ve attended for 20 years is a lot like the Lutheran congregation I was raised in, except that no supernatural beliefs are expected or taught. 

Every congregation is different, but in general there’s a real inclination toward science and away from physics-defying miracles. In last Sunday’s virtual service, the ministers addressed the topic of COVID-19 in a naturalistic way, with a bonus etymological reference to why the pandemic of 1918 was called “influenza”. Some UU congregations will doubtless feature relatively vague prayers for people to be safe, but none of our ministers are going to heal the disease over the Internet. We’re also not going to rely on supernatural protection to justify meeting in person. We like science, and we treat pandemics the way scientists tell us to treat them. Speakers in some congregations are bound to talk in more-or-less New-Agey terms about God, meaning, challenges, visualizations, mysterious workings, or everything happening for a reason. We don’t have a pope to tell everyone to think or say the same things, so each congregation is its own thing. 

And of course if you find value in a community where you share supernatural beliefs that I don’t share, more power to you.

If the idea of connecting to a “church” makes you choke the way it used to make me choke, you can find UU “fellowships”. These are often congregations whose founders didn’t want to call their communities “churches”. Alternatively, you can think of the church as an “assembly”, which is the word used by ancient Jews, including early Christians. 

Churches also do online activities for kids. I’ve taught church school on and off for years, and there’s good stuff there, so I would bet that UU churches will have worthwhile stuff for kids to do. When I teach church school, I don’t usually know which of the kids believe in the supernatural and which don’t. A lot of them don’t really know themselves. 

You can find my church’s online programs on their web site, and you can readily find others by searching online.

click here

Sunday School for Geeky Kids

UU youth at the General Assembly

When I was a kid, Sunday school at my family’s Lutheran church was no place for me. The teachers taught material that didn’t make sense, and my hard questions weren't welcome. My geeky interests had no place, and the system was designed to get all us different kids with all our different personalities and experiences to conform to the same credo. Then, after Sunday school ended I had to attend the church service with my family, which was even worse. For instance, you weren’t allowed to kick the back of the pew in front of you, not even if you were bored as hell. Take a guess as to whether I hated and resented the whole ordeal. So you can imagine my surprise when I ended up, 30 years later, teaching Sunday school myself. What I found out is that a Unitarian church can be a pretty great place for geeky kids. My 10-year-old self would have gotten something out of it. In September, Unitarian churches all across the States are starting their Sunday school programs. Here, the kids are not subjected to the church service, hard questions are welcome in class, and each student’s own beliefs are valued. The programs help kids understand the “big ideas” rather than laying out a creed for them to sign onto. Maybe one of these programs would be a good fit for a geeky kid in your life. 

Geeky Kids. Unitarians are the only denomination in the US to edge out Jews when it comes to high SAT scores. We’re a highly educated bunch, and you can see it in the kids. They are into Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Cosmos. Here you might find kids with names like Mithril. These kids are curious, with good questions that deserve good answers. “What is a Jew?” “Why do different religions fight all the time?” 

Geeky Topics. The official curriculum includes holidays around the world, contemporary world religions, the scientific story of our world’s origins, and justice in today’s society. Questions are welcome, and conformity is not expected. One 8th-grader got us into a discussion of whether the universe is a computer program. A 4th-grader was interested in Greek myths, so she ran a class session where she presented information to the class, followed by an improvised skit where the kids acted out the story of Artemis and Actaeon. Kids like acting things out, and one 6th & 7th-grade class improvised a skit about the Six-Day War. My daughter’s class, when studying religious history, watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which I never got to watch as part of my Sunday school training. 

Modern Values. The kids start the class year by crafting a “covenant” covering the behavior that they expect of each other and of themselves. This exercise enforces the idea that social rules are up to us. The curriculum embraces pluralism and freedom of conscience. My own training in Sunday school was mostly about teaching me how to be a Lutheran, while Unitarian Sunday school is mostly about what it means to be a human in these modern days. Our 6th & 7th grade class visits houses of worship around the area: Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, etc. Eighth graders take a yearlong class in sex ed called Our Whole Lives (OWL). It’s a world-class program with no-nonsense information in the context of personal choices, confidential conversations, and intention. It’s the class where my daughter learned something that Dan Savage didn’t know, that you can’t use male and female latex condoms together. Our ninth graders finish off the whole shebang with a year-long coming-of-age program, where each adolescent is paired with an adult from the congregation who participates with them over the year’s conversations and activities. And if you want your kids to be aware of climate change, racism, gay rights, poverty, immigration, and other important issues, a UU church is a great place for them to see liberals engaged in these topics. 

Atheist UUs. Here in Seattle, there are plenty of atheists in our congregation and teaching Sunday school. The believers believe in a non-anthropomorphic God that might be identified with nature or described as ineffable. For the most part, I couldn’t tell you which of my students were atheists and which weren’t. They’re kids, so they probably don’t know exactly what they believe anyway, and we don’t force them to pick a side. For that matter, I also can’t tell which adults are atheists. Word on the street is that our head minister believes in God, but not so’s you’d notice. Some congregations, especially on the East Coast, lean more toward Deism. We don’t have a pope or creed to enforce conformity from one congregation to another. 

Multigenerational Community. When my late wife made us all start attending church almost 20 years ago, I was not into it. After a couple years, my daughter talked me into teaching Sunday school, and that’s when I connected to the community. For me it’s been rewarding to see kids grow over the years, from Sunday school, to OWL, to coming-of-age. For the last three years, I’ve been involved in the local atheist community, but none of the promising new groups are intergenerational. Now my late wife’s ashes are interred in the memorial garden, which is a service that atheist groups have a hard time matching. 

All my Unitarian posts: http://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/search/label/Unitarian

To find a congregation near you, visit this page: http://www.uua.org/find

Games for Humanist Families

Clades, Chicken Cha Cha Cha, 
Cheeky Monkey, King of New York, Dixit

The games pictured here are the ones I took to the first meeting of the “humanist family game club” at my Unitarian church. The idea behind the game club is to give humanist families a fun way to hang out together. As a game designer and a father, I have spent years thinking about games that are great to play with kids and grownups together. Here are my descriptions of these games, which I recommend for humanist families.

Dixit by Jean-Louis Roubira

This charming game involves looking carefully at the detailed, dreamlike, full-color images on the game cards, so it has plenty of appeal from the start. One player gives a clue about a card they secretly chose from their hand. Then each other player secretly chooses a card from their own hands that more or less matches the clue. These cards get turned up, and only the clue-giver knows which one is the “real” card. Everyone tries to guess which card is the clue-giver’s, and players all score points based on how the guesses turned out. The real trick is that the clue-giver gets points only if at least one player successfully guesses the card and at least one player fails to guess their card. If the clue is too clear or too vague, the clue-giver loses the round. Kids have a hard time hitting the right balance between clarity and opacity, so they can struggle as the clue-giver. Little kids do well on a “team” with a grownup. Most of the game, however, is guessing others’ cards, and little kids can have fun doing that. Playing Dixit, whether giving a clue or trying to follow one, is a sophisticated use of our ability to communicate. For kids, it’s an enjoyable way to practice thinking “what did they mean by what they said that?” As for its humanist qualities, Dixit is all about understanding other people’s stories—and often misunderstanding them.

King of New York by Richard Garfield

This action-oriented game is the only violent game on this list, and it’s the most rules heavy. I recommend it because it handles battles in a way that is smart for play balance and good for avoiding hurt feelings. It’s true that the players control monsters that fight over who is the “king of New York”, but the system works such that you never choose which player you attack. Everyone attacks the monster that’s in Manhattan, except for the monster in Manhattan, who attacks everyone else. Play is straightforward: you roll a bunch of special dice, and reroll any dice whose results you don’t like. After up to two rerolls, you use the final results to determine how your monster fights other monsters, heals its wounds, smashes buildings, fights the military, gains energy for special powers, or gains fame. Kids who don’t really know the game can play by feel, and even if they don’t win their monsters will smash buildings, fight other monsters, and step on tanks like the big kids’ monsters do. Educational bit: The map shows the five boroughs of New York so you can show them to kids. One downside: A monster can sometimes get knocked out of the fight and the player out of the game. Usually, however, a player wins by amassing 20 fame points, not by defeating all the other monsters. 

Cheeky Monkey by Reiner Knizia

In this simple but engaging game, players pull animal tokens out of a bag. You can stop after taking a few tokens, or you can take more, but if you pull an animal that duplicates one you’ve already pulled this turn, all the animals you pulled this turn go back in the bag. A press-your-luck mechanic like this is great for kids because they can make real tactical decisions by feel, deciding whether to play it safe or to take risks and living with the consequences. If you have to put all those tokens back in the bag, it’s because you pulled one too many tokens, not because another player messed with you. A few additional rules involve stealing tokens, allowing for player interaction. In addition to being a fun game, Cheeky Monkey features hyenas, walruses, and other distinctive animals from around the world, with science notes about their habits and habitats. 

Chicken Cha Cha Cha by Klaus Zoch

In this German game, you move your chicken around a track, using concentration-style memory play to control movement. Kids are famously good at memory tasks, so it’s a great multigenerational game. The pictures are fun and colorful, mostly animals and eggs. The game includes an aggressive element in that you are trying to steal the tail feathers of all the other chickens, but the circular track prevents players from simply picking on whichever other player they like. Most of the action is memory play and moving around the track. 

Clades and Clades: Prehistoric by Yours Truly

In addition to teaching kids about evolution, Clades has a lot going for it as a game for kids and grownups. Physically, the game involves looking at lots of cute pictures of animals, something that even little kids enjoy. Everyone plays all the time, so kids never have to wait their turn. It’s easy to make the game simpler for beginners, and it’s easy to handicap. Plus, of course, it’s about evolution and science. A middle school science teacher I know says that the game elicits deep questions from students. Clades: Prehistoric is the same game, but with dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and other extinct animals. Order here from Atlas Games or ask for it from you friendly local game store.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game

Why Games for Humanist Families?

Games are great ways to let kids see humanism in action. For one thing, we humanists turn to other humans for our meaning in life, not to a spirit or an afterlife. Your experience playing a game results from a live interaction shared with other people and with no fore-ordained conclusion. That’s a genuine interaction in a way that seeing a movie together is not. Engaging with other humans for an evening also sends the implicit message that human relationships are worth investing in, a message that adults pick up as well as children. Second, playing games is good for social development. On one level, it teaches basics such as fairness and being a good sport. On a more fundamental level, games teach children to see human interaction as a social construct. Society is like a game, with rules, penalties, winners, and losers. We agree to interact with each other by the rules, but ultimately the rules are up to us, and we can change them to make things better. For example, if we play a game “fairly” and by the rules, some people have built-in advantages that give them an outsize chance of winning. Older kids, for example, do better at Dixit than younger ones. Is that fair? If not, can we change the rules to make the game more even? Whatever the answer, that’s good humanist thinking. 

Kids’ Games and Clades: earlier post on noncommercial games for kids 

Sex Ed at Church

Comprehensive sex ed, with or without God

Every year, middle school kids across the US participate in a program of private sex education classes that cover the topic frankly, comprehensively, and graphically. It’s liberal in general and LGBTQ-friendly in particular. Each class is led by one man and one woman, and an honor code of confidentiality helps the young people feel safe opening up on this touchy topic. The program puts special emphasis on values, not to enforce any particular moral code but to help the participants explore and develop their own values. The classes don’t just convey information. They foster a culture of respect and openness, allowing the students to ask the personal questions they have and to the learn from each other. This curriculum, called Our Whole Lives, is used in the UU and UCC churches, and it’s a good example of what I mean when I say that religion is better thought of as a social institution than as a belief. Those of us at UU or UCC churches might believe that kids should have good sex ed classes, but what counts is that people before us have put this program together for us to use. It’s the institution that makes it happen. In this case, the institution is the sort of sex ed program that you can’t find just anywhere. 

Fostering community

The Our Whole Lives program is a fine example of intentionally fostering a mini-community. The participants promise each other confidentiality, and the adult leaders create a safe space where young people can discuss sensitive topics about sex, romance, love and other adolescent minefields. When my daughter started this program years ago, it was the first year she didn’t complain about going to church school on Sunday morning. The program created a group that she wanted to be part of. We atheists are individualistic by reflex, but some experiences develop only in the context of an intentional community.

Volunteerism

One feature of a religious community is that it elicits volunteer work from members. Lots of nonprofit organizations, such as Girl Scouts, also rely on volunteer efforts. The Our Whole Lives class is taught by two adult volunteers, one male and one female. These instructors see young people respond positively to the program, and that experience hooks them and gets them to keep volunteering. While I’ve never led OWL, teaching Sunday school and mentoring young people has given me some of the same fulfillment. Some of the value that a church structure brings to a community is simply the infrastructure to recruit, prepare, and coordinate volunteers. 

Multigenerational community

Richard Haynes is a leader in the atheist community and a former Christian minister. He sees two sorts of atheist groups in the States: older atheists with money but no time, and younger atheists with time but no money. As he points out, churches bring the generations together like few other institutions do. OWL is a classic case of elders passing down secrets to the youth, and a band of young initiates growing closer together by sharing emotionally powerful experiences. In ancient initiations, elders taught secrets to the youth. In OWL, elders create a safe space for the youth to share their own secrets with each other. Reflecting the intergenerational nature of church, Unitarians are sometimes called “atheists with kids.” That description certainly holds for my family. 

On our own

The closest thing I have to a holy book is The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. In verse, Wallace explores what it means to be human now that we have found out that the gods don’t exist. In “Sunday Morning,” he describes us as “unsponsored, free.” And that describes the freedom we Unitarians have in figuring out how to run our congregations. No deity is sponsoring us. We’re not responsible to any external party for how we initiate our children into adulthood. No human generation before us has ever had to navigate a sexual landscape like today’s, with more options, fewer prohibitions, and effective birth control. Our Whole Lives lays it all out there to help young people find their way. 

Bigger than yourself

Jonathan Haidt examines morality from an evolutionary perspective. He says that people are mostly selfish, but we’re also a little “groupish.” Being part of a group comes naturally to us, just like looking out for “number one” comes naturally. It’s common for people to say that they gain fulfillment by devoting themselves to something that’s bigger than themselves. Ultimately, perhaps this tendency arises from the primeval instinct to feel as though one is part of a family, clan, or tribe. 

OWL participants create a mini-community, which is bigger than they are individually. I can see the results myself. This year I’m mentoring a 9th grader, and I can see how close-knit the 9th graders are. I worked with these same students two years ago, and they are much better connected now.

Atheists in OWL

Of the kids I’ve seen go through OWL, I mostly don’t know which ones are atheists and which are believers. Maybe lots of them don’t know themselves. That’s my congregation for you. Is OWL a “religious” program? People who define religion as a belief would say that it’s religious for the believer kids but not for the atheists. I pay more attention to behavior than to beliefs, so I’d say it’s religious for all of them, believers and atheists alike.

Institutions Get Work Done

Lots of people believe that adolescents should get frank information about sex and help sorting their way through romance, emotions, love, and the rest. On some level, I’ve always agreed with that idea, but that belief by itself doesn’t go very far. What worked for me is being connected to a congregation. OWL is a social institution, one that coordinates activity around a modern sex ed program. It’s institutions that makes things happen. A secular organization could readily duplicate what OWL accomplishes, but only by creating a duplicate institution. 

OWL and your kids

If you’re a parent curious about OWL for your kids, you can look up a Unitarian congregation near you. Unitarians have no creed or doctrine, so each congregation has its own style. Some have a pagan flavor, some are basically humanist (like mine), and in others a sort of deistic God is popular. Some congregations call themselves fellowships rather than churches to announce their distance from your typical church. I prefer the term church because I don’t like to be divisive, but that’s just me.

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Rites of Passage: the OWL program is intense enough to qualify as a "rite of passage."

Christmas Unitarian-style

Nordics like to honor Santa Lucia,
a figure of light in the darkness.
Her name means “Holy Light-Girl”.

If you’ve ever wondered how a church congregation might handle Christmas when it’s not a Christian church, you’re in luck. The Unitarian Universalist church where I teach Sunday school is big enough to offer a variety of Christmas-themed events, and they provide a special insight into how a congregation without a creed conducts itself. Here’s a rundown, with commentary.

Festive solstice potluck: First off, if you want some holiday cheer but don’t want to honor the Christmas tradition, per se, you’re covered. Local “Freethought” groups, such as Humanists of Washington and Seattle Atheists, gather at the church for a “Winter Potluck”. Lots of atheists attend but think it’s weird to meet in a church.

Family holiday service: This is my favorite, where the kids do a semi-traditional Christmas pageant, with little kids dressed as sheep, wise men, and the rest. It’s not all by the book. The number of wise men expands to keep kids from getting left out. Sometimes we Unitarians are smeared as “atheists with kids,” and this event plays to that stereotype. Where else could my atheist daughter have ever played Mary?

Family candlelight service: This one’s a little more serious, taking place in the evening, with kids doing readings. Our Seattle congregation has a large number of Nordics, so we do the Santa Lucia bit, where a teen girl with candles on her head walks through the sanctuary with attendants, all in white. There’s nothing particularly universal or unitarian about this ceremony, other than that as Unitarian Universalists we can do whatever we want, and this is one of the things that we want to do.

Candlelight Christmas Eve service: This service is the most traditional of our services, for those of us who really want to get our Christmas fix. Christmas Eve services are beautiful whether you believe in anything or not, and especially if it plays into your nostalgia.

Messiah Sing- and Play-Along: For the real music lovers, there’s an event the day after Christmas where you can sing along to Handel’s Messiah, solos and everything. If you’re handy with an instrument, bring it along and play. It’s so popular that you have to buy tickets, and they always sell out.

Blue Christmas: This special Christmas service says something about how intentional we are about our church experience. This service is especially for people who are sad around the holidays, which is a lot of people. For people in grief, all the holiday cheer, Christmas carols, and kids’ events can make things worse. This quiet service is for them. What other church acknowledges how many people feel the holidays as a time of loss?


In the nineteenth-century, Unitarians and allies, such as Charles Dickens, were central in the successful campaign to transform Christmas from an adults’ drinking party to a tender-hearted, family-oriented holiday. Our congregation continues in that tradition, honoring Christmas, but taking it on our own terms. Our approach is customer-centric. There isn’t any church hierarchy telling us to do anything other than what the various people in our congregation want to do. Merry Christmas!

Life, Death, and Religion

Remember, you will die.

It’s common to consider religion to be a matter of personal philosophy, and that's part of the story, but religion is also a matter of life and death. That might sound strange coming from an atheist, so let me elaborate.

Modern people tend to think of religion as “what you believe in.” That modern attitude has been a long time in coming. Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther defined Christianity as a matter of belief rather than of communal identity. Salvation, he said, depends on your faith, not on the Church. Since then, religion in the West has become more and more a question of individual orientation. Today one might go so far as to characterize religious identity as a matter of opinion. You might ask a friend, "Who do you think should win American Idol?" or "Do you believe in God?" But there’s more to religion than belief. For our ancestors, religion meant membership in a spiritual community, and that’s what it means to me today. When my wife died a few years ago, all belief was dead to her, but her church was there to mark her passing. It’s the congregation that she belonged to as a living person that mattered, not any beliefs about another world. For many people, religion seems to be ultimately about the afterlife, but for me it’s about this life.

Years ago, after our daughter was born, my wife insisted that we join a Unitarian church in Seattle, where we atheists would be welcome. I thought she was crazy, but I made the best of it. Years into it, my daughter finally talked me into teaching Sunday school, and that's when I first started feeling like there was something interesting going on at church. And then when my wife passed away in her 40s, I got an even closer look at the benefits of being part of a community. The pastor who spoke at my wife’s memorial service was the same woman who had counseled my wife in the hospital as she faced her own death. Since my wife didn’t believe in the afterlife, she was grateful to have a spiritual counselor who didn’t try to distract her with promises of personal immortality. No personal philosophy could have provided my wife with a trusted counselor to help her face her own demise. That sort of help comes from a congregation.

My wife got support, and so did I. Mine was a volunteer from our church whose husband had died at the end of a long illness. Our connection was not a shared belief but shared community. Philosophically I'm a Taoist, and politically I'm a secular humanist, but it wasn't a Taoist or a secular humanist who talked personally with me about what it's like to have your spouse die. It was someone from my congregation.

At this time, our adolescent daughter was going through the coming-of-age program, which meant she was already paired up for the year with a woman in the congregation, a mentor with whom she had a confidential, one-on-one relationship. The mentor program is standard for all youth, but it takes on a special meaning for those whose parents are dying. This is the same program that provided our daughter with world-class sex education. Religion is about life as well as death.

More generally, people overestimate the role that belief plays in religion. Historically, belief has usually been secondary to practical concerns, such as rulership, ritual, holidays, group bonding, morality, law, education, charity, politics, authority, obedience, war, ethnicity, tradition, song, dance, art, language, time-keeping, record-keeping, etc. Even belief itself has often been used for the practical purpose of defining in-groups rather than for any personal, spiritual growth. It's easier to understand religion when you watch what religious people do rather than categorizing them by the creeds they profess.

PS: Here's a Sunday school experience I've had in the years since I first composed this post. A man from the congregation came to my Sunday school class of 6th and 7th grade Unitarians. He recounted how he had seen his wife die of cancer, and he told them that they and everyone they know would also die. Engaging stuff. It scared me a little, so I can only imagine how it touched these kids. Increasingly, I think we secular people could really own the topic of death.

[revised November 2014]

2011

Burning Man theme, 2011

Rites of Passage

The theme for this year’s Burning Man is rites of passage. That theme provides an opening for me to talk about the Unitarian church where I teach Sunday school. As society has become less traditional and more individualistic, rites of passage have fallen by the wayside. Ironically, Unitarians are so nontraditional that we have circled all the way back to doing some pretty decent rites of passage.

Communal rituals in general and rites of passage in particular used to be a big deal. Adolescent males had their flesh gashed or penises sliced. People endured punishing ordeals or lonely vision quests. Greeks went to Eleusis to have their minds blown in secret mysteries, which apparently involved drinking a psychedelic concoction. Today our rites of passage are attenuated. We still have personal milestones, such as getting your driver license or graduating from school, but rites have lost most of their power. A Bar/Bat Mitzvah or a confirmation ceremony carries less weight in the community at large than does reaching your legal drinking age. As Nietzsche said about modern marriage, rites of passage have lost their meaning and are as good as abolished. Elders have ceded initiation rites over to frat boys, who haze their initiates in a crude approximation of the rites that once inducted boys into manhood.

The Lutheran church I grew up in had two rites of passage, both anemic: first communion and confirmation. In ancient times, these rites accompanied the life-changing event of adult baptism, marking your initiation into the body of church. Often, your ties to family were severed at the same time. But when I experienced them, these same rites lacked any sort of gravitas and even lacked any real supernatural weight. Given my experience growing up, you can imagine my surprise when my Unitarian church turned out to deal seriously with a young person’s rites of passage.

The first stage of passage from child to youth is a world class sex ed program for middle schoolers. Unlike the dry, tentative programs you find in public schools, the Unitarian sex ed program deals forthrightly with feelings, desires, social roles, and personal issues, not just anatomy and condoms. A male and a female teacher run the class together, and a promise of mutual confidence among the students encourages open discussions. The visual aids are remarkably frank, and a broad range of sexual expression is portrayed as within the pale.

The second stage is a full-on coming-of-age program. The goal is to help the kids develop their own beliefs and ideals, rather than inculcating in them any particular set of official tenets. Each child is paired with a same-sex adult from the congregation, someone with whom the child can develop a personal relationship and have confidential discussions. The program also engages in group bonding events, such as a ropes course. The program culminates in a weekend retreat. The kids leave on Friday as children and return to their parents on Sunday as youth. We don’t pretend that they’re adults and instead acknowledge “youthdom” as a distinct stage of growing up. On the retreat, the kids participate in imaginative rituals, designed to have psychological effects rather than supernatural ones. The most arduous trial that these kids face is sitting alone in the woods for six hours without any electronic devices or other distractions. It might not be as severe as the mutilating ordeals of adolescents in many other cultures, but let me assure you that the prospect of this “vision quest” strikes fear into the hearts of these multitasking kids.

As modern people, we no longer have the option of participating in the rites of passage that our ancestors passed down to us through the generations. As the poet Wallace Stevens repeatedly alluded to, we’re in a brave new world where we have no choice but to find our own way. I’m lucky to have found a congregation where the elders take the challenge of growing up seriously.

Now we Unitarians might not be much for proselytizing, but if you know some nontraditional parents with grade-school or middle-school kids, consider forwarding this link to them.


PS: This post was originally written based on my daughter's experience with these classes. Since then, I've served as a coming-of-age mentor myself and have now seen the program from the inside. It’s pretty remarkable. —JT, 2015

Other Posts about Rituals

Burning Things with Meaning, 2021 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2021/07/burning-things-with-meaning.html 

Dance Church Seattle, 2017 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2017/09/dance-church-seattle.html 

Table Grace for Nonbelievers, 2016 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2016/07/table-grace-for-nonbelievers.html 

Land of Nice Atheists, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/10/land-of-nice-atheists.html 

Reading about Religion, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-about-religion.html 

Christmas Unitarian-Style, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/12/christmas-unitarian-style.html 

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/welcome-ceremony-at-burning-man.html 

Burning Man Temple, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-burning-man-temple.html