Please read the following excerpt from “Can Unitarian Universalism Change?” by Paul Rasor.

“Nearly a century ago, the Rev. Lewis B. Fisher, the dean of the Universalist seminary at St. Lawrence University, memorably described religious liberalism’s flexibility. “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand,” he wrote. “The only true answer . . . is that we do not stand at all, we move.”

We could say the same thing for Unitarian Universalism today. Our commitment to religious freedom, our openness to new ideas, our insistence that religion should live in the present and not in the past, our healthy theological pluralism — all of these, the very theology that makes us liberal, mean that our collective religious identity will inevitably be difficult to pin down at any particular moment in our history.

Yet there are times when the opposite is true, when the realities are so daunting that we freeze up, playing out Dean Fisher’s aphorism in reverse: we do not move, we stand.

We face a major turning point in Unitarian Universalism, and our decision whether to stand or move will shape the identity and set the course of our religious movement for the twenty-first century. In a word, our turning point can be summed up in the term multiculturalism.

The context of our challenge is familiar but worth saying. American society is now undergoing the most radical demographic shift in its history. These changes are forcing us to reexamine everything we thought we knew about ourselves, both as a society and as a religious movement…. And yet, despite our efforts to become a truly multiracial, multicultural religious movement, we are changing much more slowly than the society around us, if we are changing at all….

In adapting to modern culture, Unitarian Universalism has for the most part adopted the core values of modernity, including its emphasis on human reason, the autonomous authority of the individual, and the critical evaluation of all religious truth claims. We want our religious beliefs and commitments to make sense, so we examine them and reexamine them, taking nothing for granted, and especially taking nothing on someone else’s say-so. These are important values, and we rightfully treasure them.

Yet this legacy encourages us to keep our religious commitments largely in our heads, where we can hold them at a comfortable arm’s length. This gives us a sense of control; it allows us to feel spiritually safe.

Multiculturalism threatens this sense of safety… At one level it is the fear of change, and the fear of difference that change always represents. At a deeper level, it is a fear of losing control.

I am not talking here about political or social control… Instead, the real fear is the loss of intellectual control. Our move toward becoming a multiracial and multicultural faith challenges our safe and tidy way of being religious. In this sense, multiculturalism might represent for some a threat not simply to our illusion of control, but to our very identity.

[But] we cannot reason our way into multiculturalism.

The reality of lived multiracial and multicultural communities cannot be grasped through analysis, statistical or otherwise. We will have to embrace it bodily, not just intellectually. We will have to wade into the new cultural waters up to our necks, and even risk getting in over our heads, without first being able to measure the currents or predict the storm cycles….”

[Source: “Can Unitarian Universalism Change?” Rev. Dr. Paul Rasor, UU World, Spring 2010. Italics added.]