Of all existing religions that claim to be religions, Unitarian Universalism (UU) seems to be the least dogmatic and therefore the least harmful—and perhaps the most liberal and tolerant. It adheres to no scripture, and although many members believe in God, others are atheists or agnostics. I’ve even been to a UU service, where to my surprise I saw a cross on the wall. (That must have been a more conservative branch!)
At any rate, it came as a surprise to learn that some UUers, many of whom are good people doing good things, are nevertheless infested with Wokeness. This apparently includes the 500 white UU ministers who signed an open letter after UU minister Todd Eklof (white as well) circulated an invidious book at a national UU meeting in Spokane. (According to reader Jeremy, who sent me the link, the book was a critique of “political correctness”.) The book was Eklof’s own product: “The Gadfly Papers: Three Inconvenient Essays by One Pesky Minister.” Its Amazon summary says this:
The Gadfly Papers is a collection of three essays written by Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof about the negative impacts the emerging culture of Political Correctness, Safetyism, and Identitarianism is having on America’s most liberal religion. It’s written specifically for Unitarian Universalists who care about the future of their faith, but will prove of interest to anyone seeking to understand how today’s identity politics can fundamentally alter any institution, and presents a seminal case-study for researchers of this timely subject.
Well, that won’t fly in a UU meeting, and, indeed, Eklof was expelled from the meeting, despite the fact that he had spent a lot of his career fighting for gay marriage. According to the Spokane (Washington) Spokesman-Review, Eklof offended some people because of his book’s “themes”:
“Rev. Eklof began distributing his book on Saturday. The book, which contained factual errors and called for the dissolution of our Association, raised many concerns,” wrote Carey McDonald, executive vice president of the [Unitarian Universalist] [A]ssociation, in the statement. “When many leaders, including those named in the book as well as people of color and trans and nonbinary leaders, expressed concern about themes in Rev. Eklof’s book, event organizers tried to engage him about how his book impacted others at the event.”
Eklof, who lost his job in Kentucky for arguing against a statewide initiative banning gay marriage, said he was inspired to write his essays after reading a piece criticizing what have been termed “safe spaces” on college campuses, where certain topics are avoided to preserve students’ emotional well-being. The same suppression of ideas is occurring within the Unitarian Universalist church, Eklof argues, and in a second essay made the case that the situation might require a separation of congregations that have been united since the early 1960s. The combined faiths’ early years saw adherents supporting the Civil Rights movement in America.
The book, which Eklof said he passed out at a booth at the national General Assembly of Unitarian Universalists at the Spokane Convention Center starting Friday afternoon, drew a strong rebuke from within the church at the assembly and online. The Diverse Revolutionary Unitarian Universalist Multicultural Ministries, a collection of people of color within the church, issued a statement Saturday condemning the book, which it said “reintroduces toxic histories and theologies containing transphobia, ableism, sexism and targets people of color, and in particular religious educators.”
Well, I don’t know what was in Eklof’s book; my own guess (which is just a guess) is that it was pretty innocuous, and the reaction of his colleagues would be similar to the reactions of students at campuses like Oberlin, Evergreen State, or Williams: gross offense, banning, and even self-recrimination. At any rate, you can read the objections of the 500 white ministers by clicking on the screenshot below (a shorter version is at the last link above), with the introduction as follows:
The following open letter was published and signed by nearly 500 white Unitarian Universalist ministers after the Rev. Todd Eklof, minister of the Spokane UU Church, distributed a self-published treatise that included vitriolic rhetoric about several marginalized groups within Unitarian Universalism. Several hundred copies of the treatise were distributed by Rev. Eklof and members of the Spokane congregation during General Assembly in Spokane.
The letter is okay as far as it goes, condemning racism and bigotry, but it’s truly excessive, and could have been something confected by Oberlin students attacking Gibson’s Bakery. Four things strike me about the letter.
1.) Its self-flagellation and attacks on the UU church itself. It’s almost like something written by a dunce-capped malefactor during China’s Cultural Revolution, declaring that the church, and themselves, are complicit in racism and harm.
2.) It accuses the UU church of harboring a “white supremacy culture”, i.e., the church is structurally racist. From what I know of the church and the several adherents I know, I don’t believe this at all. It’s liberal, tolerant, and full of kind people. Nevertheless, the ministers were so stung by what Eklof did that they wrote stuff like this:
- White Supremacy Culture (WSC) is alive and well within Unitarian Universalism. The impacts of WSC are pervasive and harmful, and while all of us are spiritually harmed within such a dehumanizing system, the primary impacts fall upon people of color and Indigenous people (POCI). This treatise, itself, is a manifestation of WSC, and is causing harm to our siblings of color, as well as to the integrity of our ministry.
- We believe our siblings of color as the experts in their own life experiences. They have done the emotional labor of testifying, again and again, to the consistent marginalization, aggression, and traumatization that they experience in UUism, and are pleading with us to face and dismantle the systems and structures that enable such harm to continue. We are grateful for this painful truth-telling, which comes at great personal and professional risk, and affirm that we witness and believe their experiences, and commit to addressing harm. All politics are identity politics, and when the default is white supremacist patriarchy, we must trust the experience of those who are targeted.
Is the first bit really an accurate portrayal of UU? I doubt it. I saw no white robes at the UU event I attended. But if you’re an adherent, weigh in.
3.) It goes on at length about the “harm” done to people by Eklof passing around his book (of course, people didn’t have to read it). And it makes the common and fallacious claim that the offense engendered by the book distribution are forms of VIOLENCE (second bold section below is mine):
When unjust power structures–and those who benefit from them–are exposed and critiqued, backlash is predictable. We often conflate critiques of our behavior with condemnations of our personhood. Here, however, we affirm that Unitarian Universalist ministers must act in solidarity with those harmed by the power structures, while also unequivocally declaring that although all people have inherent worth and dignity, all behaviors and ideas do not. Ideas and language can indeed be forms of violence, and can cause real harm. It is disingenuous at best, and malicious at worst, to argue that those who have been targeted by systemic violence have an obligation to bear witness to “ideas and words” that demean and diminish their personhood and discount their lived experience. The predictable “freedom of speech” arguments are commonly weaponized to perpetuate oppression and inflict further harm.
No, dear ministers, ideas and language are not forms of violence, though they may offend people. If they were real violence, they would be against the law. And offense alone, at least in the US, is not enough to warrant banning speech. But it apparently is in the UU church, which seems to be unitarian in promoting a unity of opinion. (Note too, the “lived experience” trope and the notion that a book can “diminish personhood”, a claim that I’ve never fully understood.)
4.) Worst of all is this claim, which I’ve put entirely in bold:
We recognize that a zealous commitment to “logic” and “reason” over all other forms of knowing is one of the foundational stones of White Supremacy Culture. Instead of accepting the frame of Rev. Eklof’s arguments and debunking them, we instead affirm the following:
What other “forms of knowing” are they talking about? And the argument that “logic” and “reason” (both in scare quotes) are foundational stones of “White Supremacy Culture” is ludicrous, offensive, shameful, and not even wrong. What they’re arguing here is that there’s no need to confront Ecklof’s arguments; they can just dismiss them because they’re ideologically impure. yet according to the Amazon summary, Ecklof indicts the church for things that many of us indict universities for, and doesn’t that deserve a discussion instead of banning and expulsion.
Again, I haven’t read Eklof’s essays, but you don’t really need to read them to criticize this breathless overreaction. Yes, perhaps what Eklof said was offensive to minorities or women, and the UU ministers could have condemned his message (if it was really that bad), but in a way less offensive to liberal secularists. By equating words with violence, by making the probably-false claim that Unitarian Universalism is ridden with White Supremacy Culture, and by claiming that logic and reason are tools of oppression, this group of ministers have embedded themselves in the offense culture. Haven’t they heard of being forgiving and charitable?
At any rate, since UU is one of the few “religions” that I haven’t criticize strongly, as it is nondogmatic, liberal, and (I thought) charitable, I was truly disappointed to see it turning into The Evergreen Church of Perpetual Offense. I condemn their attack on reason and logic, and their claim that words are the same thing as violence.
A Facebook group was created a couple of weeks ago to discuss these essays, the author, events at the General Assembly meeting, and related issues.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/363721400985412/about/
There are definitely factions with different perceptions of what happened, who is in the wrong, and what needs to happen next.
I’m not the least surprised that UU congregations are hotbeds of wokism.
I would EXPECT them to be, actually!
If true this proves the President is not a racist.
🙂
That’s a logical statement.
That’s a particularly deft syllogism (to quote Douglas Adams).
Always said he didn’t have the “stones” (never mind the braggadocio).
I am glad that Professor Coyne mentioned this paragraph from the letter:
“We recognize that a zealous commitment to ‘logic’ and ‘reason’ over all other forms of knowing is one of the foundational stones of White Supremacy Culture. Instead of accepting the frame of Rev. Eklof’s arguments and debunking them, we instead affirm the following:”
The ministers should be asked the following questions: Is it okay to have a non-zealous commitment to logic and reason? If so, where do you draw the line? The problem with white supremacy is not a zealous commitment to logic and reason, but that the commitment to them is faulty. That is, they are not actually applying logic and reason. I do not know that I would accept Elkof’s arguments, but to criticize them for a commitment to logic and reason is quite disturbing. I am person of the Left and I would argue that I am such because of logic and reason. For those on the Left who criticize logic and reason, I repudiate them. These people are fools.
But they are woke fools!
I abandoned UUism in 2011 (though I cont I need to attend for 4 more years) after 22 years in the denomination precisely over multiple fiascos like this.
continued not “cont I need”
My history with UUism is almost identical to yours. Originally I joined because they were a community of liberal and logical thinking people who were respectful of others. By 2010 they were becoming too ‘woke’ for my brand of liberalism. Nevertheless, going to a celebration of life there this afternoon. They still do a great send-off.
I’m a fallen-away UU as well. In addition to their wokism, they tend to scoff at atheists as well, or at least smile tolerantly at us.
Yes, you’re right, Atheists are ‘welcome’, but being welcome is about more than getting in the door.
When I was 12 my atheist parents shocked the bejeezus out of me by announcing that we were going to church at the Unitarians. (At that time the Unitarians and Universalists had not yet joined forces. I was given no choice in the matter.)
Why on earth my parents wanted to go to church on Sunday was beyond me, even it if was indeed the Unitarians, where one could be an atheist.
By the time I was 21 and Legally An Adult I was outta there.
Decades passed, and we had an enthusiastic UU atheist in our Atheist Club. He kept inviting me to come to the UU, even though I said I seriously did NOT want to go to church on Sunday, never mind how liberal and atheist-friendly they are. He continued to invite me.
I’ve heard tell that there are some UU fellowships that do not welcome atheists and don’t want us there. The UU isn’t automatically atheist-friendly everywhere.
“We recognize that a zealous commitment to “logic” and “reason” over all other forms of knowing is one of the foundational stones of White Supremacy Culture.” Beautiful, as perfect an expression of wokeness as we have seen. Their animus is against the scientific revolution and the enlightenment, because this progress in understanding reality is guilty of having begun among Europeans. Once again, the seriousness of the ministers’ plaint will be shown by seeing if they look for “other forms of knowing” in treatment for their own tooth decay, diabetes or pneumonia.
Why is it that those on the extremes (both left and right) want to suppress free speech? It is not because, as some on the Left argue, that the victims or targets of the speech will feel hurt. No, I would argue that the real reason is the fear that people will be influenced to accept the “bad” arguments because most people are incapable of applying logic and reason to determine the merits of them. That is, most people’s thoughts and beliefs are driven by emotion. Therefore, it is the job of those not driven by emotion to make sure that the masses are not exposed to “bad” thought. Only “true” free speech is to be allowed and those with power will decide it. In this particular instance, power resides with the ministers.
Is it true that the masses lead their lives through emotion? I do not know. I leave the answer to sociologists and psychologists. Certainly, there is evidence that people can be seduced by emotional arguments with little rational substance. The Nazis and Trump indicate this. So, to the extent that is true, there will always be a tension between persuading people by logic and reason versus emotion. The problem is compounded by people purporting to be arguing with logic and reason when they are doing nothing of the sort. We can expect the assault on free speech to continue unabated and indefinitely. Throughout history, advocates of free speech have generally lost. The United States has mostly but not always been an exception to this. We must not assume this will always be the case.
I find this statement of yours very profound. Thanks.
I would quibble with “most” being used here. All people are driven by emotion. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind argues this pretty convincingly. The best people are just better at pausing and forcing their reason to guide their emotions.
I agree that this is a useful insight. It explains the motivation.
It still doesn’t explain how they got to “a zealous commitment to “logic” and “reason” … is one of the foundational stones of White Supremacy Culture.” That is crazy talk.
White supremacists, ‘race realists’ in particular, like to talk about the intellectual heritage of the west, and how whites(the male ones at least) are capable of logic and reason while foreigners aren’t. Unsurprisingly, they all tend to be as thick as pigshit.
Of course this is no reason at all to characterise ‘logic and reason’ as tools of racism. That’s just ridiculous. You can hear the echoes of a bad social studies education reverberating through that claim.
The demented thing is that people like Sandra Harding (who made this claim on behalf of women, before dialing back) say that’s a *good* thing. I.e., in this case that supposedly science *as such* was women-hostile, rather than having sexist individuals and institutions. What a boor.
(Reference: _The Science Question in Feminism_.)
“What other ‘forms of knowing’ are they talking about?”
As “forms of knowing,” logic and reason are almost as over-rated as they are under-used. Almost. The lack of them in our public discourse and the resulting sloppy thinking—of which the UU ministers’ open letter is a prime example—are one of the great banes of our times.
That said, I would contend that at least equally deplorable is a lack of empathy. And if empathy is not a “form of knowing,” then what is it?
Oh, give me a break. Empathy is a way of FEELING, not knowing. It is no more a way of knowing that is anger or lust. Just stop with this argument, okay?
Emotion and instinct. After all if it ‘feels’ right, it must be right. Shouldn’t it?
It is a form of knowing oneself, relating to others (the recipient) and like minded individuals and groups but thats about all to my mind. It has this quality of being slippery too, for instance at the heavy end, a nazi sympathizer can show empathy towards another nazi sympathizer, in humans, empathy can be very selective. That much “we do know”.
I actually think empathy can be an important form of knowing in complex tasks such as theory of mind. In those situations it is not just basic experiential knowledge (qualia-like “what it’s like to feel” something) but a component of advanced thought and problem solving. I think it is even debatable whether or not someone with zero empathy would ever be capable of learning a language.
That said, I think this might actually be an example of what Paul Bloom talks about when he mentions the dangers of empathy. There is so much empathy in one direction, with almost causal demonization in the other. That someone on one side might have their ‘safe space’ even criticized is taken as traumatic; while making accusations that someone with a mildly different opinion (I mean the guy is not a fan of safe spaces, so what?) is a white supremacist – a potentially life ruining accusation – apparently is not given a second thought.
A part of me questions whether this is actually true empathy or just moral posturing, but I do think there are cases when our empathy can be skewed in this manner. For me, it’s anything that sets me into “mama bear” protective mode – that might be my nieces or nephews, students, cat, or even my aging parents at this point. Suddenly they seem infinitely sweet and vulnerable and the thought of them being hurt seems unbearable, while the rest of the world seems like a cruel potential bully who just needs to be guarded against. I’m sure everyone has their own example of when they feel a ton of empathy in one direction and a hardness towards the rest of the world in general. The thing is, though, I think this is something we have to strive to overcome with some equanimity. (Or, alternately, we should leave appeals to empathy out of such debates and instead appeal to ‘right and wrong’, where a certain amount of lopsidedness is not hypocritical in the same way as it is for empathy. If you appeal to empathy, for example, it’s hypocritical not to be empathetic to all sides; if you appeal to what is ‘right’, it actually follows that you would not treat those you see as being in the ‘wrong’ in the same way. I think the Left often avoids this framing due to embracing moral relativism, however.)
I don’t understand your first sentence at all. It is tautological. Theory of mind isn’t a task, it is a mental construct representing (with uncertain accuracy) the perspective of somebody else. So you’re saying that empathy is important in creating empathy.
And how does that inform anyone of anything? After all, knowledge is information about something. Empathy is, I think, an untestable hypothesis about the state of someone else’s mind. This isn’t knowledge.
Theory of mind is a learned skill with a huge number of levels (by way of example, Stephen Pinker was recently an author on a paper about theory of mind at more complex levels – complex to the point of being confusing to read, ha ha! “Wait – he thinks that he thinks that he thinks that…”). I suppose if you want to get into deep philosophy, you could say that any human cognition is actually, as you say, a tautology – i.e., you could say we do not really ‘do’ calculus, calculus exists whether we know about it or not, and all we do is slowly remove the barriers to our understanding of something that already existed, until we see the equation fully. The calculus itself doesn’t change during that process. While that’s an interesting semantic debate, I think in colloquial usage, we ‘use’ theory of mind in the same way that we ‘use’ math, making it a task in at least the colloquial sense.
To better explain what I’m talking about – empathy is often divided into ‘affective empathy’ and ‘cognitive empathy’ (people use different terms to represent those two things, but that is essentially what it breaks down to.) There is currently no consensus on exactly how those two components interact or the degree to which (or if) one can exist fully independent of the other, but some people do believe that affective empathy or ’embodied simulation’ is really a crucial component of learning and a precursor to cognitive empathy. (People give the example of sociopaths ‘not having’ affective empathy, but this is actually not true – what sociopaths have is the ability to turn empathy on and off, meaning even they would have some opportunities to learn with affective empathy turned ‘on’.) In language learning, empathy, and affective empathy or embodied simulation in particular, is often proposed as a crucial component to the degree that language is contextual (I believe that school of thought is known as pragmatism and there is an opposing school of thought in contrast to it, although I can’t for the life of me remember what it is at the moment. It seems reasonable to assume that language is at least partly based on pragmatism, however.) For example, if a block tower falls over and an adults says ‘Uh oh!’, an infant needs some sense of how that adult is feeling in order to make sense of the utterance. Does ‘uh oh’ mean “Yes! We finally knocked over this tower, I’m so happy!”? Does it mean “I have a stomachache”? Does it mean “These blocks are red”? Etc., etc., etc.
You’ve run down the rabbit hole describing a subjective feeling. At length.
The point is, subjective feelings are not knowledge in any meaningful sense.
So, even if (if, I don’t take it as a given) empathy is crucial to language, thinking, and problem solving, it is not meaningful knowledge because subjective feelings are not meaningful knowledge and meaningful knowledge is not subjective feelings. Speaking of tautologies…
I, following Antonio Damasio, regard them as indicating knowledge of the internal state of my (and sometimes, by analogy someone else’s) body. But *fallable* such – the whole reason we have diagnostic manuals and instruments and other things is because of this.
Damasio is a highly regarded neuro-scientist and author of popular books. He emphasizes that feelings and emotions are deeply important. They are how internal body states make it through to conscious awareness. Particularly interesting are brain damage cases he relates where impaired emotions are accompanied by all sorts of bizarre changes in thinking.
“It is disingenuous at best, and malicious at worst, to argue that those who have been targeted by systemic violence have an obligation to bear witness to “ideas and words” that demean and diminish their personhood and discount their lived experience.”
It is flat-out dishonest and malicious to imply that anyone had asserted any such obligation on anyone.
Just look at the number of echo chambers! That should disprove it.
-Ryan
Speaking as an awoken one (“a” from the Greek expression of negation), I amazed that people of reasonable intellect and education can state with a straight face that the UU denomination has a prevalent culture of “white supremacy”. (Did I miss the Confederate Flags on the way in?) Maybe you could make that claim in a non-absurd way about the Southern Baptists based on their denominational history, but the UU’s?
On the other hand, it is transparently the typical politics of authority. Declare your political opponents to be witches or Nazis or something, de-legitimate rational critique of your defamatory accusations as evidence of witchcraft (which creates your unquestionable authority), then use your authority to squelch your political opponents. Obviously, the more ludicrous your accusations, the more followers demonstrate their true loyalty to you over any sense of moral or intellectual integrity. Likewise, confession and penance to fantastic charges of witchcraft is a pure act of humiliation and dominance to the victims/witches.
Happy to say out where I live, the Unitarians are still socially conscious and peaceful folk. Concerned with the climate crisis, art and music festivals, and not this nonsense.
Evidence that even the most progressive people are made dumber by religion.
Reason and logic are tools available to anyone who wants to use them, including white supremacists. Teaching people to throw out reason and logic because someone has attempted to use them as tools of oppression only disarms the oppressed. How about instead encourage the use of reason and logic to expose the flaws in the oppressor’s argument?
Yes, it reminds me of the argument that “science is no good because it gave us eugenics.”
Both are the corrupt grandchildren of Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” thinking.
The distinction between sound logic and sophistry was never made.
This reminds me – I saw a video a while back of a group of white campus students and admin listening to some black student activists who were talking on-stage.
The latter were really laying into the white audience, talking about how they were ‘complicit’ in a culture of racism, etc. Their talk was aggressive and charmless(and not really true either, not unless you use the word ‘complicit’ in a vacuously broad way.).
The response of the white audience? They applauded loudly.
But that wasn’t the most absurd part….because in response to this loud applause the black students began telling the audience off. They began furiously chiding the audience…for applauding them.
Evidently, the audience had not played their part properly. They had tried to signal their solidarity with the black students’ cause. But clearly they didn’t want the audience’s solidarity; they didn’t want anything positive to come of their talk/rant at all. They wanted to EMPHASISE the racial division that existed rather than challenge it.
I always think of that video when I hear well intentioned white liberals talking about how we must be quiet and listen and never interrupt or question when minorities talk about their ‘lived experiences’.
I think they mean well when they say it…and yet I find that attitude deeply creepy – that timorous obeisance to the opinions of another person simply because they have a different skin colour. It’s disturbing and patronising. And it has unintentional shades of the racist idea that minorities somehow can’t deal with rational arguments.
I think it does huge harm to the anti-racist cause; we cannot afford to emphasise divisions at exactly the time when populist reactionaries are gaining power all over the west and anti-immigrant sentiment is curdling into genuine racism and neo-fascism.
By comparison with a recrudescent far-right campus stuff like this is small fry, and nowhere near as frequent as certain alt-righters like to imply, but it is amplified massively on the internet, on YouTube, and we on the left are simply handing PR victories to our enemies every day by indulging in this bullshit. IMO there is no bigger recruiter for people like Trump than left-wing identity politics.
If we could just wean ourselves off it I honestly believe we would absolutely annihilate the far-right electorally. It is one of the only weapons they have. Without it they’re just the same cranks who’ve been knocking fruitlessly on the door for the last sixty, seventy years.
(Apologies for the length. If I had the time it’d be a lot shorter.)
“IMO there is no bigger recruiter for people like Trump than left-wing identity politics.”
Just as there was no bigger recruiter for the reelection of Nixon, back in those days, than the Weathermen and “Days of Rage” wing of the anti-Vietnam War movement. I often scratched my head then, and wondered if the Weathermen were actually FBI plants. After observing this phenomenon repeated time after time, I have been forced to conclude that the Left seems to harbor a death wish. [Incidentally, an inclination to sanctify the Weather Underground retroactively can be found among the Wokies. No surprise there.]
I wouldn’t compare the obnoxious students of today with the Weathermen. The latter were domestic terrorists: what we’re talking about today are just annoying, patronising scolds.
Which is why, while I dearly wish we could wean ourselves off identity politics, and I also think that identity politics is pushing certain people into voting for Trump, I nevertheless have nothing but contempt for Trump voters who have turned to him simply because some people on the left have occasionally been divisive in some of the things they’ve said. It’s such a ridiculous overreaction and it’s ethically unjustifiable on any level. They should go get a punching bag or take a long walk or something. Not drive democracy off a cliff.
You have to remember that the Woke definition of ‘Ally’ is not the same as the dictionary definition.
As far as I can tell the Woke definition of ‘Ally’ is “Person (of Non-Color) who sits down, shuts up and does what they are told (By a person of color/gender/size), when they are told, immediately and without question.’
Ceding logic and reason to white men is surely a mistake for any who would like to see the full range of human diversity on equal footing in society. Logic and reason do not occupy their place in our intellectual life because they are white or male, but because they are useful, effective, and correct.
How exactly do these people think they construct their arguments if not by logic and reason?
You literally cannot communicate with another human being without those tools. It’s like saying we should try breathing without air.
I recognize that a zealous commitment to “breathing” and “eating” over all other forms of staying alive is one of the foundational stones of White Supremacy Culture.
-Ryan
My parents are UUs. Good people, but IMO they are *too* openminded. (The group, not people like my father, who have to smile and nod.)