Humanism and unitarian universalism - overlap between the principles of two groups - Brief Article - Column

Humanist, March-April, 1998 by Ed Doerr

Humanism comes in many shapes and sizes. Organizationally, humanism is largely identified with the American Humanist Association, the American Ethical Union, the Council for Secular Humanism, the Society for Humanistic Judaism, and smaller groups. Opinion polls show that millions of Americans are essentially humanists, though the vast majority do not use the term and are not members of any, organized humanist group -- as, of course, they need not be.

But the largest single organization of humanists in the United States is the Unitarian Universalist Association and its thousand or so local congregations. The UUA's 1989 Commission on Appraisal Report showed that about three-fourths of Unitarian Universalists are humanists of one sort or another. That amounts to about 150,000 people.

An interesting confirmation of this great op between humanism and Unitarian Universalist occurred at the Tenth Humanist World Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union held ten years ago in Buffalo, New York, and attended by more than 1,300 participants from twenty-nine countries. When one of the featured speakers, UUA President William Schultz, asked participants how many were connected to a UU congregation, about half the audience stood up.

Something similar happened at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Phoenix, Arizona, this past June. When the Commission on Appraisal asked Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and other UUs to stand up, rather few did so. But when humanist UUs were asked, as least half the participants stood.

In any event, the November/December 1997 issue of the UU journal World ran Warren Ross' article, "The Marginalized Majority: UU Humanism in the 1990s," with additional comment by humanist UU ministers Brian Eslinger, Sarah Oelberg, and Victoria Safford. The same issue aired AHA Vice-president Valerie White's complaint that the choral program at the 1997 general assembly was excessively theistic and sexist -- a view that I, as a longtime member of UU church choirs, share.

There is, I aim convinced, a certain dissonance between the bell curve of the UU humanist majority and that of the congregation's professional leadership that remains to be suitably resolved.

Humanists are freethinkers and individualists, but that should not be allowed to stand in the way of the kinds of cooperation and solidarity that we must have in the face of challenges from militant fundamentalism, mindless hedonism, greed, injustice, and ignorance.

Edd Doerr is president of the American Humanist Association and executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty.