Our heroes, who move us in paradoxical awe and pity, have never chosen this way of being.

*

When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s the misfit kids were indignant when their bands were adopted by the mainstream. I think it was like this: the mainstream could have chosen otherwise – it just helped itself to something novel that happened to be there. The mainstream would equate its consumption of yet another variety of entertainment with our need for what we experienced as art, as a rare and precious sense of belonging.

I think when we pulled that move of dismissing an artist’s later work (“That first album was great, but…”), we were attempting to preserve a brand relationship. We severed our relationship with the band as it exists in the present – and even with the band’s past work as it is discovered in the present. The new brand relationship was having been there at the time it was happening: having the right to enjoy the band nostalgically. We learned how to do this, and did it repeatedly, constantly, as our desperate alternative to an unacceptable existence became the consumer category Alternative Music.

Then we became ashamed of hanging our identities on bands at all. Sonic Youth decided to like Madonna and hip hop, and that seemed like a good way to go. We tried to like sports, and we wore baseball caps. We looked for guilty pleasures that could democratize us a little. We loosened our grips, opened our hands, went out into the market…

I was raised Unitarian-Universalist. I would characterize my relationship with them as hostile.

I’ve been looking back through my journal archives. Some of my posts are nothing but hot bile, but some of them are hot bile that point to themes that have become central in my life.

A post from January 2004:

The archetypal Unitarian summits the mountain by telescope. 

Another post from the same day, entitled “Uh oh,” which I completely forgot about: “Kwame just suggested that perhaps I am the perfect Unitarian.” — Someone accused me of something similar last week.

Another one from March: “I approve of the Unitarians’ hidden meanness, but disapprove of their hiding it.” 

This one, which I called “Hater” is from 2005:

I hated my high school one way, I hated my home another way, and I hated the Unitarians a third way. That was my whole hateful life before I started taking art classes.

The students at my art class played mysterious music from some other world, and I would sit there silent, stunned, painting. Many of them were gay, but I had no concept of gayness, and only found out years later.

We were all outsiders in respect to school, home and church in our own personal ways. That’s how it is in small towns. In large cities it’s all about affinities. In small towns, desperation drives you to learn abstraction: “I am like you, because neither of us are like them.”

 

A nicer post on UU was one of the last before I took my new job and entered a very different phase of my life:

Unitarianism is the religion of subjective show-and-tell. When the Unitarian exhibits his theological opinions, the others can either 1) nod with them, or 2) tolerate in silence.

–

Picture Unitarianism as a venn diagram of divergent beliefs, with one microscopic overlap: “God is a matter of opinion, not debate”. This is the Unitarian ideal of “tolerance”. 

–

Perennialist theologians sometimes compare religion to a mountain with various paths to the top. Most Unitarians agree with this picture of religion, because they’ve been to the top of the mountain many times, by telescope.

“God is a matter of opinion, not debate.” That is it, my core complaint: the refusal to converse past a certain boundary.

*

So what if we cannot finally know? There are other reasons to know than to definitively grasp reality. There are good reason to keep God discussable while avoiding all attempts to “capture in words” what or who God is.

(At work I keep insisting that a brand essence can only be indicated by words, but no sentence, no book – no library full of books – could be the essence of any authentic brand. Brands are essentially spiritual, and that means you see with them or by them. A graphic identity system is only a manifestation of a brand.)

*

At this moment – and I can’t explain why – to call the Unitarian-Universalists “my people” is comforting, and not despite the fact that I disagree with them so deeply on so many things. Perhaps my disagreements, as deep as they are, are nonetheless, not essential? Or perhaps when I disagreed I disagreed as a Unitarian-Universalist against Unitarian-Universalism? If I were to discover that Unitarian Universalism accommodates this depth of disagreement… and by “accommodates”, I mean actively accommodates through dialogical involvement – as opposed to theoretically permitting (a.k.a. “tolerating” or “accepting [the fact of]”) the belief.

There is no greater difference: the former is love (or at least a good, fertile kind of hate that easily transmutes to love); the latter is indifference and alienation and impotential. Genuine religion is a practice of intersubjective spirituality. Whatever speculative knowledge gets wound into the practice is mere support for this practice. Religion is not essentially a matter of beliefs – and especially not objective, reflective beliefs, which belong to the realm of physics.

So, the question for me is whether there is anyone in the Unitarian-Universalist tradition who will participate in our disagreements with me. If not, all my complaints still stand.