Feeling and Spirituality vs Reason
I had a disagreement with someone recently about what the main focus of being a Unitarian Universalist should be. (Neither of us used the phrase "main focus" - it's the closest I can come to describing the context.)He said that some Unitarians overemphasize feeling and "spirituality" (he verbally put the word in quotes) at the expense of Reason, and doing so "was a slippery slope".
I told him that if I wanted a completely intellectual experience, I'd go to grad school.
Reminded me of a day-long seminar I went to a few months ago that was run by Michael Durall who wrote The Almost Church. The subject of how long people stayed active Unitarians came up. Durall took a quick survey of the audience and determined that those attending (church leaders for the most part) had stayed active Unitarians longer than most people. He asked people why they thought they stayed active.
I said that, if Unitarians are there to learn, maybe we were the slow learners.
posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 8:36 AM
7 Comments:
Dear Paul,
Ever since Emerson derided "corpse cold Unitarians" we have had a bad rap about emotion in religion. To hear some people say it, you'd think Unitarian Universalists were some kind of emotionally repressive cult worshipping a big brain in a jar. Well, what if we did? This head/heart dichotomy really doesn't make a lot of sense, since we now understand that our heart, or at least the seat of our emotions, is really in our heads, anyway.
It is a false dichotomy in another way, too. While the questioning and critical method of liberal religion relies upon reason and rightly, in my opinion, looks with skepticism upon claims that things are true because we feel them to be true, that does not mean that we are strangers to emotion. We just have a different set of emotional responses to religion and value them differently.
Not far from where I serve as a student minister, there is a charismatic Christian church that is very successful. It is the church that we constantly compare ourselves to. As in, "Oh, if only we had the numbers of young people that they have at Heartland. What are they doing right that we aren't doing." Curious, I visited a couple of times to see. There was certainly a lot of emotion during the service. At various times, people lifted up their arms to the blue light of the Jumbotron, ecstatic over the pre-recorded service, and swaying like a mass of sea anemones. Young men in baseball caps flexed their muscles and shouted the words to "Our God is a Mighty God." And young women who looked as if they had really earned their reasons to repent wept bitterly over their sins and their absolute lack of purpose and meaning in life without the guidance of Jesus. There was a good deal of paranoia, too, over the moral decline of society, particularly through the agency of atheists and homosexuals, but this was quickly replaced by a kind of militant self-righteousness as we heard how God would take care of these problems by giving the unrepentant what they deserved. It seemed to me that these particular emotions led people toward intolerance, dependency, and uncritical obedience.
It was an emotional palate familiar to me. I grew up in a variety of charismatic and evangelical churches. If it was holy and rolling, my mother took a ride on it. I can well remember my introduction to a hot and stuffy Pentecostal church in rural Arkansas. It was the kind of church that met in a storefront and the service was accompanied by the wailing of an electric guitar battling with an electric organ with the orgiastic rhythms of a drum set and innumerable tambourines only ceasing when the members of the church began to speak in tongues. There was a little girl about my age seated in front of me. She was obviously bored with the service but her pious mother snatched her up from the seat and began to hit her, telling her over and over again, "Get the Holy Spirit. GET the Holy Spirit!" I'm a quick study and I immediately started to gibber, too, before anyone got the idea of hitting me.
Surely, that is not the kind of emotion in religion that critics of Unitarian Universalism would like us to adopt.
You can imagine, with my background, how much I appreciated a religious community that valued a different set of emotions. Calm clarity is my favorite. Or how about curiosity and the pleasure of discovery? What about the exciting sense of being part of a community committed to making a difference in the world we live in? How about reverence felt when contemplating the wonders of terrestrial nature or the infinitudes of space? There are plenty of plain good times to be had with the friends I've made and the reassurance that I'm part of a community where I'm welcome and where I would be missed if I weren't there. There have been solemn, meaningful times at memorial services, when I mourned the lives of friend who met death without fear or regret and certainly without a retreat into supernatural hysteria. I guess I'm trying to say that for some of us, certainly for me, I'm a Unitarian Universalist in part *because* of the way in which emotion is a part of our religion. As a religious liberal, I demand that my religion makes sense and I'm suspicious of anyone in the pulpit who has to resort to cheap emotional tricks or neurobiological flim-flam to get their point across.
Matthew,
Thanks so much for responding to my post. You make a good point - one that I know is shared by a lot of UUs.
One of the problems I have with your argument concerning what the charismatic Christian church near you does (and what some other successful conservative Christian churches do) is that we seem to make a causal connnection between an emotional experience of the type those churches provide and conservative Christianity. I'm gonna guess that a 6-piece electrified band doesn't cause people to speak in tongues. My reason (!) tells me that's not possible.
I think that UU churches don't provide that type of visceral experience with a positive UU message because UU churches have never provided that type of visceral experience with a positive UU message. And darn it, we're too intellectually superior to need to stoop that low.
And anyway, our several dozen attendees at a service multiplied by our Individual Intellectual Points gives us a lot higher score than their thousand or two attendees multiplied by their Individual Emotional Points. Yep, that must be it.
Dear Paul,
Why wouldn't wouldn't an electrified band (as a part of a charismatic religious service) cause people to speak in tounges? (Or at least claim to.) Music can be used to incite and control emotion, why else do we have movie scores and military bands? I'm not sure I understand your objection.
Matthew,
More specifically, I meant that a 6-piece electrified band doesn't cause people to *be able to* speak in tongues when they weren't able to do so before. If there *were* able, the music might well motivate them to do so at that time.
Certainly music can be used to incite. But not just to incite people to do things we disagree with. It could be used to incite people to do what we consider good, too.
Paul,
Thanks for explaining, I think I get it now, and perhaps it is common ground between us: the power of emotion in religion is amoral. I certainly believe that, but I also believe that some emotions are detrimental to the spirit of religious liberalism which, as I've already said, has its own emotional palette.
There is, however, another thorny issue: Even when emotion is used to incite what we believe to be good, is it the best way to call people to action or belief? Just as people can do bad things for good reasons, isn't it possible that good actions can be prompted by bad reasons? I've always thought that the method of liberal religion relied upon persuasion and trusting people's judgment, not clouding judgment with artfully induced emotion. Isn't that basically why we didn't stand on our rooftops waiting for the end of the world during the Great Awakening? In the end, I think emotion is a poor motivator because it is unpredictable and induces a shallow commitment. If people are so easily led, they might easily be led away.
Matthew,
"the power of emotion in religion is amoral.". Yes. I agree. That's a good way of phrasing it.
I suspect that you're right about using pursuation and logic being superior in some sense to using emotion. You're right - that's the way of liberal religion.
I do think that emotion can induce a deeper committment than logic. That's its danger, of course - it's not necessarily a rational committment. Although I've never been in the service, I suspect that getting soldiers to kill the opposition isn't done purely on logic - although I might be wrong.
Paul,
I think you are right about the soldiers, at least for some. I had an interesting experience at the University of Chicago two years ago when I was taking a class about Just War theory with Jean Bethke Elshtain. Some of the other students in the class were officers for whom JWT was part of their training. For them, having a good reason to do to war was important and it would take more than a soundtrack to lead them into battle. It is fascinating, however, to look at the most requested songs on military radio.
I don't deny the power of emotion, whether used by the state or the church. In fact, it is the experience of that power that makes me cautious about employing it in worship services. When I hear people calling (as seems to be common these days) for more emotion in UU services, I wonder if they really want what they are asking for and whether their minds would change if they witnessed its use in services like the one I initially described.
Thanks for your blog!
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