Intellectual Escapism or Activism? Liberal Religion Explored

TEF UU FOTF 2-5-2020 I see your point, thank you for clearing that up for my ancient, fossilized brain![😁😉] I do not see "retreating" to liberal religion though as being escapism, quite the opposite, people's spiritual, religious, or moral conceptions lie at the root of their political thinking and actions. That is a well established fact.The liberal Unitarian faith made our forebears very powerful influencers, and mover and shakers back in the founding of this republic, and up to the late 20th century when the last of the old school Unitarians died. Thoreau once said that there is only one hacking at the roots of evil to the thousands who hack at the branches. All of the political thinking in UUisn today, including our being seduced by leftist, PC, or identity politics, plus illiberal and intolerant thinking, is because we have wandered far from our spiritual roots into the world of social clubbing. Yes, many of us take part in social justice movements and useless demonstrations without stopping to see that our energies are deliberately being drained off by useless actions due to us not going after the roots of the problems. We protest against climate destruction while the oligarchs laugh at us because we will not remove them from power. The fake two party system was set up to make sure we are ineffectual in making change. I will not go into that right now, maybe later, its late. But we need to look at why people are hateful, racist, and conservative. At the same time the nation has become the land of political and social ignorance, so education should be our greatest goal to change that. Jefferson, as well as other great thinkers over the ages, but especially our Unitarian ones, have pointed out that there has only been two sides since the dawn of human society contending for control and dominance, that of conservatism, and that of liberalism. We need to stop confusing this issue and get back on track and back to our liberal religious heritage...a good place to start.

Well, you certainly need to do what makes sense to you, and our liberal religious heritage has important strong points, essential ones I would suggest. I see a problem in the selected and limited empirical resources underlying the actual tradition itself. In my biography, I embraced a chance to write a Letter to the Ed of my high school newspaper that marked my recognition of sound action and empirical investigation. Why didn´t Priestley and Jefferson explore Quakerism, for example? That´s allowable as individual preferences go, but in formulating declared doctrines like their shared Rationalism, it´s incomplete and really a little careless. Getting back to roots, as you say, is indeed prudent. I recall, however, that my first contact with the UU institution was focused on my embrace of a term in a UU pamphlet, "spiritual path" (ca. 1981), and led by my (shared) University-Educational values in the study of Human Biosocial Evolution in college, along with reading Huston Smith on Taoism, and Alan Watts, too 🧐😃😏🐼✊ I identified my affiliative strength more with activist not-for-profits and later food co-ops, holistic workshops, and University culture more directly than the superficial socializing I found in my contact with UU congregations. All that, combined with the History (and Sociology) of Science, Education, and Economics led me to observe the importance of the spirit of Christian monasticism in St. Thomas of Aquinas and Martin Luther, and prefiguring and along side that the non-institutional societal emergence/resurgence of Christian high integrity as in St. Anthony of the Desert and St. Francis of Assisi. While Galileo, DesCartes, Locke, Newton in the 1600s and Priestley by 1800 are key in the University-Enlightenment line to Jefferson, George Fox emerged in the 1600s outside those circles in an impressive demonstration of the spiritual-revelatory dimension of high Christian integrity. His activism expressed the rather pragmatic and alternately conscientiously introspective and social Quaker-Friend approach, as "doctrines" go.

It was his protege Quakers who organized the association that spurred other Christian dissidents in the pioneering Anti-Slavery social movement by the 1780s. Thomas Clarkson, a dissenting Anglican in the UK, for example, and in the US a Philadelphia Quaker group with T Paine writing already as a maverick Quaker scion, and Ben Franklin a Freethinking unaffiliated Christian. I haven´t come across much Unitarian involvement that I can think of, since they seem to have had a more intellectual and institutional focus. Emerson was a maverick intellectual who broke away from Unitarian antiquated formalities at the time, I recall, and embraced a concept of Nature focus as a "Transcendentalist." He did get inspired to comment by the 1830s as events heated up. Secularist social entrepreneur Robert Owen awoke doing economic activity as he helped inspire a major economic innovation along with the massive Anti-Slavery boycotts and "free (non-slave) produce" campaigns and projects. Along with FD Maurice´s UK "Christian Socialism" by the 1840s, the 28 workers at Rochdale founded their pioneering and landmark Co-operative Store. Marx´s stuff was brilliant in identifying alienation, exploitation, and the significance of economic ownership, but he simply disregarded and neglected the individual and co-op model as badly as any wrongheaded moneybags capitalist. It turns out a Danish minister brought the UK co-op model to Denmark, Germans like Raiffeisen founded co-op banks, the Frankfurt School, and Boell Mitbestimmung Corp Work Councils, and a Spanish priest spurred poor polytechnic students to become engineers and found the brilliant industrial co-op Mondragon. Italy´s got another major story. The Anti-Slavery movement´s UK success, however, revealed sexism, and that´s where I recall that Quaker Susan B Anthony liked mixing with some Unitarians, like T Parker, I believe. My own reflection and experience have thus situated UUism´s religious-intellectual insights in relation to the Christian basis of its societal and economic fabric, and the foundation of Christ´s teachings, including spiritual practice.