A Philosopher on UU’s Echo Chamber Problem and Increasing Irrelevancy

The national church and many congregations have become out of touch

After publishing my recent post, “My Congregation as a Rapidly Shrinking, Self-Reinforcing Echo Chamber,” I spoke about the dangers of echo chambers with the prominent philosopher and Unitarian Universalist Robert M. Wallace.

Wallace, who did his undergraduate studies at Oxford University before earning his Ph.D. from Cornell, is the author of the books Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God (Cambridge University Press) and Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present (Bloomsbury).

Wallace confirmed what many have noticed. Many UU congregations and advocacy groups have unintentionally become echo chambers. In doing so, they have lost touch with the very communities they claim to serve, including most racial and ethnic minorities and the working-class, and risk rendering themselves irrelevant in American public life.

Historically, UU prided itself on welcoming diverse beliefs and fostering dialogue. That spirit has faded. Social justice, once a strength, is now filtered through narrow progressive ideological lenses. Activist UU orthodoxies leave little room for debate, and traditional liberals, moderates, and independents feel pushed out, making UU increasingly insular and prone to groupthink.

This narrowing isolates the national church, many congregations and congregants from the wider public. Many denominational leaders, ministers, and activists now embrace fringe causes, such as abolishing the police and prisons, “decentering whiteness,” “fat liberation,” and “dismantling” Enlightenment values, and have adopted postmodernist jargon that resonates with few Americans and alienates most of the very minorities UUs claim to champion. The result is a church that looks less like a bridge to diverse communities and more like an illiberal and fringe subculture speaking its own coded language.

A UU congregant recently wrote:

“If Unitarian Universalism wants to be diverse, we are doing ourselves no favors by exactly mirroring the same discourse as an overwhelmingly affluent elite college. Same issues prioritized, same stances, same lingo, same self-guilting humblebrags to signal in-group membership, same penchant for luxury beliefs, same looking down on dissenting viewpoints.”

As the 2024 national election showed, "wokeness" and rigid progressive identity politics, such as what the current Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and many UU congregations push, are off-putting to most Americans and highly divisive even within the Democratic Party and other politically left movements. It was a key contributor to Trump’s win, and for a marked increase in the number of racial and ethnic minorities and working class people leaving the Democratic Party to vote Republican.

Wallace on the Confusion and Decline in UU Congregations

Wallace has seen this firsthand:

“My congregation, too, has lost formerly active members who did not move away. I’m afraid that many UUs aren’t so much lazy, as just confused, both about UU policies and practices, and about national politics as well.

The trajectory of wokeism has created real confusion for lots of well-intentioned people, who feel that women and minorities obviously need protection, and don’t understand why this has turned out not to be a sufficient program to defeat Trumpism and the like. This is bound to be a confusing situation for people.

With the result that UU national politics is now pretty obviously irrelevant to the challenges that the country faces, but UUs have little or no idea why this is the case.”

The problem, Wallace argues, is life inside an echo chamber:

“And we don’t even realize we’re in one. After all, we have Beacon Press and Skinner Books and Meadville-Lombard and Yale Divinity School, we must be well informed! I don’t think anyone intended to create this particular echo chamber. After all, it dominates a lot of the discussion across departments in the universities.

The question is, how long will it take for (enough of) the participants to figure out what they’ve done to themselves?”

A self-reinforcing echo chamber leaves members unable to understand, let alone engage with, those outside it. Suppression of dissent and narrowing of thought have stifled diversity and made it harder for UUs to communicate with wider society.

Wallace believes the only way forward is honest, wide-ranging conversation and open engagement with different viewpoints:

“The first step toward addressing it effectively would be a serious and open discussion, entertaining all sorts of voices. John McWhorter's book, for example (Woke Racism, 2021), would be highly relevant.

But this kind of discussion is obviously not something that people who've been raised in wokeism, or accustomed to hearing it from the pulpit, can readily imagine engaging in.”

I have seen this locally. A friend whose career was in federal civil rights left the congregation I attend, Westside UU in Seattle, after years of involvement. She saw how insular and out-of-touch congregants had become with the lives and views of average, everyday minorities, including in our city.

The result is a church that is shrinking, isolated, and increasingly fringe. The church has not only been losing membership, but losing racial and ethnic minority membership, making UU one of the most racially and ethnically monolithic and white churches in the country.

Once an open and bridge-building movement, UU now struggles to reach beyond the already converted. Its echo chamber, elitist rhetoric, silencing of diverse viewpoints, and narrowing of thought have made it less relevant to American life, less able to engage with the world, and less diverse than it once aspired to be.

UU minister Rev. Munro Sickafoose wrote, “If we become a shrill and illiberal faith, I believe we are doomed to irrelevance.“