Financial Times article on how UU has devolved into a farce

"It's like a Monty Python skit"

Many longtime Unitarian Universalists have expressed grave concerns about the recent transformation of Unitarian Universalism. Traditionally known as a haven for tolerance, religious liberalism, freedom of belief and inquiry, and the spiritual home of original thinkers such as Julian Jaynes and Kurt Vonnegut, it has recently succumbed to an illiberal, authoritarian, dogmatic hierarchy that promotes fringe political views. 

The national organization, the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), has devolved into just another dime-a-dozen narrow-minded religious organization, replete with self-righteous true believers, holier than thou dogmatists, public shamings, and heresy trials.

Some observers outside of UU have already covered this. This includes the University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne (here and here), Columbia University professor John McWhorter (here and in his 2021 New York Times bestseller Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America), philosopher and magazine editor Joseph M. Keegin (here), and the podcast Blocked and Reported (here). However, December 9, 2023, was the first coverage by a major international news outlet, The Financial Times of London.   

The Financial Times, one of the most respected and widely-read newspapers in the world, and known as a "newspaper of record" in Europe, published an article by the British journalist Jemima Kelly titled "The culture wars dividing America’s most liberal church." A former reporter for Reuters, Kelly highlights that the conflict within Unitarian Universalism is not a traditional battle between progressives and conservatives but between people on “the same side of the political spectrum.”

You can read the article here:

The culture wars dividing America’s most liberal church (ft.com)

If that link doesn’t work, you can find an archived copy of the article here:

The culture wars dividing America’s most liberal church (archive.is)

One essential aspect the article does not cover is how the UUA has undermined the church’s democratic processes to ensure that the national hierarchy is stacked with pre-approved ideologues.

It is worth reading the reader comments below the Financial Times column, as it is telling what the current state of affairs in UU looks like to an international audience of non-UUs. The following are some of the comments: 

“It's like a Monty Python skit.” 

“This sounds like an episode of South Park. Thank you for digging into this Jemima! Very entertaining to say the least.” 

“I've been to music festivals where acid-enhanced individuals dance incoherently, every one of them assuming that they appear to others as graceful as a ballerina in Swan Lake. These people seem, to me, to be their equivalent in the intellectual realm. They are all over the place, there is no structure to their thinking and the output is rather pitiful.’” 

“They always end up devouring themselves, because there's no real principle involved in their hectoring, just a desire to outdo the next person in claimed virtue. Banning ‘I stand with . . .’ because it's discriminatory of people who can't stand is the perfect example.” 

“Simultaneously fascinating and repulsive. They stand for nothing except Stalinist purity-spiralling and anti-white hate.” 

“This is how identity politics self-destructs. All you have left is intolerance.” 

“Meanwhile, Trump is neck-and-neck with Biden in the polls... None of these folks are actual positive forces for progressivism. They divide and distract the Left instead of bringing it together to fight real right-wing authoritarianism in the USA.” 

“Enough said. Upper-class white intellectuals squabbling internally and without outside involvement or interest about hypothesized multiracial utopias is the pinnacle of delusional self-importance.” 

“Great piece of human comedy.” 

“It’s sad that a church ostensibly devoted to inclusion and tolerance is unable to continue those values.” 

“For an organization which seems to promote everyone’s rights, but then stops some people having rights….? Seems a bit hypocritical.” 

“I’m glad there’s a place for these people to congregate in their little bubble, constantly infighting, and not actually make a meaningful difference to the world.” 

“I'm not sure if this is intentionally funny or not, but made me lol several times reading it.”  

“Yikes. Thanks, but no thanks.” 

“Great article. Trump sounds sane compared to this.”   

“Why are the politics so nasty? Because the stakes are so low.” 

“Put a load of religious people together without any meaningful structure or dogma and they’ll invent their own.” 

“Crikey.” 

“Total madness. Like the French Revolution they are eating their own and hopefully will cannibalize themselves out of existence.” 

“Great article demonstrating the pathetic compulsion of wokists to persistently cancel everything and everybody, eventually turning on themselves.”