"What exactly is a grit?" er...UU?Okay. We can and must define who the members of our congregations are, whether for legal organization and voting purposes or for calculating our dues to the UUA and the district. Who is a member of a UUA member organization, then, is not a matter of debate.
So what we are talking about here is identity. Who has the right to identify as Unitarian Universalist? Who has the authority to decide who is and is not a Unitarian Universalist?
The minute you make it the question of identity that it is, it becomes self-evident to me that it is just as offensive a question as asking who has the right to self-identify as any other identity out there. This or that group may gripe about this or that person's claim to an identity without having kowtowed to some arbiter's standards or decision about identity. But in the end there are many, many reasons for identifying this way or that, and ultimately anybody's objection is like a fart in an over-heated car whose doors and windows are jammed shut. It stinks like hell but in the end stains no one other than the one making the noise.
If someone says they are UU because their great-great-grandmother was U or U and no one in the family has gone to church anywhere since then, fine! If someone says they are UU because they have read the brochures or the website and decided that, if they are any religion, it's UU, fine! If someone says they are UU because they are tired as hell that the Jehovah's Witnesses keep knocking on their door and they need some identity to ward them off, fine!
Rather than worrying about defining the identity, we would better spend our time inviting those with the self-identity UU, in whatever ways they are emotionally or otherwise able to do so, to celebrate and share their identity with us who also share that identity.
UUA member congregation member UUs lose nothing in accepting the UUness of UUs of other definitions or self-understandings.
2 responses:
I know free range UUs and the reason their free range is they don't want anything to do with a Church. Even a UU Church... they just us us for Funerals or Weddings. I think they're poor candidates as future members of our Churches, because the whole reason they're on the range is they don't like Church.
Oh, I don't mind, Bill, whether or not they are good candidates. We should leave the door open to them. Whether or not they come in is completely their concern. I suspect that you are probably right that not many free rangers are likely to come "home" to roost.
Regardless, it doesn't matter whether non-members claim the identity. Whatever level or type of their adherence to the label, I'm fine with it. And even if I weren't, nobody has rights over another's self-identification.
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