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Sexy Spiritual Surveys
A Sermon Given
by The Reverend Roger Fritts
on March 3, 2002
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
I arrived back at my church office Thursday after being away with
my family for a week in Arizona. We were attending the Memorial
Service for my father who died February 19. My father died at the
age of 82 after several months of declining health. While his death
was not a total surprise, it did come sooner than we expected. My
father's ashes were buried in the Memorial Garden of the Phoenix
Unitarian Universalist Church on a beautiful sunny Saturday
afternoon, and a service was held last Tuesday at the Prescott
Unitarian Fellowship in the mountains of central Arizona. While out
in Arizona, I thought of the many members of this congregation who
have lost loved ones in the eight years I have been one of your
ministers. I want to thank everyone who sent me cards and left me
messages of concern. Also I want to thank Douglas Taylor and Betty
Jo Middleton who continued the work of the ministry of this church
while I was away.
On Friday I started work on this sermon, looking carefully at two
new surveys of American religion. One is called "Faith Communities
Today" by the Hartford Institute for Religious Research. The other
is called "American Religious Identification Survey," and it was
conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York.
The studies contained some interesting information. For example,
although we only have about 150,000 Unitarian Universalists adults
on our membership roles in our churches, 627,000 adults in the United States say that they are Unitarian
Universalists. I wonder
where all those other Unitarian Universalists are when it comes time
to pay the bills.
Still, because of my emotional state, after reading and trying to write
about these surveys on American religion, at the end of the day I had
to admit that they did not seem as interesting to me as they did when
I first conceived of this sermon topic about two months ago. I have
read other surveys about religion over the course of the last few
years, and one of those earlier studies continues to hold my interest.
I want to share with you research this morning that was conducted
by the late Dr. Robert Miller, who was the chaplain and a professor
in the Department of Religion at Tufts University, in Medford,
Massachusetts.
Dr. Miller conducted a study in the mid 1970s that stirred
considerable interest among Unitarian Universalists. He published
the results of his work in a journal called The Review of Religious
Research. The article was entitled "The Religious Value System of
Unitarian Universalists." For years after it appeared, the study was
discussed in Unitarian Universalist congregations across the
continent. The widespread interest reflected a deep need I still find
among us--the need to define our religious identity. Because we are
such independent people, because we reject any creed, because we
believe so strongly in the autonomy of each individual congregation,
we often wonder what holds us together. We wonder what the glue
is that cements us into one association under the name Unitarian
Universalist. We wonder what we share in common.
This is an important question for me since I have dedicated my life
to the Unitarian Universalist ministry. It is important to me that the
glue that holds all of us together be strong. I am reluctant to be part
of a religious association of one thousand congregations that has in
common only a name and a general hostility toward traditional
Christian churches.
It is not that I do not like diversity. It is just that I have the feeling
that if we are truly to call ourselves religious, we need to share
certain common ideals, certain common values. I believe that if we
are to justify our existence as a religious gathering, we need
constantly to clarify, to review, and to understand what is that we
hold in common as a group.
Dr. Miller's study attempted to identify the religious world view
Unitarian Universalists share in common by studying our value
system with the tools of social science. The study was quite
impressive. He sent out questionnaires to more than 5,000 people in
108 churches across the country. A total of 1,979 questionnaires
were returned properly completed. This number of respondents was
larger than any other previous study of its kind. Those who
responded represented a good cross-section of Unitarian
Universalists. Results came in from all parts of the country. They
came in from old and young persons, from males and females, from
very active and not so active churchgoers, from people with low,
middle, and high incomes.
There was a particular advantage to the questionnaire Dr. Miller
selected. Other researchers used it to study the values of several
religious groups: Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and persons with no
formal religious affiliation. Thus we could not only examine the
responses of Unitarian Universalist, but also compare our responses
with those of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and nonbelievers.
You have before you the essential parts of the questionnaire, a list
of eighteen Terminal Values:
A Comfortable Life
An Exciting Life
A Sense of Accomplishment
A World at Peace
A World of Beauty
Equality
Family Security
Freedom
Happiness
Inner Harmony
Mature Love
National Security
Pleasure
Salvation
Self-respect
Social Recognition
True Friendship
Wisdom
And eighteen Instrumental Values:
Ambitious
Broad Minded
Capable
Cheerful
Clean
Courageous
Forgiving
Helpful
Honest
Imaginative
Independent
Intellectual
Logical
Loving
Obedient
Polite
Responsible
Self Controlled
Dr. Miller was a little fancier. His questionnaire had the values listed
on separate pieces of paper affixed to a waxed paper strip. In this
way the respondents could move the words around until they
establish the order they wanted. Also, Dr. Miller's questionnaire
asked questions about such things as age, income, and sex. These are
things that I did not include today.
This morning I am going to give you the two or three most
important values, and the two or three least important values that
Unitarian Universalists and other religious groups identified.
The terminal values that Jews, Protestants, and Catholics ranked
highest were a world of peace and family security. Unitarian
Universalists ranked as their number one terminal value self-respect.
Second was wisdom and third was freedom. Family security came
forth in Unitarian Universalist ranking.
Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, placed as lowest on their
list an exciting life and pleasure. Unitarian Universalist ranked as
lowest salvation and national security.
Miller made much of the fact that Unitarian Universalists ranked
salvation as the least important. He wrote:
Unitarian Universalists frequently communicated
their intense desire to rule out salvation as a part of
their value system. Many left the label, "Salvation"
affixed to the wax strip and refused to include it in
any way. Others pasted it vertically off to one side of
the rank ordered grid. Still others discarded it
entirely. Some pasted it below the grid, leaving line
eighteen blank. Others pointedly pasted it upside
down below the numbered grid.
Miller concluded, "Salvation comes close to being a disvalue for
Unitarian Universalists."
I like to think that we are different from all those other religious
groups because we, unlike them, have no interest in salvation.
However, in truth no group ranked salvation high on their list except
the Baptists.
- Baptists ranked salvation third.
- Lutherans ranked salvation ninth.
- Methodists ranked it 10th.
- Presbyterians ranked it 11th.
- United Church of Christ members ranked it 11th.
- Catholics ranked salvation 13th.
- And Episcopalians ranked it 14th.
Jews and nonbelievers, like Unitarian Universalists, ranked salvation
as 18th or least important.
Turning to the instrumental values, all the groups, Protestants,
Catholics, Jews, nonbelievers, and Unitarian Universalists ranked
honesty first. Protestants and Catholics ranked as second ambitious.
Jews, nonbelievers, and Unitarian Universalists all ranked broad-minded as second. Unitarian Universalists ranked loving third. No
other group ranked loving as highly as we did.
On the other end of the list, Christians, both Catholic and
Protestants, ranked as least important imaginative (18), intellectual
(17), logical (16), and obedient (15). Unitarian Universalists chose
as least important obedient (18), clean (17), polite (16), and in
marked contrast to the Protestants and Catholics who ranked
ambitious as second, we rank ambitious as 15th.
Dr. Miller wanted to discover if there were any significant subgroups
in the Unitarian Universalist denomination. He compared the
responses of different kinds of people who responded to the study:
- He compared the responses of those with high incomes to
those with middle or low incomes.
- He compared those who attended church regularly to those
who come only once and awhile.
- He compared those who said that religion is very important
in their daily life to those who said it is mildly important or
unimportant.
- He compared the responses from various parts of the
country to see if there are significant differences in the value
systems depending on where we live.
- He compared the responses from different size cities to see
if people in large communities differed from people in
smaller communities.
- He compared the responses of people from small
congregations to those of people who were members of
large congregations.
In every one of these comparisons Dr. Miller found no significant
differences in the value systems of Unitarian Universalists.
- Economic class was of virtually no influence on the rank
ordering of either terminal or instrumental values.
- There was little significant difference in responses between
persons with varying degrees of church attendance.
- Importance persons attributed to religion in their daily lives
made little difference in the pattern of their value systems.
- The place of residence made virtually no difference in
responses. People gave the same responses whether they live
in urban, suburban, or rural communities.
- The kind of religious community made no difference.
Responses were the same from members of small
congregations and large congregations.
We are, it appears, a remarkably homogeneous group. This values
study reflects my own experience. I have visited Unitarian
Universalist congregations all over the country. Wherever I go,
whether San Francisco or Charlotte, Boston or Phoenix, Atlanta or Santa Barbara, I have found that we Unitarian Universalists appear
to have the same basic values.
We pride ourselves on being open to different experiences, different
beliefs, and different attitudes toward life, yet we are remarkably
similar in our religious value systems.
Dr. Miller concluded with a summary of the values that distinguished
us from other religious and nonreligious groups--values we ranked
higher than other groups. The terminal values we ranked higher
were:
Self-respect
Wisdom
Inner harmony
A world of beauty
And an exciting life
The instrumental values we ranked higher than other groups were:
Loving
Independence
Imaginative
And logical
Dr. Miller wrote in his conclusion:
The distinctive quality of being religious in the
Unitarian Universalist value system reflects a belief
in personal realization, individual self-fulfillment, and
self-actualization.
So now we know what to tell our friends next time they ask us that
difficult question: "What do Unitarian Universalists believe?" We
can say Unitarian Universalist value self-respect, wisdom, honesty,
and broad-mindedness. On the other hand, we do not consider
salvation, national security, obedience, or cleanliness very important.
We can back up our statements with research.
However, we need to be careful. I sat and filled out this
questionnaire just as you did this morning. As I did, I reflected on
the process I was going through in making my selections. I noted
several things. Perhaps most obvious, I noted that I was very careful
about making my first two or three choices. However, soon I
became impatient and found myself paying much less attention to my
other choices. I found myself thinking that I had lots of other
important things to do and that I could probably better spend my
time in other ways. I suspect that this reaction is not unusual. I am
inclined to believe that the first few responses and last two or three
responses that a person makes are more significant than the ones in
the middle.
Also, when I began to reflect on why I chose one value and not
another, I noted that I rated highest the things that I want and do not
have. I put last the things I take for granted, such as the word clean.
If other people are like me, in that they list as most important what
they want of life and do not have, this puts a new light on the study.
If I am correct, given the current state of the world, a World at
Peace, might be a much higher value today for Unitarian
Universalists than it was in the late 1970s when our nation was not
at war.
The one thing that all of us agreed on, Protestants, Catholics, Jews,
and nonbelievers, and Unitarian Universalists was honesty. Twenty-five years ago we all felt a deep need for honesty. If my theory is
correct (that we rank high what is we want and do not have), people
in the 1970s felt a lack of honesty in human relationships.
This morning we welcome new members into this congregation. To
all these new members, I say welcome. You will find that being a
Unitarian Universalist is not always easy. For here, in conversation
with others, you will be encouraged to exist on your own authority,
to compose your own theology, to work out your own system of
ethics and values, and to work with other independent people in a
religious community.
It can be hard work. Still, I believe that you will find the rewards of
membership are special. Here you can probe the meaning of human
existence, to participate in a long tradition of religious liberalism, to
share joy, and hope, and beauty, and to get know so many wonderful
men and women.
Now I invite the new members who are here at this service as well
as the representative of our Member Services Committee and Rev.
Taylor to join me here on the stage.
Office@CedarLane.org
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