[Parts one and two.] Say what you will about the irreligious, but they’re not us UUs. We’ve got atheists and agnostics to be sure, they aren’t irreligious. Otherwise they wouldn’t come to worship or sign the membership book.
Or perhaps we’re looking at the religious irreligious? I don’t know. I hate to contribute to our sense of terminal uniqueness, but it does seem like a one of a kind religious category.
Does anyone have the numbers on the numbers of (formerly) irreligious UUs? As opposed to, say, lifelong UUs or recovering Presbyterians? Seems like that would be an important benchmark of how we are doing.
I hear anecdotally that we now see more “unchurched” folks coming in the door for the first time than “recovering-x” folks. If so, that’s a good sign, drawing from the fastest growing religious group.
At work I get about one email a week from someone who is interested in our congregation but doesn’t know how to go about it. They are so radically unchurched that they don’t know whether they have to sign up before they can walk in the door! Their pursuing us like that is courageous, I think. I wonder how much the culture shock is.
What does UUism—as a practiced, organized religion—have to offer to the irreligious? And what do irreligious UUs have to offer to UUism?
I’m at a loss here. I need religion like a VFW hall needs bingo. Try as I may, I can’t imagine living without it. So I have a tough time wrapping my head around living irreligiously to begin with. I just can’t grok what that’s like.
Maybe I get it in the abstract; if you’re not religious you’re not religious. But what motivates people who grow up irreligious to pursue us? Maybe some of you irreligious UUs can help me out?
Perhaps it’s an intentional exclusion from your discussion on this topic, but I see no mention (or contextually none, anyway) of “spirituality.” I think a large part of the irreligious population could potentially be described as spiritual, even if unrealized by the individual. Religion, as an opiate, is a turn-off to the world’s critical-thinkers. However, critical thinking doesn’t necessarily address questions of spirituality, which may reside deep within our systems – undeterred by logical reasoning. It is these people that I think find comfort in UU. They’re made up of both the religious and irreligious for a reason; spirituality is the common bond.
Incidentally, I’m decidedly pagan in spirit, though not religious.
You can’t separate spirituality from religion. People have made religion into a certain narrow thing, made up of all the little things they don’t like. Then labeled all the things they do like “spirituality.” But it’s all one thing. If you’re religious, your spiritual, and if you’re spiritual, you’re religious. It’s just a question of how you go about it.