Considering My Options

[poliphilo]

Ailz and I have been thinking that  we should check out the Unitarian church- that maybe we'd find we were Unitarians.

So I was reading up about them. They're OK.  Maybe a little on the serious side. I can't find anything to disagree with.

But they're a gang. And I don't want to join a gang. I don't want to go round sporting gang colours.

It suits me better to be out on the margins. It always has done.

Which is why it works for me to attend an Anglican church. Anglicanism is the state religion and everyone who isn't specifically something else is Anglican by default.  Anglicanism isn't a gang; it's an atmosphere. If I became a Unitarian I'd be signing up for something, but by continuing as an Anglican I'm just going to church. There's a difference.
 
I've always been afraid of being co-opted, of becoming one of the crowd.

Or worse, of becoming a spokesman for a particular crowd- where you have to say what the crowd thinks (which is actually what the leader of the crowd thinks) not what you think yourself.

You see them on TV-  the spokesmen and spokeswomen. So carefully turned out, so carefully spoken.

I pity them.

I was like that when I was a vicar. It killed the mischief in me. And what's the use of a priest without mischief?

Comments

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

A friend attends the Unitarians irregularly, and I've been along with them on three occasions. I found them unbearably smug and utterly blithe about cultural appropriation. The message I got from them was 'we have taken the best from the world religions and combined them in one superior religion'; it seemed to me as though in doing so they had completely disregarded the cultural traditions that inform those religions, and set themselves up as morally and intellectually superior beings who see beyond all that superstition to the profound truths that, like, God is love, man, and you shouldn't be hurting people. In short, it seemed like a white liberal middle-class organisation for feeling good about yourself, with a surreal gloss of mid-Victorian earnestness.

I know this isn't everyone's experience, and certainly in the area of queer rights I have the utmost respect for them, but I was still astonished by how tiresome I found them and how little desire I had to go back.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's rather what I feared. I can't be doing with earnestness. My local Anglicans are rough and ready and not the least bit smug.

Still I believe the Unitarians have a ritual with a chalice where- instead of drinking from it- they SET IT ON FIRE! That's got to be worth seeing.