What's it like to be a Unitarian Universalist in America? with Reverend Daniel Kanter

What are the specific traits of a Unitarian (as opposed to a Trinitarian), and what does it mean to be a Universalist who does not believe in hell? Hear from Reverend Daniel Kanter on how these traits translate into a social justice commitment here on earth.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm George Mason, your host, and I'm delighted to have another installment of American Faith with our guest today, the Reverend Dr. Daniel Kanter, who is the senior minister of the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Texas. Daniel, we're so glad to have you with us. Thanks for coming.

Daniel Kanter:
Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be with you. You and I have done a lot of things in our city, and look forward to talking to you-

George Mason:
Great.

Daniel Kanter:
... about American religion.

George Mason:
That's exactly right. So let me say a little more about how we know each other and what you do and why we're doing this particular program. We know each other because we're colleagues in Dallas, but also because we are co-conspirators for good, we hope, in Faith Forward Dallas at Thanksgiving Square, and with our parent company of this Good God Podcast, which is Faith Commons, and things that we do for the matter of the common good and social justice in Dallas and in Texas in particular.

George Mason:
So we find ourselves at the table a lot, and sometimes in the street, and often with a pen, figuratively speaking, writing statements and speaking and trying to create a better community. We do it from a religious perspective, each of us from our own religious perspective. While there's a lot of commonality at times, we want to emphasize some of the distinctiveness of different expressions of American faith in this particular podcast series.

George Mason:
So among the various religious organizations that we can identify in America, the Unitarian Universalist Church is one of the few uniquely American experiences, you might say, birthed in this country, regardless of it's longer roots elsewhere. But Daniel, tell us a little more about who are the UUs? Where did you come from? How do you think about where you are situated in the larger religious framework of American religion?

Daniel Kanter:
Yeah. That's a big question. We do go back to the 1700s in America where these Unitarians and Universalists, at the time it would have been two different faiths, arrived in America. Many of them arrived right around the revolution. So their sort of progressive religious perspectives really fit the turmoil of the time when people were trying to make sense of the faiths that they were living in.

Daniel Kanter:
We would really land very firmly in New England as the Unitarians breaking off from the congregational church, the inheritors of the church of the pilgrims. And then the Universalists were really defrocked ministers from the Methodists from England who came over to America. Those two faiths ran parallel really until 1961 when they merged. So we are one of the only faiths in America with two theological names combined, thus Unitarian Universalist.

George Mason:
I think we should say a little more for people who would recognize that part of the spiritual movement that connected with the UUs was the New England transcendentalists, right?

Daniel Kanter:
Absolutely. Yeah. The transcendentalists were the sons and daughters of Unitarian ministers from that early phase, so from the ministers who were running churches in the Boston area, especially in the 1800s. Their children, like Emerson and Thoreau and Margaret Fuller and lots of others, literally their children revolted against them and really what they wanted to do was blow the doors open of the church and say, "Well, there's this whole natural world out here that we're finding our spiritual lives in."

Daniel Kanter:
That would sound very familiar to people today because we absorbed in America a lot of that sensibility that religion didn't have to be contained in a book in a church by the word of a minister, but could be experienced in the world in very different ways. So transcendentalists were Emerson, the most famous, who was a Unitarian minister himself in Boston at Second Church in Boston and left because he felt the communion ritual was empty, that people weren't coming to it genuinely. So he, as an act of conscience, and I think he was also not so good with people, but he left the ministry for a more fruitful career in writing.

George Mason:
Yes. Right. So I think maybe just even clarifying for people a little further, the language of Unitarian should be opposed to the language of Trinitarian, right?

Daniel Kanter:
Yes.

George Mason:
Explain that a little more and then go to the Universalist side as well.

Daniel Kanter:
Sure. Yeah. The Unitarians really started going back. We can go back very clearly to the 1500s in Romania and Poland and Italy. They were humanists, meaning they were really interested in how the human mind could evolve. They were studying right around the time of the Gutenberg press. They were getting access to documents. They started reading these things and saying, "What we're reading doesn't make sense to us theologically." They started to question the Trinity, especially around the divinity of Jesus.

Daniel Kanter:
That Unitarian question, which really developed into churches in Europe, came to America in the 1700s, And then early in 1800s, really after the revolution, they really took hold. But I served King's Chapel in Boston, which was founded in the 1600s, was the church of the King of England. In the 1780s, they had a debate about the prayer book. They were looking at the Trinitarian language and they were looking at the Bible and they said, "We don't see this. We see Son of Man. We see these things." But to them, that meant that Jesus was more man than God.

Daniel Kanter:
So those Unitarians, which are a bit of anomaly in the story, but they're in my experience, in the late 1700s changed the language in the prayer book from Trinitarian language to Unitarian language or to what we would call like a God that was more mystery, but one, not embodied in the Jesus. Then in the early 1800s, they really defined it, which was they argued that Jesus was man, not God, that we are inherently good, not inherently sinful, and that salvation was by character, not by the choice of the divine being. That really defined them over and against Trinitarianism.

Daniel Kanter:
In fact, even going back to Europe, Unitarianism was a derogatory term given to them by the Trinitarians at the time who, in Europe, were trying to squash that kind of heresy in that.

George Mason:
Well, I think perhaps one of the most famous martyrs was when Michael Servetus, who was a Unitarian, was burned at the stake with the blessing of John Calvin. One of the most grievous times of the Reformation. Yeah.

Daniel Kanter:
Yeah. Not only the blessing, but he was actually ... Servetus, I think, had a little bit of a death wish. He and Calvin were in school together in Paris and then eventually became enemies. Servetus would take Calvin's books and annotate them and then send them back to Calvin and vice versa. And then eventually, Servetus was caught and put into prison by the counter Reformation in France, and he escaped somehow. Where did he go? He went to Geneva.

George Mason:
Of all places.

Daniel Kanter:
And then in Geneva on Sunday under Calvin, you had to show up at church on Sunday or you were fined. Servetus was sitting in the back of Calvin's church when he was arrested and then tried. There's some documentation of those trials. That was a crazy thing. But it was basically the same argument, that Servetus read the Bible, said he believed he saw a man who he could follow. That was also an important thing for them, that a perfect God was, to them, something that they couldn't follow the example of.

Daniel Kanter:
They felt like they needed the human being. That's why the Unitarians at that time and in New England and even today, the Unitarian Christians say, "We follow the teachings of Jesus, not the atonement, not the miracles, not these things." So there's a whole long history on all.

George Mason:
Right. So I think that should lead to the point too that what you just described as Unitarians who say, "We follow Jesus and we follow His teachings, His way of life, and that sort of thing," leads some Unitarian Universalists to say that they are within the camp of Christianity, while other UUs are not as willing to identify as such. Can you describe the distinction there?

Daniel Kanter:
Yeah. I think the door to which that tent got bigger or opened was the transcendentalists who started studying Hinduism and Buddhism and really saying, "There's truths in all of these religions. We don't have a monopoly on the truth." Really from the transcendentalists mid-1800s on, Unitarian Universalism then evolved, especially Unitarianism evolved to be a bigger tent faith. Some stayed very closely tied to the Bible and to the story of Jesus. The church I served in Boston was a Unitarian Christian Church. We had a lectionary. We preached out of the Bible.

Daniel Kanter:
We preached about Jesus almost every Sunday. That was important. The distinction being it wasn't Jesus who saved the world, it is the people who follow the teachings of Jesus who do save the world, that distinction. And then many of my congregants in Dallas would have all kinds of beliefs. It's not my job to indoctrinate them with a kind of belief system. It's my job to open them in dialogue with themselves, others, and the holy to find meaning and truth. That's what the evolution of the Unitarian side has sort of provided us.

George Mason:
Now, the Universalist side, Universalist language is about universal salvation, right? There's a critique of a Christian doctrine of heaven and hell where some go to one place and some to another based upon their choice or decision about Jesus. So universalism was a separate movement, but it merged with the Unitarians. Can you say a little more about that?

Daniel Kanter:
Yeah. There's 200 years-plus of history there. Universalists were Christians. They were Trinitarians, and they came from England, as I said, the Methodist ministers who got defrocked and kicked out. John Murray was the most famous who arrived. There are these miracle stories in Universalism where Murray's boat got grounded on a sandbar in Cranberry Point, South of New Jersey. Lo and behold, while they were waiting for the tide to change, Murray went into town and met this farmer, Potter, who had built a chapel on his property and was waiting for a Universalist preacher to come and spread the word. That was 1770.

Daniel Kanter:
At one point it was one of the largest sects of Christianity in America, because what they were saying was, "You don't have to have special favor from God. Once you are a Christian, you are saved and there's no conditions on that. God loves humanity, created humanity, and that which God created would not be condemned to burn for eternity." There are all kinds of Universalists that had different ideas about this. Some believed that you had to spend some time in punishment for what you did. Some believed that you didn't. The Ultra Universalists, they were called, believed it didn't matter what you did.

Daniel Kanter:
You were free. You would be free of any kind of damnation. So they didn't believe in hell basically. That heritage then was also combined with a couple of things. One was this incredible optimism that you could not give up hope on anything and anyone and, secondly, a real strong heritage of doing good social justice work in the world. So they were both anti-slavery people. They were about liberating prisoners and reforming prisoners outside of punishment. They did a lot of work with people in the streets, et cetera. That heritage also lives very strongly in us.

George Mason:
Yeah. I want to go there for a moment with you too, because I think if people only had a passing acquaintance with Unitarian Universalists in their communities, probably what they would find is what you just said. That is that in every possible way that you might find religious leaders gathering to promote social justice and the common good in a community, you will find UU faith leaders present. And yet, one might from the outside think that if you're a Universalist that you might not have a high degree of moral urgency, you might say, because there is no sort of threat of hell involved in that.

George Mason:
What is the motivation to do what is good and the like? And yet, it's really part of the DNA of the UU tradition that you are very deeply engaged in that. So can you say something about where that motivation comes from and where that sense of ongoing and really dynamic engagement really falls?

Daniel Kanter:
Yeah, sure. My best understanding of that is, on the one hand, it was easy to become a Universalist and also easy to leave Universalism in the 19th century because after a while people said, "I can do anything. So I could just go to the gambling house on Sunday morning." They said, "Yeah." Because the Universalists, their highest values were both love and calm and freedom. So I think what happened was in the founding of the institutionalized versions of Universalism because, remember, this was just an idea that was bubbling in the church. But it only became a real church itself in America. When they institutionalized it, they founded it on this notion not that ... Basically, they preached that when Jesus Christ had saved all souls, that was it.

Daniel Kanter:
So the salvation wasn't something that urged us to action. It was acting out and imitating the pure love of God. That love was so strong in the world that we could not stand by while others suffered. So almost like a bodhisattva or a Buddhist who takes the vow, that no one is saved until all are saved in love, or no one is free until we are all free. The Universalist had that same burning sensibility. They talked of that. There are many, many stories just to prove their point. Hosea Ballou was a famous 19th century Universalist, would tell a story that he'd go to a town. These were people in New England. He'd meet a farmer.

Daniel Kanter:
The farmer says to Ballou, "My son is a terrible drunk. He's a wastrel. He's no good for anything." So Ballou would say to him, "Okay. So what we'll do is tonight when he's coming home from the pub, we'll make a fire next to the path he's walking. When he comes by, we'll push him into the fire." The farmer would say, "No. How could we do that? He's my son. I love him." Ballou would say, "So why would God do the same to you?" And then beyond that, what is your responsibility to act out that deep love for your son, not to punish, but to reform.

Daniel Kanter:
So I think those are the kinds of threads in Unitarian Universalism now, both on the Unitarian side, the right to conscience, the dedication to dialogue, freedom, and free religious pursuit and, on a Universalist side, this requirement to practice and to try to practice deep love for the world. And that-

George Mason:
That's what we see in your work.

Daniel Kanter:
Yeah. I hope. I hope.

George Mason:
One of the things that tickles me is we were on a call the other day and we, I guess, had gotten to waxing philosophical a bit in this interfaith group that we had. You sort of raised your head and said, "Okay. I know I'm always the one to do this, but I'm not going to let us get off of here before we figure out what we're going to do. What action are we actually going to take as a result of these ideas that we have? We're not finished until we do something."

Daniel Kanter:
Yeah. A lot like the rabbis of the civil rights movement, or even the ministers who were marching in civil rights, they would say, "It's well and good to pray and to enact our spiritual lives on issues of the world, but we have to put our feet on the ground. That's where we have to go." That might just be me, but it is a theme in Unitarian Universalist churches very strongly, that social justice work, that work to bring about a greater good. Now, Lord knows what a greater good is these days with all the confusing kind of-

George Mason:
Of course, of course.

Daniel Kanter:
... things coming and going. But the sense that, for us, that evil restricts freedom, that evil oppresses human life or tries to create a conformity around an idea and thus a behavior in the world, that that has to be addressed. There was a great article in The New York Times this week about some of the Christian nationalism, I know I'm talking to a Christian here, that is trying to conform a political reality in our country around this Christian ideal that, if I'm studying theology correctly, isn't really an agreed-upon ideal, but is an ideal.

Daniel Kanter:
To us, there's an evil in that because it can become oppressive to every other person who believes a different thing, not to mention Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, the great variety of people in our country.

George Mason:
Right. One of the points of this American faith series that we're talking with different people about is that both in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, we have the security of both non-discrimination and complete religious liberty for people, which also includes the freedom not to believe and to be treated equally before the law. But the lived experience of people since the beginning of the colonial days and certainly since constitutional America as well doesn't always match that ideal.

George Mason:
So part of what the goal is of the American Project is to say, "Here's what we say. Now, can we catch up on the ground to our ideals?" Faith Commons is an organization that is trying to do that, Faith Forward Dallas as well. So I guess one of the things I would ask you, given that you brought up Christian nationalism and Christianity has been in the many, many forms of Christianity in America since its beginning, in a sense, sort of the default religious identity of the majority of Americans, which has created a sense of yearning for place, you might say, of every other religious conviction and group.

George Mason:
What would you say about where you see us today? As a Unitarian Universalist minister, what would you want people who are not UUs to know about your convictions and your vision for religious life in America?

Daniel Kanter:
Yeah, that's good, really good question. I wish I had gotten that question before we got on. But I'll take it on the fly. I mean just to put a historical note on some of this, we're pretty good at claiming some of those founding fathers who worked on that Constitution. So to us, it's no surprise that there's liberty and justice for all as part and parcel of some of those original documents. The Adams, John Adams and family are buried in the crypt of the Universalist church in Quincy, Massachusetts. Some of the others, we claim people like Jefferson, although he never was really institutionalized part of us. He just argued with the miracles. So we-

George Mason:
You claim him.

Daniel Kanter:
I know that George Washington was in the King's Church where I served many times and all that stuff. But I think it makes sense to us as Unitarians because of all of what we talked about already, that there's this strong strain of religious liberty. To this point, I see my faith as we used to use this term, beyond Christianity. But I don't even think there's a trajectory there that it makes that much sense. I think we are Christians. We are non-Christians. We are atheists. We are agnostic. We are Unitarians all at one time. I mean I can tell you that the church that I serve, there are people sitting next to each other who are atheists and Trinitarian. Some believe that when you die, nothing happens and some believe you're going to heaven, and everything in between.

Daniel Kanter:
To me, that is the vision of America because we can hold the tension of those various beliefs. We can use a common language, which is theological, historical, spiritual in all kinds of different ways. We don't have to force on one another a kind of religious faith. That, to me, is the beauty of things like Faith Forward Dallas, where we're not evangelizing each other. We are holding each other in esteem for who we are as religious people and who we are as part of this American culture. We're working together to change things in our society around issues of poverty and oppressions of all kinds, racism, and whatnot.

Daniel Kanter:
So to me, we have to hold onto that foundation very strong. What we see in America with senators proclaiming these Christian nationalist perspectives that are driving these kinds of conspiracies is, to me, very damaging to that foundation. If I was a Christian pastor, I'd be looking for ways to reclaim the language they're using. I feel kind of exempt from that because they think I'm a heretic anyway. But I'm also trying to make room for all those ideas, at the same time, not allowing some ideas become oppressive over others. That is incredibly tricky business.

George Mason:
It really is. You're right. It is tricky because. Ironically, the people who are trying right now in the name of Christian nationalism to claim the high spiritual and moral ground that they feel for the country in order to put it in a favorable position before God, at the same time, feel both morally and spiritually superior and yet under attack and victimized by not having the preeminence that they believe they deserve to have.

George Mason:
This is the challenge for us as Christian ministers is, yes, I know that we make a similar confession of Jesus as the Son of God and our faith as being followers of Jesus. I'm not trying to put you in a position of now being outside of the grace and mercy of God because we disagree. But if you disagree with me, you still have a place in the American landscape as well as in the church. But if I disagree with you, I'm not sure I do. That's true for America generally, right?

Daniel Kanter:
Yeah. But that's also the roots of fascism. It makes it very difficult to both be someone who promotes genuine inclusion, which is part and parcel of my faith, and someone who is ... I mean just the Universalist heritage which says, "God loves all." My people are always asking me, "Does God love that guy who wants to kill us? The answer still is yes. The answer is always that there is grace enough to bring people into the circle of love and the community of love, but not at the expense of the community or the circle itself.

Daniel Kanter:
That's where I think there has to be some hard lines drawn and some accountability, especially as we're talking, the post-Capitol invasion and now they're into impeachment and all this stuff. How do you hold people accountable, but also hold them in love? That's a real challenge.

George Mason:
Well, it is. I always go back to an image in my mind of a principal who has to enter the playground at recess and who sees that the children are cowering and they're fearful of a particular bully and his friends who are dominating the playground and making it impossible for everyone to experience the intent of that freedom that is supposed to be recreation time at recess. Now you can say, "Well, you should respect the bully because God loves the bully as well as those he's bullying."

George Mason:
But at the same time, the entire enterprise is being held hostage by someone. He has to be held accountable so that everyone can have the blessings to flourish together. I think this is part of the tricky challenge, isn't it?

Daniel Kanter:
Yeah. And then I'm not sure in that metaphor if, in our country, the principal is the bully or is God. Those would bring us to different conclusions. If the bully is the principal, then the teachers are going to have to work hard to reform the whole system, which I think is what we're seeing. If the principal has God, then God's love has to help those around the bully, hold that bully at arm's length and not force that bully into more bullying activity. But it's really hard.

George Mason:
No, it is hard. It is hard. It's the same thing we're wrestling with, with friendships today in this highly-charged, political environment where people have deeply different views of things. We find it hard to talk to each other, to socialize, to know where to find the humanity in each other and to celebrate life as neighbors and human beings when we have so much passion that's built up in us.

Daniel Kanter:
Yeah. Yeah. And then, for my people, it used to be that evangelical Christians were scary because they believed different things than we did, or that really on the extremes, they believed the Earth was 6000 years old and things that seemed irrational to us. That shifted. So even in 20 years that I've been here, my people used to complain a lot about those kinds of encounters and being asked if they'd been saved. Now they're talking about actually much more extreme versions of that, of being seen and known as a danger to society because they don't conform to certain kinds of Christian beliefs.

Daniel Kanter:
This is where this kind of one-size-fits-all religion for society just cannot redeem us. We have to find ways to honor each other and leave room for so many different beliefs. The Unitarians are far in that, deep on that spectrum because we have our roots in the congregational Christianity. We've moved and tried to just evolve and change and not hold so tight to those things that we have to be what we were 200 years ago but, at the same time, not cut that off. We can be blamed at times for cutting those trees off at the roots and then almost creating completely new perspectives in religion that, in my circles, some of my colleagues who can't reference back to the Christian or the Judaic root have lost track of what's important. So in any event, that's ...

George Mason:
Well, Daniel, thanks for sharing your perspective of the UU tradition with us. I especially want to say thank you for the work you do side-by-side with others who have different religious perspectives, but together we're working to make Dallas and the world at large the kind of place that we think God envisions for us. So it's good to talk with you and thanks for being on Good God.

Daniel Kanter:
Thanks. It's so great to be here.

George Mason:
All right. Very good.

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