COMMENTARY: Unitarian Universalists show courage
As an occasional visitor to the wooded campus and a longtime social activist-educator in Camden County, I definitely applaud the Cherry Hill Unitarian Universalist congregation for its courage in posting the now-stolen/vandalized Black Lives Matter sign in front of its Kings Highway property.
Besides the Cherry Hill church, many area Unitarian Universalist churches — unique, philosophically oriented churches that are overwhelmingly white, and which are composed of religious and secular humanists, heretics, theists, agnostics, skeptics, atheists, left-wing political activists, free-thinkers, gender activists and people of multiple former faith traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and such — support the growing Black Lives Matter movement.
Last year, in a major march and rally for racial and economic justice, called for by well-known Newark activist Larry Hamm and his militant People’s Organization for Progress, several dozen members of North Jersey Unitarian Universalist churches actively participated with colorful banners and educational leaflets addressing why fair-minded whites and others of goodwill should deal with courageously racism and white privilege issues and definitely support the national Black Lives Matter movement’s goals.
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I attended the Newark rally and spoke with some key Unitarian Universalist folk who informed me that their national denomination had officially gone on record in favor of the movement.
The great 19th-century black feminist thinker Frances E.W. Watkins Harper attended the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. It should be noted also that the late, great civil rights leader and National Urban League chief Whitney Young Jr., along with the brilliant black news analyst and professor Melissa Perry-Harris, were and are both highly praised Unitarian Universalist members.
The late Dr. William R. Jones was a black Yale Divinity School black Unitarian Universalist professor who wrote the wake-up text “Is God a White Racist?” — a text that opens wide the critical concern of theodicy in black liberation theology — and that concern has more recently been taken up by other black Unitarian Universalist theologians like Dr. Anthony Pinn, a nationally recognized black atheist-humanist professor at Rice University.
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In relation to the traditional black religious perspective, theodicy deals with the concern that if God is good, loving and all powerful, then why does God — or the complex of Gods — allow white racism and black suffering to flourish? The traditional black theological answers have been varied and usually boil down to the idea that black suffering is a mysterious divine test or that prophetic suffering is salvational because it’s part of discipleship.
Black Unitarian Universalist theologians usually find the traditional black church responses unsatisfactory, unnecessarily irrational and an impediment to a liberated black self-determination that does not demand or require a theist belief or a transcendently derived moral system for black temporal success.
Mahdi Ibn-Ziyad, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor in the philosophy and religion department of Rutgers University-Camden.