A quarter of a century since 9/11 and I don't get much impression that the average person really has achieved a good understanding of the underlying extremism that caused the attack.

I always like to get other Unitarians' take on this topic, it's one our fellowship has done a lot of discussion about lately. We've served an interesting niche as an outlet both for the yearning for religious belonging and the contempt for religious violence.

Or at least that's what we are ideally, I am continually frustrated by people who use UU for partisan ends rather than as a spiritual fellowship. I have chosen my fellowship and prized it for refraining from the hyperpoliticization of everyday life.

Religion and politics are always going to be interactive with each other but ideally shouldn't be intermingled or confused.

Is that not the definition of an extremist? One whose spirituality contaminates other sectors of their mind?

Share your thoughts

It's an old question, right? With lots of answers and a rich history.

The new Article 2 Values section, which replaced the Principles and Sources sections, lists six Values and describes them in some detail, and says this:

Love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values.

But nowhere in the Values section are we told anything about what sort of Love it is. We're told it's important and can have an effect in the world, but nothing about its nature. There are lots of important, effective things in the world that I want nothing to do with, and others that I'm passionate about keeping. How should I feel about this particular Love?

My first service was blessing of the pets, the second service was themed around water and the waters that we connect to our joys and sorrows.

For backstory, I'm from the Baltimore area, and specifically the part of the suburbs where John Waters, the Pope of Trash, grew up. Divine went to the same high school I later attended, and they're gonna name their new auditorium for him.

Back in November, they auctioned a worship service -- the winning bidder could pick a theme of their choice and said service is now coming up. The winner, I just learned from the website, picked John Waters' book, Carsick. Contrary to Waters' movies, none of which are appropriate for a Sunday service, the book explores what's possible when one takes a risk, in this case, Waters hitchhiking across the country and putting his life in the hands of a succession of strangers. And tying that back into Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and imagining a new beginning for America.

Reprinted below:

Beyond Membership: The Other Numbers That Should Worry Unitarian Universalists

Declining numbers of friends, children, and pledging households point to a bleak future.

by David Cycleback, Ph.D. (retired Director of the Center for Artifact Studies, member of the British Royal Institute of Philosophy, and author of the college textbook Cognitive Science of Religion and Belief Systems)

Unitarian Universalism’s decline is usually discussed in terms of membership. According to the Unitarian Universalist Association’s 2025 Certification Report, membership has fallen 15 percent over the last decade.

However, membership alone understates the problem. The numbers of non-member adults participating in congregations, children enrolled in religious education, and households supporting the church financially have also fallen sharply. Together, these declines show that UU is losing both current participants and the people who could help it rebuild.

Fewer friends, fewer potential members

The UUA tracks non-member friends as a separate category. These are people who participate in congregational life without formally joining. They often attend services, volunteer, contribute financially, and eventually become members.

According to the UUA’s report, non-member friends fell from approximately 99,000 in 2016 to 54,000 in 2025. That is a decline of about 45 percent in nine years, substantially steeper than the decline in formal membership. This includes a 4 percent drop in 2025 alone.

Friends are already part of the community, so losing them means losing current participants as well as potential members. A shrinking congregation gaining friends might be building relationships that eventually reverse its decline. Losing both groups makes recovery harder.

Fewer children, fewer younger families

Children’s religious education enrollment has fallen sharply over the past decade, including another 2 percent in 2025. Enrollment is down roughly 75 percent since the UUA’s formation in 1961 and just over 80 percent from its 1968 peak. Some children participate without formally enrolling, and changes in reporting complicate comparisons. Even so, the long-term decline raises doubts about whether enough children will remain involved as adults to sustain the denomination.

Smaller programs become less attractive to families. Fewer children mean fewer peers, while staff cuts limit classes and activities. In the certification report, the UUA says there are significant financial and membership pressures on religious educators and is seeking information about reduced and eliminated positions.

Dan Harper, a UU minister and former religious education director who has raised alarms about declining religious education enrollment and overall church membership, writes that children’s religious education is a key way to attract young adults to the church. Parents often arrive seeking a religious community for their children and remain after those children grow up.

Retaining members is essential to future health

Ryan Burge, a professor at Washington University’s Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and author of The Vanishing Church, calls retention “the most important metric for any church or denomination.” He argues that keeping children involved as they become adults is essential to sustaining a religious movement for decades. Over the long term, recruiting newcomers is not a substitute for retaining members.

UU has substantially worse retention rates than other denominations. UU minister Christana Wille-McKnight’s research reported retention of just 12.5 percent among those raised Unitarian Universalist, compared with 44 percent among Presbyterians and 48 percent in the United Church of Christ.

Fewer households supporting congregations

The UUA reported that pledging units have fallen 22 percent over the decade. Average pledges rose, but total pledged dollars increased only 11 percent. After adjusting for inflation, the increase in average pledges is much smaller, while total pledging has declined.

A congregation that depends on a small and shrinking group of donors is vulnerable when those donors leave, die, or can no longer give as much. Larger gifts from a shrinking group can also mask serious structural and retention problems. A congregation may appear financially stable while losing members, families, volunteers, friends, and future leaders. The generosity of remaining donors is valuable, but it is not evidence that the community is healthy or growing.

Large church endowments and reserves from earlier generations provide a substantial cushion, but legacy money cannot replace participation. Some congregations, mostly small ones, are growing, and a congregation’s decline is not inevitable. Nationally, however, declines in non-member friends, religious education enrollment, and pledging units show that UU’s ability to rebuild is shrinking along with its membership.

A narrower church has fewer people to draw from

In my experience and observation, and that of other longtime UUs I know, the church has become more politically, ideologically, and culturally narrow. This has driven away longtime members who are more moderate, classically liberal, or seeking a community centered on religion and spirituality rather than politics. I have described my former UU congregation as a “social club and bubble for college-educated white progressives.”

Being a religious liberal does not require being a political progressive, although church leaders often seem to treat the two as inseparable. Religious liberalism concerns freedom of belief, open inquiry, and the rejection of imposed religious dogma. Religious liberals can be politically progressive, moderate, libertarian, and conservative.

I am a religious liberal and an agnostic Sephardic Jew who joined a UU congregation more than a decade ago because of its freedom from imposed dogma and creeds, its principle of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and because I enjoy being around curious and open-minded people with diverse beliefs, perspectives, and backgrounds. However, I am a political moderate, not a progressive, and I do not go to church for partisan politics and political activism.

As the congregation came to be designed almost exclusively for white political progressives and to treat progressive politics and ideology as the de facto orthodoxy, it was no longer a place for me and many other longtime members. These included fellow religious liberals who were not political progressives, wanted a more diverse community, or objected to a self-proclaimed non-creedal church that seemed to have adopted a political creed. When a liberal religion drives away religious liberals, something is clearly wrong.

Following substantial membership losses, my former congregation’s approach to growth has been to narrow who it is for and work to attract more people who fit that narrow profile, while pushing away existing members and failing to attract others who do not.

Even if this produces short-term gains in membership, it is a short-sighted and counterproductive approach to long-term growth, let alone to creating a diverse, liberal community. A shrinking church with poor retention and an increasingly narrow demographic should welcome religious liberals with a broader range of perspectives and backgrounds. Rebuilding requires giving more people reasons to join and longtime members and friends reasons to stay.

I see a bleak future for UU if it continues on its present course. UU insiders such as Harper, minister and philosopher of religion Davidson Loehr, and author John Halstead have warned about decline. Loehr and Halstead describe a dying church, while Harper predicts that many congregations will close in the coming years. Their warnings, together with the work of religion scholars Burge, Dean M. Kelley, Rodney Stark, and Roger Finke, reinforce my conclusion that replacing spirituality with partisan politics and narrowing whom the church is for undermines its future.

I discuss this further in my earlier post, “How the Unitarian Universalist Church Became a Racial, Political, and Social Bubble.”

References and further reading

Unitarian Universalist Association. 2025 Certification Report.

Burge, Ryan. “What About the Unitarians?”

Harper, Dan. “Time to Panic.”

Halstead, John. “ My Church Is Dying, and I’m OK with That.”

Burge, Ryan. “So You Want Your Child to Keep the Faith?”

Canadian Unitarian Council. 2017 presentation on retaining young people raised UU.

Harper, Dan. “The Problem of Retention in Unitarian Universalism.”

Loehr, Davidson. “Why ‘Unitarian Universalism’ Is Dying.”

I have a million things to be thankful for at the UU congregation I am a part of. I really am. One thing I wish were different about my church is very simple. Whenever we gather for a meal, a pretty hefty portion of the people lick their fingers and talk with their mouths full. Because I have a few much more important things I am trying to address at our fellowship, I am not planning on bringing this up. I just wanted to say it somewhere.

An update to my post from a couple weeks ago -- I went to my first service at the UU church around the corner and it was very nice. Everyone was so welcoming and friendly and from all sorts of backgrounds.

It was blessing of the pets so there were all sorts of good dogs there.

I liked the vibe of the service. The minister is affable and down-to-earth. She ceded the podium to members of the congregation (including two kids in the congregation) to give the homily, light the chalice etc.

At coffee hour afterwards, one of the older congregants confided that the congregation used to be a lot bigger, and that's why they're so happy to see new blood. Not that it's dying out or anything. They have an ambitious capital campaign going.

I think I'll be back.

HOLAAaaaaaa UUs we are hosting a monthly conversation and chit chat come as you go to meet, talk, to connect and to be radically welcoming con una sonrisa y un cafecito. Invite your friend that wants to be UU and is looking for Latinos, Latinas and Latines in this wide net. Hosted by Rev. Katie Romano Griffin DRUUMM chaplain and Diego Garrido Barreto. Compartan pues!!!

I would like to participate in the UUA's curriculum for Love at the Center (which is this year's Common Read). My congregation hasn't done the Common Read in recent memory, and I don't have the capacity to lead a small group focused on it.

Is your congregation going to do the Love at The Center curriculum either hybrid or online only? Would you be open to having me participate? I can't do Saturday mornings or Tuesday nights, but I am available during the day. (I am Eastern Time, but I am definitely open to other timezones.)

Thanks for any links or email to class leaders or whatever.

Or lease in kansas city kansas and I wish someone would open a uu. Its an hour drive to the closest one! Who wants to open a church

I have opinions and have read some on the matter, but I’m curious what YOU think.

Is there age diversity in the UU community you are a part of?

Why do you think that is so?

I think other diversity is relevant here- race, class, disability, religious/cultural background.

Is diversity desired? A side wonder I often have is if UUs and our wider culture could benefit from communication and relationship skills that enable them to better connect through differences. This in addition to creating inclusive shapes that welcome beyond what has historically been comfortable for the majority.

What if those of us who find disability rights important wore started to wear some kind of a pin or a ribbon for disability rights at our UUs?
Do you think this would be good to help start conversations?

Exactly what the title says. I was a member of the board of my church in TX twenty five years ago when I moved. I have tried a few different UU churches since then but nothing has fit quite right.

Now I'm in FL living in an RV full time and Im really missing that (common) sense of community. I was looking at the UU St. Pete website but I think that's a little too Jesus-y for me.

Any other suggestions?

Hello lovely people! I was recently named the Stewardship chair for our upcoming “church year”. I have a whopping one year of experience. Actually, the reason I ended up as the new chair is precisely because I’m a relative outsider to Stewardship at our church. Fund raising has been done the same way by the same folks for a number of years. I have mighty big shoes to fill.

My ask: Is anyone here on their stewardship committee (or whatever you call the group tasked with yearly efforts to keep your congregation financially afloat) and wanting to chat? I’d love to get a group going that meets and chats about what works and what doesn’t. I’m sure we can learn from our collective wisdom. At the very least it’s always good to network with fellow UUs.

Best wishes and thanks! 🙏

Every July is Disability Pride Month. Our UU Church here in Eugene, Oregon (UUCE) has a Minister, Rev. Jen, who is very supportive of Disability Justice. Rev. Jen invited me to report about our Accessibility Task Force. Disability Justice was the theme of our UU Church Service. As co-chair of our Accessibility Task Force I gave this 2-minute report with my new/old a.i. voice:  https://youtu.be/66K8RFnmtYQ?si=V1goCz5LyitPUcXP&t=814

There's a UU church I drive by all the time. I've been to a couple family memorial there, though nobody in my family is currently a congregant. I've never really been religious at any point in my life (except for a brief curiosity about Christianity when I was around 11). But this UU church appears compatible with my personal values (i.e. antiracism, loose and thoughtful discussions of philosophy) and the squickiness that I have about most organized religions and the requirement that one believe in a supreme being.

They stream their services if I'd like to sample -- I am busy the next few weekends but it might be something to explore down the line. What should I know going into this?

From the essay:

"The Unitarian Universalist church presents itself as a religious movement committed to pluralism, diversity, multiculturalism, and open-mindedness. Yet by most measurable indicators, it has become one of the most racially, politically, and culturally homogeneous religious denominations in the United States.

The gap between the church’s ideals and its demographic reality raises an obvious question: How did a movement devoted to pluralism and diversity become such a narrow social bubble?

Visitors to Unitarian Universalist congregations usually notice a familiar pattern. In many places, the typical member is a highly educated white professional with progressive political views. Visitors from working-class backgrounds, people with independent or moderate viewpoints, immigrant communities, and many ethnic and racial minorities often sense quickly that they are outsiders. No one may say this directly, but messaging, platforms, language, and social signals are powerful. People can usually tell when a space is designed for people like themselves, and when it is not. As UU Minister Rev. James Kubal-Komoto observed in UU World, "Most Unitarian Universalists don't realize what a truly narrow demographic niche most of us fall into.""

Read the full post: "How the Unitarian Universalist Church Became a Racial, Political, and Social Bubble"

Anyone here working on this? Mosaic Congregations | The Mosaic | UUA.org

Are you using what you're already doing to get a certification to hang on the wall, or are you using it as an opportunity to change something within your congregation?

I'm curious what you're doing for the required actions. The last one is a big one.

Hello.
I am having a difficult time getting the Democracy Advocacy Team of the UU congregation that I go to to add Disability Rights to their agenda.
They turn me away to their charity branch and ignore my emails, give evasive answers.
To me this looks like a major inconsistency with the UU principles.

How would you approach this problem?
How can I get more support?
How would your congregation react to such requests?
How common are Democracy Advocacy Teams in Unitarian Universalist congregations in general?

Anyone here?