For Loving Thy Neighbor, Unitarians have Long Been Attacked
No one can explain why someone decides to open fire on innocent strangers—especially a church congregation in Knoxville, as 58-year-old Jim Adkisson did yesterday. Even more perplexing is why a self-described conservative would unload a shotgun on a Unitarian Church, one of the few denominations that actually follows the spirit of Jesus.
But that was Adkisson’s call Sunday, when he gunned down two people in the midst of a kids play. At this home, investigators found a letter blaming “gays and liberals” for his inability to find work. The former mechanical engineer seemed to think they were hogging all the jobs destined for him.
Adkisson is just the latest in a long line of people who have vilified Unitarians.
Jason Shelton, associate minister of the First Unitarian Universal Church on Woodmont Boulevard, says the church has been attacked going back to the early 1800s. Its principal sin? It seems to take that whole Love Thy Neighbor Thing way too far—particularly when it comes to loving people deemed unlovable.
According to Shelton, Unitarians have been at the forefront of pretty much every major social movement since the time of Lincoln—abolition, women’s suffrage, women in ministry, gay, lesbian, and civil rights, etc. “Very much unpopular movements,” says Shelton. In fact, fully one-third of the nation’s Unitarian ministers marched in Selma.
The church is sometimes described as Christianity Lite, due to its open tent and shortage of hardline doctrine. But while most religions like to “love thy neighbor, except for this guy, that guy, and this other guy over here,” the Unitarians hold it as sacred, without the usual qualifications. After all, Jesus wasn’t big on providing loopholes for us to bag on people.
“Most of us wouldn’t concern ourselves with what happens when we die,” says Shelton. “We’re concerned with what happens while we’re alive, what the world could be if there was justice and peace and tolerance. …What we agree on is not a creed, but how we’re going to in the world. Deeds not creeds.”
Or in the people’s vernacular, they’re trying to walk it like they talk it.
Comments
Good post, thanks for the reminder. As I posted over at my place today, Jesus had something to say about this:
"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
"Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."
Posted 07/28/2008 at 03:02:19 PM"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." -Mark Twain
Posted 07/28/2008 at 03:29:15 PMThank you for acknowledging the tragedy and sadness that happened to our sister church in Knoxville and for contacting our assistant minister at First Unitarian Universalist Church in Nashville, Jason Shelton. He is the first assistant minister for our church and the first ordained minister of music in Unitarian Universalist history. His amazing ministry is truly through music both to us and to our entire denomination. It's not easy being a UU in the South but he makes it joyful and inclusive through all kinds of music, sacred, secular and international.
Posted 07/28/2008 at 11:22:29 PMThanks for a very thoughtful article. I was sitting 2 rows behind Linda Kraeger when she was shot, saw her blood spreading around her body, saw the injured in convulsions as they were loaded onto stretchers, saw Greg McKendry draw his last breath. I have seen worse things since on the internet: the bile and bigotry hurled, in the name of Jesus, against us un-repentant liberals. It reminds me again that those who question how the Holocaust could have happened have never been confronted by a zealot. What happened at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church on July 27 was tragic. What I've seen on the internet since then, is sometimes horrifying.
Posted 09/03/2008 at 05:44:11 PM