This is part one of the version of my final essay about First UU Springfield that I presented at the 2012 Midwest American Academy of Religion conference in Rock Island, IL. This and the following two parts will not have foot notes or references; I removed them from the text so that it would read easier.
This ethnographic study of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Springfield, Missouri—hereafter referred to by the church’s own preferred abbreviation, First UU Springfield—is structured around the paradoxical relationship between the apparent self-consistency of the church as a religious institution and the extent to which this appearance of self-consistency is a projection of socio-economically contingent ideological processes.
My research began with attending the weekly service at First UU Springfield for roughly two and a half months in the fall semester of last year. It was then supplemented and retroactively guided by two personal interviews that I conducted with an active participant of the congregation and the church’s part-time minister. Because of the inherent limitations that come with my subjective position as a critical observer and the limited scope of this research project, I do not want my analysis to be mistaken for any sort of definitive statement about Unitarian Universalism generally or First UU Springfield specifically. Rather, I have used my observations at First UU Springfield to frame an investigation into the social and economic context in which religion is practiced and congregations attempt to develop a corporate identity and sense of self-direction.
This essay is organized in two interlocking parts. In the first part, I will argue that the weekly worship service of First UU Springfield provides its congregants with the discursive space in which values and practices of modernity become privileged, including especially a decentered, pluralist vision of society and the empowerment of the subject through critique. In the second part, I will turn to fashion my own critique of the congregation by engaging Marxist literature to show how the condition of postmodernity—which Frederic Jameson has famously called the “cultural logic of late capitalism”—creates fissures in the corporate identity and religious politics of First UU Springfield. Thus, even though most of the members of the church are committed to modernist ideals and oppose the social injustices of capitalism, their resistance to capitalism is framed by the paradoxes of this system.
But we can begin with a few general words about the congregation.
Even though First UU Springfield is a relatively small congregation, with only a few dozen registered members in regular attendance, it is home to an incredible diversity of religious views. Of the various traditions integrated into First UU Springfield, the minister noted congregants with Christian, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds, humanists, agnostics and atheists, pagans, and others who are at least vaguely interested in (if not vigorously committed to) Native American spirituality, Buddhism, and assorted “Eastern” traditions. While there are a variety of paraliturgical opportunities for smaller groups with specific interests to meet in monthly “covenant groups,” a fact that would tend to indicate the compartmentalization of intra-congregational relationships, one equally important point to consider is that the weekly worship service attempts to accommodate this wide variety of viewpoints and synthesize the diverse concerns of the congregation into a reasonably coherent expression of group identity. To this effect, the weekly services are tightly structured and highly liturgical, with little to no room for deviation on a week-to-week basis. Such order is in pointed contrast to the congregation’s radically opposed viewpoints on all manner of theological, philosophical, and practical issues.
It is obviously problematic to conclude that First UU Springfield has something like a coherent identity based on the consistency of its weekly liturgy—and certainly the member I interviewed pointed to some dissatisfaction in the congregation—but we can understand the weekly worship service as the church leaders’ attempt to forge such an identity. And in what follows, I want to suggest that this identity is intimately related to the genealogical modernism of the UU tradition.
