American Nations and My Religion

It's really true.  My religion is firmly rooted in New England. Unitarian Universalism is an expression of the New England way.  Our central offices are in Boston.  Our people were intimately involved over two centuries in the great project of exporting New England values through educational institutions, publishing, writing, and speaking.  Our people went West in the nineteenth century to participate in that project of cultural evangelism.  To St. Louis, to Minneapolis, to San Francisco, and more.  People with Boston names were their ministers, at least at first.

When I started reading Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures in North America, I was pursuing a thread I had picked up in my political reading.  I had gotten interested in the political evolution of Scots-Irish culture in Appalachia and beyond, since I personally have that heritage.  And since I had been living in the northern marches of the part of our country that once was in Mexico, the political implications of that very different cultural background were also on my mind.  Politics: red, blue, and purple, that was what was thinking about.  Not religion.

But then it struck me: The eleven nations Woodard identifies have very distinctive ways of faith as well as very distinctive ways of politics.  He writes about the private protestants, interested in personal salvation versus the public protestants, interested in doing right in this world for everyone.  We're the apotheosis of public protestants, I thought.  It's a good place to stand -- or was, maybe, in the 20th century-- but kind of limited on a continent with eleven different "Nations." We stand in the very center of Yankeedom, as Woodard calls our nation of greater New England.  Maybe we have reached out into the upper Midwest to the point that it is part of our nation.  And maybe we have strong allies in New Netherlands and the Left Coast, but culturally we are not doing so well in the Deep South, Tidewater, New France, El Norte, Greater Appalachia, the Midlands, the Far West, or the First Nations.

From American Nations, by Colin Woodard

The impact of our impressive reach into education and the printed word has been eroded by changes in media.  Once, it might not have mattered if no one had heard of Unitarian Universalists, for they were reading what we wrote. Now, fewer people read. And reading has a different social meaning.  Instead, people watch things produced in places culturally distant from us.  We need to reach out again to find  places to stand that can reach into all these nations. For our message is not identical with the culture of Yankeedom.

Maybe that's what's important for us about reaching out into nations that are actually in different countries. Maybe we need to do that to understand how to establish our faith in places that are culturally not part of Yankeedom.  There are people building congregations from Catalunya to Burundi. from Rural Northeast India to urban Czech Republic.They are very different from us, and yet have some things in common. Some of them -- with Uganda the chilling example of the moment -- are risking their lives for principles we share. There's always the intriguing question -- what things do we need to have in common, and what can we let go?

I'm thinking our practice of asking and answering that question in an international framework can help us find the way into a Unitarian Universalism that speaks broadly in the Far West, El Norte, and New France, maybe even in the Midlands, Greater Appalachia, and the Deep South.  I believe this is something we need to explore. What do you think?