Yeah, contemporary Unitarian Universalists don’t believe in much in particular. Mostly they’re “people who would be atheists reconstructionist Jews (if they were ethnically Jewish), casual western Buddhists (if they were Californian), or “spiritual” (if they were middle-American young white women), but they are New Englanders descended from people named things like Hortense Rather.” It’s said that the only time you’ll hear “Jesus” in a Unitarian church is when the janitor stubs his toe. Most Christians consider them “historically and aesthetically connected to Christianity, but not actually Christian.” In the olden days they were more obviously “heterodox Christians”—like LDS, 7DA, or JW today, they would certainly consider themselves Christians holding the most truly Christian beliefs, though others considered them weirdos. I’m not sure how the transition occurred, but my impression is that the Universalism part of UU made it a uniquely easy religion to keep affirming as the early-20th-century weird-Christian milieu of New England rapidly turned into late-21st-century standard elite atheism.
Yeah, contemporary Unitarian Universalists don’t believe in much in particular. Mostly they’re “people who would be atheists reconstructionist Jews (if they were ethnically Jewish), casual western Buddhists (if they were Californian), or “spiritual” (if they were middle-American young white women), but they are New Englanders descended from people named things like Hortense Rather.” It’s said that the only time you’ll hear “Jesus” in a Unitarian church is when the janitor stubs his toe. Most Christians consider them “historically and aesthetically connected to Christianity, but not actually Christian.” In the olden days they were more obviously “heterodox Christians”—like LDS, 7DA, or JW today, they would certainly consider themselves Christians holding the most truly Christian beliefs, though others considered them weirdos. I’m not sure how the transition occurred, but my impression is that the Universalism part of UU made it a uniquely easy religion to keep affirming as the early-20th-century weird-Christian milieu of New England rapidly turned into late-21st-century standard elite atheism.