Imperfect Genius

I run a Yahoo homeschooling group for my area of the state and I’m often helping to answer questions that newcomers have about how to get started and so forth. This week one of the moms who has been on the list for about a year emailed me to say that she did it, she sent in her paperwork and she’s officially homeschooling now! That was great news, but not a complete surprise, as it’s something she’s been thinking seriously about for a long time.

However, she went on to say that she’d read somewhere that I attended a Unitarian Universalist congregation. She wrote that she’d never heard of it before, so she looked it up and this was her response:

WOW. I didn’t know that such a place existed. My husband and I have been seriously thinking about checking the place out. We want the structure and sense of community that church has to offer, but don’t like ANY of the options in our area, plus our personal beliefs just don’t fit in.

It is a rare occasion that I meet someone who has heard of UUism, in fact I didn’t know about it myself until a few years ago, so that part wasn’t unexpected. However, what is highly unusual is for someone to bring up the topic with me. It has been said that there are probably millions of people who would identify with UUism, they just don’t know about it.

In general, UUs don’t proselytize or go around knocking on people’s doors. Most people discover it by chance. Perhaps they encounter it somewhere and are curious enough to look up what it means. That’s what happened in my case, actually. Just for fun, I took an online quiz called “What Religion Are You?” and the results came back saying I was a Unitarian Universalist. I was like, what the heck is that? I’d never heard of it.

So I started looking it up, and as it turns out that a fun little quiz led to a profound discovery. For the first time in my adult life, I’d come across a spiritual community I could actually identify with. At first, my reaction was similar to my friend’s. I thought, there is no way this sort of thing really exists. But I was happy to learn that yes, it certainly does!

Lately it seems like UUism has been turning up everywhere, which is a very unusual experience for us! We went to a gathering to celebrate my best friend’s wedding. There were many great conversations that night and religion was touched upon a few times. At one point everyone talked about their beliefs, and despite the presence of diverse views, it was all very civil and open-minded. When I mentioned that we are UUs, one guest from California got excited and said, “Oh, my girlfriend’s a UU!”

The reason for the excitement was because it’s rare to encounter another UU unless you’re actually at a UU function. In official numbers there are about 220,000 of us in the United States, but many more people consider themselves to be UUs even though they do not belong to a specific congregation. In 2001, roughly 630,000 people identified as UU in an American Religious Identification Survey, while Adherents.com reports the number has grown to almost 890,000 in 2004.

However, considering that the population of the United States is hovering around 300 million, we make up only about .3% of the population (yes, that’s point three, or less than one percent). So it’s still a pretty rare occurrence to run into someone else who is UU. We’re a small bunch compared to other religions, for example the largest religion claims over 2 billion members around the world.

So you can imagine that when a man at the grocery store struck up a conversation about Unitarian Universalism out of the blue last week, it was the last thing my husband was expecting. DH was in line at the register when the gentleman beside him started talking about Roanoke and how he missed living there.

DH had lived in Roanoke for a while, too, so he agreed that there were many nice things about the city. Then the man said, “You know, I think what I miss the most is the Unitarian Universalist congregation.” Insert a short pause as DH stares at the man in surprise. “You’ve probably never heard of that, but I sure do miss it.”