Birthright UUs

By Jeff's description, I feel like I was raised UU. I wasn't, of course. But my anger at Christianity was mild and short-lived. You can see it at about its worst in a snotty but sort of funny essay about Baptists when I was about seventeen. (A professor friend and her daughter had thought that this church was having a spring concert. It turned out to be this weird pageant. To a presby kid, a gold fabric heaven seems pretty fucked up.) Anyway, that is literally as bad as I got right there on that page.

Yet, like Jeff, I've known lots of converted UUs who have gone on being snotty ex-Christians for years. (And I also see new people come in who love having freedom, but don't really grok the reason component of our faith tradition.)

Also, Jeff suggests that people raised UU aren't interested in making a big deal over whether we're a religon or not. (That we are seems obvious.) The core of our tradition. (It's a core of method rather than a core of belief, but of course it's there.) What should we do with the roots of our tradition? (Know them, use them, but still be us. Calvin comes up less in the presby church than one would think.)

So I do feel like I'm a "birthright UU" in the sense that Jeff talks about. And on beliefnet there was a lady who had been raised Unitarian who flung every one of these reasons at us as a reason why UUism sucks.

One could argue that my deal was that while I wasn't raised UU, I became a UU pretty young. And that this lady was angry at the rest of the world, too, so why not be angry at UUism.

My guess is that it comes from several long conversations with Katy-the-Wise I had in the first month or two I was going to a UU church. I wanted to learn about UUism, not take the first UUism idea I heard and run with it.

But if some people raised Presbyterian can get here, and some people born Unitarian don't, maybe it isn't about where you were raised.

What is it about then?

CC