Anyway, we were talking about writing, and I mentioned the “religious” book I have coming out this Spring (I did warn you about the plugs) and he wrote back

Religious?

Yes, I said, didn’t I tell you about my church…?

I could almost hear the claxon sound across the Gulf of Arabia.

Church….?! Gosh.

I felt the axis of our friendship lurch. Breaking the news to a friend (to my friends, anyway, and thankfully my faith does not encourage ridding oneself of the old) is always a sensitive moment. People have default settings about religion too, particularly those of that most irreligious nation, England.

It’s not necessarily what you think, I wrote hurriedly back. It was an authenticity thing… I came to the point whereby I could not deny I had a spiritual side. Actual proofs, like the existence in God for example, seemed largely irrelevant. The important thing was for me to be true to my experience, and the Unitarians are a non-creedal religious community that allow me to do that. Really, it’s not a cult, I added (few people in the UK having even heard of Unitarianism). Here’s a link, I said. Don’t worry, I added, attempting to knock down all his ducks in one go, it’s not as happy-clappy as it looks either.

I have yet to hear back.

But it got me thinking about what Unitarianism was, funnily enough a theme continued over at my old minister Andy Pakula’s new blog, which itself picks up on a thread over at Reignite worrying over the decline in Unitarianism in the UK.

Certainly I think many Unitarians have experienced frustration. Our religion is not like other faiths. It is in fact often the opposite – bottom-up rather than top-down, led by individual experience rather than doctrinal writ. To us it does appear to embody a kind of “truth” that perfectly fits the modern world… yet it is so damn hard to make people understand what it’s about.

Part of the reason I believe is because most people are raised from an early age to believe religion must be a set of rules. If it is not, then how can it be religion (more than once I have overheard my partner, brought up Catholic, “explain”: he calls it church, but it’s not really… they can believe anything...)?

I experience the same issues in my day job – social marketing – in which I use customer insight to try and drive behaviour change, usually around public health. A key principal is to shape one’s intervention not about how you expect the world to be, but how the world is actually experienced by the target audience.  This can take time – investment in research and testing – when the client often wants to jump to the solution. It’s obvious, after all, isn’t it? Can’t we just tell them? Well no, not if they not prepared to listen.

I think Unitarians face a similar challenge – we’ve got a great product, and its benefits are self-evident (to Unitarians, that is). Yet its definition as a religion does not fit the “rules” that most people – religious or not – carry from birth, no matter how much we may want things to be different.

I think the 2007 US advertising campaign Is God keeping you from going to church? tacitly acknowledged this problem and made a brave attempt to play the game according to their rules but ultimately came up short because, being Unitarian (Universalist), it could never really win. Its cognitive dissonance was too pronounced, its semantics kind of self-defeating: what’s the point of going to a church with no God? An atheist church? But surely that’s not a religion at all, and I’m religious, spiritual… I just don’t want to be bombarded with dogma. Even atheist dogma…

It was a brave attempt at selling the sense of “our secret”, but it seemed to have put the proverbial cart before horse, tried to use the language of other religions to explain our own.

Instead I think we should begin by facing up to the reality of what people want, then… take a deep breath… and actually define our faith, emphasizing what makes it special – it’s Unique Selling Point. We need to create our own set of rules before inviting people to come and play our game. Because like it or not, people need rules in a game, even in a game of no rules…

To me, Unitarianism acknowledges our unique experience of the divine and how our recognition of this uniqueness drives us to unity. This is why I’m a Unitarian, as is everyone I know (so far as I know). No other religion, to my knowledge, does this. This is our USP, but it tends to get lost in the rush to say what we’re not about, defending our goal in a game played by other religions’ rules, and thereby confusing the public, as well as ourselves.

We have to write our own rulebook rather than be judged by others’.

Just as the Buddhists are about “detachment”, the Muslims “submission under the Koran”, Christians, “love under the Bible”, we need to be “united by our unique experience of the truth” or some such.

We need to be about a religious method. There’s no getting away from it – committee-created catch-alls about “values” or bombastic over-compensation are not enough: we need to state our “rule”, even if it emphasizes our freedom, and more – we have to explicitly present it as our pathway to fulfillment.

We might not like it, but there’s no getting away from it: it’s what the public expects (and let’s face it, it’s what we believe, even though it might feel somewhat… vulgar to say so).

And from this theological kernel, begin to speak to people in a language they understand.