Read this headline aloud and people might imagine that at the Sedona Unitarian Universalist Fellowship female clergy dressed in black and white habits chant psalms.\u00a0 No, there are no nuns at SUUF, but there are many \u201cNones.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nones is a term used for people who check a survey box saying they have \u201cno particular religious affiliation.\u201d\u00a0 This group has grown recently to about 30% of Americans.<\/p>\n
Nones usually are defined by what they aren\u2019t\u2014 adherents to a religious tradition\u2014rather than who they are or what they believe.<\/p>\n
Although most Unitarian Nones did leave the confines of a more traditional religion, many didn\u2019t get rid of their beliefs–they expanded them.<\/p>\n
They fit better into a new category, described by David Campbell, Notre Dame professor, in his recent book,\u00a0Secular Surge<\/em>, as \u201creligious secularists.\u201d\u00a0 He says religious secularists \u201csee the world through a secular lens, but they also have a foot in a religious community.\u201d They have \u201cfound a way to accommodate both ways of seeing the world.\u201d<\/p>\n In journalist Jessica Grose\u2019s recent NY Times articles about the trend of\u00a0Americans moving away from religion, she asked her readers for input, and 7,000 replied.\u00a0 Many said they had found\u00a0\u201ca new spiritual community that was less exclusionary than the denomination they were raised in.\u201d<\/p>\n One was Donnell McLachlan, from Chicago, who wrote that \u201chis church did a lot for him and his family when he was growing up, but he gradually came to feel that it was a faith rooted in fear and judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n McLachlan now describes himself as a \u201cspiritual pluralist\u201d rather than a Christian, though he still values \u201cthe love-rooted, justice-centered wisdom found in the Bible.\u201d<\/p>\n He added, \u201cReligion is like a language, a means of communicating with the divine. And just like language, there are many interpretations and ways to express it. I believe that love is the ultimate law of life, and try to align my spiritual practices with traditions that reflect this belief.\u201d<\/p>\n He could well be talking about SUUF, where many congregants might well be\u00a0described as\u00a0spiritual pluralists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Read this headline aloud and people might imagine that at the Sedona Unitarian Universalist Fellowship female clergy dressed in black and white habits chant psalms.\u00a0 No, there are no nuns at SUUF, but there are many \u201cNones.\u201d Nones is a term used for people who check a survey box saying they have \u201cno particular religious … Continue reading SUUF and Nones [#60]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7209"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8847,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7209\/revisions\/8847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}