Religious Deism is not Unitarian Universalism
In the Religious Deism (RD) website, there is a tab called “Comparative Table” that mentions what RD has in common and is different from Christianity, deism and atheism/agnosticism. However, some people have asked us if we are anything like Unitarian Universalists (UUC). This has been based on the fact that it is a religion that had Christian roots but that is no-longer Christian-based. Also, John Adams was a Universalist and in many cases, his more deistic views withihn the Universalist tradition are often very close to those of RD. However, there are very significant differences between RD and the UUC.
The UUC mentions 5 beliefs, 6 sources and 7 principals regarding their beliefs. While RD would consider most of these points as positive, we also consider them to be very vague and general at best. Here is a list of the several points that are not in line with Religious Deism theology.
Quoting the UUC website, one can see the difference between their Church and RD theology. First, the site says that its members have “no shared creed” which is completely different from Religious Deism with its 8 point creed.
Point 4 of UUC Principals states a belief in a “Free and responsible search for truth and meaning”. While in many respects, this reflects the RD search for contradictionlessness, it does not reflect the UUC ideal that personal theologies are all equally valid in terms of theological understanding.
In the five beliefs, there exists the most differences between RD and UUC. Regarding their belief in a “Higher Power”, the UUC website says that within the UCC there are “agnostic, theist, atheist and everything inbetween.” They go on to say “We join together not because we have a shared concept of the divine”. Again, RD is certainly not atheist or theist and only agnostic in the way that it approaches the issue of empirical proofs about God. And, RDs definitely have a shared concept of the divine as described in the RD Creed.
Last, UUC beliefs about “Life and Death” are very different from RD. According to the UUC website: “Unitarian Universalist views about life after death are informed by science and spiritual traditions. Many of us live with the assumption that life does not continue after death, and many of us hold it as an open question….Few of us believe in divine judgment after death”. RD uses neither science (empirical evidence) nor spiritual traditions (revealed evidence) in formulating its beliefs about the afterlife. It only uses reason to arrive at this conclusion. And, RDs feel that any religion that allows for its members to believe in hope for or not believe in an afterlife is a religion in contradiction, especially considering just how important the afterlife is to theology.
RD sees the UUC as a church option that might be appropriate for those RDs coming from an agnostic tradition to consider as the service of choice since it is so welcoming of all religious traditions. However, RD sees the lack of any unifying theological beliefs to be a weakness in the UUC and something that readily demonstrates the theological differences between the Unitarian Universalist Church and Religious Deism.