While the Twenties Roared

“Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” With these words in his 1920 novel, This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald expressed the heady optimism that prevailed at the beginning of the decade known as the Roaring Twenties, notwithstanding the brutal world war that had just been fought, the inflation that was wreaking havoc on household budgets, and the influenza pandemic that had not yet completed its course. In other words, a decade that sounds an awful lot like the one we’re living in now.

Here is Winnipeg, the city was dealing with the aftermath of the greatest labour unrest it had known, having lived through general strikes in both 1918 and 1919. The social disruption of the war and ensuing labour unrest had an impact on many city institutions, two of which we will consider here today because their stories became woven together during the '20s. The first was Wesley College, now the University of Winnipeg, where one of the principal leaders of the Social Gospel in Canada, Salem Bland, was dismissed as professor of church history and New Testament exegesis in 1917 after 14 years at the college. Although Bland’s dismissal was attributed to financial constraints resulting from reduced enrollment and wartime conditions, there can be little doubt that it was really prompted by his political and theological radicalism, which put him at odds with college leaders.

Not far away at All Souls Unitarian Church, Bland’s colleague as one of two ministerial delegates to the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council, Horace Westwood, was increasingly discouraged as members of his congregation drifted away to join the open-air Labour Church, which had been organized along Unitarian lines by ministerial leaders of the Winnipeg General Strike. The darling of the labour movement since he had arrived in the city in 1912, Westwood ran afoul of his labour friends when he and Arthur Puttee, the president of the congregation and editor of the labour newspaper, The Voice, criticized the firefighters for joining the general strike of 1918, a precursor of the much larger strike the following year. Their influence waned in the labour movement and Westwood began looking for a new pulpit. In the spring of 1919, he accepted a call to the Unitarian church in Toledo, Ohio, and left the city before the great strike began, leaving a gaping hole in the life of the congregation.

All Souls Church had been founded in 1904 by Hope F.M. Ross, a former Methodist minister, and Arthur Puttee, Canada’s first Labour MP. The congregation met in rented halls and, following Ross’s resignation in 1907, was served by four different ministers before the congregation called Westwood in 1912. During the first year of Westwood’s leadership, the congregation erected a spacious building at the corner of Furby and Westminster, and soon found itself outgrowing the space. At its peak, All Souls had a full house twice each Sunday. Westwood’s sermons and commentaries appeared frequently in Winnipeg’s daily newspapers.

Westwood’s departure led to a period of decline following what had been a very promising ministry and five different ministers served All Souls before Philip Petursson arrived in 1929, ushering in a new period of growth. It was a difficult decade. First, the congregation called the 28-year-old son of a local Baptist minister in 1919 who continued to draw large congregations until he left for greener pastures two years later, eventually serving a large Presbyterian congregation in Oklahoma. He was followed by a German American from Ohio, a brilliant intellect who was tainted by his ethnicity in a city where anti-German prejudice still prevailed; his ministry lasted just six months and it’s reported that only a few members of the board were present for his final service. That was clearly the church’s low point. James Hart arrived in 1923 and served until the following year. He was a professed humanist, which alienated some members of the congregation, and he left to take the pulpit in Madison, Wisconsin, before becoming minister of the First Humanist Society of New York City. He was followed by Edgar Whitehouse, the religion editor of The Winnipeg Tribune, who decided to cast his lot with the United Church after church union was achieved.

The last of the five ministers to serve during this decade of disappointment was Prof. William G. Smith, who was minister of the congregation for eighteen months beginning in January of 1927. Born in Newfoundland, the son of an unschooled farmer and fisherman, Smith trained for the Methodist ministry but he was more widely known for his work in education and the social sciences. He taught psychology at the University of Toronto for 16 years and was one of Canada’s early sociologists. Before coming to Winnipeg in 1922, he published two books on the subject of immigration, as well as several scholarly articles in Social Welfare and the Canadian Journal of Mental Hygeine. His work was noteworthy for its acceptance of cultural diversity and openness to immigration from ethnic groups beyond Europe, which set it apart from the prevailing attitudes of the day.

Ordained to the Methodist ministry in 1904, Smith was not known for being especially successful as a parish minister. However, he was very active in the ministerial association, where he developed a strong reputation for “his great interest in the social problems of Canada” and his knowledge about “immigration and social conditions.” He was known for an abiding interest in civic affairs and it was said of him that “he has bridged the space between the university and the pastorate.” Like his friend and colleague Salem Bland, he gravitated towards the Social Gospel movement.

Described as “an incisive, inspiring, interesting teacher,” W.G. Smith also “prided himself equally on his scientific detachment and plain speaking” – that is to say, his academic objectivity, notwithstanding his occasional lack of objectivity and sometimes irritable temper.

In his book Building the Nation, Smith wrote: “It will not do to say that problems of industry are not any part of the church’s work, which is to preach the gospel and save souls. Wherever a human being suffers want, or injustice, or misfortune, or cruelty, or neglect, or maladjustment, there must be present the stabilizing, adjusting, healing hand of the Church.” 

In 1921, Principal John H. Riddell undertook to recruit Smith to come to Wesley College, although the exact position he would fill evolved during the course of negotiations. Smith obviously had credentials in both psychology and theology, although he was considered something of a radical in the latter subject and Riddell was attempting to steer Wesley away from radicalism towards a more moderate course. Smith was secure at the University of Toronto, although restless, so his willingness to come west hinged on position and compensation. Moreover, as a friend of Salem Bland, Smith had reason to be concerned about how well he would fit in at Wesley. When the possibility of Smith teaching sociology came on the table, Riddell inquired about his attitudes towards the recent General Strike, expressing his concern about “any unwise advocacy of radical measures,” which he worried might be “fatal” to the college’s mission.

In the end, W.G. Smith was appointed Vice Principal and professor of psychology at sociology at Wesley. He took up his responsibilities in the fall of 1921. 

The following June, five members of Grace Methodist Church, the denomination’s most influential congregation in the province, complained to the president and board of the college that Smith was promoting ideas that conflicted with Methodist teachings. Their specific complaints were that Smith did not accept the miraculous conception and virgin birth, nor the resurrection of Jesus, and that the sole significance of the crucifixion was to be found in Jesus’s “willingness to suffer and die for his great principles.” Moreover, the church members reported that Smith rejected the Gospel of John, evidently favouring the synoptic gospels, according to a course of lectures he had given to the congregation’s young men’s club. A supporting letter signed by more than 30 people demanded Smith’s resignation or dismissal. Smith was fired, the president reacting to his theological liberalism while the board reacted to his political radicalism. Both the president and the board agreed, though, that Smith had usurped the principal’s authority by endeavoring to reorganize the college on a more progressive model from the second seat.

The controversy threatened the very foundations of the college. While the college was affiliated with the Methodist Church, the controversy set the stage for the closing years of the decade at All Souls Church. Smith sued Wesley College for $30,000 in a case that kept the issue on the front page of the papers, but he eventually lost and received only a year’s severance. It ended Smith’s academic career. He wasn’t yet 50.

Following his dismissal, Smith spent a year as principal of Darlingford School, near Morden, and provided pulpit supply for sympathetic congregations. He was principal of Norwood High School from 1926 until 1929, serving concurrently as minister of All Souls Church during the middle part of his tenure at Norwood.

Early in his tenure, the Free Press actually described him as the congregation’s director of religious education rather than its minister and went on to say that he had “arranged a series of lectures and debates on religion, literature, philosophy, psychology and science” for a newly-organized student group. The mistake wasn’t entirely off the mark, for the focus of his ministry was indeed on education. The restoration of a group for older youth and young adults, which had first been created by James Hart, was his major organizational achievement. Otherwise, he filled the pulpit on Sundays and left the board to do its work, and the women’s society and Sunday school to do theirs.

While he had been dismissed by Wesley in large measure for his perceived radicalism, his focus in the pulpit was pretty conventional, his liturgies quite austere, and he was arguably the most conservative minister the congregation had known in his approach and style. He was a Methodist minister with a Unitarian message.

Smith’s sermon themes focused on what he considered to be the fundamental religious questions: “How Did the World Come to Be?” – “What is the Function of the Church?” – “What is the Real Dignity of Worship?” He addressed the five points of the New Theology, as they had been expressed by James Freeman Clarke, and addressed the issues that were current in contemporary debates about God, Jesus, Job, ethics, prayer, parables, and biblical criticism. Some of his sermons were essentially book reviews and, for all intents and purposes, he introduced the idea of the monthly theme in church programming. His most radical sermons were those in which he explored what he called the “gospels” of various thinkers – Charles Darwin, Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll, and Sinclair Lewis. 

Unlike Westwood, the press ignored William Smith during his ministry among the Unitarians. He wasn’t considered as newsworthy as previous ministers had been, nor as he himself had been following his termination at Wesley, which sadly became the thing he’s most remembered for, notwithstanding his many contributions as a social scientist, educator, and public servant. All Souls announcements during the period described the congregation as “the Church of Liberal Faith.”

Smith’s greatest innovation was the introduction of what was called the “social half hour” following services – something that we now take for granted which was unknown before then. Towards the end of his tenure, he preached on the theme, “Putting Props Under the Skies,” which seems to have been about preserving religion in the face of the collapse of so much that we thought we knew about heaven and earth. Interestingly, that is what he did for All Souls Church – at a critical moment when it appeared that the congregation might collapse altogether, he propped it up and saw it to the end of its most challenging decade.

After leaving All Souls and then Norwood High School, the provincial government named him director of child welfare, a position he held for three years before once again leaving in a controversy, saying that he was “fed up and tired of trying to do the impossible” in light of the government’s indifference to child welfare and other social issues. After a short tenure as director of the Manitoba School of Social Sciences, he moved west to Calgary with his family where he died in 1943.

In 1929, Rev. Philip M. Petursson was called as minister of All Souls, ushering in a new period of settled minister, stability for the congregation, and the eventual merger of All Souls with the Icelandic congregation on Banning Street.

And so it was that All Souls Church fulfilled the spirit of the age, as had been expressed by F. Scott Fitzgerald – “a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights,” but destined to meet it with love and pride, a new generation dedicated to tackling poverty and other social ills, using the church as a tool to do so, challenging the worship of success that didn’t reach the least fortunate among us, “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought,” or so they thought, and all faith in humanity shaken, yet undeterred in striving to move forward.

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.

At the Core of Our Living Tradition

The quickest way to silence a Unitarian Universalist is to ask them to tell you what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. Ours is not a way in religion that lends itself to short, pithy statements about the essentials of our beliefs and practices, although that hasn’t stopped many of us from trying to come up with what is sometimes called an “elevator speech” to share with family and friends, neighbours and colleagues, whether religious or secular. The idea behind an elevator speech is that it’s a focused but comprehensive statement that can be recited between the time one boards an elevator, and the doors close, until the time they open again. The challenge for us is that nobody has yet erected a building tall enough for anyone to be able to adequately describe Unitarian Universalism during an elevator ride unless the elevator gets stuck on its journey – and in that case, nobody really cares to know, anyway. They just want to get off the elevator.

When we’re asked, “so what do Unitarians believe anyway” – it’s rare for someone to include the Universalist part of our name – we tend to feel awkward, at best, and sometimes even embarrassed. Ask a Lutheran a similar question about their faith and they’ll tell you they believe in salvation by grace and maybe even throw in an anecdote or two about Martin Luther; a Presbyterian may recite the Five Points of Calvinism, which bears the curious acronym TULIP; and a well-schooled Methodist or Nazarene may speak of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral – scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. We just squirm … while trying to call to mind the Seven Principles before remembering there are now eight. And if we’re successful in recalling even three of them, whoever it is we are talking to is bound to ask, “What’s religious about that?”

At its heart, the problem is that we simply don’t speak the same language as other people when it comes to religious matters. This wasn’t always the case. In the early years of both the Unitarian and Universalist traditions, our forebears understood themselves as Christians – indeed, they considered their faith to be the truest and purest expression of Christian teachings – so Unitarians and Universalists described their doctrines with direct reference to the prevailing stories and teachings of Christianity, emphasizing what they shared with other churches (which was actually a lot) while noting the points where they differed, which, though small in number, were nevertheless quite controversial. In the eyes of our neighbours, the rejection of the Trinity and affirmation of universal salvation were great heresies that set us apart.

Early Unitarians and Universalists were liberal Christians whose understanding of the Bible, theology, and church history put them at odds with their neighbours. Ironically, Unitarian Universalism inherited a double-barrelled doctrinal name, notwithstanding the fact that, today, it is notoriously difficult to pin us down doctrinally. Although many efforts have been made to offer more expansive understandings of the names Unitarian and Universalist – such as we’re Unitarian because we embrace a unified view of life and we’re Universalist because we seek inspiration from many sources – the fact of the matter is that relatively few present-day Unitarian Universalists in Canada and the United States are either Universalist or Unitarian, at least not in the original doctrinal meaning of those words. Looking back, our evolution from those original doctrines seems quite natural and easily explained, given enough time, but the beliefs we espouse today bear little resemblance to the beginnings of our tradition. Like human evolution, spiritual evolution is littered with missing links.

Once again, we simply don’t speak the same language as the prevailing religious culture, even with the growing diversity of religions found among us. This realization was driven home to me more than three decades ago when I was flying from Winnipeg to Milwaukee for the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. On the plane, I was seated next to a gospel singer from Dallas who had been in Winnipeg to appear on the television show It’s a New Day. She asked me where I was going and what I did for a living, and, in a moment of weakness, I told her. “Unitarian Universalist? What’s that?” she inquired, and an awkward hour began to unfold with me trapped in the window seat. She peppered me with questions about God, Jesus, the Devil, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the prophet Jonah and his adventures at sea. Now, if she had been talking to Björn Pétursson and Jennie McCaine Peterson, the founders of this congregation, they would have had ready answers for her because they had appended an 11-point declaration of “the major articles of belief” to the church bylaws. They covered all of her questions – and more. But it was me she was sitting beside, not them, and she was unimpressed by my answers and, at one point, asked if there were any biblical teachings that I didn’t consider to be “merely metaphorical.” As we neared our destination, she got up and knelt in the aisle of the plane and began praying for me. I was mortified, but she wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to save me from myself and redeem my soul, if it were even remotely possible.

And thus began my practice of offering vague answers to questions on planes, although, in time, I grew more confident again – and more comfortable with being misunderstood. Moreover, the arrogance of age now means that I’m less reticent than ever about expressing what I believe personally without worrying that someone will mistakenly think that what I believe is what all Unitarian Universalists believe. After all, if you’re looking for a dozen different opinions, all you need to do is gather ten Unitarian Universalists together in the same room.

So, if most of us don’t believe what our spiritual ancestors believed, and if we can’t describe our beliefs using the prevailing religious language of the society in which we live, what’s at the core of our living tradition? Well, like biological evolution, which led to increasingly complex life forms based on a few simple laws of nature, our spiritual evolution is the product of a few simple guiding principles.

That’s why we fall back on our familiar statement of principles, whether they count seven or eight, and many of us have committed them to heart – or we can at least paraphrase them, typically emphasizing the ones we like best. So I’m a “search for truth and meaning” Unitarian Universalist with a deep love for the interdependent web and an abiding concern for human worth and dignity. That’s more or less my Trinity of values.

However, our current statement of principles only dates back to 1985. While they do offer a summary of values we cherish in language that is both succinct and poetic, and while these values can be discerned through a careful examination of our history, they are abstract and lend themselves to widely varying interpretations. Accordingly, they can only be fully understood and appreciated when those who profess them are aware of how they have been lived out in history. These abstractions cannot be separated from the real-life struggles and triumphs of our spiritual ancestors. They are sublime, but they aren’t likely to be the last things we think about as we slip away from life.

We call our way in religion a living tradition for a reason. It is dynamic and changing. And that living tradition is more a process than it is a product. That’s one of the reasons we have such a difficult time explaining Unitarian Universalism to others. While most religions rely upon a complex web of mythology and history, doctrine and ritual, we embrace a methodology informed by a number of principles – an approach that looks something like the scientific method in religion, albeit with room for feelings and emotions, not to mention some robust assumptions about the nature of the world and humankind.

In the middle of the 20th century, as the world was dealing with authoritarianism run amok, James Luther Adams articulated five guiding principles of liberal religion, which his editor Max Stackhouse described as the “five smooth stones of liberalism,” alluding to the story of how David slew Goliath, but I think it’s better to think of them as seeds rather than stones, which is precisely what you would expect at the core of any fruit.

“Religious liberalism depends first on the principle that revelation is continuous,” according to Adams. And the fruits of our faith, for want of a better term, all flow directly from that initial observation. Neither the Bible nor any other source of knowledge and wisdom, including the latest discovery of science, has the final word. We are engaged in an ongoing voyage of discovery and the end is nowhere in sight. Whatever writings we may consider sacred, their last chapters have not yet been written. Just when we think we’ve figured things out, we have something new to learn. And neither age nor our own sense of certainty absolve us of the responsibility to continue learning, to be open to new ideas and insights, to listen to the ideas of those around us.

Secondly, religious liberalism assumes that “all relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not on coercion.” It is this principle that lies at the heart of our broad tolerance as a religious community and our affirmation that the best way to organize human affairs is to do so as democratically as possible, recognizing that democracy takes time, trust, and tenacity.

Thirdly, religious liberalism “affirms the moral obligation to direct one’s efforts toward the establishment of a just and loving community.” As Waldemar Argow observed, it’s not enough to know and to feel, we are compelled to act on what we know and feel for the betterment of the world in which we live, or at least the tiny portion of it that we call home. If we are lucky, we learned this while we were still very young – to play fair, to clean up, and to care for our friends as well as ourselves.

Fourthly, religious liberalism recognizes the importance of enduring forms. “And the creation of a form requires power,” said Adams. “It requires not only the power of thought but also the power of organization and the organization of power.” Adams preferred to state this fourth guiding principle in the negative, declaring, “we deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation.” Goodness is embodied in good people, and it grows with the nurture of good communities. In other words, a worldview, a philosophy, a sentiment of goodwill that is not embodied in the form of institutions devoted to realizing its vision for the world will never reach the goodness it aspires to achieve. And so we gather in spiritual communities precisely because we are stronger together than any one of us is alone, and we can achieve more through common effort – for ourselves, our families, and our society – than any of us can hope to accomplish on our own.

Finally, “liberalism holds that the resources (divine and human that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.” This may be the hardest principle of all for us to live up to, since it is so easy to succumb to despair. But we cannot afford the luxury of despair. Life may often be tragic, but it’s not hopeless. And while we may not realize our aspirations in this moment, or even the next, we can trust in the ongoing renewal of life and, despite setbacks and reversals, hope that the future may prove better than the past because progress is not an inheritance, but a journey forward.

So, to summarize: the principles at the core of our living tradition affirm that revelation is not sealed, but that humankind is on a voyage of continuous learning and discovery; as sure as science continues to push back the frontiers of knowledge, liberal religion aspires to discover new insights about the human spirit. We assume that relations within our congregations and in society at large depend upon mutuality and freedom, that democratic living is both the seed and the fruit of the free church. We are morally obligated to strive to create a world that is more just and loving. And this requires the organization of power and the power of organization because social ends can only be achieved through social means. And through it call, we are called to be hopeful, even optimistic, that the world of our dreams is a world that can be attained through human ingenuity and effort, working in harmony with the nature that is our home. It is our duty to save humankind and the planet itself in this life, not another.

Knowing these five guiding principles helps us to better understand and explain how Unitarianism and Universalism grew from being sects within Christianity to becoming something more expansive, more inclusive, more complex. But here’s the rub: none of this gets us even an inch closer to having a compelling elevator speech. Ours is a way that defies the elevator speech while inviting us to become more comfortable with ambiguity, uncertainty, and the acknowledgement that our spiritual life, like the Facebook relationship status, is complicated.

Yet we remain quietly confident, in spite of life’s ambiguity and uncertainty. “Whatever the destiny of the planet or of the individual life, a sustaining meaning is discernable and commanding in the here and now,” proclaimed James Luther Adams. “Anyone who denies this denies that there is anything worth taking seriously or even worth talking about. Every blade of grass, every work of art, every scientific endeavor, every striving for righteousness bears witness to this meaning. Indeed, every frustration or perversion of truth, beauty, or goodness also bears this witness, as the shadow points round to the sun.”

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.