The Limits of Inclusivity

Is there more to community than just feeling like you belong?

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

(A five-minute read.)

I read a sentence last week in the course of my doctoral research that really arrested my attention. It honestly provided a whole afternoon’s worth of pondering as I wrestled with and debated the truthfulness of the idea.

Here’s the sentence: “People do not choose a church because it tries to include them; they choose a church whose mission they believe in.”

The concept is provocative enough on its own, especially challenging some of my own assumptions and commitments. For the last seven or eight years, as I’ve written about before, I’ve tried to practice and promote an inclusive faith which prioritizes belonging and community, believing it’s not only a key value of love-centered Christianity, but an appealing practice in twenty-first century post-Christian contexts.

So such a thesis confronts this posture quite a bit.

But what makes the sentence all the more provocative, and attention-grabbing, is the source of the claim.

It was not written by a truth-protecting fundamentalist, or someone who necessarily has a strong commitment to theological orthodoxy.

It was instead written by two Unitarian Universalist ministers.

Tucked away in the last chapter of their Introduction to the Unitarian and Universalist Traditions, published by Cambridge University Press, Andrea Greenwood and Mark W. Harris offered the reflection as they wrestled with the challenges of establishing a common Unitarian Universalist identity.

Since the denomination—which was established when Unitarians and Universalists merged in 1961—practices radical inclusivity, some within the faith struggle to have a sense of common identity. There’s not a shared theology, a shared source of authority—outside the individual self—and Unitarian Universalists practice many different types of faiths and non-faiths.

That has led, in the authors’ estimation, to not only challenges of shared identity, but challenges in growth.

Indeed, the membership of the Unitarian Universalist Association is in decline, having peaked at about 178,000 members in 1967, but shrinking to about 153,000 members in 2020 (for comparison, my denomination had a membership of about 1.3 million in 1961, when the Unitarian Universalist Association was established, and now claims about 22 million members).

Such a reality provoked the authors to share the above reflection, framing it within this larger context. “It is difficult to go deeply into a religious faith and establish a vision for Unitarian Universalists,” they thus wrote, “because there is tremendous concern about inclusivity. But defining a core to the faith might actually allow a broader spectrum of people to find a home in a Unitarian Universalist congregation.”

They then dropped the sentence I quoted above: “People do not choose a church because it tries to include them; they choose a church whose mission they believe in.”

To be clear, they’re not disavowing the practice of inclusivity altogether. Far from it. They’re simply saying that inclusivity, as an end in itself, has its limits. Inclusivity, trying to stand on its own two feet, is seemingly incapable of inspiring people to deeper action.

A community or movement that has no boundaries—even if those boundaries are extremely soft and somewhat-negotiable—ultimately struggles to galvanize people toward a common goal.

People want to feel included, to be sure. But included for what purpose and to what end?

Thus, again, inclusion has limited value if it’s not connected to a higher calling.

It also has limited value if it’s not connected to transcendence—to a sense that there’s something beyond the here-and-now.

In that regard, Unitarians have historically had a “vague theology,” as Greenwood and Harris put it—and now essentially have no theology.

Indeed, a large majority of Unitarian Universalists are not even theists—that is, they don’t believe in the reality and existence of a personal God. And even the few that do believe in the existence of a personal God leave their understanding of God vague—so as not to alienate and implicitly exclude others who don’t share their theistic beliefs.

So, again, inclusivity wins out over theological clarity—which seemingly has a hard time inspiring and galvanizing people.

Inclusion at what cost?

There’s also another significant limit to inclusivity. Individual inclusion can oftentimes come at the cost of collective safety.

Thus, for example, these same authors noted how Unitarians and Universalists, when they were separate entities in the nineteenth century, had a really hard time organizing for and promoting abolitionism. Both movements were infamously slow to take up the abolitionist cause.

Why?

Because promoting abolition conflicted with their commitment to inclusion. Many leading thinkers, even if they personally believed slavery should be gradually—though not immediately—abolished, didn’t voice these convictions too loudly, lest they alienate those among them whose convictions on slavery were different.

So individual inclusion won out over the collective safety and wellbeing of enslaved people.

From a theological perspective, it seems to me that this is the sort of dilemma God has on his hands. God is, I’d propose, the most inclusive Being in the universe. But God also has a jealous regard for the collective safety of the universe and each individual who inhabits the universe.

So inclusion—as an end in itself—is not God’s ultimate end. Safe inclusion is. And God will therefore not eternally include people if it comes at the expense of his creatures’ safety.

There’s more I could say to further explain this point, but I trust you get what I’m saying.

All this is to say that inclusivity has its limits.

To be sure, I don’t think it’s an either/or. I don’t think we either prioritize inclusivity or we prioritize mission and theological clarity. I believe it’s a both/and.

Neither do I write this to be critical of my Unitarian Universalist sisters and brothers (a number of whom I met and hung out with last week via Zoom, as I was invited by a Unitarian Universalist professor at Harvard to join a community of Unitarian Universalist doctoral students). I greatly admire a lot of the values of Unitarian Universalism, and believe I have a lot to learn from them.

I simply write this to wrestle with my own posture and approach.

As I shared above, I’m deeply committed to a posture of inclusivity—to the point where, at times, I’m probably at risk of downplaying and burying theological differences or peculiarities, and in danger of resorting to the lowest common religious denominator (“let’s just all love each other”) in an attempt to create rich and robust community.

So inclusivity is good—but not apart from a clear sense of mission and a transcendent, God-directed religiosity.

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As a postscript, I realized after writing all this that I’d sort of tackled this question before, at least from one angle, about 18 months ago—in a piece called, “Are Love and Exclusion Mutually Exclusive?” It’s quite a bit longer, and rambles a bit, but give it a read.

Ironically, I also cited an example from Unitarian Universalists as well—back when I knew a lot less about them.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.