Unitarian Universalism: A Religion Without a Required Creed
Unitarian Universalism is a congregational religion formed in 1961 when American Unitarians and Universalists consolidated, and it binds members by covenant rather than by a creed. This guide covers the seven Principles and six Sources, the 2024 Article II revision, congregational polity, what a Sunday service and membership actually involve, and the criticisms Unitarian Universalists make of themselves.
What is Unitarian Universalism?
Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religion organized in North America as the Unitarian Universalist Association, and it binds its members by covenant rather than by a required creed. It was formed in May 1961, when the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America consolidated into a single body headquartered in Boston. One UU congregation can contain humanists, theists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans and people who refuse every label, all of them holding full voting membership on identical terms. What they share is an agreement about how to search together and how to treat one another, not a conclusion about God. The UUA counts roughly a thousand member congregations in the United States, and it is an association of self-governing churches rather than a hierarchy: it owns no congregation's building, cannot appoint or remove a minister, and cannot compel a congregation to teach anything. Joining requires no baptism, no profession of faith and no renunciation of a previous religion. The movement's own shorthand is deeds not creeds, which is accurate about the entry requirement and misleading about the culture, because Unitarian Universalists argue about theology constantly and in public.
The name is a compound of two nineteenth-century American denominations, each named for a doctrine it rejected. Unitarian denied the Trinity, holding that God is one rather than three persons. Universalist denied that damnation is eternal, holding that every soul is eventually reconciled to God. Both began as Christian heresies argued in Christian terms, and both had traveled a long way from those arguments by the time they merged. Whether the result is a religion or a religious community without a religion gets disputed inside the movement. That argument is a century old: the humanist ministers John Dietrich and Curtis Reese were fighting theist colleagues over exactly this question in Unitarian pulpits through the 1920s, and the American Unitarian Association never settled it by ruling for one side. Legally the question is settled: congregations are churches, ministers are credentialed clergy who sign marriage licenses, and congregations hold the tax status any church holds. Culturally it is less settled. Members arriving from Catholicism or evangelical Protestantism often report that the first year feels like a church with the theology removed, while members arriving from no religion at all report the opposite, that there turned out to be far more religion in it than they expected. The movement also has a public record that outlasts its size. Two Unitarian Universalists were killed during the Selma voting rights campaign in March 1965, the minister James Reeb and the laywoman Viola Liuzzo, and that fact still does a great deal of work in how the association describes itself.
Is Unitarian Universalism a denomination or an association?
Both words get used, and the legal reality is an association. The Unitarian Universalist Association is a membership body whose members are congregations rather than individuals, so a person joins a church and the church belongs to the UUA. Journalists and the association's own publications still say denomination as shorthand. The distinction matters whenever someone assumes headquarters can order a congregation to do something. It cannot.
What does covenant mean in a Unitarian Universalist context?
A covenant is a mutual promise about conduct and relationship, adopted by a group and revisable by that group, as opposed to a creed, which is a statement of belief you assent to. Most UU congregations have a bond of union or a covenant of right relations that members affirm at joining. It describes how people will treat each other rather than what they will hold to be true.
What is the flaming chalice, and where did it come from?
The flaming chalice is the movement's emblem, a cup with a flame rising from it, lit at the start of most services. The Austrian artist Hans Deutsch drew the original in 1941 for the Unitarian Service Committee, which was moving refugees out of occupied Europe and needed a mark that looked official on documents. Its adoption as a worship symbol came considerably later.
What do Unitarian Universalists believe if there is no required creed?
Unitarian Universalists believe a wide range of things, and the absence of a required creed means the movement takes no position on most of the questions religions exist to answer. Surveys the association has run of its own members have consistently found humanist to be the most commonly chosen self-description, with theist, earth-centered, mystic, Christian, Buddhist and Jewish all drawing sizable numbers behind it. Those instruments let a respondent check more than one box, so what they record is overlapping identity rather than a ranked table, and a large share of members pick several at once. No count of members who reject every label offered has been published to a standard worth quoting. On the existence of God, on revelation, on scripture and on what happens after death, there is no UU answer, only UU answers in the plural. Congregations draw freely on the world's religions without adopting any of their doctrines, and a reader who wants the actual afterlife teachings compared should see Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth. What is genuinely shared is procedural and ethical: a commitment to search honestly, to revise a belief when the evidence turns against it, to treat the search of the person in the next pew as legitimate even when it arrives somewhere opposite, and then to act on what you conclude. Ask a UU minister what the church teaches and you will usually get that method described rather than a list of propositions.
The mechanism worth understanding is what a covenant binds compared with what a creed binds. A creed governs belief and makes membership conditional on assent. A covenant governs behavior and makes membership conditional on how you conduct yourself with the other people inside it. Article II of the UUA bylaws has long carried an explicit protection of individual freedom of belief, and it forbids the use of any congregational statement as a creedal test. That is why the common outside gibe, that Unitarian Universalists can believe anything, is wrong in a specific way. There are positions a UU congregation will not tolerate, and they are behavioral rather than doctrinal. A member who campaigns for the inferiority of other members gets removed under the covenant, not tried for heresy. The practical limit sits in three places: the congregation's own covenant, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee's authority over who may serve as a minister, and the association's power to end a congregation's membership. None of the three tests belief. All three test conduct.
Can two members of the same congregation hold contradictory beliefs?
Yes, and they routinely do. A humanist who regards prayer as a form of self-address and a theist who regards it as communication can serve on the same board and sing the same hymn, because neither position is being ratified by the congregation. The friction this produces is real, and it surfaces over language in worship far more often than over metaphysics, particularly over whether the word God is heard from the pulpit.
Is there anything a Unitarian Universalist cannot believe?
Nothing is formally prohibited as a belief, but a great deal is prohibited as conduct, and each congregation's covenant draws that line for itself. Someone who holds that certain people are less than fully human will find no doctrinal charge available against them and every practical door in the building closed. Ministers face a further filter, because fellowship with the association can be withdrawn for behavior.
What do UU congregations teach children about God?
Religious education in UU congregations generally teaches about many answers rather than teaching one, introducing children to Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, humanist and earth-centered material and then asking them what they make of it. The curriculum the movement has exported furthest beyond its own buildings is Our Whole Lives, a comprehensive sexuality education program developed jointly with the United Church of Christ and used well beyond UU congregations.
Where did Unitarianism and Universalism come from, and why did they merge?
Unitarianism and Universalism began as separate Christian heresies, in different countries and different centuries, and merged in 1961 largely because both were shrinking. Antitrinitarian Christianity surfaced during the Reformation: Michael Servetus was burned in Geneva in 1553 for denying the Trinity, Ferenc David led a unitarian church in Transylvania where the Edict of Torda of 1568 granted an unusual measure of religious tolerance, and the Polish Brethren produced the Racovian Catechism in 1605. In England, Theophilus Lindsey opened an avowedly Unitarian chapel on Essex Street in London in 1774, and Joseph Priestley carried the theology to America after a mob burned his house. American Unitarianism grew out of a split inside New England Congregationalism; William Ellery Channing's 1819 ordination sermon in Baltimore, usually called Unitarian Christianity, gave the party a manifesto, and the American Unitarian Association followed in 1825. Universalism arrived separately and lower down the social scale, with John Murray preaching in the colonies from 1770 and Hosea Ballou publishing A Treatise on Atonement in 1805, arguing that the work of Christ was to change humanity's disposition toward God rather than God's toward humanity.
The two bodies had almost nothing in common socially. Universalism spread through rural New England, upstate New York and the frontier, among farmers and mechanics. Unitarianism concentrated in Boston, at Harvard and among the professions. A quip usually attributed to Thomas Starr King, who served in both denominations, put the theological difference as Universalists believing God too good to damn them and Unitarians believing themselves too good to be damned. Universalism was a substantial American denomination in the middle of the nineteenth century, with societies across rural New England, New York and the Ohio valley, and it then declined sharply, partly because its distinctive claim, that nobody is damned forever, quietly won the argument across liberal Protestantism. Cooperation preceded consolidation: the two groups pooled religious education and publishing in the Council of Liberal Churches from 1953, and members of both voted on a merger plan that took effect in May 1961. Universalists were the smaller partner by then, and some of them said at the time that they were being absorbed rather than joined.
What did the first American Unitarians actually teach?
They taught that God is one person rather than three, that Jesus was a human being of unique moral authority rather than God incarnate, that human nature is capable of goodness rather than totally depraved, and that reason and conscience are legitimate tools for reading scripture. Channing's 1819 sermon set out that program in order. It was a Christian argument, made in Christian terms, about Christian texts.
What did Universalists mean by universal salvation?
They meant that God saves everyone eventually, so hell is either temporary or nonexistent. Universalists then split over which. Hosea Ballou argued that punishment happens in this life and ends at death, a position called ultra-universalism, while restorationists held that some correction continues after death before reconciliation. The dispute ran through the 1820s and 1830s and produced a short-lived breakaway body, the Massachusetts Association of Universalist Restorationists, formed in 1831. The restorationist position gradually became the ordinary Universalist one, and Ballou's stricter version faded out with his generation.
Did anyone oppose the 1961 merger?
Yes, on both sides. Some Universalists feared the loss of their name, their theology and their institutions inside a larger and wealthier partner, and they were largely right about the theology, since universal salvation is now rarely preached from UU pulpits. Some Unitarians thought the merger diluted an intellectual tradition. Both bodies nonetheless approved the plan by wide margins.
What are the seven UU Principles and six Sources, and are they binding?
The seven Principles are the covenantal statements UU member congregations affirmed in the association's bylaws from 1985 until 2024: the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process; the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all; and respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. They were never binding on individuals. The wording is careful about this, because the Principles are what member congregations covenant to affirm and promote, which makes them an agreement between institutions rather than a test applied to a person in a pew. The bylaws set out no procedure for requiring a member to sign them and no procedure for removing a member who rejects one of them. In practice they became the movement's public face, printed on orders of service and quoted in newspaper profiles, which gave them far more weight in the culture than they ever carried in the bylaws.
Alongside the Principles, Article II named six Sources the tradition draws on: direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder; the words and deeds of prophetic people, a phrase the 1985 wording gave as prophetic women and men; wisdom from the world's religions; Jewish and Christian teachings; humanist teachings that heed reason and the results of science; and the spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions, added as a sixth Source in 1995 after a long push from Pagan-identified members. In 2024 the General Assembly finished a multi-year revision and replaced the whole article. The new Article II puts love at the center and names six values: interdependence, pluralism, justice, transformation, generosity and equity. The fight over it was bitter and is not finished. Supporters argued that the Principles had hardened into a de facto creed and read as individualistic. Opponents argued that the revision weakened the free search and the democratic process, and some of them organized outside the association, including in a body called the North American Unitarian Association. Both texts share one feature worth noticing: neither asks a member to hold any position on God, revelation or salvation. The word God does appear in the older article, inside the fourth Source, which names Jewish and Christian teachings that call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves. It sits there as a description of what a source says, not as something anyone is required to affirm, and that distinction is the whole reason the article was never a creed.
Are the seven Principles still official after the 2024 change?
They are no longer the text of Article II, which now carries the values statement adopted in 2024. Congregations remain free to print them, teach them and use them in worship, and many still do, because forty years of hymnals, banners and religious education material do not change with a single bylaw vote. Expect both texts in circulation for a long time.
Do UU services quote scriptures from other religions?
Regularly. The Sources explicitly include wisdom from the world's religions, so a Sunday reading may come from the Hebrew prophets, the Gospels, the Dhammapada, Rumi or the Tao Te Ching, usually with no claim that the text is authoritative. For what one of those source texts teaches on its own terms, see Tao Te Ching: What It Teaches and How to Read It.
Can a congregation be expelled for violating the Principles?
The association can end a congregation's membership, and that is the only sanction available to it, since it cannot seize property, remove a board or install a minister. Removal is rare and has generally followed conduct rather than doctrine. A congregation that stopped affirming one of the Principles would more likely be argued with for a decade than expelled.
What actually happens in a Unitarian Universalist service?
A Unitarian Universalist service looks like a stripped-down Protestant service with the doctrine removed and the readings widened. The usual order runs: prelude, welcome, the lighting of a flaming chalice with spoken words, an opening hymn, a story for the children before they leave for religious education, a reading that may come from any tradition or from poetry, joys and concerns in which members name a death, a diagnosis or a birth aloud, a musical offering, the collection, a sermon of roughly twenty minutes, a closing hymn and words of benediction. Coffee hour afterward is treated by many members as part of the service, and it is where the community actually happens. What is absent tells you as much as what is present: no creed is recited, no confession of sin is offered, most congregations do not celebrate communion, and nobody is invited forward to be saved. Hymns come mainly from Singing the Living Tradition, published in 1993, which keeps a great many familiar Protestant tunes while rewriting theologically specific lyrics, and from its 2005 supplement Singing the Journey, which leans more heavily on newer and multicultural material than on reworked hymnody.
Variation between congregations runs wider than that standard order suggests. A Christian-identified UU congregation may hold communion and keep the liturgical year. A humanist congregation may have no prayer at all and open with a reading from a working scientist. Groups affiliated with the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans hold seasonal circles marking solstices and equinoxes. Small lay-led fellowships, many of them planted through a program the American Unitarian Association began in 1948 to reach places with no minister available, often run entirely on member-delivered talks and have no clergy at all. Architecture tracks that history closely. New England congregations frequently occupy white clapboard meeting houses their Congregational forebears built, while the fellowship-era congregations of the 1950s and 1960s tend to meet in low modernist buildings with a wall of glass facing trees. Sitting in the two is a different experience before anyone has spoken a word.
Do Unitarian Universalists pray?
Some do and some do not, and services often use a formula built to accommodate both, such as an invitation to prayer or meditation as you find meaningful. Ministers who avoid the word God will frequently speak of the spirit of life, a phrase taken from a hymn by Carolyn McDade that most congregations sing. Humanist members typically hear those moments as reflection rather than address.
What music do UU congregations sing?
Mostly hymns from Singing the Living Tradition, the 1993 collection that keeps familiar Protestant tunes while rewriting theologically specific lyrics, alongside its 2005 supplement Singing the Journey. The repertoire also takes in spirituals, folk songs, Shaker tunes and material from other traditions. Singing quality varies enormously, and choirs, jazz trios and recorded accompaniment are all common depending on the size of the congregation.
Do UU congregations read from the Bible?
Frequently, and without treating it as inerrant or uniquely authoritative. Jewish and Christian teachings are one of the named Sources, and a UU sermon may work carefully through a parable or a passage from Amos. What you will rarely hear is a claim that the text settles a question because it is scripture. Some congregations read from it weekly, others hardly at all.
How does a UU congregation govern itself and choose its minister?
A Unitarian Universalist congregation governs itself, and the technical name for the arrangement is congregational polity: the members, voting at a properly called meeting, hold final authority over the budget, the bylaws, the property and the minister. A board elected by those members handles ordinary business between meetings. When a settled minister is needed, the congregation elects a search committee, which works with the association's transitions staff, reviews packets from ministers in fellowship, interviews candidates, and eventually brings one candidate to spend a week with the congregation preaching and meeting people. The congregation then votes to call that person, and congregational bylaws commonly set a high threshold, ninety percent or more, because a minister called by a narrow majority begins with a divided church. Ordination is performed by a congregation, not by the association, which is a genuine difference from most denominations: a congregation can ordain whomever it wishes. What the UUA controls is fellowship, the credential that lets a minister be considered by other UU congregations, and that is granted and withdrawn by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee.
The polity is inherited rather than invented. New England Congregationalists set it out in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, and the Unitarian split ran straight through those parishes a century and a half later. A Massachusetts court decision in 1820 involving the parish of Dedham held that church property belonged to the parish, meaning the broader body of townspeople, rather than to the gathered church members, which delivered many historic meeting houses to the Unitarian side and left orthodox members to build again from nothing. Resentment about that outcome lasted generations. Above the congregation, the UUA holds an annual General Assembly where delegates sent by congregations vote on bylaws, resolutions and the election of a president. Sofia Betancourt was elected president in 2023, following Susan Frederick-Gray, the first woman elected to a full term. The association reorganized its districts into larger regions during the 2010s. Congregations without a called minister are common and normal, and they operate with contract ministers, part-time ministers shared between two congregations, or no clergy whatsoever.
Who owns a UU church building?
The congregation owns it outright. The association holds no property interest in a member congregation's building and cannot claim it if the congregation leaves, which is the sharpest practical difference from Catholic, Episcopal or Methodist arrangements. It also means a congregation that dissolves decides for itself where its assets go, subject only to its own bylaws and state law.
What is the UUA General Assembly?
General Assembly is the annual meeting of the association, held over several days each June, where delegates elected by member congregations vote on bylaw changes, business resolutions and public witness statements. It doubles as a large conference with worship, lectures and workshops. Delegates vote as individuals rather than under instruction, and attendance skews toward those who can afford to travel.
Can the UUA remove a minister?
It can remove a minister's fellowship, which ends that person's standing as a UU minister and their access to the search system, and the Ministerial Fellowship Committee handles those cases. It cannot fire anyone. A congregation that wishes to keep a minister who has lost fellowship may do so, and the association's only remaining lever is that congregation's own membership.
How do you join a UU church, and what is asked of members?
You join a Unitarian Universalist congregation by signing its membership book, and in most congregations that follows attending for a while and taking a newcomer class that runs a few hours across one or two sessions. The class covers the movement's history, the congregation's own story, how the budget works and what the covenant asks of people. Nothing in it tests belief. Bylaws commonly add two conditions before a member can vote: a waiting period, often thirty days from signing, and a financial contribution of record, meaning a gift of any size that appears in the treasurer's books. That second condition surprises newcomers, and congregations usually explain that the amount is unspecified because the point is participation rather than revenue. What is asked afterward is money and conduct. Members are invited each spring to pledge an annual amount, and congregations run almost entirely on those pledges plus whatever endowment they hold, which is why a weak pledge drive turns up the following year as a cut to the minister's hours or a lapsed religious education contract. Attendance is not monitored and belief is not audited. The covenant is the one thing you are expected to keep.
Membership carries no requirement to leave another religion, and a noticeable minority of Unitarian Universalists hold a second affiliation, attending a synagogue, a Zen center or a Catholic mass alongside Sunday morning. Children are not made members and are not baptized into anything; most congregations offer a child dedication instead. The recognizable UU rite of passage arrives in adolescence, in a coming-of-age program where a young person spends a year with an adult mentor and writes a personal credo, then reads it aloud from the pulpit. The credos are frequently better than the sermons. Youth finishing high school are marked with a bridging ceremony. Adults who arrive after a bruising exit from another religion are common enough that many congregations run a group for exactly them, sometimes under names borrowed from recovery language, which some members find apt and others find flippant.
Do you have to give up another religion to join?
No. UU congregations do not ask for an exclusive commitment, and dual affiliation is ordinary rather than merely tolerated. Members who also belong to a synagogue, a Buddhist sangha or a Christian church are common, and some congregations have standing groups for them. The other religion may take a different view of the arrangement, which is a question for that religion rather than for the UUA.
Is there a fee to be a Unitarian Universalist member?
There is no set fee. Most congregations ask for a financial contribution of record before a member may vote, and they deliberately leave the amount open, so a single dollar satisfies the bylaw. The annual pledge drive asks for a considered amount, often suggested as a share of income, and that ask is public and repeated. Nobody checks a gift against a threshold.
What is a coming-of-age credo?
A coming-of-age credo is a personal statement of belief that a UU teenager writes at the end of a year-long program, usually with an adult mentor, and then reads aloud to the congregation. It is the closest thing the movement has to confirmation, with one difference that changes everything: the young person writes their own text, and nobody grades the conclusions.
What are the main criticisms of Unitarian Universalism?
The most serious criticisms of Unitarian Universalism come from inside it. The first is theological thinness: that a religion which declines to say what it holds ends up preaching current politics in a liturgical accent. James Luther Adams, whose essays remain the movement's main twentieth-century theological reference point, spent his career arguing that liberal religion had gone sentimental and had no working account of evil, and that charge has been inherited rather than answered. The second is homogeneity. UU congregations are overwhelmingly white, well educated and politically left, and the association's own Commission on Institutional Change said so plainly in its 2020 report Widening the Circle of Concern, which described white supremacy culture operating inside the association's structures. The third is borrowing. UU worship has taken practices from Native American, African diasporic and Asian traditions with varying care, and the misappropriation argument has run inside the movement for decades; the ethics of that borrowing are worked through in Smudging and Space Clearing: Practices, Ethics and Alternatives. The fourth is numerical decline, which the association's own annual certification figures record and which its leadership discusses in public.
From outside, the standing objection is coherence: whether a body held together by covenant alone can transmit anything across generations, or whether it settles into a political association with hymns and a building fund. Unitarian Universalists answer that covenant is an old religious form rather than an evasion of one, and that Judaism and New England Congregationalism both built durable communities on relationship prior to assent. The honest position is that the question remains open. Retention of children raised in UU congregations has worried the movement for decades, and religious education enrollment in the association's certification returns has fallen faster than adult membership. The bitterest internal episode remains the Black Empowerment Controversy of the late 1960s, when the association voted funding for a Black-led body, then reduced and ended it at successive General Assemblies. Supporters of the funding walked out of the 1969 General Assembly in Boston. Nobody inside the movement treats that as settled history.
Are UU congregations politically diverse?
Barely. The Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study files them under Unitarians and other liberal faiths, a category in which a large majority of respondents identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, placing it among the most Democratic-leaning groupings Pew reports. Conservative and libertarian members frequently say they keep quiet about it. Critics within the movement, several of them ministers, argue that a free and responsible search runs poorly in a room where one political conclusion is assumed. Defenders answer that the covenant carries ethical commitments with political consequences.
What was the Black Empowerment Controversy?
It was the conflict between 1967 and 1970 over UUA funding for Black-led organizing. After the urban uprisings of the mid-1960s, Black Unitarian Universalists organized and the association voted substantial funding for a Black Affairs Council, then cut and finally ended it at later General Assemblies amid procedural fights and a walkout. Many Black members left the movement. The association has since apologized, and the wound reopens regularly.
Is Unitarian Universalism growing or shrinking?
Shrinking, on the association's own congregational certification numbers, which have declined across the past decade after a long plateau, with religious education enrollment falling faster than adult membership. Closures and mergers of small congregations have become routine business at the regional level. Some congregations grew after moving services online, and the movement keeps attracting adults leaving conservative religion, but neither trend has offset the losses.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are Unitarian Universalists Christian?
Some are; the movement as a whole is not. Unitarian Universalism grew out of Christianity and kept its Sunday morning shape, its hymn tunes and its ordained ministry, but most congregations do not confess Jesus as God and most members do not describe themselves as Christian. The body now called the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship dates to 1945, when Unitarian Christians organized to keep an explicitly Christian voice inside a denomination moving away from one; it took its present name after the 1961 merger. A minority of congregations remain explicitly Christian, keeping communion and the liturgical year. Asking whether a particular congregation is Christian is a far better question than asking it about the movement.
Do Unitarian Universalists believe in God?
Many do and many do not, and the association takes no position on the matter. Theist, deist, pantheist, agnostic and atheist members hold identical standing, vote on the same motions and serve on the same boards. Worship language reflects the split: some ministers pray to God directly, others speak of the spirit of life or the mystery, and congregations often negotiate that vocabulary explicitly and at length. The word appears in the historical Sources, which name Jewish and Christian teachings, without being required of any member.
Can an atheist be a Unitarian Universalist?
Yes, without qualification, and atheists have been prominent in the movement for over a century. Religious humanism developed largely inside Unitarian congregations in the 1910s and 1920s, and many of the signers of the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933 were Unitarian ministers. Atheists serve as Unitarian Universalist ministers, congregational presidents and religious education directors, and nobody regards this as anomalous. Humanism has generally been the largest single self-description in the association's own surveys of its members.
Do UU churches perform baptisms, weddings and funerals?
Yes, all three, with wide local variation. Most congregations offer a child dedication rather than a baptism, a naming and welcoming ceremony that commits the adults rather than the infant, though Christian-identified congregations do baptize. Unitarian Universalist ministers are legally authorized to officiate at weddings, and they performed ceremonies for same-sex couples for decades before civil marriage was available anywhere in the country. Memorial services are common and are usually built around remembrance rather than any doctrine of the afterlife.
Are Unitarian Universalist ministers ordained and formally trained?
Yes, and the process is long. Preliminary fellowship generally requires a Master of Divinity, typically three years of graduate study, plus a supervised congregational internship, a unit of clinical pastoral education usually served in a hospital, a career assessment and an interview before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. Two seminaries are identified with the movement, Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago and Starr King School for the Ministry in the San Francisco Bay Area, and candidates also train at Harvard Divinity School and at other schools with no UU connection at all. Ordination itself is conferred by a congregation.
How many Unitarian Universalists are there, and where are the congregations?
The UUA reports roughly a thousand member congregations in the United States and certified adult membership somewhat under a hundred and fifty thousand, a figure that has drifted downward across the past decade. Congregations cluster in New England, the upper Midwest, the Pacific coast and college towns, and many across the South and Mountain West are small enough to be lay-led. Canadian congregations are served by the Canadian Unitarian Council, which took over most of that work from the UUA in 2002.
Is Unitarian Universalism the same as the Unitarian churches in Britain or Transylvania?
No. They are related bodies rather than branches of the UUA, and each governs itself. The Transylvanian church, founded in the sixteenth century and still worshipping in Hungarian, is Christian and unitarian in the strict theological sense, and it now carries the name Hungarian Unitarian Church following a reunification with Unitarians in Hungary. Its services would surprise an American visitor. Britain's General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches is closer in temper to the UUA and much smaller. The Unitarian Union of North East India, founded in the Khasi Hills by Hajom Kissor Singh in 1887, is another independent body.
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