At home with the Unitarians

Just along the square from the building where I now have my work-base, there is Newcastle's Unitarian Church. I've met Unitarians -I think there's a relatively regular reader of this blog who is Unitarian- and I'm interested in the way that it seems to show that faith in rationality can be so culturally particular: rationality isn't culturally transcendent, it turns out. So Theo Hobson's encounter with USAmerican Unitarianism is intriguing (Theo is no cheer-leader for orthodox church life). Not least because he gives some background of the way that Unitarianism influenced the founding and consolidating of the USA.

What we're left with seems ambiguous, though.

I came away with the feeling that it was very harmless. And maybe that's the key difference from Christian worship. In Christian worship there's a certain sense of risk: we risk affirming an idea of truth that is somewhat at odds with natural wisdom, inner peace. And we risk affirming a tradition that has an aura of violence – the violent rhetoric about the Lord of hosts and so forth – and the references to death and blood in the sombre ritual. There's a sense of potential danger in Christianity – this religion has been used for violent ends, and people have suffered martyrdom for it too. There's a disturbing absoluteness. Unitarianism carries about as much sense of dangerous otherness as a tots' singalong at the local library.

However, the sense of worship being dangerous, in some way, is intriguing, don't you think? I certainly relate to the sense at some occasions of corporate worship that we were not dealing with a tame God, and the awe of that was not necessarily the anxiety-funk sort of thing that would be dehumanising but somehow is about awakening us to Otherness which lies, I would argue, at the heart of learning love. An ennobling awe; an inside-outing awe; an awe that calls us beyond who we were before...

Check it out: At home with the Unitarians | Theo Hobson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk