I grew up in a UU churxh ans both my parents were air force. I guess it could be seen as slightly different than active combat since they were c17 pilots. However they were both deployed in desert storm when flying c130s.
I mean... we have as complicated a history as any other faith. We dabbled in missionary imperialism and also helped dismantle it. We advocated for peace or pacifism and also for necessary or just military intervention. There are veterans and some active service members in every congregation I've ever been in and i've seen the chosen faith help them to challenge, clarify, and contextualize their service in a spiritual framework. I sincerely believe Unitarian Universalism is a religious community for everyone and anyone who wants it. It's also a human community with all the flaws and pitfalls that come with that. But for all the stuff I've seen in UU I've never seen a service member or veteran judged, mistreated, or turned off or away.
Well, you haven’t seen enough UU churches then. During the Vietnam Conflict, my congregation, as an extension of their opposition to the war, refused to host memorial services for those in the war. Needless to say, it’s a decision that caused profoundly deep wounds in our faith community that persisted decades.
I'm so sorry to hear that. I hope they've undertaken the hard work of reconciliation and atonement. And learned lessons from the zealousness of that era.
Unitarians have never been a Pacifist Church. Their degree of belligerency has varied over time and conflicts, but it's never been Pacifist or even close. Chris Cohen and William Perry are recent Sec Defs and both were UUs if I recall right. Perry helped found the Church in Palo Alto https://www.uupetaluma.org/services/william-perry-founder-of-the-william-j-perry-project/
I think when discussing anything about UUs, it's worth keeping in mind that apart from our shared values, there is no such thing as "the UU stance." In fact, the lack of such a thing is one of our values.
I think from Vietnam onwards it's been more common to see criticism of U.S. use of the military (which is true of non-UUs as well). However, its less common to see that manifested as a criticism of the military as an institution, or as criticism of people in the military, rather than criticism of the political decisions guiding its use. There are also pacifist UU critiques of the military, but those are critiques applicable to most militaries, not just that of the U.S. Like with most things, if you started polling individual UUs, you'd get very different answers,
This was true even in our ancestral denominations. Among the Unitarians around the Civil War you had everything from avowed pacifists to Unitarian ministers financing slave rebellions to Unitarians becoming very prominent Union officers during the war. The Universalists were even messier. All of those are part of our history and have descendant beliefs in our congregations up to the present day (except probably the universalists who backed the Confederacy/slavery; that's not really reconcilable with where we are as a faith today).
I'm a UU and retired Air Force officer. I was the flaming liberal in every unit I was in for my entire career. I found several others throughout my career, but more often they were UU's but just didn't know it.
I've been asked "how can you be a UU and in the military" many times. After much thought, I've always answered that question with "would you rather a military without any UU's?" I believe that our military would be far better with more UU's, with people that will seek non-violent solutions and will fight to uphold the law of armed conflict.
There were times in my career where I had to push back due to my believes, and since my response was always grounded in the law, it worked. Now, I was in a non-combat role so this didn't happen often, and I expect that my experience would have been very different if I was a combatant.
I do wish there were more UU military chaplains, and I think in my career I only heard rumors of a single UU chaplain in the military. I believe that there are a lot of atheists and agnostics in the military that would greatly benefit from having an active community to be a part of.
I will end with a story from a General Assembly many many years ago. I was talking to a woman and I mentioned that I was military, and she didn't believe me. So I showed her my identification, and she sneered at me and turned her back on me. She was convinced that no UU should be in the military, but when I asked her if the military would be better with UU's, that question stopped her in her tracks. She didn't talk to me the rest of the week, but it did make it clear that no everyone in the UU is welcoming to us in the military. Even with that, I think we need more UU's in the military, not less.
I’m a veteran Army officer and my husband is still in. We’re currently stationed in a pretty blue area around several military bases, so our UU has a large and thriving population (and a former veteran minister).
Our last duty station, where we initially discovered UU, was in a very red area and was small with a lot less to offer.
What kind of experiences did you have attending so many different UUs? I was raised Catholic, and found the familiarity of the Catholic mass at different churches reassuring. I appreciate the individuality of different UUs, but am dreading our next move and a potentially less vibrant UU.
Good question. It really varied. At Eglin, the UU church was right outside the gates yet was mostly negative on the military. At Kirtland, the church was wonderful and very welcoming. I was lucky to be stationed at Hanscom near Boston, which was full of many UU churches. I always felt welcomed.
Personally, I left my uniform at the door and was just a member. Unless you asked, you wouldn't know I was military. However, there were always a few that disliked the military. For the most part, 90% of the folks were always welcoming.
I also was lucky to run into long time UU's that were veterans themselves. I was surprised to see so many Vietnam vets in church.
Overall, it varied as every church is unique, but I was always welcomed and had a good time.
I don't think "we should have more UUs in the military" isn't the winning argument you think it is.
While I get what you're trying to convey, it completely ignores the very real impacts of the US Military both at home and abroad. It basically comes down to "I did it and I didn't have any problems so neither should you".
IMHO the military wouldn't be helped with more UUs... It would ultimately stop being a military if it was a majority UUs who held firm to convictions.
And I do think being in the military is antithetical to being a UU. You can't advocate the inherent worth and dignity of all people when you're drone-striking a wedding, bombing schools, destroying people and community. It's oil and water, and requires extreme mental gymnastics to make the two jive.
You are welcomed to believe different. I was taught, as was all military officers that combat should be the last option used. We should always use diplomacy, economics, and other soft power tools before drone strikes. That is what is taught at War College, and that lines up very well with my beliefs.
Now, the reality is that we jump to violence too fast without trying other solutions first. My belief is that more UU's would get the conversation started on what other non-violent options are there that we should try first. I also believe that UU's would be more likely to hold the line on illegal orders because of their beliefs vs others.
Given that there are so few UUs in the military I don't know if my hyptothesis would be correct or not.
I’m retired Navy, and my UU congregation has quite a few veterans. The Navy has some UU chaplains, I know this for a fact, one was at NAS Oceana then on one of the carriers, awesome lady. I’m raising my children to be protectors, and not aggressors. I have a lot of guilt of the events that took place during my time in service, but things in the past cannot be changed and we must move on, learn from them and not repeat them. I would encourage my children to a life of service in something like NOAA or peace corps, but I don’t regret my service, I got me out of a bad situation and gave me opportunities I would not have otherwise had.
Thank you for your service and for writing this so eloquently. Reading this reminded me of my dad, who has a similar story. Being raised by a proud veteran who is now generally anti-war was a really great lesson in the nuance of what the military means to so many Americans. I think that lesson made me a stronger UU overall.
My oldest is in the US Navy. He doesn’t attend services anymore but, when he did, he found a significant percent of congregants were retired Navy or higher ranking active duty officers. He found those congregations far more political than his home church.
Here is the UU World on UU Secretaries of Defense. Rev. John A. Buehrens wrote,
I once went to call on the late Elliot Richardson, a staunch birthright Unitarian, who had served briefly as Secretary of Defense. It was shortly after William Perry, another UU, resigned that office, and President Clinton had named as his successor William Cohen, still another UU. So I asked Richardson why, with our relatively small numbers and our liberal values, three Unitarian Universalists in three decades had been placed in charge of the world’s largest military establishment. He replied that our commitment to the use of reason might have something to do with it.
I winced at the word stance when I first read this post but Unitarians have embraced many views on War. Stance may fit the bill for describing the attitudes and the tilt to leading the US Military.
Universalists have a different tradition and one I'm less familiar with although a UU Minister told me they would often have a memorial plaque in the Church for members who died in service. I've never seen that in a Unitarian Church.
I’m a service member and there are a handful of veterans I have met in the congregation we joined. This is my first UU experience. I’m sure everyone has their opinions but overall people seem positive about the service members. From my perspective, I respect that people answered a call to serve and likely made sacrifices by doing so, even though their country may have used that service and sacrifice for something negative. Better to hold the elected officials to account for how they use the military than to reject the people who were willing to serve. That’s just my view though, I’m sure there are pacifists in UU who oppose the military’s very existence, and it is their right to hold that belief.
I'm a UU and a veteran. It has never been an issue at my church, even though when I was a teen they had a class on how to declare yourself a Conscientious Objector. There are even a number of UU chaplains in the US military.
UUA statements are filled with stances on conflicts the US has found itself involved in. I think the most recent general one would be from 2010 and it can be found here https://www.uua.org/action/statements/creating-peace
Few of these statements would be stances on the US Military.
I've been attending or a member of UU Churches since the anti war days of the 60s. I was astonished a few years ago to see a Ukrainian flag draped across the pulpit of the society I currently attend. It stayed there a good year. That was the first time I had ever seen any nation's flag in a UU sanctuary.
Stephen Fritchman's "Heretic: A Partisan Autobiography" has a chapter explaining to the 1960's generation why he pivoted from vehemently pro-war 1941 to 1945, to anti-war in 1946 into the 1960s. He omitted comments on the years of the Stalin-Hitler pact too when he was briefly anti-war although he had some unkind words about Finland in the Russo-Finnish war if I recall him correctly.
Unitarians do not have a Pacifist tradition although you'll find pacifists among our Churches. I can't find the exact quote but I believe Jenkin Lloyd Jones said of the American Civil War that it was the most noble of causes won in the most horrible of ways, or something along those lines. That's been an enduring tension among Unitarians, but not so much Universalists, and IMO more bitter than anything we've seen lately.
My congregation has a number of retired veterans, including some who saw battle action. My congregation has never taken a stance on "the US military," which seems an overly broad thing to take a stance on.
I don’t think we have a unified stance. But to combat the simplistic narrative, I will point out that I have many Afghan friends who look back on the US occupation years as a golden age of freedom and female empowerment.
Which wouldn’t have been necessary if we hadn’t armed Jihadist groups in the 80s which led to the power vacuum that led to all this shit to begin with.
Afghanistan, like many countries in that area and elsewhere (Saudi Arabia, for instance) was not a hotbed of women's rights before the Taliban. Make the argument that neither we, the Russians, the British, nor the Germans before them should have been intervening in other peoples' civil wars, but Afghanistan has a long and complex history, and the current situation is an outgrowth of that.
What area? Do you mean the Middle East or Central Asia? And regardless, it’s been proven time and time again, military involvement just causes recruitment booms for extremist groups. It’s terrorism math, D. Rumsfeld said it back in 2003.
Both. And yes, people do react badly to being invaded, a principle that was recognized long before Rumsfeld. Nevertheless, that doesn't address the fact that the Taliban or the mujahedeen before them didn't invent the gender power structure there.
It’s a bold inference that the Soviet backed government could have survived for 40 years. Including the end of the Cold War and the Chechen war. Or that democracy would replace it.
Pakistan was also supporting the mujaheddin, probably much more so that America. Also China, Iran, Arab states and UK.
I think it’s very “optimistic” for you to think that the Soviet backed government would still be in power despite having that list of enemies.
If America could not crush the mujaheddin and taliban then why do you think that the USSR would have been able to?
You act as if our interference changed anything other than adding to the death toll. We put millions of arms into Afghanistan, without that it would at least be not as politically unstable.
You don’t have the slightest evidence that a place which has been whipsawing between communism and jihadism for a full century, surrounded by mutually hostile neighbours would be “stable” if a single meddling country stopped meddling. It almost seems like an article of faith for you that everything that happens in the world is directly controlled by the USA.
Indeed. And it goes back much more than a century, and as a crossroads between Russia/the Mongols, India, China, and the Middle East, has been fought over (but never really conquered or really stable) for millennia.
Rev. John Haynes Holmes during WW 1.
Julia Ward Howe's post Civil War Mother's Day for Peace.
And I would say the debate of the nuance of pacifism versus non-violent resistance or even intervention was pretty majorly a part of Article 2 revision at GA a couple years back.
As I said we've been and are a lot of things. I'm personally not a pacifist but I've listened to a lot of UU's for whom it's a core religious principle.
As you can see from the responses, there is no UU "stance" on the military. That is because uUism does have a stance on individual conscience - we are each responsible for discerning what is the best course in a given situation based on the knowledge and wisdom available to us 9and to continually increase our knowledge and understanding.)
i served in the US military. most of my time was spent on diplomatic and foreign aid. i know we've done a lot of terrible times, but while i was in i saw the best of the military and the good we can do is incredibly inspiring and restores a lot of faith in humanity (even if it is just to 'spread soft influence')
I think its a really nuanced conversation that a lot of uus wrestle with fairly well. Lots of vets in my congregation. I support veterans with all that I have to give, because people I love served. Doesn't mean I have to support the military in how they enticed those people into service, nor can I turn a blind eye to how our country's actions impact other countries.
We haven’t had a justified war in 80 years and every time we go somewhere we end up making the situation worse and it bites us in the ass ten or so years later without fail.
UU enthusiasm for Ukraine's resistance to Russia's invasion surprised me. It's a meat grinder of a War defending independence of a land few UUs would have joined in solidarity at a Captive Nations day parade 30 years ago
There is no one UU stance on anything really, at least not one that could be boiled down to “xyz institution is good” or “bad”. We have shared values which include the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings including those we disagree with and those we believe hold harmful viewpoints or do harmful things. In a given congregation you will probably have as many stances on something as you do people.
At my church we recently celebrated Veteran’s Day by honoring all the veterans in the congregation with a slideshow and the sermon was given by one of our members who was a veteran about their service.
It’s highly individual. You will find individuals in every congregation of just about any viewpoint you can think of.
I grew up in a UU churxh ans both my parents were air force. I guess it could be seen as slightly different than active combat since they were c17 pilots. However they were both deployed in desert storm when flying c130s.
I mean... we have as complicated a history as any other faith. We dabbled in missionary imperialism and also helped dismantle it. We advocated for peace or pacifism and also for necessary or just military intervention. There are veterans and some active service members in every congregation I've ever been in and i've seen the chosen faith help them to challenge, clarify, and contextualize their service in a spiritual framework. I sincerely believe Unitarian Universalism is a religious community for everyone and anyone who wants it. It's also a human community with all the flaws and pitfalls that come with that. But for all the stuff I've seen in UU I've never seen a service member or veteran judged, mistreated, or turned off or away.
Well, you haven’t seen enough UU churches then. During the Vietnam Conflict, my congregation, as an extension of their opposition to the war, refused to host memorial services for those in the war. Needless to say, it’s a decision that caused profoundly deep wounds in our faith community that persisted decades.
I'm so sorry to hear that. I hope they've undertaken the hard work of reconciliation and atonement. And learned lessons from the zealousness of that era.
Unitarians have never been a Pacifist Church. Their degree of belligerency has varied over time and conflicts, but it's never been Pacifist or even close. Chris Cohen and William Perry are recent Sec Defs and both were UUs if I recall right. Perry helped found the Church in Palo Alto https://www.uupetaluma.org/services/william-perry-founder-of-the-william-j-perry-project/
Bill Cohen, not Chris Cohen
Yep, my mistake. I think there were three other SecDef who were UUs before these two also.
There was a UU Chaplain in Baghdad in spring 2008 when I was there. I never attended any services or had much idea what he did there.
I think when discussing anything about UUs, it's worth keeping in mind that apart from our shared values, there is no such thing as "the UU stance." In fact, the lack of such a thing is one of our values.
I think from Vietnam onwards it's been more common to see criticism of U.S. use of the military (which is true of non-UUs as well). However, its less common to see that manifested as a criticism of the military as an institution, or as criticism of people in the military, rather than criticism of the political decisions guiding its use. There are also pacifist UU critiques of the military, but those are critiques applicable to most militaries, not just that of the U.S. Like with most things, if you started polling individual UUs, you'd get very different answers,
This was true even in our ancestral denominations. Among the Unitarians around the Civil War you had everything from avowed pacifists to Unitarian ministers financing slave rebellions to Unitarians becoming very prominent Union officers during the war. The Universalists were even messier. All of those are part of our history and have descendant beliefs in our congregations up to the present day (except probably the universalists who backed the Confederacy/slavery; that's not really reconcilable with where we are as a faith today).
I'm a UU and retired Air Force officer. I was the flaming liberal in every unit I was in for my entire career. I found several others throughout my career, but more often they were UU's but just didn't know it.
I've been asked "how can you be a UU and in the military" many times. After much thought, I've always answered that question with "would you rather a military without any UU's?" I believe that our military would be far better with more UU's, with people that will seek non-violent solutions and will fight to uphold the law of armed conflict.
There were times in my career where I had to push back due to my believes, and since my response was always grounded in the law, it worked. Now, I was in a non-combat role so this didn't happen often, and I expect that my experience would have been very different if I was a combatant.
I do wish there were more UU military chaplains, and I think in my career I only heard rumors of a single UU chaplain in the military. I believe that there are a lot of atheists and agnostics in the military that would greatly benefit from having an active community to be a part of.
I will end with a story from a General Assembly many many years ago. I was talking to a woman and I mentioned that I was military, and she didn't believe me. So I showed her my identification, and she sneered at me and turned her back on me. She was convinced that no UU should be in the military, but when I asked her if the military would be better with UU's, that question stopped her in her tracks. She didn't talk to me the rest of the week, but it did make it clear that no everyone in the UU is welcoming to us in the military. Even with that, I think we need more UU's in the military, not less.
I’m a veteran Army officer and my husband is still in. We’re currently stationed in a pretty blue area around several military bases, so our UU has a large and thriving population (and a former veteran minister).
Our last duty station, where we initially discovered UU, was in a very red area and was small with a lot less to offer.
What kind of experiences did you have attending so many different UUs? I was raised Catholic, and found the familiarity of the Catholic mass at different churches reassuring. I appreciate the individuality of different UUs, but am dreading our next move and a potentially less vibrant UU.
Good question. It really varied. At Eglin, the UU church was right outside the gates yet was mostly negative on the military. At Kirtland, the church was wonderful and very welcoming. I was lucky to be stationed at Hanscom near Boston, which was full of many UU churches. I always felt welcomed.
Personally, I left my uniform at the door and was just a member. Unless you asked, you wouldn't know I was military. However, there were always a few that disliked the military. For the most part, 90% of the folks were always welcoming.
I also was lucky to run into long time UU's that were veterans themselves. I was surprised to see so many Vietnam vets in church.
Overall, it varied as every church is unique, but I was always welcomed and had a good time.
I don't think "we should have more UUs in the military" isn't the winning argument you think it is.
While I get what you're trying to convey, it completely ignores the very real impacts of the US Military both at home and abroad. It basically comes down to "I did it and I didn't have any problems so neither should you".
IMHO the military wouldn't be helped with more UUs... It would ultimately stop being a military if it was a majority UUs who held firm to convictions.
And I do think being in the military is antithetical to being a UU. You can't advocate the inherent worth and dignity of all people when you're drone-striking a wedding, bombing schools, destroying people and community. It's oil and water, and requires extreme mental gymnastics to make the two jive.
I don't find the argument "it would ultimately stop being a military" convincing.
It would absolutely be helped by people who have thought about their moral convictions and by a strong focus on humanitarian missions.
I would greatly appreciate a military where I wouldn't have to worry about amoral people fantasizing about annexing Greenland or attacking Venezuela.
You are welcomed to believe different. I was taught, as was all military officers that combat should be the last option used. We should always use diplomacy, economics, and other soft power tools before drone strikes. That is what is taught at War College, and that lines up very well with my beliefs.
Now, the reality is that we jump to violence too fast without trying other solutions first. My belief is that more UU's would get the conversation started on what other non-violent options are there that we should try first. I also believe that UU's would be more likely to hold the line on illegal orders because of their beliefs vs others.
Given that there are so few UUs in the military I don't know if my hyptothesis would be correct or not.
I’m retired Navy, and my UU congregation has quite a few veterans. The Navy has some UU chaplains, I know this for a fact, one was at NAS Oceana then on one of the carriers, awesome lady. I’m raising my children to be protectors, and not aggressors. I have a lot of guilt of the events that took place during my time in service, but things in the past cannot be changed and we must move on, learn from them and not repeat them. I would encourage my children to a life of service in something like NOAA or peace corps, but I don’t regret my service, I got me out of a bad situation and gave me opportunities I would not have otherwise had.
Thank you for your service and for writing this so eloquently. Reading this reminded me of my dad, who has a similar story. Being raised by a proud veteran who is now generally anti-war was a really great lesson in the nuance of what the military means to so many Americans. I think that lesson made me a stronger UU overall.
My oldest is in the US Navy. He doesn’t attend services anymore but, when he did, he found a significant percent of congregants were retired Navy or higher ranking active duty officers. He found those congregations far more political than his home church.
Here is the UU World on UU Secretaries of Defense. Rev. John A. Buehrens wrote,
I once went to call on the late Elliot Richardson, a staunch birthright Unitarian, who had served briefly as Secretary of Defense. It was shortly after William Perry, another UU, resigned that office, and President Clinton had named as his successor William Cohen, still another UU. So I asked Richardson why, with our relatively small numbers and our liberal values, three Unitarian Universalists in three decades had been placed in charge of the world’s largest military establishment. He replied that our commitment to the use of reason might have something to do with it.
https://www.uuworld.org/articles/pacifists-pragmatists
I winced at the word stance when I first read this post but Unitarians have embraced many views on War. Stance may fit the bill for describing the attitudes and the tilt to leading the US Military.
Universalists have a different tradition and one I'm less familiar with although a UU Minister told me they would often have a memorial plaque in the Church for members who died in service. I've never seen that in a Unitarian Church.
I’m a service member and there are a handful of veterans I have met in the congregation we joined. This is my first UU experience. I’m sure everyone has their opinions but overall people seem positive about the service members. From my perspective, I respect that people answered a call to serve and likely made sacrifices by doing so, even though their country may have used that service and sacrifice for something negative. Better to hold the elected officials to account for how they use the military than to reject the people who were willing to serve. That’s just my view though, I’m sure there are pacifists in UU who oppose the military’s very existence, and it is their right to hold that belief.
Well said. Thank you for your service and I think your stance on holding elected officials accountable makes a lot of sense with UU values.
I'm a UU and a veteran. It has never been an issue at my church, even though when I was a teen they had a class on how to declare yourself a Conscientious Objector. There are even a number of UU chaplains in the US military.
UUA statements are filled with stances on conflicts the US has found itself involved in. I think the most recent general one would be from 2010 and it can be found here https://www.uua.org/action/statements/creating-peace
Few of these statements would be stances on the US Military.
I've been attending or a member of UU Churches since the anti war days of the 60s. I was astonished a few years ago to see a Ukrainian flag draped across the pulpit of the society I currently attend. It stayed there a good year. That was the first time I had ever seen any nation's flag in a UU sanctuary.
Stephen Fritchman's "Heretic: A Partisan Autobiography" has a chapter explaining to the 1960's generation why he pivoted from vehemently pro-war 1941 to 1945, to anti-war in 1946 into the 1960s. He omitted comments on the years of the Stalin-Hitler pact too when he was briefly anti-war although he had some unkind words about Finland in the Russo-Finnish war if I recall him correctly.
Unitarians do not have a Pacifist tradition although you'll find pacifists among our Churches. I can't find the exact quote but I believe Jenkin Lloyd Jones said of the American Civil War that it was the most noble of causes won in the most horrible of ways, or something along those lines. That's been an enduring tension among Unitarians, but not so much Universalists, and IMO more bitter than anything we've seen lately.
My congregation has a number of retired veterans, including some who saw battle action. My congregation has never taken a stance on "the US military," which seems an overly broad thing to take a stance on.
I don’t think we have a unified stance. But to combat the simplistic narrative, I will point out that I have many Afghan friends who look back on the US occupation years as a golden age of freedom and female empowerment.
Which wouldn’t have been necessary if we hadn’t armed Jihadist groups in the 80s which led to the power vacuum that led to all this shit to begin with.
Afghanistan, like many countries in that area and elsewhere (Saudi Arabia, for instance) was not a hotbed of women's rights before the Taliban. Make the argument that neither we, the Russians, the British, nor the Germans before them should have been intervening in other peoples' civil wars, but Afghanistan has a long and complex history, and the current situation is an outgrowth of that.
What area? Do you mean the Middle East or Central Asia? And regardless, it’s been proven time and time again, military involvement just causes recruitment booms for extremist groups. It’s terrorism math, D. Rumsfeld said it back in 2003.
And, to go back to women's rights
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/womens-rights-afghanistan-history
Both. And yes, people do react badly to being invaded, a principle that was recognized long before Rumsfeld. Nevertheless, that doesn't address the fact that the Taliban or the mujahedeen before them didn't invent the gender power structure there.
Although they are certainly the extreme. And would not be in power if it wasn’t for our meddling.
It’s a bold inference that the Soviet backed government could have survived for 40 years. Including the end of the Cold War and the Chechen war. Or that democracy would replace it.
Pakistan was also supporting the mujaheddin, probably much more so that America. Also China, Iran, Arab states and UK.
I think it’s very “optimistic” for you to think that the Soviet backed government would still be in power despite having that list of enemies.
If America could not crush the mujaheddin and taliban then why do you think that the USSR would have been able to?
You act as if our interference changed anything other than adding to the death toll. We put millions of arms into Afghanistan, without that it would at least be not as politically unstable.
You don’t have the slightest evidence that a place which has been whipsawing between communism and jihadism for a full century, surrounded by mutually hostile neighbours would be “stable” if a single meddling country stopped meddling. It almost seems like an article of faith for you that everything that happens in the world is directly controlled by the USA.
Indeed. And it goes back much more than a century, and as a crossroads between Russia/the Mongols, India, China, and the Middle East, has been fought over (but never really conquered or really stable) for millennia.
We don't live in a present created by having made ideal choices in the past.
Rev. John Haynes Holmes during WW 1. Julia Ward Howe's post Civil War Mother's Day for Peace. And I would say the debate of the nuance of pacifism versus non-violent resistance or even intervention was pretty majorly a part of Article 2 revision at GA a couple years back.
As I said we've been and are a lot of things. I'm personally not a pacifist but I've listened to a lot of UU's for whom it's a core religious principle.
As you can see from the responses, there is no UU "stance" on the military. That is because uUism does have a stance on individual conscience - we are each responsible for discerning what is the best course in a given situation based on the knowledge and wisdom available to us 9and to continually increase our knowledge and understanding.)
i served in the US military. most of my time was spent on diplomatic and foreign aid. i know we've done a lot of terrible times, but while i was in i saw the best of the military and the good we can do is incredibly inspiring and restores a lot of faith in humanity (even if it is just to 'spread soft influence')
I think its a really nuanced conversation that a lot of uus wrestle with fairly well. Lots of vets in my congregation. I support veterans with all that I have to give, because people I love served. Doesn't mean I have to support the military in how they enticed those people into service, nor can I turn a blind eye to how our country's actions impact other countries.
We haven’t had a justified war in 80 years and every time we go somewhere we end up making the situation worse and it bites us in the ass ten or so years later without fail.
UU enthusiasm for Ukraine's resistance to Russia's invasion surprised me. It's a meat grinder of a War defending independence of a land few UUs would have joined in solidarity at a Captive Nations day parade 30 years ago
There is no one UU stance on anything really, at least not one that could be boiled down to “xyz institution is good” or “bad”. We have shared values which include the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings including those we disagree with and those we believe hold harmful viewpoints or do harmful things. In a given congregation you will probably have as many stances on something as you do people.
At my church we recently celebrated Veteran’s Day by honoring all the veterans in the congregation with a slideshow and the sermon was given by one of our members who was a veteran about their service.