Has anyone read or heard a UU response to Leo here: https://www.romereports.com/en/2025/11/28/pope-leo-xiv-warns-against-the-resurgence-of-old-heresies-there-is-a-new-arianism/
But there is also another challenge, which we might call a “new Arianism,” present in today’s culture and sometimes even among believers. This occurs when Jesus is admired on a merely human level, perhaps even with religious respect, yet not truly regarded as the living and true God among us.
I could go through UU History and find many responses but I'm curious if any contemporaries have answered, or if they even feel it necessary, and have said so. I used to attend a UU society where the Minister told us we were Arians but I'm not sure how relevant the rest of the congregation found that comment. It may have seemed like UU trivia.
The Pope is Christian, Roman Catholic to be specific, and has little to no bearing on Unitarian Universalism which is truly neither (with roots of formerly being Christian).
Exactly. While I think it's important for UUs to listen to and carefully consider the wisdom offered by faith leaders such as the Pope, the Pope holds no greater position than a random minister, rabbi, imam, or what have you. When their words are very clearly intended for "internal consumption", meaning for other trinitarian Christians, the UU response should be respectful silence - this isn't our arena, we have no business weighing in here.
UUs are free to see Jesus as a god walking among men, or as a friendly neighborhood faith leader who flipped some tables.
Agreed. We simply don't need to comment on a statement that was not intended for us in the first place. It's for other trinitarian Christians and, more specifically, for Roman Catholics. We don't need to comment on their internal debates, at least not when it doesn't have a social justice component (which I would say this does not).
You say roots of formerly being Christian. Former roots an interesting formulation and I'm curious for you to expand.
Not “former roots” as in that is no longer part of our roots as UU, rather “roots of formerly being Christian” as in the Unitarian Universalist religion is no longer a sub sect of Christianity.
We have Christians who are members of our congregations and we do hold Christian teachings as holding wisdom, and we do not hold that wisdom as having a higher value than wisdom we receive from the Torah or Humanist teachings or Earth centered practices.
That’s part of our being a Covenantal religion rather than a Creedal one. We do not teach nor enforce a specific creed, we come together in a series of agreements (covenants) on how we exist in community with each other.
You describe a very Christian concept of a New Being (Tillich wrote the book of that Title) and an idea described by Paul: 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”
Christianity is a constant upheaval of digging out roots and making what was, former. The Christianity in UUism a difficult thing to shuck away.
One reason I suspect UUs avoided responding to Leo. We would be holding a mirror to ourselves and not like what we see.
As I had stated, we aren’t shucking it away. We understand and teach about our roots. We understand and teach about the wisdom found in the Christian bible.
Unitarian Universalism just isn’t a Christian religion anymore. We have humanists as members and friends in our congregations, we have Jews as members and friends in our congregations, pagans, Buddhists, and anyone who is willing to understand and live by our shared values (Justice, Equity, Transformation, Pluralism, Interdependence, and Generosity all centered on Love).
We don’t respond to the Pope because the Pope has no authority over us. The papacy didn’t have any authority over the Unitarians or Universalists that came before, either. Just as the Patriarchs in various locations don’t.
If you choose to be Christian, that is entirely up to you and is entirely alright. What you don’t get to choose is to try to force others to be such.
I don't call myself a Christian. I don't attend a Church professing Christianity.
I don't claim belief or values.
I don't feel spirit.
I just try to describe paths and directions, and where they may lead.
We definitely claim Arius as a Unitarian ancestor, though there isn’t necessarily continuity from him to us. I love this framing from Rev. Connie Simon:
“Arius was a religious leader born in Libya, Northern Africa, who argued against the trinitarian view that God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were one: ‘If the Father begat the Son, then he who was begotten had a beginning in existence, and from this it follows there was a time when the Son was not.’ He was declared a heretic at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE….While some white UUs would prefer to think of Arius as European, the fact is that this Black ancestor has shaped our faith for nearly two thousand years.”
source
It might help to remember that our Unitarian roots are most evident in the (then called) anti-Trinitarian thinkers who emerged during the radical reformation of the 16th century. There are other Unitarians who have shaped us, but that’s where our identity was first expressed (and persecuted) widely.
Calling Arius black is about as accurate as calling him European.
Yes, it does help. See my comment with a link to Fritchman's Unitarian Pioneers above somewhere. Thankyou
I personally don’t feel the need to justify my theological beliefs to the Pope or his followers, as someone who the church considers to be an abomination on par with the nuclear bomb (per Pope Francis).
Then consider presenting your justification as a dry run before a one-on-one before God.
Or, as a UU Minister said, "Don't tell me what you believe. Show me your check-book and I'll tell you what you believe".
That Minister's God my want access to our Quicken before we've prepared our PowerPoints on belief.
Justification for what? For not believing in the divinity of Jesus? UUs are united by our shared values, not by beliefs or lack thereof. There's really nothing to be said when our ministers don't speak beliefs on behalf of congregants. I'm curious why you so desperately want a contemporary UU response when arguing for or against the divinity of Jesus is no longer a relevant matter to UUism.
I wouldn't say I want a response. I don't think Leo was talking to UUs in particular either. I doubt we are on his radar. I'm curious if any Minister's picked up Leo's comments and fashioned a Sermon from them. I think that would be worthwhile.
When I looked at the revised principles, my first thought was this looked like something drafted by Methodists. It is a deeply Christian set of values. The earlier drafts were Christian too but the presentation on the latest version seemed more Evangelical to me than before.
I can do a further post on this topic, but for starters, there is no evidence Love is at the center of much of anything. Certainly Love doesn't dominate in my experience. Love is often defeated. It takes an act of deep Faith to profess Love as the center and I think when UUs do so, they are just restating God in a way more accessible to those uncomfortable with God talk.
As for Leo, like Francis, their focus was and will be on the growing African Church Certainly not on Humanists or Liberal Christians.
I wonder if Leo chose an African theologian for the debate between Orthodoxy and his construct of Neo Arianism, and what I gather will be an admonition not to go the way of the west.
I'm not certain UUs have anything to offer here, or if they want to engage Leo, and perhaps just will stand down, or more accurately, why even stand up to respond to Leo.
I'd much rather see us make sense of that graphic with Love in the middle for people daily confronted with cruelty. I'm puzzled because humanity's propensity for cruelty has hard evidence. Love, interconnection, justice, liberation; they seem like weak options for the oppressed. Why should they bother with such a view?
The values/love at the center aren’t meant as a description of life on earth today but as an aspirational set of values to strive for.
That's if you believe in yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Einsteins words to Besso's Family stick in my head, For us believing physicists, the separation between past, present and future has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.
The drafters of the principles may have intended a history and a future, but they didn't write that. Our reality is in the moment. When Jesus said he was the alpha and the omega, he may have been more in tune with modern science than we realize.
I would definitely be interested in what you have to say about Love in the middle.
Putting Love at our center requires Faith. That's my short thought.
A longer take is knowing that Universalist Churches often displayed 1 Corinthians 13:13 in their sanctuaries.
I could still see the words behind the old pulpit of the Elgin Universalist Church. The Pentecostals kept those words after they bought the building.
Standing on the Side of Love was an unfortunate take on Love because Love is often hard to find, much less stand beside. Read all of 1 Corinthians 13, and you'll find Paul writing ...and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
UU Principles soaked with Christianity, and demand faith in a Love that transcends faith itself.
Love's not something to stand beside; it's bigger than us, at the center, and we are over in the margins. I hope (my faith waivers a lot) it is standing on my side, though.
I don’t believe in god personally. I don’t think I’m going to have to justify my own metaphysical theological beliefs to anyone after death. Or even before it, honestly.
Our lives have consequences, and we are responsible for them. I see that daily in my life. Whether I believe God imposes that on me or it's just there, I'm not certain.
The Russian movie Pop (The Priest) about a Russian Orthodox priest, Father Alexander, during the German occupation of Belarus, has a scene where Alexander tells someone (I forget whom) to live their life so God doesn't feel sullied when God embraces them.
I'd stumble over any justification, so why bother? I'll be happy to keep my dirt to a minimum, regardless.
BTW, the movie did gloss over some facts about Father Alexander. We don't have the benefit of directors favorably depicting our stories.
Well, Arius believed in the Trinity, the heresy was that God and Jesus were not identical. His description sound more like Socianism, which is unitarian. But why would we feel it necessary to argue with the Pope, or anyone, about the nature of Jesus or any other doctrine?
on the other hand, the article reports he also said "Here too we learn an important lesson: the Christian faith must always be expressed in the languages and categories of the culture in which we live, just as the Fathers did at Nicaea and in the other Councils. At the same time, we must distinguish the essence of the faith from the historical formulas that express it — formulas that are always partial and provisional and can change as doctrine is more deeply understood." which sounds to me a whole lot like "Revelation is not sealed" which is quintessentially our outlook.
All religion is metaphor, and metaphor varies with time, place, culture. Seems to me what is important is whether the metaphor, of a living God among us, the interdependent web, or whatever, results in our better understanding and practice.
FYI, the idea of "Revelation is not sealed" or similar has always been part of Catholic doctrine and in some ways distinguishes Catholic doctrine from the "sola scriptura" doctrine of Protestantism.
Seems to me that sola scriptura is not the opposite of revelation not being sealed. That was based on differences with Catholicism on whether Church authority was in addition to individual interpretation of the Bible, not whether new understanding was possible.
Church authority is clearly important in the Catholic tradition and is used to determine what is new revelation. But the idea of new revelation is not new.
Re: But why would we feel it necessary to argue with the Pope, or anyone, about the nature of Jesus or any other doctrine?
Responding to Leo (and we'd need not argue) would have us define what is Unitarian Universalism. Choosing not to respond asks the question UU Theologians may not know the answers. It could be they think the dialogue with Leo not worth it, or relevant to our moment, but it's a question I'll be asking some clergy.
I think it has been more than a few centuries since we defined ourselves against Catholicism, and a couple since we differentiated ourselves from several varieties of Protestantism. And more than a century since we abandoned doctrine altogether. I'm not a UU Christian, so I don't know whether they would find it helpful to have anything about this clarified, but I wouldn't expect a UU minister to respond to this idea - we decided long ago that Jesus as a living God among us was not our metaphor.
My response to this, is while I appreciate the theological history, especially on the Unitarian side that makes this a relevant discussion for some UUs, as a religious but not spiritual UU, I think Leo the XIV would have different criticisms for me personally. As he would for my pagan, Hindu, and Jewish UU friends. What I love about UU, is that blending two forms of deep heresy, universal salvation, and Unitarian's rejection of the trinity/literal divinity of Jesus, gives folk like me a lot of room to interact with theology of liberation in UU spaces. The pope, likely being more concerned with salvation on the hereafter, than liberation in the here and now, would do well to address his comments in those terms, should he choose to enter a conversation with UUs specifically.
I would not dismiss Leo as one who only cares in the hereafter. He has been one of the most important vocal opponents to the treatment of immigrants in the US and other places in the world.
I'm pretty sure Leo is just wrong, and this belief has existed since the time of Jesus. I wouldn't consider myself an Arian, because I'm not even certain Jesus existed. I think it's possible, but that there isn't enough evidence to accept it as truth.
Arianism an ancient Christian tradition. I'd say it is dominate today among US Christians although few would use label
Most US Christians seems to be heavy believers in the Trinity so I'm not sure what you mean by that.
I mean the What Would Jesus Do? sort of US Protestant Christianity. Jesus as a teacher or Jesus as migrant as I've seen past few days. The engagement is with Jesus on a human level as Leo puts it. A greatly admired human and the greatest teacher ever, but his is a guy. Jesus's divinity not mentioned.
Most US Christians don't believe he was "just a guy". Maybe most Unitarian Universalists do.
My experience is that many US Christians speak about Jesus personally. Jesus enters your life and solves your problems: family, financial, jobs, and personal (or guide social justice activism), just as a close friend might do. Their Jesus would walk onto the Big Box Church stage in casual clothes and a sweater and pick up a mike just like the Pastor.
I visit a Chaldean Church, Armenian Orthodox, or Coptic (I'm close to all three) and see an abstract Jesus. American theology is thin, and many Americans, if not most, prefer Jesus as therapist and social worker, not as logos experienced through a complex liturgy and theology (hours of Mass in Aramaic as a friend of mine recently sat through at a colleague's funeral).
Yes, but I was specifically speaking to how he defined "new Arianism" as Jesus being a regular human. That's not quite what Arius taught.
Your right on Arius and that might be one path on a response to Leo.
Fichman began his book Men of liberty; ten Unitarian Pioneers with Servetus https://archive.org/details/menoflibertytenu0000frit/page/n7/mode/2up . Maybe the path back from Servetus doesn't reach back to Arius, and Unitarianism starts in the 16th Century, but all of the recent retrospection on the Council of Nicaea has me thinking the questions raised at Nicaea are enduring and began very early in the history of Christianity. They are still ongoing. Leo certainly believes the debate on Christ's nature is ongoing, and as a tradition calling itself Unitarian, it seems we should be engaged.
I have been told by a UU Minister she wished we had scrapped Unitarian as our Label. She preferred Liberal Church. That was popular name for some Unitarian Churches in the early 20th Century. She felt it a better description of what we did.
The Council of Nicea is when the Church ceased to be about Jesus and became an imperial religion. Arius was right.
Incidentally, legend says that St Nicholas was so offended by Arius’s speech that he got up and smacked him across the face. That’s right: our spiritual forbear got dope-slapped by Santa Claus. We have never been able to catch a break.
Side Note: Pope Leo recently met with Orthodox leader Patriarch Bartholomew and other Christian leaders at Nicaea, to commemorate the council held there 1700 years ago, which produced the Nicene Creed. That council had been in response to Arianism, which lost the vote by a wide margin. So Arianism was likely on his mind.
But Arian Christianity continued until the 700s or so and there is an exquisite Arian Baptistery in Ravenna Italy from about the year 500. Eventually the Ariani were absorbed into the Catholic Church.
https://www.turismo.ra.it/en/culture-and-history/religious-buildings/arian-baptistery/
As someone who is not remotely Christian beyond the cultural stuff prevalent in the USA, I struggle to wonder why I would care. Like, it sure is an opinion someone can hold; the in-theory Protestant Christians heading up megachurches who hold UUs are literal messengers of the devil are of more immediate concern, for eminently practical reasons.
A tangent, but would you boot out UU satanists?
As soon as you define "satanist".
Members who call themselves UU Satanists.
And again, I ask, what are these satanists doing? The word gets used for several mutually contradictory groups. I wasn't asking to be cute.
If we are speaking of members of the Satanic Temple, "To encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits" is their mission statement, which is more than compatible with the UU Principles. They're basically agnostic and atheist humanists who use the name for publicity and shock value, but in actual moral stance are very similar.
LeVey-style Satanism? Second verse, more or less the same as the first although LeVey's Satanism isn't explicitly humanist; there it is down to the individual's interpretation of LeVey's philosophy. Still, not explicitly incompatible with UU either.
The Satanists of bad movies and fundamentalist Christian-fueled panics? They don't actually exist in any organized sense, but even if they did, human sacrifice and the like could certainly be said to violate the Principles, as well as the law.
I don't know what Satanists do. I don't know LeVey.
You mentioned Big Box Churches and that's what caught my interest. My UU Minister would get referrals from the Pastor of a Big Box Church asking her to meet with a member really troubled with damnation. The Pastor would tell us one of his members was in a deep funk about hell, and the Pastor would respond they should learn a little about Universalism. We had pretty good relationships with the Big Box types. There often affiliated with some Reformed denominations and are our theological cousins.
The Satanic comes with Christianity. Dante couldn't have written the Inferno without Christianity. Satanism embedded in the Christian story. Think Donald Pleasence playing the devil in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and telling Jesus to jump off a cliff. When one is a Christian, the Devil comes along in the package, and guidance on how to respond to those voices part of faith; Christian or Humanist (or Satanic for that matter).
I don't know if UUs still do Building your own Theology as part of New UU programs. One of the downsides of that is people build some eccentric theologies. I've never seen those constructs tested for compliance with any supposed UU Values, or variations on the principles. If UUs draw on Satan, I'd just say there are plenty of Christians who beat you to it, and people found reading the Inferno far more popular than reading about Paradise. Satanism is in good Christian company.
You mention legality. One of my first encounters with UU was draft counseling including evasion back in the 60s. Later, as I looked into the history of our Church, I learned of abortion counseling back when it was illegal. It was offered to anyone in community with procedures to keep identities anonymous. UU's, at least some, have been prepared for Civil Disobedience.
The lines are not strictly legal vs illegal. I mentioned to some members of my Congregation that yes, we are a welcoming church as we tell ourselves every Sunday, but we will require some people on the property only if they have an escort. Serving on a Board can be an education on our responsibility for a safe sanctuary. The Minister gets informed someone made troubling comments and then Minister and Board need to act. I've never seen Principles as reference either. The Seminaries and UUA offered pretty good training on safety.
Why they always have enemies?? 😂😂😂