For the record, I am very critical of the Christian religion. But my slamming it ends when I am dealing with a Christian who is open-minded enough to befriend and respect me in spite of my hostility towards his religion. Such a person, in turn, earns my respect. I only do battle with bigots among the Christians, not Christians in general. If I hated all Christians, I wouldn’t be a Unitarian Universalist (UU). UUs, even those that reject Christianity, are still Protestants. If not for the Protestant movement in Christianity, UUs as a denomination wouldn’t exist.

I spent one Sunday talking  with a young member of my UU church. She told me about how she visited a Baptist church while wearing a necklace with a rainbow on it, the rainbow being a symbol of gay rights. She was then confronted by the church’s pastor who demanded why she wore such a necklace. The girl then said that she liked other girls, which caused the pastor to give her a lengthy diatribe about how she was headed for hell for being gay.

Later, the UU girl brought to her church a Christian girl who was wearing a cross around her neck. The Christian was confronted by an old UU man who was quite hostile to her and an argument erupted. The UU girl was very embarrassed.

I think that old man should have faced some sort of punishment for his rude behavior. While many people, including myself, regard UU churches as a refuge from Christian fundamentalism, that does not mean we can lable all non-UU Christians as members of the “enemy”. Such an attitude never fails to disgust me. And when a UU teenager is smart enough to recognize the hypocrisy of one of her own elders, that actually gives me hope that the next generation of UUs will be more enlightened and pull UUs in general away from any form of fanaticism, including that of atheists and other anti-Christians. That simply has no place among the UUs!