"At the Most, One God"

According to an old wisecrack, "Unitarians believe that there is, at the most, one God." Last week, in the Unitarian monthly Christian Register, 17 Unitarian members tried to say a little more clearly, and a little less cleverly, exactly what the nation's 75,000 Unitarians do believe in.

For such free-style individualists as the American Unitarian Association, the effort was doomed from the start. The writers found widespread Unitarian agreement on only three points: 1) belief in the dignity and promise of man; 2) insistence on "the principle of the free mind"; 3) "a common program of [liberal] social action." On matters theological there seemed almost as many opinions as there were Unitarians; toward God, attitudes ranged from emphatic interest through vagueness and indifference to flat rejection. Sample views:

P: "We have a strong sense of cohesion in our midst, but we have never really been able to state what it is."

P: "The Unitarian church discharges a 'vestibule' function in relation to the larger Christian church, inviting into itself as a foyer the unchurched but searching souls of our age who are as yet unprepared to penetrate into the Protestant sanctuary."

P: "We are not Protestants, for the principle of Protestantism is an unconscious agnosticism which leads to the fallacy that private opinion, rather than law and spiritual knowledge objectively verified, is the rule of life . . . [Unitarianism is rather] a true Catholicism . . ."

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