Garrison Keillor And Unitarian*Universalist aka U*U Purging Of God And Jesus From Christmas Carols And Christian Hymns
I have not said all that much about Garrison Keillor's alleged or actual anti-Unitarian "rant" on this blog yet. I have however made a number of comments on various U*U blogs that have devoted a post or two to discussing, or indeed "ranting" against. . . the "perceived insult" of Garrison Keillor's satirical, or indeed "less than satirical", rant against Unitarians aka Unitarian*Universalists that was originally published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and picked up by the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and various websites like Salon.com. I expect that I will say a few things here soon enough, but for the time being I am posting a comment that I just submitted in response to Rev. Debra Haffner's blog post responding to Garrison Keillor's "rant" entitled 'A Response to Garrision (sic) Keiller: Our Unitarian Universalist Christmas' on her 'Garrison Keillor And The U*U Movement: What's The Connection?' blog. :-)
I am pretty sure that Garrison Keillor *actually* concluded,
“Christmas is a *Christian* holiday – if you’re not in the club, buzz off.”
Not unlike how *some* U*Us are wont to effectively say, in one way or another. . .
“This Unitarian Church is *actually* an Atheist Social Club – if you’re not in the club, buzz off.”
Garrison Keillor seemed to be quite specifically sharing his concerns (as it were) about the rather problematic U*U propensity to remove any and all reference to God and Jesus from traditional Christian hymns, not just Christmas carols by any means. . . in a manner that is not all *that* far removed from the Stalinistic purging of persona non grata from historical records and similar "memory holing" as described in George Orwell's 1984.
Or at least that is how I read his saying -
"I discovered that "Silent Night" has been cleverly rewritten to make it more about silence and night and not so much about God. . ."
I have reasonable grounds to believe that is precisely why he went on to say -
"it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough."
Perhaps Garrison Keillor should have spoken about spiritual vandalism. . . Besides being comparable to Stalin's purging of the images and historical records of political rivals, the Unitarian purging of God and Jesus from many if not most U*U hymns is not that far removed from how some ancient Egyptian pharaohs chiseled out the cartouches of problematic predecessors from their monuments.
I happen to believe that *those* concerns of Garrison Keillor are quite legitimate having seen no shortage of U*U hymns that have been subject to the UUA's Stalinist "pogrom" against God. How many "churches" do you know of where a "pastor" can dogmatically preach from the pulpit that God is "a non-existent being" and that belief in God "seems primitive"? Heck I well recall how Rev. XXXXXXX XXXXX of the Unitarian Church of XXXXXXXX (just making a point while complying with the Code of Silence that is written into the UUMA Guidelines that I am not actually a party to in any case. . .) somewhat gratuitously concluding a Sunday sermon in which he spoke about witnessing bush fires in Australia by declaring -
"God can be a son of a bitch."
Not that God *can't* be a bit of an S.O.B. every now and then. . . but this is hardly the kind of public pronouncement that one expects to hear from the minister of any "church" during a Sunday service.
So it would *appear* that when Unitarians aren't busy purging any mention of God or Jesus from their hymnals *some* Unitarians are busy publicly denying the very existence of God or even calling God an S.O.B. in front of a "captive audience". I am pretty sure *that* is more or less what Garrison Keillor was "ranting" about.
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