UU Political Office Holders

Adlai Stevenson, the Illinois governor and two-time Democratic presidential candidate in the 1950s was born a Unitarian and attended All Souls Church, Unitarian in Washington. Being a Unitarian was controversial, partly because for centuries some leaders of larger religious traditions said Unitarians were heretics. But another, perhaps more decisive reason, was the advent of the Cold War.

Several Unitarians, like others who criticized the militarism and red-baiting that followed World War II, found themselves investigated by government security officials and subject to smears in the press. Stevenson himself saw J. Edgar Hoover's FBI try to sink one of his presidential bids with rumors of his homosexuality. Others -- including the Rev. A. Powell Davies, Stevenson's minister at All Souls in Washington, D.C. -- won the scorn of the security establishment for criticizing the anti-Communist and anti-homosexual campaigns of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Personal and political attacks against religious liberals weren't the only drags on Unitarians holding office in the postwar years. Many fell away from the denomination during the 1970s, after the Unitarian and the Universalist movements merged and disagreements about the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War split many congregations. Pete Stark, an opponent of the war who was elected to Congress from California, became a UU at the time. He credits his service on the board of Starr King School for the Ministry with giving him an apprenticeship in political power before his election to the House of Representatives in 1972.

In the generation since the 1960's, more political issues have united UUs than divided them, including church-state separation and civil rights for bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgendered people. UUs in politics also seem to have turned a corner on the issue of religious identity. Most UUs in elected office today - there are dozens - approach the role of religious minority, not with trepidation, but with determination to speak up for an often forgotten perspective and to defend religious pluralism.

Still, says John Buehrens, former UUA president, "We're not monolithic. After all, we're a religious community, not a political bloc." Whether serving in city, county, or state government, elected UUs tend to defy the stereotype of lockstep progressives who champion civil liberties and reflexively embrace the downtrodden.