Watching the blues haranguing the reds (or was it vice-versa?) got me thinking about our human need to take sides, to prefer unambiguous choices, more – our need to simply be in the right; that maybe being “right” in the competition of life places us a step higher on the podium, that bit closer to God.

Perhaps from an existential point-of-view being “right” is simply another way to avoid confronting death – being “right” gives us a taste of eternal truth, a kind of affirmation.

Equally, each time we are “wrong” our existence is nullified, we die a little. Bullcrap? Well consider rejection: by a partner, for a job, that proposal, book or poem you’ve just submitted and the feelings that can accompany it.

You didn’t make the grade, you were not good enough – in a way, you do not have value. You do not matter enough in the eyes of the other.

I’ve certainly mourned the end of a relationship before; quite literally because part of me expired with it – in the present, future and (the meaning of our) past, now tinged with what had been lost.

To be accepted on the other hand, is to belong. To belong is to live, which also makes evolutionary sense if you think about it.

It would be tough out there, alone in the wilderness. Rejected by the community, you wouldn’t stand much chance of survival. Get things wrong – take the wrong turn, misjudge a danger, and you wouldn’t last long either.

So we compensate, we rationalize: we tell ourselves the person who rejected us was the wrong one; actually it was our employer who was at fault; that in fact we are a misunderstood genius (look at Van Gogh!).

And little by little, we come to life again, resuscitating ourselves with life-affirming rightness.

But despite our human needs, right is rarely 100 per cent right, and wrong totally wrong. Nature is not black and white. Life is in Technicolor.

God is full spectrum; especially in the doubt, ambiguity, commonality that fills the space between: the crossing in Jericho where, during the last World Cup, the Israeli border guard checked my partner's passport and exclaimed “Italia! Football!”; the Arab kid who approached us after we had parked and went “England! Manchester United!”  For all their protestations to the contrary, the over-riding impression most of us are left of our politicians (and their politics) is probably the most accurate - they are all the same.

This week Islington and Newington Green Unitarians were featured in the national press for standing up for what they (we!) believe is right - marriage equality. But note that word - equality: perhaps it should help us discriminate between the kinds of truth, or rightness,  that contain values  I would call divine, and those based on more humble, human anxieties;  that invariably contain the kernel of inequality and division.

Anyway, we were talking about writing, and I mentioned the “religious” book I have coming out this Spring (I did warn you about the plugs) and he wrote back

Religious?

Yes, I said, didn’t I tell you about my church…?

I could almost hear the claxon sound across the Gulf of Arabia.

Church….?! Gosh.

I felt the axis of our friendship lurch. Breaking the news to a friend (to my friends, anyway, and thankfully my faith does not encourage ridding oneself of the old) is always a sensitive moment. People have default settings about religion too, particularly those of that most irreligious nation, England.

It’s not necessarily what you think, I wrote hurriedly back. It was an authenticity thing… I came to the point whereby I could not deny I had a spiritual side. Actual proofs, like the existence in God for example, seemed largely irrelevant. The important thing was for me to be true to my experience, and the Unitarians are a non-creedal religious community that allow me to do that. Really, it’s not a cult, I added (few people in the UK having even heard of Unitarianism). Here’s a link, I said. Don’t worry, I added, attempting to knock down all his ducks in one go, it’s not as happy-clappy as it looks either.

I have yet to hear back.

But it got me thinking about what Unitarianism was, funnily enough a theme continued over at my old minister Andy Pakula’s new blog, which itself picks up on a thread over at Reignite worrying over the decline in Unitarianism in the UK.

Certainly I think many Unitarians have experienced frustration. Our religion is not like other faiths. It is in fact often the opposite – bottom-up rather than top-down, led by individual experience rather than doctrinal writ. To us it does appear to embody a kind of “truth” that perfectly fits the modern world… yet it is so damn hard to make people understand what it’s about.

Part of the reason I believe is because most people are raised from an early age to believe religion must be a set of rules. If it is not, then how can it be religion (more than once I have overheard my partner, brought up Catholic, “explain”: he calls it church, but it’s not really… they can believe anything...)?

I experience the same issues in my day job – social marketing – in which I use customer insight to try and drive behaviour change, usually around public health. A key principal is to shape one’s intervention not about how you expect the world to be, but how the world is actually experienced by the target audience.  This can take time – investment in research and testing – when the client often wants to jump to the solution. It’s obvious, after all, isn’t it? Can’t we just tell them? Well no, not if they not prepared to listen.

I think Unitarians face a similar challenge – we’ve got a great product, and its benefits are self-evident (to Unitarians, that is). Yet its definition as a religion does not fit the “rules” that most people – religious or not – carry from birth, no matter how much we may want things to be different.

I think the 2007 US advertising campaign Is God keeping you from going to church? tacitly acknowledged this problem and made a brave attempt to play the game according to their rules but ultimately came up short because, being Unitarian (Universalist), it could never really win. Its cognitive dissonance was too pronounced, its semantics kind of self-defeating: what’s the point of going to a church with no God? An atheist church? But surely that’s not a religion at all, and I’m religious, spiritual… I just don’t want to be bombarded with dogma. Even atheist dogma…

It was a brave attempt at selling the sense of “our secret”, but it seemed to have put the proverbial cart before horse, tried to use the language of other religions to explain our own.

Instead I think we should begin by facing up to the reality of what people want, then… take a deep breath… and actually define our faith, emphasizing what makes it special – it’s Unique Selling Point. We need to create our own set of rules before inviting people to come and play our game. Because like it or not, people need rules in a game, even in a game of no rules…

To me, Unitarianism acknowledges our unique experience of the divine and how our recognition of this uniqueness drives us to unity. This is why I’m a Unitarian, as is everyone I know (so far as I know). No other religion, to my knowledge, does this. This is our USP, but it tends to get lost in the rush to say what we’re not about, defending our goal in a game played by other religions’ rules, and thereby confusing the public, as well as ourselves.

We have to write our own rulebook rather than be judged by others’.

Just as the Buddhists are about “detachment”, the Muslims “submission under the Koran”, Christians, “love under the Bible”, we need to be “united by our unique experience of the truth” or some such.

We need to be about a religious method. There’s no getting away from it – committee-created catch-alls about “values” or bombastic over-compensation are not enough: we need to state our “rule”, even if it emphasizes our freedom, and more – we have to explicitly present it as our pathway to fulfillment.

We might not like it, but there’s no getting away from it: it’s what the public expects (and let’s face it, it’s what we believe, even though it might feel somewhat… vulgar to say so).

And from this theological kernel, begin to speak to people in a language they understand.

And nothing was more divine than his call to be humble. Humbleness is closest to holiness.

The saying that the meek shall inherit the earth is easily misunderstood from a human perspective. At times when brutality and power triumph over the “little person” it is hard to see the sense of it. But with respect to humbleness in the sight of God it makes perfect sense. It actually serves to remind us that we are human, not perfect. We are not Gods.

I was reminded of this when I read about the execution of two young men in Iran for their part in the protests against the state, the planned hanging of another nine, with the promise of more on the way.

There is something particularly chilling about judicial murder, the attempt of a regime not to hide its sordid crimes but to actually legitimize them. The show trials in Tehran echo those of Stalin and Hitler, and in particular bring to mind Sophie Scholl and her friends – the young German students who peacefully protested against the Nazi regime and were tried and guillotined in 1943.

Wikipedia notes Sophie’s firm Christian belief in God and in every human being's essential dignity formed her basis for resisting Nazi ideology.

Meanwhile in present-day Tehran Ayatollah Ahmad Janati commented: May God not have mercy on those who are lenient with the corrupt on earth. There is no room for clemency. It is time for severity.

Judicial murder characterizes Utopian politics. From The Terror of Revolutionary France there is clear line of sight to present day Iran.

Certainly on the surface the fundamentally atheist France of Robespierre bears little resemblance to the Islamist fundamentalism of Ahmadinejad, but both are borne of Utopianism – the belief heaven can be built upon the earth. Yet whether it is in the name of Reason or God makes no difference – the deed must always be done by human hands, with the inevitable blood-soaked consequences.

Jesus saw this danger clearly. Time and again he emphasized our imperfect humanity, fallibility; our need therefore to be humble, meek. Not to cast the first stone. His was the authentic voice of God. The vengeful pronouncements of priests and politicians in the name of a higher authority are human, all too human.  

I was not surprised by Tony Blair’s performance at the Chilcot Enquiry into the war in Iraq, because there were no surprises – he was sad about the deaths, naturally, but he had few regrets and still believed history would consider him in the right.

I had a letter published in the press back in 2003 when he originally stated his faith in history, in which I wrote he was therefore likely to appear in a revised edition of Barbara L Tuchman’s The March of Folly, a seminal study of how states pursued polices contrary to their interest.

I’m no pacifist. I’d seen Blair’s wars at first hand – as an aid worker I’d gone to Sierra Leone and Kosovo alongside the British forces – and in Sierra Leone in particular I realized what an impact for good military intervention could have.  But Iraq was different. Different place, politics, world post-9/11. War is not like the movies… it is messy, unpredictable and cruel seen from the ground and I don’t think it’s much of a surprise to find the last people who invariably want it are the generals.

So I went on the marches, I signed the petitions, wrote to the papers, although at the time it felt as if my practical concerns placed me in something of a minority – many of the protesters appeared angry because they felt in their guts it was wrong, while the PM was going to war because he felt in his guts it was right – God was on his side, and, as he said, would be his judge.

It’s ironic that Tony Blair went on to convert to Catholicism because the then Pope John Paul was one of the war’s most ardent critics, a position I suspect would be supported by his successor, although not necessarily for the reasons one would immediately expect. 

Benedict is very keen to emphasize the dual Christian traditions of faith and logos – Reason. This sprung from the earliest requirement of Christianity to marry the “revelation” of Christ with the Greco-Roman philosophical heritage. It needed to do this if it was going to gain acceptance in Roman society. Historically of course, logos has ebbed and flowed, but the German Pope, having himself experienced the terrifying consequences of Utopian un-Reason growing up under Nazism is understandably keen to reaffirm this bond.

The God of Benedict would by definition not expect one to do something that was intrinsically unreasonable. For God embodies Reason and Reason is how we discriminate between what is truly divine and just our egos, emotions or whatever. For Benedict, as for me, faith alone is not enough. 

For Tony Blair and George Bush however, it is apparently all. Never mind that they call themselves Christians – their God has far more in common with the Jewish, Islamic or, dare I say it, Crusader God.

Seemingly relying upon faith alone, they believed they were acting in the name of God, and they reaped what they sowed.

I don’t believe in Heaven anywhere other than upon this earth. There are no pearly gates, palm-fringed vacation resorts beyond our mortal life. But I do have a sense that each moment has an eternal element to it – although we pass through the length of our lives in a chronological arc, every day resonates infinitely.

Tony Blair told the enquiry that not a single day passes by that I do not think about that responsibility... and I do not doubt that he does. I don't believe he is a liar. But as he reclines in the comforting embrace of his certain faith, that nagging question disturbing his rest is God too: logos judging him, each day and forever.