Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 41, part two.

  A Happy Couple in a Sometimes Conflicted Church: Part Two.


     What is the Unitarian faith? Basically it was yet another religion that came out of the reformation in 16th century Europe. Unitarians believed back then that God, the Son and the Holy Ghost were all one being. This of course smacked of heresy to the Catholic and Orthodox churches back then. They attacked the church's doctrines and the Unitarians that worshipped there. Still, the Unitarians managed to survive in places like Transylvania in present day Romania. The  Unitarian doctrines later trickled out to other parts of Europe.
    In the early 19th century it came to Canada and spread westward. By the 1950's, most Unitarians were  liberal believers. "Unitarians believe in the dignity of the individual," one clergyman said. Few Unitarian sermons contain references to Christ, the Holy Ghost or God for that matter. Nor do their hymns. No crosses grace the walls of any Unitarian church. And there are no stained glass windows in any Unitarian church either. "God is noted by its absence," says one Unitarian .
      Yet all of this freedom didn't always lead to harmony. "There's really no theology in Unitarianism," said Sally Novinger, a former choir director at the Vancouver church. "So there's plenty of disagreements." The first outbreak of dissent hit the church in the 1960's. If the 1950's was an age of innocence, the 1960's was an age of rebellion. Dozens of groups came out of the woodwork to claim a place in the sun.
   Feminists, Quebec sovereigntists, anti-Vietnam war protestors, First nations, environmentalists, hippies and yippies, and gays and lesbians demanded social justice in Canada.  Religions faced challenges too. "A cultural revolution was under way in the 1960's," writes the American socialist Michael Harrington. "It challenged moral certitudes and practices with the authority of  centuries behind them." Organized mainstream religions, Harrington points out, declined in importance and many Eastern and pseudo religions sprung up. Casual sex, casual drugs, and casual dress became commonplace.
    Cultural and political challenges surfaced in the Vancouver Unitarian church too. Many of its members tried L.S.D and marijuana which then as now were illegal. A few members left their wives or husbands to practice what they called back then "free love". At one Unitarian conference held in Canada in the late 1960's, American black  power advocates demanded social justice and money as reparations for what they said were centuries of  oppression of African-Americans.
   As this age of dissent faded somewhat in the early 1970's, it left some scars behind. Yet the Unitarian Church of Vancouver, like most other churches survived. Tilda Sweet and Barry Look came here to the church in the 1970's, and stayed. At this time it had a congregation of about 600. It went into the 1970's on a firm footing. It still had a future ahead of it.