Minister's Musing

Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

May 2007

It amused me the other day to read an appreciation in the Asheville Citizen-Times that marveled that novelist Kurt Vonnegut was an atheist who nonetheless had a strong religious and moral sense. Vonnegut died on April 11 at age 84. I thought to myself, “Well, it’s no mystery to me. After all, Vonnegut was a Unitarian Universalist.”

Indeed, though he never did, Kurt Vonnegut could have boasted credentials of long standing in the liberal religious tradition. He was born from a long line of immigrant German free thinkers who had settled in Indiana. His parents were married at All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis and were active members. In fact, Vonnegut’s father, an architect, designed the first building for All Souls. Kurt himself was never especially active in any of our churches, but all his life freely identified himself as a UU.

In 1986 Vonnegut was invited to give the Ware Lecture at General Assembly, a premier event at our annual gathering. “You are like the early Christians in yearning for an era of peace and justice, which may never come,” he told the assembly. “They thought Jesus would bring that about. You think human beings should be able to create such an era through their own efforts.”

The formative experience in Vonnegut’s life was during World War II when he was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany when allied forces carpet-bombed that city, creating a firestorm that annihilated it. Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners, who survived the bombing in an underground meat locker, were assigned to remove the dead. He recounted the experience in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, and it left him a committed pacifist and skeptical of authority.

In all his writings, Vonnegut had a wicked eye for the absurdities of any dogmatic way of looking at the world and also a deeply felt humanistic vision of the world. Our churches include people of many theological perspectives – atheists, theists, humanists, mystics, and more. Kurt Vonnegut is someone I’m happy to claim as one of us.