Don’t Trust the UUMUAC

This is the text version of a video I made for Youtube, which can be found here, and which features additional graphics and screenshots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCTtE4kRZdI

Listen: you can’t trust the Unitarian Universalist Multiracial Unity Action Council.

You might be thinking, “But multiracial unity — I thought that was a good thing!” I know. It’s a trap. Of all the Gadfly-related organizations, this is the most overtly racist. The group also goes by “UUMUAC,” which they pronounce “you-me-ack.”

I’ve been meaning to make a video about UUMUAC for a few years now, but I’ve hesitated because some of the core members are honestly pretty mean, and have been relentless about harassing people online. But they recently had another one of their convocations and they’re likely to pick up more members as a result of it. So let’s get into it.

UUMUAC was founded by Finley Campbell, a Black man and member of First Unitarian in Chicago. The group, however, is predominantly white. Some of the white members have heavily relied upon the fact that the founder is black in denying how racist the group actually is — which we’ll get into soon.

Finley Campbell is a charismatic person with a lot of friends, especially in Chicago, but he also has a long history of problematic and concerning behavior. Let’s just look at the past few years:

• He was so disruptive at the 2017 General Assembly that he was ruled out of order and his microphone had to be cut off.
• He tried to convince the participants of the banner parade to storm the conference call because he felt the opening remarks were taking too long.
• He marched in the parade with an empty pole instead of a banner to make some point. And by his own account he had to be calmed down by a friend who warned that he was making quote “a spectacle of himself.”
• Later he got an altercation with a group of teenagers and yelled at them.
• For at least 15 years, he publicly misrepresented himself as a Unitarian Universalist minister, which he is not. He allowed people to believe that not only was he a member of our clergy, but that he was specifically the minister of the church that he attends. After warning him repeatedly, in 2018 the board at that church — First Unitarian Chicago — disqualified him from serving as a delegate to GA and banned him from holding any position of responsibility at the church for at least two years.
• The following year, in 2019, they banned him from teaching any more classes at the church because his teaching was so egregious, intolerant, and demonstrably untrue.
• He has written that white privilege isn’t real, that the Black Power movement was started by the government, and that anti-racism work is anti-white.

The group he founded, UUMUAC, is a least 12 years old, but it started to gain momentum in 2017 in the wake of the UUA Hiring Controversy. At that point, its membership doubled in just a few months. For certain white people in our denomination, UUMUAC seemingly presented a viable alternative to mainstream Unitarian Universalist anti-racism work that could serve as a cover for their racism. They’ve been able to join this group founded by a Black man that allows them the plausible deniability to say they’re working on “multiracial unity” while actually fighting to keep Unitarian Universalism as white as possible.

I realize that sounds really cynical but it’s 100% true. One dynamic I’ve seen is that when there’s a conflict at a church around racism or anti-racism work, an entire group of white people who aren’t ready to work on their stuff will all join UUMUAC at the same time.

However, even though UUMUAC has “Unitarian Universalist” in the name, it’s not an official Unitarian group — they’re not affiliated with the UUA; as far as I know they’re not affiliated with any church; and they are vocal about the fact that they are against the UUA, against our Ministers’ Association, against our Religious Educators’ Association, and against mainstream Unitarian Universalism in general.

Their main goal is, in their words, “to be liberated from the Afrocentric neo-racist cabal presently controlling the UUA.” So this is not an organization that’s working FOR Unitarian Universalism.

They weren’t allowed to have a booth at the 2019 Mid-America Regional Assembly because their aims and objectives were in contradiction to the goals and aims of the UUA. So the Mid-America region chose not to support UUMUAC and their message using the Region’s resources.

UUMUAC had their virtual booth removed from the General Assembly portal in 2020 because they tried to sneak in Todd Eklof, the author of The Gadfly Papers, after he had been banned from participating for his bad behavior.

They were also denied a booth at General Assembly in 2022 on the grounds that their mission is fundamentally incompatible with Unitarian Universalist values.

There’s a big overlap in membership between the UUMUAC and The Fifth Principal Project. Where the Fifth Principle Project has largely served as the political activism wing of the Gadfly movement, UUMUAC has focused on ideology.

So what do they believe? Let’s take a look.

• According to the UUMUAC, “actual racism” is rare compared to “alleged racism” — and they often put the word “racism” in quotes.

• They believe that we can’t trust Widening the Circle of Concern, the groundbreaking report put out by the UUA’s Commission on Institutional Change, which reported on substantial and widespread harm to Black Unitarian Universalists. And they believe we can’t trust it because it provides no real data, only the stories — I’m sorry. ONLY the stories told by 1100 people of color. They complain that it doesn’t include stories from white people who feel “falsely accused” of racism.

• They believe that more our kids are identifying as transgender because of “social contagion” and that those kids are being tricked into it by trans activists.

• I am not going to provide screenshots for this item, because I’m concerned about making it worse, but: members of UUMUAC have an obsession with several leaders of color within our denomination that is so persistent and hateful it constitutes harassment.

But moving on, perhaps more important than their beliefs are their beliefs about what the UUA believes. Because they dedicate a lot of space in their newsletters to describing what they think anti-racism is, and the wild thing is, they’re wrong about a lot of it. It’s really interesting, because it gives us insight into what they’re afraid of.

• For instance, they write that in the “new caste system” marginalized people are treated as sacred while straight white men are at the bottom.

• They write that according to the UUA, “the white soul must be purified” and “white people must be monitored by people of color”. And I’m sorry, but I just can’t imagine the average Black Unitarian Universalist having the free time or the desire to “monitor” their white fellow church members, but you can see that the UUMUAC is afraid of something like this happening.

• They’re afraid that anti-racism is a conspiracy theory to blame everything that goes wrong in society on white people.

• They’re afraid that in anti-racism work, “people of color are taught to look for racial slights in every interaction and to demand appropriate restitution to match their superior moral status, instead of working things out in a civil manner.”

• Overall they believe that people of color are taking over Unitarian Universalism. They’ve written that our leaders are “effectively kneeling before people of color.”

• They’re very against the adoption of the proposed eighth principle which would state that Unitarian Universalism is against racism. The UUMUAC is particularly upset about the clause about being accountable, which is telling. In fact, they’ve uploaded an 18-page criticism of the eighth principle to their website. It contains statements about how the eighth principle rejects white ways of doing things,

• how they feel like they’re not allowed to disagree with minorities anymore,

• and it contains the false claim that if the eighth principle is adopted minorities will force us to replace our culture.

This is not the only time that the UUMUAC talks about racial minorities and Unitarian Universalists as separate groups.

Beverly Seese, one of two Gadflies who ran for the UUA board by petition in 2022, has been heavily involved with UUMUAC. And last year during her campaign she offended a lot of people when she wrote, quote,

“I acknowledge the desire of many especially younger and or marginalized identifying members to take our religion in a profoundly different direction… I would wholeheartedly support helping another branch of UUism to be formed that is more attractive to the aforementioned folks.”

Her statement positioned marginalized people in opposition to our “historic integrity,” claiming that “our principles and practices are being undermined” and our tradition is being eroded.

It also makes a distinction between real members and identity groups, as if people of color, trans folks, and young people aren’t real UUs and it would be better if they would just leave, to preserve our faith.

It should be clear to you now who UUMUAC sees as the real Unitarian Universalists.

This is a constant refrain in UUMUAC that’s uncomfortably parallel to the “great replacement theory” among white supremacist groups, that white people are being replaced and need to defend themselves against the existence of other people.

By the way, Beverly Seese does serve as a minister of a small fellowship in Indiana — who I’m sure are wonderful people; this isn’t about them — but even though she serves a church, she is not a fellowshipped minister with the UUA, she’s not a member of our Ministers’ Association as far as I know, and she doesn’t have an MDiv degree — so she’s not accountable or held to typical standards of professionalism.

Let’s look at who else is associated with the UUMUAC.

As of 2023 the chair of the board is my colleague, the Reverend Richard Trudeau, a retired minister who has written that calling a white person racist is the equivalent of calling a Black person the n-word.

The corresponding secretary is Dick Burkhart. If you’ve ever been to a UUA Board meeting, you might recognize that name, because Dick goes to every open house and harasses the board by asking the same bad-faith, accusatory questions over and over again.

He’s a prolific contributor to the UUMUAC newsletter, writing articles like “What’s Wrong with Critical Race Theory?” in which he writes — wrongly — that under CRT there is a victimhood culture with a hierarchy of whites at the top and blacks at the bottom, which then gets inverted to form a moral hierarchy with BIPOC at the top. He writes that black people get assigned certain privileges while white people get persecuted. He goes on to complain about how woke people of color can make accusations without evidence leading to white men being automatically judged at fault.

This paragraph is absolutely bonkers, but it’s just one from the hundreds and hundreds of pages of writing Dick Burkhart has online, much of which is in the UUMUAC newsletters.

Treasurer Allan Lindrup’s name might be familiar to you if you work in the office of a church, because Allan has spammed hundreds of church administrators on behalf of both UUMUAC and The Fifth Principal Project, asking them to put Gadfly-related materials in the church newsletter.

UUMUAC’s convocations feature speakers like:

• Reverend Eklof, who was disfellowshipped for refusing to engage with an ethical misconduct charge against him;

• Reverend Kate Rohde, who was disfellowshipped for interfering with colleagues’ ministries and refusing to adhere to professional standards, among other things;

• Anne Schneider, who wrote a book about how white supremacy culture isn’t real;

• and noted Gadfly Jay Kiskel who unsuccessfully ran for the UUA Board of Trustees on a platform of “democracy” because he didn’t like how a majority of Unitarian Universalists had democratically decided to focus on racial justice.

Most of the leaders of this group are people who have behaved badly in public and then gotten angry when the people around them tried to talk to them about it. Whenever you see something from the UUMUAC, you should run the other way.

And if you’re a white person who’s struggling with all of this anti-racism stuff — as a lot of us do! — and maybe you had hoped that this group would offer you a valid alternative that wasn’t so difficult?

I’m sorry. This isn’t it.

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