Originally published on Forbes.com Aug 26th, 2013
I recently wrote about the court fight over the “parsonage exclusion” which pits the Freedom From Religion Foundation against the United States.  It has taken a strange turn.  FFRF, in order to get standing, started paying its atheist officers housing allowance.  They have not excluded the allowances from their taxable income, since, in their minds, there is no way they are ministers.   The Government is arguing that maybe they do qualify as ministers. This development caught the interest of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability 

The ongoing litigation over the constitutionality of the clergy housing exclusion has taken a fascinating turn. According to attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice, not only is the law constitutional, but atheists might also be considered religious leaders for purposes of federal tax law (“ministers of the gospel”) to qualify for the exclusion.

I wonder if they would be surprised to learn that ministers in a denomination that includes some of the oldest churches in the thirteen original United States are allowed to be openly atheistic along with many of the denomination’s members.  The denomination is the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Interview With The Endorser
Reverend Sarah Lammert is the right person to confirm that UU ministers can be atheists.  Reverend Lammert is the Director of Ministries and Faith Development for the UUA.  She is also the UUA endorser of chaplains for the Armed Forces.  I’m sure the process is a little more formal, but in principle the idea is that if somebody want to be an Army chaplain, the Army has to have somebody to call to check their credentials.  If its a Catholic priest, they call Archbishop Timothy Broglio.    For UU ministers it is up to Reverend Lammert.  I don’t imagine an admitted atheist will make it past the Archbishop, but Reverend Lammert could endorse one if otherwise qualified.
The Unitarian Universalist Association
The Unitarian Universalist Association was formed in 1961, but many of its constituent congregations are much older.  First Parish in Cambridge Massachusetts, for example, built its first meetinghouse in 1632.  In Massachusetts, “First Parish” is a common name for UUA congregations, since they were, in fact, the first parishes and were founded at the same time as their towns.
The way you got a new town in those days was when people settled far enough out to have trouble getting to church every Sunday decided they needed another church.  The first parish minister who would have fewer tax dollars (or shillings maybe) to pay his salary was not always that enthusiastic about it.
How you get from parishes that were subject to a theocracy that countenanced hanging witches and Quakers to ones that are accepting of atheists (And gays and lesbians and pagans to name a few others who would not have fared well in 17th Century Massachusetts) is a long story well beyond the scope of this piece.  It is intertwined with the intellectual development of the United States.  Ralph Waldo Emerson was ordained as a Unitarian minister for example.   Here is brief history lesson on the denomination

Reverend Lammert told me that there are currently about 1,600 UU ministers serving about 1,100 congregations.  There are about 165,000 members, although around 1,000,000 people identify themselves as UU (Full disclosure I am currently among the 835,000 or so sleeping in every Sunday.  Well, actually I’m usually working on my blog while my covivant goes to Jazzercise.)  Reverend Lammert, herself, holds theistic views.  She did not have an estimate of how many atheist UU ministers there are, but there are some.
How Can Atheists Do Religion ?
I don’t think you can really view atheism, itself, as a religion.  Atheism can be viewed as a theological position like transubstantiation or presuppositionalism.  You probably need a bit more than a position on a single issue, however sweeping to have a religion.  Certainly, nobody argues that theism is a religion.  Rather it is a theological tenet, a very basic one, of most, but not all religions.
Reverend Lammert says:

Whether you put your faith in God or in humankind, religion at its best is about amplifying the power of love in the world.  Religare, the latin root of the word, means “to bind together.”  Humanists, like theists, are called to work for justice, celebrate creativity, and live their own lives with integrity – and this is best done in community.

Reverend Lammert is supportive of the effort to have humanists and freethinkers recognized as military chaplains:

Some people wonder why there should be humanist chaplains in hospitals, on campuses and in the military.   Yet doubt is a part of any religious journey, and particularly when we face the most broken and brutal aspects of life, many people are left feeling alienated from God, or at the very least temporarily unable to connect to God.  A humanist chaplain could accompany  a person through this wilderness journey and help them find their way back to feeling that life has meaning, with or without faith in a supernatural deity.

She also pointed out that theism covers a lot of ground:

Theism is a very broad idea.  I consider myself to be a theist, but my definition of God might not be recognizable to someone of a different faith tradition.  Having belief in “God” be the defining factor or religion becomes a very strange litmus test indeed.

Reverend Lammert became interested in ministry when she learned about Liberation Theology while majoring in Development Studies at Brown University.  She worked for a while at Women’s World Banking and then studied at Starr King School For The Ministry graduating in 1993.  She served several congregations before taking her current job with the denomination.  Here she is as a guest preacher at the church she currently attends.

For another view on why atheists might go to church, you can check this out.

The Housing Allowance
Despite the theocratic roots, the UUA generally comes out pretty strongly for church state separation.  On the other hand the denomination  seems quite enthusiastic about the tax free housing allowance for clergy.

The clergy housing allowance exclusion is the most important tax benefit available to ministers and to retired ministers.

I asked Reverend Lammert if she knew of any UU ministers who have refused to take a tax free housing allowance as a matter of principle.  She had never heard of that happening.  Perhaps they collectively have the attitude I espouse:

Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.

I don’t know if Learned Hand was a Unitarian, but he went to Harvard, so he must have known a few.
You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.
Afternote
I promised my most loyal commenter, Robert Baty that I would try to work a reference to presuppositionalism into one of my posts.  I still don’t understand it, but I’m not so great on unified field theory either.
The “first parish” theocratic phenomenon is a feature of many, although not all, New England UUA congregations.  In other parts of the country, UU congregations were founded explicitly as centers of liberal religion.  They have shorter histories, but no association with witch hanging.