The 8th Principle

At our Dec 13th, 2020 congregational meeting, UUCB members voted to adopt the 8th principle:

Journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.

Excerpted from the Article II Study Commission's Statement on the 8th Principle:

The 8th Principle Project is a grassroots movement started in 2013, aimed at articulating a commitment to dismantle racism and other forms of oppression within the Covenants made between and within the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

"When the 8th Principle project began, it addressed something vital that had been missing in our UU movement, namely that anti-racism and anti-oppression must be central to congregational life and our community building. The mammoth project of fostering conversation within congregations and other communities, and then calling on those communities to make an explicit statement in the form of the "8th Principle" has become a true groundswell within Unitarian Universalism. ...

The process of examining and possibly revising Article II of the UUA Bylaws is a scheduled effort of the UUA Board, demanded by the bylaws themselves. The Study Commission, who has been charged with making a proposal to the UUA Board in January of 2023, has tremendous respect for what the 8th Principle movement has accomplished—and is accomplishing within UU communities. More than the language of the 8th Principle itself, we are moved by the ongoing conversations about what it means to be accountable to each other, and how we must—through our actions—take on the work of anti-racism and anti-oppression as an inextricable part of our Unitarian Universalist faith.

And so, though the task we have been charged with is larger than the specifics of the 8th Principle, we understand these ideals to be at the very heart of our work and very much part of the direction we are journeying. We understand the work we are doing to be building on the strengths of the 8th Principle movement. Whatever flowers grow from the process of engaging UUs in this reimagining, the seeds sown by the 8th Principle project will surely bloom brightly."