Dec. 6, 2004
A feature news release by J. Bennett Guess Editor, United Church News

Like Bill Clinton and Al Gore, presidential candidate Richard Gephardt wears the Southern Baptist tag, while George Bush and John Edwards are United Methodists. John Kerry and Dennis Kucinich are life-long Roman Catholics.

Carol Moseley Braun, no longer Catholic, worships as an Episcopalian. Joseph Lieberman is an Orthodox Jew, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, a Pentecostal minister, spends his Sunday mornings in the pulpit.

But Howard Dean, the former five-term Vermont Governor who has emerged as the Democratic Party's presidential front runner, is piquing interest with word that he's a "Congregationalist" - a faith label much less recognizable to those living outside the Congregationalist-laden Northeast.

Not since a war-time Richard Nixon cried Quaker have so many expressed interest in learning about a presidential aspirant's faith tradition.

To be technically accurate, Dean is a member of the United Church of Christ, a 1.3-million-member denomination of nearly 6,000 congregations formed in 1957 by the union of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church. But in New England, Congregationalists are as common as clam chowder, so it's no wonder that so many UCC members in the New England area cling to their original, regionally-recognizable "Congregationalist" identity.

Born to a Catholic mother and an Episcopal father, Dean was raised in the Episcopal Church. But in 1982, the same year Dean entered public life as a member of Vermont's House of Representatives, he became a member of First Congregational UCC in Burlington, Vt., a prominent congregation of 1,000 members in the state's capital city. Dean, a doctor, was first introduced to the congregation by his then-landlord, while Dean was completing his medical residency in Vermont.

Dean's wife, Judith Steinberg Dean, who also is a doctor, is Jewish. Their two children have been raised with exposure to both traditions by observing Jewish and Christian holidays.

The Rev. Robert A. Lee - Dean's pastor - describes Dean as a "supportive and faithful member of the congregation."

"Howard Dean is known in this community and in the church as a person with strong principled views who speaks his mind and stands up for what he believes in," Lee told United Church News, the UCC's denominational newspaper, in September.

To illustrate, Lee said that when the congregation's board of trustees suggested that members donate part of their 2002 tax rebate checks to the church to fund ministries for the poor, "One of the first letters I received in response to that appeal was from the Governor of Vermont's office, with a check for [Dean's] entire tax rebate."

To be sure, the UCC's New England roots are deep. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, the UCC is the largest Protestant denomination. But New England is not the only place where the UCC can be found. Located in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, the UCC also is formidable in New York and Pennsylvania, the industrial Midwest, Missouri, the West Coast, Florida and Hawaii.

The UCC's membership includes six U.S. Senators, representing a broad political spectrum: Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) and former presidential hopeful Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who was the first candidate to withdraw from the 2004 contest.

Andrew Young (D-Ga.), the former civil rights leader, member of Congress, U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor, also is an ordained UCC minister.

On Dec. 30, conservative syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, disparaged the UCC as "a liberal denomination that does not believe in ministerial authority or church hierarchy." Thomas further claimed that "each Congregationalist believes he is in direct contact with God and is entitled to sort out truth for himself." Meanwhile, The New Republic, in its Dec. 29 cover story on Dean's religious life, called his church "a denomination famous for its informality and liberal stances."

More accurately, the UCC's Congregationalist roots trace back to the early 1600s, when the Pilgrims and Puritans first landed on the continent. These "Congregationalists," as they were later called, sought religious independence from persecuting political authorities in Europe. They believed firmly in local church autonomy, church-state separation, personal piety and the priesthood of all believers.

Today, the UCC holds firmly to these early religious tenets. Yet, while often recognized for its historical and contemporary social justice commitments, its approach to worship might be considered traditional by most standards. Although each congregation's liturgical style is influenced by its heritage and members' preferences, as is true in most mainline denominations, the UCC, as one pastor aptly put it, is an "exasperating and heady mix."

Interestingly, "A Field Guide to U.S. Congregations," a 2002 publication based on a comprehensive survey of U.S. Christians, found that UCC members, slightly more than others, listed traditional hymns and biblically-sound preaching as being essential to good worship. Surprising to some, the same study also found that slightly more UCC members self-identified as conservative rather than liberal - a tidbit that President Calvin Coolidge, a conservative Republican and the nation's last Congregationalist president (1923-1929), might have found interesting.

As one of the nation's oldest faith traditions, the UCC includes some of the country's oldest congregations and structures, including many organized and built nearly four centuries ago. As a blend of four distinct Christian traditions - Congregational, Christian, Evangelical and Reformed - each strain of the UCC has left its mark on U.S. religious and political history.

Increasingly, the UCC is becoming home to churches outside the original mix. Since 2001, more than 80 churches have joined the UCC, including many once-Southern Baptist congregations that have been "disfellowshiped" by state or national conventions for ordaining women or welcoming gay and lesbian members.

The UCC has historical ties to hundreds of educational institutions, including the likes of Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth, which it helped to found. After the Civil War, the church was instrumental in starting many now-prominent schools for freed slaves, including Howard, Fisk, Talladega and Tougaloo. Today, it maintains direct ties to 48 institutions of higher learning and 345 health and human service agencies in 37 states.

Known widely for its leadership on social, racial and economic justice issues, UCC history includes an impressive list of firsts. It launched the first attempt at congregational democracy (1630), led the movement to abolish slavery (1700), was a leading force in the spiritual revival known as the Great Awakening (1730), staged the nation's first act of civil disobedience that inspired the "Boston Tea Party" (1773), hid the Liberty Bell when the British occupied Philadelphia (1777), was the first mainline denomination to ordain an African-American pastor (1785) and formed the nation's first foreign missionary society (1810).

The UCC came to the aid of the illegally-enslaved Amistad captives in 1839, an event that led to the U.S. Supreme Court's first civil rights ruling. It was the first church to ordain a woman in 1853 and the first to ordain an openly gay man in 1972.

The Cleveland-based United Church of Christ has been a consistent leader in the global ecumenical, interfaith movement and maintains full communion partnerships with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Reformed Church in America.

United Church News Service