Crisis, Solidarity, and Ritual in Religiously Diverse Settings: A Unitarian Universalist Case Study

Abstract

How can religious ritual foster solidarity in religiously diverse communities in times of crisis? This question is crucial in social contexts characterized by increasing religious and nonreligious diversity and ongoing intersecting crises associated with violence, inequality, and climate change. Solidarity is necessary both as an immediate response to crisis and to the pursuit of long-term solutions that address underlying causes. Situated in the literature on disaster ritual, this study draws on Randall Collins’ sociological theory of interaction ritual chains to analyze the weekly ritual of sharing “Joys and Concerns” followed by a “Meditation” practiced by a theistically diverse Unitarian Universalist congregation. Anchored in one year of ethnographic research in this community, it concludes that the trusted structures, shared stories, and embodied symbols associated with this practice contain the ritual ingredients necessary to produce social solidarity in response to personal and societal crises and may be a model to apply in other religiously diverse contexts.