Eugene's Legendary Unitarian

More than 40 years after the march on Selma and the protests against the war in Vietnam and the cross atop Skinner Butte, Carl Nelson is still trying to bring the church back to earth and the warlike to their senses.

At 91, Nelson remains eloquent, energized and, quite likely, the most significant minister in the history of the Eugene Unitarian Church. Watching the war in Iraq unfold has only deepened this Marine veteran's conviction that the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg challenged all of us to be conscientious objectors whenever the need arises, with moral obligations to humanity that transcend those to our nation.

And Nelson continues to believe that invoking a heavenly deity is part of the problem, not the solution.

"When you put the creative power up in the sky, you take it out of the natural world. And the natural world becomes materialistic," Nelson said Wednesday. "What becomes sacred is dogma, not the natural world. Christians, Muslims and Jews are forever killing one another -- through jihads, inquisitions, colonialism, whatever -- because dogma is sacred, not living things."

Nelson's sense that the sacred is rooted in the natural world we routinely plunder springs from his experience growing up on a farm in Wisconsin, attending seminary in Chicago and spending six years with the Marines during World War II.

He was diverted to officers' candidate school when his outfit was sent to the Solomon Islands in 1942, so Nelson never saw combat. He knows what a difference that made: "I wouldn't have come back."

Nelson arrived in Eugene in the early 1960s as the Universalists and the Unitarians set aside their legendary differences -- "The one thinks God is too good to damn them forever; the other thinks they are too good to be damned forever," historic minister Thomas Starr King once said -- and merged.

In seven years at the helm of that congregation, Nelson pushed it to the forefront of progressive activism in Eugene. He led protests against the Vietnam War, with FBI-taped vigils in the park and all-night teach-ins at the University of Oregon.

He went to Selma, Ala., to walk beside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. after James Reeb, a Unitarian-Universalist minister, was clubbed to death two days after the Bloody Sunday confrontation between state troopers and civil rights marchers.

And Nelson and the church led the fight to get a 52-foot concrete cross removed from city property atop Skinner Butte.

His impact, said Eugene activist George Beres, "owed to the degree of his anger and the ways he found to express it. He didn't lash out. He ventured into areas of community life that were controversial, sensitive and spoke to his sense of values as a person and a Unitarian."

More than 40 years later, Nelson winters in Eugene and summers in Wisconsin. He still believes, in the words of Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, that "war is a racket." He still writes poetry and tells a great story, such as the tale of his son's 1968 trial as a conscientious objector.

As a student at Antioch College, Mark had used his car to run draft dodgers up to Canada, Nelson said, "but he didn't want to go there. This was his country. He'd stay, protest the war and suffer the consequences."

The Portland judge had already sent 45 COs to jail on the morning Mark came before the bench; he asked Mark if he'd accept alternative community service, and Mark agreed. To celebrate, his parents took him to lunch at a nearby restaurant . . . where the bartender promptly told the kid he wasn't old enough to ogle the topless dancers.

"He was just old enough to go off to war and get killed," Nelson said.

Steve Duin: 503-221-8597; 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201

steveduin@news.oregonian.com http://blog.oregonlive.com/stevedu