UU’s “prosetylization of the dead”

So I've been chewing on this one for a couple of weeks. I posted that FlUUnking History post, and my pal Chutney posted an elaboration on his blog, which can be seen here. And its on his point about "our prosetylization of the dead." I absolutely love that wording. In my New UU class, for example, we had a worksheet scavenger hunt on old famous UUs.

The whole New UU class was rather pointless, and this just reiterated it.
He may wonder why we're obsessed with declaring important dead people to be UUs, and actively pushing the fact, but it seems somewhat clear to me in my relative New-UUness. It seems twofold to me, neither which seem pretty to me. We want to seem more important than we really are, and we are so desperate to communicate with people outside UUism that we want to use a historical figure to explain it. Since we can't quite look to Jesus, Abraham, Mohamed, etc.

We are a small group of individuals, and on the national political spectrum, especially right now, we have little if any voice in either religious matters or political matters. We're hardly on the map. Take a gander at this mapping of religion in the US. We're so tiny it's a sand castle in the way of the red tidal wave of Baptists. If we can claim famous dead people, any sort of governmental official at all, it gives us something to be proud of and not feel so alone, and makes us sound more important that we actually are in the national historical spectrum.

The communicative effects are offbeat too. We can tell people that Thomas Jefferson was a UU. They know who Thomas Jefferson was. Therefore, they know who UUs are and its our in. That sounds, well, stupid, but it seems to happen. There are soooo many more wonderful things about UUism than famous dead people that we could use in evangelist efforts, but we stick to the dead people. If I was flirting with UU and someone told me all the famous dead people who were members of UU, it would put me off. It's like a desperate old fart holding on to their last vestiges of youth by wearing spandex top at 80. A scary sight, and makes me want to nervously scoot towards the exit.

Some people might say we're proud of our heritage, but if I'm not mistaken, a lot of that famous UU list aren't people who were actual Unitarians or Universalists, but people who had like-minded ideals. We have so many other things to be proud of than old dead white guys…why can't we push those instead?

We really need classes on evangelism if we think the dead guy think works.