When the American Unitarian Association and the Univeralist Church of America completed their merger in 1961, the Unitarian Universalist Association was born. Although there was much continuity between the old organizations and the new one, there was a definite departure from the unique identities that both had held.
One of the things that they had in common in the early days is that they shared a common enemy: Calvinism. David Robinson in his book “The Unitarians and the Universalists,” from which this entire history is excerpted, writes: As the religion of the New England Puritans, Calvinism was a vital theology, prone to different emphases and interpretations … and a theology of uneasy tensions. In preserving the inviolability of the will of God, it seemed to sacrifice the will of humanity. This was agonizingly true of the doctrine of “election” to grace, which held that God chose those who would be saved before the dawn of time, and those not so elected were powerless to effect their own salvation.
In 1770, John Murray arrived from England and began preaching a new message of hope. Salvation is for all: all are, in effect, “elected.” This message of “universal” salvation was seized by many, and spread in the late eighteenth century, largely among rural and small town populations of middling economic status. Universalism was born.
Meanwhile, another change was taking place among many of the clergy in Boston and eastern Massachusetts. Ministers who were part of the churches of the “Standing Order” of New England, established by the Puritans, began to emphasize God’s benevolence, humankind’s free will, and the dignity rather than the depravity of human nature. This trend was accelerated by evangelical revivals. The emotional excesses of the revival, and the threats that iterant preachers posed to the established clergy, caused a reaction that forced a deeper commitment to liberal and rational theology. As this liberalism grew in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the institutional and intellectual base of American Unitarians was prepared.
The Universalist movement developed principally in New England with John Murray and then Hosea Ballou. The Universalists struggled against the system of tax support for the “established” or official churches, and they took on a role as intellectual mavericks and social protesters. Denominational organization remained primarily congregational, although in 1790, a national convention met in Philadelphia and two years later the New England Convention of Universalists was formed. In 1803, that group adopted the “Winchester Profession of Faith,” which affirmed a belief in the revelation of the Bible, the certainty of eventual salvation, and the moral imperative of good works as essential Universalist tenets.
The Unitarian denomination continued to emerge as the liberals of the day, increasingly wary of Calvinist orthodoxy, opposed those who were trying to hold the line against departure from orthodox doctrine. The controversy came to a head in 1805 when the liberal Henry Ware was elected Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard over orthodox objections. (Some will recall that the primary address at General Assembly, the annual meeting of the UUA, is called the Ware lecture.) Later a pamphlet debate began, culminating in William Ellery Channing’s important sermon of 1819, “Unitarian Christianity.” In that sermon, Channing confirmed the presence of a new theology movement, embraced the term Unitarian, and rallied the liberals together as a discrete theological group. Denominational reorganization was not part of Channing’s vision, but Unitarianism began to achieve institutional identity.
Many of the established churches split between the liberals and orthodox, and a legal ruling over such a split at Dedham, MA in 1820 served to give the Unitarians’ control of the original church buildings and properties. Hence, many Puritan churches of Massachusetts became Unitarian. In 1825, the American Unitarian Association was formed, essentially as a publishing and education arm of the Unitarian movement. It was an association of individuals.
Almost as soon as Unitarianism achieved an identity, it produced its own rebellion: Transcendentalism. This movement was most closely identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, who espoused a religion of direct intuition of God or the “One Mind” of the universe. Transcendentalism was a highly individualistic version of Unitarianism, disposed against ecclesiastical organization, and was reformist in its political outlook, within the limits of its individualism.
Universalist Hosea Ballou held the intellectual and personal leadership of Universalism in the early nineteenth century and he pushed the concept of universalism beyond Murray. For Murray, salvation was eventually assured, although suffering for many after death, for a limited time, was probable. As Ballou gradually began to see it, all punishment for sin was in consequences of sin in this life. After death, all were saved with no period of suffering. Ballou’s version of Universalism sparked a heated and divisive debate. “The “Ultra-Universalists” followed Ballou in rejecting all future punishment, and the “Restorationists” held that limited punishment was part of the Divine plan.
The difference of the major dialogues of the Unitarians and the Universalists at the time was that Universalists were more closely identified with one theological position, universal salvation, insisting on biblical authority and the centrality of Jesus and his atonement whereas Unitarianism was in the leadership of the general Protestant movement away from orthodoxy and toward modernism.
The controversies surrounding Transcendentalism dominated the intellectual world of Unitarianism before the Civil War, and those controversies extended into the political realm as well, as Unitarians tried to respond to the issue of slavery. (As an aside, it is important to remember that as a whole, the early Unitarians of Boston profited from the slave economy.) Theodore Parker, whose transcendentalist views on theology had made him a figure of controversy, extended that controversy through his increasingly strident antislavery ideas.
During the Civil War, many Northern Unitarian ministers went south to help with the wounded, and one minister, Henry W. Bellows, upon seeing the dismal conditions of field hospitals, created the United States Sanitary Commission to upgrade medical care. His experience led him to form a National Conference of Unitarian Churches in 1865 to help Unitarianism emerge into a more general movement of liberal religion of a truly universal appeal. This idea was also appealing to the Universalists who, while still committed to the principles of Christian Biblicism, were beginning to see that the term Universalist could denote the universal community of all men and women and the necessity of working toward the secular realization of the community through peace and justice on earth.
Bellows’ effort to organize Unitarianism brought forth a counter reaction. Radicals in the denomination, spiritual descendants of Emerson and the Transcendentalists, resisted the organization of liberal religion and suspected Bellows and others of hoping to impose some uniformity of thought or belief on Unitarianism as a condition of organizing it. Some of them bolted from the denomination to form the Free Religious Association, which held its first meeting in 1867. This Free Religious movement was committed to being completed noncreedal, and took a largely post-Christian outlook that located religious value in the evolving progress of the human race, arguing in a thoroughly nonsupernaturalistic way that God worked “in and through human nature.”
As Unitarianism spread from New England to the Midwest and Pacific Coast, the issues of theological modernism were also debated. The Western Unitarian Conference was formed in 1852 to organize Midwest Unitarianism. In the 1870s and 1880s, it evolved into a vehicle of theological radicalism that was at odds with the more conservative eastern Unitarianism centered at the AUA in Boston. Western ministers insisted on the creedless religion tied to an ethical basis rather than a theological dogma. The controversy ended in an 1894 meeting of the National Conference where the denomination unanimously adopted a declaration that “nothing in this constitution is to be construed as an authoritative test,” thus declaring the denomination to be uncompromisingly noncreedal.
Universalists were evolving as well and they began to hold a social interpretation of religion. The 1917 Declaration of Social Principles, drafted by Clarence Skinner and adopted by the Univeralist General Convention, stressed the fact that evil is a result of “unjust social and economic conditions” and called for a religion that addressed those conditions. Among the strikingly prophetic list of recommendations in the report was a call for a more democratic division of land and industry, equal rights for women, social insurance, and a world federation. For Skinner, the true Universalism was of this world: it was economic and social as well as spiritual.
The early decades of the 20th century were marked by the rise of the Humanist movement among the Unitarians, an attempt to reformulate liberal theology on completed nontheistic grounds. In one sense, the Humanists continued the radical theological impulse that had been expressed by Free Religion or Transcendentalism, although the Humanists, having a distinctly empirical cast, were less speculative in theological matters.
Partly in response to Humanism, but primarily in response to a more general crisis of faith in liberal thinking in the 1930s, Unitarian minister James Luther Adams called for a revival of liberal religious principles that focused on a recognition of the “tragedy” of human life and human progress and the necessity of active “commitment” to which such a recognition of tragedy must lead. By criticizing liberal religion as its very core, its doctrine of human nature, Adams and others hope to revive the action principle of liberalism that facile optimism had tended to numb in the 20th century.
After this crisis, Unitarians underwent a surge of growth after World War II, and groundwork was laid for the consolidation of Unitarian and Universalism. But if the consolidation signified the crest of an expansionary phase it was followed shortly by the social upheaval of the 1960s, which was reflected in a period of unrest and uncertainty within Unitarian Universalism. National politics, the general social disenchantment with all institutions, and demographic factors can all be said to have contributed to that upheaval. But another salient fact is that the diversity of outlook that had always characterized the denomination seemed to increase in the post-World War II period. Underneath the social stresses of the era of Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and the feminist movement lay the difficult question of finding a common identity within that diversity.
In the 1980s, the denomination was in a period in which political goals unified rather than divide liberals and David Robinson concludes his summary with his analysis that perhaps it is now that common history is starting to be seen as a sign of common identity.
Excerpted from David Robinson, “The Unitarians and the Universalists,”
Greenwood Press, Greenwood, CT, 1985
A Summary View, pages 3-8
