The Emergence of Universalist Religious Thought

The global presence of both Christianity and Islam ensured that, by the late nineteenth century, emergent religions throughout the world would reflect the influence and prestige of these Abrahamic faiths. The most direct manifestation of this influence can be found in their embrace of a monotheistic paradigm, in which the idea of a single and singular “God” becomes a core precept in their offshoot theology. But no less direct an influence can be found in the belief—shared by so many “universalist” religions, and in particular by Baha’i and Unitarianism—that their teachings reach beyond the boundaries of time and geography and therefore speak to the whole of humankind.