Unitarians and Universalists

Most major American denominations of the 19th century modified traditional Protestant notions of human depravity and predestination in favor of human ability and free will, but none so thoroughly as Unitarianism, a product of Boston’s intellectual culture, and Universalism.

Unitarianism rejects the doctrine of the Trinity in favor of God’s oneness. It surfaced periodically through the history of Christianity before appearing in Enlightenment England, becoming official doctrine at Anglican King’s Chapel in Boston in 1785, and finding an advocate in British emigre Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), who founded two congregations in Pennsylvania in the 1790s. American Unitarianism originated above all with Congregationalist opponents of the Great Awakening, who rejected its revivalism and orthodoxy in favor of such liberal positions as God’s benevolence, Jesus’ divine but subordinate status, human moral efficacy, and a rationalistic approach to Scripture.

The embrace of these positions by the professional classes of eastern Massachusetts during the late 18th century generated a rift between orthodox and liberal Congregationalists. Schism ensued when a liberal takeover of Harvard College in 1805 prompted the founding of orthodox Andover Seminary in 1808, William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) asserted “Unitarian Christianity” in a provocative 1819 sermon, and an 1820 Massachusetts Supreme Court decision allowed Unitarians to assume control of some one hundred Congregational parishes in eastern Massachusetts. In 1825, 125 churches, most in and around Boston, formed an informal American Unitarian Association. (A more formal National Conference of Unitarian Churches followed in 1865.) Unitarianism became the dominant church of maritime New England.

Cool toward revivalism and disinclined to proselytize, Unitarians attracted few adherents in other areas.

Unitarianism soon spawned an even more liberal offshoot: Transcendentalism, which infused Unitarianism with German idealism and Flindu ideas. In 1836, a Boston-area group led by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) formed the Transcendental Club, and in 1838 Emerson offered Transcendentalism’s manifesto in a commencement address at Harvard Divinity School. Transcendentalism generated the short-lived communal experiments of Brook Farm (1841) and Fruitlands (1843), and inspired Henry David Thoreau’s famous 1845 retreat to Walden Pond. It also influenced a range of emerging “metaphysical” movements in American religion.

Universalism teaches that all human beings will achieve salvation. It circulated in post-Reformation England and Germany but was particularly salient in the populist religious subculture that developed in rural northern New England after the Great Awakening. It was spread in the early United States primarily by John Murray (1741–1815) and by Elnahan Winchester (1751–97). Murray preached throughout the Northeast, founding a church in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1779 and finally settling in Boston. Winchester worked in the Philadelphia area, attracting several Baptists and in 1781 founding the Society for Universal Baptists. Resistant to centralized organization, American Universalists at first formed scattered societies in the New England and mid-Atlantic states, but a need for legal recognition led them to form regional conventions in New England (1785) and Philadelphia (1790) and eventually, in 1833, the Universalist Church of America. The new denomination remained strongest in New England—where about 55 percent of its churches were located in 1850—but its populist character promoted its spread into the small towns and rural areas of the South and West. Its greatest growth came between 1820 and 1850, when conventions were organized in several Southern and Western states. By 1900 there were about 65,000 Universalists in nearly 1,000 societies.

Doctrinal similarity and declining membership prompted Unitarians and Universalists to merge into the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961. This organization—small, socially progressive, largely Northeastern, and especially strong among professionals and academics—remains a key religious expression of American liberal impulses.