American Unitarian History

1. American Unitarian History

2. American Unitarian History First Unitarian Church in America King’s Chapel in Boston

3. American Unitarian History King’s Chapel in Boston • The Royal Governor built King's Chapel on the town burying ground in 1688. When the building became too small for the congregation in 1749, architect Peter Harrison was hired to design a new church on the same site 'that would be the equal of any in England.' This church was completed in 1754 (one of the 500 most important buildings in America). The magnificent light-filled sanctuary is considered by many to be the finest example of Georgian church architecture in North America. Before the American Revolution, it was the headquarters of all the colonial Anglican churches. In 1785, King's Chapel became the first Unitarian Church in America. Services are still held today. • Born in 1759, James Freeman led King’s Chapel to explicit acknowledgement of the Unitarian position. Freeman graduated from Harvard College in the class of 1777. He was invited to serve as lay reader at King’s Chapel in 1782. In December of that year, he wrote to his father, “I am confirmed in the opinion that I shall obtain the settlement for life.” In the following two years, his views on the Trinity so changed that he expected that he would be obliged to resign his post. But after he stated his position on the subject in a series of sermons, the congregation voted in 1785 to amend the liturgy of the Prayer Book, bringing it into conformance with Freeman’s views. • Thus the first Episcopal Church in New England became the first Unitarian Church in the New World.

4. American Unitarian History The Unitarian Controversy • In 1805, Henry Ware, Sr. was elected to the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard College. The Hollis Professor of Divinity was the oldest endowed chair in America. The election of Ware has been called “a college revolution.” • Reverend Henry Ware was the minister at Hingham’s First Parish and was known to be a religious liberal. He and his colleague, Dr. Daniel Shute of Hingham’s Second Parish, had collaborated in preparing for use in their parishes a catechism which was clearly Arian in Christology. • Jedidiah Morse led the orthodox reaction to Ware’s election. Jedidiah Morse, the minister of the First Church of Charlestown, was without a doubt the most active and effective opponent of liberal Christians who dominated who dominated Boston pulpits in 1805. It must be remembered that, before Ware’s election, in Boston the spirit of Harvard, long the stronghold of moderate Calvinism, had impressed itself on the life of the churches. • The controversy within Harvard College and the surrounding churches didn’t subside until roughly thirty years later.

5. American Unitarian History The Dedham Case, 1818 • But the question now arose, whose should be the church property when Unitarians and orthodox drew apart? This was the question involved in the Dedham case (Baker vs. Fales). • In order to understand the matter, one must remember that in the Massachusetts towns there bad long been two religious organizations. The “parish,” or “society,” consisted of all the male voters of the town organized to maintain religious worship, which they were bound by law to support by taxation. The “church” on the other hand consisted only of those persons within the parish (generally a small minority) who had made a public profession of their religious faith, and bad joined together in a serious inner circle for religious purposes, and were admitted to the observance of the Lord’s Supper. • By law a minister must be elected by vote of the whole parish which supported him; but by natural custom it had come to be generally expected that he must also be acceptable to the church, even if not nominated by it. For generations church and parish had generally agreed. • But when the controversy arose between the orthodox and the Unitarians, disagreements became frequent and often serious; and in many cases it happened that while the majority of the church members wished to settle a conservative from Andover, the majority of the parish would prefer a liberal man from Harvard, and usually no way of compromise could be found. • This was the situation at Dedham, where the pulpit fell vacant in 1818, and the parish voted two to one to settle a liberal man, while the church by a small majority voted against him. As the parish refused to yield, a majority of the church withdrew and formed a new church, taking with them the church property, which was in this instance nearly enough to support the minister. A lawsuit followed, to determine which was the real church, and which might hold the property, the majority of the church who seceded from the parish, or the minority who stayed in it. The case was bitterly fought, and the Supreme Court of the state at length decided in 1820 that seceders forfeited all their rights, and that even the smallest minority remaining with the parish were still the parish church, and entitled to the church property. • The orthodox losses as the result of the divisions that took place were indeed severe. In eighty one instances the orthodox members seceded, nearly 4,000 of them in all, thus losing funds and property estimated at over $600,000, not to mention the loss of churches which went to the liberal side without a division. • By 1820, there were some 120 Unitarian churches in eastern Massachusetts.

6. American Unitarian History William Ellery Channing “Apostle of Unitarianism" • Channing was a leading figure in the development of New England Transcendentalism and of organized attempts in the U.S. to eliminate slavery, drunkenness, poverty, and war. • He studied theology in Newport and at Harvard and soon became a successful preacher in various churches in the Boston area. From June 1, 1803, until his death he was minister of the Federal Street Church, Boston. • Jedidiah Morse, denounced the Boston clergy as "Unitarian" rather than Christian. During the next five years Channing issued several defenses of his position, especially "Unitarian Christianity," a sermon delivered at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore in 1819. It has been called the most famous sermon ever delivered in America. • Reluctantly accepting the label of Unitarianism, Channing described his faith as "a rational and amiable system, against which no man's understanding, or conscience, or charity, or piety revolts." Although he did not wish to found a denomination, believing that a Unitarian orthodoxy would be just as oppressive as any other, he formed (1820) a conference of liberal Congregational ministers, later (May 1825) reorganized as the American Unitarian Association (AUA).

7. American Unitarian History Transcendentalism • Transcendentalism was not a mass movement, but it made up in quality what it lacked in quantity. The transcendentalists included some of the greatest names in American literary and intellectual history: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker and Margaret Fuller among them. • Of the twenty-six members of the “Transcendentalist Club”, seventeen were Unitarian ministers. • While they always honored Channing’s own open-mindedness, the Transcendentalists worried lest his views settle into new Unitarian orthodoxy in the hands of his successors. • Conrad Wright describes the Transcendentalists as “essentially pantheists, people who saw and felt God everywhere – in all creation and especially in themselves.” Material things they were inclined to treat as symbols of divine things. The Transcendentalists admired not only the romantics love of nature but also their glorification of passion.

8. American Unitarian History Ralph Waldo Emerson • Emerson began his career as a Unitarian minister but went on, as an independent man of letters, to become the preeminent lecturer, essayist and philosopher of 19th century America. Emerson was a key figure in the "New England Renaissance," as an author and also through association with the Transcendental Club, the Dial and the many writers—notably Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller —who gathered around him at his home in Concord, Massachusetts. Late in life his home was a kind of shrine students and aspiring writers visited, as on a pilgrimage. He and other Transcendentalists did much to open Unitarians and the liberally religious to science, Eastern religions and a naturalistic mysticism. • His father, William Emerson, distinguished minister of First Church, Boston, had drawn his congregation with him into Unitarianism. The family was intimate with the Boston intellectuals of the era, among them William Ellery Channing and Henry Ware, Sr. • In October, 1826, Emerson was licensed to preach by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. In 1829 Emerson became associate minister to Henry Ware, Jr. at Second Church in Boston. In 1830, after Ware joined the faculty of Harvard Divinity School, Second Church made Emerson full minister. He never relished parish work, especially the "calling" he was expected to do every afternoon, though he liked preaching. Ware criticized his use of biblical texts to illustrate his sermons, as opposed to preaching from the texts. Yet in 1832, in a radical departure from common practice, Emerson resigned his pulpit and never served another congregation. • His "Divinity School Address" was delivered as a sermon from a minister to graduating students for the ministry. Emerson considered his ideas consistent with the teachings of Jesus. He was taken by surprise when his "Divinity School Address" was both acclaimed and denounced vigorously in a storm of controversy. Theodore Parker, the newly ordained minister in West Roxbury, thought the speech "sublime." Andrews Norton, Harvard's Dexter Professor of Biblical Literature, labeled it the "latest form of infidelity."

9. American Unitarian History Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker was a New England Transcendentalist heavyweight.  A Transcendentalist, theologian, scholar, Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and social reformer, Parker impacted America in more ways than most people imagine.  In his vigorous challenge to religious dogmatism, his tireless (and fearless) anti-slavery stance, and his fight for women’s rights, he was years, decades, ahead of his time.  His brilliant sermon A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity (1841) is truly a Transcendentalist manifesto. • Parker was originally introduced to liberal religious perspectives in the early 1830s.  He rapidly moved beyond traditional Unitarianism and joined the Transcendental Club in 1836.  In 1840, he debated conservative Unitarian leader and curmudgeon Andrews Norton over the significance of biblical miracles in a lengthy public letter written under the pseudonym “Levi Blodgett.”  Essentially, Parker pursued Unitarianism much further than the Unitarians were willing to go.  His words and actions rightfully accused many Unitarian ministers of teaching a supernatural Christianity in which they no longer believed and insisting on conformity to a creed that they professed not to have. • Parker vigorously advocated social reform and personally aided and defended fugitive slaves in Boston.  He was a noteworthy contributor to the Dial and later founded his own magazine, the Massachusetts Quarterly Review (1847–1850).

10. American Unitarian History Margaret Fuller • America's first true feminist, Margaret Fuller holds a distinctive place in the cultural life of the American Renaissance. Transcendentalist, literary critic, editor, journalist, teacher, and political activist, ultimately turned revolutionary, she numbered among her close friends the intellectual prime movers of the day: Emerson, Thoreau, Horace Greeley. • Fuller received an intellectually rigorous classical education, whose boundaries she challenged when she won admittance for herself to the male-only halls of Harvard's Library, where she continued her reading, research, and study of languages. • She and Emerson founded the Transcendentalist journal, THE DIAL, in 1840. Fuller served as editor for the first two years, turning the publication over to Emerson's editorship in 1842. • After THE DIAL ceased publication in 1844, Fuller was invited by Horace Greeley, Owner and Editor of the NEW YORK TRIBUNE to serve as literary and cultural critic for the paper. • In that job, she increased her awareness of urban poverty and strengthened her commitment to social justice and to the causes that concerned her: prison reform, Abolitionism, Women's Suffrage, and educational and political equality for minorities.

11. American Unitarian History Thomas Starr King • The Reverend Thomas Starr King was the Unitarian minister in San Francisco from 1860 to 1864.  A pastor, patriot, humanitarian, educator, orator, writer, man of letters,  journalist, fighter for justice, shaper of public opinion, and lover of nature, he is best known for his role in keeping California in the Union during the Civil War.  His book, The White Hills, their Legends, Landscape and Poetry, his sermons and his correspondence in newspapers such as the Boston Evening Transcript, brought his love of nature to the attention of the American public. • San Franciscans were proud of King's eloquence, his ties with literary Boston, his line of ministerial descent in the church of Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and Theodore Parker. That he was self-educated, that he has risen in the learned Unitarian ministry without benefit of an earned degree, reinforced the assumption that talent, not birth or background, was what counted. • Starr King believed in one God.  God is the sovereign and ruler of the universe....God is love,...his spirit strives with every soul.  King believed that the spirit of God was in every person and in every thing--pervading every part of His creation. • However,  he felt that Reason, instead of being subordinated to faith, is the very essence of faith, else faith is blind idolatry.

12. American Unitarian History Henry Whitney Bellows • BELLOWS, Henry Whitney, clergyman, born in Boston, Massachusetts, 11 June 1814; died in New York City, 30 January 1882. He was graduated at Harvard in 1832, and at Cambridge divinity school in 1837, was ordained pastor of the first Congregational Church in New York, 2 January 1839, and attained a reputation as a ready and eloquent pulpit orator and also as a lecturer on social questions. • In 1846 he founded the " Christian Inquirer," a weekly Unitarian paper, of which he was the principal writer till 1850. His involvement with the northern war effort in the 1860s resulted in the formation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, and this organizational experience led Bellows to form the National Conference in 1865. It was a historic, although controversial act, because one faction of the denomination feared the centralization of power and the possibility of creedalism that Bellows's efforts represented to them. But Bellows thought that liberalism had to be organized further than it was under the American Unitarian Association. In his sense of the need of an institutional grounding for liberalism, and in his successful efforts to secure that grounding, Bellows changed the course of American Unitarianism. • Dr. Bellows was pastor of All-Souls Church in New York City, for forty-three years.

13. American Unitarian History Factions within Unitarianism, 1865 • The Evangelicals. Unitarianism has often included some who have never been quite sure whether they belonged in the denomination or in one of the more conservative Protestant bodies. Sometimes they were Unitarian in their Christology, but longed for a more evangelical kind of piety or a more ritualistic mode of worship. This group was characterized by a strong loyalty to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. • The Older Rationalists. The Unitarian right wing shaded imperceptibly from the Evangelicals to the Older Rationalists. These represented a Unitarianism of the first generation. For them Christianity was validated not by inner religious experience, but by historical evidence of the divine mission of Jesus as attested by miracles. They sometimes described themselves as “Channing Unitarians” by way of contrast with Transcendentalists, for whom the primary validation of religion itself is by inner consciousness, not historical evidence. • The Broad Church Group. The “Broad Church Group” shared the Christian commitment of the Evangelicals and the Older Rationalists, and were not disposed to remake Unitarianism into a movement of free spirits in which Jesus Christ – in Bellow’s words – would be put “into comparative contempt.” But unlike the conservatives of the older type, they did not seek to exclude the Radicals, but rather tried to draw them in. They would not tolerate creedal definitions to promote exclusion. • The Radicals. These were the free spirits of the denomination who refused to acknowledge for Christianity any special rank among the religious traditions of mankind. The Radicals were splendid gadflies and dissenters within the denomination, and their influence on it throughout the closing decades of the century was considerable. Some of them formed the Free Religious Association as a forum for the expression of more advanced religious ideas than Unitarianism seemed ready to accept.

14. American Unitarian History Saratoga Conference, 1894 • The Saratoga Conference of 1894 ended nearly thirty years of controversy. Yet the final outcome was substantially what Bellows had sought in 1865. Why was it possible to achieve consensus without compromise in 1894, when the struggle had been so prolonged and at times so acrimonious? A combination of factors must be acknowledged. In the first place, some of the more rigid personalities had lost influence. There was, as Bellows had wished, a growing denominational consciousness. There were new instruments for common activity such as the Women’s Alliance. Then, in 1886, the denomination acquired a headquarters building designed especially for its use at 25 Beacon Street in Boston. • The consensus statement: “These churches accept the religion of Jesus, holding, in accordance with his teaching, that practical religion is summed up in love to God and love to man. The Conference recognizes the fact its constituency is Congregational in tradition and polity. Therefore, it declares that nothing in this constitution is to be construed as an authoritative test; and we cordially invite to our working fellowship any who, while differing from us in belief, are in general sympathy with out spirit and our practical aims.” • So, as the American Unitarian Association moved into the twentieth century everything was settled. This wouldn’t last for long.

15. American Unitarian History 25 Beacon St.Headquarters of the UUA Ground was broken for this building in 1925 by Nora Gallagher, president of the Alliance of Unitarian Women, which raised substantial donations for its construction. Special permission was granted by City Hall to transfer the number "25" to this new site. The original "25" was located on the corner of Beacon and Bowdoin Streets.

16. American Unitarian History Samuel Atkins Eliot • American Unitarian Association President, 1900-1927 • He worked to reorganize and solidify the AUA. This project was his major life’s work. • Samuel A. Eliot stands as one of the major administrative talents in the twentieth-century Unitarian history. • Sam spent his formative years in the company of his father and the tightly knit Harvard faculty. Under their guidance Sam and his brother, architect Charles Eliot, were educated individually. Sam Eliot received his A.B. in 1884 cum laude. He entered Harvard Divinity School in 1885. • In 1889, Eliot accepted a call to Unity Church in Denver, Colorado. In 1892 Eliot was called to a prominent Eastern pulpit, the Church of the Saviour, in Brooklyn, New York. In 1894 he began serving on the board of directors of the AUA. Upon joining the AUA board, Eliot urged measures that would transform the AUA into an engine of progress for both congregational and secular organizations, through application of the new "science" of corporate management. He and his allies hoped to restore the Unitarians' once prominent civil as well as religious leadership. • He feared that as other faiths became more liberal, the less numerous Unitarians (and Universalists) would lose their distinctive appeal. • Beginning in 1899, Eliot worked to further ties between the Unitarians and Universalists. Growth and strength could best be accomplished through institutional cooperation, if not unity. • Eliot tirelessly advocated application, in all church related matters, of the methods of successful business practice.

17. American Unitarian History Sophia Lyon Fahs • The life of Sophia Lyon Fahs was a remarkable journey from the heart of evangelical Christian orthodoxy to a leadership role in a revitalized religious liberalism, a revitalization due in large part to her role as an innovative religious educator. • Born in China on August 2, 1876, the child of Presbyterian missionaries, Sophia Lyon graduated from Wooster College in Wooster, Ohio. • Sophia Fahs wanted to delay Bible study until children could really grasp that it was actually a library of books written by fallible human beings over hundreds of years. • The Unitarian churches had long been wrestling with many of the problems that perplexed Sophia Fahs. In 1837, 100 years before she took up her work with the denomination, the prophetic Unitarian preacher, William Ellery Channing, speaking before the Boston Sunday School Society, urged his listeners to have faith in the child and to see as the challenge "not to stamp our minds irresistibly on the young, but to stir up their own, …” • In February 1959, at the age of 82, Sophia Fahs accepted the invitation from the Montgomery County Unitarian Church of Bethesda, Maryland, to be ordained into the Unitarian ministry.

18. American Unitarian History Frederick May Eliot • Frederick May Eliot was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, where his father was minister of the Unitarian church. • He graduated with honors from Harvard in 1911. He entered the Harvard Divinity School, from which he graduated in 1915. • Following his ordination as a Unitarian minister, he became assistant, for two years, to Dr. Crothers at the First Parish in Cambridge. In 1917 he was called to Dr. Crothers' old church in St. Paul, Minnesota. There he remained, with the exception of a few months when he was chaplain in the armed services, until called to the presidency of the American Unitarian Association twenty years later. • History records the results of his presidency. During the twenty years of Frederick's incumbency (1937-1958), adult membership in the denomination increased 75% Church School membership almost trebled. In the last ten years, forty new churches have been established, over two hundred fellowships have been organized, of which a dozen have become churches (included in the forty). Indeed, to use a current expression, the Unitarian population has "exploded" and the machinery, more especially the American Unitarian Association, has been hard pressed to meet the challenge with ministers, buildings and other services. • Frederick made it plain, or tried to, that as President he had no authority to tell Humanists or anyone else what to think or preach, nor any power to expel them from the denomination, even if he wished to, and that, at any rate, he did not think it wise to discriminate against Humanists financially if they were otherwise good Unitarians. Frederick, being a Humanist of sorts, was fairly persuasive along this line, except with those whose minds were closed on the subject.

19. American Unitarian History A. Powell Davies Five Principles of Modern Unitarianism • Individual freedom of belief • Discipleship to advancing truth • Democratic process in human relations • Universal brotherhood, undivided by nations, race, or creed • Allegiance to the cause of a United World Community This, in many ways, was the basis upon which Unitarianism would move into the post-war (1945) world. The statement is indicative of how far American Unitarianism had traveled out of the Christian consensus. It is a methodological statement, which avoids all traditional religious terms – God, Jesus, Christianity, etc. In many ways, it embraces as normative the Humanism preached by Curtis Reese at Harvard in 1920.