History of Unitarian Universalism
A history of UUCA is also available.
By Dr. Edward Frost, Minister Emeritus
A while ago a woman called to ask me about conducting a wedding service for her daughter. The bride’s family is Roman Catholic; the groom’s family Jewish. The clergy of neither faith would marry them. Such situations often get referred to a Unitarian Universalist church—usually by the clergy of the other faiths who are convinced that Unitarian Universalist ministers are totally undiscriminating.
We talked details for a while, then the woman said, “I have never heard of Unitarians. You’re not some kind of cult are you?”
I felt insulted by that, so I asked her, “Have you ever heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson?” She said, “Of course I’ve heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson!”
And I said, “Well, not only was he a Unitarian Universalist, but he was a Unitarian Universalist minister.”
“Really?” she asked, “Why didn’t I know that?” I considered pointing out to her that I had no way of knowing the cause of her realms of ignorance. But that wouldn’t have been fair. Most of the world never heard of Unitarianism.
Still, I get defensive and offended by the world’s ignorance—as when some delivery person coming to the office asks if this is the Unity Church or the Unification Church. It has seemed to me that one shouldn’t have to validate one’s religion by resting back into history and pulling out names of famously reasonable people. On the other hand, history is justifying. Our history is our firm foundation and we should know it and cherish it—not simply out of duty, but because living in our history has more religious value than merely living isolated in one congregation.
As a refresher course for some, then, and perhaps as a surprising illumination to those newer to our faith, let us take a quick dash through Unitarian and Universalist history—not as a defense, but as a reaffirmation of ourselves.
Unitarianism
Unitarianism—as a religious idea—the idea that God is one, not three-in-one, as in Trinitarians, goes back many centuries. We may start with the third century theologian, Origen, (sometimes called “the first Universalist”) who defied Christian thought of his time by proclaiming that God would save everyone, not just believing Christians. And, in the fourth century, there was Arius, the heretic who dared to suggest, in a great debate in Nicea in 325, that, while Jesus was like God, he was not God. Arius lost that debate and Trinitarianism—the idea of three Gods in One—won the day and became orthodox doctrine. The Unitarian idea of One God, however, survived.
In the sixteenth century in Transylvania, a Unitarian preacher, Francis David (pronounced “Daveed”), debated the Trinitarian, Melius. Melius said to David, “If I win this debate, you will be executed (religious dialogue was serious stuff in those days).” But Daveed said, “And if I win this debate, you and everyone else in this land will be given complete religious freedom and the tolerance due to every human being.” David prevailed in the debate, leading the young King Sigisimund, in 1568, to proclaim an Edict of Toleration, the only such edict of its time. Hungary and Romania* still have over 500 Unitarian churches.
We rejoice that, given the timely demise of the oppressive regime in Romania, those churches that were slated to be destroyed (some of them centuries old) are now being restored and saved. Our ancient history in Europe lives on.
John Calvin, himself a heretic and Protestant Reformer, was, nevertheless, a committed Trinitarian. He lured the Unitarian, Michael Servetus to Geneva, under the pretext of a safe-passage, to engage in debate. Instead of a debate, Servetus was put under arrest and, under Calvin’s orders, was burned at the stake as a heretic. Calvin was obviously in favor of religious freedom—for Calvin.
Still, Servetus’s martyrdom was not in vain. His death led to a continuing debate about toleration among the followers of Calvin. On a monument near where Servetus was burned, are these words:
“The respectful and grateful sons of Calvin, our great reformer, condemning an error which was that of his time and firmly attaching themselves to liberty of conscience, according to the true principles of the Reformation and the Gospel, have raised this expiatory monument.”
Universalism
The Universalists, like Origen in the third century, believed that God is simply too good to commit any person to eternal damnation. Again, “salvation” is not for particular people, as the Calvinists believe, but is universal, for everyone: hence, the Universal-ists.
The Universalist, John Murray, was originally a British Methodist preacher, who lost his wife by death, and lost his career, suffered deep depression and sailed to America. He rowed ashore from a shipwreck off the coast of New Jersey, landing at the spot called, ironically for Murray, one would think, “Good Luck.” There, at a place now called Murray Grove, a Unitarian Universalist Conference Center, he met an illiterate farmer by the name of Joseph Potter, who had been praying for someone to come to preach universal salvation at his family chapel. Murray, though while in the depths of depression had vowed never to preach again, did preach at Potter’s chapel, got the spirit again, and went on to preach Universalism throughout the Northeast. The chapel in which he preached is still there, at Murray Grove. Murray instructed the preachers who went forth to spread his universal gospel to “Give them not hell, but hope.”
Universalism and the doctrine of universal salvation also had its spokesman in Hosea Ballou, a Vermont schoolteacher. Ballou preached that the idea that people are born into sin is ridiculous, that God is love, and that Jesus “saves” by his human example, not by being divine.
Unitarians and Universalists Together
Like the Unitarians, the Universalists had always been at the forefront of ethical and social reform. They were the first denomination in America to denounce slavery—in 1790. They were among the first to advocate birth control as public policy. Among the Universalists were: one of the founders of the nation, Benjamin Rush; Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross; Adin Ballou, the pacifist who influenced Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Thomas Starr King, who kept California for the Union; and Olympia Brown, who, in 1863, was the first woman in America to be ordained as a minister.
Unitarians have their legendary heroes, too. The English scientist, Joseph Priestly, the discoverer of oxygen, was also a minister. He ran afoul of the Britons of his day by siding with the revolutionaries in America and France. The clergy of his region incited mobs against him, who burned down his house and laboratory and drove him from the country. Priestly fled to America where he founded Unitarian churches in Pennsylvania and preached to John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was so convinced by Priestly’s common sense in religion that he came out publicly and said that every thinking person would become a Unitarian in his lifetime!
If you travel throughout New England’s hundreds of towns and villages, you will see white steepled churches with signs on their lawns reading “First Parish,” or “Second Parish,” even “Third.” One is likely to be Unitarian, the other Congregationalist. And what you are looking at when you see all those churches crowded into little villages (there were twenty Unitarian churches within a twelve mile radius of the church I served in Massachusetts)—what you are seeing is Unitarian history.
In the early nineteenth century, Harvard Divinity School appointed a Unitarian Professor, which infuriated the Trinitarians. They declared a theological war that spread through New England. Congregationalist churches were divided right and left when some of their ministers began preaching the Unitarian faith of the humanity of Jesus and the necessity to read the Bible with reason, not credulity.
In 1825, in Dedham Massachusetts, the congregation voted to fire its minister, who was preaching Unitarianism. The Unitarian faction supporting the minister went to court. The judge ruled for the Unitarians, who kept the minister and the church, while the losers took the silverware and went across town to build “Second Church.” The Superior Court judge in this momentous decision, a decision that affirmed democracy in church affairs, was a Unitarian!
The mid-nineteenth century was perhaps the most exciting period in our history. Let’s start with William Ellery Channing. Channing was the giant of American Unitarianism, minister of the prestigious Federal Street Church in Boston (Boston figures prominently in Unitarian history in America). He inspired such great reformers as the educator, Horace Mann, the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, and the prison reformer, Dorothea Dix.
Channing however, didn’t see himself as a radical or a firebrand for causes, but when he was converted to the anti-slavery movement, he was unstoppable. Channing was also a staunch pacifist. He preached his first anti-war sermon in 1812. It wasn’t popular, but it made him the spirit behind the organization of the first peace society in Massachusetts. As a champion for universal human dignity, Channing was deeply moved by the revolutions of his era.
He was once invited to speak at Harvard—his own alma mater. He lit into the Harvard students for their apathy, saying to them, “I see the young men of Harvard are quite sedate and unconcerned over the new revolutions in Europe.” He stormed at them, “I was at Harvard in the days of the first French Revolution, and at every turn of events we lighted bonfires and marched in torchlight parades at each new burst of freedom!” The sons of Boston Brahmins said this was a childish outburst. And Channing replied, “We were always young for liberty!”
Channing was also a giant in intellect and a religious reformer. In a two-hour sermon at the ordination of young Jared Sparks in Baltimore, he gave a point-by-point definition of nineteenth century Unitarianism. The sermon was called “Unitarian Christianity,” and, published in booklet form, it became the definitive work to separate the Unitarians from other Protestants in decades of debate.
In his sermon, Channing developed a view of religion as grounded in reason, on the use of reason as being sufficient to understand the bible, on the necessity of reading the bible as one would any other book, on the divine spark in every human being, and on the humanity of Jesus, not God, but fully human. Easy stuff for us now, perhaps. But in the early nineteenth century, it was a religious revolution.
And then there was Theodore Parker. (In Bahston, it’s pronounced “Paa-ka.”) He was a firebrand and made no bones about it. Parker was incensed by the fugitive slave law, which made it a crime for anyone to harbor runaway slaves. His response to that law was to keep a pistol in desk to resist anyone who came to retrieve a slave from his protection.
When he was finally arrested for resisting the law, he made such a fuss that the judge released him, rather than give him a platform for his views. Parker was also, like his mentor, William Ellery Channing, a primary spokesperson for a new religious view, he wrote—and remember this was over a century ago—
“The church that is to lead this century will not be a church creeping on all fours, mewling and whining, its face turned down, its eyes turned back. It must be full of the brave spirit of its day, keeping also the good times of the past… It demands, as never before, freedom for itself, usefulness in its institutions, truth in its teachings, and beauty in its deeds. The church which did for the fifth century, will not do for this. It must have our ideas, the smell of our ground, and have grown out of the religion in our soul.”
Our liberal religious movement went on to struggle through the divisive debates of the early twentieth century between humanists and theists. We have suffered through the loss of spiritual passion in our faith, a time Emerson saw coming when, in his own day, he decried the over-emphasis on reason and spoke of “a religion of dry bones.”
Our churches were torn, painfully divided, through the civil rights and Viet Nam eras, some never to be fully reunited. One of the most painful pictures in my memory is that of several hundred Unitarian Universalists filing out of a General Assembly in Boston, in the ‘60s, in protest against the Assembly’s refusal to grant all the demands of a Unitarian Universalist Black Affairs Caucus.
We also continue to grieve the loss of Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, a graduate of Princeton Theological School, who died of a beating during the civil rights demonstration in Selma, Alabama. Ironically, despite having James Reeb as an alumnus, these days Princeton Theological School does not admit Unitarian Universalist students because they are not considered “Christians.”
The religious freedom forged in our rich history, sometimes in martyrdom, maintained often at such great cost, has been our blessing and, perhaps, a precious curse of sorts. We have been free not to agree with each other on the great social issues of our day and of the centuries. And, often, we have not been able to disagree in love. Hosea Ballou, that great Universalist, once said, “If we agree in brotherly love, there is no disagreement that can do us injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good.”
Unitarian Universalists have always been wary of religious symbolism. While traditional Christians have for centuries had the cross, the flaming chalice is a relatively new symbol for Unitarian Universalists. First used by the medieval Unitarian scholar, John Huss, our movement’s first chalice was created by Hans Deutsch, an Austrian refugee from Nazism. He had been a musician and an artist who got into trouble with the Nazis by creating some unflattering caricatures of Hitler. His escape was aided by the Unitarian Service Committee, which asked him to develop a symbol for its work. The flaming chalice—symbol of warmth, light, love, truth and justice—became the symbol of Unitarian Universalism throughout the world, the symbol of our history—which is our experience.
Merger
As you can see from the preceding, the Unitarians and the Universalist had much in common from the beginning. The two denominations began to talk about merger in 1865, but the merger did not take place until 1961. We like to talk things through thoroughly in Unitarian Universalism.
I have told only a very few of our stories, and I have told them very briefly. I hope they give you a sense of how deep and lively are our roots, of how profound our issues have been, and of what a great and enduring contribution our faith has made to the world.
As Rev. Richard Gilbert writes, “Our history is more than a fad. Embedded in these stories of flesh and blood people with whom we share this ‘lively experiment,’ are the values which sustain us.”
If we are little known, it is because we have been more humble than we need to be, more shy than our forebears have been, less public than our heroes.
One of the missions of my ministry is to restore a sense of tradition, a sense of rich, religious belonging, and an honest sense of the spiritual.
If the world does not know us, it is critical that we know ourselves. It is not enough—not enough for us as persons, not enough for us as a congregation—to be members of this church. We are more fully nurtured in the spirit when we know and celebrate our nurturing roots and history, and when we know that we are part of what the eminent Unitarian Universalist historian, Conrad Wright, has called “The Stream of Light.”
