American Unitarian History

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American Unitarian History
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American Unitarian History
First Unitarian Church in America Kings
Chapel in Boston
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American Unitarian History
Kings 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 Kings 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 Kings 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 Freemans views.
• Thus the first Episcopal Church in New England
  became the first Unitarian Church in the New
  World.

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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 Hinghams
  First Parish and was known to be a religious
  liberal. He and his colleague, Dr. Daniel Shute
  of Hinghams 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
  Wares 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 Wares 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 didnt subside until roughly
  thirty years later.

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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 Lords 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.

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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).

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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 Channings 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.

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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
  writersnotably 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."

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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 womens
  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 (18471850).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Bellows 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.

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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
  Womens 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 wouldnt last for long.

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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.
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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 lifes 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.