If you were here a month ago, you might remember that we heard the story of Unitarianism in Europe from its beginnings in the 16th century. From the start of Unitarianism we found the practices, still vital to us today, of individual questioning of the nature of God and Jesus, the insistence on the use of reason in religion, and the need for openness to innovation. Today we're going to hear about what happened when Unitarianism came to the United States1 and how those practices played out to form who we are currently. In order to better understand the place of Unitarianism, let me first tell you about the religious climate in the colonies during the 1700's. The Enlightenment, an intellectual-philosophical movement, "is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as primary values of society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means." (Wikipedia, The Age of Enlightenment) This intellectual movement acted upon the Puritan Protestantism which predominated in New England. Puritan doctrine believed in the trinity of God the father, Jesus the son and the Holy Spirit, looked at God as King and judge, and deemed humans to be depraved and tainted by original sin (the sin of Adam and Eve in eating the apple when God told them not to), saved through the grace of God. "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me." Enlightenment thought proposed that humans were not hopelessly depraved but could improve themselves through the use of reason. So Puritanism was pulled in two directions: the so-called rational and the evangelical. The evangelical focused on an immediate, emotional experience of conversion, like being "born again," while the rational focused upon a less emotional way, a rational way, to know and follow God's will. We still live with the results of this evangelical-enlightenment split in Protestant denominations and it shows in social policy and in politics today. Also, in the structures of our democracy you can see the influence of Enlightenment thought and it is no coincidence that quite a few of the founders were Unitarian in their theology. Unitarianism came to the colonies, (we were not yet the United States), probably in the 1740's. The first church to call itself Unitarian was in Pennsylvania and in Boston, the Anglican King's Chapel chose to use a Unitarian liturgy. At first though, most people who embraced a Unitarian theology (the nature of God is a unity, not a trinity), resided within the Congregational movement, which descended from the Pilgrims and the Puritans and was part of its rational wing. It was an increasingly uneasy residence though and it came to a head in the early 19th century in a number of incidents. Orthodox Congregationalists objected to the appointment of Henry Ware, a Unitarian, to the Hollis Professorship of Divinity at Harvard College in 1805, and pulled out of Harvard, founding Andover Seminary as the standard bearer of orthodoxy. As the orthodox excluded the liberals, (Unitarians), the liberals organized and in 1815 they founded the Harvard Divinity School as a non-sectarian school to teach pure, rational, undogmatic Christianity. In 1818 the Dedham case occurred. In New England, whole towns paid for the minister and the church (Congregational churches were called the "established" church) and whole towns came out to vote to call a minister, even if the townspeople were not all members of that particular Congregational church. This is as if the citizens of the Town of Ulster paid my salary through their taxes, whether members here or not. Interesting, huh? So when a minister of Unitarian theology was called to the church in Dedham, MA, the orthodox membership of the church withdrew, taking the church silver and other valuables with them. The case went to court. Who "owns" the church and its material property? The court decided that the towns "owned" their churches and thus if a voting majority of townspeople was Unitarian in theology, the church could be too, whether or not the members of the church were Unitarian. Overnight about 120 churches became Unitarian.

Unitarians considered themselves liberal Christians. Most probably would have chosen to remain within the Congregational fold. But it was not to be. In 1819, William Ellery Channing, a leading Unitarian theologian, gave what is now called the Baltimore Sermon, in which he laid out the Unitarian theology of the time. (You can see a statue of Channing standing just outside the Boston Common: a testament to the importance of Unitarians in that town.) In 1820 the Berry Street Conference began as a means for Unitarian clergy to come together for support. (That conference still exists and every year at the General Assembly there is a Berry Street lecture.) By 1825 the split was complete and the American Unitarian Association was formed.

Who were we in those years? What did it mean to be Unitarian? Why did we split from the Congregationalists? In his Baltimore sermon Channing said of Unitarian theology, "In the first place, we believe in the doctrine of God's UNITY, or that there is one God, and one only. . . . We object to the doctrine of the Trinity, that, whilst acknowledging in words, it subverts in effect, the unity of God. . . . I proceed in the second place to observe, that we believe in the unity of Jesus Christ. We believe that Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God. . . . We believe, that he was sent by the Father to effect a moral, or spiritual deliverance of mankind . . . Having thus given our belief on two great points, . . . I now proceed to another point, on which we lay still greater stress. We believe in the MORAL PERFECTION OF GOD. We consider no part of theology so important as that which treats of God's moral character; and we value our views of Christianity chiefly as they assert his amiable and venerable attributes. . . .

We object, . . .to that system, which arrogates to itself the name of Orthodoxy, and which is now industriously propagated through our country. This system indeed takes various shapes, but in all it casts dishonor on the Creator. According to its old and genuine form, it teaches, that God brings us into life wholly depraved, so that under the innocent features of our childhood is hidden a nature averse to all good and propense to all evil, a nature which exposes us to God's displeasure and wrath, even before we have acquired power to understand our duties, or to reflect upon our actions. . . . This system also teaches, that God selects from this corrupt mass a number to be saved, and plucks them, by a special influence, from the common ruin; that the rest of mankind, though left without that special grace which their conversion requires, are commanded to repent, under penalty of aggravated woe; and that forgiveness is promised them, on terms which their very constitution infallibly disposes them to reject, and in rejecting which they awfully enhance the punishments of hell. These proffers of forgiveness . . . to beings born under a blighting curse, fill our minds with a horror which we want words to express. . . .

(W)e ask our opponents to leave to us a GOD, worthy of our love and trust, in whom our moral sentiments may delight, in whom our weaknesses and sorrows may find refuge. We cling to the Divine perfections. We meet them everywhere in creation, we read them in the Scriptures, we see a lovely image of them in Jesus Christ; and gratitude, love, and veneration call on us to assert them. ...

We believe that all virtue has its foundation in the moral nature of man, that is, in conscience, or his sense of duty, and in the power of forming his temper and life according to conscience. We believe that these moral faculties are the grounds of responsibility, and the highest distinctions of human nature . . . We conceive, that the true love of God is a moral sentiment, founded on a clear perception, and consisting in a high esteem and veneration, of his moral perfections. Thus, it perfectly coincides, and is in fact the same thing, with the love of virtue, rectitude, and goodness. . . . We regard the spirit of love, charity, meekness, forgiveness, liberality, and beneficence, as the badge and distinction of Christians, as the brightest image we can bear of God, as the best proof of piety.

Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books. . . . Now all books, and all conversation, require in the reader or hearer the constant exercise of reason; or their true import is only to be obtained by continual comparison and inference. . . . The Word of God hears the stamp of the same hand, which we see in his works. It has infinite connexions (sic) and dependencies. Every proposition is linked with others, and is to be compared with others; that its full and precise import may he understood. Nothing stands alone. . . . We find, too, that the different portions of this book, instead of being confined to general truths, refer perpetually to the times when they were written, to states of society, to modes of thinking, to controversies in the church, to feelings and usages which have passed away, and without the knowledge of which we are constantly in danger of extending to all times, and places, what was of temporary and local application. . . . We indeed grant, that the use of reason in religion is accompanied with danger. But we ask any honest man to look back on the history of the church, and say, whether the renunciation of it be not still more dangerous."

This sermon brilliantly tells us who we were in the first half of the 19th century. God has one nature; Jesus is distinct from God; morality is how you live out the love of a loving God; reason is essential in making sense of religion; we must read the bible contextually; we want religion to be congruent with the natural laws around us and with our own rational experiences. Out of this world view came the idea that the development of human potential carried religious significance. Unitarians focused upon education: Horace Mann created the first public school system; Elizabeth Peabody the first kindergarten. Unitarians promoted their ideas through the arts in the belief that art serves the cause of social morality. Unitarian artists include poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell; writers Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne; essayists Margaret Fuller, Henty David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, about whom more later. Work for social justice causes like prison reform, temperance (based upon the thinking that alcohol can destroy families), better treatment for people with mental illness, alleviation of poverty were understood to be part of our religious outlook and practice. The movement for abolition of slavery contained a number of Unitarians in the forefront, among them Theodore Parker, but in the interests of openness I must tell you that there were those Unitarians who would have compromised on slavery to save the union, among them Daniel Webster. Millard Fillmore, when president of the United States signed the Fugitive Slave Act requiring the return of any slave who escaped to the free states. There were those who thought the solution to slavery was to send everyone back to Africa. We need to know it all. So here we are. This does sound like us. Is this the end of the story then? Not by a long shot. Lest the Unitarianism of Channing become solidified, Transcendentalists came along and advocated a new path in religion. Transcendentalism was one of the major intellectual movements in the United States. Most of its proponents were Unitarian: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, the Peabody sisters Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia, Theodore Parker to name a few. Transcendentalists asserted that people needed direct access to the divine and that such access came, not through the rational faculties but through intuition. God is most readily perceived in nature. Think about this a minute. How many of us have had important experiences in nature, when we felt a connection, a presence, something that bypassed our minds and bypassed our emotions and came into us by some other means? That's what the Transcendentalists talk about. I remember lying on the beach in Maine and watching a meteor shower. Shooting stars all over the place??“look here, look there. It was awesome. I felt so connected to something beyond and bigger than me, something for which I had no name but to call it life. We have an intuitive power to discern the divine and its laws for when we are in sync with the core of the universe we are also in sync with the moral law. It too resides within and without ourselves. See what the Transcendentalists did? They held up personal experience of that transcending mystery and placed it beside reason as a cornerstone of religion.

But they didn't stop there. Emerson, in the address he gave to the graduates of Harvard Divinity School in 1838 said that, as there was direct access to the divine through intuition, scripture and the accounts of the miracles performed by Jesus were irrelevant. One does not need to arrive at belief by evaluating the evidence of the miracles; one can have direct experience. Parker went even further and said that the scriptures, the creeds, even the authority of Jesus himself was transient. Only the essence, the morality of Christianity was permanent and it mattered little whether or not Jesus existed at all. Well, imagine the reception these ideas received. Ministers crossed to the other side of the street rather than say hello to Theodore Parker. Emerson and Thoreau essentially left the Unitarian church. But even though the Transcendentalist philosophy was not accepted within Unitarian ranks in its own time, it was eventually absorbed into Unitarianism and it has given us another, crucial piece of our identity, namely the importance of direct experience as we seek to articulate and live our own belief systems. It lifted up intuition and placed it alongside reason as one of our chief means of "doing" religion. It gave us a mystical bent. It also began our journey away from defining ourselves as liberal Christians.

Unitarians spent thirty or so years after the Civil War wrestling with who we were vis-a-vis Jesus and the Christian Church. In 1865 at a National Conference we declared ourselves a conference of Christian churches, though we said we had no creed. Some walked out. They were known as Radicals and they formed the Free Religious Association. In the western part of the US, Radicals defined Unitarianism, with no reference to Christianity, as freedom, fellowship and character in religion. Would we, could we, hold together? Were we Christian or not? Some said yes and some said no. Finally in 1894, at a conference in Saratoga, a compromise was found emphasizing our historical connections to Christianity, but not doctrinal ones. People agreed that Unitarian churches accepted the religion of Jesus as the practical religion of love to God and love for humanity and that no text, not even the bible, contained the final word or the everlasting, unchanging truth. And we welcomed people who disagreed, but had sympathy for our aims and general spirit.

End of story now? No. Our theological identity continued to develop with the entrance of humanists into the Unitarian fold. In the 1920's and 30's, as the modern age progressed, some understood religion as a process for aiding our adjustment to our environment. Thus in the 20th century people could no longer believe in a God but still be religious. Humanists placed emphasis on the place of moral values in human life, values formulated by humans, not received from a transcendent being. They looked to the scientific method and understood the universe as self-existing, not created by a God. Humanists put out a Manifesto in 1933, as a way of representing a developing point of view, drawn from the modern age. It was signed by 34 people, the majority Unitarian clergy. During the 1950's and 60's many people with humanist leanings joined Unitarianism, adding another stream to our river of theologies. Not without its controversies as we find ourselves pulled in two directions: toward the " spiritual" and toward the intellectual. We have not fully managed yet to integrate each to the other.

Today neo-paganism and Buddhism have joined the ranks of Unitarians, increasing our theological diversity. We hold onto our historical and traditional method of freedom in articulating our beliefs for ourselves. We hold onto our historical and traditional use of reason and intuition in the doing of this. We hold onto our traditional and historical practice of social engagement as a manifestation of our religion. Even as we grow and change, we remain who we are, and were.

Here is my elevator speech about Unitarian Universalism, at least for today. (An elevator speech is what you say to someone who asks you what a UU is and all the time you have to explain it is the time it takes for an elevator to reach the top floor.) Unitarian Universalism is not a belief system, but rather an approach to religious life, and indeed all of life. An approach that allows for freedom of the individual to fashion his/her faith structures within a community that encourages spiritual growth and shares a virtually absolute commitment to work for justice, guided by a set of agreed upon ethics. How we are together is who we are together. We seek no less than to make the world a better place for everyone.

You can see from our story how much of that comes from the Unitarian side. Next time we'll learn about the Universalist side. As a little preview, these words from Olympia Brown, the first woman to be ordained as a minister by a denomination ??“ the Universalists, in 1863. "Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before us the loftiest ideals. Which has comforted us in sorrow, strengthened us for noble duty and made the world beautiful. Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message. That you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost. Go on finding ever new applications of these truths and new enjoyments in their contemplation, always trusting in the one God (however you might understand that word) which ever lives and loves." May it be so.

Endnotes:

1. Sources for Unitarian history in the United States include Conrad Wright, A Stream of Light; David Robinson, Unitarians and Universalists; David Bumbaugh, Unitarian Universalism: A Narrative History; class notes from lectures by Robert Hemstreet; David Parke, The Epic of Unitarianism; The Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, _http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/index.html_ (http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/index.html) ; William Ellery Channing: Selected Writings, edited by David Robinson; Ralph Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire; Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings; Paula Blanchard, Margaret Fuller; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays.