History
 Unitarian
Universalist Origins
Our Historic Faith
by Mark W. Harris
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Unitarians and Universalists have always
been heretics. We are heretics because we want to choose our faith, not because
we desire to be rebellious. “Heresy” in Greek means “choice.” During the first
three centuries of the Christian church, believers could choose from a variety
of tenets about Jesus. Among these was a belief that Jesus was an entity sent
by God on a divine mission. Thus the word “Unitarian” developed, meaning the
oneness of God. Another religious choice in the first three centuries of the
Common Era (CE) was universal salvation. This was the belief that no person
would be condemned by God to eternal damnation in a fiery pit. Thus a Universalist
believed that all people will be saved. Christianity lost its element of choice
in 325 CE when the Nicene Creed established the Trinity as dogma. For centuries
thereafter, people who professed Unitarian or Universalist beliefs were persecuted.
This was true until the sixteenth century when the Protestant Reformation took
hold in the remote mountains of Transylvania in eastern Europe. Here the first
edict of religious toleration in history was declared in 1568 during the reign
of the first and only Unitarian king, John Sigismund. Sigismund’ s court preacher,
Frances David, had successively converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism to
Calvinism and finally to Unitarianism because he could find no biblical basis
for the doctrine of the Trinity. Arguing that people should be allowed to choose
among these faiths, he said, “We need not think alike to love alike.”
In sixteenth-century Transylvania, Unitarian congregations were established
for the first time in history. These churches continue to preach the Unitarian
message in present-day Romania. Like their heretic forebears from ancient times.
these liberals could not see how the deification of a human being or the simple
recitation of creeds could help them to live better lives. They said that we
must follow Jesus, not worship him.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Unitarianism appeared briefly
in scattered locations. A Unitarian community in Rakow, Poland, flourished for
a time, and a book called On the Errors of the Trinity by a Spaniard, Michael
Servetus, was circulated throughout Europe. But persecution frequently followed
these believers. The Polish Unitarians were completely suppressed, and Michael
Servetus was burned at the stake.
Even where the harassment was not so extreme, people still opposed the idea
of choice in matters of religious faith. In 1791, scientist and Unitarian minister
Joseph Priestley had his laboratory burned and was hounded out of England. He
fled to America where he established American Unitarian churches in the Philadelphia
area.
Despite these European connections, Unitarianism as we know it
in North America is not a foreign import. In fact, the origins of our faith
began with some of the most historic congregations in Puritan New England where
each town was required to establish a congregationally independent church that
followed Calvinist doctrines. Initially these congregational churches offered
no religious choice for their parishioners, but over time the strict doctrines
of original sin and predestination began to mellow.
By the mid-1700s a group of evangelicals were calling for the revival of Puritan
orthodoxy. They asserted their belief in humanity’s eternal bondage to sin.
People who opposed the revival, believing in free human will and the loving
benevolence of God, eventually became Unitarian. During the first four decades
of the nineteenth century, hundreds of these original congregational churches
fought over ideas about sin and salvation, and especially over the doctrine
of the Trinity. Most of the churches split over these issues. In 1819, Unitarian
minister William Ellery Channing delivered a sermon called “Unitarian Christianity”
and helped to give the Unitarians a strong platform. Six years later the American
Unitarian Association was organized in Boston, Massachusetts.
Universalism developed in America
in at least three distinct geographical locations. The earliest preachers
of the gospel of universal salvation appeared in what were later the Middle
Atlantic and Southern states. By 1781, Elhanan Winchester had organized a Philadelphia
congregation of Universal Baptists. among its members was Benjamin Rush, the
famous physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence.
At about the same time, in the rural, interior sections of New England, a small
number of itinerant preachers, among then Caleb Rich, began to disbelieve the
strict Calvinist doctrines of eternal punishment. They discovered from their
biblical studies the new revelation of God’s loving redemption of all. John
Murray, an English preacher who immigrated in 1770, helped lead the first Universalist
church in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the battle to separate church and state.
From its beginnings, Universalism challenged its members to reach out and embrace
people whom society often marginalized. The Gloucester church included a freed
slave among its charter members, and the Universalists became the first denomination
to ordain women to the ministry, beginning in 1863 with Olympia Brown.
Universalism was a more evangelical faith than Unitarianism. After
officially organizing in 1793, the Universalists spread their faith across the
eastern United States and Canada. Hosea Ballou became the denomination’s greatest
leader during the nineteenth century, and he and his followers, including Nathaniel
Stacy, led the way in spreading their faith.
Other preachers followed the advice of Universalist publisher Horace Greeley
and went West. One such person was Thomas Starr King, who is credited with defining
the difference between Unitarians and Universalists: “Universalists believe
that God is too good to damn people, and the Unitarians believe that people
are too good to be damned by God.” The Universalists believed in a God who em-braced
everyone, and this eventually became central to their belief that lasting truth
is found in all religions, and that dignity and worth is innate to all people
regardless of sex, color, race, or class.
Growing out of this inclusive theology was a lasting impetus in both denominations
to create a more just society. Both Unitarians and Universalists became active
participants in many social justice movements in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker was a prominent abolitionist,
defending fugitive slaves and offering support to American abolitionist John
Brown.
Other reformers included Universalists such as Charles Spear who called for
prison reform, and Clara Barton who went from Civil War “angel of the battlefield”
to become the founder of the American Red Cross. Unitarians such as Dorothea
Dix fought to “break the chains” of people incarcerated in mental hospitals,
and Samuel Gridley Howe started schools for the blind. For the last two centuries,
Unitarians and Universalists have been at the forefront of movements working
to free people from whatever bonds may oppress them.
Two thousand years ago liberals were persecuted for seeking the freedom
to make religious choices, but such freedom has become central to both Unitarianism
and Universalism. As early as the 1830s, both groups were studying and promulgating
texts from world religions other than Christianity. By the beginning of the
twentieth century, humanists within both traditions advocated that people could
be religious without believing in God. No one person, no one religion, can embrace
all religious truths.
By the middle of the twentieth century it became clear that Unitarians and
Universalists could have a stronger liberal religious voice if they merged their
efforts, and they did so in 1961, forming the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Many Unitarian Universalists became active in the civil rights movement. James
Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister, was murdered in Selma, Alabama, after
he and twenty percent of the denomination’s ministers responded to Martin Luther
King, Jr.'s call to march for justice.
Today we are determined to continue to work for greater racial and cultural
diversity. In 1977, a women and religion resolution was passed by the Association,
and since then the denomination has responded to the feminist challenge to change
sexist structures and language, especially with the publication of an inclusive
hymnal. The denomination has affirmed the rights of bisexuals, gays, lesbians,
and transgendered persons, including ordaining and settling gay and lesbian
clergy in our congregations, and in 1996, affirmed same-sex marriage.
All these efforts reflect a modern under-standing of universal salvation. Unitarian
Universalism welcomes all to an expanding circle of understanding and choice
in religious faith.
Our history has carried us from liberal Christian views about Jesus and human
nature to a rich pluralism that includes theist and atheist, agnostic and humanist,
pagan, Christian, Jew, and Buddhist. As our history continues to evolve and
unfold, we invite you to join us by choosing our free faith.
About the Author
Mark W. Harris is minister of the First
Parish Unitarian Universalist in Watertown, Massachusetts,
one of the five oldest Unitarian Universalist congregations.
Previously he served congregations in Palmer and Milton, Massachusetts,
and was Information Director for the Unitarian Universalist
Association from 1985 through 1989.
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