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THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNITARIANISM

The old Puritan churches of Massachusetts were the suprising cradles of Unitarianism in America. Reacting to the hellfire and damnation preaching of the Great Awakening of the 1730's and 40's many ministers and congregations of the New England Standing Order (the Congregational Churches) began to quietly explore alternatives to rigid Calvinism. Influenced by the rationalism of the Enlightenment they began to adopt Arian or non-Trinitarian theologies. The political atmosphere of the American Revolution accelerated the movement. By the late Eighteenth Century many of the oldest of the "First Parishes" including the Pilgrim Church at Plymouth, the Salem Church where a century earlier witches had been burned, John Adams's home church in Braintree (now Quincy), and important Boston churches were unitarian in theology although remaining in fellowship with the Standing Order.

There were other independent sparks of Unitarianism. As mentioned, Joseph Priestly had established a congregation in Philadelphia and was influencing religious thought in the Middle States. Thomas Jefferson, the champion of religious liberty, became unitarian in theology though a member of no sect. In 1785 the Anglican King's Chapel in Boston revised its Book of Common Prayer deleting all references to the Trinity and thus became the first openly unitarian church in New England.

By the early 19th Century the strain between liberals and Calvinists in the Standing Order became too great to sustain. In 1819 William Ellery Channing, a beloved Boston minister, laid out his explicit challenge to orthodoxy in an ordination address in Baltimore. He boldly asserted unitarian doctrine, elevated the role of reason in religious inquiry, and maintained that revelation was not sealed, but ongoing. Thus began the "Unitarian Controversy" that led to the formal break with Congregationalism and the establishment of a new denomination. Sometimes this entailed bitter law suits over the property of a parish between its unitarian and Calvinist members, but the right of parish to retain its property if the membership decided to become unitarian was established by the court.

In 1820 the first efforts at organizing the independent unitarian congregations began with the Berry Street Conference in Boston. In 1821 Channing and associates began publication of The Christian Register, an important national voice for unitarianism. Finally, in 1825 the American Unitarian Association (AUA) was established and the break with Congregationalism was complete and formal.

By the 1840's younger ministers were restive at the vestiges of orthodoxy in Unitarianism. Influenced by eastern religions, particularly Hinduism, they looked beyond Christianity and the Bible. The Transcendentalists, as they were called, believed in the direct experience with the divine in each individual, unity with nature, and a duty for religious individuals to provide prophetic witness to the social issues of the day. Ralph Waldo Emerson articulated these beliefs in his Harvard Divinity School address in 1839. Although fiercely opposed by more traditionalist ministers, Transcendentalism spread through the denomination. Its most eloquent spokesman was Boston preacher Theodore Parker. After Civil War Transcendentalism successfully synthesized itself with Channing style liberal Christianity and become the dominant strain in what was called the Broad Church Movement.

Unitarians during this period emerged as among the nation's most advanced advocates for social reform. Of notable interest were Horace Mann, father of public education: mental health reformer Dorthy Dix; abolitionists like John Quincy Adams, Samuel May, and Julia Ward Howe; and women's rights leaders Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Olympia Brown, the first ordained woman minister with a regular parish in America.

Many of the great writers and thinkers of the era were Unitarians including Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his cousin Samuel Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, Louisa May Alcott, George Bancroft and Francis Parkman. Walt Whitmean and Emily Dickenson, while never members, were influenced heavily by Unitarian thought.

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