The Fatherhood of God

“The Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Neighborhood of Boston”: The Beginnings of American Unitarianism

A Lecture Given on August 25, 2002 at the Unitarian Society of Hartford, Connecticut, by W. Robert Chapman

Good morning. Like many of you, I did not grow up a Unitarian Universalist. I was raised a Methodist, became an Episcopalian as a young man, and eventually I settled on Unitarian Universalism in my early 30s. Like many converts, I wanted to know how my adopted faith came to be and what made it distinctive. That curiosity led to a scholarly interest that culminated, nearly a dozen years ago, in a Trinity College thesis on the beginnings of Unitarianism in Connecticut. Since then I have written several articles on denominational history. On a local level, I assisted Professor Freeman Meyer in researching, writing and editing our Society's history, which was published in 1994. My study of the architectural history of this building and its predecessors is now available on the Society's web site.

This morning I want to discuss with you how American Unitarianism developed. As you know, since 1961 we have been members of the Unitarian Universalist Association, which resulted from the merger of the American Unitarian Association, founded in 1825, and the older Universalist Church of America, which was established as a denomination in 1793. If I were to begin to do justice to Universalism, we'd have had to pack our lunches and stay well into the afternoon. Besides, there are no doubt others in this room who are much better qualified to tell us about George de Benneville, John Murray, Hosea Ballou and others who introduced the then-novel belief that Christ provided salvation for all, not just the Elect.

At their inception, both Unitarians and Universalists shared a common theological enemy known as Calvinism. As the religion of the New England Puritans, Calvinism had deeply affected the fabric of American living and thinking. It was a vital theology, prone to different emphases and interpretations, one that was adapted in remarkable ways to the necessities of American spiritual life. But it was also a theology of uneasy tensions. In preserving the inviolability of the will of God, it seemed to many to sacrifice the will of humanity. This was most agonizingly true of the doctrine of “Election” to grace, which held that God chose those who would be saved before the dawn of time, and those not so elected were powerless to effect their own salvation. In 1770 John Murray arrived in America from England and began preaching a message of universal salvation. Salvation is for everyone, he preached: everyone has been “elected.” Murray's message began to spread, largely among rural and small-town populations of middling economic status.

Meanwhile, another more gradual change was taking place among many of the clergy of Boston and eastern Massachusetts. Still part of the churches of the “Standing Order” of New England, established by the Puritans on a Calvinist basis, these ministers began to doubt the doctrines of Calvinism, especially that of Election. They began to emphasize God's benevolence, humankind's free will, and the dignity rather than the depravity of human nature. This trend was accelerated by the religious upheavals that had begun with the Great Awakening in New England in the 1740s. The emotional excesses of the revival, and the threats that the many itinerant preachers posed to the established clergy, caused a reaction that forced many of the Boston-area ministers into a deeper commitment to liberal and rational theology. The vast majority of these Harvard-educated clergy adopted Arminianism, the belief that mankind was free to accept or reject God's grace.

A few of the established Congregational churches evolved into Universalist societies, but the greater number of Universalist churches were comprised of the lower classes of New England society. According to Universalist historian Ernest Cassara, “Universalists were come-outers from many denominations; an amazingly large number came from the Baptists. They were of little education compared to the Unitarians and could not boast of a well-educated clergy. This differential in social rank and education was an important factor in keeping Unitarians and Universalists apart in the eighteenth and through much of the nineteenth century. Although they shared certain beliefs in common, the Unitarians increasingly looked to nonbiblical sources for inspiration. The Universalists, on the other hand, maintained a more pious biblical orientation.”

The two liberal movements were heavily influenced by the worldview of the Deists, and both accepted the importance of reason in religion. They did not reject the Scriptures as did the Deists, but they insisted on subjecting them to the analysis of reason. They accepted belief in the unity of God and a radically revised view of the atonement of Jesus. Finally, like the Deists, they took a vastly more optimistic view of the nature of man. By the middle of the nineteenth century, San Francisco pastor Thomas Starr King—who served both Universalist and Unitarian congregations—could reduce the theological distinction between the two liberal denominations to the following succinct albeit pithy statement: “Universalists believe that God is too good to damn people, and the Unitarians believe that people are too good to be damned by God.”

Few opposed the intense revival that swept New England in the 1740s with the tenacity and vehemence of the Rev. Charles Chauncy, pastor of Boston's First Church. A serious and scholarly man educated at Harvard, given to neither great emotion nor large ambition, Chauncy found in the Great Awakening not only a source of personal passion in his dissent to it but a role of leadership in a movement that neither he nor anyone else in New England had contemplated. Chauncy was able to transmute his vigorous dissent into a positive set of ideas, falling loosely into three major categories: (1) a commitment to logic and reason in theology, (2) a biblicism that was strict but that demanded critical and historical analysis, and (3) an overriding concern for moral aspiration as the focal point of Christianity.

Underlying these theological issues were sociological and political ones as well, for just as the Great Awakening drew most of its adherents from the lower classes, the opposition to it came from the Boston establishment. Chauncy and his friends who shared his Universalist convictions were disturbed by the appearance of “a stranger who has of himself assumed the character of a preacher.” Not only was John Murray preaching without proper ordination and as an itinerant, but he was proclaiming what Chauncy considered a wildly improbable exposition of Universalism.

The emotional excess of the revivals was the target of liberal criticism, because it differed from the rational concept of religion that crystallized in the late eighteenth century. In an important sense, the seedbed for this rational religion was in the larger intellectual revolution of Sir Isaac Newton, whose reputation among a good many eighteenth-century Christian thinkers is best expressed by Alexander Pope:

NATURE, and Nature's laws lay hid in Night:
God said, Let NEWTON be! and all was Light.

The new science held out the promise of a growing discovery of an ordered, benevolent universe, the product of a rational and benevolent God, intent on demonstrating his qualities through the perfection of nature. A system based on learning, reason, and order certainly had a great attraction for those skeptical of the intuition, passion, and disorder found in revivals.

The growth of natural theology in New England was not unique and was in fact nurtured by a rich speculative background in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English theology. This tradition of “supernatural rationalism,” which had direct impact on American liberals such as Chauncy, Ebenezer Gay, and my half-third cousin eight times removed Jonathan Mayhew,² developed the idea that natural religion is good and true so far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Hence it needs to be supplemented by revelation that must not in any way contradict it but must be consistent with it in all of its parts. The catch, according to Oregon State University's David Robinson, was in the last phrase, for the insistence that there be no contradiction between science and scripture was both the source of the appeal of the tradition and a source of controversy.

Within the context established by English thinkers, New England speculation on natural theology began to thrive. The liberal attack on Calvinism took two forms, one of which is exemplified in the pastoral career of the Rev. Ebenezer Gay in Hingham, MA. Although his sympathies were with the liberals, he chose not to introduce controversy and division into his sermons. Instead he simply ignored Calvinist dogma and preached his own form of liberal Christianity.

Liberals consistently attacked Calvinism on the related issues of Original Sin and Election to salvation, doctrines that in their view undermined human moral exertion. The idea of the taint of Adam, communicated to all people regardless of their action or character, seemed to deny the possibility of the moral life; the idea of God's preordained selection of a few to salvation, regardless of their character or action, seemed to undercut the motivation for it. The liberals countered with a moral system that affirmed human capability, as evidenced in the moral sense, and even those writings that did not attack Calvinism by name contributed to the liberal revolt by contributing to a positive counter-theory.

Jonathan Mayhew's Seven Sermons, preached in 1748, offers a very good sense of the developing liberal moral philosophy. Mayhew based his series on a firm rejection of all creeds and a corresponding insistence on private judgment as the necessary arbiter of religious opinion. The cornerstone of the whole series of sermons was an argument for human ability to make moral distinctions and act on that knowledge. As Mayhew saw him, God was “perfect in all those moral qualities and excellencies which we esteem amiable in mankind.”

In rehabilitating human nature, Mayhew and the other liberals were not asserting the actual goodness of humankind but the potential for goodness in human nature.

Although Boston and eastern Massachusetts were the cradle of American Unitarianism, and have remained its focal point, there were other Unitarian stirrings outside Boston in the eighteenth century. The most notable was in Philadelphia, where Enlightenment values such as reason, tolerance, and moral service gained a stronghold. In 1794 the eminent English scientist Joseph Priestley, who had been a leader among English Unitarians, came to America, escaping a dangerous situation in England. His home in Birmingham, with his library and laboratory, had been destroyed in a riot, and he was even vulnerable to charges of treason because of his sympathy with the French Revolution. In 1796-97 he lectured in Philadelphia on religion, the first of these lectures being held at the Universalist church. As a result, “the first permanent Unitarian church in America”—that is, the first permanent church to call itself Unitarian—was founded in Philadelphia in 1796.

Priestley's theological system, The Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, published in 1772, began with a consideration of the nature of God, and in Priestley's view, all of God's moral character stemmed from his benevolence, which was the cornerstone of the New England liberals' theology. Priestley's humanly accessible God stood opposed not only to the orthodoxies of his day, but to a history of creedal “corruptions” of the genuine Christian message. Perhaps his most influential theological work was An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, published in 1792, which tried to restore the purity of the Christian faith by sweeping away the dogmatic encrustations that were its corruptions. Although Priestley was principally concerned to establish the superiority of God to Christ, and thereby refute Trinitarian doctrines, he was also interested in carrying his argument a step further. He wanted to argue for “the simple humanity of Christ” as opposed to seeing Christ as beneath the Father, but still a supernatural being, who was creator of the world.

Priestley's form of Unitarianism was influential in England and was not without its effect in America. The Rev. James Freeman led Boston's King's Chapel to a Unitarian stance after the Revolutionary War and was much in sympathy with the views of the English Unitarians. Its pulpit vacant because of a shortage of clergy due to the schism with Great Britain, the wardens of King's Chapel in 1782 invited Freeman, a young Congregational graduate of Harvard, to be lay reader until an Anglican candidate could be found.³ Freeman accepted but soon found the trinitarian creeds and prayers in the Book of Common Prayer incompatible with his unitarian views. When he explained his conflict to the congregation, it supported him and voted to alter the liturgy. Premised on the strict unity of God, all references to the Holy Trinity were omitted or modified. The Nicene Creed was deleted and the Apostles' Creed edited to remove offending passages. Three years later King's Chapel formally rejected trinitarianism and effectively became America's first Unitarian church in 1787 when Clark could not obtain Anglican ordination, even though it did not accept the Unitarian label until much later.⁴ It is today unique among Unitarian Universalist congregations because of its combination of Anglican liturgy, Congregational polity, and Unitarian theology.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, liberal Christianity had slowly and quietly prevailed in eastern Massachusetts. The shift to liberalism involved a majority of the Congregational churches east of Worcester, including eight of the nine in Boston. The break between the liberal and orthodox Congregationalists came dramatically in 1805 when a liberal clergyman, the Rev. Henry Ware, was elected Professor of Divinity at Harvard College. Established in 1721, the Hollis Professorship was the oldest endowed professorship in America and had fallen vacant in 1803 upon the death of Professor David Tappan. Liberal majorities in the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers sought Ware's immediate election. The conservative minority, led by the Rev. Jedidiah Morse, unsuccessfully opposed Ware's nomination. Soon afterwards, Morse published The True Reasons...the Election of a Hollis Professor of Divinity...was opposed. Morse quoted the college's motto, Christo et Ecclesiae (“For Christ and the Church”), and the clause in Hollis' orders specifying a man “of sound or orthodox principles.”

Ware's election shattered the unity of Massachusetts Congregationalism. Accepting that Harvard had “fallen” to the liberals, he and his sympathizers in 1808 established the Andover Theological Seminary to train men in the orthodox tradition. In the decade after 1805 the liberals steadily gained strength. William Ellery Channing and Joseph Stevens Buckminster preached liberal Christianity to growing numbers of Bostonians. Journals brought forth articles, reviews, and sermons to a large audience. By 1815 Massachusetts Congregationalism was divided in everything but name. According to Sydney Ahlstrom and Jonathan Carey,

The new intelligentsia turned from the prophetic to the rational ideas because they seemed useful, verifiable, and hence true. Education brought accentuated demands for religion free from paradox and mystery. People of means and accomplishments preferred a message assuring them of man's essential goodness.

Most of the liberal clergy rejected the Unitarian name, since it was too closely identified with English Deism. They preferred instead the label “liberal Christians.” But in 1815 Morse cleverly forced the Unitarian name on the liberals by distributing, under the title American Unitarianism, a chapter from Thomas Belsham's Memoir of Theophilus Lindsey, which purported to show a direct connection between the Socinian-oriented Unitarianism⁵ of Great Britain and the Arminian-influenced liberal Christianity of New England.

Before the liberals could publicly clarify their differences with the English Unitarians, Morse had American Unitarianism “reviewed” in his orthodox periodical, The Panoplist. Written by Morse's friend Jeremiah Evarts, the article reinforced the notion that the Unitarian label applied to the Boston liberals. One of the “infidels” mentioned in the article was the Rev. John Sherman of Mansfield, CT, who in 1804 was suspended by his county's ministerial association for openly denying the Doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ.

The undoubted, albeit reluctant, leader of the Boston liberals was the Rev. William Ellery Channing. The son of a prominent Newport lawyer and grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Channing's Calvinistic upbringing taught him humility, while his father's example and his Harvard education encouraged his inquisitiveness. Channing recognized the theological diversity that existed even then in Boston's liberal Christian community:

A majority of our brethren believe that Jesus Christ is more than man; that he existed before the world; that he literally came from heaven to save our race; that he sustains other offices than those of teacher and witness of the truth; and that he still acts for our benefit and is our intercessor with the Father. Others reject the distinction of three Persons, without judging on (sic) system as to his nature and work. Others believe the simple humanity of Christ. We preach precisely as if no such doctrine as the trinity had ever been known.

In preparation for entering Harvard, the young William Ellery Channing was tutored by his uncle Henry Channing, a liberal Congregational pastor who was eventually dismissed by his New London, CT, congregation for insufficient orthodoxy. Channing became pastor of Boston's Federal Street Church in 1803. As a near-pacifist and ardent foe of government overreach, he opposed the War of 1812. His blistering sermon against that war was preached a month after the death of his dear friend and colleague, the Rev. Joseph Stevens Buckminster, who was pastor of Boston's socially exclusive Brattle Street Church. Buckminster was the first American to acquire proficiency in German biblical scholarship. Buckminster's preaching blended moral and aesthetic concerns, appealing to conscience and imagination as the keys to spiritual development. In this respect Channing resembled him, although he was no match for Buckminster as a cutting edge scholar.

Following Buckminster's death, Channing assumed his mantle of liberal leadership, launching The Christian Disciple, a magazine that proposed to speak for a good-spirited, inclusive understanding of the Christian faith. The editors vowed to speak for Christian love, the unity of the church, and the primacy of the religion of Jesus. Channing's heart was in his claim to religious openness and ecumenicty. He asked his detractors to see the liberals as they saw themselves: progressive post-Calvinists who deserved to inherit the churches built by their orthodox Calvinist forebears. The liberal pastors were concerned chiefly about the spiritual nature of humanity, the moral likeness of God and humankind, and the correlation of revelation and reason. Their congregations, said Channing, were no longer interested in the doctrines or scholastic language of Protestant orthodoxy. What really mattered in Christianity, said Channing, was the “great principle” that “our external happiness depends on the character we form.”

The liberal Christians tried to say that the Trinitarian issue was not of major importance, but then vigorously defended their anti-Trinitarianism. They tried to evade the Unitarian label but found themselves defending Unitarian teaching more insistently and publicly than before they were provoked. The label stuck to them and on May 5, 1819, Channing turned it to the liberals' advantage. The occasion was the ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks in the First Independent Church of Baltimore. Many of the leading liberal ministers were present. Even before the sermon was preached, arrangements had been made to print and distribute 2,000 copies. Known as the Baltimore Sermon and, more formally, as “Unitarian Christianity,” the first part of the sermon demonstrated how the liberals interpreted the Scriptures:

We regard the Scriptures as the records of God's successive revelations to mankind, and particularly of the last and most perfect revelation of his will by Jesus Christ. Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is...that the Bible is...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. Human language...admits various interpretations....

We believe that God never contradicts, in revelation, what he teaches in his works and providence. And we therefore distrust every interpretation, which...seems repugnant to any established truth.

The second part of the sermon outlined liberal Christian beliefs about God, the Trinity, Jesus, and Christian virtue. Liberal Christianity viewed itself as standing on the side of enlightenment, progress, moral sensitivity, and faithfulness. Channing genuinely believed that the divided house of American Protestantism could be reunited if the church straightened out the irregularities of scripture. He had no concept of a Unitarian movement that did not assume and respect the Bible's revelational authority. As to the Doctrine of the Trinity, Channing argued that it is a later church deviation from the teachings Jesus and of the early church. The purpose of true religion, Channing argued, is to “spiritualize the mind,” not create gods in our own image.

The crucial part of the “Baltimore Sermon” defined his vision of liberalism. “We consider no part of theology so important as that which treats of God's moral character,” he argued. Genuine Christianity praises God not because God is overpowering, Channing declared, but because God is the perfection of virtue. Channing conceded that the Doctrine of Atonement was more perplexing to liberals. Liberal Christians did not agree on the nature of Christ's mediating work, he said, but they did agree that Christ was sent by the Father “to effect a moral or spiritual deliverance of mankind.”

The Baltimore Sermon ignited a firestorm of controversy that thrust a reluctant Channing to the forefront of the liberal movement. It inspired a critical mass of pastors to stop equivocating about their liberalism. It simultaneously horrified and gratified conservatives, who at least were finally given the satisfaction of confronting an openly declared enemy. The pamphlet wars it sparked raged throughout the 1820s and well into the 1830s. But Channing refused to be drawn into a highly public debate against conservatives like Morse. The task of defending nascent Unitarianism fell mainly on Harvard professors Andrews Norton and Henry Ware.

By the early 1820s, the essential structure of the colonial Puritan theocracy that provided tax support for public worship still existed in New England in a number of similar forms. In New England Congregationalism, the parish, generally defined as a town's entire group of male voters, was required to maintain, and was taxed to support, a system of public worship. The church consisted of the religiously observant members of the parish who assented to a covenant, or made a confession of faith, or took part in the Lord's Supper. Many Massachusetts churches consisted largely of women. Thus the parish memberships were large and mostly male, while the church memberships were smaller and often mostly female.

The distinction between the parish and church became critical in 1820 when the conservative majority of a congregation in Dedham, MA, appointed a liberal minister to the church's vacant pastorate. After two ecclesiastical councils came down on opposite sides of the conflict, the majority of the church withdrew from the parish and kept their church's property. The remaining church members sued for return of the property. The case was appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which ruled that the protesting conservatives had no right to the building, communion silver, or anything else belonging to the church. In Baker v. Fales, the Court ruled that

When the majority of the members of a Congregational church separate from the majority of the parish, the members who remain, although a minority, constitute the church in such parish, and retain the rights and property belonging thereto.

In effect, the court ruled that the church belonged to the parish and that the parish had power over all civil matters pertaining to the church.

The jury's stunning decision led not only to a schism but was a major factor in the 1833 decision to disestablish Congregationalism in Massachusetts. The withdrawal of orthodox Congregationalists from the Unitarian-dominated churches to form new societies proceeded rapidly. By 1840, 136 (or one quarter) of the 545 Congregational churches in Massachusetts had become Unitarian. Most were located in the eastern half of the Commonwealth.

Although the American Unitarian Association for formally established on May 26, 1825, its principal activities during the next forty years were to sponsor publications and traveling agents. Unitarian churches were formed in Hartford,⁶ Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, San Francisco, and other American cities and towns. It was not until 1865, with the establishment of the National Conference of Unitarian Churches, that Unitarianism began to act like a true religious denomination.

* * *

The Unitarianism envisioned by Channing and his liberal Christian co-religionists did not long survive. Within a generation it would face the challenge of Transcendentalism within the “neighborhood of Boston.” Led by Unitarian ministers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, this quasi-religious movement found God more in Nature than in the churches, and provided the first schism within Unitarianism.

As Unitarianism spread to other parts of the United States it began adapting more to local conditions, and many of its new churches began to see the National Conference as overly conservative. In 1867 the Free Religious Association was formed, which welded the humanistic revolt against Christianity into a single movement based on individual freedom of belief, the scientific study of religion, and the conviction that a single, universal spirit underlay all historic faiths. The Free Religious Association's stronghold was the Western Unitarian Conference, formed in 1852, to advance the work of Unitarian churches west of New York State. The Western Conference was in the forefront of the movement to ordain female clergy, following the lead of the Universalists.

The twentieth century saw the inclusion of humanism into the Unitarian pantheon, with the adoption in the 1930s of A Humanist Manifesto. Since the formation of the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961, we have seen a growing inclusiveness that has welcomed theists and non-theists alike into our religious tent.

In looking backward to the beginnings of American Unitarianism, it is important to see that movement through contemporaneous lenses. Channing and his colleagues regarded themselves as reformers, not as revolutionaries. As inheritors of the religion of Jesus Christ, they sought only to bring contemporary Christianity back into line with what they regarded as the purity of the early church. Like most other Protestants, they believed that they could do so by following the doctrine of sola scriptura (scripture alone). The liberals of the “neighborhood of Boston” thought of themselves as uncorrupted modern Christians. They were products of their time and should be placed within that historical context, although not limited to it.

Religions always invite detractors. During the American Civil War it became fashionable in certain circles to derisively describe Unitarians as believing in a “trinity” that consisted of “the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Neighborhood of Boston.” There is of course a grain of truth in this slogan, but as we know, American Unitarianism has a much more complex history.

I hope this overview of the beginnings of the Unitarian half of our denomination has been useful and informative. If you'd like more information, please feel free to contact me or the Rev. Terasa Cooley. I'd like to stay longer after the service but unfortunately I have to sell beer at the Hartford Saengerbund's Bierfest, which begins at noon!

Thank you for your attention.

W. Robert Chapman has been a member of this Society since 1977. His senior thesis, "One God in One Person Only": Unitarianism Challenges the Connecticut Standing Order, 1800-1820, won the 1991 D. G. Brinton Thompson Prize in United States History at Trinity College. He contributed to and edited Hartford Unitarianism, 1844-1994, and is the author of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Unitarian and Universalist Clergywomen: A Bibliographic Essay and Victor Lundy's Unitarian Meeting House, Hartford, Connecticut. Bob is a reference librarian at the Hartford Public Library.

Select Bibliography

An American Reformation: A Documentary History of Unitarian Christianity, ed. & with intro. by Sydney Ahlstrom & Jonathan Carey (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985)

Brown, Arthur W. Always Young for Liberty: A Biography of William Ellery Channing (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1956)

Chapman, W. Robert. “One God in One Person Only”: Unitarianism Challenges the Connecticut Standing Order, 1800-1820 (Senior Thesis, Trinity College, 1991)

Cooke, George Willis. Unitarianism in America (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902)

Corpus Dictionary of Western Churches (Washington, DC & Cleveland: Corpus Publications, 1970)

Dorrien, Gary. The Making of American Liberal Religion: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001)

Mendelsohn, Jack. Channing theReluctant Radical: A Biography (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown & Co., 1971)

Meyer, Freeman. Hartford Unitarianism, 1844-1994 (Hartford: Unitarian Society of Hartford, 1994)

Parke, David B. The Epic of Unitarianism: Original Writings from the History of Liberal Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957, 1960)

Robinson, David. The Unitarians and the Universalists (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985)

A Stream of Light: A Short History of American Unitarianism, ed. By Conrad Wright (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1975, 1989)

Unitarianism: Its Origin and History, A Course of Sixteen Lectures delivered in Channing Hall, Boston, 1888-89 (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1890)

Universalism in America: A Documentary History of a Liberal Faith, ed. Ernest Cassara (Boston: Skinner House, 1971)

Wilbur, Earl Morse. A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945)

---, A History of Unitarianism: In Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952)

Wright, Conrad. The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955, 1966)

Footnotes

1 It's worth noting that by the middle of the nineteenth century, as Universalists continued to ascend the socio-economic ladder, they recognized the need for an educated clergy—and founded what would become one of America's great universities in which to train them: Tufts.

² Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766) was directly descended from Thomas Mayhew, Sr. (1593-1682), the first Governor of Martha's Vineyard and father of Bethia Mayhew, who married my 9^th great-grandfather Thomas Harlock, Sr. (abt. 1602-1672).

³ Anglican (Episcopal) priests must be consecrated by bishops. Because Anglican bishops were then required to swear an oath of allegiance to the British crown, it was temporarily impossible for Americans to be consecrated to the espiscopate. This impediment was circumvented in 1784 when the Rev. Samuel Seabury of Connecticut was consecrated an Anglican bishop by the Church of Scotland. Ultimately, the British Parliament and the Church of England cleared the way, and the Archbishop of Canterbury consecrated two other American bishops in 1787. Two years later an autonomous Anglican body, the Protestant Episcopal Church, was formally organized in the United States.

⁴ The church established in 1796 by Joseph Priestley in Philadelphia was the first in America to use the Unitarian name but it was not the first Unitarian church in the United States. Nine years earlier, King's Chapel in Boston became the first American church to adopt a Unitarian theology while retaining its Anglican liturgy.

⁵ Socinianism is a form of Unitarianism that developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Poland under the leadership of Fausto Sozzini (a.k.a. Faustus Socinus). Socinianism was a rejection of the Trinity, the Fall of Adam, the incarnation, the expiatory redemption, the resurrection of the body, and the natural immortality of the soul. Christ was held to be essentially a man, divine only in the sense of sharing in the power of the Father.

⁶ In 1830 one of these agents, the Rev. Samuel Joseph May, brought Unitarianism to Hartford. However, it would be another fourteen years before the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Hartford was formed. An ardent abolitionist, Rev. May—who would later be pastor of Brooklyn's First Ecclesiastical Society, the first Unitarian society in Connecticut—befriended and defended Canterbury schoolmistress Prudence Crandall, who in 1833 turned her private academy into a school for black girls, only to have it declared illegal.

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 2/21/05)