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(Webmistress note: this is a transcript of the film we use in our Introduction to Unitarian Universalism classes.
Here's our original information about UUism.  Enjoy both!)

People who learn about the Unitarian Universalist Church often assume that it is, somehow, a new phenomenon - that if churches in which people looked at religion like we do had been around for long, they would certainly have heard of them before. It astounds them to learn that we trace our roots back nearly two thousand years.

Many people have a very limited understanding of the history of religion. Today on FUSION, we will be placing our modern ideas about religion in context by looking at "An Heretical History."

I’m Dave Weissbard, senior minister of the Unitarian Church in Rockford, your host for this series.

Today on Fusion, a program of a different sort. Instead of exploring a contemporary religious issue from a liberal perspective, we are going to take a look back, to establish the basis from which we approach religion.

The roots of Unitarian Universalism begin at the time of Jesus of Nazareth. We sometimes forget that the earliest followers of Jesus were Jews, not Christians. They were Jewish working people who saw their leader in the context of the tradition of the Jewish prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Jonah, and Micah.

As the influence of Jesus spread, supernatural ideas, expectations, and interpretations began to be attached to people’s understanding of who he was. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is recorded as having asked his followers who people said he was, and they had a variety of responses. The Book of Acts clearly records the struggle between the Jewish and Greek Christians who, it reports, "had no small dissension and debate," because of their conflicting expectations of what it meant to be followers of Jesus.

People in the early centuries of the Christian church held diverse ideas of who Jesus had been. Some, like the teacher Arius and his followers, believed Jesus to have been separate from the father God; while others under the leadership of Athenasius insisted that Jesus was, and always had been, God. And there were other views also.

The conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine changed Christianity. Constantine, who wanted to use the religion to bring unity to his empire, insisted that a council of the Christian Bishops be called to resolve for once and for all the question of who Jesus was: god or man, and what Christians had to believe to be Christians.

The Council was held in Nicea in the year 325, under the "protection" and intimidation of Roman troops. Not surprisingly, the Council agreed with the position of the Emperor’s Bishop, and adopted what Christians know as the "Nicean Creed" which affirms the teaching that god is three in one – "Father, Son, & Holy Ghost" -- belief in what is known as "the trinity."

Those who believed that God was only one and not three, were known as Unitarians, because of their insistence in the "unity" of God, and they were declared by the council to be heretics. (Actually, ten years later, a council held at Tyre restored the Unitarian view as church teaching and Athenasius was exiled. And then in 381, the Council of Constantinople decided for once and for all in favor of belief in the three-personed God as central to Christianity.) Throughout the years, there have however been Christian scholars who insisted that they could find no scriptural basis for the teaching of the Trinity.

Another ancient Christian controversy was over the teaching of eternal punishment. Some Christians, like the teachers Origen and Clement of Alexandria, insisted that the loving God whom Jesus called "father" would never condemn his children to an eternal Hell. This teaching of "universal salvation" was declared a heresy in 544.

Because Unitarianism and Universalism were outside the mainstream and were not organized, when we trace our history, we tend to include as spiritual ancestors, many who rebelled against the religious establishment, even if they weren't specifically Unitarian or Universalist in their beliefs, because they were people who chose to follow their consciences. Among these are the English reformer, John Wycliffe, who criticized the structure of the church as being unbiblical … and his follower, Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake in 1415 in Prague by decree of an ecclesiastical council for refusing to renounce his beliefs in using the common language and a common cup for communion.

The Unitarian movement was launched intellectually in the 16^th century by the Spanish physician, Michael Servetus. His book "On the Errors of the Trinity" raised a furor in both Catholic and Protestant circles. John Calvin, with whom Servetus corresponded, promised to burn Servetus at the stake for his heresy if he could get his hands on him. For unfathomable reasons, Servetus went to Geneva to challenge Calvin. He was arrested, tried, and burned at the stake in 1553.

An unusual interlude of tolerance took place during the short reign of King John Sigismund of Transylvania. In those days, religious debates were as popular as tournaments and jousting had been. In 1568, King John called for a religious debate to be held in the city of Torda. Representatives of the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and Unitarian faiths participated. The debate lasted for ten days. In the end, King John was, not surprisingly, persuaded by the eloquence of the court preacher, Francis David, who represented Unitarianism. The rallying cry of the Unitarians was "Egy Az Isten" (God is One.) King John declared himself to be a Unitarian, but proclaimed the Edict of Torda, which acknowledged religious faith to be a personal and private decision for all -- others in his kingdom were not required to see religion as the king did. The Edict said "... in every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel, each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well, if not, no one shall compel them, for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve."

Unfortunately, King John died an early death as the result of injuries from a hunting accident. (Actually, there were nine assassination attempts during his ten year reign.) His successor inaugurated the Catholic counterreformation which canceled religious freedom, persecuted the Unitarians, who now had some 400 churches, and threw Francis David into prison where he died in 1579.

The church at Cluj, Rumania, however, stands today as a reminder that there is still a Unitarian movement in Eastern Europe: there are hundreds of little Unitarian Churches in Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland where the central teaching is that "God is One."

Faustus Socinus was the next to risk being burned at the stake in the early 1600's. A refugee from the Italian Inquisition, he fled to Poland where for a time he led a very successful liberal religious movement. Socinus rejected the trinity and insisted that Jesus saved people by the example of his life, not by his death on the cross. Persecuted by the Jesuits, he escaped with his life, but watched his book being burned in the streets of Cracow.

Our story now shifts to 17^th century England where John Milton, John Locke, and Isaac Newton all held Unitarian beliefs. To express those beliefs openly, however, could lead to imprisonment or death. The "Father of English Unitarianism," schoolmaster John Biddle, spent nearly half his adult life in prison for his beliefs in the unity of God. In the 18^th century Theophilus Lindsey was a leader of the Dissenting Churches. Benjamin Franklin was among the worshippers at his Unitarian Essex Street Chapel in London.

Joseph Priestley was perhaps the best known English Unitarian. A great scientist, who is credited with the discovery of oxygen, and a political philosopher who supported both the French and American revolutions, Priestley was also a Unitarian minister and theologian. For his outspoken views on politics and religion, Priestley was driven from England. He set sail for America, partly at the encouragement of Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. In 1794 Priestley founded the first Unitarian church in America in Northumberland, Pennsylvania.

Thomas Jefferson often heard Priestley preach in Philadelphia and was greatly influenced by his religious and political views. Jefferson judged some portions of the Bible more valuable than others, and cut and pasted his own version, containing the sayings of Jesus and leaving out the miracles and the resurrection. Jefferson wrote to a friend that because of a shortage of Unitarians in his neighborhood, he had to be content to be a "Unitarian by himself," but he was certain that Unitarianism would be America’s religion before the generation then alive had died. Jefferson was brilliant, but not infallible.

Joseph Priestley was not the first proponent of Unitarian ideas in America. Its seeds were evident in enlightened liberal Christianity, which cherished human goodness, free will, the unity of God and the use of reason in religion. The so-called "Great Awakening" was a revival movement that some felt was necessary to oppose the popularity of liberal religious ideas among the colonists.

Among the liberal leaders were the 18th century Congregational ministers Charles Chauncy, Ebenezer Gay, and Jonathan Mayhew, whose radical theological ideas foreshadowed those of the Unitarians.

In New England, the congregational form of church government prevailed, which meant that the congregation of each church was empowered to choose its own minister. In an environment in which political and intellectual freedom was brewing, some people were disinclined to be told on Sundays that they were sinners, reason was a tool of the devil, and they must submit to the authority of others in their beliefs. Increasingly, the churches began to seek out preachers of a more liberal bent, whose religious message was more in keeping with the people’s revolutionary political philosophy.

In 1785, nine years before Priestley arrived in the New World, the Anglican congregation of The King’s Chapel in Boston became Unitarian. James Freeman, who served them as interim minister when they found it hard to entice an Anglican to America, was prepared to leave the church because he didn’t believe in the trinity, which was prominent in their worship. The congregation responded that most of them didn’t believe in it either, so they edited the trinity out of their edition of the Book of Common Prayer.

At this point, let us pick up again the Universalist strand of liberal religious history. James Relly, an 18^th century Englishman developed the theological framework for what was called universal salvation in his book Union. John Murray, a devout Methodist who set out to show the errors in Universalism, was persuaded by the reasonableness of Relly’s ideas, and became an active leader of the Universalist congregation. After the deaths of his baby and his wife, and a term in debtor’s prison as a result of the bills from their illnesses, Murray set out in 1770 for America to begin a new life determined to leave religious disputation behind.

The ship on which Murray was a passenger was becalmed off the Cape of Good Luck in New Jersey. Murray went ashore with a group of people seeking supplies. He knocked on the door of a farmhouse owned by Thomas Potter. According to the legend, Potter opened the door and asked Murray, "Are you the preacher God promised to send to preach Universalism in the pulpit of the meetinghouse I built on my farm?" Murray tried to deny knowing what Potter could be talking about. Potter asked if he could say he never preached, and Murray admitted that he had, but insisted he would no more. Potter told him God would not let that ship leave -- the wind would not change -- until Murray preached Universalism in his pulpit. The wind did not change. Murray entered the pulpit that Sunday and delivered a sermon to Potter’s neighbors, the title of which set the tone for all his future work – "Give Them Not Hell, But Hope and Courage." After dinner, the wind changed, the ship was able to move, and Murray proceeded to New York.

After that beginning, John Murray preached far and wide, in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. He founded the first Universalist church in America at Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1779.

Universalism gained many converts. Dr. George DeBenneville, who lived from 1703 to 1793, became known as the "Father of American Universalism." He was a medical doctor turned preacher. Largely as a result of his preaching that all persons would finally be restored to God, forty Universalist churches were formed along the Atlantic seaboard, including the First Universalist Church in Philadelphia in 1786.

An important early Philadelphia Universalist was Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Rush’s pioneering work in the then almost unknown field of mental health has earned him the title "Father of American Psychiatry." A zealous reformer, he was a founder of the first anti-slavery society in the United States and a leading proponent of public education for both males and females.

In 1793, the Universalists held a convention in New England, which some view as the precursor of the Universalist General Convention.

The pre-eminent theologian of the Universalist movement was Hosea Ballou, who emphasized universal salvation and rejected the doctrines of original sin and predestination. In 1803, he wrote a "Treatise on the Atonement," which held that it was the example of the man Jesus which led people to salvation, not the doctrines of his vicarious atonement. Ballou’s theology intellectually united the Unitarian and Universalist strands of liberal Christianity, but he was not acknowledged by the Unitarians who viewed the Universalists as social inferiors.

Harvard Divinity School was the scene of the eruption of the conflict between the liberal Unitarian ideas that had quietly emerged among the New England churches, and the traditional Trinitarian ideas of the congregational establishment. The Harvard Board of Overseers appointed Henry Ware, Jr., a Unitarian Bible scholar, to the chair of theology at the school in 1805. Conservatives were outraged.

For the next two decades and beyond, Boston Common and its environs was the scene of a passionate theological war. Pamphlets were written by both sides, each attacking the other. The liberals insisted that they were only Christians who believed what Jesus taught. The orthodox clergy threw the dirtiest names at them they could muster, one of which was "Unitarian." The label stuck. In reality, the disagreement was not only about the nature of Jesus, as that name implies, but also about the goodness or sinfulness of humanity, and the place of reason and the Bible in religion.

One of American Unitarianism’s early leaders, and the author of many of the liberal pamphlets in the battle with orthodoxy, was William Ellery Channing, minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston. Channing gave expression to the new movement in 1819 with his sermon "Unitarian Christianity" which he delivered at the installation of Jared Sparks as minister of the new Unitarian Church in Baltimore. In that sermon, one of the foundational documents in American Unitarian history, Channing proclaimed the liberals belief in the humanity of Jesus, the goodness of humankind, and the use of reason in religion, particularly in the understanding of the Bible.

The Liberals, who simply considered themselves good Christians, finally decided in 1825 that they needed an organization, and the American Unitarian Association was created. The movement attracted humanitarian reformers like Horace Mann, first president of Antioch College and founder of the nation’s first public school system; Dorothea Dix, who worked to improve the condition of the imprisoned and the insane; both Samuel Gridley Howe, who established teaching methods for the blind, the deaf and the mentally retarded, and his wife, Julia Ward Howe, a staunch abolitionist who wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" after watching Union troops march off to war. Henry David Thoreau also was a Unitarian although he resigned from the church in Concord to follow his own distant drummer. Poets like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell were also counted among New England Unitarians.

One of the problems with reformers is they almost always believe they have gone about as far as anyone needs to go. There are always others who say, "You’ve made a good start, but we must go on." One of those "others," another towering figure during this "flowering of New England", was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was the Unitarian minister of the Second Church in Boston for two and a half years until he decided that he could not, in good conscience, celebrate communion and utter public prayers. He liked the ideas of liberal religion, but was not enthusiastic about dealing with people all the time. Emerson began to question belief in the Bible stories about miracles, and belief in a god who was separate from the creation itself. In his great address delivered to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, Emerson attacked the formalism of the church and its structures and called for the graduating ministers to be preachers who "shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy."

The leading Unitarian ministers found Emerson’s ideas too radical. Emerson’s bold thinking influenced Theodore Parker, who became one of the nation's most militant reformers and abolitionists prior to the Civil War. Parker, almost a hundred and fifty years ago, insisted that the concept of a male God was too limiting, and often addressed his prayers to "Mother and Father God." In his great sermon, "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity," Parker insisted that the real Christianity was the religion OF Jesus, as distinguished from the religion ABOUT Jesus. The things about Jesus, the dogmas and theologies of the Church, were obviously transient, since they changed from time to time. The Permanent, he insisted, were the truths that Jesus taught about love of God and love of neighbor. Parker said, "It is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid or Archimedes. The authority of Jesus, as of all teachers, ...must naturally rest on the truth of his words, and not their truth on his authority."

During the years before the Civil War, many Unitarians and Universalists were part of the anti-slavery movement. No one was more vocal than William Lloyd Garrison, whose paper, "The Liberator," became synonymous with the abolitionist movement. This 1845 ad was signed by 170 Unitarian clergymen to bear their "solemn testimony against the system of American slavery." Some 304 Universalist ministers signed a similar ad in the same year.

Symbolic of the new nation’s expansion westward was the establishment in 1844 of Meadville Theological School in western Pennsylvania to train Unitarian ministers for the West. That school moved in the early part of this century to become a part of the complex of theological schools at the University of Chicago. In 1852, the Universalists founded Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts, and in 1856, the St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.

Thomas Starr King, the son of a Universalist minister, served both Universalist and Unitarian congregations in the East before taking the pulpit of the San Francisco Unitarian church in 1860. He was instrumental in the campaign to save California for the Union. It was Parker who, when asked the difference between Universalists and Unitarians, said that Universalists believe God is to good to damn us, and Unitarians believe we are too good to be damned by God. One of our Unitarian Universalist theological schools in Berkeley, California, is named after Starr King.

The Unitarian support of women’s rights caught the interest of Susan B. Anthony. Her family had left the Society of Friends (the Quakers) and joined the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, New York. Although she devoted her life to the cause of women’s rights, she died in 1906 before women won the right to vote. However, Anthony may have been heartened when the Universalists were the first denomination to ordain a woman as a minister. That distinction went to Olympia Brown who graduated from the Theological School of the St. Lawrence University in 1862 and was ordained as a Universalist minister the following month.

The Unitarian movement was very loosely organized. Henry Whitney Bellows, minister of the All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City was an organizer -- he was the founder of the US Sanitary Commission, the predecessor of the Red Cross. An institutionalist, Bellows pressed hard for the tightening of the limits of the Unitarian movement, to exclude radicals like Emerson and Parker and their followers, who were becoming less exclusively Christian because of their growing awareness of the significance of the other great religions of the world. In 1865 Bellows helped create the National Conference of Unitarian Churches, which united the Christian liberals and made the more radical ministers feel unwelcome.

In 1867, the radicals created the Free Religious Association, maintaining that Unitarianism had to grow beyond the Christian framework. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the first to join the new association which was devoted to promoting "the interests of pure religion, to encourage the scientific study of theology, and to increase fellowship in the spirit."

After thirty years of acrimony between conservative and liberal Unitarians, an 1887 statement developed by William Channing Gannett, "Things Commonly Believed Among Us," finally re-united Unitarianism on a non-creedal basis.

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1869 set off a war between science and religion. However, Unitarians and Universalists were among the first to embrace the contribution of science to religion.

Unitarians and Universalists have always believed that religion must be acted upon, so the "Social Gospel" was rooted in the liberal religious movement. Clarence R. Skinner, Universalist minister and President of Tufts Theological School, pioneered the study of "The Social Implications of Universalism." Skinner wrote "Liberalism is not a body of doctrine and never can be defined in static terms. It can never be inherited, but must always be won by a new battle for each generation." Skinner’s words still speak to us today as we watch the efforts of the Christian right to impose its beliefs and moral teachings upon American society.

John Haynes Holmes, minister of the Community Church of New York, a Unitarian pacifist, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), can be said to have put the "social gospel" into practice.

The central theological controversy in the 20's and 30's was the "humanist-theist debate," symbolized by the publishing of the Humanist Manifesto in 1933. That document, signed by a number of Unitarians and Universalists, proclaimed that a person did not need to affirm a traditional belief in God to be religious. Humanism saw science and education instead of theology and mysticism, as the sources of human salvation, which should be in this world, not a future one. That debate, which some thought resolved a generation ago, actually continues to this day within the pluralism of a non-creedal faith, and most Unitarian Universalist churches have within their membership, both people to whom the concept of a god or higher power has meaning, and those to whom such a concept does not speak.

Interestingly, Unitarianism grew significantly during the McCarthy era in America when people with liberal ideas were subjected to persecution. It seemed as if it became too risky for some people to be liberal alone, and the importance of communities where liberal values were shared became more evident.

In 1961, after a whole century of flirtation, the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America merged into the Unitarian Universalist Association. Unitarians and Universalists, under the leadership of Dana McLean Greeley, provided significant leadership during the Civil Rights Movement, and during the anti-war movement of the 60's.

At the time of merger, there were about 100,000 Unitarians and about 70,000 Universalists in a thousand churches and fellowships (lay led groups) in North America. Unitarian Universalism experienced the same decline that other moderate and liberal churches did in the 70's and 80's dipping to a low of 135,000 members in 1982. In 1992, membership had risen back to 148,000 adult members in still just over 1,000 churches and fellowships.

Our churches, as well as our history, reflect tradition...and innovation...The old...and the new.

The Principles and Purposes of the Unitarian Universalist Association provide a good summary of what it is that our churches are about in today’s world:

We affirm and promote:

The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations;

Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

Respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part;

The living tradition which we share draws from many sources:

Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;

Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;

Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;

Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;

Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.

Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision.

It is the vision formed in the light of our liberal religious past that continues to guide the Unitarian Universalist movement as it responds to the challenges of our times.

We have reached the end of our time today. I want to express my appreciation to The Rev. Richard Gilbert of Rochester, NY whose slides and script provided the point of departure for today’s program, and The Rev. David MacPherson whose slide collection filled in some of the gaps. Neither of them, of course, can be held responsible for my interpretation of our heretical history.

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