Roots of Unitarianism

May 5, 1985
Lakeland

May 26, 1985
Port Charlotte

The calendar is the context for today's subject, the roots of Unitarianism. If you have the Unitarian Universalist Calendar, you know that the various dates carry the names of persons and important events for our Unitarian Universalist tradition. May is a month filled with memorable dates. These dates are the stimuli for digging in Unitarian roots (on another occasion, the same device will be used to examine Universalist roots). The purpose of this look at the past is not only to increase consciousness of our particular religious past, but also because our past informs and guides are expectations of the future.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to their being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.... We will have the dead at our councils.” (Quoted, CONTEXT, from Orthodoxy)

Guided by such recognition, let us consider May days:

May 4 (1819): William Ellery Channing delivered the historic “Baltimore Sermon” at the ordination of Jared Sparks. Channing, by that time a famous preacher, chose as his topic “Unitarian Christianity.” In Baltimore, First Independent Church was the new theology’s first church outside eastern Massachusetts.

Speaking with trenchant reason and fearless candor, Channing defined an approach to religion which, while antagonistic to existing dogmas and creeds, was delivered so persuasively that it was the catalytic sermon which, among other influences, six years later led to the formation of the AUA.

[Regarding the] Baltimore Sermon, published within a month, “it has been claimed that no pamphlet except Tom Paine's COMMON SENSE had ever been so widely circulated in the U.S.”

Also on May 4 (1796-1859) Horace Mann was born. If one grew up in a Massachusetts city, the chances are that there was a public school named for Horace Mann (from 1st to 6th grade, I was taught in the Horace Mann school in my city).

Born in poor circumstance and taught religiously of the terrors of orthodoxy, Horace Mann persisted and secured a law education. He also became a Unitarian because of the illumined, reasonable sermons of William Ellery Channing. Mann became a success in law and politics, was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1827 and the Massachusetts Senate in 1833.

As President of the Senate he pushed through the historic bill which provided for a State Board of Education. Up to that time, school districts were completely independent, not responsible to any governing or supervising body. As a consequence, public schools were physically dilapidated, teachers both untrained and miserably underpaid. Standards were grossly uneven.

Abandoning his lucrative law practice and promising political career, Horace Mann became Secretary of the State Board of Education. His annual reports became educational classics. When I was doing some studies at Teachers College, Columbia, it was both taken for granted (and required) if one was heading for a graduate degree in education, that one study Mann's annual reports. They were models for improving public education, not only in Massachusetts, but in many other states. Mann is the most important person in the recognizing the need [and developing the value] of free public education in our nation.

He espoused other causes – state hospitals for the mentally disturbed, and restriction of lotteries and the liquor traffic. In his own words, he believed in the "unlimited improvability of the human race through education."

Mann became the first president of Antioch College. In his final commencement address, he summarized his highest value and life-long passion, “be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

On May 10, 1860, Theodore Parker died in Florence, Italy, and buried there in the American cemetery. More will be said about him when marking another May date.

On May 14, 1525, Laelius Socinus was born in Siena, the Venice territory of Italy. Born Lelio Sozzini, of a wealthy family, he was associated with the liberal part of the Reformation. He, with others, called into question the dogma of the Trinity. Forced to escape from Venice because of religious persecution along with others in the discussion group we might call a fellowship, he moved about Europe. He was influenced by Servetus. John Calvin warned Socinus about the consequences of asking too many questions about dogmas and creeds. The Inquisition seized his properties in Italy. He is less famous than his nephew Faustus Socinus, but Laelius was a guide and forerunner. Socinianism was the name for Unitarianism in much of Europe in those troubled, but world-changing times of the early Reformation.

On May 15, 1961, there was celebrated the consolidation of the AUA and UCA. After a hundred years of sometimes half-hearted, sometimes intense approaches and negotiations, these two liberal unique religious denominations became one, the Unitarian Universalist Association.

On May 16, 1804, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-1894) was born in Salem, Massachusetts. She was one of three remarkable sisters. Mary was the wife of Horace Mann; Sophia the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. At age 16, Elizabeth Peabody opened a private school in Lancaster, 2 years later, one in Boston. For 9 years she was secretary to William Ellery Channing. She was a key figure in assembling the famous religious and literary figures of the time, so well described in Van Wyck Brooks’ FLOWERING OF NEW ENGLAND. The planners of the utopian community, Brook Farm, met in the back room of a bookstore she opened in 1839, ([the] only one carrying foreign books). She set up a press and published 3 of Hawthorne’s [books] and the writings of Margaret Fuller as well.

After 1845, Elizabeth Peabody devoted herself to education. She was a member and lecturer at the then-famous Concord School of Philosophy. In 1860, she established the first kindergarten in the U.S. She lived [until] her 90th year and her life and memories contributed much to our understanding of an American age notable not only for its literary flowering, but also for the developments in Unitarian thought.

May 19, 1841 is one of the most distinctive dates in American religious history. On that Sunday, Theodore Parker delivered his sermon on “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.”

Theodore Parker, grandson of Capt. William Parker, who commanded the Lexington militia on April 19, 1775, [was] born [in] 1810, ... the 11th and last child of John and Hannah Parker. Theodore Parker, as a Unitarian minister, was radical even in the eyes of his Unitarian colleagues. He questioned the authority of the Bible, he doubted that Jesus performed miracles. The Unitarian weekly (CHRISTIAN EXAMINER) complained, “Mr. Parker is not a Christian believer.... This young man must be silenced.” He was shunned by most Unitarian colleagues.

Parker was a social prophet and reformer. He participated in demonstrations against the Fugitive Slave Law. He was a scholar of prodigious learning.

It was [on] May 19 that he preached “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.” He criticized the reliance Christians had on the authority of Jesus. He argued for the validity of truth, not the authority of a savior, saying “If it could be proved Jesus never lived, still the truths of Christianity will stand firm. If all the Evangelists and Apostles were liars; if Jesus never lived and the New Testament a forgery from end to end, the doctrines of love to God and love to man are just the same absolute truth. They rest on their own authority.”

He believed the church to be in the social order, with responsibility for it. He said, uncompromisingly, “If there be a public sin in the land, if a lie invade the state, it is for the church to give the alarm: it is here that it may war on lies and sins; the more widely they are believed in and practiced, the more they are deadly, the more to be opposed. Here let no false action or false idea of the public go without exposure or rebuke. But let no noble heroism of the times, no noble man pass by without due honor.”

Such was Theodore Parker, “Yankee Crusader” - repudiated in his own time by his Unitarian brethren; today, a hero and exemplar.

On May 25, 1825, the AUA was organized as a member organization, not a denomination of churches. Its organizational beginnings and growth are a long and developing history. Up until the time of consolidation with the Universalists, the annual meetings of a Unitarians were always called “The May Meetings,” and without exception held in Boston in May.

By co-incidence, rather than specific planning, the British Unitarian Association was organized the following day, May 26, 1825.

Also, on May 25, but in 1803, Ralph Waldo Emerson was born. We have discussed him before. Many would agree that he is the greatest figure in American literature. Others recognize that his Transcendentalism – his belief that one could know God directly and no religious institutions were needed for such communication – has guided several American religions. His influence in bringing the insight of the Hindu scriptures to the American world, his stirring lectures, his masterful essays, all these make him a Unitarian hero, even though he found the ministry to stifling and insensitive. He influenced Parker, but also generations of Unitarians. Emerson believed in the universality of truth. He held that character is the test of a person’s worth. In one of his enduring adages, he wrote:

“Every man takes care that his neighbor does not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then he has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun.”

On May 27, 1819, Julia Ward Howe was born of a wealthy family. She is most famous as the author of the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Visiting a campsite near Washington in the early days of the Civil War, she scribbled the words in a tent in the dark. But the years of her living contributed much more than that, even though largely unrecognized.

Rejecting the social life of the upper crust social elite of NYC, she went to Boston for education (debutantes were not educated). There she met and married Samuel Gridley Howe, 20 years her senior (he’s a valiant story in himself – courageous abolitionist and founder of the famous Perkins Institute for the Blind (and for 44 years director)).

Julia, too, was an abolitionist. With her husband she edited “The Commonwealth,” an anti-slavery paper. Their home was a gathering place for abolitionists. She wrote poems and prose in that cause.

Following the war years she became a leader in the women’s suffrage movement, President of the New England Women’s Suffrage movement..

She was also a brave and persistent advocate of world peace, and was one of the organizers and leaders of an international conference of women for peace and against war in 1820 (probably the first such international conference). She died in 1910 with no fulfillment of women’s suffrage or world peace, but she was one [of the] pioneers in both these causes.

Thus the memorable dates in May. Each month could provide similar stories of innovation in thought and deed, courage, and persistence in the upholding the human values of justice and kindness.

These men and women were the kinds of persons about which E.E. Cummings wrote in his line “Be Yourself”

to be nobody but yourself
in a world which is doing
its best night and day to
make you everybody else
means to fight the hardest
battle which any
human being can
fight and never
stop fighting.

These persons and their deeds have not been cited in order that we may gloat with vicarious virtue about famous Unitarians. That would be a bad mistake they never made. They were of their own time and wrestled with the problems of their times.

Our task is not to repeat their names just for historical denominational vanity, but rather to catch up with their expectations of the future – their vision of a world more just and kind, and a religion free, reasonable, and loving.

To be informed and guided by Cummings' reason and compassion.
To be emboldened by the social courage and prophetic radicalism of a Parker and Julia Ward Howe.
To be faithful to the educational ideals and dreams of Horace Mann and Elizabeth Peabody and apply them to our times.
To be grasped by a sense of the transcendent that Emerson held before us.
To recognize that religious movements survive by a combination of the free individual and a democratic organization – AUA, ... UUA.

Such principles applied to our issues of self and society represent the better way to be faithful to a tradition worth our loyalty.