Expansion & Transformation Through Consolidation: 1850 - 1961

Unitarian Expansion & Transformation through Consolidation: 1850 - 1961

1 Timeline

• Emerson’s Nature & beginning of Transcendentalist Revolt (1836)

• Emerson preaches "Divinity School Address” (1838)

• Parker preaches "Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (1841)

• Margaret Fuller, Women in the 19th.century (1845) (d. 1850)

• Seneca Falls Convention (1848) Timeline

• Western Unitarian Association founded (1852) • Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell ordained (1856) • Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species (1859) • U.S. Civil War (1861-1864) • Ordination of Olympia Brown (1863) • Free Religious Association founded (1867) • James Freeman Clarke, Ten Great Religions (1884) • World Parliament of Religions at Chicago World's Fair (1893) • “Plessy v. Ferguson,” legalizes racial segregation (1896) • Beacon Press established (1902) • Starr King School for the Ministry established, Berkeley, CA (1904) Timeline

• U.S. Involvement in WW I (1917-18)

• Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (1917)

• Clarence Skinner, “Universalist Declaration of Social Principles” (1917)

• 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote (1919)

• Prohibition (1919-33)

• Scopes Trial (1925)

• Stock market crash, start of the Great Depression (1929)

• First Humanist Manifesto (1933)

• Universalists consider merger w/ Unitarians (1937) (also in 1899, 1925)

• Unitarian Service Committee organized (1939) Timeline

• U.S. Involvement in WW II (1941-45)

• Norbert Capek dies at Dachau (1942)

• Church of the Larger Fellowship organized (1944)

• Unitarian Fellowship Movement founded (1949)

• Brown v. Board of Education (1954-55) “Most inﬂuential minister in mid-19th century America”

• Minister of the 28th Congregational Society

• Largest free church in the country

• Largest church of any kind in Boston

• In the 1850s, almost 3,000 people went weekly to hear him preach (2-3% of the population of the city)

• ~50,000 listened to him lecture every year, in lyceums from Maine to Illinois.

• Thousands more bought his published sermons and addresses…which found readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

• Scholars and thinkers took his work seriously

• Read more than twenty languages. Theodore Parker (1810 - 1860) Theodore Parker (1810-1860)

• Parker’s Election sermon in 1846: “government of all, by all, for all”

• Helped inspire President Lincoln’s conclusion to his Gettysburg Address 17 years later: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” MLK: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 8 Theodore Parker

• Dr. King’s version was chosen by President Obama to weave into the rug in the Oval Oﬃce.

• Origins lie with the nineteenth-century abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. • neither tall nor handsome; his big head was bald, and the features on his long face were plain….

• [H]is voice was deep and resonant, but not especially strong….

• His impact came instead from the force of his complex personality, the exciting power of his prose, the strength of his ideas….

(University of North Carolina Press, 2002) Signiﬁcance: (1) hard questions of theology (2) risks for racial justice

• For nearly a century after his untimely death at age 49, in 1860, interest in him remained high around the world.

• Two collected editions of his works were published, a 14-volume set in London and a 15- volume edition in Boston.”

• Translated into German, Swedish, and Japanese.

• Multiple biographies about him in English. Biographies were also written about him in French, German, and Dutch.

• 1910: centennial of Parker’s birth marked by major celebrations

• Began to be forgotten by the middle of the twentieth century [neo-orthodoxy] Further Signiﬁcance: Radical Thought w/in congregation

• Emerson left his pulpit after only a few years for the lecture circuit. Parker stayed.

• Transcendentalism was about much more than Thoreau living alone on Walden Pond

• Also about infusing progressive religion into existing congregations. Theodore Parker (1810-1860)

• 1810: born in Lexington, Massachusetts.

• “Baby”: last of 11 children, with 9 surviving sisters and brothers, ages 4 to 26. Father was 49 and his mother 46.

• Grandfather (Captain Parker) commanded the Minutemen on the nearby Lexington Green: “Don’t ﬁre unless ﬁred upon, but if they want to have a war, let it begin here”

• Seeds of being a radical — of being willing to use violence if necessary to bring about social change — were planted early in young Parker’s psyche. Theodore Parker (1810-1860)

• Supporters of using violence to end slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War were much closer historically to the Revolutionary War than we are to the Civil War.

• Only 84 years had passed from 1776 to 1860, whereas more than twice as much time (more than 160 years) has passed from the Civil War to today.

• Parker and the other members of the Secret Six saw themselves as extending the ﬁght for freedom begun at during the American War for Independence. Theodore Parker (1810-1860)

• 1819: Parker was 9 years old when William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) preached his sermon “Unitarian Christianity”

• 1938: Parker was in the audience for Emerson’s “Divinity School of Address”

• 1842: Channing died the year after Parker’s landmark sermon on “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” (1841) Theodore Parker (1810-1860)

• As late as 1832 during his early twenties, when he was employed as a school teacher, he was still a biblical literalist

• Over the course of a decade, he became increasingly liberal theologically, particularly in regard to how he viewed the Bible — inﬂuenced by a local Unitarian minister

• 1836: graduated from Harvard Divinity School, doubts had increased signiﬁcantly about traditional teachings of Christian orthodoxy, particular in regard to miracles [Transcendentalism’s “miracle year”] Theodore Parker (1810-1860)

• Began asking increasingly bold questions, some of them at ﬁrst only privately in his journal, but some of them he was also starting to weave publicly into his preaching:

• “How is Christ more a Savior than Socrates?”

• “Why did the world need a Savior?”

• “The Resurrection — why was the body of Christ raised? — why “carried up?” How is the resurrection of matter proof of the Immortality of Spirit? Is not the material Resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ unspiritualizing?

(Beacon Press, 1960) Theodore Parker (1810-1860)

• Dove deeper into German biblical scholarship, such as David Strauss’ Life of Jesus: “Is not Strauss right, in the main, when he says the New Testament is a collection of myths? No doubt he goes too far, but pray tell me where is far enough”?

• Title of “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” is an allusion to Strauss’s article “On Transiency and Permanency in Christianity.”

• 1840: “I intend in the coming year to let out all the force of Transcendentalism that is in me, come what will come”

(1808 - 1874) Theodore Parker (1810-1860)

• Strauss was ﬁred from his professorship for his pathbreaking scholarship

• But despite the widespread controversy Parker’s sermon generated, no one in his congregation left or turned against him

• Parker’s sermon “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” (1841) caused widespread controversy because he preached it not from the safety of his home congregation, but at the ordination of a new Unitarian minister.

• 1843 “Heresy trial” before Boston Association of Ministers (refused to resign) and cut oﬀ from almost all pulpit exchanges.

• 1846 left West Roxbury for 28th Congregational Society. (1808 - 1874) 28th Congregational Society

[I invite you to] imagine you are in Boston some summer Sunday morning in the mid 1850s.

You decide to go hear Theodore Parker, the famous Transcendentalist minister, preach to the 28th Congregational Society. Having never been, you arrange to accompany a friend who attends regularly. As the two of you turn the corner from Tremont onto Winter Street, you are struck by the sheer size of the crowd gathered there. The sight of nearly three thousand people massing for a routine religious service is a novel one. You go down a narrow, dark alley to the entrance of the Boston Music Hall. Inside, you pass through into a large, airy, and elegantly decorated chamber. 28th Congregational Society

Before you is a low stage on the back of which stands a large bronze statue of Ludwig van Beethoven, reminding you what the room is used of the rest of the week. On the stage is the preacher’s desk. On it sit a Bible and hymn book, red velvet cushion ready for the sermon manuscript, and a vase of fresh cut lilies. Mr. Parker was the first minister in Boston to have flowers on his pulpit. Others think flowers on the pulpit irreverent. You are not used to seeing black and whites, laborers, merchants, and threadbare foreign scholars sitting side by side. As a group they seem inappropriately noisy, and you note that many of them are reading books and even newspapers. A wave of silence starts from the front of the hall. Mr. Parker has come in. He is a small man, plain featured, with a high forehead, dressed in a carefully tailored dark suit. He recites from memory the “lesson” (which includes not only Scripture, but a poem by Longfellow), then a hymn, in a strong, clear, deep voice. Music follows, provided by an organ and a choir of professional singers.

The sermon lasts exactly an hour. Although there is a scriptural text quoted at the beginning, you quickly realize there is to be no exposition of it; it is to be used only as a motto. His oration — about how our goal in life should not be pleasure, fame, or wealth, but perfect wisdom, justice, love, and holiness — is stirring. A few people head to the exits as the sermon is ending, but you and your friend stay until the service is over. There is another hymn, and Mr. Parker gives a benediction. Then you exit slowly with the crowds, through the dark alley, into the midday sunshine.” Violent & Nonviolent Social Change

• “Secret Six” - helped fund and supply John Brown’s 1859 raid on the federal armory Harpers’ Ferry

• Three of ﬁve were Unitarian laity (George Luther Stearns Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Samuel Gridley Howe)

• Two others were Unitarian ministers (Thomas Wentworth Higginson & TP)

• Gerrit Smith was a “Nonsubscribing Presbyterian”

(U of South Carolina P, 1997) Violent & Nonviolent Social Change

Parker: “liberty is an end, and sometimes peace is not the means toward it Parallel energy today? energy — pipelines, fracking, [willingness to commit violence against property] Violent & Nonviolent Social Change

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” …We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”… I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom….” —The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from (1808 - 1874) a Birmingham Jail” (1963) Violent & Nonviolent Social Change

“Easier to give up on long-term social change when one is comfortable in the present — when it is possible to have challenging work, excellent health care and housing, and access to the ﬁne arts. When the good life is present or within reach, it is tempting to despair of its ever being in reach for others and resort merely to enjoying it for oneself and one’s family…. Becoming so easily discouraged is the privilege of those accustomed to too much power, accustomed to having needs met without negotiation and work, accustomed to having a political and economic system that responds to their needs.… Responsibility is equated with action that is more likely to succeed, thus identifying responsibility with action that is, by deﬁnition, supportive of the status quo?” Abolition Bell, All Souls Unitarian in D.C.

Joseph Revere, the son of Paul Revere, cast the church’s 1,000-pound bell in 1822. (Fundraising for the bell was boosted by a $100 contribution from President James Monroe.)

For years, it served as an unoﬃcial city bell, rung to announce ﬁres or call public assemblies.

Public use stopped on December 2, 1859, when the church tolled the bell throughout the day that John Brown was hanged for leading a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. (denounced by DC’s mayor and city council) Moved with the congregation and is still rung on Sunday mornings, now in remembrance of all who have died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.” Margaret Fuller: Competing Oppressions vs. Coalitions

• When asked about focusing her Conversations more on the abolition of slavery: “The Abolition cause commands my respect, as do all eﬀorts to relieve and raise suﬀering human nature.”

• Her particular interest was expanding the Abolition movement from “the enfranchisement of the African only” (which came in 1870 with the 15th Amendment) to include woman’s suﬀrage (which did not come until ﬁfty years later in 1920 with the 19th Amendment)

• Fuller was unafraid to name the ways in the 19th- century that “women are slaves” ﬁrst to their fathers and then to their husbands

• [twenty years before the Civil War] “Invisible”…submerged within (U Alabama P, 2001) Episcopalian, for example

• Of the 7 Unitarian churches in the would-be Confederate states, only two (Charleston and New Orleans) managed to remain organizationally active on the eve of the Civil War

• Many southern Unitarians believed in an agrarian system (contrasted with the “evils” of an industrial capitalist society that took no interest in labor) — and thought slavery would soon give way to a milder form of servitude.

• Paternalistic view of enslaved…saw supporting enslaved as “family values”

• Some southerns called Parker’s sermons “pulpit treason” for violating “non-interference.” Unitarian Church of Charleston

30 New Orleans Emersonian Individualism vs. Bellowsian Institution Building

• 1839: Ordained and Installed at First Congregational Church in NYC (now All Souls).

• Remained 43 years. [stability]

• 1859: helped organize and became president of National Conference of Unitarian Churches (prior to 1865, AUA was association of individuals.)

• 1861: became president of U.S. Sanitary Commission [idea from women in his congregation to help wounded an improve camp condition]

• Entire sum raised for binding up wounds of war < cost of single day of Civil War Henry W. Bellows

• Hedge: “our bishop” [Channing] (1814 - 1882) Henry Whitney Bellows (1814-1882)

• Was supposed to be named “Edward Sterns Bellows,” but minister mixed up names at christening with his twin brother, who later died tragically in a snowstorm. • Practice of visiting every family in his growing congregation frequently every year.

(Skinner House, 1979) Bellows’s Four Groups of Unitarians

• Conservatives (Gannett) - still resentful of Parker and the radicals and suspicious of anything not originating in Boston • Radicals - think Christianity is only one among many other religions, and resistance to test/creed • Evangelicals - Christians ﬁrst in identity, Unitarians secondarily, relatively few in number • Broad Church men (Bellows, Clarke, Hedge, Edward Everett Hale) - “recognize the elements of truth in all other sections and believe in the possibility of welding them together” Henry W. Bellows (1814 - 1882) Bellows: “Suspense of Faith” (1859)

• Churches have “lost their faith and become “lecture foundations” • “Less religious” and “more political, social, and ethical” • feared that science and literature were becoming “substitutes for religion.” • Protestantism has brought individual freedom to faith with a mighty centrifugal force, but it has gone too far. • must turn back to “existing religious institutions of Christendom.” • 1865: National Conference Henry W. Bellows (1814 - 1882) National Conference (1865)

• Preamble: “all disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ…service of God…building up the Kingdom of his Son.” • Bellows’s vision of “Liberal/Universal/ National Christian Church of America” • Both: liberty, science, experience • And: Christian, worshipful (re- interpreted) • Saw Liberals as leaven and Conservatives as ﬂour…need one another. • Too broad for radicals, viewed Christian language as creedal, leading to formation of Free Religious Association (FRA) in 1867. Henry W. Bellows FRA never much organizationally, but had (1814 - 1882) signiﬁcant impact on AUA. Another “Broadchurch” Man

• Named for step-grandfather James Freeman, minister of King’s Chapel, ﬁrst declared Unitarian church in U.S. (1785) • friends since childhood with Margaret Fuller • Editor of Western Messenger (1846-9) during his sojourn in Louisville [“failure” made him aware of his limits] • Married to Anna Huidekoper (whose father was the major ﬁgure behind the founding of Meadville Theological Seminary) • Returned to Boston 1841 to found the innovative Church of the Disciples. • Remained minister there until death in 1888 at James Freeman Clarke age 78. [stability: 47 years] (1810-1888) Another “Broadchurch” Man

• 1872: ﬁrst volume of Ten Great Religions appears (early contribution to study of comparative religions) • 1886: “Five Points of at the New Theology” [optimism, inevitable progress] • “Channingite Unitarian”: • worth of human nature, • supernatural revelation conﬁrmed by miracles, • superhuman nature of Christ. • From transcendentalism he accepted the worth of innate perceptions, unity/ immensity of God in the world James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) Church of the Disciples: Context for Innovation (1841)

• 1841: Parker, “The Transient and the Permanent” and Ripley resigns pulpit to found Brook Farm

• 1840s: Thoreau at Walden and Fuller in Rome (ﬁrst female U.S. war correspondent)

• Average Sunday attendance at CoD 1864 (381) 1865 (403) 1866 (477) 1857 (409) Intentional Structure for breaking down barriers

Principle #1 (of 3): Breaking down social barriers (laying groundwork for “worship wide”)

If members are going to trust one another and cooperate with one another, need to get to know one another

• Intellectual: classes, discussion groups

• Religious Aﬀect: prayer meetings, Bible studies

• Ethical (“Will”): benevolent work among The “Cheers” Effect the poor and marginalized of Boston Church of the Disciples: Intentional Structure

Bonus Principle: Breaking down building barriers (laying groundwork for “worship wide”)

• Temperance advocate, supporter of Washingtonian movement, precursor to AA

• Helped draw up a protest against slavery (signed by 173 Unitarian ministers)

• Member of the Boston Vigilance committee to protest unlawful seizures of slaves

(Beacon Press, 1954) Church of the Disciples: Intentional Structure

Principle #2 (of 3): Breaking down class barriers (laying groundwork for “worship wide”)

• All donations from voluntary subscriptions.

• In 1841, the pews in every Unitarian church in Boston were owned/rented annually to pay for expenses.

• Undemocratic: those with the most money owned the church property and controlled it

• un-Christian: improper distinction between rich and poor

• Impractical: rich didn’t attend because of apathy and poor through fear of trespassing on someone else’s property Church of the Disciples: Intentional Structure

Principle #3 (of 3): Breaking down sacerdotal barriers (laying groundwork for “worship wide”… and transformative lay leadership)

• Conventionally: Unitarian laity took no part in the Sunday service.

• Organ and choir music: professionals, often were not even church members.

• Professional clergy: everything else — read Scriptures, recited prayers, preached sermon.

• [McClendon vs. professional training… doctor/mechanic/lawyer] Church of the Disciples: Intentional Structure

Principle #3 (of 3): Breaking down sacerdotal barriers

• Congregational hymns sung without accompaniment [Methodists]

• Responsive Readings, Psalms read antiphonally by people and minister

• Unison Lord’s Prayer

• Silent prayer for meditation [Quakers]

• Lay Preaching [Methodists]

• Open Communion open to all

• [For Clarke: less original than biblical] Opposition to Bellows’ Broadchurch and Institutionalism

• Emersonian “churches of two, churches of one,” and “solitary Sunday walks in grove and glen” instead of gathering together with a religious community [Wendell Berry’s Timbered Choir] • “Parochialism”: ministers such as Rufus Ellis were content with the current status of their congregation, and did not see the need to attend a convention of congregations. OBF • ﬁrst president of Free Religious Association (1867-1878) • Theology evolved from Transcendentalism to “Rationalism,” a completely scientiﬁc worldview. [The Religion of Humanity (1872)]

• Wrote biography of Parker & a history of Octavius Brooks Frothingham Transcendentalism. (1822-1895) Opposition to Bellows’ Broadchurch and Institutionalism

• Parker had carried Christianity as far as it would go — would “bear no more attenuation.” • Francis Abbot: New direction, not mere modiﬁcations of Christianity: “It is new wine and is fast bursting the old bottles…it is time to make new and better ones” “If you want freedom, you must abandon Christianity.” • “What is free religion? …the opposite of the traditional view that religion belongs to the supernatural sphere…. It is the rational impression that science is revelation” [Dowd] (Univ of Alabama P, 1977) Free Religious Association (FRA)

• Transfer loyalty from “Christ” to “Christ’s principles” (truth, righteousness, love) • Reconcile religion and science • Group could not speak as a whole because members were only responsible for their own opinions (although some wanted group to take stands) • Inﬂuenced Unitarianism into a broader more universal and humanist movement. Western Unitarian Conference

• 1849: isolated Midwest Unitarian churches began to organize.

• Tension between independence and UUA centralization eﬀorts

• 1875: withdrew from AUA’s outreach program and hired Jenkin Lloyd Jones as Mission Secretary to lead them toward “Freedom, Fellowship, and Character in Religion” Western Unitarian Conference

• 1882: started the Church of All Souls in Chicago

• 1893: Executive secretary of the committee for the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago

Jenkin Lloyd Jones (1843 – 1918) Western Unitarian Conference

• 1886: Christianity/theistic vs. free religion controversy came to a head with Jabez Sunderland's Issue in the West (mailed to all ministers and congregations and distributed at annual meeting)

• 1887: William Channing Gannett proposed compromise of “Things Most Commonly Believed Today Among Us” (adopted 59 to 13).

• 1894: mostly resolved at National Conference with new preamble containing some emphasis on “religion of Jesus” with qualiﬁcation that no “authoritative test” William Channing Gannett