Part I: Our Origins

    What are our roots?  From where did we spring? All too much UU history traces us back to pagan days, claiming everyone from Plato to Thomas Jefferson among our forbears.  But this will not be a history of ideas, but of institutions: a bald history as devoid of hype as I can make it.
    Our name provides a convenient starting point. Unitarian as opposed to Trinitarian. Universalist as in universal salvation. Let us take the U’s one at a time.
    There were antitrinitarian movements in the early Christian church—Arianism, for example—but modern Unitarianism traces its origins to the Protestant Reformation. In Geneva, Servetus was burned at the stake in 1553 for his antitrinitarian views. Under Socinus, a strong center of Unitarian belief developed in Poland. In Transylvania—better known today as Hungary—Francis David laid the foundations for the Unitarian Church in approximately 1560.  In some ways, this is the real start, because that’s when the Unitarian sign went up over the door, figuratively if not literally.  
    These Socinian influences took root in England in the 17th and 18th centuries, and it is this movement that begins to stir most Americans. John Biddle is sometimes called the father of English Unitarianism, but the development of a separate Unitarian body came about gradually through the efforts of such men as Joseph Priestly.
    Originally scripturally oriented, Unitarianism under the leadership of James Martineau in England and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker in America, became a religion of reason. Reason and conscience were considered the only guides to religious truth; complete religious toleration, the innate goodness of man, and universal salvation were preached.
    In America, Unitarianism took hold in the liberal wing of the Congregational churches of New England.  At King’s Chapel, Boston, in 1785, Trinitarian doctrines were removed from the liturgy.  In 1796, Priestly, who had fled to America to escape persecution, established a Unitarian church in Philadelphia.  By about 1815, liberal Congregationalists had formed themselves into a new denomination, to which the name Unitarian  was given by their conservative opponents.  The final separation was hastened by the choice in 1805 of Henry Ware, a liberal, for a professorship of  divinity at Harvard University, and by the ordination sermon preached by William Ellery Channing in 1819 in Baltimore.  
    Channing’s statement of Unitarian beliefs became the platform of the denomination, formed in 1825 as The American Unitarian Association.  In 1961, this group merged with the Universalist Church of America, to form the current Unitarian Universalist Association.
 (I remember the vote well, though the only thought about it that sticks in my head is the memory of a mild annoyance at the new name’s awkwardness. At the time, most Unitarian churches were coping with the baby boom and more concerned with building more classrooms than building associations.)
    The Universalist church originated in the 18th Century, almost entirely in the United States.  Though the doctrine of salvation from sin through divine grace is old, no organized body of believers took it as a distinctive feature of their church until  modern times.  John Murray, a convert to Universalism as taught by James Relly in England, brought this doctrine to America in 1770. After preaching in New Jersey, New York and New England, he settled in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the first Universalist church was formed in 1780.
    The movement spread. In 1790, a convention in Philadelphia decided on a congregational organization, and drew up a profession of faith. Murray’s Universalism was of the Calvinistic type, but under Hosea Ballou, the most influential force in  the denomination during the first half of the 19th century, Calvinism was shed, Ballou’s doctrine of “Christ’s subordination to the Father” gave Universalism a position very similar to Unitarianism.
    The name Universalist General Convention, adopted in 1866, was changed in 1942 to the Universalist Church of America, until the 1961 merger with their Unitarian brethren.