Channing’s Church of Reluctant Radicals

In religion, as in all other human endeavors, perspective makes all the difference.  What to one person is eminently reasonable and obvious, to another person is often looked upon as dangerous and radical.

This morning I want to tell you a little bit about a man who in his day was considered by some the most reasonable and eloquent voice of modern religion on this continent; a man whom others rushed to condemn as an inflammatory radical, a heretic who, had he lived in another place and time, would have burned at the stake for his bold questioning of traditional views of God and Christ and the proper reading of Scriptures.

The man’s name was William Ellery Channing, and the religious movement he helped to found was American Unitarianism.

Channing is to Unitarianism what Martin Luther is to the Protestant Reformation: if not exactly the father of the movement, he was most certainly the right man in the right place and the right time.  Like Luther, his personal intellect and his personal religious vision galvanized a religious movement that was waiting to happen.  Like Luther, he had the courage to take on the religious establishment of his day to preach the principles he believed in.  But unlike Martin Luther, William Ellery Channing did not possess a classic revolutionary personality.  His was not a fiery, earthy temperament.  He was, by all accounts, a painfully shy man, always uncomfortable with confrontation, an introvert who spent a lifetime, it seems, trying to avoid the natural positions of leadership that his powerful intellect and gifted preaching ability continually thrust upon him.

And yet, during a professional ministry that spanned forty years at the Federal Street Church in Boston, there is virtually no single great social issue of his time that he did not powerfully influence.  Historians Daniel Boorstin and Henry Steele Commager list Channing among the ten major shapers of American thought in the 19^th Century. “Before Channing,” writes Boorstin, “there is literally no such thing as a liberal church in America.”

William Ellery Channing was born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1780, the youngest son of a large family.  His prosperous father died when Channing was only 13, and the family was left dependent on the support of his merchant uncles.  He was a brilliant student, mastering Latin, Greek, and French before he was a teenager, and through the sponsorship of an uncle, he was sent off at age 16 to Harvard College to prepare for a career in law.

Channing had been raised as a proper New England Congregational Calvinist as befitted his station in his community, but during his college years as he read deeply into philosophy and theology, he confronted a faith crisis.  His own image of a loving God could not in good conscience accept the Calvinist notion of Pre-Destination, with its images of eternal damnation and hellfire for the Unsaved.  The more he studied Scriptures – he added Hebrew and German to his curriculum to do so – the deeper his doubts grew.  It was a stressful time in the young student’s life, and his health broke for the first time while he was at Harvard – probably what we would diagnose today as mononucleosis.

It was only the beginning of a lifetime of physical ailments for Channing.  He was a physical ruin for most of his 62 years.  There’s a glorious huge bronze statue of Channing today on the Public Garden in Boston just across from Arlington Street Church, and to look at it, with Channing’s preaching robe grandly billowing around him, he looks like a formidable figure indeed.  But in fact, the man was barely five feet tall; he weighed only about a hundred pounds at his healthiest.  He suffered from deafness and gout and dyspepsia.  He knew other pains as well.  He lost his father at age 13, two of his own children died at an early age, and his beloved wife was taken with a crippling arthritis.  When Channing’s closest brother died, he left a young son in Channing’s care.

On the surface then, Channing’s life carried more than its share of pain and sorrow.  Yet, despite all this, he is remembered as a happy man, a genteel and generous soul, a loving pastor who although not gregarious and never really comfortable in the personal encounters required in ministry, nevertheless always made time for his people when they needed him.  He was clearly most comfortable in the privacy and security of his study from which he produced fantastically prolific sermons and essays and lectures, all of which emanated a rich and hopeful theology, full of optimism and affirmation of God’s love and the potential of the human spirit.

His sermons, in accordance with the custom of his day, averaged some two hours in length, and in an age of great oratory, Channing was an acknowledged master, as lively and dramatic in the pulpit as he was shy and introverted outside of it.  (It was said Channing would cross a street to avoid having to chat with parishioners coming the other way, then get up in front of hundreds on Sunday and hold them spellbound.)  His preaching was said to be mesmerizing.  His Calvinist New England predecessor of the previous century, Jonathan Edwards, relied on fire and brimstone to keep his congregation’s attention in the pulpit.  Channing, quite to the contrary, held people with his themes of love and peace and justice.  Always and again he returned to his great central focus: the dignity of human nature as created by a loving God, the potential greatness of the human soul.

But in religion as in all other human endeavors, perspective makes all the difference.  What to one person is eminently reasonable and obvious, to another person is often seen as dangerous and radical.

By 1819, the Congregationalist churches of New England were divided in all but name between the conservative majority of Calvinists of the Old Order, whose traditional clergy clung to the gloomy tenets of Calvinist fire and brimstone, and an increasing number of churches whose clergy leaned toward the more liberal intellectual and philosophical influences of the Enlightenment. (In fact, they were called “New Light” Protestants.)  Most of the New Light clergy were recent Harvard Divinity School graduates, and among their “dangerous” doctrines, they openly questioned not only Pre-Destination, but also the true place of Jesus, Biblical literal interpretation, Revelation, Miracles, and the validity of the Trinity itself as Christian doctrine. 

Boston printing presses were cranking out theological treatises, local clergy debates, heated letters to the editor, and anonymous pamphlets by the thousands in 1819, something hard for us to imagine today, and it was clear that Congregationalism, then the largest Protestant denomination in America, was about ready to split at the seams.

The occasion came on May 5, 1819 when a young star student of Harvard Divinity School, Jared Sparks, was ordained by the Congregationalist Church of Baltimore. With the encouragement of the New Light clergy of Boston, Sparks invited William Ellery Channing to deliver the Ordination Sermon.  It was a carefully chosen occasion, an ordination ceremony attended by several hundred clergy who traveled down from New England to attend.  Channing entitled his sermon that day, “Unitarian Christianity.”  Even he could not have known the explosive impact his sermon would have on American Protestantism.

Within a month after the Baltimore Sermon, as it came to be called, some 25,000 pamphlets of its text were sold in Boston alone.  Within two years, over a hundred New England Congregationalist churches declared themselves to be “Unitarian” in theology.  Within five years, more than 200 parishes officially left the Congregationalist fold and established a new liberal denomination, the American Unitarian Association of Churches.  It’s first elected President was William Ellery Channing, who neither sought the position nor wanted it, but who was persuaded that his eminence and eloquence were essential to the survival of the fledgling movement.

In his biography of Channing, Jack Mendelsohn writes, “by enshrining reason, experience, and conscience at the heart of Christian life, by declaring that revelation and salvation must be measured by human character rather then by dogmatic pronouncement, Channing wanted to provide a relevant rational Christian option.”  And of course, what his own career would demonstrate and what the association he launched would experience over the next century and a half, is that such flaunting of orthodox authority and tradition is seen by many as dangerous radicalism.  For in religion as in all other human endeavors, perspective makes all the difference.

Love, justice, and peace, it seems, were no less controversial in Channing’s day than in our own, and no less likely to lead religious liberals and preachers into troubled waters.  The Federal Street Church, which Channing served, included some of the wealthiest and most influential citizens of Boston in the 1830’s.  And while his congregation had reluctantly entertained a “radical” reputation on matters of abstract debates over Calvinist theology and orthodoxy, when Channing began in his sermons to apply the principles of radical love, radical justice, and radical peace to some of the pressing social issues of the day, his congregation’s taste for such radicalism began to sour.

In 1833 (the year this very Brooklyn Unitarian congregation was founded, by the way) Dr. Channing spoke out on the issue that he had resisted addressing as long as he could.  The issue was slavery, and Channing had resisted speaking out on the topic, not because he had any doubts about the moral imperatives of the issue, but because he knew full well the institutional effect his public stance would have.  For many of the most prominent families of the church, indeed of Boston high society, were merchant shippers who directly and indirectly profited from the Southern slave system.

As he knew it would, his treatise on slavery in 1833 cracked open his congregation.  Although it was immensely influential in galvanizing a struggling Abolitionist Movement in New England, the financial support for his church virtually disappeared overnight, and it never really built up again before Channing’s death in 1842.  For such a strong believer in church institutionalism as Channing, this was a truly devastating event.  When Channing’s ministerial protégé, the brilliant young Abolitionist  Rev. Charles Follen, died in a shipwreck the following year, the deacons of Channing’s church refused permission to hold a memorial service there because Follen was such a rabid abolitionist.  Although deeply hurt over this unchristian and insensitive action of his church, Channing did not resign his pulpit as his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson advised him to do.

Before his death, William Ellery Channing would go on to lend his leadership and his energies to virtually every major reform movement of his day: Abolition, Women’s Rights, Prison Reform, Peace, Temperance, and mental health reform all claimed his attention at one time or another.  Jack Mendelsohn says that if there is a continuous theme to his life, it is that of a kind of “reluctant radicalism.”  Not radicalism for the sake of sensationalism or passing fad or fashion for celebrity.  Not radicalism when it is chic or safe or popular with the press.  But radicalism that is an informed deep loyalty to principle.

Why reluctant, then?  Because the wise man or woman knows that such radicalism, such informed dramatic loyalty to principle, always exacts a price.  The world cannot tolerate radical truth because radical truth or principle always puts the world to shame.  That’s why we kill prophets when they appear.  Susan B. Anthony once said that when one woman speaks the truth, there is a revolution.  Radical truth always puts the world to shame.

Why reluctant?  Why was Moses reluctant when Yahweh called him to lead the Chosen People?  Because he knew what the price would be.  Jesus knew too, when he said, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.”  Martin Luther King Jr. knew that radical truth puts the world to shame.  “Like most men,” he said, “I would like to live a long life.”

William Ellery Channing’s reluctant radicalism, his leadership in issues that would place him in prominent confrontation with the beliefs and values of his time, his loyalty to liberal principle, are still the inheritance of our Unitarian faith.  I believe that his great central theme – the dignity of human nature and the greatness of the human soul – is still the core of the Unitarian Universalist heart, still the message that distinguishes this church from the modern-day religious purveyors of gloom and doom theology.  I like to think that his kind of radical love and radical peace and radical justice in all their simplicity and in all their insistence still undergird the church that Channing founded.

It’s true there are some religious movements – like Quakerism, for example – that are more radical than ours in their organizational style.  And there are some religious movements – like Roman Catholic Liberation communities in Latin America, for example – that are more radical than ours in their general politics.  We haven’t always been radical enough to suit some.  We haven’t always been loud enough in protest, or fast enough in action to suit others.  But by and large, I think the overall record of Unitarian Universalism speaks well for itself over the 190 years since Channing took on the establishment in Boston.  It remains to be seen what we’ll do as a movement in the next generation.

“Channing’s Church of Reluctant Radicals” one historian called us.  Funny, you don’t look like a very radical crowd to me.   Perspective is everything, I guess.