The Story of Universalism

Like the Unitarians, with whom the Universalists would merge in 1960 to create a new denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the early Universalists rejected the notion of the Trinity, and they urged the use of Reason in religion and in the reading of Scriptures. They differed from the nineteenth century Unitarians, however, in that the Unitarians had a highly educated clergy, mostly from Harvard Divinity School.

The Unitarians also struggled – then as now – to maintain a fairly well organized denominational structure, with varying degrees of success; and the Unitarians tended to draw from urban middle and upper class populations. The Unitarians were sooner open to non-Christian ideas and influences in their theology than the Universalists.

In the twenty years between 1880 and 1900, however, the Universalist Church of America suffered a dramatic decline in numbers. Consider that in 1880, Universalism was the sixth largest denomination in America, and twenty years later it was one of the smallest. What happened?

Well, in part, the failure of the Universalists to support a strong denominational structure did them in. But the real story of the Universalist decline was that their original mission had been more or less accomplished by 1900. That is to say, gradually the Calvinist doctrinaire hold on mainstream Protestantism in America had in effect been broken. By 1900 it was no longer a radical message in mainstream Protestant churches to preach that God is Love. By the arrival of the twentieth century, almost all the major churches were singing and preaching “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and the once distinctive message of universal salvation seemed less urgent, and the need to preach it less pressing.

(Not everywhere, of course, even today, as a quick tour around the radio dial this morning will remind you! But by and large, Universalism was tremendously influential in moving mainline American Protestantism to a kinder, gentler theology.)

In 1880 the Universalist Church of America counted 800,000 members in its ranks. By 1961 when they merged into the Unitarian Universalist Association, there were only some 45,000 self-identified Universalist members.

During the course of the twentieth century, the Universalist took a route similar to the Unitarians. Gradually their theology broadened to include not only a Christian orientation, but eventually a more – well, Universal – approach to religion. Scriptures of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism were introduced into services on an equal footing with those of Christianity. Unitarians and Universalists seemed to be saying that humankind possesses a basic religious need which has been expressed in various formulations in different cultures over time.

Today Unitarian Universalism represents a kind of post-Christian or trans-Christian approach to religion that takes us decidedly on a different path than many other American churches. We have traveled a fair distance from our original roots when Unitarian meant “non-Trinitarian,” and when Universalist meant belief in universal salvation through the atonement of Christ.

Yet these words, Unitarian and Universalist, remain descriptive of us, not only because we revere our heritage, but because, in the words of Clarence Skinner, a great Universalist preacher, we seek more than ever to be a religion of the unities and the universals.

We seek a unity, an operative harmony, that we sense at the heart of creation and between and among all people of good will. And the universalism we seek to practice is a philosophy of life, a system of values, stressing the largest possible world outlook, which sees in every expression of religious truth humanity’s eternal quest for meaning and understanding.

Perhaps it has been necessary in ages past for us to navigate through “oceans of fire” to reach such understanding. But I sense what I call a “new Universalism” being evidenced in so many of the people coming to our churches for the first time these days. By which I mean a wider fellowship of souls for whom the particulars of theology or creed are not nearly so important as the authenticity of religious thought, impulse, and experience.

In a world where the fragility and closeness of the human family can no longer be denied, and where the stakes have never been higher, this new Universalism sees religion’s primary task as bringing people together, not dividing them one from another, as in days gone by – the saved from the unsaved, the theologically correct from the theologically unsound.

Religion’s task today ought to celebrate instead the bonds that hold our imperiled planet together. Religion’s task today must be to point to those eternal truths which save our lives from emptiness and selfishness, from materialism and isolation, from deadening cynicism. Religion’s task today is to give those truths a name, to give them voice and make them come alive, to make them shine in our lives. It is the emerging sense of a new generation today that there is indeed only one true religion; it is that ancient universal truth that lies beneath all religions.

Theodore Parker called ours the religion “whose temple is all space; its shrine, the good heart; its creed, all truth; its ritual, works of love; its profession of faith, divine living.”

We have seen where the divisive theologies of the past have brought the world. Perhaps it is time to go deeper. Perhaps it is time for what the poet Adrienne Rich calls, a “severer listening.”

Perhaps it is time, finally, for the very kind of theology that our Universalist churches were in fact promulgating but which a divided and sectarian and jingoistic world found too radical and too threatening for its day.

A theology which prizes redemptive love over doctrines of damnation. A theology that proclaims one world and one common humanity. A theology calling us to the openness that John Cummins celebrated in the reading this morning, openness “to nature, to the blessings of each day and season, to all persons, to their ideas, their needs, their faith, their prayers, as we share in the common and age-old quest for higher good.” (John Cummins quoted in To Meet The Asking Years)

There is a fresh wind indeed stirring in churches like this one today. People are reclaiming the right to define themselves as “spiritual beings” without apology and without reference to outworn traditions, to narrow Scriptures, or to so-called Revelations that closed off 2,000 years ago.

By a “new Universalism” I mean that many people today are no longer willing simply to cede the precious territory of the human spirit to the dogmatists of the world. They are asking, as Thoreau once asked for us all, “Why should we not enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight, and not of tradition, a religion of revelation to us and not the history of theirs? For the sun shines also today.”

If our church has a single message to proclaim in this day and age, perhaps it is this: an insistence that a fragile world depends on our ability to see beyond the partial and the dividing, and to go deeper down to the unities and the universals. That’s the message I see in our history, and it is the one call that I hear from the future.