Below you’ll find the text of two sermons (with some annotations) published in 1822 by Rev. Jacob Flint of Cohasset, Massachusetts. While these sermons might appear to be of little interest to anyone except students of Cohasset history, they also contain some interesting theological content for those interested in the battles between the Unitarians and Trinitarians in 1820s Massachusetts.
Two years after Flint gave these two sermons, in December of 1823, he preached two sermons stating in no uncertain terms that trinitarian beliefs were supported neither by the Bible nor by human reason. The 1823 sermons precipitated a split in the Cohasset congregation. In the present sermons, preached in December of 1821, Flint claims that a couple of his predecessors were Unitarians in thought if not in name; in addition, he makes it clear that he agrees with his allegedly Unitarian predecessors. Anyone who heard the 1821 sermons could not have been surprised by the 1823 sermons.
Interestingly, the second of the 1821 sermons includes a long footnote in which Flint carefully outlines how the Cohasset congregation had lived in unanimity for most of a century. He must have been aware of the trinitarian leanings of some of his congregants; was this his way of trying to keep them from splitting the congregation?
I also noticed the way Flint erases the Indians from his account of Cohasset history, confining any mention of them to a short section labelled “Curiosities.” He never mentions how there were Indians who were members of the church in the mid-18th century. As it happens, I’ve just been reading Jean O’Brien’s book Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Univ. of Minnesota: 2010), which examines the ways in which the authors of local histories in New England created the myth of the “vanishing Indian.” Flint’s sermons are early examples of that myth.
So there’s more going on in these two sermons than just boring local history!
Notes on the text: OCR-generated text found online was checked against a physical copy of the sermons in the archives of First Parish of Cohasset, and a number of corrections were made. Footnotes in the original have been numbered consecutively, with numbers enclosed in square brackets, and moved to the end of each section (Discourse I, Discourse II, and Geographical Sketch). A few editorial notes have been added, enclosed in square brackets. Pages breaks in the original have been indicated by enclosing “page X” in square brackets. One or two long quotations have been placed in separate paragraphs.
The 1823 sermons: Earlier this year, I put Flint’s 1823 Unitarian sermons (the ones which precipitated the split with Second Congregational Church) on this blog: the first sermon — the second sermon.
In an earlier post, I published the first of a series of two sermons preached by Rev. Jacob Flint here in Cohasset in December, 1823. In these sermons, Flint proclaimed publicly that he supported the Unitarian side of the Unitarian / Trinitarian controversy then raging through eastern Massachusetts churches of the Standing Order. Not surprisingly, once their minister openly espoused Unitarianism, the Trinitarian sympathizers in the congregation left to form their own Trinitarian church.
I’m finally getting around to publishing the second sermon, the one that Flint preached in the afternoon. I can’t help wondering how the Trinitarian sympathizers responded after hearing the first sermon, the one in the morning. Did they gather together during the lunch break to talk? Did some of them refuse to return for the afternoon sermon? If they did return, were they angry as they sat there listening to their minister tell them that their cherished theological beliefs were irrational, non-Biblical, and even unchristian? And how did the Unitarian sympathizers in the congregation feel? — were they perhaps relieved that at last their minister came out and stated openly the beliefs that probably everyone in the small town of Cohasset knew he held?
It turns out to be a fairly well written sermon. Today’s Unitarian Christians might even find it to be of mild theological interest.
But I suspect most of the interest this sermon holds today is its historical interest. It’s a sermon that cause an open rupture between Unitarians and Trinitarians in one small town. It is in a sense a microcosm of the larger theological and institutional battle raging through organized religion in eastern Massachusetts. Flint was not arguing about abstract theological issues; he was arguing with people that he knew well, people he saw every day. His sermon might even cause us to reflect on the power of words and the power of thought, and how words and thought can lead to open conflict and (according to tradition) acrimony as well.
Original page breaks are noted in square brackets, like this: [p. 14]. Footnotes from the original have been numbered and placed as endnotes. A few editorial notes have been included, always enclosed in square brackets.
Discourse in which the Doctrine of the Trinity is examined…
by Jacob Flint (Christian Register: Boston, 1824).
[p. 11] PART II
[1] Thes[salonians] v. 21. — “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”
The Scriptures, given by inspiration of God, contain, as I attempted to show you in the morning, a system of doctrines and morals admirable for their simplicity and truth, and a most necessary guide for men to faith, duty, and happiness. They are in the highest degree profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness. But I had to remark, that unhappily for the peace of society, and good will of christians towards each other, these sacred writings had not long been in the hands of fallible and and erring mortals, before they were made to teach, for doctrines, the inventions and commandments of men. These inventions, or spurious doctrines, became the source of almost endless dispute, animosity and persecution among christians. For these dreadful effects, however, there is no blame that can justly be attached to the gospel, because that every where inculcates forbearance, charity, and good will in all men.
Because Yvonne asked me to, I put together a timeline of UU history. Instead of focusing on White male ministers from wealthy urban areas, my timeline includes people and events from outside the mainstream of UU history.
Unitarians and Universalists in the United States
1773 Caleb Rich (White) becomes minister of a new church in Warwick, Mass., that has a universalist theology.
1775 John Murray (White), Universalist minister, serves as a chaplain in the Revolutionary army.
1779 The Independent Christian Church (Universalist) organized in Gloucester, Mass., one of the earliest Universalist congregations in the U.S.
1785 King’s Chapel is the first Unitarian congregation in the U.S.
c. 1795 The scientist Joseph Priestley (White) holds Unitarian services in Northumberland, Penna.
c. 1795 Prince (no last name), a Black man, joins the church in New Bedford, Mass., as a full member.
1838 Nathan Johnson, a Black Universalist in New Bedford, Mass., shelters Frederick Douglass on the latter’s first night of freedom
1859 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a White Unitarian, opens the first kindergarten in the U.S.
1860 Samuel Jackson, a Black Baptist minister, asks to bring his entire congregation into the American Unitarian Association, but because he and his congregation are Black, he is ignored.
1863 Olympia Brown, a White woman, ordained by the Universalist General Conference. She was the first woman to be ordained by a denomination (rather than just a congregation) in the U.S.
1876-1878 The U.S. government invites Protestant denominations to manage American Indian reservations; the Unitarians take charge of Ute tribes in Colorado.
1883 Poet William Carlos Williams, a Hispanic Unitarian, is born.
1887 First Unitarian service is held in the Khasi Hills of India, led by Kissor Singh (South Asian).
1895 Eliza Tupper Wilkes, a White Universalist minister, is the first woman to preach in Stanford University’s nondenominational chapel
1917 Adeniran Adedeji Isola (Black) founds the Unitarian Brotherhood Church (Ijo Isokan Gbogbo Eda) in Lagos, Nigeria.
1918 Unitarian minister William Short Jr. is arrested for draft evasion, because he’s doing peace activism; when he appeals to the American Unitarian Association to confirm that he’s a minister, they throw him under the bus.
1922 Abigail Eliot (White), an LGBTQ Unitarian educator, brings the nursery school concept to the U.S.
1923 The first Flower Celebration is led by Norbert and Maja Capek, ministers at the Unitarian church in Prague, Czechoslovakia. This ritual is later wrongly called a “flower communion.”
1930s Probably a third of all Unitarian and Universalist churches close due to the Great Depression.
1932 Poet Sylvia Plath, a White Unitarian, is born.
1937 Unitarians and Universalists cooperate to create a new hymnal.
1937 The American Unitarian Association grows concerned that Leila Thompson, an ordained Unitarian minister, is running for city council in Berkeley, Calif., as a Socialist.
1942 Unitarian minister Norbert Capek dies in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1947 Stephen Fritchman, a White minister, is forced out of his job editing the denominational magazine due to accusations that he is Communist.
1950s (date uncertain) UU ministers officiated at some of the earliest UU same sex weddings.
1956 Christopher Moore, a White minister at First Unitarian in Chicago, founds the Chicago Children’s Chorus, an interracial chorus which rapidly became one of the best children’s choruses in the U.S.
1950s Religious liberals in the Philippines affiliate with the Universalist Church of America.
1961 The UUA bylaws have six principles.
1961 Unitarians and Universalists consolidate into one denomination.
1965 Year with highest Unitarian Universalist membership in the U.S.
1965-1970 Unitarian Universalism loses half its Black members during the Black empowerment controversy.
1977 Ysaye Maria Barnwell founds the Jubilee Singers, a gospel choir, at All Souls UU church in Washington, D.C., the first Black-led UU gospel choir.
1977 First Unitarian of Los Angeles publishes the first Unitarian hymnal with Black and working class music in it.
1980 The first Water Ritual takes place at a feminist gathering of women. Later, it was wrongly called a “Water Communion.”
1985 The UUA adopts new non-sexist bylaws with seven principles.
2004 Unitarian Universalist Association of Uganda is formed.
2005 Last year of growth in U.S. Unitarian Universalism.
2008 Carleton Pearson, a Black Pentecostal minister who became a Universalist, brings his congregation to the Unitarian Universalist church in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Back in 1823, Rev. Jacob Flint was the minister of the one church that then existed in Cohasset, Mass. He had been ordained in Cohasset in 1798. He was fairly liberal to begin with, but over the quarter of a century he served the congregation he had become an outright Unitarian. So on December 7, Flint decided to preach a sermon on Unitarianism.
I can imagine the scene. He preached this sermon in the Meetinghouse that we still use today, but the old box pews were still in use in 1823. Wood stoves had been put in the Meetinghouse for the first time the previous year, in 1822, so at least people would have been relatively warm for the two lengthy sermons that were delivered each week. Flint would have climbed up into the high pulpit, suspended halfway between the main floor and the gallery. Sadly, he was not a good speaker — John Adams wrote that “his elocution is so languid and drawling that it does great injustice to his composition” (John Adams, Diary, 19 Sept. 1830).
Despite his poor elocution, at least some people in the congregation must have been paying close attention to this day-long Unitarian sermon. Within months the Trinitarians had left in a body to start building their own church just a hundred feet away across the town common. I can just imagine how angry the Trinitarians were after the morning service on December 7, 1823, and how little they looked forward to the second sermon in the afternoon when they would hear even more about how wrong the doctrine of the Trinity was. How they must have steamed and stewed as Flint preached, especially since his preaching seems specially designed to infuriate anyone with Trinitarian leanings.
But this was probably to be expected of Flint, who was an uncompromising man. Years later, Capt. Charles Tyng remembered a time from his boyhood when he had to live in Flint’s house:
“…I was then put under the charge of the Rev. Dr. Jacob Flint, the minister at Cohasset. I soon found that the change was from the frying pan to the fire. Doctor Flint was a large man with a forbidding countenance. He was morose & cross in his family, which consisted of his wife, three sons, and an infant daughter…. I dreaded Sunday, the Dr. was so very strict, made us boys sit in the house, reading our Bibles, or learning hymns…. Dr. Flint was a tyrannical man, and very severe, particularly with his own children. Hardly a day passed without his whipping them. Us Boston boys did not get it so often, although I often felt the effects of the rod. He probably was deterred from whipping those who boarded with him, as his disposition would have induced him, had he not thought our parents would take us away.” (Charles Tyng, Before the Wind: The Memoir of an American Sea Captain, 1808-1833, chapter 1.)
With that preface, here’s the first part of Flint’s divisive Unitarian sermon of December 7, 1823:
Recently, people in the United States have been taking the month of September to reflect on the wrongs perpetrated against the indigenous peoples by the U.S. government and citizens.
(And yes, the perpetrators of wrongs against Native Americans were nearly all White, which means that Ron DeSantis doesn’t want this material taught in the Florida public schools because it might make some White kids feel ashamed of their race. More than 20 other U.S. states have laws similar to Ron DeSantis’s law in Florida, which means that this blog post is officially and legally banned in schools in more than one third of the U.S. But I digress….)
After the Civil War, various religious groups were assigned to Native American groups. The Christian religion, especially Protestant Christianity, was considered a “civilizing force,” a means by which White settlers could maintain control over Native peoples by forcibly integrating them into White culture. The Unitarians were still considered Christians in the 1870s (we got kicked out of the Christian club after 1900), and as a small denomination we were assigned “the Utes of Colorado,” a group of Native nations then living in Colorado, later forcibly removed to Utah. The Unitarians considered this “mission work,” a way of spreading the Unitarian religion through good works among non-White (and therefore less “civilized”) persons; and they classed it with the Unitarian mission in Kolkata, India, and the mission work done among African Americans in the Deep South.
Apparently, the Unitarians were fairly ineffective at this mission work. Given the history of Unitarianism, I suspect our ineffectiveness was due to our usual lack of organization and unwillingness to provide adequate funding. We established a school for Ute children, which is not listed in the first volume of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, so perhaps it was not a boarding school. Nevertheless, given what we know now about how White-run boarding schools did so much damage to Native children, it seems important that we learn more about how this school operated.
(All this makes me think: The Universalists can be thankful that we were so small and disorganized and heretical during the 1870s and 1880s that the U.S. government never assigned them a group of Native peoples.)
In any case, I’ve collected some documents from the 1870s and 1880s pertaining to the Unitarian mission among the Ute peoples. They make for some pretty uncomfortable reading. Even though the Unitarian Universalist Association formally apologized to the Utes back in 2009, we still have a lot to do to reflect on how the Unitarian religion was used as a tool of colonization.
Unitarian Universalists today love to talk about covenant as if it has a long history. I’m arguing that covenant was a mid-twentieth century invention by Conrad Wright and James Luther Adams. It does not have a long history. And that’s a good thing. The history that Conrad Wright invented for covenant has too many negatives for me to feel comfortable.
When we deconstruct in the Conrad Wright conception of covenant, here are some of the things that we begin to understand: — Historically, covenant was designed to promote theocracy; — it was dependent on patriarchy; — it was rooted in enslavement of Africans and Natives; — and it supported British imperialism and colonialism. Plus the Wrightian history of covenant ignores our Universalist heritage.
These are some of the things that Wright either wasn’t aware of or ignored. I don’t think we can remain unaware of these things, or ignore them, any longer. We have to deconstruct “covenant” so we can reconstruct it without quite so many negative aspects.
Since the time of Wright and Adams, others have tried to articulate a vision for Unitarian Universalist covenant, most notably Alice Blair Wesley in her Minns Lectures from the year 2000. But all these visions for covenant start with the assumptions laid out by Conrad Wright and James Luther Adams, and don’t really question those assumptions. I feel that none of these new visions for covenant adequately addresses theocracy, patriarchy, enslavement, or colonialism. And in my opinion, none of the visions for covenant takes Universalism seriously enough. To put it succinctly — none of these new visions of covenant adequately deconstructs the underlying assumptions of “covenant.”
Deconstructing “covenant” in this way has helped me to understand why I’ve been feeling increasingly uncomfortable when Unitarian Universalists talk about “covenant.” When we talk about “being in covenant,” we have to start listening for echoes of patriarchy, colonialism, enslavement, and so on. When we accuse others of “breaking covenant,” we have to start have to listening for echoes of the old Puritan practice of public shaming of church members. When we think of covenant as an organizing principle, we have to ask ourselves why we are ignoring the Universalist tradition.
If we’re unwilling to deconstruct “covenant” — how are we going to reconstruct “covenant” to remove the lingering taint of sexism, enslavement, anti-democratic theocracy, and colonialism? Perhaps deconstructing and then reconstructing “covenant” would allow us to make some much-needed progress in our anti-racism work, our ongoing efforts to get rid of patriarchal structures, and our beginning efforts to understand the role of religion in colonialism
If we’re unwilling to deconstruct “covenant” — how are we going to include Universalism once again in our central organizing principles? I’m afraid the answer here might well be that most of us don’t care about Universalism any more. Perhaps it would be better if we’d openly acknowledge this, because we’re “sitting on the franchise,” getting in the way of other groups trying to spread the happy religion of universal salvation. Or perhaps it would be best if we re-engaged with our Universalist heritage, with its incredible diversity of belief and practice; perhaps that would help us more than an attempt to unify ourselves with a tainted vision of “covenant.”
Unitarian Universalists talk a lot about “covenant.” We didn’t used to talk about covenant. As near as I can tell, our mild obsession with covenant came about during the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists, a process which began in the 1950s and continued for years after the legal consolidation of the two groups in 1961. We were thrashing about trying to find something that held us together. The Universalist professions of faith weren’t acceptable to the Unitarians, and the Unitarian affirmations of faith (like James Freeman Clarke’s Five Points of the New Theology) weren’t acceptable to the Universalists.
Two Unitarian scholars, James Luther Adams and Conrad Wright, had long been talking about the importance of covenant to their Unitarian tradition. Wright was a historian who interpreted the entire history of Unitarianism in the United States as centering around covenant. This was a problematic interpretation, since by the early twentieth century many Unitarian congregations didn’t have written covenants. I’m not sure, but Wright may have felt that the Unitarians kind of forgot covenant, and that forgetfulness led to the decline of Unitarianism in the 1930s. In any case, he saw the re-establishment of covenant as central to the revitalization of Unitarianism in the mid to late twentieth century.
Wright continued to trumpet covenant after consolidation with the Universalists. While his primary area of expertise was in Unitarian history, he dipped into Universalist history and claimed to find that the Universalists were pretty much like the Unitarians when it came to congregational polity and the centrality of covenant.
I don’t find Wright’s interpretation of the historical facts to be terribly convincing. Covenant was in fact central to most Unitarian congregations that began life as Puritan churches in New England. Covenant was also important to some nineteenth century Unitarian churches which had been founded by New England settlers moving west. But in my research in the archives of local congregations, covenant becomes less important as an organizing principle beginning in the nineteenth century and through the early to mid-twentieth century.
In many eighteenth century New England congregations, there were two parallel organizations, the church and the society. The society owned the real property and managed the finances; the church consisted of the people who signed the church covenant and stood up in front of the congregation and confessed their sins. Membership in the society was typically through buying a pew and contributing annual rental for your pew (often restricted to males, since there were legal limitations about females owning property), and generally speaking only males could take on leadership roles in the society. It appears that on average significantly more women than men signed the covenant to become a part of the church. People of African or Native descent could join the church, but may have been barred from owning pews or serving in leadership roles in the society.
Thus the entire system of covenant was bound up with discriminatory distinctions between males and females, and between persons of European descent as opposed to persons of African or Native descent. Nor is this an accident. Covenant in the New England Puritan tradition was a means for upholding a theocracy that placed white males at the top of the social hierarchy (note that I’m being sloppy here by including the Pilgrims in the umbrella term “Puritan”). Today, some might call this racism or white supremacy, though some historians would argue that these are anachronistic concepts when applied to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; a better way to put this is to simply say that the New England Puritan tradition was inextricably linked to enslaving people of African and Native descent. On the other hand, we can say with some certainty that this Puritan social hierarchy was patriarchal and sexist. In addition, Puritan theocracy was also tied in with the larger project of British colonialism; not quite as blatantly as in the resource-extraction economies of the southern plantation colonies, but the British empire clearly say the value of exporting religious dissidents to “tame the wilderness” thus opening up the area to somewhat “softer” economic exploitation by the empire.
In short, covenant was bound up with patriarchy, colonialism, and slavery. This is not to say that covenant is forever tainted by its origins. But these are parts of the story that Conrad Wright passes over. If we’re going to put covenant at the center of our religious tradition, at the very least we need to acknowledge that covenants were part of a theocratic political structure that was rooted in the oppression of the majority of people in the society.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the distinction between society and church seems to have slowly been forgotten; along the way, covenants often seem to have disappeared as well. So, for example, when I was doing research for the 300th anniversary of the Unitarian church in New Bedford, Mass., I found evidence for the existence of a covenant in the congregation’s eighteenth century archives, now stored at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. By the late nineteenth century, during the long ministry of William Potter, one of the leaders of the Free Religious Association, I found no evidence for the existence of a covenant. The distinction between society and church continued into the 1940s, since the ministers were not allowed to attend the annual meeting of the congregation — it appears that in the eighteenth century the minister was charged with oversight of the church, the lay leaders with oversight of the society — but with the end of pew ownership in the 1940s, that distinction finally dissolved. By the early twenty-first century, there was no distinction between church and society, or more precisely the church withered away leaving only the society.
In another congregation I researched, the Unitarian church in Palo Alto, Calif., which existed from 1905 to 1934, I found no evidence at all for the existence of a covenant. From the research I’ve done in local congregational archives, I’ve mostly found no evidence for a covenant in the early twentieth century. The only exception is the Unitarian Society of Geneva, Ill., which still maintains the covenant originally written and signed by the founders of that church — who were all emigrants from New England to what was then the frontier. That covenant was substantially revised circa 1900, to shorten it, and to remove all mentions of God or the Bible. The church almost went moribund in the early twentieth century, until Charles Lyttle, professor of church history at Meadville Lombard Theological School, stepped in to rebuild the church for use as a training congregation for his Unitarian theological students. Perhaps it is due in part to Lyttle’s academic influence that the Geneva covenant remained active (and one wonders if the historian Charles Lyttle helped draw the attention of the later historian Conrad Wright to covenant).
Thus covenant appears to have mostly disappeared from Unitarian congregations in the nineteenth century. But Conrad Wright also argued that Unitarian churches were bound to each other through congregational polity, which was another sort of covenant. The most important document here was the Cambridge Platform, a seventeenth century Puritan document that outlined how Puritan churches were supposed to relate to one another. The Cambridge Platform looked to the Bible as revealed scripture (the Word of God) to determine how churches related one to another. The Cambridge Platform was outdated almost as soon as it was written — it called for every church to support both a preaching minister and a teaching minister, which proved to be economically impossible — but it also simply didn’t apply to some Unitarian congregations.
Take, for example, King’s Chapel in Boston, which became Unitarian in 1785. It was originally affiliated with the Church of England, but became independent during the American Revolution; at which point, it removed all references to the trinity from its Book of Common Prayer, and became Unitarian in theology. King’s Chapel came from a tradition of episcopal polity, and the Cambridge Platform formed no part of its history until, at the earliest, it affiliated with the American Unitarian Association sometime after 1825. Or take the Icelandic Unitarian churches of Canada, which came out of Lutheranism, another religious tradition based on episcopal polity. Perhaps we could argue that the Unitarian tradition of covenant in North America is syncretic, taking in various influences, and transmogrifying them.
But I think it’s more accurate to say that twentieth century Unitarian covenant was something that Conrad Wright made up, using historical materials. Covenant is not an old tradition among us, it’s a newly made-up tradition. That being the case, I’m not sure I want to use a made-up kind of covenant based on Puritan theocratic patriarchal concepts rooted in colonialism and slavery.
Furthermore, as someone who thinks of myself as more of a Universalist than a Unitarian, I’m trying to figure out why we should use a made-up kind of covenant that pretty much ignores Universalism. Conrad Wright did extensive research in Unitarian covenant, but it’s clear from his writings that his knowledge of Universalist history was not very deep. James Luther Adams, the other co-creator of twentieth century Unitarian covenant, knew his Unitarian tradition quite well but did not know Universalism nearly as well.
Whether or not the Unitarians were always actually unified by covenant (or if it was something that Adams and Wright invented in the mid-twentieth century), it’s quite obvious that the Universalists were not unified by covenant. The Universalists were unified by a common theology of universal salvation, which was expressed in affirmations of faith. Because the Universalists differed so radically in the details of their universalist theologies, their affirmations of faith had to be very broad, and mostly were quite brief. Unitarian documents, such as church covenants and the Cambridge Platform, tended to be quite wordy — the Cambridge Platform fills up a small book — but the Universalists’ “Winchester Profession” of 1803 comes in at fewer than 100 words. Not that the Winchester Profession, or any later profession of faith, actually served to unify the Universalists; they’ve been an almost anarchistic group from the start; the point is that they did not have covenants in the way Unitarians had covenants. Thus the concept of covenant, as promoted by Adams and Wright, was a Unitarian thing, but it was not important to Universalism.
Todd Eklof — a former Unitarian Universalist minister who was removed from fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) over disagreements on approaches to anti-racism and other matters — is the new president pro tem of the recently-organized North American Unitarian Association (NAUA).
The NAUA joins the American Unitarian Conference (AUC) as a group that has broken away from the UUA over political and theological disagreements. Here’s an introduction to a few U.S. Unitarian groups, including the NAUA and the AUC…
North American Unitarian Association
The North American Unitarian Association (NAUA) website states that the group is “dedicated to courageously fostering and protecting the principles and practices of liberal religion: reason, tolerance, democratic process, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and expression, and the inherent worth and dignity of all people.” Membership is open to congregations and to individuals. They provide the following services: monthly online worship; an online newsletter; online courses; monthly support sessions for NAUA-affiliated ministers; a “ministerial clearinghouse”; and a few other odds and ends. Congregations may affiliate with the NAUA while retaining their membership with the UUA.
The NAUA program strikes me as quite ambitious for a new organization. They do seem to have a fairly full leadership roster, mostly drawn from Todd Eklof’s hometown of Spokane, Wash. So they might be able to keep up all these new initiatives.
American Unitarian Conference
The American Unitarian Conference (AUC) formed in 2000. The founders decided to break away from the UUA for reasons I can no longer remember, nor can I remember the people who were involved in the founding of the group. The Wikipedia article on the AUC says it “was founded in 2000 by several Unitarian Universalists who felt that the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) had become too theologically liberal and too political.”
The AUC seems to have morphed into the Unitarian Christian Church of America (see below), or has been absorbed by them. The old URL, americanunitarian.org, now returns an error message saying the hosting account has expired. I checked the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and the last version of the AUC website they have is from August 20, 2022.
Unitarian Christian Church of America
The Unitarian Christian Church of America (UCCA) appears to be a small group, based on their website. It may be that they’re the successor group to the American Unitarian Conference (AUC; see above). In any case, Shannon Rogers, head of the UCCA, is now the admin of the AUC Facebook page.
Assuming the UCCA and the old AUC are somehow linked, we might look at the the AUC Facebook page to get a sense of both organizations. This Facebook page has gotten recent comments critical of the UUA — “Unfortunately, my experiences with the UUs seemed to always have a thread of Progressivism in them” — and supportive of political conservative positions — “You can NOT be protected if guns are banned!” At the same time, the UCCA now provides children’s Christian education curriculums from ProgressiveChristianity.org. Some of their materials sound cautiously supportive of Black Lives Matter.
In short, it sounds like the UCCA is trying to become a “purple” denomination, welcoming to all political persuasions. Given that the UUA has pretty much given up trying to welcome Republicans (except for a few individual congregations), and is fairly unwelcoming to Christian Unitarians, I’m glad the UCCA provides a spiritual home for Christian Unitarians across the political spectrum.
Unitarian Christian Alliance
The Unitarian Christian Alliance (UCA) is a group of Biblical Unitarian Christians. On their website, they describe themselves as follows: “While holding to various beliefs in other areas, UCA members all agree that the God of the Bible is the Father alone, and that Jesus is his human Messiah. The mission of the UCA and its growing membership is two-fold: to promote unitarian theology and to connect like-minded believers across the globe.
The UCA claims both individual members, and nearly a hundred affiliated churches and groups. While most of the affiliated groups are in the U.S., they have affiliated groups on nearly every continent, including the countries of Brazil, Greece, Singapore, Kenya, and Australia. Interestingly, looking at the web page showing their Board of Directors, their leadership team consists of four middle-aged white men and one woman who does not have a photo.
As far as I can tell, the UCA has never had any connection to the UUA.
Spirit and Truth Fellowship International
Spirit and Truth Fellowship International (STFI) is a “non-denominational ministry” that engages in many activities. STFI issued a Unitarian version of the Revised English Version translation of the Bible. They have an active Youtube channel where they post recordings of their Sunday Morning Gatherings and their Tuesday Night Fellowship. They have a STFI app for iPhones. They also maintain a website called “Biblical Unitarian.”
As far as I can tell, STFI has never had any connection to the UUA.
Other Unitarian (Small “U”) groups
There are other denominations and groups that reject the Christian doctrine of the Trinity on various grounds. These include Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter Day Saints, Oneness Pentecostals, Christadelphians, etc. Note that these denominations do not have “Unitarian” as part of their name, and they might not identify as Unitarian per se.
Historical American Unitarian Groups
1. The most notable American Unitarian group from the past is, of course, the Free Religious Association (FRA). Though the FRA is sometimes classified as a “freethought” group, most of its members were either former Unitarians, or people who maintained dual membership with the FRA and the American Unitarian Association (the predecessor to the UUA). For most of its history, the guiding spirit behind the FRA was William Potter, the minister of the Unitarian church of New Bedford. When Potter left the FRA, it quickly died, which makes me wonder if the FRA was really just a one-man project.
(I have to admit my bias against the FRA. I’m a former minister of the New Bedford church, and while there I did some research into Potter. I felt that Potter got too wrapped up in the FRA, and perhaps neglected his own congregation. On the other hand, I was so put off by his writing that I didn’t want to spend much time researching him. After learning something about Potter, I lost all interest in the FRA.)
2. In the early nineteenth century, the Christian Connexion (variously spelled) was unitarian in theology, and even cooperated with the American Unitarian Association. A few Unitarian ministers served Christian Connexion churches. But by the second half of the century, the two groups had gone their separate ways.
3. The Swedenborgians were vaguely unitarian (small “u”) in theology. However, as I understand it, their unitarianism made Jesus Christ into a god, with God-the-Father and the Holy Spirit as aspects of Jesus Christ. There are still Swedenborgians around (with at least one Unitarian minister serving a Swedenborgian congregation) but I know nothing about their theology in the twenty-first century, so can’t comment on whether they still can be considered theologically unitarian.
[An excerpt from my forthcoming book on Unitarians in Palo Alto:]
A minister and a professor at Stanford University, Burt Estes Howard was born February 23, 1863, in Clayton, N.Y. He went to school at Shaw Academy, Cleveland. He graduated from Western Reserve University in 1883, received a masters’ degree from Lane Theological Seminary, and was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1886. He served as a Presbyterian minister in Michigan and Ohio from 1887 to 1892.
He married Sarah Gates 1890, and they had three children: Grenville (b. 1891), and twins Graeme and Emily (b. 1896). Sarah was a college graduate, having received her A.B. from Vassar in 1869.
He became the pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Los Angeles, in 1892, moving his wife and infant son to California. He only remained a pastor of that church for three years. In 1895, Burt was convicted of “insubordination” by the Los Angeles Presbytery, on what some considered to be trumped-up charges. The presbytery stripped him of his ministerial authority. Burt and his supporters appealed the conviction to the judiciary commission of the Presbyterian Synod in San Jose, which reversed the local decision. But then he was brought up on charges of heresy and insubordination again a few months later. On January 25, 1896, the Los Angeles Herald reported in a page two story:
“The Rev. Howard is to be charged with high crimes and misdemeanors innumerable. The bill of particulars, it is said, will allege that he has been guilty of denying the atonement. It will furthermore be alleged that he also questioned the integrity of the scriptures. This is not all. It will be claimed that the doughty pastor has advanced, stood by and defended the doctrine of evolution. He will also be accused, in all probability, of pantheism. This is something new, but it means that he has enunciated that all nature is good. Not content with this, an endeavor will be made to show that Mr. Howard has stood up for Unitarianism. These charges will be made, so it is claimed, by some of the members of Mr. Howard’s congregation. The congregation split, and those who withdrew formed another church.”
This second heresy trial finally drove him away from Presbyterianism. In 1897, while also serving as a lecturer in professional ethics at Los Angeles Law School, he organized the Church of the Covenant, a congregation independent of any denomination. He served as the minister of that congregation for three years.
Part Six of a history I’m writing, telling the story of Unitarians in Palo Alto from the founding of the town in 1891 up to the dissolution of the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto in 1934. If you want the footnotes, you’ll have to wait until the print version of this history comes out in the spring of 2022.
In late 1925, Elmo Robinson could look back on “four happy years, profitable to me, and I hope to the church.” But he had grown restive. He received a grant so that he could study for a semester at Harvard University in the first half of 1926. He found, or the church found, Leila Lasley Thompson to fill in for him while he was away. Thompson had married a soldier in 1918 who then was killed in action a few months later, leaving her a war widow. She then studied for the ministry at Manchester College, Oxford, England, a Unitarian theological school; was fellowshipped as a Unitarian minister by the American Unitarian Association; and pursued post-graduate study in 1925 at the Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry.
Robinson departed at the end of 1925, leaving Leila Thompson in charge of the congregation. The congregation ordained her on Sunday, February 7, 1926. A month or so later, Robinson decided that he wasn’t going to return to the church. He apparently decided to pursue an academic career, although a note from him dated April 5, 1926, has a cryptic reference about protecting himself from “the charge of using this leave of absence as an opportunity of running away from an unpleasant situation without giving everyone a chance to be heard.” The “unpleasant situation” may well have been the long-standing conflict between the pacifist faction and the pro-war faction. Not even Robinson, with his skill and experience, had been able to heal that conflict.
After going east, Robinson never returned to Palo Alto — which sounds a little too much like Bradley Gilman’s departure from the church. In September, 1926, the church called Leila Thompson as the sole minister of the church. She was reportedly the first regularly ordained woman to serve a minister of a Palo Alto church.
Sadly, Leila Thompson received little support from the lay leaders. Sunday morning attendance dropped even more, from 34 in 1925, down to 27 in 1926, and then to 22 in 1927. Sunday school plummeted from 62 in 1925 down to 25 by 1927. The Young People’s Group continued to be active; Gertrude Rendtorff was still a Stanford student, and perhaps her continued participation kept that group going.
Alfred S. Niles, a lifelong Unitarian, moved to Palo Alto with his wife Florence, also a Unitarian, in the fall of 1927. When they arrived in town, Alfred and Florence sought out the Unitarian church. He found a church that was “still functioning, but rather feebly.” He was told that the church had once been active, “but the minister at the time of World War I had been a pacifist and conscientious objector [i.e., William Short, Jr.], and this had caused a split in the church from which it never recovered.”
Attendance got so low that the congregation tried moving the services to the evening, but that didn’t help matters. At the end of December, 1927, Leila Thompson resigned. It appears from the extant records that everyone became aware that there really wasn’t enough money to pay her salary any more, not even with the assistance the church still received from the American Unitarian Association. The church got Clarence Vickland, a student at the Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry, to come preach to them in 1927-1928. Sunday morning attendance continued to drop, down to an average of 21, and by December, 1928, the Sunday school had closed “as there was not sufficient interest manifested to justify continuing the work.”
Finally, in 1929, the church stopped holding services altogether. Clarence Vickland wrote to the Women’s Alliance asking if they would like to host a visiting Unitarian minister on March 3, but they replied that “it would be impossible to get the congregation together.” 1929 was also the year that Karl and Emma Rendtorff retired to Carmel. With the Rendtorffs about to leave town, there was no real hope for the church. In May, 1930, Rufus Hatch Kimball reported to the Women’s Alliance that the Board of Trustees had turned the church building over to the American Unitarian Association. The church had finally dissolved.
The Women’s Alliance was declining, too. They continued to work on charitable projects — at their June, 1932, meeting, they worked on sewing for the Needlework Guild — but their numbers were shrinking. By May, 1930, the membership list had only nineteen names, and after Anna Probst Zschokke’s name appeared the notation, “Died May 30, 1929.” Like the church, the Alliance was slowly winding down and dying away.
The building sat vacant until early 1931. Then in February, 1931, Mary Engle reported to the Alliance that the American Unitarian Association had begun fixing up the building, and it was “now all in good repair and new locks have been put on the doors so that no invading hands could open them and…have access to Church of Alliance property.” By Easter Sunday, services were once again being held in the church, and Merrill Bates, the theological student who had been given charge of the church, had started up the church school once again.
The Alliance tried to help with the revived Sunday school, but grew discouraged with the tiny attendance, leaving Merrill Bates to manage on his own. Merrill Bates, Berkeley Blake, regional field secretary for the American Unitarian Association, and William S. Morgan, president of the Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry, each preached to the church once a month, with Bates arranging supply preachers for the other Sundays.
Bates continued in the Palo Alto church until he graduated in spring of 1934. It’s hard to know how many of the old-time members still participated in the church. On March 27, 1932, Henry David Gray, who had become a member of the church in 1905, preached the Easter sermon. But most of the old members had either died, or moved away, or given up on the church. The Alliance held its last meeting on October 11, 1932, without even coming to a conclusion as to whether they should formally dissolve or not.
In April, 1934 — a month or so before Merrill Bates graduated from the Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry — the American Unitarian Association put a “For Sale” sign up in front of the building. The building soon sold, for less than its mortgaged value. The American Unitarian Association retained possession of the organ, however, and gave it to the Unitarian church in Stockton, Calif. on permanent loan (Clarence Vickland was then the minister in Stockton). As Alfred Niles put it, there would be “no more organized Unitarianism in Palo Alto for several years.”
Interregnum, 1934-1947
Indeed, there was no organized Unitarianism in Palo Alto for almost exactly thirteen years. In 1936, the liberal Quaker Elton Trueblood became the chaplain at Stanford University, and some Unitarians — like Alfred and Frances Niles — found Stanford’s Memorial Church a congenial place to go on Sunday mornings. Other Unitarians found other religious homes. Josephine Duveneck became active with the American Friends (Quaker) Service Committee, and eventually became a Quaker herself. Alice Locke Park also became a Quaker. Several Palo Alto Unitarians gave up on organized religion altogether.
Even for the Unitarians who went to hear Elton Trueblood preach each week at Stanford, there was no Unitarian Sunday school for those with children, and there was no Unitarian minister to officiate at rites of passage such as weddings and funerals. Perhaps more importantly for many, there was no Unitarian community of which to be a part. Then when Elton Trueblood left Stanford in 1945, there wasn’t even any liberal preaching in town.
In May, 1944, the American Unitarian Association organized the Church of the Larger Fellowship to serve Unitarians who didn’t have a nearby Unitarian church that they could belong to. This was a sort of mailorder church which sent monthly newsletters with sermons and other material of interest to Unitarians; it was, in a sense, an expansion of the old Post Office Mission. The Church of the Larger Fellowship grew quickly, and within three years, a dozen or so Palo Alto Unitarians had already joined.
A New Congregation, 1947
In November, 1946, Alfred Niles saw a notice in the Christian Register, then the name of the denominational periodical, that the American Unitarian Association had appointed Rev. Delos O’Brian to be the the Regional Director for the West Coast, with an office in San Francisco. In February, 1947, Alfred Niles made an appointment to visit Delos O’Brian, who showed him two lists of names from the Church of the Larger Fellowship, one with a dozen names from the Palo Alto area, and another with a dozen names from San Mateo. Delos O’Brian was still undecided whether to organize a new Unitarian church in Palo Alto or San Mateo, and Alfred Niles later claimed that it was his visit that helped tilt the balance to Palo Alto. And on April 6, 1947, Delos O’Brian held an initial meeting to organize a new Unitarian group in Palo Alto. The Palo Alto Unitarian Society, as it was first known, grew quickly. Organized Unitarianism had finally returned to Palo Alto.
But even though many of the members of the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto still lived in the area, most of them did not join the new congregation. Ruth and Everett Calderwood, who were only in their fifties, first claimed they were too elderly to take part, though later they did make financial contributions to the church. Katherine Carruth, who was then seventy-one, said she was sorry but she was too old to participate.
Edna True, on the other hand, who at seventy-two was older than the Calderwoods or Katherine Carruth, attended the very first meeting of the society, and became a member of the congregation. Clearly, while some Palo Alto Unitarians retained their enthusiasm for being part of a Unitarian church, others had lost all such enthusiasm. When Dan Lion arrived in Palo Alto as the first full-time minister of the new church, he made contact with some of the former Palo Alto Unitarians. He made an audio recording of his memories of calling on some of those former Palo Alto Unitarians, and while that recording has been lost, nevertheless, we can make a pretty good guess why those former Palo Alto Unitarians stayed away — the bitter conflicts that split the church, the incessant lack of money, the sense that they had been betrayed by some of their ministers and by the denomination, all contributed to drive these people away from any Unitarian congregation.
Other former Palo Alto Unitarians were happy to join the new congregation. Alfred and Frances Niles were central figures in the new congregation. Edna True was a member of the congregation up until she died, when she left a large bequest to the church. Rufus Kimball was integral in helping the new congregation claim its tax-exempt status. Ruth Steinmetz, a graduate of the old church’s Sunday school, joined the new church and remained active in it the rest of her life. Cornelis Bol, who had moved to Holland before the First World WAr, returned to Palo Alto in time to join the new congregation. Walter Palmer, who lived in Oakland by then, heard about the new church, and contacted them saying that he had been one of the charter members of the old church, and would like to be on the mailing list, though he wouldn’t be able to participate. Gertrude Rendtorff, living in Monterey, also heard about the new church in Palo Alto and asked to be on the mailing list.
Then too, as time went on, descendants of some of those former Palo Alto Unitarian families resumed a connection to the church. Guido Townley Marx, grandson of Palo Alto Unitarians Guido H. and Gertrude Marx, was married in the new church. Candace Longanecker, granddaughter of Errol and Laura Longanecker, was another grandchild who was married in the new church. And over the years, Dan Lion officiated at the memorial services of a handful of those former Palo Alto Unitarians.
The new congregation, renamed the Palo Alto Unitarian Church in 1951, was wildly successful. By 1965, they had three worship services each Sunday, and the Sunday school had some six hundred children enrolled. In less than twenty years, the Palo Alto Unitarian Church became one of the largest Unitarian congregations on the West Coast. So why did the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto die, and the new Palo Alto Unitarian Church succeed?
Partly, it was a matter of demographics and the economy. Before the Second World War, Palo Alto was a small town, probably too small to support a viable Unitarian church. After the war, both Palo Alto and the surrounding area gained population rapidly while at the same time the economy was booming. This meant the new congregation could grow quickly so it didn’t need to be subsidized by the denomination, and furthermore the new congregation could attract, and pay for, excellent professional leadership. But then when the new congregation faced financial stress in the late 1960s and early 1970s, due both to demographic decline and a declining economy, conflict erupted and membership and participation plummeted. Demographics and the economy are major influences on congregational growth and decline.
It was also partly because the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto was unable to integrate new leadership. It’s no coincidence that the congregation died within a year after Karl and Emma Rendtorff retired to Carmel. By the 1920s, the Women’s Alliance consisted solely of elderly and middle-aged women; the older women had not made room for young women to be part of the Alliance. As they aged, the small core of leaders that ran the old church was reluctant to share power with younger people.
Then too, the conflicts that engulfed the old church never healed. Marion Alderton, Alice Park, Josephine Duveneck and others never really forgave their fellow Unitarians. And there were others who didn’t formally resign from the church, but nor could they ever quite forgive. The old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto proved unable to deal effectively with the conflict between the pro-war faction and the pacifists.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto didn’t have a compelling vision for itself. For much of its history, it was little more than a social club that happened to own a beautiful little building. This was part of the reason they couldn’t overcome their conflicts — when a congregation is little more than a social group, with no big purpose, there is nothing larger to inspire people to move past the conflict. Because the congregation was little more than a social group, when Elmo Arnold Robinson came along and welcomed people of different classes and ethnic groups into the church, the long-time members didn’t even bother to engage with the newcomers. As a result, they were unable to retain the newcomers who could provide new leadership, and help pay the bills. Indeed, by the late 1920s the long-time members seemed to have lost interest in Unitarianism, and to have lost interest in figuring out how their Unitarian church could affect the wider community.
In late 1947, Rev. Nat Lauriat ran into a similar problem, with a new generation of Palo Alto Unitarians. Lauriat was the dynamic minister of the San Jose Unitarian church who drove up to Palo Alto each week to preach to the new Palo Alto Unitarian Society, and to help them get organized. He wrote to denominational officials that “the general feeling was to proceed with great caution, and just have a pleasant little group.” However, Nat Lauriat found younger Unitarians who “wanted more action and growth,” and with his encouragement, these younger Unitarians were the ones who took over leadership, and built a thriving new congregation on their vision of Unitarianism as a force for good in the world. Nat Lauriat challenged the Palo Alto Unitarians to think of liberal religion as more than just a social club.
This is a perennial challenge for any Unitarian Universalist congregation. It is a challenge that Palo Alto Unitarian Universalists face today. There is still a feeling among some of today’s Palo Alto Unitarian Universalists “to proceed with great caution, and just have a pleasant little group.” But when we hear the story of the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, we find that proceeding “with great caution” and having “a pleasant little group” ultimately leads to decay and dissolution. It’s the congregations with a larger vision — the congregations that hunger for “more action and growth” — that grow and thrive, that nurture the growth of their members, and that ultimately change the world around them for the better.
