Around the year 1800 something new happened in American religion: the Universalist Church of America, and the American Unitarian Association officially separated from their parent denominations. Over the next two centuries the two tranquil streams of our faith meandered through landscapes of have Transcendentalism, The Free Religious Association, “liberal” religion, the social gospel, humanism, and more, until, in 1961 we met and merged into the Unitarian Universalist Association.
We’re focusing on our history for the next several weeks.
October 3 will mark the 80th anniversary of this congregation. We will celebrate all month with a series of worship services telling the history of this congregation.
Our congregation’s history is our history. But we also belong to a much older history, the history of Unitarian Universalism, for we are part of a long historical river, as well as our own much newer Studio City stream.
And so, before we get to telling the 20th century story of this congregation, I wanted us to start this year by telling some of that longer, older story.
Last week, I reached all the way back to the beginning of our Unitarian and Universalist heritage, all the way back to the earliest days of Christianity and to two Christian Bishops who argued for ideas that formed the springs from which the Unitarian and Universalist streams would run.
Origen, a second century Bishop, was a Universalist. He argued that God had made all things good but human beings, following their free will, sometimes slipped away. And so, Origen argues, because goodness is the original, natural state, and evil only comes when humans choose to turn away, then eventually, humanity will tire of its sinning and come back to our proper state.
All who have turned from the good will turn back. All will be saved. Universalism.
Arius, also a Christian Bishop, a generation younger than Origen, defended the unity of God by holding that the Trinitarians erred when they created a god of three persons in one being. Arius saw Jesus as a separate being, created by God, not co-equal nor co-eternal with God. By separating Jesus from God, Arius, opened the spring that would eventually flow toward the Unitarianism we recognize today: Jesus as a strictly human man, a teacher and exemplar, who shows humanity how we can create lives of health and joy for ourselves. Unitarianism.
That God is one, and that all creation shares a single destiny were not new ideas, even for Arius and Origen. The monotheism of Moses, Akhenaten and Zoroaster was more than a thousand years old before Arius. The single abode of the dead was a long-standing belief many cultures.
But these two ideas, like two separate streams, while they flow perpetually, they also meander and pool. The line of our faith history isn’t straight, but sinuous. It runs fast, then slow. It dances above a rocky course, or it dives underground for a time, as the streams of Unitarian and Universalism did during the dark ages, until they bubbled-up again, like a fresh spring after a frozen winter, during the breaking open of thought in the Renaissance.
Our faith is an old faith, but also a new faith. Its origins are ancient, but it also re-invents itself in each new place and time. Unitarian Universalism is not defined by what it was, but by its ability to be ever new. We define our religion not by the ancient spring from which it emerged, but by the streams that perpetually flow onward, directed by the twin principles of the power of every human being to make lives of health and joy for ourselves and others, and that all creation is bound together by a single destiny.
As this Unitarian Universalist congregation, today, moves through an interim period, between your previous settled minister and the settled minister to come two years from now, the question becomes prominent once again: What do we wish to retain from our history, and what should we now choose to leave behind? Where are our Unitarian and Universalist streams flowing today? What bends in the river have we forever left behind us? And what may be coming around the next bend in the river, that we should prepare for?
As the Unitarian and Universalist streams re-emerged in Renaissance Italy, they flowed then into Poland and Eastern Europe. And then, following the religious politics of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, spread westward, into Holland and France, and then across the channel to England, and then to the English colonies of North America.
The earliest churches now called Unitarian Universalist in America were founded as Congregationalist churches by the Puritans in the mid-1600s. One by one, many churches persuaded by thought leaders from Europe, or discovering the principles of religious liberty themselves, adopted the Unitarian or Universalist theologies.
Increasingly, as the colonists advocated for independence from England, the revolutionary leaders were attracted by a theology that affirmed the power and freedom of the human person to choose and make their own good lives for themselves, without dependence on a distant, inscrutable power, be it monarch or deity.
Around the same time as the birth of our country, two new religious associations were founded, and by many of the same people. The first general convention of what would become the Universalist Church of America was held in 1778. The fiercely independent Unitarian congregations took longer to bind themselves together, founding the American Unitarian Association in 1825.
John Adams was a Unitarian, as was his son, John Qunicy Adams. Together with their “First Ladies” they are buried in a crypt inside the United First Parish Church of Qunicy, Massachusetts, known as the “Church of the Presidents”, founded in 1636 and Unitarian since 1750. Rev. John Hancock served as the minister there, from 1726 to 1744, and his son, the John Hancock who signed the Declaration of Independence was baptized there.
Thomas Jefferson was a Unitarian, although not a church-goer. Other Unitarians were political leaders, and thought leaders, and artistic leaders, and industry leaders of the early 19th century. You know many of their names: Channing, Emerson, Fuller, Alcott, Thoreau, Melville, Julia Ward Howe, Dorothea Dix, Oliver Wendell Holmes.
And perhaps you know the name, Theodore Parker.
Theodore Parker was born in 1810. As a young man he studied at Harvard and Harvard Divinity School. He began his career in ministry at the Unitarian church in the West Roxbury neighborhood of south Boston in 1837 and joined the Transcendentalist Club of Emerson and Fuller the same year.
In 1841 his preaching became more radical as he denied the literal truth of the Bible, and the authority of the person of Jesus, proclaiming instead that religious truth was directly accessible to all through their own inner connection to the divine. His own congregation continued to support him, but many other Unitarian churches closed their pulpits to him.
But his popularity grew. In 1846 he resigned his pastorate in West Roxbury and began to preach to a congregation of 2000 at a music hall called the Melodeon in Boston. Parker took the issue of slavery head on, preaching abolition and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act. As a member of “The Secret Six” Theodore Parker was one of a group of six benefactors who funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.
Ill with tuberculosis, Parker retired in 1859. He traveled to the Caribbean, in search of a warmer clime, and then Italy, where he died, in Florence, in 1860.
While in the Caribbean, he wrote a memoir, later published by his congregation as Theodore Parker’s Experience as a Minister. Here is an excerpt:
“I count it a great good-fortune that I was bred among religious Unitarians, and thereby escaped so much superstition. But I felt early that the “liberal” ministers did not do justice to simple religious feeling; to me their preaching seemed to relate too much to outward things, not enough to the inward pious life; their prayers felt cold; but certainly they preached the importance and the religious value of Morality as no sect, I think, had done before. Good works, the test of true Religion, noble character, the root of salvation, if not spoken, were yet implied in their sermons, spite of their inconsistent and traditionary talk about “Atonement,” “Redeemer,” “Salvation by Christ,’ and their frequent resort to other pieces of damaged phraseology. The effect of the predominant Morality was soon apparent. In Massachusetts, the head-quarters of the Unitarians, not only did they gather most of the eminent intellect into their ranks, the original talent and genius of the most intellectual of the State, but also a very large proportion of its moral talent and moral genius, most of the eminent conscience and philanthropy. … I think it will be found that all the great moral and philanthropic movements in the State – social, ecclesiastical, and political—from 1800 to 1840, have been chiefly begun and conducted by the Unitarians. Even in the Anti-Slavery enterprise, the most profound, unrespectable and unpopular of them all, you are surprised to see how many Unitarians,–even ministers, a timid race—have permanently taken an active and influential part.”
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it. It makes your heart swell with pride, doesn’t it?
But remember that Parker was regarded as a radical by the Unitarians of his day, so he goes on in the next sentence to say:
“The Unitarians, certainly once had this moral superiority, before the free, young, and growing party became a Sect, hide-bound, bridled with its creed, harnessed to an old, lumbering, and crazy chariot, urged with sharp goads by near-sighted drivers, along the dusty and broken pavement of tradition, noisy and shouting, but going nowhere.”
Parker admires the Unitarianism and the Unitarians of his day. He wishes, in the first part of the paragraph I read that the Unitarian faith put more emphasis on the inner, pious, aspect of religion, reflecting his Transcendentalism and the belief in an inward direct connection to the divine. But he admires the Unitarian focus on morality as the essence of religious life even if they sometimes continue to cling to doctrinaire subjects like “atonement” and “salvation by Christ”. And he sees how, by putting morality first, the Unitarian faith became the cultural leader of the first decades of our country.
But Parker is confronted, too, as we are today, by the question of discerning what is healthful of our past, and essential to our faith, and what of our tradition prevents us from moving toward our future. When does our faith tradition direct us down a clear and freely flowing stream, and when, as Parker says, does tradition lead us “along the dusty and broken pavement of tradition, noisy and shouting, but going nowhere?”
This is the question of history that we must examine as this congregation leaves one form of itself behind and looks to be what it needs to become in your next incarnation. How do we hold fast to what is essential and healthful? How do we recognize and foreswear what led us into error in our congregation’s history and choose a different way?
This is the question, too, of the Jewish High Holy Days, that we find ourselves in this morning. We’re challenged to look back. We’re challenged to read our history and make judgement. We’re challenged to make an honest reckoning, to give to our faults and failings the same regard we happily give to our successes. And then, as Jack Riemer says, in the words of this morning’s Call to Worship, to make a turning.
“For leaves, birds, and animals turning comes instinctively. But for us turning does not come so easily. It takes an act of will for us to make a turn. It means breaking with old habits. It means recognizing that we have the ability to change. These things are hard to do. But unless we turn, we will be trapped forever in yesterday’s ways.”
The more crucial challenge, though, comes not in the changing, but in the work of discerning what should we change from and what should we change to?
The most important challenge we face, when so much in our Unitarian Universalist faith is presently changing, when the general religious culture of the United States is changing, when American life itself is convulsing under the attacks of vast cultural change that may lead either to destruction or a new birth, is not, can we change, but how do we carefully discern what is essential and healthful of the past, so that we do not leave behind what is necessary, and what can we safely let go of, to help us into our new future, without losing ourselves along the way?
The question for this church, and for Unitarian Universalism in this time, is how do we make ourselves new, without ceasing to be ourselves?
Unitarian Universalism faced this challenge before.
Although Parker was regarded as a radical by the establishment, he also gathered a following who were persuaded by his critique of the more traditional Unitarians, and by his vision of the future. Far from Boston, in what was called the Western Unitarian Conference, but which we would today call the mid-West, Unitarian leaders found the liberty to engage with the ideas of Parker and Emerson, and to steer the course of the Unitarian faith in a new direction. Taking the foundational principle of a creedless religion to its logical end, they began to disassociate the Unitarian faith from its exclusively Christian identity, and to gather our evolving faith around a set of more general religious principles.
Here is an excerpt from a statement written by William Channing Gannet. His father had been a minister working with William Ellery Channing and he named his son after his friend and mentor. This is a resolution written in 1887 and adopted by the Western Unitarian Conference meeting in Chicago. After a short pre-amble affirming the non-creedal nature of the Unitarian faith he goes on to “[set] forth in simple words the things most commonly believed to-day among us.”
“In all matters of church government we are strict Congregationalists. We have no “creed” in the usual sense; that is, no articles of doctrinal belief which bind our churches and fix the conditions of our fellowship. Character has always been to us the supreme matter. We have doctrinal beliefs, and for the most part hold such beliefs in common; but above all “doctrines” we emphasize the prinicples of Freedom, Fellowship, and Character in Religion. These principles make our all-sufficient test of fellowship. All names that divide “religion” are to us of little consequence compared with religion itself. Whoever loves Truth and lives the Good is, in a broad sense, of our religious fellowship; whoever loves the one or lives the other better than ourselves is our teacher, whatever church or age he may belong to. So our church is wide, our teachers many, and our holy writing large.
…
We believe that to love the good and live the good is the supreme thing in religion;
We hold reason and conscience to be final authorities in matters of religious belief;
We honor the Bible and all inspiring scripture, old and new;
We revere Jesus and all holy souls that have taught men truth and righteousness and love, as prophets of religion;
We believe in the growing nobility of Man;
We trust the unfolding Universe as beautiful, beneficent, unchanging Order; to know this Order is truth, to obey it is right, and liberty, and stronger life;
We believe that good and evil invariably carry their own recompense, no good thing being failure and no evil thing success; that heaven and hell are states of being; that no evil can befall the good man in either life or death; that all things work together for the victory of Good;
We believe that we ought to join hands and work to make the good things better and the worst good, counting nothing good for self that is not good for all”
A religion based on principles for living, rather than a creed of metaphysical beliefs. A religion that honors the Bible and Jesus, but only as one scripture and one prophet among many. A religion which upholds “reason and conscience to be [the] final authorities in matters of religious belief.” A religious statement, that though written by a Unitarian for Unitarians includes the Universalist belief, “that good and evil invariably carry their own recompense” and that “all things work together for the [eventual] victory of [the] Good.”
And so, while not yet flowing into the stream of Unitarian Universalism on whose banks we have our church, the water from the Western Unitarian Conference is flowing in our direction.
There is still much ground to cover. The streams will need to find their path through the challenges of the 20thcentury, two world wars, an ongoing racial reckoning in the United States, a rising humanism in our churches, and an advancing secularism in the broader culture.
Our own church, founded in the midst of the Second World War, will take up those challenges and carry our Unitarian and Universalist faith through the merging of those two streams in 1961, through the rapidly changing culture of the 1960s, women’s and gay liberation movements, sexual freedom, increasing environmental awareness, and onward to today.
Ever the question must be asked and answered. From where have we come? What in that was good for all time, and helpful for today? What was a mistake to be corrected, or served its purpose for the faith of the time but not for our future? Where will we go now?
The journey continues next week.