January 29, 2023
By Linda A Dove
Lighting the Chalice: Reading
“Life is protected and saved by those who embody presence, wisdom, resistance, gratitude, humility. These are the gifts people can bring to one another and can foster through long participation and practice as members of religious communities devoted to saving and protecting life, rooted in rituals of praise and thanksgiving.” Rebecca Parker
SLT Hymn No. 113 Where is Our Holy Church?, verses 1, 2, 5.
Way back last November, I traced how the Unitarian and Universalist movements grew in fits and starts during the 17th. and 18th.centuries and how, in my view, their theological disputes held them back from becoming mainstream denominations in the Christian tradition. (You can read my two earlier messages on our HUU website, HUUweb.org). In the mid-19th century, exhausted and leaderless, both branches were weak and dispirited. Today, I’ll trace how they gradually came to define themselves in the USA through the next 150 years until they became a unified UUism in 1961.
As the story unfolds, see if you can discern which of our Principles became prominent. Also, see if you can detect where UUs followed or led religious trends emerging in the wider society, and how today we still deal with similar issues.
To get us in the right frame of mind, let’s stand, if we are able, and Dee will lead us in Singing the Living Tradition Hymn:No. 389, Gathered Here. We’ll sing it twice.
The Civil War led to a much needed growth spurt for both Unitarian and Universalist ideologies and gave UU women opportunities to lead. A great male champion for women was Dr. Henry Bellows who, for 43 years, was minister of the First Universalist Church in New York (now the famous All Souls). I have time to name a few of the many UU women who revitalized UUism through innovative good works. Elizabeth Blackwell founded the soldiers’ relief organization. Dorothea Dix set up the first soldiers’ mental health facility. Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross. Mary Livermore cared for victims of the cholera epidemic and established sanitary hospitals. Julia Ward Howe lobbied for women to be ordained, wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” established Mothers’ Day, and, all her life, campaigned for peace and gender equality. Of course, many women struggled against patriarchy in their marriages and among clergy; and even as late as the 1920s, only 88 Christian women were actually ordained, 42 of them Unitarians and a few Universalists.
Bellows also helped strengthen UU organization. He founded the National Conference of Unitarian and Other Christian Churches (UAU). Congregations, not ministers, were in charge. The conference’s formal statement said it was a voluntary association whose decisions would not be binding on its member congregations and in no way would it exclude from fellowship those who held dissenting views. What a big reversal of 2,000 years of tradition! And, yes, the new doctrine proved too liberal for some and dissenters split to form their own associations, all of them short-lived. Nevertheless, Bellows’s initiative convinced many UUs of the need for an organizational structure: a mechanism to network small congregations in remote areas and help reconcile diverse and shifting UU truths.
Also important in this was the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones. He travelled all over the expanding country establishing state conferences. He served for nine years on the Western Conference Board. He supported women’s ordination and the budding suffragette movement. In 1878, he was elected to the UAU’s Board of Trustees. Then, four years later, under his leadership, the National Conference discarded its Christian preamble and, two years later,removed belief in God as a condition of fellowship. Given the 2,000 years of ties to Christianity which we reviewed in my first two talks, these were radical, risky and courageous moves.
Pamela Beverage will now lead us in Responsive Reading SLTNo. 655: Change alone is Unchanging by the ancient Greek sage, Heraklitos of Ephesus.
Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published in America in 1861 during the period when UUism was taking giant steps forward in definition, structure, and values. But the Origins exposed a deep conflict among UUs: between liberals’ acceptance of evolution and conservatives’ adherence to Biblical creationism. Interpretations of Darwinism consumed the energies of many prominent UUs. It especially energized the non-Christian secularists and, as we’ll see, supported the emerging Humanist movement. It also antagonized UU Christians, mainly Universalists. Importantly, it exposed a big split over social justice. You’ll recall that the 1870s began the thirty or so years of the Great Depression when vast socio-economic inequalities grew during industrialization. It was also the Gilded Age when the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgan-Stanleys, the Mellons and others made huge fortunes from building canals, rail roads, mining of chemicals, steel manufacture, bank investment and lending. UUs were dismayed by the inequalities but were reluctant to act against the all-powerful barons who might and did, ruin their “enemies.” Furthermore, governments used the new doctrine of Social Darwinism to stay away from social injustice issues. Policymakers said it wasn’t sensible to spend public money on social welfare to promote equality because Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” had shown that people were rich or poor according to the natural order. In fact, this was a distorted simplification of Darwin’s theory and many people had never actually read Darwin’s book.
However, many brave souls did champion social justice. Notably among UUs, the Reverend John Holmes set up the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice and Mary Ovington and Clarence Skinner set up the NCAAP. Skinner also founded the Community Church of Boston that still exists. He wrote two influential books. The Social Implications of Universalism described a vision of a kingdom of heaven on earth and a common destiny for humanity rather than individual salvation. Notice how this harks back to the Middle Ages’ controversy about living a good life in a heaven on earth or deserving a heavenly after-life. And in 1945, Skinner published his second book, A Religion for Greatness. His ideas and writing were important because they offered coherent form to Universalism for the post-World War Two 20th. Century.
Some of the notable UU change-agents of this time lived well into the 1900s, a few in living memory. And Universalists and Unitarians gradually realized they shared many ideals and could be stronger if they worked together to achieve their visions. There was a pragmatic necessity too for the Universalists who were out of funds, weak in numbers, and often lacking the power which education and high social status gave the Unitarians.
But I pause here to mention two scandals that set back Unitarian growth in the early 20th. Century. One was financial embezzlement that denuded the Unitarian Association of its funds. The leadership under the Reverend Dana Greeley covered this up fora decade. This was significant because the Association had promised to fund the Black, mainly southern UU communities. But Greeley kept finding excuses to delay payments. When all this came to light, Black UUs felt betrayed and most of them left the movement. A few years ago, we at HUU investigated all this in our CLA meetings so, time being short, I won’t repeat the sad details here.
Alice Krech now offers us SLT Reading No. 494: “The Prayer of Our Souls . . .” by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Now back to the UU efforts to merge. Thomas Starr King was an influential preacher, teacher and promoter of the Union cause in the Civil War. Sadly perhaps, he’s best known today for his aphorism, “Universalists think God is too good to damn them for ever; Unitarians think they are too good to be damned.” He originally identified with Universalism but eventually served in the big, wealthy First Unitarian Church of San Francisco. King’s major contribution was to show how Unitarian and Universalist ideals converged. Today, one of the training seminaries is named in his honor.
Remember how Social Darwinism misleadingly used the idea of “survival of the fittest” to justify governmental refusal to fund or promote social welfare programs? This was still going on in the early 1900s when the industrial revolution, the backlash to reconstruction against Black Americans, and the aftermath of continual wars had ground down even middle-class people into poverty. In opposition to all this, many Christian and charitable groups worked on Social Gospel programs. Two ministers led UUs in this. Unitarian J. Haynes Holmes and Universalist Clarence Skinner founded community churches in Boston and New York and often preached in each other’s pulpits to huge congregations. In this era too, Asian religious thought gained influence among UUs. John Dietrich spread Buddhist and Confucian ideas about peaceful society and ethical government. He also promoted the importance of finding truth about society through scientific evidence rather than unquestioning faith. The evangelical Reformed Church promptly defrocked him and he migrated to Unitarianism and became a minister in Washington State. All this exploration of religions and ethics melded well with the Social Gospel program and brought Unitarians closer to Universalists in valuing respect for all, inclusivity, and equality. Also, the Lombard Divinity School merged with the Unitarian Theological School to form the UU Meadville-Lombard Theological School and the systematic institutional training of ministers in UUism was achieved through the unlikely partnership of two ordained men, Frederick Gould, an English secular Humanist and Curtis Reece, a liberal Southern Baptist.
I must emphasize also the importance of the emerging Humanist movement in enriching UUism and providing a vehicle for the more secular Unitarians and the more Christian Universalists to see eye-to-eye. It was Frederick Gould who, in the Journal of the British Ethical Societies, first defined Humanism as a belief and trust in humanity alone without divine assistance. And by the 1920s, leaders like Reece and Dietrich were promoting the idea of bringing Humanism into both Unitarianism and Universalism. A decade later, the Humanist Manifesto was signed by 34 people; among them, a third were Unitarians, one was a Universalist, and two even identified as Unitarian-Universalist.
Meanwhile, a Humanist leader, Charles Kennedy Scott, best known for his musicianship, was successful in including race in the UU social justice agenda. In the 1930s, he was an early supporter of black people in challenging segregation. He also founded the Church of the Wider Fellowship to help Universalists in remote areas, even in other countries, link without walls with more populous communities. This institution still exists today and I wonder whether Covid-era hybrid innovations have energized it. Scott died in 1965.
Now back to the unification process. Several efforts to merge failed over the thirty years from the 1930s to 1960s. The Universalists, in particular, kept falling out over what they wanted as their own structure and were nearly bankrupt. In 1931, efforts to merge as a Christian fellowship failed. Nevertheless, out of this failure, a new organization arose. The Free Church Fellowship championed the idea that individuals were the grassroots source of authority, not even church congregations, and certainly not denominations. Individuals in the fellowship could choose their religious faith. Note too that the emphasis on grassroots authority has informed our present Unitarian-Universalist Association—as well as muddying the UUA’s role and status in UU governance. Then, in 1953, the new UU Council of Liberal Churches merged their work—setting up a public relations office, the Beacon Hill publishing company, and youth organizations and children’s religious education.
The evolution of the CRE idea is important. Remember, it was William Channing, a century before, who proposed CRE should affect children’s hearts with love of God rather than their minds with Biblical teachings. In the early 1900s, Sophia Lyon Fahs spread the view that a child’s first education should be through natural life experience rather than religious instruction for which the child’s analytic and critical mind was not yet ready. She said children should be filled with wonder, curiosity and questioning attitudes and that religious education should acknowledge other religions. It took over 20 years, but, in the 1960s, Fahs’s ideas became the UUA standard. She died in 1978 at age 101.
David Lane will now lead us in Responsive Reading No. 657 in SLT: It Matters What We Believe by Sophia Fahs.
Now back to the long journey towards UU structural unification and definition. In 1956, the two UU organizations set up a Joint Merger Commission. The JMC Chair, the Reverend William Brooks Rice, was trained at Tufts School of Religion and ordained in both UU traditions. He led an exercise in grassroots democracy, conducting a plebiscite covering all but 5 percent of UUs. Of 142 congregational votes cast, 125 (86%) were in favor of a merger. So the two movements combined their funds and set up a Board of Trustees. In 1961, the joint meeting was to elect a President who would declare the meeting as the first annual General Assembly. Even now, a serious hitch emerged. William Rice had proved himself as the obvious best presidential choice. But remember the Reverend Dana Greeley, the leader centrally involved in the earlier financial scandal and cover-up? He had clung on to the UAU presidency since then but had promised not to seek re-election. However, he went back on his word and managed to win by the slimmest majority. He remained a controversial and somewhat ineffective President for eight more critical years.
So, in its infancy and with weak leadership, Unitarian-Universalism had to stay afloat and meet the challenges of the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. n my final message in this series on February 19th., I’ll briefly list some key issues that have faced the UUA over the last 50 years. But the emphasis will be on how our own Harrisonburg Unitarian-Universalists has evolved. And two others among us will offer us their experience and points of view. And rest assured we won’t have to cover 2,000 years of history for that!
Thank you and Namaste.
Extinguishing the Chalice: Reading (Cathy and Charlie Strickler).
The future of Unitarian Universalism depends upon empowering and reimagining our faith communities as fields of spiritual transformation committed to helping heal the world. After Ian Maher