Our Pilgrim Past

Those pilgrims the ones that we celebrate every November, with their weird looking hats and collars, dressed all in black; with stern faces and sterner still morals those pilgrims – were the mothers and fathers not only of America but more specifically of Unitarian Universalists. When I first discovered that I found myself in a quandary. How the heck did a liberal church, open to diverse ideas, backgrounds and lifestyles, including, even Humanists, agnostics and atheists, immigrants, gays and pagans, spring from such rigid, fundamentalist beginnings?

So I began my investigation of how that came to be.

I discovered, first, that the Pilgrims did not come to America the New World out of a desire for profit or prosperity, (though they were not inclined to disavow its importance). They came, rather, seeking religious freedom and a vision of a better world. (Religious Freedom – the first clue.) They had fled their native England several years earlier and planted themselves in tolerant Holland . But they were uncomfortable in a country not their own and decided that they must travel west to the newly discovered “land of milk and honey” – “God's Country” if ever there was one. They knew, of course that the land was in reality a rugged wilderness and that it was already inhabited, but that did not deter them from their mission to create a “Kingdom of God on Earth”. Like us, they were searchers and seekers, questers and questioners. Finding meaning and truth, for them, like us, was worth the risks and hardships they had to endure. For the Pilgrims, the very harshness of the terrain was seen as God's test of their faith. And they did indeed endure great hardships. But, in spite of the fact that half of the colonists died in the first harsh New England winter, when the spring planting produced an abundant harvest of corn, potatoes and squash that they learned from the native Americans as well as the more traditional English crops, they were thankful; thankful to God for having given them the opportunity to plant their heavenly city and endure the hardships which the wilderness demanded.

These Pilgrims were dissidents from the Church of England. Another group of dissidents that were similar but not exactly the same joined them a decade later. They were the Puritans. The Puritans were more severe in their desire to follow a pure and strict religious life. The Pilgrims welcomed the Puritans with open arms and they soon merged into one large Calvinistic congregational religious tradition. They rejected the authoritarianism of the Church of England and they insisted upon creating a democratically organized congregational church. Our UU insistence upon antiauthoritarian democratic congregational autonomy has its beginnings here. In rejecting the teachings and trappings of the Anglican church, they brought with them, as well as a rigid morality, a disdain for ornament and finery. Although in recent years UUs have relaxed some, we still tend to build and furnish our churches plainly. Ornamentation, banks of candles, incense, and large organs are not usually part of the makeup of Unitarian Universalist churches. The stained glass in this church might not have been so fine and beautiful if this building had been originally constructed by Unitarians.

The early Congregationalists did not even celebrate such a frivolous holiday as Christmas. They did insist, however, on the individual’s right and obligation to learn, for him or herself, how to follow God’s law. They were insistent that the only way to learn what God wished of us was by individual investigation. What someone else told you was only valid if you could verify it for yourself. Individual integrity, responsibility and respect; These are a direct legacy that they have left to us here today. One thing that we did not, inherit from them was their adherence to John Calvin 's doctrine of predestination. Calvin taught that God would reward only a few with a heavenly eternal life. According to Calvin , God had elected those who were to spend eternity with God in heaven even before their birth. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, were condemned to eternal damnation, also prior to their birth. The sin was original and whatever one did on Earth would not influence one's final destination.

By the next generation the Pilgrims and Puritans of the first generation had given way to a congregational polity which was much less doctrinaire and only required baptism. In addition, some of the children and grandchildren of the founders had now become prosperous. Wealth brings more than status and comfort. Prosperity permitted the children and grandchildren of the Pilgrims and Puritans not only to send to Europe for fancy clothes and furnishings but also for books. And those books contained in them the new radical ideas of the larger world. The New England economy was based on fishing and shipping. This meant that many New Englanders came into contact with Catholics and Jews, as well as radical English and French thinkers as John Locke , Joseph Priestly and Tom Paine .

The literacy and wealth of 18th century New England had its center in cosmopolitan Boston , and, as always, the college was the center of learning, in this case Harvard College . Harvard had been established in 1636 to train Congregational clergy. An early brochure, published in 1643, stated that the purpose of Harvard was "To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches." Like many colleges and universities throughout history, Harvard eventually became a hotbed of liberalism. By the beginning of the 18th century such graduates of Harvard as Charles Chauncey and Jonathan Mayhew were beginning to read and then preach profoundly heretical notions about the humanity of Jesus . These liberals became more numerous, and, I might add, more attractive, to the cosmopolitan Bostonians.

The Board of Governors of Harvard College was made up of respected Harvard graduates. Since the most successful graduates were often in the most lucrative pulpits, they tended to be primarily settled in cosmopolitan Boston . In 1806 the Board of Governors, made up primarily of Boston Congregational clergy, elected a new President – the liberal minister Samuel Webber . A year earlier the board, after a long and heated fight, they had elected Henry Ware , also a liberal, to the prestigious Hollis Professorship. The position of Dean of the Divinity School , now vacant, also fell into the hands of the liberals. In the next few years more and more faculty positions were given to liberals. Harvard became self consciously liberal and Unitarian for the next century and a half. Every single President of Harvard from 1810 until 1933 was a Unitarian. Even though Harvard has never had any official connection to the Unitarian denomination, Unitarians have always been considered its Divinity School one of the primary sources of theological education for Unitarian ministers. The Harvard library is still, today, a primary repository of Unitarian history. The conservatives were not about to take this lying down, however, especially the Rev. Jedidiah Morse .

Jedidiah Morse was a prominent conservative minister from Connecticut and is known as the father of American Geography. He was also the father of Samuel Morse , inventor of the Morse code. Morse initiated a publicity campaign to denounce the liberals. He had read a book written by an English Unitarian which praised the growth of Unitarianism in England and, in a concluding chapter, spoke of the Unitarian advances being made among the Congregationalists in New England . Morse republished this final chapter as a small book and in it explained that this was the very same heresy that was now in control of Harvard . At first the liberals were inclined to ignore Morse , thinking that he would soon be out of steam. But he did no such thing and in the next few years the battle lines were drawn. At the instigation of Morse , orthodox ministers began refusing to exchange pulpits with the liberals.

The Congregational churches in New England were not a hierarchically ordered denomination, just an association of separately organized democratic congregations. They maintained a kinship through the practice of ministers “exchanging pulpits” so that the congregations could hear sermons from a variety of ministers over the course of a year. This reinforced and encouraged each in similar beliefs and practices. In 1819, the Rev. William Ellery Channing, one of the most prominent ministers in New England preached at the ordination of a new graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Jared Sparks. Channing chose a seemingly oxymoronic his sermon title “Unitarian Christianity”. Channing had come to the conclusion that he could no longer accept the Trinity, which included a Jesus that was at the same time, wholly divine and wholly human. Twenty thousand copies were printed and sold. It became the best selling sermon in the history of America until that time. While our other denominational ancestors, the Universalists, were quite separate from the Unitarians at this time, Hosea Ballou, the most prominent Universalist minister was, at this time, serving a Universalist church within walking distance of Channing's Federal Street Church. He was so impressed with Channing 's perspective that he began considering himself a unitarian as well as a Universalist.

He tried to meet with Channing but Channing was not interested. In the next six years two thirds of the Congregational Churches in New England and eleven out of the thirteen in Boston, became Unitarian. Included among them was the church made infamous by Cotton Mather, Old North Church ; the one in Salem made infamous for the burning of witches; the one that hung the lanterns for Paul Revere ; former President John Adam ’s church and, even, the original Pilgrim church in Plymouth, Mass. The descendants of the Pilgrims of the first Thanksgiving had now become Unitarians. The Congregationalists, who remained, like Jedidiah Morse , continued to look to their historical roots for guidance and, thus, the Congregational Church (which has since merged with the German Evangelical and Reformed churches to become the United Church of Christ) styles itself, even today, the “Pilgrim Church”. The larger part of the split, the liberals, those who became Unitarians (and later merged with the Universalists to become the Unitarian Universalists of today) chose instead to look to the future. They promoted science, education and literature and created the literary flowering of New England . Unitarians chose to regard philosophers like Joseph Priestly , John Locke and visionaries like Thomas Jefferson as their heroes and ancestors and ignored those stalwart Pilgrims like Governor Bradford , Miles Standish , John Cotton and Cotton Mather. We do the same thing today. Jefferson and Emerson you might recognize as Unitarians but usually only seminary students know that Presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore and Howard Taft were, even more clearly than Jefferson , devoted Unitarians. (And we almost had another, Adlai Stevenson .)

It was this forward looking and questioning attitude that led the Unitarians and, later, the Universalists to embrace Transcendentalism in the 1830s. Transcendentalist minister Ralph Waldo Emerson , chose to leave the ministry rather than preside over communion, which was then the accepted procedure in Unitarian churches. Another Transcendentalist minister, Theodore Parker , was called before a group of Unitarian ministers for the purpose of censoring him because he no longer could accept supernatural miracles, or the Calvinist understanding that human beings are intrinsically evil. Parker was becoming a universalist as well as a Transcendentalist. The other Unitarian ministers did an unusual thing. Though they disagreed with Parker, they did not vote to censure or to excommunicate him. They did what other denominations would not do. They allowed diversity in beliefs to prevail. This set the stage for similar tolerance of dissenting opinions in the 1880s.

During the last decades of the nineteenth century some Unitarian ministers felt that they could not continue to call themselves Christians since they could no longer believed in the divinity of Jesus. A huge controversy ensued. How can one be a minister of a Christian church and not be a Christian? The Unitarians had come to a major turning point in their “road less traveled”. Other Christian denominations had never even considered such a proposal. In 1894 the National Conference met and asserted the importance of love for God and humanity, but without a Christian focus. A year earlier, in 1893, Unitarian minister Jenkin Lloyd Jones organized the 1893 World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in connection with Chicago’s world fair which celebrated the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’ founding of America. Protestants, Roman Catholics and Jews, worked with Jones to assemble the first truly interdenominational gathering in history.

In addition to Protestants, Catholics and Jews, twelve Buddhists came from Asia, including the founder the Maha Bodhi Society who came from Sri Lanka . Another Buddhist came from Japan . He was to introduce Dr. D. T. Suzuki to the West. There were several Hindus of the Brahmo Samaj , and Swami Vivekananda , a follower of Sri Ramakrishna . Swami Vivekananda was one of the most colorful figures of the Parliament and his plea for universal tolerance won much sympathy. The Parliament was the first occasion when a reference to Baha'i religious teachings was made at a public meeting in the West.

Following the Parliament Zen monasteries were established in America for the first time. Lectures were given both on the teachings of the different religious traditions and on social problems of the day. There was much discussion about the relationship of different traditions to each other. Some claimed that their religion would ultimately become the one religion of the world perhaps by adapting and incorporating aspects of other religions. Others hoped that a new, more universal religion would emerge from the coming together of the world religious traditions. Others expected that the great religions would retain their distinct identity, although they hoped that the relations between them would reflect friendliness and charity. Despite different views about the relationship of religions, most participants hoped that religious communities could work together to promote the peace of the world. In his opening address, the President of the Parliament voiced this longing: "When the religious faiths of the world recognize each other as brothers, children of one Father whom all profess to love and serve, then, and not till then, will the nations of the earth yield to the spirit of concord and learn war no more."

The World Parliament of Religions influenced Unitarians such that by the end of the nineteenth century many Unitarian ministers considered themselves Universalists as well as Unitarians. Some Universalist ministers, during this same period, had begun considering themselves unitarians, as well.

Unitarianism began to be defined as one world rather than one God and Universalism began being defined as universal humanity rather than universal salvation. Unitarian and Universalism, thus, both began to be defined as meaning one humanity in a unified universe. The Young People's Religious Union, or YPRU, was formed in 1896 and was comprised of both Unitarian and Universalist youth.

In the 1920s a new controversy developed. This time it was about a number of ministers who, not only could not accept Jesus as God but, in fact, could not accept a personal God at all. Again Unitarians did what no other church would do. They accepted “Humanists” as Unitarians. Some Universalists, again, agreed with these ministers, even though the Universalist denomination never officially relinquished its Christian identity. Some Unitarian and Universalist ministers served churches in both denominations in the first half of the twentieth century.

The merger of the two denominations was finally accomplished in 1961 after a score of years of dancing with one another. In the second half of the twentieth century, informed by the Civil Rights movement which Unitarians and Universalists actively supported, African Americans were, in turn, welcomed, not only into Unitarian Universalist congregations, but also encouraged to become ministers and lay leaders; and this without hindrance, in fact, with intentional encouragement. By the 1970s the women's movement was quickly endorsed by UUs and women were now actively recruited for the ministry and leadership positions in the denomination. By the 1980s the same was true of Pagans and Buddhists and then Gays and Lesbians.

Unitarians and Universalists, have, from Plymouth Rock on, had a strong influence upon America . Unitarians and Universalists have been in the forefront of this country's fight for liberty, its struggle to put an end to slavery, its affirmation of civil rights, its embracing of science and technology, its advocacy of public education and public libraries, its social conscience, and its support of humane treatment of prisoners, the mentally ill, immigrants, the poor and children. America 's sacred documents the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have Unitarian and Universalist authors. America, itself, whether conservative Christians accept it or not, has continued its Unitarian and Universalist roots of tolerance by welcoming Catholics and Jews, Buddhists and Muslims, Hindus and Pagans. Even the phrase “under God” which was inserted into The Pledge of Allegiance by religious conservatives in the 1950's, does not require any to Pledge Allegiance to “Christ” but, rather, simply to “God.“ In this context “God” is a Unitarian and generic word that enables people from many nonChristian traditions to think of Buddha , Allah or Yahweh as they utter the word (Of course, Atheists are still left out, but you can't have everything!)

In celebrating the grandest of American Holidays this month it is good to know and be proud of the fact that Thanksgiving is truly our Holiday . .Unlike our celebration of Christmas, Passover or Easter, this is one holiday which we should have no qualms about celebrating. Not only is gratitude for what life has given us, in spite of hardships, something that we can readily affirm, but also (something that the fundamentalists shut their eyes to) the inviting of the Indians to join in, affirming a relatedness of one race with another, a race with a different culture and lifestyle, is something that we above any other religion continue to advocate. The twenty first century will surely bring new challenges to this open, welcoming, inclusive religion. What they will be we cannot now foresee but controversy will surely continue to be our companion. The only fear that I have is that we may loose our center, the core that has nourished us throughout the last few centuries. This could occur if we divide ourselves into adversarial, balkanized camps representing the different groups that we have welcomed. To avoid this we must continue to embrace the core – Unitarian Universalism, itself – and give it prominence over any of the many subgroups be they theological, cultural or lifestyle.

We must see Unitarian Universalism as the hub of a wheel that contains many spokes rather than an umbrella which simply shelters divergent individual beliefs and lifestyles. We owe much to the legacy that our Pilgrims ancestors began on that first Thanksgiving. Even though this holiday s as Unitarian Universalist as Easter is Christian may we generously continue to share it with the rest of America .