The beginnings of Unitarianism in America

by Conrad Wright

305 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1955

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a great tour through the events and controversies of 18th century religion in the northeast US which led to the development of Unitarianism in America. It amazes me how I could have had such little understanding of this era in American religious history after being raised in religious schools, in the northeast no less. Alas, this book just leads up to the start of Unitarianism in the US; I wish the author had written a part 2 and continued to cover 1800 forward! The book was very well written in that educational but also entertaining sort of way.

[Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Beginnings of Unitarianism truly is about the beginnings of Unitarianism--the last line of the book is "the Unitarian Controversy had begun"--and it's only near the end that we meet anyone who professes to be a Unitarian. Most of the book is about Arminianism, from which Unitarianism seems to have emerged, emerging not so much because of a logical progression from Arminianism's theological ideas, but from the Arminians' political freedom and intellectual comfort with dissent.

This book helped me understand how it was that Unitarianism seemed to appear so quickly in New England, where Puritanism had been dominant only a century earlier. All the dissenting religious groups that had arrived in the colonies--Baptists, Quakers, etc.--cleared the ground for toleration of un-orthodox Christian beliefs, so when the Zeitgeist of a more Enlightenment-friendly view of God (distant, orderly, mechanical, not human) took hold among the thought leaders at Harvard, there was little opposition.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

C. Conrad Wright (1917-2011), who served for more than thirty years as professor of American Church History at Harvard Divinity School, wrote the first draft of this book as a Harvard dissertation under the direction of Perry Miller; and this gracefully rewritten work won the Carnegie Award of the American Historical Association in 1955.

The subject might be better described as Precursors of Unitarianism in America, 1735-1805. Unitarianism per se does not appear until the final page of the book, in 1805, after it became obvious that the prior quasi-academic tussle between orthodoxy and liberalism would thereafter be fought in the clear with serious real-world consequences. Still, it is sobering to note how easily 18th-century divines—mostly graduates of Harvard—passed from orthodoxy to Arminianism, to Arianism, and finally Socinianism before a Unitarian Church even existed. Though this book is fundamentally intellectual history, Wright does reflect on the social dynamics of religious change, noting the importance of the Great Awakening and the role of Boston’s upper class in the rise of a more genial gospel.