A complete history of our movement -- properly called "liberal religion" -- would begin many thousands of years ago when the first human being felt a sense of awe in response to the powers of nature, at the very beginnings of religion itself. But, to be brief, let's begin this history at the beginning of the current or "Christian" era.
Around the beginning of the first millennium of this era, there existed an obscure cult, called the Essenes or Nazareans, among the residents of the Roman colony of Judea, or Palestine. This group of Jews followed the teachings of one or more rabbis (called Teachers of Righteousness) who carried the title "Joshua," in honor of the legendary Jewish hero of that name. Some of them even felt at least one of these rabbis would lead the oppressed Jews against the Roman ruler, so that nicknamed him "The Anointed." The language these Jews spoke was Aramaic (not Hebrew) and Joshua the Anointed in Aramaic was "Yeshua Meshiac or Messianas." This translated into Greek as "Iesus Christos."
Judaism itself was brutally crushed by Roman authority (after the uprising of 70 C.E. in which the temple was destroyed for the last time) and Jews spread out over the known world, among them the Essene "Christians."
Now most of these cultists believed that Yeshua or Jesus was a great rabbi, no more. But many of them, such as Saul of Tarsus and John of Paphos, were influenced by the prevailing mystery cults of Rome and began to transform the simple rabbi into something of a god incarnate.
The Roman Empire was falling on hard times -- with inflation within and invasion without -- and the resulting centuries of privation and war saw the increase of mystery cults throughout Rome. By the fourth century, the bulk of the Roman army was composed of Mithraists and Christians (i.e. Essenic Jews of the mystery cult variety). Mithraism was a cult of the sun, having its principal holiday on December 25 and admitting only men to the worship activities.
The essenic Jews called a large meeting, or council, to determine which of the two schools of thought were correct: those who felt Jesus was a rabbi and those who wanted to worship Jesus as a god. The first council ruled that Jesus was only a human being. Then politics stepped in.
Rome was ruled by Constantine, who was hard put to keep his empire together. Rebellions in the army plagued him and without the army, he could not hope to maintain his rule. Constantine decided to convert to the new religion of Christianity, and to force his army to convert as well. Half the army would do so willingly (being Christian already) and the other half would do so as long as the brand of Christianity was to their liking.
Constantine called another Council, this time in Nicea. This time he surrounded the theologians with soldiers and gave them instructions as to how they were to decide. Not surprisingly, the council voted to support the Bishop Atheneus. The Nicene creed, then called the Athenasian creed and still accepted today by most Christian groups, was adopted by force. Jesus was ruled to be one of the "persons" of the godhead. Those who followed the Bishop Arius and believed Jesus to be only a human being, were condemned to die if they did not publicly convert. Many of them fled into the wilderness or went into hiding.
Meanwhile, a group of Christians in north Africa, led by another Bishop, Origen, decided that if God were really a loving god, it would be impossible for hell to exist. This was also considered a dangerous heresy for the new -- combined with the Roman Empire -- church, for without the threat of hellfire and damnation, Constantine could not keep his rebellious army under control -- and that, after all, was the only reason for Christianity in the first place!
From these two fonts, the Unitarianism of Bishop Arius and the universalism of Bishop Origen, comes the modern movement called Unitarian Universalism. In the 1700 years intervening -- in the cooking pot of persecution -- the movement was refined into a non- creedal theology of an extraordinary kind. What happened after Nicea and what has happened to our movement in the past 200 years are a fascinating study in the growth of a system of ideas.
After Nicea, Unitarianism was dispersed. It kept cropping up throughout Europe. One band of Goths converted to Arianism and later sacked Rome (having, naturally, little respect for the Pope). But they were converted to the Papacy through gold -- the Pope being wealthy and they being poor.
Another group developed in Poland, called the Racovian Fellowship or the Polish Brethren. A combined army of Catholics and Zwinglians (normally bitter enemies) invaded Poland and slaughtered the pacifist Unitarians -- man, woman and child. Only a handful survived, fleeing Poland by wagon train. Some stayed in Hungary with Unitarians there (still there, by the way), and some moved on to Holland and England where they helped forge the "dissenting" movement among the Protestants there.
The name "Unitarian" was first applied to the group in Hungary. A Unitarian king actually existed for a short while there and the world's first Decree of Toleration was published by him.
The distinguishing feature of these early Unitarians was not only that they did not believe Jesus was a god, but also that they so firmly opposed the imposition of a creed on anyone. Having suffered persecution for so many years because of a creed, they developed a concept that, as the Hungarian Unitarian minister Francis David wrote, "We do not need to believe alike, in order to love alike."
Many of the early dissenters who settled in America were of the Unitarian heresy. The first church in Plymouth -- though nominally Congregational (Calvinist) -- refused early to adopt a restrictive creed, and eventually became a Unitarian church (which it is to this day.)
In England, in the 18th century, Unitarians tended to be as vocal as they are today. One Unitarian minister, Joseph Priestley, got into so much trouble that a mob burned down his home, his church and his laboratory. Priestley would never have won any "Mr. Personality" contests, but he was probably a genius. In his laboratory, he discovered oxygen and several oxides, for which he is recognized to this day. But in his pulpit he was outspoken against the English government, and one Bastille Day he spoke out in favor of the French Revolution. That was what got him into trouble.
With the loss of his home, church and lab, he had no place to go. Benjamin Franklin befriended poor Priestley and paid his way to America, and started a fund to create the first openly Unitarian church in this country.
These Unitarians of the 18th century -- Franklin, Priestly, Jefferson -- were primarily scientifically minded individuals. Their brand of religion was what became known as Deism -- which saw no conflict between religion and science. Deists essentially believed that God created the world and then dropped out of active control, leaving science in charge. A deist could thus believe in God and still accept the precepts of science. Jefferson was so convinced of the logic of this concept that he predicted that within one generation, every American would be a Unitarian!
Closet Unitarianism came out into the open around the time of the American Revolution. Why shouldn't our religion be as democratic as our politics? they asked. A minister named William Channing, in his famous Baltimore address (from the same pulpit, by the way, I preached a few years ago as a guest speaker at First Unitarian in Baltimore), called for reason in religion. Nominally Congregational churches all over America voted to become Unitarian, and within a few years the American Unitarian Association was formed, with Channing as its president.
But a religion based strictly on science can get to be a dully boring one. By the middle of the nineteenth century, many Unitarians were ready for something different. That something different was Transcendentalism. Unitarian ministers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Parker preached this theology, that there was something transcendent about all human beings -- something deeper (Emerson called it the Oversoul) than the purely physical. Influenced by Hindu thought, the transcendentalists recognized the god within each person, and felt each person was more responsible to that inner transcendence than to external laws and churches.
Emerson left the ministry in order, as he said, to minister. Parker was banned from preaching outside his own congregation in the Boston area. But out of their philosophy arose a vast political action program. Thoreau and his civil disobedience. Parker and his open support of the Underground Railway. These transcendentalists took their religion seriously -- and religion meant living for and working for the highest moral principles.
By the end of the nineteenth century, most Unitarian ministers tended to be transcendentalist in theology.
That was the time a new wave of thought struck our movement -- humanism. The transcendentalists tended to move away from science too much, to ignore a lot of reality. The humanists felt that religion didn't have to be "airy fairy" and could be completely down to earth. They also believed that one could be religious without believing in a god. The moral values they accepted were the basic moral values of the human species.
At first, they were banned from unitarian churches, but eventually became more accepted. By the mid-1970's, more than 70 percent of Unitarian ministers considered themselves humanists first.
Meanwhile, the Universalists, those who believed there was no such thing as hell, were existing side by side with Unitarians. Like the Unitarians, the Universalists supported the Revolutionary War and a Universalist was George Washington's chief of chaplains.
Universalists in this country developed from the Methodist movement, taking the basic Methodist concept of religious freedom and applying it in its ultimate form. Total love from God and total freedom to be loving from humans. Universalists believed that morality was something one would want to do in response to God's love, not something that must be forced on people by threats of hellfire and damnation.
Transcendentalists within Universalism were known as the "natural religionists" or believers in natural religion. They felt that if you simply accepted your natural being and listened to the voice inside, you would discover the truth.
By the mid-20th century, the two groups, Unitarians and Universalists, were so close together that the national organizations combined, forming the Unitarian Universalist Association. Technically, we are now Universalists of the Unitarian type.
How did that happen? Parker was once asked the difference between Unitarians and Universalists. He answered: "Universalists believe that god is too good to condemn humans to hell. Unitarians believe that humans are too good to be condemned to hell!"
Today, Unitarian Universalists exist in all of the above types. There are so-called Christian Unitarians who hold that Jesus was a holy person, a direct emissary from God, and that God still rules the universe and directly answers prayer.
There are many deists in our midst, those scientific types who accept God but don't think the deity has any business mucking around with miracles and all that.
Many of us are transcendentalists, who accept an inner power of divinity and follow a different drummer from the majority of humans.
And many Unitarian Universalists consider themselves to be humanists, accepting human values as more important than mystical ones, and calling themselves atheists or agnostics.
There is a new wave of theology, of course, within our movement. Those of us who consider ourselves to be existentialist are now in the minority -- but in a growing, if unorganized, movement. Existentialism is a reaction against the sterility of humanism (as transcendentalism was against deism), and accepts a wide range of possibilities in the religious life.
Briefly, existentialists hold to the fact of human existence as the important reality. We accept the creating nature of the human spirit, the total freedom of each person, and the total responsibility of each individual for the universe at large. We accept the reality of the mystical experience and -- because we believe each person to be totally free and responsible -- we accept each individual's religious position as totally true and proper for that person.
This, briefly, is the history of our movement: from a small mystical sect of Judaism who accepted the teachings of a wise rabbi to a multi-patterned collection of believers in freedom in religion.
The hardest part about being a Unitarian Universalist is to stay true to our oldest and most important tradition -- tolerance. For it is tempting to elevate our own theological position to that of The Truth, and to put down other religions and other ways. But to do so makes us no better than those who persecuted us in the past and who still persecute those who believe differently from themselves.
I know it's difficult to look at the theology of the Southern Baptist and accept that it is completely and totally true for that person. But not to do so is to fall into the pitfall of established creed.
Please remember this about our movement:
Although we accept a diversity of beliefs, from deist to theist to atheist, from rational to mystical, from political to apolitical, we have always held to one principle above all others: freedom to believe and worship. This has always meant that we did not require a creedal statement from any members. No one can be excluded because of theology. Technically, trinitarians can be (and some are) members of Unitarian churches.
For two thousand years, we have been saying to the world: you may believe anything you wish; only respect me and allow me to believe as I wish; and we can be friends.
That is the essence of Unitarian Universalism.
Blessed Be!