"Unitarians and Universalists - What's the Difference?"

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Rev. Suzelle Lynch
October 5, 2003

READINGS

As an aid to understanding the differences between the Unitarians and the Universalists, the readings I have to share with you today are in a humorous vein. Yes, they are UU jokes! Some of you may be familiar with some of these…. some of them are pretty awful, but I hope you will tolerate them in the spirit of a learning experience….

Q. What do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah's witness?
A. Someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason.

Q. What do you get when you cross a Universalist with a Jehovah's witness?
A. Someone who knocks on your door to tell you you're already saved.

Q. What do you call a dead Unitarian?
A. All dressed up with no place to go.

Q. What do you call a dead Universalist?
A. Dirt.

Once upon a time there were three religious leaders having a talk down in Hell. The Priest explained, "We have strict rules about lust, but I just couldn't help myself. That's why I'm here."

The Rabbi spoke. "We have many laws governing diet, but I just couldn't help myself. That's why I'm here."

After a silence, the Priest and the Rabbi turned to the third member of their group. "We confessed," they said, "So why are you here in this terrible, hot place?"

The third man glared at the others. "Hey, I am a Universalist," he said. "This place is not hot and I am not here."

One day the devil was giving a tour of hell for some newcomers. "Here," he said, "Is the section where we keep people who have violated the food taboos of their religion."

"Behind the first door are the Catholics. They ate meat on Friday."

"Behind the second door are the Jews and Muslims who ate pork."

"Behind the third door are the Unitarians. They ate their entrée with their salad forks."

And finally, these definitions from "the Devil's Dictionary," a compilation of the wickedly accurate and insightful new definitions for common words authored in the 1920s by Ambrose Bierce - who was, himself, a Unitarian.

Unitarian - definition: One denies the divinity of a Trinitarian.

Universalist - definition: One who foregoes the advantage of a Hell for persons of another faith.

Sources: The Church Where People Laugh by Gwen Foss, available through UniUniques or from Gwen Foss, P.O. Box 775, Farmington, MI 48332

"Even the Gods Love Jokes: A Unitarian Universalist Joke Book II," Hinrich Bohn, editor - published by the UU church of Tucson, AZ.

A collection of jokes from Andrew Hill, a British Unitarian minister (via e-mail)

SERMON

U-ni-tar-i-an U-ni-ver-sal-ist. Ten syllables. A definite mouthful. And it gets worse when someone asks you what church you go to. "Why, I go to the U-ni-tar-i-an U-ni-ver-sal-ist Church West," you say, adding even more syllables to the pronouncement. No wonder some of us just mumble, "I'm a Unitarian," and let it go at that.

But I have to tell you, if we do that, if we leave off the Universalist part, we're leaving out something very important!
What is a Unitarian? What is a Universalist? A Unitarian Universalist?

Sometimes it depends on whom you ask. When I told one of our long-term members that I was doing this sermon, she said, "Oh, every minister gives us their version of that sermon." Seeing that I was about to protest, she added, "And of course it's always interesting - especially for the new people." (At least, that's what I heard her say…!)

She made me think about why it's important to have services about our history. It certainly does help the new folks among us learn more about where we come from, where our roots are. And it might be interesting for those of you who are not new to know something about where this particular minister comes from in terms of understanding of our history.

But ultimately, it has to be more important than that, or else I'm wasting your time. I believe we pay attention to our history because it helps us locate ourselves. By connecting ourselves with the great procession of ancestors who walked this way before us and the events of their times, we come to better understand ourselves and our involvement in our contemporary religious movement. We study our history to find our place within it - to empower ourselves to help the next chapter unfold. We study our history to avoid repeating its mistakes. We study our history to illuminate both our limitations and our genius as a religious people.

So what is the difference between the Unitarians and the Universalists and Unitarian Universalists? Technically, there are no Unitarians or Universalists in the United States, these days, though there are Unitarians in Canada and in Europe. All of us here, though, if we are members of this church or another UU congregation, are Unitarian Universalists. Ten syllables, no hyphen. Of course we are free to identify ourselves as primarily either one of the two "Us" or to modify either or both with a further descriptor like UU Christian, UU Humanist, or UU pagan. But to our larger religious association, we are UUs.

It wasn't always that way, of course. When this church was making its beginnings, we were a Unitarian congregation - a sort of branch congregation, actually, of the First Unitarian Church downtown. By the time we became official in 1962, the American Unitarian Association, with which we were affiliated, had merged with the Universalist Church of America.

When I was growing up in a lay-led Fellowship that began, like our church, in the Unitarian side of our movement, I was led to believe that the Universalists were not particularly important. They were the Christian side of us, the side that was mostly dying out, and that the Unitarians had rescued when we merged with them.

When I was a young adult, I gathered from my limited adult religious education experiences at a UU church that the Unitarians represented the educated and intellectual part of our religion, and the Universalists represented the more intuitive and caring part of our religion. They were the head and the heart, respectively, and while we certainly needed both, the head seemed to get a lot more attention and respect.

You've heard me say this before: way back in 1858, the Rev. Thomas Starr King, a Universalist minister who was called to serve the Unitarian Church in San Francisco, was asked to comment on the difference between the two movements. In reply, he told the story of the Universalist minister who, in argument with a Unitarian colleague, said, "The Universalist... believes that God is too good to damn us forever; and you Unitarians believe that you are too good to be damned."

There are grains of truth in all of those answers, but I'd like to take a better look today at both the Universalists and the Unitarians and how their legacies inform today's Unitarian Universalism.

Who were the Universalists?

Let's start with the Universalists. They were a religious movement that emerged onto the American scene in Revolutionary times, back in 1770. You'll remember, of course, that this was the age of the Enlightenment, when traditional social, religious and political ideas were being rejected. The Enlightenment gave birth to rational religion, by which I mean religion subject to the scrutiny of human intelligence, not simply accepted on faith.

Universalism's ideas were not new, indeed, they first arose in the early centuries of the Christian church. But they always were suppressed as heresy, and their promoters executed. Universalism first arrived in the American colonies from Britain in the form of John Murray, a gifted preacher who had grown up in England under strict Calvinist discipline. Calvinist doctrine held that human beings were totally depraved and that God was mighty, just and unforgiving. God's plan was to bless a few human beings with eternal life in heaven, and to damn all the rest to eternal torture in a fiery hell.

Murray had been haunted by fears of hellfire throughout his childhood, but was set free by the writings of the English Universalist, James Relly. Relly had found in his understanding of the doctrine of the Atonement confirmation that all souls - not just a few elect -- would eventually find their home in God. Murray, became convinced of this universal salvation and began preaching it, but met with bitter hostility from more orthodox Christians. He also suffered a series of terrible personal misfortunes. When he finally sailed for America in search of a new life, in which he did not intend to continue as a preacher, the ship he was on ran aground near the farm of a man named Thomas Potter. Potter had been praying and waiting for someone to come who could preach Universalism from the small chapel he had built on his property.

Was it miracle or coincidence that had these two men meet? It is one of the oft-told tales of our history, that Potter met Murray, who had rowed ashore with a party seeking supplies, with the question, "Are you the one who has come to preach Universal salvation?" And that when Murray admitted to being a preacher and a Univeralist, Potter told him the wind would not change and free the grounded ship until Murray had preached the good news from his chapel. The wind did not change, and Murray preached a sermon that included these famous phrases that serve as a definition of the Universalism of the time:

"… give them, not hell -- but hope and courage -- do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God."

Other Universalists besides Murray emerged independently of one another in the American colonies between 1740 and 1800. They were part of the growing revolt against the depressing fatalism of Calvinism. The Univeralists always encountered fierce opposition - conventional Christians worried that if the people had no fear of eternal damnation, what would keep them from immoral behavior?

The Universalist movement grew slowly at first. Preachers, who were largely self-educated, traveled from town to town, mostly in rural areas. Only a few of the Universalist groups would be able to afford a building, much less a minister. By 1800, there were only five Universalist meetinghouses in the country.

But after 1800 the movement began to expand rapidly. This was largely due to the evolution of Universalist thought spurred by Hosea Ballou. Ballou had entered ministry as a Calvinist Baptist at an early age before rejecting its doctrines. He had little formal education, but he had a keen mind, and was widely read. He was a powerful preacher and an original thinker, and with arguments both biblically based and rational he wrote his first book, A Treatise on the Atonement, in 1805.

Before Ballou, Universalism had been fairly traditional - the one radical idea being that of Universal salvation. But Ballou took things farther by rejecting the central Christian doctrine of the atonement -- that Christ died as a sacrifice for our sins - and argued that Jesus' life demonstrated God's infinite love. "The consequence of atonement," he declared, "is the universal holiness and happiness of mankind. . . " He also rejected the idea that Christ was God.

Ballou argued that the consequence of sin was the harm it did to the sinner in this life, not eternal punishment after death. He wrote, "Is God any less intelligent than any parent? Would a parent see any point in punishing a child forever? Would that improve the child?" He said that Hell was not the punishment place, but instead, was a state of disharmony between humans and God. Heaven, therefore, was created when there was unity between God and humans. Ballou preached his message in many parts of New England, and it spread. By the 1840s, the Universalists claimed hundreds of thousands of adherents, making them the fifth largest denomination in the country.

Who were the Unitarians?

The Unitarians got their start on our shores in similar fashion. Like Universalism, Unitarianism originated in theological ideas that were centuries old, but had always been deemed heretical by the church. British Unitarians like Joseph Priestley, who fled to America in 1791 and was both a scientist and a minister, rejected as unscriptural the Trinitarian God of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, insisting instead that God is one and that Jesus, whatever his nature, could therefore not be God.

Priestley founded Unitarian churches in the Philadelphia area - but at the same time, Unitarian ideas began to emerge in some of the most established, longstanding congregations in New England - those begun by the Puritans. During the first four decades of the 19th Century, hundreds of these congregations fought over ideas about sin and salvation, and especially over the doctrine of the Trinity. Most of these congregations split over these issues, and many eventually became Unitarian.

William Ellery Channing was the major figure in early Unitarianism. Like Hosea Ballou, he was intellectually gifted. His 1819 sermon called "Unitarian Christianity" helped define the basic ideas of Unitarianism and give it a name in the face of its opponents. About Jesus, Channing wrote that while "we gratefully acknowledge that he came to rescue us from punishment we believe that he was sent on a far nobler errand: namely, to deliver us from sin itself." In other words, Channing said, Jesus intended to teach us to love instead.

Despite some similarities, there were major differences between Ballou and Channing: Channing was a Harvard graduate; Ballou had little formal education. Channing was a Boston Brahmin; Ballou grew up on a farm. Channing's church was part of the Establishment, one of the Standing Order churches supported by tax money as were the other originally-Puritan churches. Channing was an insider, and Ballou was an outsider who struggled constantly for recognition, for civil rights, for a livelihood.

These differences between Ballou and Channing were germane to their denominations. The Universalists tended to be more rural, much more egalitarian and less educated. The Unitarians were urban, moneyed, and sophisticated, and a bit snobbish about their status. Both movements arose to oppose Calvinism; and their thinking overlapped in many ways, but where the Unitarians worked within the established churches, liberalizing them and focusing on the use of reason, the Universalists challenged the established order.

For example, the Universalists urged their members to reach out and embrace people whom society marginalized. In 1790, just three years after slavery was written into the United States Constitution, the first Universalist Convention denounced it: "We believe it to be inconsistent with the union of the human race," they declared, " . . . to hold any part of our fellow-creatures in bondage." The Gloucester church included a freed slave among its charter members. Some prominent Unitarians spoke out against slavery, but many more remained silent, because their fortunes were tied to the southern textile industry. When fugitive slave Thomas Sims was arrested in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, the Liberator reported that the bells of the Congregational, Methodist, and Universalist churches in Waltham tolled in protest. Sarcastically, he added: "The bell on the Unitarian Church being clogged with cotton would not sound." Garrison was, himself, Unitarian. The Universalists also were the first religious denomination to ordain women to the ministry (1868 - Olympia Brown); and ordained an African American minister a quarter century before the Unitarians.

Despite their differences, both groups were unfolding in similar directions. As early as the 1830s, both were studying and disseminating texts from world religions other than Christianity. They both struggled with the post-Civil War culture, when the secularization of modern culture, the liberalization of Protestantism, and the challenges of science, philosophy and literature were calling churches to redefine themselves. After a long romance with the radical individualism of the Transcendentalist movement, Unitarianism hoped for a widening liberal church, universal in its outlook and appeal. The Universalists, who celebrated their 100th anniversary in 1870, were still committed to the principles of Christian biblicism, but also began to see that the term Universalist could be construed to mean the universal community of all people and the necessity of working toward the secular realization of that community through peace and justice on earth.

Within Unitarianism there was a call for institution-building and the National Conference of Unitarian Churches was founded in 1865. Unitarianism was growing, but Universalism was in decline by the end of the nineteenth century. The mainline Protestant denominations had quietly abandoned Calvinism, and Universalism had lost its uniqueness. Though revitalized in spirit in the early 20th century by their commitments to justice and equality and the work in society these required, their lack of organization did not support increasing membership.

In the 1920s, Universalists began to consider merger not only with the Unitarians, but also with the Congregationalists. The Unitarians were becoming more humanistic than some Universalists could stomach. Humanism declared God irrelevant and proclaimed that religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are intended to forward the complete realization of the human personality (Humanist Manifesto, 1932-33). But by 1943, the Universalists' General Superintendent, Robert Cummins, realized that the only way their faith would survive was to revision itself. "Universalism," he proclaimed, "cannot be limited either to Protestantism or to Christianity, not without denying its very name. Ours is a world fellowship, not just a Christian sect. For so long as Universalism is universalism and not partialism, [we must make it] unmistakably clear that all are welcome: theist and humanist, unitarian and trinitarian, colored, and color-less. A circumscribed Universalism is unthinkable." The idea of Universalism as "universal religion" helped pave the way for a merger with the increasingly eclectic Unitarians.

The merger was finalized in 1961, after many discussions and votes and compromises on both sides. The Universalists, who were outnumbered five to one by Unitarians, worried about simply being absorbed into the larger denomination. And in some regards, that did happen. Only in recent years have our history books given the Universalists their fair share of ink, and only in sermons like this one do clergy like me remind us of what we miss if we leave the Universalists out.

Now, I have left a great deal out about the Universalists in this sermon, and about the Unitarians as well. I have not even begun to address the history of women's involvement in either side of our movement, nor the involvement and contributions of African Americans, nor much of our social justice history. There's no way to pack it all in! I do hope I have left enough in, however, for us to see some of the legacies Unitarianism and Universalism each have left in our current faith.

Here's what I see. From the Unitarians, we retain our love of the intellect, and of religion that is reasonable - belief passed through the fire of thought. This is good stuff, but its shadow side is an attitude of privilege and exclusivity that dogs our congregations and threatens to make of us an irrelevant, remnant religion, instead of a liberal beacon for those who want to change the world. From the Unitarians we also retain our focus on the individual, and the importance of our personal search for truth. The shadow side of this, of course can be a consumerist approach to religious beliefs, where I pick and choose what I want from any religion without regard to its integrity; or to religious community, where my needs are more important than those of the group as a whole.

The Universalists have left us a legacy, rediscovered and re-appreciated in the past ten years, of the quest for inclusiveness and the breaking down of barriers to participation in our congregations and in society for people of every race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, gender expression, physical and mental ability, economic class and education level. Our valuing of the inherent worth and dignity of every person is a part of this legacy. The shadow side is, of course, the possibility that we will work too hard to be all things to all people, and lose the spark that enlivens our faith. The Universalist legacy also remains in our strong sense of the importance of community - for to them, salvation was a corporate process, not merely an individual one. And of course, this, too has a shadow side. But for us, it mostly serves as a useful check on our tendency to idolize individualism.

Both faiths leave us the gift of social conscience, and the affirmation that there are many ways of knowing truth and the holy - scientific and intuitive, mind-centered and heart-centered, thoughtful and compassionate. And because we now encompass both of these historic faiths, we also live the legacy of being both insiders and outsiders - which can be a creative and productive tension, or a frustrating problem, and often is both.

But I believe this quality -- of being both insiders and outsiders - is our particular genius. Because our religion results from the merger of two originally distinct theologies, two different cultural worldviews, two different ways of taking action in the world, we have a particular calling toward inclusivity and diversity. Binocular vision is always more full than monocular - our history gives us both permission and responsibility to develop a broader cultural competence that will push our religion into further evolution and transformation.

At least that is the way I see our calling as people of liberal religion. I have lived that insider/outsider tension religiously for most of my life, and like many of you, my personal world is no longer monocultural, but is more a reflection of the increasing diversity of our world. Being interracially married and part of an extended family that includes five generations, eight or nine different religious faiths, two languages, two nations, different sexual orientations, socioeconomic classes and education levels - I see that my faith has always grounded my participation and my work for social change in a world of increasingly rich cultural diversity.

We are, I declare, U-ni-tar-i-an U-ni-ver-sal-ists. All ten syllables - for no smaller number could contain us with all our passions and contradictions, all our cultural worldviews, growing edges and encrustations of opinion. Today's Unitarian Universalism is no longer trying to be a universal religion, but is instead reaching out hands of support and listening ears of understanding to people of many faiths, and seeking to open our eyes and our doors to the wealth of cultural worldviews all around us. We also are seeking to be open to all of our own history.

Ours is a religion to which we might awaken in every moment having learned something new, having been challenged yet again to open both our hearts and our minds, and to put our values into action.

It's a faith for which I am deeply grateful, as I am grateful for your presence and the presence of our congregation within it.

Amen.