You wanna see an impressive list of people?

[Snotcicles]

Search famous Unitarians.
John Adams
Susan B. Anthony
Alexander Graham Bell
Ray Bradbury
Charles Dickens
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thomas Jefferson

The list goes on and on. Wow, what great company those UU's keep.

[hootinholler]

1. I didn't realize they were that old as a denomination. n/t

[Pacifist Patriot]

5. Unitarians and Universalists merged in 1961, but their roots are much older.

Unitarians developed out of the congregational churches of the Puritans in Massachusetts and the Universalists pretty much start with the evangelical preaching of John Murray in the late 18th century. By the early 19th century they both have fairly coherent denominational structure. In the 1840s the Universalists were the sixth largest denomination in America, but experienced a rapid decline after the Civil War. They began exploring merger in the 19th century but it didn't become a reality until 1961. Still today you'll see some churches within the UUA with just Unitarian or Universalist in their name, but most changed to UU.

A lot of people see theological and spiritual roots in the Reformation, and some try to take it all the way back to early church fathers like Origin, but organizationally UUism is roughly 200 years old. We do maintain relational ties with Unitarian churches in Romania, but they are typically Christian while few UU congregations in the United States would uniformly identify their spirituality as distinctly Christian.

Clear as mud? *grin*

[hootinholler]

6. How does a church so liberal grow from the puritan seed?

That's what is mind bending.

-Hoot

[intheflow]

9. Separation of church and state.

And congregational polity.

In Europe, the state told them what religion they had to practice, so the Puritans fled to be able to worship as they saw fit.

They also believed in congregational polity, that is, each individual church community has the right to act autonomously, to worship as they please, without being bound to a earthly authority like the Pope or a king.

Eventually there was a split among Puritan churches, some becoming more conservative in their Biblical interpretations, and others interpreting the Bible with more liberating message. The liberals left those conservative churches and founded their own churches, still based on the same polity framework but with different worldviews.

Over the next century or so, the Unitarians grew so radical that they broke off from the Congregational church (what's become the UCC church today). The breaking off point was that they thought the Trinity was baloney--there was only one God and Jesus was divine only in that he lived an exemplar life. Hence the name Unitarian, as opposed to Trinitarian. That split was made permanent in 1825.

John and Abigail Adams were members of a congregation that became Unitarian. However, they spent most of their lives attending a Congregational church. (John Adams died in 1826, only a year after the Unitarian split.) That's why both UCCs and UUs claim the Adams' as their religious ancestors.

Initially the Unitarians viewed themselves as Christians. But as soon as they denounced the Trinity, the Council of Churches shunned them, saying that if they didn't believe in the Trinity, they couldn't be Christians. I believe that shunning led the Unitarians to further question the accepted Christian worldview, which led to their reliance on intellect and personal experience of the divine over doctrine, and also led to their looking to other religions for larger answers.

The Universalists were another denomination altogether. They were still devoutly Christian when the two denominations merged for self-preservation/financial reasons in the early 1960's. (I used to attend a small UU church that had been Universalist before the merger, and a couple old ladies there still viewed the merger as a hostile takeover by the godless humanist Unitarians.:)) But by the time of the merger, the Universalists had adopted a very liberal view of world religions, believing so strongly in God's love that they felt God wouldn't condemn to hell someone living a good and compassionate life just because that person wasn't a Christian.

[Pacifist Patriot]

12. Congregational polity / freedom of the pulpit for the most part.

Each parish was free to call it's own minister.

The philosophy of Locke began to seriously affect American theology and then relatively shortly thereafter the German higher criticism of the Bible did it's turn as well. Because there was no governing body determining fitness for the pulpit and making clerical assignments, this opened up the possibility of liberal theology in the pulpit creating liberal congregations.

The development of a liberal congregation wasn't always neat and tidy creating splits and spats over tax revenue. Tax revenue went to the parish church so ownership over church property caused major headaches when parishes created a second church. Eventually a law was passed prohibiting tax money to the churches and thus Massachusetts lead the way in the separation of church and state in that respect.

Come the late 1830's / 1840's, the transcendentalists (seminarians at Harvard University) and their admiration for Kant, the German/Scottish romantics, and the availability of Eastern scriptural texts in English for the first time took Unitarians further down the path.

The Humanists of the first few decades of the twentieth century carried the journey even further.

Each time there was a controversy, the denomination (from it's loose federation to a tighter denominational structure) upheld freedom of the pulpit.

[roguevalley]

16. they are all products of the Enlightenment. :) (most of em) :-D

[LiberalEsto]

20. Hey, maybe the fundie churches

will some day give birth to rebellious new progressive ones. Let's hope!

[LiberalEsto]

21. Unitarians also claim a heritage dating from the Arians

and the Council of Nicea in the early 4th Century. The Arians believed Jesus was separate from God. They were persecuted as heretics. The term Unitarian refers to a belief in a single deity, as opposed to Trinitarianism, which regards God as three-part: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Centuries later, Michael Servetus (1511 – 1553), a Spanish theologian and physician, denied the Trinity. He strongly influenced the beginnings of the Unitarian movement in Poland and Transylvania. Servetus was burned at the stake as a heretic, partly at the urging of John Calvin the Protestant reformer. He is regarded as the first modern-day Unitarian martyr.

The Transylvanian King Sigismund, influenced by Servetus, proclaimed the first Act of Religious Tolerance and Freedom of Conscience in 1568, and made Unitarianism one of three official state religions. Sigismund was the only Unitarian king in history.

More information on the origins of UUism: http://archive.uua.org/pamphlet/3600.html

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. That's worth a Rec # 5. UUs rule . Or ought to. nt

[Tesla]

3. I guess loving everyone in the World is a bad thing...

You are only supposed to Love the ones just like you!

[Mnemosyne]

18. You know my family?

:)

[Pacifist Patriot]

4. In all fairness, many on the list might not find their spiritual home in a UU congregation today.

We do have a great tradition of modern prophets who were Unitarians or Universalists. We just have to be careful because it isn't accurate to say someone is a UU prior to the merger in 1961. (I know you didn't say that.)

Charles Dickens for example was an anglican who turned to Unitarianism in the 1840s. But the English Unitarians at that time would probably have more in common with liberal and mainstream protestants than today's UUs. It's also a little off to claim some of the British Unitarians because the current UU denomination is American born and bred.

Thomas Jefferson was a close associate of Unitarian minister Joseph Priestly, but Jefferson never actually became a member of any Unitarian congregation.

I always chuckle when someone claims that the U.S. has had five UU presidents. In fact, we've had four Unitarian presidents and that is an exceptional percentage given the size of the Unitarian and Universalist denominations throughout our history.

As much as I'm a stickler for detail, I do appreciate what you are saying. It is a wonderful thing to use the lives of these people when teaching our children about creativity, social justice, tolerance and responsibility.

Some of my personal favorites are Olympia Brown, first ordained female clergy (Universalist), Elizabeth Blackwell the first woman to graduate from medical school (M.D.) and a pioneer in educating women in medicine, Clara Barton, Dorthea Dix.....

Great company indeed!

[SteelPenguin]

7. Randy Pausch was a UU too

the professor from CMU who became famous from his "last lecture" that went around on Youtube was a UU.

[Pacifist Patriot]

11. And Christopher Reeves

[intheflow]

13. Really?

I didn't know about Christopher Reeves. The celebs I've heard of being affiliated with UUs are Michael Learned (mother from The Waltons), and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Also, Daphne Zuniga's mother is supposedly a UU minister.

[Pacifist Patriot]

14. Yep, here's a snippet from a Reader's Digest interview...

RD : You went nearly 50 years without religion in your life. What made you recently join the Unitarian Church?

Reeve: It gives me a moral compass. I often refer to Abe Lincoln, who said, "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that is my religion." I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don't know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do. The Unitarian believes that God is good, and believes that God believes that man is good. Inherently. The Unitarian God is not a God of vengeance. And that is something I can appreciate.

[intheflow]

15. That's a nice quote.

:)

[central scrutinizer]

8. A UU minister described the church...

as a place for those who believe in God but wish they didn't and those who don't believe in God but wish they could. I am a member of our local UU church, by the way.

[Pacifist Patriot]

10. That's funny. I'll have to use that. I've always said it's a place for people who believe in one God

more or less.

[timtom]

17. You left out my favorite poet

e e cummings.

[DeepModem Mom]

19. I believe you can add Keith Olbermann. nt

[LiberalEsto]

22. Famous UUs web site link

http://www.famousuus.com/


Here are some names most folks will recognize:


Kurt Vonnegut
William Carlos Williams
Pete Seeger
Henry David Thoreau
Beatrix Potter
Isaac Newton
Florence Nightingale
Clara Barton
Linus Pauling
Jackson Browne
Adlai E. Stevenson
Frank Lloyd Wright
Paul Revere


And here's another link with a good, more contemporary list that includes Keith Olbermann and Eliot Richardson.

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977332262