American Unitarianism & Universalism — the Consolidations

Two movements that had grown up separately in New England spent this century turning themselves into organized denominations. In 1819 William Ellery Channing preached an ordination sermon in Baltimore that gave liberal Congregationalists both a name and a platform, and in 1825 they founded the American Unitarian Association. The Universalists, who taught that God would in the end save everyone, built their own conventions on a separate track. Within a generation the Unitarian side produced a third thing it had not expected. Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry and told Harvard's divinity students in 1838 to look for religion in intuition and nature rather than historical revelation, and the Transcendentalists carried that further than most of their elders wanted to go. What held the movements together was less a shared creed than a shared refusal of creeds, along with a strong practical bent — toward schools, prisons, asylums and abolition.