The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1770-1815 · New England, the mid-Atlantic, and London
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
Two separate movements, often confused with one another, converged in the new American republic. The Universalists came first in organized form. John Murray, an English preacher who had absorbed the doctrine that God will finally save everyone, arrived in America in 1770 and gathered a congregation at Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1779, and a general convention adopted the brief Winchester Profession in 1803. The Unitarian thread came from inside New England Congregationalism and from English precedent — Theophilus Lindsey opened the Essex Street Chapel in London in 1774, and in 1785 King's Chapel in Boston, an Anglican congregation left leaderless by the Revolution, revised its Book of Common Prayer to remove the Trinity. Neither had a denomination yet; those came in the 1820s, after this period closes.
No sources recorded.