"CLF" by Laura Cavicchio ©
II. ON THE FRONTIER
Christian orthodoxy has been a dominant force in America since the Unitarian and Universalist movements first took root. Despite the proliferation of pluralism on religious and cultural fronts over the last century, the polarization of political and religious ideologies across the conservative to liberal spectrum has mostly increased. It is common for Unitarian Universalists, whether ‘churched’ or ‘unchurched’, to live with a sense of outsiderness. Some choose a life off the beaten track, but for many Unitarian Universalists, the simple fact of being a part of a minority religious tradition predisposes them to an experience of cultural separateness. By geographical circumstance they may live far from a "UU" church, or their work or military or diplomatic service may take them to a remote location far from a religious community. Whether at ‘home’ or abroad, some religious liberals endure suspicion or even danger because of not subscribing to the religion of the ‘status quo’. Individuals may be incarcerated, or because of sexual orientation or other social differences may not trust acceptance by a conventional congregation. When they are isolated, families may lack resources for raising their children according to their values and may require support for continuing their liberal religious lives outside of a traditional religious community.
All of the situations described above present a sort of ‘religious frontier’. They and countless others describe some of the demographic situations that represent current members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship Unitarian Universalist. In my professional interactions as a religious educator with the farflung member families of the CLF, I was often inspired to witness their determination to reach across the boundaries of isolation, ethnicity, or intolerance to live and articulate their religious ideologies. For many of these individuals and families, their home hearth or kitchen table is their "church", the only place they have for religious reflection or shared ritual. The one thing they most desire, various CLF surveys have shown, is a sense of "membership". [5] Many indeed are like religious prospectors making connections with one another and seeking ways to transmit their values intellectually and spiritually to their children. Is the character of their religious adventure and perseverance any different from the Unitarians and Universalists of the formational 18th and 19th centuries? In both cases, a pioneering energy is evident. A brief review of historical events will lead on to a discussion of the evolutions and innovations that have formed the Church of the Larger Fellowship in its present incarnation.
Returning to the year 1825, it was on May 26 at William Ellery Channing’s Federal Street Church in Boston that a group made up of mostly Unitarian clergymen voted to authorize the inception of the American Unitarian Association (AUA),
"…a new organization…the chief and ultimate object (of which) will be the promotion of pure and undefiled (Christian) religion…Its operations will extend themselves throughout the whole country and will chiefly consist of the publication and distribution of tracts and the support of missionaries…"
It was to be a body comprised of liberal religious individuals gathered under a motto of "Liberty, Holiness, and Love". The AUA represented the beginnings of a denominational identity and mechanism to clarify and transmit the teachings of liberal religion in the face of Christian orthodoxy. Backlash from the "Dedham Decision" of 1820 and American expansion via new railway access to the west sparked an increased level of evangelistic missionary outreach by the Calvinist churches. The time was ripe for Unitarian Christians to follow suit. In the words of Ezra Stiles Gannett, although the Unitarian name "has a sectarian sound…it was chosen to avoid equivocation on the one hand, and misapprehension on the other." [6]
The new Association was quick to organize a publications and missionary ministry that would help to spread the vision of a larger liberal fellowship. To the Pennsylvania frontier town of Northumberland, where thirty years before the founding of the AUA – in 1795, Joseph Priestly had established one of the earliest societies to take the Unitarian name, the newly established AUA sent its first missionary. (Note: according to Wilbur’s historical account of Unitarianism in America, in 1792 a society in Portland, Maine was the first to adopt the Unitarian name under the leadership of Thomas Oxnard, a follower of Priestlyan writings.) [7] Also in its founding year of 1825, the AUA commissioned a five thousand mile missionary expedition, much of it on horseback. Its purpose was to make connections with religiously liberal, intellectual folk throughout Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, and Illinois. The expedition was the first of three such surveys of ‘religious prospecting’ over the next 25 years.[8]
The first Unitarian tract, "The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints", authored by Henry Ware Jr., was also published in 1825, opening up new avenues for the transmission of free religious ideas. The Christian Register began publication in Boston, while other publishers and book sellers went West to meet the avid reading habits of frontiers people who craved news on business, legal, political, transportation, and religious matters. [9] In the next three decades, the AUA focused its missionary efforts in the larger cities on the Ohio River axis and the Erie Canal and Great Lakes axis to the Mississippi, and Meadville, Pennsylvania, but progress was labored. Unity in a denominational sense was hard to come by. Western Unitarians were energetic, intellectual, highly devoted to freedom of religious inquiry, and had little in common with Easterners. As Parkerite liberalism and social consciousness grew stronger on the frontier, the gap widened between East and West. [10]
The establishment in 1852, of the Western Conference of Unitarian Churches (WUC), by seventeen member churches, was an attempt to bring scattered individuals, fellowships and fledgling groups, as well as non-Unitarian liberal thinkers, closer together and to meet their spiritual needs. Under its motto of "Freedom, Fellowship, and Character in Religion", the WUC hoped to bring more unity to western Unitarianism as well as to improve missionary efforts. It also hoped to establish its own distribution of books and other instructive and evangelistic publications. [11] In an undated, eighteen-page, hand-written account that was probably authored in the mid to late 1880’s, Susan Lloyd Jones, the first president of the women’s auxiliary of the WUC, posed this frustration:
"One of the first, most persistent perplexities that faced the Western Unitarian Conference, at its very inception, was, how to reach the isolated? How carry our gospel of love to hearts hungering for it. All over this long, broad Mississippi Valley were scattered men and women toiling ceaselessly to found homes and rear families up to the stature of their high ideals – for this they had left home, old ties, dear memories and associations and started out buoyant with hope…" [12]
Hardships prevailed, however:
"But O, the weary wanderings in the wilderness when, amid black days and nights of (prairie) malaria…" and the threat of death answered by theological brimstone: "Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger; to make the land a desolation and destroy the sinners there of out of it." And if, instead, some believed "that life and character made for righteousness…" and they had "a faith in God’s goodness, justice, and love too strong to accept the popular theology of an angry deity"…they were denounced, and " stood alone, with aching hearts and a great hungering for religious kinship; something that would put them in touch and harmony with the gospel of love and good will they so strongly believe in, that they might feel the electric thrill of companionship, brotherhood…" [13]
"To touch such lives", in Susan Jones’ words," this was the Conference problem". The account details attempts, beginning in the 1850’s, to fashion districts over which lay missionaries and clergy would have responsibility for locating pockets of liberals and taking books, sermons, and tracts to them. A tract entitled "Unitarian Views" was prepared and printed by the WUC just for the purpose. In the field these lay folk established book depositories, taking literature from farmhouse to farmhouse, despite attention diverted by the Civil War. It was a time-consuming and physically arduous process, but there were successes. In response to grassroots distribution efforts, a lively give and take of inquiry and correspondence was beginning to develop: "There comes to us daily assurances that there are multitudes thirsting for our Liberal religion, that the demand is for living men and living books." [14] It is to the history of the ‘circulated’ word that I now turn, as it is there that we find the taproot of ministry to the isolated.
"CLF"
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[5]
Davis, Fenn, and Kuebler, "Report of the Committee Appointed
by the Board to Make a Study of the Possibility of the Re-Establishment
of the Unitarian Church of All Souls", 1943, and Board Minutes,
November 14, 1986, archives of the UUCLF
[6]
David Robinson, The Unitarians and the Universalists
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985), 43.
[7]
Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism In Transylvania,
England, and America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1945), 395.
[8]
Lyttle, 25.
[9]
Lyttle, 99.
[10]
Lyttle, 97.
[11]
Lyttle, 70.
[12]
Susan Lloyd Jones, "The Story of the Post Office Mission"
(Handwritten manuscript, Jenkin Lloyd Jones Manuscript Collection,
Meadville Lombard Theological School, Chicago) circa 1885?,
p. 1
[13]
S. Jones, 5.
[14]
S. Jones, 7.
Last updated June 12, 2005
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