By Daniel Rigney
Unitarianism may be the most historically-important religious tradition in America that you’ve barely heard of. Many of the founders of the new republic in 1776 were small-u if not large-U Unitarians (non-trinitarian and inclined toward deism), including Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John and Abigail Adams, and Paul Revere, the latter a Boston silversmith who crafted some of the finest Unitarian church steeple bells in New England.
The early American transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, were also closely associated with the Unitarianism of their day.
Unitarianism may be the most historically-important religious tradition in America that you’ve barely heard of. Many of the founders of the new republic in 1776 were small-u if not large-U Unitarians (non-trinitarian and inclined toward deism), including Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John and Abigail Adams, and Paul Revere, the latter a Boston silversmith who crafted some of the finest Unitarian church steeple bells in New England.
The early American transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, were also closely associated with the Unitarianism of their day.
Today, Unitarians (now known as Unitarian Universalists or UU’s) remain a
progressive community of religious liberals with historic roots in
Christianity, deism, American transcendentalism and modern science among
other sources. Unitarians are welcoming and ecumenical in spirit.
We’ll take our wisdom wherever we can find it.
You may be astonished to learn of the number of famous Unitarians
in history (list from the UU Fellowship in Los Gatos, CA). In addition
to the colonial leaders and transcendentalists named above, here are a
few of my own personal favorites from the list:
- Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), organizer of the women's suffrage movement.
- Clara Barton (1821-1912), founder of the American Red Cross [a Universalist, whose members merged with Unitarianism in 1961].
- Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), inventor of the telephone; founder of Bell Telephone Company.
- Ray Bradbury, science fiction writer.
- William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), abolitionist, founder of Unitarianism in America.
- Charles Darwin (1809-1882), scientist and evolutionist, author of The Origin of Species.
- Charles Dickens (1812-1870), English novelist.
- Dorothea Dix (1802-1887), crusader for the reform of institutions for the mentally ill.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), lawyer and member of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1902-32.
- Horace Mann (1796-1859), leader in the public school movement, founder of the first public school in America in Lexington, Mass., President of Antioch College, U.S. Congressman.
- Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), British nurse and hospital reformer.
- Thomas Paine (1737-1809), editor and publisher of Common Sense.
- Theodore Parker (1810-1860), a renegade Unitarian minister of the mid-19th century and a leading figure of the Abolitionist movement in the Boston area.
- Linus Pauling, chemist, won Nobel Peace Prize, 1962.
- Joseph Priestly (1733-1804), discoverer of oxygen, Unitarian minister.
- Kurt Vonnegut, writer, author of Slaugherhouse Five. [I’m a little surprised not to see Mark Twain’s name as well. He seems awfully Unitarian to me!]
- Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959), architect.
- Whitney Young (1921-1971), head of the Urban League.
Three of my personal
lights who were not cited in the source list above but who were also
Unitarians are: the visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller, the extraordinary social science fiction writer Rod Serling, creator of the television series "The Twilight Zone," and Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, without whom this blog could not have been posted. Thank you, Tim, and thank you all.
These are just some of the most famous Unitarians. I’m not even mentioning the slightly less famous ones, including mi esposa!
One
of the things I like best about Unitarians (or UU’s) is their ability
to laugh at themselves. Not everyone can do this. If you have a mind to,
see this sampling of Unitarian jokes. They’re not all gems, but they do give the flavor of our community.
Peace.
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