Unitarian Universalist History
Unitarians and Universalists have always been heretics. We are heretics because we want to choose our faith, not because we desire to be rebellious. “Heresy” in Greek means “choice.” During the first three centuries of the Christian church, believers could choose from a variety of ideas about Jesus.
Was he God? Or was there only one God as Unitarian-type thinkers believed?
Was there universal salvation? As the Universalist-type thinkers believed?
This choice ended with the Nicene Creed in 325 CE which established the Trinity as being the truth and salvation only for the chosen. For centuries thereafter, people who professed Unitarian or Universalist beliefs were persecuted.
It was the Puritans who brought the beginnings of Unitarian beliefs to this country. In Puritan New England each town was required to have a church that followed Calvinist doctrines. In the beginning these churches offered no religious choice for their members, but over time the strict doctrines of original sin and predestination began to mellow.
By the mid-1700s a group of evangelicals were calling for the revival of Puritan strict beliefs. They asserted their belief in humanity’s eternal bondage to sin. People who opposed the revival, believing in free human will and the loving benevolence of God, eventually became Unitarian. During the early 1800’s, hundreds of these original congregational churches fought over ideas about sin and salvation, and especially over the doctrine of the Trinity. Most of the churches split over these issues. The churches that broke away became the Unitarians. However, they were Christian Unitarians.
The churches that the Unitarians split from were known as Congregationalists, now the United Church of Christ. There is a church of that denomination in Boone.
At about the same time, there were a small number of preachers began to reject the strict Calvinist doctrines of eternal punishment. They discovered from their biblical studies the new revelation of God’s loving redemption of all. They formed the first Universalist churches.
To differentiate these two groups, one person has said: “Universalists believe that God is too good to damn people, and the Unitarians believe that people are too good to be damned by God.”
After the split, many of the Unitarians came to believe that the ideal spiritual state transcended physical and intellectual things and was based on intuition. They were known as Transcendentalists.
About 1900 the humanist movement became prominent in the Unitarian religion. Humanists believed that it was fantasy to believe there was a loving, caring God and emphasized the goodness of human beings.

Both Unitarians and Universalists became active participants in many social justice movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the middle of the twentieth century it became clear that Unitarians and Universalists could have a stronger liberal religious voice if they merged their efforts, and they did so in 1961, forming the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Our history has carried us from liberal Christian views about Jesus and human nature to a rich pluralism that includes theist and atheist, agnostic and humanist, pagan, Christian, Jew, and Buddhist.

BORN AGAIN UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISM
by Forrest Church
June 29, 2003

Today I shall dedicate my remarks to our good news. That’s what the word, gospel, means, by the way: good news. I, for one, am not ashamed of the liberal gospel. It has enriched, even transformed my life.
As the negative print image of every form of fundamentalism, Unitarian Universalism offers to the world an alternative religious vision. Rather than spend our lives dividing sheep from goats, we celebrate unity, twice in our very name. As for liberal, it means generous, flexible and free. And yet, this saving power, the power of our good news, will make an impact only if we bring the same passion to our liberal faith–to our open handed, open hearted, open minded faith–that others bring to theirs.
You may have heard this quotation: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity." Do you know what separates the worst from the best? The worst are sure that they’re the best, while the best have the good sense to acknowledge that they carry the worst within them. This may (and should) temper the passion of our intensity, but it must not undermine our conviction. In fact, never in history has the world so needed the witness of a faith that respects rather than disdains honest differences of belief. To take our light out from behind the bushel, however–to make it shine more brightly in order to penetrate the gathering darkness–we must first articulate more precisely, for ourselves and then to others, what this light of ours illuminates.
Let me pose a question. If somebody asked you, "What do you believe?" would you have a ready answer?
Do you know what happens when you cross a Unitarian Universalist and a Jehovah’s Witness? Someone who knocks at the door for no apparent reason.
Is there no such thing as an evangelical Unitarian Universalist? In my book there is. For me, evangelical Unitarian is not an oxymoron. I loved what a young person in our church said in his belief statement last year. He stood up tall and proclaimed, "I believe in magic." Indeed. The magic of life, riddled with mystery, imbued with wonder. He sounded just like Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson believed in miracles. Not in the stopping of the sun. Not in the parting of the Red Sea. But in the miracle of the sun shining upon this earth and the miracle of the oceans teeming with life. The miracle of a newborn child. The miracle of consciousness. The miracle of hope. Fundamentalist and orthodox believers find their miracles in Scripture. Secular materialists discount the very idea of miracle. Unitarian Universalists follow Ralph Waldo Emerson and say "All life is miracle," from "the blowing clover to the falling rain."
Religious experience springs from two primary sources, awe and humility. Neither awe nor humility is served by those who refuse to go beyond the letter–either of scripture or of science–to explore the spirit. Fundamentalists come in two basic varieties. Right-wing fundamentalists enshrine a tiny God on their altar. Fundamentalists of the left reject this tiny God, imagining that by so doing they have done something creative and important. Both groups are thinking about the same tiny God.
Some Unitarian Universalists employ God language; some do not. It really doesn’t matter. When people tell me proudly that they don’t believe in God, I ask them to tell me a little about the God they don’t believe in, for I probably don’t believe in him either. God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each. Call it what you will: spirit, ground of being, life itself; it remains what it always Has been–, an awe-inspiring, mind-bending mystery.
Theology is poetry not science. During our brief span, we interpret the greatest and most mysterious masterpiece of them all, the creation itself. The creation is our book of revelation, not a bound book given to us by some ancient guru. We rely on the oracle of our own experience, drawn from our reading of the book of nature and of human nature, including our reading of the Bible and our study of philosophy. The text of meaning is vast, its nuances many and various. Honoring this reality, Unitarian Universalism enshrines freedom of thought. We also insist upon mutual respect in so far as it is earned by the reciprocal granting to us of the freedom to follow our own conscience.
In what I call the Cathedral of the World there are millions of windows, each telling its own story of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, each illuminating life’s meaning. In this respect, we are many. But we are also one, for the one Light shines through every window. No individual, however spiritually gifted, can see this Light–Truth or God, call it what you will–directly. We cannot look God in the eye any more than we can stare at the sun without going blind. This should counsel humility and mutual respect for those whose reflections on ultimate meaning differ from our own.
Gaze into the light of the heavens. There are 1.7 trillion stars for every living human being. The star to person ration is 1.7 trillion to one. That is awesome and it counsels humility. It should certainly discourage the scourge of human pride. But does it? No. Instead, we sit on this tiny, grandly featured rock, arguing over who has the best insider information on the creator and the creation. Is it the Christian? The Buddhist? The Atheist? The Humanist? The Theist? Please! We humans trumpet our differences, some even kill one other over them, while, in every way that matters, we are far more alike than we are different. We are certainly more alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge. In fact, by the time we die, we will barely have gotten our minds wet. The wisest of us all will have but the faintest notion of what life was all about. This counsels humility, but it also affirms oneness.
The acknowledgement of essential unity is a central pillar, the central pillar, of Unitarian Universalism. In contrast, fundamentalists, perceiving the Light shining through their own window, conclude that theirs is the only window through which it shines. They may even incite their followers to throw stones through other people’s windows. Secular materialists make precisely the opposite mistake. Perceiving the bewildering variety of windows and worshippers, they conclude there is no Light. But the windows are not the Light; the windows are where the Light shines through.
Why then do we choose to join together rather than exercise our full freedom to believe what we will in the privacy of our homes on Sunday mornings? Simply because experience has taught us that we need one another. We need guidance in recognizing our tears in one another’s eyes. We need prompting to raise our moral sights. We need companions in the work of love and justice to enhance our neighborhoods and to strengthen our witness in the world. And yes, we choose to join our hands and hearts because we know how easily we slip back into mechanical habits that blunt our consciousness. We need and know we need to be reminded week in and week out how precious life is and how fragile.
So very fragile. And so phosphorescent. A year can seem to last forever–to the point that we may pray for it to end–yet decades flit past in an eyeblink. Before you know it, there you are staring into the abyss.
You may know my definition of religion. Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are not so much the animal with tools or the animal with advanced language as we are the religious animal. Knowing we must one day die, we cannot help but question what life means. Unitarian Universalism doesn’t offer a single set of answers to life’s unanswerable questions. Though we don’t always act the part, we are, by definition, the world’s most humble faith. But we do have a clear sense of life’s purpose, I believe. The purpose of life, and its truest test as well, is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.
So, whenever the roof caves in, don’t ask "Why?" Why will get you nowhere. The only question worth asking is "Where do we go from here?" And part of the answer must be, "together." Together we kneel. Together we walk, holding each another’s hands, holding each other up. Together we do love’s work and thereby we are saved.
This faith we have chosen is a gift, a great gift, and the greatest gifts of all are not for hoarding. They are for sharing. So, my fellow born-again Unitarian Universalists, I say to you, lift that light up from behind its bushel. Go out joyfully and bravely into this blessed day and beyond. Love to a faretheewell. Be hale and courageous. Don’t be afraid of climbing to the very rooftops. Raise that beacon as high as you can. Go out and do your sacred duty. Sisters and brothers, amen and Hallelujah; spread the word!