A Contemporary Evaluation of Universalism
I first encountered Universalism in Ohio, in April of 1957, when, in my junior year in
college, I was invited to serve a small, struggling Universalist Church in a nearby town. I had
never heard of Universalism; I had heard of Unitarianism, but thought it had died out with Ralph
Waldo Emerson. Nonetheless, I accepted the invitation and in that way entered upon my lifelong
engagement with liberal religion. I found myself immediately plunged into the conversations
and debates surrounding the immanent prospect of merger with the Unitarians.
Within a few months I had received a license to preach from the Universalist Church of
Ohio, had become editor of the Ohio Universalist, and soon after was elected president of the
Ohio Universalist Ministers Association. In what I would discover was something of a pattern,
my newness to the movement was never considered a handicap to my entering into the on-going
conversation, ultimately becoming a vocal advocate for the consolidation of the Universalist
Church of America and the American Unitarian Association. In 1959, I was called to the
Universalist church in Lyons, Ohio, and as delegate from that church, attended the Syracuse
meetings during which the terms of the Consolidation were hammered out. I campaigned for the
merger during the plebiscite of the churches that followed. In 1960, I enrolled at Meadville
Theological School--I believe the last student to enter the school with the explicit intention of
becoming a Universalist minister. I continued to serve the Lyons church during my first three
years in seminary. In May 1961, I found myself weeping on the floor of the General Assembly
in Boston as the final action was taken which ended the separate existence of the Universalist
Church of America--the only religious home I had known since I was a young child, and in some
ways the last religious community in which I would ever feel truly at home. When I was
ordained in 1964, Philip Randall Giles, the last General Superintendent of the Universalist
Church of America preached my ordination sermon. Throughout my career in the Unitarian
Universalist ministry, I have thought of myself as a Universalist who became a Unitarian by
merger.
However, the Universalism that claimed my loyalty all those years ago, and the
Universalism to which I still feel a deep and abiding loyalty was not the romantic understanding
of Universalism that seems to be much in vogue at the present moment. Contemporary
advocates of increased spirituality in our churches and a renewed interest in our Christian roots
often of late have defined that project in terms of a return to the Universalist portion of our
heritage. Implicit in that claim is an assumption that Universalists were less concerned with
reason, closer to their Christian roots, more comfortable with a religion defined by personal
piety, more open to diverse points of view than their Unitarian cousins, and that the unfinished
business of Unitarian Universalism is to reclaim that religious stance. In truth, however, that was
not the Universalism that captured me in the penultimate years of the Universalist Church of
America; nor do I believe it reflects the work that Universalists were engaged in during those
final years. Consequently, this assumption misunderstands the agenda which was left unfinished
at the time of Consolidation and the work which calls for completion by this generation.
To understand the legacy of Universalism and its continuing impact on the Unitarian
Universalist Association, it is necessary to review briefly some of the history of the movement,
to examine what Universalism had become and the issues with which it was struggling on the
eve of Consolidation.
As Universalism prepared to enter the twentieth century it was facing chronic problems,
the scope and seriousness of which would only become fully evident over time. Universalism
had expanded out of its fortress base in New England and New York state with such momentum
that it seemed to many observers that it must carry all before it. However, by 1860 the
movement had ceased growing at a rate faster than the rate of growth of the population of the
country. To be sure, Universalism was still growing, it was still vital, but--to use the jargon of a
different time and a different discipline--Universalism after 1860 was slowly loosing market
share.
More than this, Universalism was loosing its monopoly on its central message. As the
nineteenth century came to a close, mainstream Protestant churches in this country were
dominated by a liberal theology which had abandoned traditional teachings about the innate
depravity of human beings, and which had replaced them with faith in a God bound not by his
own unbreachable moral rectitude but rather by his infinite loving nature. Traditional teachings
that had warned that all but an elect few were destined to eternal punishment were quietly
abandoned when not outright repudiated. The Universalists' gospel of the greater love and larger
hope now seemed not very different from the message of mainline Protestantism. Universalism
was confronted by a quiet, growing identity crisis: What happens to religious radicals when the
world in general embraces, or at least stops repudiating their central message?
The question of the relation to Christianity was made sharper and more clear for some
Universalists in the 1890's when, following the pattern of other Protestant bodies, including the
Unitarians, they sent missionaries to Japan. Here, Universalists, who were accustomed to
proclaiming a gospel centered upon correcting the teachings of the Christian church regarding
eternal punishment, found themselves dealing with a population not tainted by that particular
doctrine. The Japanese had no attachment to the doctrine of hellfire and damnation. While the
Japan mission had minimal impact upon Japanese society as a whole, it did impact Universalism
in the United States. It forced Universalists to confront the question of whether Universalism
had any mission beyond that of correcting the false teachings of other Christians. And if so,
what might be the distinct content of that mission, the peculiar message of Universalism? Was
Universalism to be defined as a Christian denomination that advocated a purer understanding of
the central message of the founder, or did it have implications and meaning beyond the Christian
community--implications which would allow it to speak with power in a non-Christian context?
At home, that question became more and more important as Universalists sought to
understand their position within the religious community, their position on the religious
spectrum, their relationship to larger denominations which had implicitly, if not explicitly
embraced the Universalist gospel--larger denominations which had shifted focus from faith to
works and were embarked upon the venture which would be known as the social gospel.
Increasingly, the Universalists chose to define themselves as a branch of the great Protestant
church, working side by side with others to establish the Kingdom of God on earth--ameliorating
the suffering of others and calling institutions and governments to enact the churches' moral
vision in a reformed, renewed and just economic and social order. When the Universalists
adopted their social justice statements in the early years of the twentieth century, they
consciously and deliberately modeled them on the similar statements of the Methodist Church
and explicitly referenced those statements. The Universalists defined themselves as part of the
great army of "Christian soldiers, marching as to war" in a campaign to bring into being the
Kingdom of God on earth. The focus was no longer upon a unique Universalist gospel; it was
upon discovering ways in which Universalism might engage the great social mission of the day
as a full partner in the liberal Protestant enterprise.
The dream that defined the social gospel movement, and the liberal theology from which
it had emerged, was mortally wounded by the vicious, brutal, inhumane trench warfare of the
First World War. The war left the liberal assumptions of a rational humanity progressing onward
and upward toward a more perfect state in tatters. The deathblow was delivered by the global
catastrophe of the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism. Neo-orthodoxy replaced liberalism
as the dominant theology of American Protestantism, and Universalists found themselves
abandoned by those they had considered religious allies. When push came to shove,
Universalists discovered that, in the eyes of others, they had never been fully part of the larger
Protestant movement. Twice in the 1940's their application for membership in the Federal
Council of Churches was rejected because they were not Christian enough. Universalists found
that according to general consensus they were something else, though by this time they were not
sure what that something else was.
Social changes over which they had little control served to deepen the crisis of identity
facing the Universalist Church. During the period leading up to the First World War,
Universalism had not only stopped growing but, as it identified more and more completely with
mainline Protestantism, had begun a gradual but inexorable decline. Faced with vast
demographic changes in the country, which were a consequence of the Great War, the slow
decline of Universalism avalanched into near catastrophe. Small town and rural church after
small town and rural church closed as older members died and younger members moved to cities
in search of broader opportunities. Urban churches, finding little to justify their continued
existence as distinct entities, merged with Unitarian churches or Congregational churches
depending upon the theological preferences of the remnant congregation, or they simply went out
of business. (Church statistics are notoriously unreliable and difficulty to decipher. However, the
records suggest that in 1896 there were 811 Universalist churches with approximately 65,000
legal members. By 1955 the Universalists were reporting some 41,000 members in some three
hundred churches. Or as another measure, in 1905 there were 777 Universalist Church Schools
with 54,529 members. In 1955 there were 229 church school with a combined enrollment of 13,
580.–SKSM Universalism Website)
In the years immediately preceding merger, the Universalists were busily responding to
this challenge by redefining themselves, seeking to recover a distinctive voice, seeking to
understand anew the radical tradition out of which they had emerged, and the specific gospel
with which they had been entrusted. While many still hoped that they might find some way to
rejoin the larger Protestant tradition, many of the younger and more radical Universalists had
begun to envision a more daring role for the once great and now sadly diminished movement.
As early as 1935 the Universalist Church of America meeting in Washington, DC, had
adopted an affirmation of faith which reflected some of the changes occurring within
Universalism. That statement said:
- The bond of fellowship in this church shall be a common purpose to do the will of God as Jesus revealed it and to cooperate in establishing the Kingdom for which he lived and died.
- To that end we avow our faith in:
- God as Eternal and All-conquering Love
- The spiritual Leadership of Jesus,
- The supreme worth of every human personality,
- The authority of truth, known or to be known,
- And in the power of men of good will and sacrificial spirit to overcome all evil and progressively to establish the Kingdom of God.
This remarkable document is a landmark in the process which would define Universalism
for the remainder of its existence as a separate movement. Unlike previous Universalist
statements, this one does not mention the Bible; it redirects attention from a concern about
eternal salvation and redefines the Kingdom of God as the consequence of human effort; it
reaffirms a commitment to social justice, and it embraces Jesus as a spiritual model, leaving his
relation to God unspecified. In many ways, it is a milestone on the journey from Universalist
beginnings to a new self understanding. In this statement, adopted with little debate, the
Universalist Church of America had not departed fully from its Christian identity, but it had
opened the door to a much broader understanding of its mission and its nature.
Within a very few years, leaders of the national church were publicly questioning the
Christian identification of Universalism. In 1943, Robert Cummins, General Superintendent of
the Universalist Church of America, told the General Assembly that
Universalism cannot be limited either to Protestantism or to Christianity, not without denying its very name. Ours is a world fellowship, not just a Christian sect. For so long as Universalism is Universalism and not partialism, the fellowship bearing its name must succeed in making it unmistakably clear that all are welcome: theist and humanist, unitarian and trinitarian, colored and color-less. A circumscribed Universalism is unthinkable.
Angus MacLean of St. Lawrence Theological School, reflecting on the rejection of the
applications for membership in the Council of Churches, commented that twice having been
turned down as not Christian enough, it was time for the Universalists to look elsewhere. Tracey
Pullman, minister of the Universalist church in Detroit, called for a new religion that would be
greater than Christianity. Another General Superintendent, Brainard Gibbons proclaimed that
Universalism and Christianity were simply incompatible. The Massachusetts Convention of
Universalists created Charles Street Meeting House and charged Kenneth Patton with
establishing a liberal church in the bastion of conservative Unitarianism and creating new
liturgical forms appropriate to a religion for one world. In these ways, the Universalists,
smarting at their rejection by mainline Protestantism, stunned by their catastrophic decline, and
driven to redefine their gospel in relation to a new and more complex world, entered into a
prolonged and deliberate period of self-examination, redefinition and theological discernment.
This process, which formed the background for some of the debates around the question of
consolidation, was still unfinished at the time of the Consolidation of the Universalist Church of
America and the American Unitarian Association in 1961. And it is this unfinished business that
is the critical legacy of Universalism to the subsequent movement.
I've have spent this much time exploring the history of Universalism from the turn of the
twentieth century until merger because I am increasingly convinced that many of the challenges
facing us as we move into the twenty first century have striking parallels to those with which the
Universalists were struggling during those years. Let me say at once that I do not believe that
history ever repeats itself exactly. But I have enough experience with systems theory to believe
that under stress institutions have a way of reverting to old responses even when those responses
have proven ineffective or destructive in the past, that institutionalized behavior patterns have a
way of reemerging within human institutions, both influencing how we understand the history in
which we find ourselves and limiting the range of alternatives we are able to envision as we
struggle with the challenges of any given moment. Therefore, it behooves us to understand the
history out of which we have come, lest we miss the parallels and spend our energies on the
same strategies that failed us in the past.
A quick word about what the Unitarians were doing while this turmoil was stirring within
Universalism. Unitarianism was engaged, in the social gospel movement, in the humanist-theist
debate and was also struggling with a significant decline in its own fortunes. However, with the
report of the first Commission of Appraisal, the Unitarian movement chose to treat its crisis as an
organizational rather than a theological problem avoiding careful theological discernment in
favor of organizational restructuring. It recast the office of the president, it created the office of
moderator, it supported a fellowship movement, reorganized the religious education department
and intentionally or unintentionally pushed questions concerning the nature of the faith off into
other arenas.
For a variety of reasons, the consolidated Unitarian Universalist Association has never
completed or even taken up the work the Universalists had engaged prior to 1961. For a while,
the necessity of perfecting the machinery of the merged denomination captured all available
energy and resources. (This, after all, was the arena in which the Unitarians who dominated the
new movement seemed to feel most comfortable.) Then, swiftly on the heels of the merger,
came the need to respond to upheavals in the larger social order, upheavals which produced a
serious decline in the fortunes of many religious institutions--our own included--and created a
fortress mentality, a culture of scarcity which produced a reluctance to engage questions which
might appear divisive within the movement as a whole. Much of our effort, under the guise of
serving democratic process, was aimed at achieving broad consensus and avoiding sharp
distinctions. After 1968, we stripped the General Assembly of its power to control the resources
of the Association and to direct program, moving the debates such power requires to the arena of
the Board of Trustees and a handful of insiders. We altered the process by which general
resolutions were handled so that relatively few items would be addressed and those only after
they had been carefully sanded and rounded, molded and massaged. We turned the General
Assembly into a giant and costly annual pep rally. We increased the power of the Ministerial
Fellowship Committee to exclude fringe and radical ministers and stripped the General
Assembly of oversight of the committee. All these actions and others served to hamper careful
consideration of the kinds of questions the Universalists had been forced to confront in the thirty
years prior to merger--questions which we feared might limit our ability to attract and retain
members and have a negative impact on the Association's ability to fund its continued existence.
I believe there are significant parallels to be drawn between the issues confronting
Universalism in its last years, and the issues that now face us. To begin with, Let us take a look
at the questions of size and growth. At first glance it would appear that our situation is vastly
different from that which the Universalists confronted. They were in steep decline; we continue
to boast of modest growth. If, however, we look at that modest growth without the rose-colored
glasses provided by a persistent institutional boosterism, much of it begins to appear illusory.
First of all, we need to ask what is the benchmark against which we are measuring. If we
measure from the nadir years of the late sixties and the early seventies, we have clearly grown.
But if we measure from 1961, the year of the merger, that growth disappears. We are still
clawing our way back to that number. Each year our net growth appears to amount to an average
increase of between one person per congregation, or less. And we achieve that number by
counting every babe in the nursery and every child in the church school. (The most recent
directory actually reported a miniscule decline in the members of Church schools.) Whatever
you make of these numbers, one fact remains indisputable. Every year since merger, Unitarian
Universalism has lost market share. Our growth has never matched the rate of the growth of the
nation's population as a whole. The latter history of Universalism would suggest that we need to
take this demographic reality seriously sooner, rather than later.
In recent years, the fact that our people are, by and large, financially privileged has saved
us from the extreme funding problems which have bedeviled some other religious groups, but
our financial stability has been won at a price--we have become steadily more privatized in our
understanding of the religious venture, steadily more ameliorative rather than radical in our
responses to issues of justice. The fact remains that we are facing serious demographic
challenges which, like the Universalists prior to the First World War, we often have failed to
confront directly or with imagination, and which, when we become aware of them often result in
the same kinds of responses which the Universalists offered--an attempt to emphasize the ways
in which we are like other conventional religious groups rather than exploring the directive in
our own history and seeking to build on that which has made us distinct and driven us beyond
society's religious consensus. Thus, like our Universalist forebears, we dream of an interfaith
coalition in which we are full partners in the struggle for a just society and in service to that
coalition, are prepared to surrender our distinctive position within the larger religious venture
and to soften the language of our social and theological critique. Since most people in the
country appear to be Christian, or at least people of the book, or at the very least theist, ought we
not be prepared to adopt their categories and a more conventional language in order to participate
in the larger conversation? It may mean a not altogether exact translation of our religious values
and our specific tradition, but what does that matter? We are all engaged in the same larger
social undertaking and if we can further that project by softening our distinctive edges, ought we
not do precisely that?
Beyond the demographic challenge is a significant cultural challenge, not unlike that
which the Universalists encountered when they sent their mission to Japan in the 1890's.
Increasingly we find ourselves to be strangers in strange land--a land in which the cultural
certainties in which we were nurtured have collapsed under the onslaught of an unforgiving
deconstructionism, and the gospel we have inherited seems strangely dated if not irrelevant. In
the postmodern world in which we find ourselves, the ground is littered with the debris of failed
systems and once-eternal verities. We, who, in many ways, originated in a daring critique of
conventional religious thinking, we who rested that critique upon a strong faith in reason and the
human ability to reach toward objective standards of truth, find ourselves caught in a world in
which all things have become contingent, in which all judgments are seen to be culturally
conditioned and all values historically limited. Like our Universalist forbears, we are driven to
ask what is our gospel, what truth do we serve, what is our tradition in a world in which there is
no longer a guiding narrative to which we can relate either by embracing it or by critiquing it?
What does it mean to be heretical in a world in which heresy is the standard of faith? Have we
any story of our own, any good news, any gospel to proclaim in a culture which is suspicious of
all proclamations and skeptical about any central and shared narrative?
Once more, our response to this cultural challenge is similar to the response of the
Universalists of an earlier day. We have retreated from strong statements of faith and have
sought refuge in more conventional thinking. Let me give you an example of what I have in
mind. The first of the Seven Principles that Unitarian Universalists embrace with increasing,
unthinking fervor as we struggle with questions of self definition affirms "The inherent worth
and dignity of every person." This is a statement which appears far more radical than, in truth, it
is. It is a statement which is unlikely to be challenged from anywhere within the religious
spectrum. It is an affirmation which, with precious little twisting, might be used to support a
pacifist position, a just war position and a terrorist position, an evangelical's theology and an
atheist's anti-theology, and might give comfort to supporters and opponents of a woman's right
to choose abortion, supporters and opponents of the death penalty. And curiously, it is this
ability of the statement to bolster a wide variety of positions, even antithetical positions, that
many of us prize most highly about it.
Contrast that first principle with the statement from which it emerged. In their beginning
effort at theological discernment, the Universalists, in 193--facingthe emergence of Fascism and
the totalitarian state--affirmed "the supreme worth of every human personality." That was a
statement which restated the Universalist tradition in a radical way for a new time It was an
affirmation which had some sharp edges to it. The statement was provocative. The human
individual--not god, not the state, not society at large, not some utopian dream of justice--but the
human individual was of supreme worth. Every other value, every action had to be judged in
terms of the its impact upon the human personality. Human beings might not be the measure of
all things, but they were of supreme worth. There were sharp edges all over that statement of
faith. And Universalists knew that here they were approaching a central, a core value which
distinguished them in the religious community. Although the Washington Avowal of Faith was
adopted unanimously, the debates about that clause echoed through Universalist churches for the
next fifty years as preachers and congregations sought to understand what that affirmation meant
in light of issues ranging from the death penalty, to racism, to poverty, to war. And people
squirmed and wiggled and some were driven to the conclusion that if this statement truly defined
what Universalism stood for, they could not be Universalists, given the state to which their own
faith in human worth had fallen. This affirmation was a plumb-line set in the midst of a peculiar
people, and that plumb-line depended from the central story which had always made
Universalists radical. I find it difficult to imagine the Unitarian Universalist so challenged by the
current Seven Principles that she or he would be forced by conscience to withdraw. And maybe
that is the reason we so prize the current statement.
Similarly, the Universalists, late in their history, affirmed in the same Washington
statement their faith in "the authority of truth, known or to be known." (Small wonder that the
Federal Council of Churches refused their application for membership.) Contrast that statement
with the parallel from the statement of Principles and Purposes, which affirms a "free and
responsible search for truth and meaning." Universalists, having surrendered faith in the Bible as
the source of all truth and having thereby embraced a position outside the Christian mainstream,
were, nonetheless able to affirm that truth was more than the focus of our search; that it had an
authority of its own, that there was a truth beyond subjectivity and that it answered to its own
imperatives and sometimes fell upon us with power when we would rather it had not. This is a
far cry from the postmodern conviction that all truth is historically conditioned and a matter of
perspective.
The point I would make here is that like the Universalists in Japan, we find ourselves
challenged to reexamine who we are, and what is the nature of our gospel in a world in which the
old categories are no longer adequate to human experience. The alternatives before us in this
postmodern desert are stark and pointed and inescapable. Shall we retreat to a kind of religionin-
general in which we build communities focused on mutual support and encouragement,
communities in which we share each others' joys and concerns, take in each others' emotional
laundry and help each other feel a little better as we struggle to make it through one more day--
congregations which, are largely indistinguishable from denomination to denomination, from
place to place, from congregation to congregation, institutions which like contemporary
shopping malls are largely homogenized in their understanding of religious mission and purpose?
Or, have we the courage to construct out of the shards of broken hopes and disappointed dreams,
if not a global meta-narrative, at least a guiding metaphor by means of which we can say who we
are and what matters to us, and what vision lures us to struggle for a world made whole and all
its people one?
The legacy we have inherited from late Universalism suggests that unless we are willing
to embrace and affirm that which makes us a different part of the religious venture, unless we say
clearly who we are and what we are about, unless we are willing to give voice to a clear, honest
critique of the conventional religious, social, political, economic thinking of the day, unless we
are prepared to stand firmly at the left end of the religious spectrum, unless we are willing to
proclaim a vision against which we and all religious faiths can be measured and judged, we have
little to offer in any interfaith dialogue. Absent this clear self-differentiation, we have little to
offer those whom we would have join us. Absent this clear self-understanding we have little
justification for taking up time and space in a busy and crowded world.
I do not think that we are in danger of disappearing from the religious scene in one clap
of thunder. Religious movements rarely die a quick and merciful death; most often they die a
long, slow, agonizing death of increasing irrelevance and impotence. If I some of these
conclusions seem strident, perhaps it is because as I travel around from congregation to
congregation these days, I am haunted by a sense of fevered irrelevance and narcissistic selfabsorption
creeping over us. Perhaps in thinking of the future of our movement, this is what
troubles me most--not that we will cease to exist, but that we will become one more of those
religious traditions difficult to discern from the kind of twelve-step, self-help, mutual support
programs which seem to be the postmodern version of the social gospel. I would rather we die
out than live on--all our sharp edges smoothed over, our quirky distinctions blurred, devoid of
any commanding vision--into lingering, irrelevant narcissism.
Faced with some of the same challenges which confront us today, The Universalists I
knew in the years immediately before Consolidation set about the business of refining their
religious vision, restating their peculiar gospel, breaking out of the confines of conventional
thinking, renegotiating their relationship to the surrounding culture, and breaking through selfimposed
limits in search of broader possibilities. The questions they were asking and their
example in the face of a very real and persistent crisis constitute their abiding legacy and their
on-going challenge to our generation. To meet that challenge and embrace that legacy we will
have to surrender our romantic vision of what the nature of Universalism was as it entered the
process of consolidation, and see the reality of the difficulties with which it struggled, and the
truly radical nature of the responses it formulated in the face of those difficulties.
Rev. David E. Bumbaugh