Radio Script #1273
Little Talks on Common Things
April 26, 1981
Often on this program we have had something to say about religious sects that have gained a foothold in New England since the beginning of the 19th century. Today I want to correct some of the wrong impressions about the denomination known as Unitarians. Although I myself am a Baptist, a sect far removed from the Unitarians in theological beliefs, my firm position is that all religious faiths have the right of recognition in this free America and especially the right to be understood.
The Unitarians have been accused of being actually a non-theistic sect, not really believing in the Judea-Christian God, and especially not deserving of being called a Christian church. In its origin, Unitarianism was far from being humanistic and non-theistic. It differed from the older, evangelical churches in that it rejected the idea of the trinity (father, son and holy spirit) and insisted on the single unity of deity, God the Father. It rejected the virgin birth, but did not deny the peculiar relationship of Jesus to God as the deity’s most inspired teacher.
The importance of the Unitarian movement lay in its emphasis on the worth of the human being and his relationship to God.
Early Unitarians never contended that man could lift himself by his own bootstraps and had no need for a god. They contended that the older faiths placed too little importance on the human soul, too often depicting man as only a pawn in the hands of a whimsical god. They completely rejected the view held by the Calvinist churches: their belief in predestination, that from the beginning of time God had chosen every individual either to be damned or to be saved, and there was no such thing as freedom of the will. Today most churches, evangelical as well as liberal, no longer hold to that old view that when you’re born you’re done for. The Unitarian position was that man is indeed a creature of God, but endowed by God with the freedom to choose his own destiny.
In the early 19th century, the Unitarian churches were definitely biblical. They accepted not only the leadership of Christ, but also belief in his miracles. But they rejected all creeds, standing firmly for the right of personal religious freedom. There could thus be included within the membership of any Unitarian church persons of many different theological beliefs.
As time went on, under their great preachers of the late 19th century, Unitarians found religious authority not only in the Bible, but also in religious history and in human experience. Religious belief, they insisted, must be directed by reason and the conscience of mankind. That is why Unitarianism appealed to New England intellectuals like Emerson and Thoreau. They welcomed the Unitarian position that God did not end his inspiration with the writers of the books of the Bible, but has continued to transmit his inspiration to men through all the centuries, and still does so today, that God still speaks through the human conscience.
At King’s Chapel in Boston their great preacher, William Ellery Channing, tried, as he put it, “to bring Christianity into harmony with the spirit of the time.” Piety and devout meditation were not enough, he contended. The true Christian must be concerned with all areas of life. Thus the Unitarians became leaders in social action by the churches, a position accepted by many of the older sects today.
By many leaders in other sects, who acknowledge the contribution of Unitarians to the religious life in America, the fault they saw in that church was its tendency to become more and more secularized, until some of its churches almost completely lost their historic Christian ties, and become little more than ethical culture societies. While there is some justice in that charge, it applies in some degree to many churches of more historic duration, and there is little to be gained by the pot calling the kettle black.
Anyhow I wanted today to set the record straight that Unitarianism originated as a true Christian sect.
Now let us turn to another development of liberalism, as I saw it take place in another American institution once strongly allied with the church, the American college. What took place right here in Waterville was typical of what went on in colleges allover the United States. Colby had received its charter from the Mass. legislature in 1813, allowing representatives of the several Baptist Associations in the District of Maine to establish an institution designed especially to train their own clergy, but also open to others for a liberal arts education. A century later, Colby was still affiliated with the Baptist denomination. When the college celebrated its 100th anniversary as a degree-granting institution in 1920, a majority of the faculty were not only Baptists, they were also predominantly Republican in politics. In their attitude toward the college curriculum, student behavior, and political action, they were strongly conservative.
On the Colby campus, the bit of liberal enthusiasm engendered by Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party in 1912, had largely subsided eight years later. In the 1920’s the Colby faculty was joined by two prominent liberals: William Wilkinson in history and Walter Breck~nridge in economics. Wilkinson was a liberal Democrat who believed in action as well as talk, and he was elected a member of the Waterville Board of Aldermen from a strong Republican ward. Breckenridge, although independent in politics, was an ardent proponent of Keynesian economics and a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. He completely changed the stand of Colby’s Department of Economics from its traditional, classic position since the days of its early teacher, Albion Woodbury Small, who turned out to be more of a sociologist than an economist. As other persons joined the Colby faculty, many of them showed their indoctrination by the liberal ideas that came to dominate the university graduate schools. Their views on current issues became with students much more popular than the traditional views of their older colleagues.
Because liberals were more likely to be Democrats rather than Republicans, the political complexion of the faculty completely changed. By 1950 the day had long passed when the college could deny an honorary degree to a Maine governor because he was a Democrat. In 1952 the faculty voted more than two to one for Stevenson over Eisenhower for president. One woman member of the faculty publicly shed tears when she learned that Eisenhower had been elected. Colby officials have heard complaints that the college has so changed in political, social, and religious attitudes that it is out of step with American life, exhibiting today an altogether too extravagant liberalism.
That accusation is grossly unfair. Today it would be hard to find a dominant conservative college faculty anywhere in America. There are still religiously oriented colleges like Bob Jones and Oral Roberts, but in most private as well as public colleges, the liberal spirit prevails. On the other hand, most colleges, from the oldest — Harvard, Yale and William and Mary – down to the newer institutions of this century, still receive strong financial support from conservative alumni. The new liberalism has not cost the colleges either financial support or academic prestige.
It is important to distinguish liberal education from liberal politics. Some of Colby’s strongest leaders have stoutly upheld the conservative view of liberal education, as founded in the trivium and quadrivium of Roman times, while at the same time taking liberal stands on economic and social issues.
Colby’s President Seelye Bixler, an unrelenting supporter of the liberal arts was the author of a book entitled “An Unrepentant Liberal.” In the 1920’s President Arthur Roberts faced the problem of freedom of speech by Colby faculty members. Several trustees complained to him that the public statements of Professors Wilkinson and Breckinridge were damaging the college. Roberts stood firmly by all of his faculty, declaring that the college which had produced Elijah Parish Lovejoy, national martyr in the cause of freedom of the press, should be the last college in America to deny its teachers the precious right of freedom of speech. Roberts of Colby thus entered the illustrious company of such college presidents as Lowell of Harvard and Hopkins of Chicago in the unyielding position that no institution of higher education should seek to suppress political statements by members of its faculty.
If Colby College today is so different in social and political atmosphere from what it was seventy years ago, the same may be said of the whole nation. But life seems to conform pretty generally to the pendulum swing. When any movement reaches extreme proportions, it tends to swing back toward the other extreme. We Americans cannot seem to learn the virtue of Aristotle’s golden mean, the temperate life, neither too much nor too little of anything.
Today’s conservatives may take some comfort in the fact that the pendulum swing seems already to be underway. Politically it was shown in the presidential election of 1980. Economically it is revealed in the present tendency toward reduced public expenditures and tax relief all the way from rural town meetings to the national capitol in Washington. In time, some of the same attitude will hit the college classrooms. Already, in many a university, Keynesian economics has come seriously into question. The conservative views of the Economic Institute at Great Barrington, Mass. are gaining increased respect.
As we now face a resurgence of more conservative views in religion, in politics, in economics and social behavior, let us hope that the pendulum will not swing too far in that direction, as it formerly swung too far in the liberal direction. American society would pay too great a price if it returns to the conservative repression of colonial Massachusetts if religion again comes to dominate the state, if isolationism prevails over international concerns, if free speech is repressed, if individual conscience is spurned. Surely this great nation, now the oldest free government in the world, can somehow find a way to live in the middle ground between extreme conservativism and extreme liberalism, respecting wide differences of opinion
among its citizens, but denying to none of them the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Year: 1981