Who the hell are you and why are you here?

[carolinayellowdog]

35. the Free Religious Association, founded 1867, was pivotal

My recent research has centered on the Transcendentalists, a great many of whom were current or former Unitarian ministers. But they were the radical wing of Unitarianism. Openness to Hindu and Buddhist ideas is a well known characteristic of Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. But there was also an embrace of Western pagan antiquity by people like Bronson Alcott and colleagues in the Concord School of Philosophy. So the avant-garde of Unitarianism was moving away from exclusive Christian emphasis by the 1870s. Universalism was more involved with the birth of Spiritualism than the rise of interest in Indic or Hellenistic traditions. Many Universalist ministers converted to Spiritualism, while Boston-based Unitarianism fed more into New Thought and Christian Science. This IMO has to do with the geography of Universalism and Unitarianism being different, as well as the emotional vs. intellectual styles.

In the short term the Free Religious Association "lost" and faded away. But in the long term it won, because by the time the UUA was formed in 1961 both Unitarianism and Universalism had moved in the non-creedal direction.