The Unitiarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1801-1865

During the early years of the 19th century, the Unitarian intellectuals represented one of the preeminent voices of progressive American social and religious thought. Perhaps most famous for giving birth to the Transcendental movement of Emerson and Thoreau, the Boston community of Unitarians was, in the early years of the American republic, a driving force in its own right. The ministry of such men as William Ellery Channing, Henry Ware Jr., and Levi Frisbee, along with their relationship to America's leading light in education - Harvard University - brought a galvanizing voice to that much needed American position which held religion and reason hand-in-hand.

Forged and tempered in the philosophical schools of Burke and Locke, and broadly educated in the liberal arts, the Harvard trained Unitarians sought to reconcile nature and intellect, empiricism and aesthetics within a unified, coherent, thought system. In the face of a not inconsequential rise in Calvinism, this community often provided a starkly contrasting voice concerning the issues of the day. This is not suggest a base relativism or simply liberal heterodoxy. This community of preachers and writers was secure that the foundations of their faith were strongly constructed. Their conception of the holy was not undermined, but rather was strengthened, by contemporary developments in the sciences. In one of his most famous sermons, Unitarian Christianity, William Ellery Channing would proclaim his faith that, "God never contradicts in revelation what He teaches in his works." Channing's faith was grounded in his conception of the perfect Divine, and he would not let an overbearing Calvinism, nor a type of anything-goes universalism of the Transcendentalists, pervert what he saw as a unification of the intuitively understood and immediately apprehended experience.

While Howe's work paints a clear picture of the Unitarians, it is less clear why the Transcendentalists and Unitarian's differences proved insuperable. While it is true that the universalist thread of transcendentalism has become inextricably linked to much of American Unitarianism, it would be incorrect to assume either that such was fated, or that those who fought against the eventuality of this transformation provided a reason and faith system that was either incoherent, or that was easily discarded. While the relative conservatism of the mainline Boston Unitarians struggled to adapt its views to the slavery question, or to the type of radical social democratic thought that would come to define much of American protestantism and liberal political discourse, the conceptual worldviews held by these broadly educated and deep-thinking men provided real alternate conceptions of moral leadership in a democracy. The questions which they struggled  with, how to reconcile liberty with order, and how to bring reason and conscience to bear upon the problems of society, are with us still. As clear voices for a modern bourgeois values system, the Unitarians provided insight into the world approaching the coming generations of Americans.