The Universalist Movement in America, 1770-1880 (Religion in America Life)

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In this volume Ann Lee Bressler offers the first cultural history of American Universalism and its central teaching -- the idea that an all-good and all-powerful God saves all souls. Although Universalists have commonly been lumped together with Unitarians as "liberal religionists," in its origins their movement was, in fact, quite different from that of the better-known religious liberals.
Unlike Unitarians such as the renowned William Ellery Channing, who stressed the obligation of the individual under divine moral sanctions, most early American Universalists looked to the omnipotent will of God to redeem all of creation. While Channing was socially and intellectually descended from the opponents of Jonathan Edwards, Hosea Ballou, the foremost theologian of the Universalist movement, appropriated Edwards's legacy by emphasizing the power of God's love in the face of human sinfulness and apparent intransigence. Espousing what they saw as a fervent but reasonable piety, many early Universalists saw their movement as a form of improved Calvinism.
The story of Universalism from the mid-nineteenth century on, however, was largely one of unsuccessful efforts to maintain this early synthesis of Calvinist and Enlightenment ideals. Eventually, Bressler argues, Universalists were swept up in the tide of American religious individualism and moralism; in the late nineteenth century they increasingly extolled moral responsibility and the cultivation of the self. By the time of the first Universalist centennial celebration in 1870, the ideals of the early movement were all but moribund. Bressler's study illuminates such issues as the relationship between faith and reason in a young, fast-growing, and deeply uncertain country, and the fate of the Calvinist heritage in American religious history.

The Universalist Movement in America, 1770-1880 (Religion in America Life) Review

This very well researched and sourced book has one over-arching virtue. The theme with which it starts, that Universalism was a sort of improved Calvinism, is actually rigorously and creatively brought throughout the whole book like a fascinating leitmotiv. On the way you are filled in on all sorts of curious social corners of American history, like the haughtiness of Unitarians, or the salvific pretensions of Phrenologists. But somehow the author manages to keep the notion of a Calvinism, disengaged from the limitations of Predestination, as a recurring rubric by which to see a complex subject throughout a tangled history. That made it very fascinating to read. One is left with the inevitable question whether the average believer of this type would have had anything like the complex combination of freed-up Calvinism and rationalist optimism which the main thinkers of the Universalist movement had. In fact the later speculations by the author of why the movement lessened later, namely that the liberal viewpoint was too much like others easily available elsewhere, raises the previous doubt. The cumulative effect of the books insights, at least for me, was that it was an attenuated form of opposition, both in terms of social class and religion. But the good thing is that the dense history provided could be read a different way. On that reading Universalism really was a Calvinist logic taken in a very different direction. From their perspective, the ineluctably correct one. The whole book is so well done that it raises a variety of cultural and religious questions powerfully. It is also a good read, if you are into religious topics. I took it on a trip to California a while ago, and was drawn to reading it straight through even on vacation.

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