The Universalist Movement in America 1770-1880.
Williams, Peter W.
By Ann Lee Bressler. Religion in America Series. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001. x + 204 pp. $35.00 cloth.
Most people who have heard of Universalism at all are likely to
think of one of two loci of the name's appearance. Today's
Unitarian Universalist Association has the word incorporated into its
official name, but "UU's," as that group is familiarly
known, often have to make some effort to recall the specific reference
of the second part of their denominational appellation. The other locus
is the joke, well known enough in church history circles at least, that
Universalists thought God too good to damn them, while Unitarians
thought themselves too good to be damned.
Ann Bressler's study of early Universalism demonstrates
convincingly that this joke is truer than many such jibes, at least in
its first assertion. Bressler, in this reworking of her University of
Virginia doctoral dissertation into an admirably brief and lucid
monograph, takes as her central thesis that, at least in the early days
of the theological ascendancy of the first Hosea Ballou, Universalism
was really much closer in many ways to New England Calvinism than to
other liberal movements such as the more urban and upscale Unitarians
from "the neighborhood of Boston." More specifically, early
Universalist thought represented a popular attempt to reconcile
Edwardseanism with the rationalism and optimism of the Enlightenment by
focusing not on human but rather on divine goodness. God, as Edwards
might have said, decrees election out of his own will, rather than as a
reward for human effort. The twist, however, is that divine election is
now irresistibly extended not simply to a remnant of saints, but rather
to the whole of humankind. God is thus not only all-powerful and
all-knowing but also all-good in a way congruent with a human
understanding of the Good. The result was a theological system that was
at once theocentric and humanistic, in the sense that Edwardsean
inscrutability had now vanished from the description of the divine. The
god of the Universalists was preeminently scrutable.
The proper context for the study of early Universalism, then,
becomes not so much liberalism of the Unitarian variety but rather the
almost all-pervasive Evangelicalism of the early nineteenth century,
since Universalism promoted an explicitly Christian brand of piety.
Bressler also situates the Universalists in the democratic discourse of
the era, arguing that another major note of the movement was communal
solidarity based on the universal experience of election, in contrast to
the increasingly individualistic focus of contemporary Evangelicalism.
Her attempt to situate this emphasis socially is not quite as convincing
as her other major arguments, since she wields the paradigm of
declension so vigorously as to imply that American history to that point
had been one long downhill slide from the time of John Winthrop, with
generation after generation of Puritans resolutely aspiring towards or
unwittingly stumbling into Yankeehood.
Bressler also, not surprisingly, situates the rise of Universalism
in the proverbial boondocks, characterizing its early adherents as both
urban and rural folk who had been exposed to the currents of popular
radicalism represented by Tom Paine and Ethan Allen, and its major
spokesmen as autodidacts. Although beyond the author's self-defined
scope, her characterization of Universalism as a popular religion might
well be developed further, since this movement, as she describes it in
considerable intellectual if not social detail, provides an important
chapter in what the sociologist Thomas O'Dea long ago identified,
apropos of the Latter-day Saints, as "the intellectual history of
the common man." What commonalities may exist between this aspect
of Universalism and other popular movements of the day--Mormons,
Millerites, and other adventists, for example--still awaits a
substantive investigation of structural patterns in thought, and the
issue of whether these arose--and still arise--out of a distinctive if
not always very coherent community of discourse.
After laying out the basics of the "pietistic necessitarianism" of the elder Ballou's generation, Bressler
goes on chronologically to address the changes that befell the movement
as the nineteenth century progressed. The affinities between the
reputedly free-thinking Universalists and the "spiritual sciences
of Mesmerism, phrenology, and spiritualism, for example, provided a
challenge to the Universalist propensity towards a rather laissez-faire
attitude towards doctrine, with an ultimate move to define beliefs
enough to exclude the more radical manifestations of pantheism implicit
in these practices. At the other end of the spectrum, the place of
Universalism in the American religious spectrum was challenged more
subtly but perhaps with greater long-run damage by the erosion of
Calvinism among Evangelicals and the concomitant rise of social reform
and individual moral progress as new centers of emphasis. Growing
Universalist sympathy with these trends began to erode the
movement's intellectual and spiritual distinctiveness and, by the
1880s, its numbers, never vast, began to decline precipitously until its
nearly complete loss of identity after the 1961 merger with the
Unitarians.
Bressler makes some other interesting arguments along the way. For
example, she challenges Ann Douglas's thesis that American
Protestantism became "feminized" during the later nineteenth
century by citing the growing popularity of Universalism among women in
that era who were attracted to a denomination open to women's
ordination--Olympia Brown was, after all, a Universalist--and
coeducation, and who in turn produced not escapist fantasy but rather
serious appraisals of contemporary issues in such fora as the
Ladies' Repository. She also notes that the movement's
best-known lay people were Horace Greeley and P. T. Barnum, an affinity
perhaps worth further investigation.
On the whole, Bressler's study is a brief but very important
contribution to American religious historiography, not only for its
delineation of the little-understood movement's history but also
for the illumination it provides on the dynamics of the overlapping
histories of Evangelicalism, religious liberalism, and popular religion
in nineteenth-century America.
Peter W. Williams
Miami University
