Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

What Ever Happened to Hell?:
The Story of Universalism
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

I. Eternal Punishment?

Hell. How odd! For hundreds of years, millions of our people lived in fear of the fires of hell. Hell was as real a place to them, was far more real than, say, South Carolina, which was also far off and unseen.

Though it is now apparent that hell is a myth, up until as recently as 40 or 50 years ago it was, in many people's minds, an exceedingly real, scary, haunting place. Wherever it was exactly. Most humans will dutifully believe what they are taught to believe as they grow up.

It was almost 200 years ago that Universalists began to work at the destruction of hell, dissolving it in the love of God. One outstanding Universalist minister, Hosea Ballou, in the year 1805, launched an attack on hell with great vigor, with powerful arguments, both rational and biblical. He was a remarkable speaker and writer and an original thinker.

Ballou's first book, A Treatise on the Atonement, was published in 1805. It was brilliant, and was a major force in shaping subsequent Universalist history.

Ballou argued that the consequence of sin was the harm it did to the sinner in this life, not, as the Puritans were then teaching, the terrible, eternal punishment after death visited on sinners by a vengeful God. Endless punishment is a ridiculous idea, Ballou said. The only valid reason for inflicting punishment on someone is to improve their character and behavior.

Ballou said: "Is God any less intelligent than any parent? Would a parent see any point in punishing a child forever? Would that improve the child?" What kind of God is it who is less loving, less caring, more brutal than we are?

Hell is not a place where people are punished, Ballou said. It is a state of disharmony between humans and God. Heaven is the creation of unity between God and humans. It was a powerful attack on hell, and Ballou preached the message in many parts of New England, first as an itinerant, then as a settled minister.

It was the Calvinist doctrines of the old Puritan churches in New England that dominated organized religion in colonial America. These established churches were supported by government tax money.

The doctrines of Calvinism held that humanity was totally depraved and that God was a mighty, fearsome, just, relentlessly unforgiving being. His plan from the beginning of time was to choose a few human beings to live with him in heaven, and damn all the rest to eternal torture in the fires of hell.

All of the best people believed this faithfully in the 17th and 18th centuries; and they did not think well of those who believed otherwise.

Ballou's book was a massive attack on this dominant, Calvinist world view. He had grown up on a farm in New Hampshire, and was early in life drawn to ministry as a Calvinistic Baptist.

He knew the Bible as only a Baptist can. In addition, he read widely. He was a creative thinker. Though he had little formal schooling, he had a keen and inquiring mind. He was not a passive follower, a dutiful believer.

William Ellery Channing was the major thinker in early Unitarianism, and Hosea Ballou held the same position in early Universalism. Until Ballou appeared, Universalism had been a pious, traditional, Calvinist-oriented movement, with just this one radical conception: that, since God was a loving being, salvation for humans would be universal, not just for a few chosen ones, the Elect. Hence the name Universalism.

But Ballou pressed the thought of the movement in an entirely new direction, much more rational, less traditional, and far beyond Calvinism. Ballou rejected the fundamental Christian notion of the atonement, that Christ died as a sacrifice for our sins. He rejected hellfire and brimstone. He rejected the idea that Christ was God. He asserted the persistence, pervasiveness, and the power of God's love.

Ballou and Channing were alilke in that both were intellectually gifted, both original thinkers, both key figures in the development of their religions. But there were differences as well. Channing was a Harvard graduate; Ballou had little formal education. Channing was a Boston Brahmin, minister to the upper middle class in urban Boston.

Ballou was from a rural area, grew up on a farm. Channing's church was part of the Establishment, part of the Standing Order. It was supported by tax money, as was true of the other Puritan churches in New England. Channing was an insider. Ballou was an outsider. He had to struggle constantly for recognition, for civil rights, for a livelihood.

Both the Unitarians and the Universalists were in vigorous opposition to Calvinism; but where the Unitarians emerged to liberalize, make more rational the established Puritan churches, the Universalists (like the Quakers and the Baptists) represented a sharp challenge to the established order.

As a result, in the early 19th century, the Unitarians felt little kinship with the Universalists, even though their thinking overlapped at many points.

While Unitarians were regarded with alarm and hostility by orthodox Calvinists, the Universalists were seen as even farther beyond the pale. The Calvinists were certain that if the Universalists were able to eliminate the idea of eternal punishment, people would fall into hopeless degeneracy and certain damnation.

Universalists were clearly a menace to all that right-thinking people held dear. So the Universalists had to fight steadily for civil and political rights.

II. Beginnings

Murray Grove, on the New Jersey coast, now a conference center, is regarded by Universalists as the place in America where, in 1770, their movement first emerged. Several years ago, Ginny flew east to a national meeting at Murray Grove of UU Service Committee Regional Coordinators. She noticed on a wall in the center of the room a large plaque containing a quotation, dated 1770, from a sermon by John Murray; and she made a copy of it.

The sermon had been given in a small chapel built by a farmer, Thomas Potter, who held Universalist convictions; and John Murray, sailing from England in search of freedom of religious expression, landed by chance on the coast very near Potter's farm.

It was in Potter's Meeting House that John Murray, a gifted preacher, delivered the first address on Universalism in this country. The little Meeting House is still there at Murray Grove.

Murray had grown up in England under strict Calvinist discipline, and had been haunted by fears of hellfire throughout childhood and youth. He was set free from these fears by the writings of a Universalist in England, James Relly.

Murray met bitter hostility from conventional people when he began preaching Universalism, and finally sailed for America in search of a new and freer life. The ship he was on ran aground near Potter's farm, and the two men soon discovered their religious kinship.

The passage from Murray's 1770 sermon that Ginny brought back from Murray Grove reads as follows, and it says a great deal about the nature of Universalism, as well as about Murray's religious experience: "You may possess only a small light but uncover it. Let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women -- give them, not hell -- but hope and courage -- do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God."

Murray went on to preach this doctrine in many New England churches. In 1774 he went to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where, with the help of a prominent ship captain, Winthrop Sargent, he organized a Universalist church a few years later.

The church had a steady struggle against the established religion, but prevailed. It is still there, and is still called "The Independent Christian Church of Gloucester," and is one of the more than 1000 societies that make up the Unitarian Universalist Association of similarly independent churches.

III. Universalism Moves West

Murray was one of a number of Universalists who cropped up independently in the American colonies between 1740 and 1800. They were part of the growing revolt against the dominant and established Calvinism. Wherever they appeared, they encountered fierce opposition. The idea of universal salvation, the rejection of eternal damnation, seemed to conventional people an invitation to loose and immoral behavior. It was alarming to proper people.

Those preaching Universalism traveled from church to church, largely in rural areas. If a number of people in a particular area developed enthusiasm for the new religion, they might start up a church of their own. Once started, it would be a struggle, ministry might be only very part-time. Only a few of the groups would be able to afford a building of their own. By 1800, there were only five Universalist meeting houses in the country.

After 1800 the movement began to expand rapidly, first in New England, then westward into the Mohawk Valley of New York, then into the Ohio Valley; and it reached all the way to the Pacific coast shortly after mid-century.

Before the end of the century, a wealthy and public-spirited Universalist in Pasadena, California, Amos Throop, established a college, which has become the renowned California Institute of Technology. The Universalist Church in Pasadena is named Throop Memorial Church, in his honor.

Another Universalist who went to California in mid-19th century was a young minister named Thomas Starr King. King's father had also been a Universalist minister. The young man had to drop out of school and go to work when his father died.

He educated himself largely through private study, and was so bright that he became one of the most gifted public lecturers of his time. He lectured widely as a way of augmenting his meager income as a minister and of winning recognition. He was so much in demand that he found himself, in Boston, often exhausted by the strenuous pattern of his life.

King had met many of Boston's leading Unitarians, and, attracted by their intellectual qualities, accepted a call to the ministry of one of Boston's Unitarian churches.

King saw the two denominations as interchangeable, and maintained ties with both. King effected the merger of the two denominations within himself more than a hundred years before the actual merger occurred.

He was aware that neither movement was perfect: the Universalists tended toward a narrow emphasis on universal salvation; and the Unitarians leaned toward social exclusiveness. Yet, both, he could see, were manifestations of a new kind of rational and humane religion that was growing in depth of understanding.

In 1858, King was asked to comment on the difference between the two movements, and in reply told the story of the Universalist minister who, in argument with a Unitarian colleague, said that the difference was, "The Universalist... believes that God is too good to damn us forever; and you Unitarians believe that you are too good to be damned."

While King was minister of the Universalist church in Charlestown, just outside Boston, he gave many public lecures in Cambridge and Boston. A philosophy professor at Harvard, James Walker, whose lectures Starr King had attended, heard King lecture on Goethe, and said afterward: "It was not merely remarkable that so young a man should have given such a lecture, but that anybody should have done it."

These gifts Starr King took with him when he accepted a call to the Unitarian church in San Francisco in 1860. Though he was there only four years before he died of diphtheria at age 39, he left an indelible mark on the state.

I was surprised to find, when I went to be minister in Santa Barbara in 1958 that there was in the city a Thomas Starr King American Legion Post. The Legionnaires were no doubt unaware of King's religious views. They knew only of his significant role in the history of the state.

King became so well known in such a short time because, when he arrived in San Francisco, he found the people of the state wrestling with the issue of whether or not, since Civil War had broken out in the East, California should secede from the Union.

King used his gifts for public speaking by traveling throughout the state persuading audiences to stay with the Union. It was largely through his efforts that the state voted to remain a part of the United States. It is for this service, above all, that King is remembered in California.

Thomas Starr King, the Unitarian Universalist a hundred years ahead of his time. The Unitarian seminary I attended in Berkeley, California has been there for more than 90 years, and it is named Starr King School for the Ministry.

It is one of the schools in the Graduate Theological Union, which contains seminaries of three Catholic Orders, as well as Episcopalian, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and non-denominational Protestant seminaries. It is a wonderfully rich center of religious thought, with much interaction among students and faculty in the various schools and a common library.

Thomas Starr King would have felt very much at home there in the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Indeed, in a very real sense, he is there.

IV. A Universal Religion?

During Starr King's lifetime, other Universalists and Unitarians also began thinking of merger as a possibility. But there were, in spite of many similarities, a number of serious differences to overcome. The fact that merger was talked about for over a hundred years is evidence of the difficulty. It was not until the 1930s, then the early 1950s that serious steps toward merger began.

The Council of Liberal Churches, organized in 1953, brought the denominations together in an association. Then in 1959, there was a joint biennial conference of delegates from the two movements. It was held in one of our large churches in Syracuse, New York, and I was myself present at the meeting. It was a moving occasion. The merger was complete in May, 1961. The Unitarian Universalist Association came into being.

What kept the Unitarians and Universalists apart so long? They shared the rejection of Calvinism and of born-again Christianity. The benevolence of God and the worth and dignity of human beings were the shared beliefs in which the rejections were rooted. They shared an affection for reason and contemporary knowledge as sources of guidance. But the differences between them were significant. The Unitarians were part of the established order.

The Universalists were dissenters from the Standing Order. They were outsiders. They fought the "official" churches. As a result there were differences in social class, in wealth, position, power, and education.

In addition, both denominations had severe internal organizational problems. Both were made up of rugged indivualists who tended strongly to resist being organized. The Universalists even more so than the Unitarians.

Universalist organization was minimal. Many Unitarians had trouble seeing themselves as a denomination, so that merging with another one was almost unthinkable. The Universalists, habitual outsiders, were moved to fight for their own identity, and merging with a body of rich, assertive, articulate, and influential Unitarians did not look to them like any way to preserve that identity.

What helped overcome these differences was a development that began appearing in both denominations shortly before 1900, and that expanded in the first half of the century.

This was a growing sense among many Universalists and Unitarians that their religions had evolved to the point where they had begun to transcend their Christian origins.

They began to see a kind of non-sectarian religion emerging among them, one no longer tied to local traditions, but opening itself to all cultures in search of that level of insight, of understanding that would enable us to find life and find it in some abundance.

People in each denomination had begun to aspire to an integration of all of the wisdom of the species, all that passed the test of reason and intuitive awareness, a religion with, not local, but universal characteristics.

This was not and is not a view unanimously shared by all Universalists and Unitarians; but it is a view that helped overcome the differences that had long separated us. The issue came up for intense discussion at the Joint Delegate Assembly held in Syracuse in 1959.

One of the points in the statement of Purposes and Objectives of the proposed new merged denomination raised the issue of whether we were Christian in our essential identity or if we had transcended our Christian origins. The question was, "To what extent is Unitarian Universalism part of Protestant Christianity? To what extent is it beyond Christianity, standing as a new universal religion?" [David Robinson, The Unitarians and the Universalists, p 174]

The great Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, shed light on the idea of a universal religion. In a lecture he gave just ten days before he died, Tillich said strikingly that all religions are systems of symbols aimed at representing reality; and every religion contains in the depths of itself an awareness that it is inadequate as an expression of that ultimately inexpressible reality. Every religion is imperfect. Once this awareness is raised into consciousness, a universal theology becomes possible. [Paul Tillich, The Future of Religions, ed Gerald C Brauer, pp 80-94]

To what extent is Unitarian Universalism beyond Christianity, standing as a new universal religion? I remember vividly the intense and protracted discussion of this significant issue in Syracuse. It was the most hotly contested of all.

The resolution of the issue was a compromise, but one that moved us a little farther away from our Christian origins and toward universality. It is not yet clear what direction we will finally take. Whatever the outcome, Universalism is surely an important element in our denominational identity.

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com