Was John Adams A Unitarian?
Rev. Edmund Robinson
UU Church of Wakefield
March 3, 2002

	There is in the human psyche a team mentality no matter how hard we might try to deny it.  I am not sports-minded as you know, and I try to encompass all humanity with my care and concern, but there is still some remnant of team spirit in my reptilian brain, a holdover, no doubt from my ancestor’s days on the savannah when we had to keep together to prevent attacks by mastodons and saber-toothed tigers.  These primitive urges in me find expression not in sporting pennants or bumper stickers for the Red Sox or Patriots, but in rooting for my denomination.  As I read something, I am wondering whether a Unitarian or Universalist will be mentioned.
	Thus it was that I embarked on the magnificent recent biography of John Adams, second President of the United States but David McCullough.  I knew Adams was one of the Founding Fathers, a political philosopher and statesman and knew vaguely that he had something to do with the Declaration of Independence, maybe the Constitution and Bill of Rights.  But mainly I knew that he was claimed by Unitarian Universalists as one of our four real Unitarian Presidents – the others being John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft.  And when I used “real” just now, that is an indication of my ambivalence toward admitting a fifth President to that body, Thomas Jefferson.
	Jefferson, as you might imagine, is big in the South, in fact the UUA district in which I came up, encompassing the two Carolinas, Virginia and part of Tennessee, has been called the Thomas Jefferson district, and this name was recently reaffirmed after an agonizing reappraisal process.  The basis of objection raised against the name was that Jefferson was a slaveholder.  That is not the basis on which I would object.  The basis on which I would object was that Jefferson was not a Unitarian.
	It is true that Thomas Jefferson had corresponded with many of the leading Unitarian thinkers of his day, had done a lot of his own scholarship and produced a Bible which expunged a lot of the more irrational parts.  It is also true that he wrote in a letter in his old age, “I trust there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.”  But I have always felt that it is kind of dishonest to claim Jefferson as a Unitarian because there is no evidence he ever set foot in a Unitarian church, and we since as we often say, our congregational polity is our theology, there should be no such thing as a real Unitarian or real Universalist not connected with a church.
	This is why this subject is worth discussing this morning.  I know that many of you don’t share my enthusiasm for history, and are not such committed cheerleaders for Unitarianism, Universalism or Unitarian Universalism as I am.  But the fundamental question these historical figures raise is, what is it that makes you and me Unitarian Universalists today – is it our beliefs or our belonging to this church?  That’s where I’m hoping to end up, if you’ll bear with me.  Some of you might even find this stuff as fascinating as I do.
	I well recommend McCullough’s biography of Adams – it’s a well-researched and well-written account of a man who might even replace Davy Crockett in my pantheon of heroes.  Though McCullough does lay his admiration for his subject on thick, it appears that his subject well merits it.  Adams the man had extraordinary courage, a great breadth of learning and wisdom, a great understanding of politics while remaining largely above the more venal forms of that art, a relentless honesty about himself and his position on issues, the stiff upper lip of the small-town New England farmer with a great heart inside, an enthusiastic reader and inveterate talker, and author of some of the most readable correspondence ever written in the English language.
	Where McCullough slights Adams is in his religious identity.  My idea for this sermon came when I had finished the book, and realized that I had not read the word Unitarian in its entire 651 pages.  A check of the index proved I was right – the word does not appear.  In the midst of the fullest account of every other aspect of Adams’s life, and several brief forays into general views of religious matters, McCullough never once mentions Adams’ religious affiliation.  Oh, no, I bewailed myself, surely we can’t have been that mistaken.  Surely here’s a President we can claim, but if he was Unitarian, why didn’t McCullough say so?
	I have been personally to the United First Parish in Quincy.  I recommend the trip to anyone: you just go to Boston and hop on the Red Line and get out in Quincy center, and there is the granite church right downtown, affectionately known in the denominations as the Church of the Dead Presidents.  For both John Adams and John Quincy Adams are buried there, as are their wives Abigail and Louisa.  This congregation, which dates to 1639, was recently in the news as they sold their Paul Revere communion server to literally keep a roof over their heads.  The National Park Service, which oversees the presidential crypts below the sanctuary, contributed not a penny to the ceiling work.

	The present minister of the church is a delightful former scientist named Sheldon Bennett, and I turned to him in my angst over the question.  For I had a few hints in the McCullough book that Adams was vaguely liberal in matters of religion, but had a firm belief in God and in the mysterious workings of Providence.  That did not automatically make him a Unitarian.  I also knew that he was a faithful member of First Parish, and I knew that First Parish eventually became Unitarian, for it is now UU, but what I did not know was when it became so.  
	For as many of you know, most of the churches of what is called the Standing Order in Massachusetts went through a period of controversy in the years 1820 to 1830, and when the liberals won these contests the churches became Unitarian, and when the orthodox won, they stayed Congregationalist.  But I didn’t know where the Quincy church fit into this picture.  It is a famous historical curiosity that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the two men most responsible for declaring independence from Great Britain, both died on July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration.  But  I didn’t know if the First Parish in Quincy had become Unitarian during Adams’s lifetime.  Even if it had become Unitarian during that period of controversy, this was long after Adams’s Presidency, so could we honestly say that Adams was a Unitarian President?
	My problem was further compounded by the website of United First Parish Quincy, which has a history page claiming that their church had been Unitarian since 1750.  I wondered how that could be, since most conventional histories of the denomination say that the first Unitarian church in Massachusetts was Kings Chapel in 1783.
	Well, I won’t keep you in suspense.  The answer is yes, Adams was a Unitarian and First Parish Quincy was as well, and we have it by Adams’s own hand, in a letter dated May 15, 1815 from Adams to Jedediah Morse, which was pointed out to me by Sheldon Bennett. Here’s what he wrote me:
It was on the basis of a letter written by John Adams in 1815 to Jedidiah Morse in response to Morse's diatribe pamphlet "American Unitarianism" that same year against the liberal clergy that we claim to be Unitarian since 1750. In his letter Adams claimed that Morse, in saying that Unitarianism had been afoot in America for 30 years, puts Morse in his place by saying that the ministry of Quincy church had been Unitarian since for 65 years, so what's new!. Adams is stretching the point a bit, but in 1750 the Quincy church (then Braintree) had a young minister, Harvard trained, named Lemuel Briant, a friend and colleague in liberal theology with Jonathan Mayhew in Boston. Neighboring orthodox clergy tried to hold a council to expose Mayhew as a heretic - charging him with "Arminianism" and "Socinianism." The Quincy Chruch held its own Council in 1753, defended their minister, and published a document upholding the principles of the right of private judgment that each person should decide for themselves what is true in scripture and religion.
	Bennett continues
Adams had been liberal in his religious thinking from adolescence - the time of Rev. Briant. He was widely read in religion, and in particular in British Unitarian writings - Theophilus Lindsay and Joseph Priestley - not that he agreed with them in all points. The best place to learn about Adams' religious beliefs is in his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson. To my knowledge, John Adams seldom if ever would label himself. The Quincy church, the "North Precinct" church is how he often referred to it (the North Precinct of Braintree became Quincy in 1792), was always important to John Adams. He was a faithful worshipper there, and in 1822, 4 years before he died, he left a donation of land (not the land the building sits on) with a granite quarry to help build the present building. 
 	To understand all this, we need to review a little of the history of Unitarianism.  
	From the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, the religious history shows a constant seesawing between innovation and orthodoxy.  As early as 1637, Anne Hutchinson and her Antinomians were being expelled from the colony for being too liberal.  In the 1730's there came a period when evangelical preachers like Johnathan Edwards shook staid New England to its foundations with a fervent brand of preaching which appealed to the emotions; this movement was known as the Great Awakening.  Several Boston ministers reacted against this “enthusiasm” as they called it, and tried to promoting the value of rationality, of head over heart.  We now call these ministers liberals, but they saw themselves as conservatives, upholding the traditions of congregationalism against the new tide of evangelism.  Preachers such as Charles Chauncy at First Chruch in Boston, Ebenezer Gay in Hingham and Johnathan Mayhew at West Church in Boston, promoted rationalism, biblical criticism, and moral aspiration.  They embraced a view of human nature which came to be called Arminianism.  Where Calvinism preached that humans were basically sinful by nature, and Universalists a few decades later would come to preach that humans were basically good by nature, Arminians held that human nature had both the potential for good and the potential for evil, and thus whether human behavior was good or bad would depend on the institutions of society.
	These early liberals did not try to separate themselves from their orthodox colleagues.  They simply left out the doctrines of Calvinism with which they did not agree, and gradually their congregations came around to their views.  For in fact what bound the liberals and the orthodox together was the structure of congregational polity which we discussed a couple of weeks ago, together with a very important principle called the right of private conscience.  
	The right of private conscience held that anyone, but especially a  minister, was entitled to arrive at his own views of ultimate questions.  As you might understand, it was a right often in contention, and never more so than after Jedediah Morse came on the scene.
	Morse grew up in Connecticut and was educated at Yale, and arrived in Boston in 1789 called to the pulpit of First Parish in Charlestown.  Those of you who have been in this church longer than two years remember Christine Jaronski, who was ordained a UU, and served as interim minister here for two years before I came.  Christine went on to be called to First Parish in Charlestown, which is today Congregational rather than UU largely because of the efforts of Jedediah Morse in the period between 1789 and 1825, and as I attended Christine’s installation, I saw Morse’s picture on the wall got a great deal of pleasure about thinking about the old man turning in his grave at the thought of a UU in that pulpit.  
	Once he was settled in at Charlestown, Morse set about systematically to smoke out those ministers whom he did not consider orthodox and expose them, forcing a schism.  The opening volley in this war came in 1805, a battle over the appointment of a liberal, Henry Ware, to the Hollis chair of divinity at Harvard.  Morse by this time was on the Board of Overseers and argued that Ware did not fit the stricture of the endowment, but the liberals were able to show that the benefactor, Hollis, was in fact unorthodox and believed in the right of private conscience, and won the battle.  It was in this battle that the term “Unitarian” as first used by the orthodox, but the liberal considered this label a “calumny”, a slander, and said that such labels led to sectarianism and schism.  They though the tens was big enough to encompass all.
	Morse disagreed, and continued to try to expose the liberals.  He saw his next major opportunity in 1813, when someone gave him copy of a memoir which had been written by an Englishman name Belsham and published in London.   The memoir basically was about a British Unitarian thinker named Theophilus Lindsey, but in the course of it, Belsham included a chapter on the New England analogues of Lindsey’s thinking, and Morse, thinking he had found the smoking pistol, published this chapter under the title “American Unitarianism.” As if to drive home the point, before the liberals could clarify their differences with the British Unitarians, Morse published a “review” of American Unitarianism in his publication the Panoplist, in order to cement the name Unitarian to the liberals as tightly as possible.  The spirit of “gotcha” reverberates throughout this review. Here’s an excerpt:
“We regard the appearance of this pamphlet as one of the most important events, which have taken place for many years, in regard to the interests of religion in our country.   It has been known for at least a quarter century, by those who have been well-informed on the subject, that there has been in Boston a defection from those doctrines of the Bible, which have usually been denominated orthodox in Protestant communities.”  
The review goes on to conclude that there is abroad in the land “a settled and persevering determination to prostrate orthodoxy and to substitute Unitarianism in its place.”
	This was the accusation to which John Adams responded by letter to Jedediah Morse dated May 15th, 1815, 15 years after he had left the Presidency and returned to his farm in Quincy. It should be remembered that through his whole life he had been a faithful member of First Parish in Quincy, though when he was growing up it was the church for the North Precinct of Braintree.  The granite church that now stands in downtown Quincy was built out of stone quarried from land that John Adams had owned and donated to the church for this purpose.
	Morse had apparently sent Adams the pamphlet “American Unitarianism” for his reaction.  Morse was something of a historian, and later that year he and Adams carried on a lively correspondence about the politics of the American Revolution.  But here is what Adams said in reaction to the pamphlet:
“I thank you for your favour of the 10th and the pamphlet it enclosed “American Unitarianism” I have turned over its leaves and found nothing that was not familiarly known to me.
In the preface, Unitarianism is represented as only thirty years old in New England.  I can testify as a witness to its old age.  Sixty five years ago [i.e., in 1750] my own minister, the Rev. Samuel Bryant, Dr. Jonathan Mayhew of the West Church in Boston, The Rev. William Shuster of Hingham, the Rev. John Brown of Cohasset, and perhaps equal to all if not above all the Rev. Eben[eezer]Gay f Hingham were Unitarians.  Among the laity how many could I name, lawyers, physicians, tradesmen, farmers!
.... More than fifty years ago, I read [English Unitarian] Dr. Samuel Clarke, Emlyn and Dr. Watersham.  Do you expect, my dear Doctor, to teach me anything new, in favor of Athanasianism?”
“....This, the coming age, will not be ruled by Inquisitions or Jesuits.”
	I take three things by this letter: (1) Adams is clearly telling Morse that Unitarian sentiment in the Boston area is old hat, dating from 1750 (this is where United First Parish bases its claim to have been Unitarian from that date.) (2) Adams himself had widely read in the British Unitarian theorists such as Samuel Clarke, and his allegiance lay with them as against the orthodox.  It is interesting that he uses the word Athanasianism to describe the orthodox, for in doing that he is recalling the great theological disputes over the nature of the Trinity from the Fourth Century, a dispute between Arius on one hand and Athanasius on the other.  And third, his reference to the Jesuits and the Inquisition can only be a slap at the whole notion of trying to impose an orthodoxy on Americans.  The spirit of the age, as Adams said, was moving towards freedom.  In a later letter to Morse in commenting on when the American Revolution began, Adams said, “The Revolution ans in the minds and hearts of the people, and in the Union of the Colonies, both of which were substantially effected before hostilities commenced.”
	These statements are probably about as sectarian as Adams ever got. There is much more material which I have read than I can put into this sermon, but the gist of it is that Adams’ deepest religious commitment appears to be to the right of private conscience, to that freedom to find the truth according to one’s own lights which is to me both the political essence of religious liberty behind the First Amendment and the similar clauses in state constitutions and the central thread within the Unitarian tradition.
	And I think this is what brings this question down to today.  What is it that makes us UUs today, our membership in UU churches or our beliefs?  Both.  There is an irony in saying that UU churches are held together by congregational polity, by our covenant to one another, because very few of our members first walk in the door because of our covenant with one another.  Those of you who did not grow up UU were attracted to us by our beliefs, and central to our beliefs is a commitment to the proposition that I have said many times, that some questions are too important to have only one right answer.  It is only after getting into the church that one realizes one can create a community of faith out of diverse beliefs, that one can have a church without a creed, and that such a faith is a strong one that recommends itself to thinking people, to the wisest and clearest-headed people, for it has been recommending itself to people of the stature and caliber of John Adams for two centuries.  
	Unitarians are often accused of arrogance, but at the center of John Adams’ religion is humility, of asserting the partiality of all human knowledge.  I will close with this quote from the same letter to Jefferson which furnished the reading today, dated September 14, 1813:
“It has been long, very long, a settled opinion in my Mind that there is now, never will be and never was but one being who can Understand the Universe.  And that it is not only vain but wicked for insects to pretend to comprehend it.”

Amen.