No Creed Required, Only a Free Search

From its founding, the American Unitarian Association held to a deliberately non-creedal structure, requiring no fixed statement of belief for membership and instead emphasizing individual conscience, reason, and an ongoing free search for religious truth as the proper basis of faith, a stance that set it apart from most other organized American denominations of its era. This same emphasis on liberty of conscience carried the Association, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, toward consistently progressive positions on major social questions: American Unitarians were prominent in the movement to abolish slavery, and the denomination ordained women to its ministry well before most other American Christian bodies were willing to do so. The Association also encouraged active engagement with the sciences and with other world religions rather than treating either as a threat to be resisted, a posture of intellectual openness that became one of the denomination's defining characteristics. That combination of non-creedal liberty and social reform commitment proved to be something the American Unitarian Association shared closely with the doctrinally similar Universalist Church of America, a resemblance close enough that the two denominations eventually merged in 1961 to form the Unitarian Universalist Association.