Two Liberal Churches, One Merger

Unitarian Universalism is a liberal, non-creedal religion formed in 1961 by the consolidation of two older North American movements: the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. Both had roots in dissenting Protestant Christianity and both had been shaped by the Enlightenment and by nineteenth-century religious liberalism. Unitarianism took its name from the rejection of the Trinity and the affirmation of the single unity of God; in America it grew out of the liberal wing of New England Congregationalism, was organised in 1825, and was carried by figures such as William Ellery Channing and, in its Transcendentalist current, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. Universalism, organised as a denomination in the same period, was defined by the conviction of universal salvation, that a loving God would ultimately reconcile all souls rather than damn any eternally.

Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries both churches moved steadily away from doctrinal tests toward an ethic of free inquiry, so that by the time of the merger their distinctiveness lay less in specific beliefs than in a shared commitment to reason, conscience and religious freedom. The united body is governed as the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), with headquarters in Boston.