A Promise That No One Is Left Behind

Universalism, the belief that a loving God will ultimately reconcile and save every human soul rather than condemning some portion of humanity to eternal punishment, took root as an organized American religious movement in the eighteenth century, with the English-born preacher John Murray, who arrived in the American colonies in 1770, generally credited as its most influential early organizer. The first formally gathered Universalist church in America was established in 1779 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the movement grew steadily over the following decades as it drew converts, many of them former Calvinists uneasy with strict doctrines of predestined damnation, into a religious body organized specifically around universal salvation as its defining doctrine. The Universalist Church of America eventually formalized into a national denominational structure during the nineteenth century, maintaining, like many liberal Protestant bodies of the period, congregational polity and a relatively open, non-creedal approach to membership even as it built out the institutional structures, conventions, and publications a growing national denomination required. Universalism's central promise, that no soul is ultimately left behind, remained the denomination's defining theological claim throughout its independent history.