Two Liberal Churches Become One

Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Universalist Church of America came to share a great deal, in practice and in outlook, with the doctrinally distinct but temperamentally similar American Unitarian Association: neither body required assent to a fixed creed, both had built long traditions of liberal engagement with intellectual, social, and political questions, and both denominations had ordained women and taken strong public stands against slavery well ahead of most other American Christian bodies. Formal conversations aimed at combining the two organizations began in earnest in the 1950s, and concurrent business meetings of both denominations, held in Boston in May 1960, created interim study committees charged with working out the practical questions a merger would raise, including nomination procedures, the new body's overall organizational shape, fund-raising, and regional structure. Those committees reported back the following year, and the merger was formally completed at an organizing meeting held in Boston in May 1961, at which the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association together became the Unitarian Universalist Association, ending both predecessor denominations' separate institutional existence while carrying their shared liberal, non-creedal religious tradition forward under a single combined name.