The Unitarians and the Universalists

David Robinson is a historian of American religion, and this book was published as part of an academic reference series on American denominations by an independent press with no tie to the Unitarian Universalist Association. It remains a standard English-language history of Unitarianism and Universalism as separate American denominations from their colonial-era roots through their 1961 merger, tracing Unitarianism's rejection of the Trinity and Universalism's rejection of eternal damnation as the two doctrinal breaks that shaped each tradition before they combined. Being published in 1985, it predates more than three decades of the merged association's own subsequent history, so a claim about the present day association needs a more current source, such as its own published statistics, alongside it. This record has not independently traced a documented history of scholarly rebuttal to Robinson's specific claims. Use it for the two predecessor denominations and their merger; use the association's own current publications for its present day identity and numbers.